San Francisco - the City by the Bay, as they like to call it - is a wonderful place. One of the prettier cities in North America, I think. I recently had the good fortune to attend a conference in San Francisco, and along with attending the conference, did a bit of looking around, and also spent a few extra days exploring the great outdoors. This web writeup records all of it!
The Conference I was attending is called 'JavaOne'. It is an annual event that focuses on Java, a popular free and open source programming language and execution environment that runs on any type of computer. Java has grown tremendously from its inception only eleven years ago, and is used in countless applications and countless products the world over. At this year's conference, there were almost 15,000 attendees.
I attended the conference with a colleague, Chris. We flew down on Monday , May 15 so that we could attend the four principle days of the conference, from the 16th to the 19th. The wekend was the Canadian Victoria day weekend, and with this long weekend as a core, I decided to tack on a few days at the beginning of the next week, bring Jenn down on the weekend, and have a bit of post-conference sightseeing and hiking!
San Francisco is truly an interesting city. There is interesting architecture everywhere - something rare for a North American city. The walk from our Hotel to the conference each day was interesting, with lots of historic buildings mixed in with fresh modern design, and with quaint looking old electric streetcars plying the streets. I do have to admit that the stretch of street near our hotel was slightly seedier than other parts of town... but interesting nevertheless!
In addition to attending the conference and seeing the sights, I endeavoured to visit recommended local establishments when we went to eat. We wanted to experience true local fare, not some chain that we already were familiar with. Over the course of our week in San Francisco, we visited a tasty Taqueria (where excellent burritos and other mexican food is sold), a popular hole-in-the-wall breakfast spot (Dottie's True Blue Cafe), and sampled a suprisingly Italian Italian restaurant in the Little Italy district. Among other places, of course!
Each Morning Chris and I would walk the 20 minutes to the Moscone Conference center where the JavaOne Conference was held. The Conference itself was a sprawling, huge affair, with capacity for thousands and thousands. Everything was on a huge scale - the dining hall, general assembly area, even the individual technical session rooms were huge. There was also a definite nod to the nerd-ish nature of the attendees: Game rooms, Movie rooms, and Internet terminals dotted the conference floors.
One excellent surprise was in store for us (well, for me, anyway) at the JavaOne "after dark" bash on Thursday night. Special guests of honour brought in for us were none other than the "Mythbusters", central figures on the show of the same name on the Discovery Channel - a show which I've watched quite a bit and which I think is great. Anyway, they were at the event, making appearances here and there, and even doling out drinks to all of us! A fun highlight to the week's events!
(By the way, if you are interested in a much more complete set of JavaOne conference images, click on the 'JavaOne' link on the left-hand sidebar, or just
click here).
During our week at JavaOne, Chris and I would venture out to a nearby pub or restaurant. One day, he caught sight of a city fire station, and had to rush in and get a souvenir for his dad (who is a volunteer firefighter back in his native Cape Breton).
We toured the interesting neighbourhood streets of San Francisco, exporing the fantastically steep streets in the area of Nob hill, exploring the Presidio, taking pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge at night, and sampling fine restaurants in the Little Italy district. The architecture everywhere was quite intricate and breathtaking.
When the weekend finally rolled around and the conference was over, Jenn arrived from Ottawa. After picking her up, the three of us headed down to the Fisherman's Wharf area to catch a boat to visit and tour Alcatraz Island, home of the infamous penitentiary that held some of the most notorious criminals of the 20th century.
The boat ride over to Alcatraz provided fabulous views back towards downtown San Francisco. As we approached Alcatraz Island, we could see that it was in a state of scenic disrepair. The National Park service has turned Alcatraz Island into a unit of the National Park system, but has left a lot of the island in an unaltered state.
