short|cuts

In Narita International Airport, Tokyo now..Flight delayed for 2 hours. Using the computer station to write this - 100 YEN for 10mins. Budweiser and MSN to pass time.

Ciao~~

Day 7 - Alcatraz Island

If you are traveling to San Francisco, and plan to stay in a hostel, here’s a tip from me: Down here in SF, all private rooms are subjected to 14% tax. Mixed rooms, on the other hand, are not taxable. For example, if you and 3 of your friends stays in one room, that’s considered a private room. However, if you, one friend of yours and 2 other people stay in that same room, it’s not a private room, i.e. not taxable. Spent the whole morning trying to figure out how come we paid extra..

Alcatraz Island’s the one and only itinerary for the day. Hmm Prison Break anyone? The place’s kinda errie.. We have this device that would give us an guided audio tour of the whole place, it has actual and dramatised narratives, it’s so good that while walking along the cells with that thing, it felt the voices were coming out from the cells..scary.. The isolation cell.. Castrophobic. The whole freaking island smells of bird poo. Why? Because it’s also a protected Sea Bird roosting area.

Dinner was some “street” food at the Wharfs: Clam Chowder, Calamari (freaking huge portion) and Mini donuts.

Heading back to Singapore tomorrow!! (NO!!!!!!!!!!)

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Day 6 - Sausalito & Apple Bash

After breakfast at Subway (USD2.99 for an Italian BMT), we headed to Fisherman’s Wharfs to get our bikes.

First stop was the Palace of Fine Arts. Magnifico! Espectacular! For a while, we thought we were in Rome. Breathtaking scenery and architecture. This will be the place where I’m going to take my wedding photos. Definitely. Marry me anyone? hahaha

Golden Gate Bridge was next. Cycling across the bridge was really an experience. At the middle of the bridge, the winds were go strong that I was almost blown over sideways. No kidding. Before long, we crossed the bridge and were in Sausalito. From there on, it’s down a picturesque hill. At the foot of the hill, lies Sausalito downtown.

Sausalito is a small and quiet town. People walks more slowly here, cars move slower here, cafes everywhere, everything is just.. nice.. before the howling of a Ferrari F430 broke the tranquility… It’s a nice car still.

Wondered around the town for a while before boarding the ferry back to San Francisco.

Had a quick shower and rushed down to the Apple Bash at Yerba Buena Gardens. Lotsa great food, beer, wine, live band performance, great music, man.. I’m totally in elements! One thing is lacking in numbers: Females. It was kinda like a sausage fest hahaha.

Went for round 2 with some Swedish and Norwegian dudes at a posh club: The Redwood Room. Too posh for us poor students in fact. Had 1 drink there before heading to another pub one block away. Drinks there are 3 times cheaper! The rest is history.

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Day 5 - Googleplex

Had a great breakfast this morning at Pinecrest Diners - Corned Beef Hash with Scrambled Eggs, served with wheat bread and hot coffee. Sounds nice? It taste even better :)

First up was a Quark Composer Session at WWDC07. Very nifty application. Learned how to create stunning visualization and effects using just simple drag-and-drops and connect the dots techniques. And I think the speaker works on the South Park cartoon.

After lunch - Beef Steak Sandwich, most of us headed to the Levis’ Store. 50% Discount!!!!! Bought a jacket (a Birthday gift for myself).

3pm: Time to head to Googleplex. We walked down from Moscone to the Caltrain (Jumbo size version of the MRT) station in San Francisco. Bought a day pass ticket for USD11.50. The train ride was surprisingly comfortable. Took about 45 mins to reach Mountain View.

Mountain View is the opposite of the Bay Area. It’s slower pace, with fewer people and the locals are extremely, extremely friendly. Mountain View, like Bay Area, is a very charming town. Victorian houses with nicely mowed lawns and blooming flowers.

We waited for 10 mins at the bus stop and realised that there are no bus to Googleplex. Sidenote: To all Singaporeans, please learn to appreciate our public transport system. Appreciate how well connected all the services are to each other (Buses, trains and cabs). Here in USA, the dots aren’t quite joined well together.

So we wonder around, hoping to hail a cab and asking the locals for alternate mode of transportation. We came across this retired couple, asking for directions. We told them we are from Singapore yada yada and we’re trying to get to Googpleplex; without hesitation, Don, offered to drive us there. There were 6 of us, he even risked having a ticket to take us there. Thumbs Up.

Googleplex is about 10mins drive from the train station. Sadir, an employee of Google, was our host for the day. No cameras are allowed inside the main compound. However, I somehow managed to use my K750i to take some shots of the cafeteria. Google is an amazing place. It’s incredibly casual, feels more like a resort than a company. There’s a life-size mock-up of the SpaceShipOne craft in one of the halls. Each employee has 2 22” LCD displays, large enough to show their millions of lines of codes. Employees are also provided with a electric mini scooter to commute between workplace and home.

Mini cafes are everywhere, and the staffs can help themselves with a wide selection of snacks and beverages.The food at the cafeteria, is as good as it can get - Restaurant standard. If you have read or seen reports about how good the standard of the food at Google is, it’s that good.

This is what I had for dinner: Roasted Beef, Roasted Lamb, Ham with Cheese and Zucchini cold side, Hoi Sin Pork Ribs, Egg salad and Nachos with salsa. (that’s first round)

My second round from the BBQ section: Hamburger patty, 6 inch hot dog, marinated Portobello Mushroom and some greens.

D E L I C I C I O U S! One of the best Birthday treats so far!

Had loads of fun taking pictures while waiting for the train back to San Francisco. We were like crazy over the sunset, trying to take as many photos of us with the sunset as possible. Did some star gazing too.

What a great day.

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Search queries on Google.com. This is not as cool as the one they have inside the building. It’s called GeoDisplay. Basically it’s a 3D rotating Earth with dots streaming from different parts of the world. Each dot represents about 1000 search queries made by that country; each dot has a different colour which represents different language; and it’s Live.

Using GoogleWIFI to write this! Still waiting for the shuttle bus to GooglePlex. Ciao~

Day 4 - Sessions All Day

Sessions, sessions and more sessions! 7 in total!!! Out of the 7, only the Widgets Creation with DashCode, Designing Web Contents for iPhone and Building Animated Cocoa Interfaces were useful and interesting..not forgetting the Apple Design Awards, not bad. The rest of the sessions sucked, really sucked…Boring.

Managed to sneak out during lunch time. Went over to (where else) Apple Store to check if they were selling a particular iPod dock I wanted. And just nice they were having a Live event - James Morrison. He totally rock. Really cool guy.

Not much pictures today. All of the stuffs during the sessions are confidential; so no pictures or videos. Below are 2 videos. One taken after the Building Animated Cocoa Interfaces session, where the Speaker sang a song at the end of his presentation. It’s quite funny if you understand geek talk, if not, just enjoy the music. The other one is taken during Apple Design Awards, it shows the Best Mac OS X Game winner - World of Warcraft by Blizzard.

Going to Googleplex tomorrow, hope it will be be much more fun day.

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Day 3 - First day of WWDC07

Today was a jam-packed day. Went to a total of 4 sessions.

First up was Steve Jobs’ keynote address. Nothing much new, half of what he demo-ed was already shown at last year’s MacWorld. Those who haven’t watch the keynote, please download and watch it. It’s kinda funny towards the end, where they joked about their “best” friend, Microsoft. One of the major new things announced is the availability of Mac OSX’s Safari on the Windows platform. For the uninitiated, Safari beats the leading Internet browsers hands down. Go download it if you haven’t.

Next up was the IT State Of the Union. Pretty boring for the most part, except for the iPhone demo. I REALLY MUST GET THAT PHONE!!

Following that was a Student only seminar. Basically a short session on how to get the most our of the Conference.

Lastly, it was the Graphics and Media State of the Union. This is where they demo Mac OS X Leopard latest in graphics and media technology, including Core Image, Core Audio, Core Animation, Image kit, Webkit. etc. Lotsa eye Candy. One of the coolest demo was the one where they record a World of Warcraft gameplay movie and encode it in H.264 in realtime, without affecting the gameplay performance. The iPhone demo was another cool one. Playing Quicktime media contents using Safari on the iPhone is.. wow.. I MUST GET THAT PHONE!

Going to so many sessions can be very tiring for anyone. I really have to applaud Apple for their efforts in ensuring that everyone is as comfortable and well-fed as possible. Breakfast, lunch, tea and even dinner are provided. In between each session, there will be cookies, gourmet coffee, chocolate snacks, a cart stacked with fruits, chips and free-flow of fresh fruit juice (Odwalla). What’s more, they serve alcohol for dinner, beer, white wine and red wine included! All free flow!

Can’t wait for Day 2 of the conference! Good night all :)

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All photos at 1024 x 768. Please view with full screen.

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