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June 07, 2005
24 Hours in California
Just got back from a quick one day trip to SF and Silicon Valley. Just quick one day turnaround. It's suprisingly easy to get down to San Jose and back; and quick. I was able to coordinate business with the June Mobile Monday. Mobile Monday is a group similar to Seattle Mobile. There is a somewhat loose affiliation of Mobile Monday meetings in several states and countries (off the top of my head: San Francisco/Silicon Valley, L.A., Helsinki, London, Tokyo, Milan/Rome, and a new one in New York). Our good friend Brian Fling was giving a presentation on mobile usibility and had some meetings in S.F. so we hooked up and did some traveling together (mostly I think because I had a rental car).
So for an extra $10 I was able to "Biggee size" my rental car. Check out the beast that they rented to me. That's a bonefied 2005 Canyonero.
Twelve yards long, two lanes wide,
Sixty five tons of American pride!
Canyonero! Canyonero!
Brian Fling had a couple of late meetings in SF so I headed over to Cafe de la Presse to get some food, a cup of coffee, and do some work. Horror, of horrors; they are closed for remodeling. Ok. Crap. So 45 minutes of driving around downtown SF looking for WiFi signal near a cafe. Then some more time doing 1-way street loops looking for a place to park. I found a cool looking cafe called "Caffe Espresso" on Powell, and there was some free hotel WiFi nearby. Caffe Espresso is perfect. Good Panini and good coffee (Illy Caffe, my favorite), and decent Wifi. I was starving too. A little out of it because it was like 3:30 and I hadn't eaten all day.
Brian walked up to meet me after his meeting and we hung out and did some work until 5.
Apparently I was out of it enough from not eating, flying, and not having had any coffee all day, that when I parked the rental car, I neglected to see these signs at the end of the block.
Hey, where's the truck? Apparently the city of San Francisco has a tow truck large enough to tow a Canyonero!
Doh!. Ok, find me a cab, we've got 2 hours until the Mobile Monday meeting in Redwood City.
So about 30 minutes, a trip to the Hall of Justice (no really that's what they call it), and $180 later and we get the Canyonero back.
We made the Mobile Monday meeting with a few minutes to spare, so everything worked out ok. The topic was Usibility and it was hosted this month at OpenWave in Redwood City. Great turnout for the meeting. There were probably 70 people there and OpenWave had a big spread. It was a great meeting. I met some really interesting people who are doing some very interesting things in the mobile space. There are some pictures of the meeting on Flickr tagged with mobilemonday.
Posted by David Adams at June 7, 2005 08:23 PM