Here’s one of the photos from my San Francisco trip:

I’m doing a contest, whoever comes up with the funniest text for the bubble wins a drink (or the Internet if you live too far away).

Submit your entry here in the comments or via e-mail

Update: Schwab’s entry was clearly my favorite so I updated the picture... Comments are closed but you can still see the other submission comments by clicking on the permalink.

I’ll be in London from May 5th to 8th, if anyone wants to meet for a beer and some Mac geek talk drop me a line :-)

Among other things, I’ll be at this event, organized by my cousin and her friends...

[This is part 4. See part 1, 2 or 3]

I was about to leave San Francisco on Tuesday of the third week. I got ready for checkout one day early on Sunday because I booked a day trip to Yosemite for Monday at pretty much the last minute [Pictures].

Of course, such a short visit isn’t all that useful because it takes 6-8 hours just to get there and back which leaves only 2-3 hours for walks around the Yosemite visitor’s center, but I still got to see a few nice waterfalls (including lots of mosquito bites), and the ride through California’s Central Valley has a few nice views too... Now I know why this is called the Golden State.

I booked a JetBlue flight from Oakland to Boston, that worked out very well, their self-checkin system is pretty cool and has a great user-interface (I like the ability to pick my seat on-screen).

A friend picked me up at the airport and drove us to the family’s house in Gardner outside of Boston. The New England region looks quite different from California, lots of green, lots of gray sky, looks a lot like Switzerland :-)

My stay in Boston was very short so I didn’t see and do too much. There are many interesting historic sites and things to be seen, and I have one restaurant tip: Sorelle Bakery and Cafe at 100 City Square. [Pictures]

On Thursday I took the Amtrak train from Boston to New York. The train ride featured a few very nice views of the Atlantic coast. A few hours later I arrived at Penn Station and after a short subway ride I checked in at my hotel, the “West Side Inn” on 107th street west. A word of advice: Avoid this place, the rooms are really ugly and old (certainly not like the images on the website) and some of the staff members are very unfriendly. Make sure you see the room before you pay as they don’t believe in refunds...

In my room I popped up my laptop and found 5 wireless networks in range, two of which were open, so I had free Internet access all the time. This proved to be very useful to look up and book all kinds of things about and in New York.

The city is overwhelming and the size and number of the buildings in Manhattan create an environment unlike anything else. I was here 10 years ago but I didn’t see too much of it back then. This time I stayed for about 10 days but I definitely want to come back and spend more time here, there is just so much more to see.

I booked two bicycle tours one day, the first one led us through parts of Harlem and Grand Central Park, the other one was during and after sunset along the Hudson river, then through downtown Manhattan and finally halfway across the bicyle path on the Brooklyn Bridge, which provides a truly breathtaking view of the city at night.

I noticed that a bicycle is a great way to get around the city; you get around faster than on foot but still slow enough to see things, you can stop whenever you want, and the car drivers were surprisingly tolerant, so I rented a bicycle for another two days to explore on my own. I spent a lot of time on the road. The beautiful new Hudson River Park has a bicycle path that allowed me to ride all the way from 107th street to downtown Manhattan. [Pictures]

During my stay I had to get some work done so I took the PowerBook to the public library where I could sit in the impressive reading room and connect the computer to wired Internet and power outlets, it was the perfect spot for working.

Bryant Park next to the library became one of my favorite spots in the city. It features a beautiful contrast between open, green space with trees and the skyscrapers surrounding it. This is a great place to relax and drink, eat, or surf the Internet using the free wireless network. One Monday evening I arrived there just in time to get a good seat for the first evening of the summer film festival which started on that day. By the time the movie began, right after sunset, the park was packed with about 10’000 people and the atmosphere was very exciting. [Pictures]

Wednesday featured ferry rides to and tours of both Liberty and Ellis Island. [Pictures]

As for nightlife, I went to two events, an Enabler party featuring Broker/Dealer and I saw Derrick Carter play at the Cielo club, which has a fantastic interior design.

I spent a lot of time wandering around and discovering nice shops, cafes and restaurants, and here are the ones I really liked:

• Zen Palate (several locations), Quantum Leap at 226 Thompson Street, Gobo at 401 6th avenue all have good vegetarian food (and the NY Spirit website has a useful listing of more similar restaurants).
• Pret a Manger is a chain of stores which serve excellent sandwiches. There’s one at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue so you can grab your food there and enjoy it sitting in Bryant Park.
• The Soy Luck Club at 115 Greenwich Av. (Jane St.) is a great cafe with delicious drinks and snacks, friendly staff and free wireless Internet access.
• Silver Moon Bakery at 2740 Broadway (105th St.) had *very* good bread for breakfast.
• Le Pain Quotidien is another good choice for breakfast.
• Calle Ocho at 446 Columbus Av. has great Latin food.
• Tabla at 11 Madison Av. serves Indian dishes, try the avocado salad and the cheese kulcha, and try to go there when the patio is open.

Mhh can you tell I like eating :-)

After many days of excitement and fun in New York I was ready for the last part of the trip, about a week in Washington DC. After a few more pleasant hours of Amtrak train ride my friend Larry picked me up at Union Station, I was staying at their place for the rest of the time.

We went to see the the usual things over the next few days. I noticed that the distances between all the well-known monuments are much larger than I thought. There’s also a lot more open, green space everywhere, it looks way better than on pictures.

I was *really* impressed by the size and number of the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, I love museums and I could easily spend months in all these places... The Air and Space museum was remarkable, it is great to see many of the actual pieces of equipment and aircraft that went to the moon and back, for example. [Pictures]

On another day, we explored some of the sites and monuments between the White house and the Capitol using my favorite vehicle, the Segway... Yes, another Segway tour :-). This time we even had members of the tour group crash their Segways into concrete blocks, which led to painfully hard landings on the pavement. [Pictures]

Larry is a big sports fan and I always wanted to see a game so we went to the Baltimore Camden Yards baseball stadium where we saw the Baltimore Orioles play against the New York Yankees. Of course Larry had to explain the rules and tactics to me before and during the game, I had no idea that it’s so complicated, with so many special cases :-) I really liked it, I’m sure I’ll do this again next time. [Pictures]

On the second-last day we did another tour of the memorials and monuments not covered on the Segway tour, specifically the Lincoln, Jefferson and Vietnam War memorials, I’m glad I got to see those as they are all quite impressive. [Pictures]

There are only two restaurant tips for this week:

• Bilbo Baggins in Alexandria has excellent dishes and desserts and a good selection of beers.
• Capitol City Brewing Co. is a brew pub right next to Union Station in Washington DC. Good beers and food.

[This is part 3. See part 1, 2 or 4]

This is WWDC week, which is why I’m here after all.

I went to the conference venue early on Monday in the hope of getting a good seat for the keynote. Unfortunately that didn’t work out as I had a different badge this year, which means that they stuck me into the overflow room where I got to watch the show on video projection. Oh well... The content is more important than the form, right :-)

During the keynote, of course, Jobs Drops Da Intel Bomb, which pretty much set the main topic of discussion for the rest of the conference. It also provided a lot of interesting session content. As always, many of the session descriptions which were published before the conference were kind of vague and they made much more sense after the big announcements were made during the keynote. Apple also added a few sessions about the new Xcode 2.1 and Intel porting.

On the evening of the first conference day I went to the WWDC weblogger’s meetup organized by Buzz Andersen. It was great to meet many of the people whose weblogs I read all the time, I had lots of interesting and funny conversations (I’m still amused about the tail recursion interview question...) The meetup’s location, the Thirsty Bear, is a nice place that serves good beers and food, it’s just a block away from Moscone.

For the rest of the conference I releaxed and enjoyed the show, with the exception of the AMP session led by Apple’s John Montbriand on Tuesday morning, where I got the opportunity to present my website and PHP packages for a few minutes. I was very glad it was just a few minutes :-). The scary thing was that I had planned to come into the presentation room a bit early to install my PHP installation package onto one of the demo machines so I could show off some of the added capabilities of those modules.

Everything looked normal until I realized that the demo machine was an *Intel* box! Of course, my PHP module is a binary built for PPC machines, so it cannot be loaded into the Intel Apache server runing on this system. Nice surprise to find out about this 30 minutes before the session starts :-) Of course, when we rehearsed and planned this a week before, nobody, not even the Apple people, knew anything about the Intel news... Luckily, there was an alternative G5 demo machine available so that one was swapped in, and everything worked well thereafter.

I’d like to thank the people at Apple’s DTS group (especially Norm, Stephen and David) for this opportunity and the support of my Open Source-related Mac OS X work over the past few years.

Anyway, after my small part of the session was over, I could really sit back and enjoy the conference content as a regular attendee... My main interests were news in the Cocoa frameworks, especially Cocoa Bindings and Core Data, and development tools, especially using Xcode efficiently. Xcode gets better and better with every release, I really like to work with it. The Xcode team at Apple is doing an amazing job. [Pictures]

Of course I visited all Intel porting-related sessions too. I spent a few hours in the Intel porting lab one evening. I realized that pretty much every single one of the Cocoa applications I have written so far uses one or more open-source libraries. That’s a bit of a problem for my porting efforts because in my case I cannot simply flick a switch in Xcode as these libraries are usually built using the GNU autoconf-style build process. These configure scripts and Makefiles have no concept of building fat or, as Apple calls them, universal binaries, and they make all kinds of assumptions that break in this scenario. I tried fiddling with compiler switches, multiple -arch flags, the “lipo” tool etc. but it’s really messy. After a few hours I did manage to build all my XML-related open source libs as universal binaries, and thereafter it really was as easy as Apple described it, the changes in my own, Xcode-based code for my TestXSLT app took less than 10 minutes, and then I had a nice, universal binary application.

It will be a challenge to build a universal PHP module, because that is nothing *but* open source libraries packaged together nicely. I think my strategy will be something like building every library twice for both architectures by passing the appropriate compiler flags (and I just *hate* how the GNU autoconf/libtool stuff does not properly propagate compiler and linker flags in all cases). Then I’ll write a script to recursively find all binaries in the two trees and glue them together using lipo.

All the time during the conference, it was fun having people come up to me and telling me that they use my PHP packages. I was really surprised how widely used it is, I usually only hear about it when something doesn’t work right, and not about the (hopefully) many more cases where it just works out of the box and does what people want... It was especially cool when I was shown some Apple-internal servers running it during an office tour at the WWDC campus bash.

The campus bash was a lot of fun and as always a good opportunity to meet people, although the food was better two years ago... Nice music, too...

Another great session, both informative and very funny, was a lunch-time talk given by Michael B. Johnson who from Pixar’s Studio Tools Group, where they use Cocoa heavily. There was a *lot* of interest in this session, they started to put people into an overflow room again.

This week’s highlight was a sailing trip in the San Francisco bay. We were invited to go on Saturday, and conditions were just perfect, enough wind and no fog, a nice and sunny day. We started south of San Francisco and motored for a while until the wind picked up near the Bay Bridge, which is when the sails went up. After passing Alcatraz we got a nice view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Shortly thereafter we turned around, passed on the other side of Alcatraz and headed back. All in all about 4 hours on the water, a nice way to spend half of Saturday... [Pictures]

This time I finally got around to checking out the night life in San Francisco, specifically I always wanted to see the DNA lounge. I was really lucky because one of my favorite record labels had a label night on Saturday of this week, featuring Mark Farina and DJ Colette (great music and a beautiful voice). I had a great night out there and will go again next time.

On Sunday friends took me to Napa Valley where we visited several wineries, among them beautiful Niebaum Coppola, to taste various great Californian wines... [Pictures]

This week’s restaurant tips:

• Ananda Fuara at 1298 Market St. was way too busy when I visited so I couldn’t get a table, but the dishes and the menu looked very promising.
• Cafe Gratitude at 2400 Harrison St. was also too busy when I went for brunch, but I’ll try again next time :-)
• Toy Boat Dessert Cafe at 401 Clement St. has excellent sandwiches.
• I ate at Herbivore several times at both locations, highly recommended.
• If you’re in the Napa Valley region, try the Pinot Blanc restaurant at 641 Main St. in St. Helena.
• More veggie tips here and here.

[This is part 2. See part 1, 3 or 4]

So my first week in San Francisco is over, I was looking at things in the city, except for one meeting outside of San Francisco in Cupertino. I rented a car to get there and I’m glad I planned for two hours of driving time instead of only one, because traffic on that highway was horrible, I guess the three-car accident during the morning rush hour didn’t help. Other than that, driving a car is fun here, wide roads and everything :-)

My meeting was over before noon and since I had the car for the rest of the day I went to Santa Cruz for lunch. One place I highly recommend there is the Saturn Cafe. (You’ll notice that most of my restaurant tips in this and the following blog entries focus on places which have good vegetarian food :-). On the way back, I took highway 1 for the scenic coastal views [Pictures]. Last time I was here in California I did this trip in the other direction, going from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

In general I used public transportation to get around San Francisco, which works fine. There are enough options, but at first it’s not quite easy to figure out when and where the bus lines run, especially the ones going out of town.

People tell me I was lucky with the weather so far. All sunshine, not a single day of fog or rain... There is one thing I keep forgetting though: It is *cold* here in the summer in San Francisco. I mentioned this to friends and was amused to hear the same quote independently from two different people on the same day: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

I’m wearing sweaters now whenever I go out, but I know that if the cold air and chilly wind outdoors doesn’t get me, then the insane air-conditioning everywhere will do it instead...

One of the things I didn’t get to see last time was the Ghirardelli square with the chocolate store. I bought a big pile of chocolate so I can do some in-depth studies and comparisons with Swiss chocolate when I’m back home. All in the interest of scientific study :-)

I think the highlight of the week was a Segway city tour. I always wanted to ride a Segway and this was the perfect opportunity. It was way better than I expected, after 5 minutes I was totally hooked. It looks really dorky, but moving around with this engineering marvel is just so much fun. The tour guide was also pretty witty so I highly recommend these guys. I want to do it again when I’m in one of the other cities I’ll be visiting on this trip. [Pictures]

The tour doesn’t actually show a lot of San Francisco because Segways are not allowed on streets or sidewalks in the city. Instead we get to see a lot of the waterfront including the Marina District, Palace of Fine Arts, etc. That spot is really beautiful and has lots of photo opportunities so I decide to come back later (unfortunately without Segway)... [Pictures]

One evening I visited friends who moved to the US to live and work in Foster City near SF, a nice place. It was interesting to hear their stories about some everyday-life differences between here and Switzerland. Some things are truly surprising, they live in this high-tech region of California yet the cable Internet connection broke down weeks ago and their provider just cannot fix it so they have to switch to DSL, which is also a pain to get going. Weeks of discussions with clueless support people and without Internet connection etc.

On Wednesday and Saturday there’s a farmer’s market, on Civic Plaza and at the Ferry Building, respectively. Lots of things to try and buy, mostly organic. I highly recommend a visit. There’s one place that sells nuts in all variations, including ones covered with chocolate and a few quite funky combinations.

On Sunday evening, I meet Larry Ullman in person for the first time, which is funny considering that by now we’ve written three books together, all using e-mail and iChat only. We met at the Moscone center to pre-register for the conference next week, picking up our badges and the usual goodies. By that time, we were still wondering which of the various rumors flying around would be confirmed at the keynote on Monday morning.

Some more hotel/restaurant tips:

• Mela Tandoori serves great Indian / Pakistani food. Make sure to try the garlic naan bread as side order.
• Taylor Hotel at Post and Taylor was a pleasant surprise. The rooms and the building are really old and it shows, but everything is clean, the location is excellent, just a few blocks from Union Square, and the price is unbeatable.

A friend sent me this in preparation for the keynote: :-)

Steve Jobs Dress-up!

P.S.: I’m uploading pictures to my snapmania.com account from time to time:

http://www.snapmania.com/users/mliyanage/usa2005/

I’m in San Francisco and ready for WWDC next week. This week I’ll meet friends and do some touristy things in and around the city... Thanks to everyone who posted comment tips to my earlier travel blog entry.

The trip was nice but it was a long day with all the time shifts on the way from Europe to the US west coast. Having the US immigration service take my fingerprints and mug shot sucks. On my connecting flight from Washington, DC to San Francisco, I was pleasantly surprised by Independence Air, they have great prices and very friendly staff both on the ground and on board.

After all the long flights, waiting times and a quick BART ride I was glad to drop into my hotel bed. I’m staying at the Taylor Hotel at the corner of Taylor and Post (can you tell I love Google Maps :-) It is immensely helpful). The hotel is pretty bare-bones but clean and affordable, with friendly management. Unfortunately I can’t pick up their free wireless signal in the lobby from my room and I can’t be bothered to go down there every time I need Internet connectivity. Luckily, there are about five to six other wireless networks visible from my room if I move my Laptop and tilt its screen just right :-) Several of the networks are unprotected and I can use one of them to connect, although the weak signal keeps it rather flaky.

I spent most of today walking around and shopping, most stores were open for business even though it was Memorial Day. I could resist the PSP for now, but I’ll be here for two more weeks and the SONY center that has them in stock is across the street from Moscone West, so you know what will happen one of these days :-)

I also had an exceptionally tasty dinner at the Toy Boat Dessert Cafe, which I highly recommend.

Tomorrow I’m off to the Apple campus in Cupertino for a meeting, and since I already have the rental car for the day I’ll probably spend a few hours in Palo Alto which I really liked last time.

For those attending WWDC, here are the sessions I plan to attend, although it will probably change several more times.

BTW, I am *very* impressed by iCal’s cross-timezone capabilities. I used the program to plan all my travel details and by correctly marking the events with their time zones and switching the view time zone at the appropriate times, I was always organized. This is something you almost never use or notice, but when you do need it and it works so well, it’s invaluable.

I’ll be spending this year’s vacation in the US again, including one week at WWDC in San Francisco. I will also spend some time on the east coast in Boston, New York and Washington to visit friends and do some sightseeing before returning home.

While researching my flight options online, I spent a *lot* of time on various travel sites selling airline tickets over the Internet. There were various issues with most of them. 1.) As outlined above, my itinerary is not a simple round-trip journey and most of the systems cannot handle complex queries well. Some don't even do one-way. 2.) Others have high prices and 3.) most of them will not allow me to book with a credit card whose billing address is non-US, even though it’s all strictly e-ticketing only. 4.) Many have used web coding stuff that does not work in Safari, or does not work in anything but Windows MSIE.

In the end I was very impressed by travelocity.com. They could handle my schedule of Zurich -> San Francisco -> Boston, and Washington -> Zurich without problems. They accept my Swiss credit card and their prices for domestic flights are the best I’ve seen anywhere.

I did find a better price for the transcontinental flight from a local site, globetrotter.ch, so I booked that part there.

I highly recommend both sites and if you know of a place that has even better deals, please post a comment :-)

Oh yeah, and if anyone can offer accommodation or has a good tip on cheap hotels in any of the places mentioned, but especially San Francisco, drop me a note :-)