Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Time to fill in the travel meme for 2012, as I've finished this year's round of travels (2012's starts bright and early on January the 2^nd as we fly to Las Vegas and then drive to Zion National Park...). So, the usual list of places I've stayed at least one night in the last year, with a little * for those that have had more than one night. The list is in approximate order of the first time I stayed there, so some, like Las Vegas, which had multiple trips, were visited several times throughout the year.

This year had fewer long road trips, but a lot of time in the US. Which reminds me, yet again that I still really must sit down with spikeiowa and plan the road trip fanzine we've been noodling for a while...



So, places:

Santa Monica, CA^*
Palm Springs, CA^*
Scottsdale, AZ
Flagstaff, AZ
Grand Canyon, AZ
Las Vegas, NV^*
Mojave, CA^*
Paso Robles, CA^*
Campbell, CA^*
San Jose, CA^*
Amsterdam^*
Orlando, FL^*
Redmond, WA^*
Barstow, CA^*
San Francisco, CA^*
Longboat Key, FL^*
Santa Barbara, CA
Laguna Beach, CA^*
Lost Hills, CA
Napa, CA
Bellevue, WA^*
Portland, OR
Roseburg, OR
Willows, CA
Monterey, CA
Bakersfield, CA^*
Lee Vining, CA
Mariposa, CA
Santa Cruz Mountains, CA^*
New York, NY^*
Newark, NJ
Long Beach Island, NJ^*
Seattle, WA^*
Portland, OR
Roseburg, OR
Willows, CA
Monterey, CA
Mountain View, CA^*
St Clement, Jersey^*

Trivia:

Airlines flown: Virgin Atlantic, Virgin America, FlyBe, British Airways
Aircraft flown: Boeing 747-400, Boeing 737-500, Embraer EMB 195, Airbus A340-600, Airbus A340-300, Airbus A330-300, Airbus A321, Airbus A320-200, Airbus A319, Bombardier Q400
Ferries taken: Oregon State Ferries (Willamette River)
Road trips: Seattle to Las Vegas (Seattle, Portland, Roseburg, Willows, Monterey, Paso Robles, Bakersfield, Las Vegas), Newark to Philadelphia (Newark, Long Beach Island, Philadelphia), San Francisco to Las Vegas, San Francisco to Laguna Beach to San Francisco
Conferences attended: CES, Parallels Summit, , BlackBerry Devcon Europe, MMS, BlackBerry World, FIRe, Maker Faire, Office 2013 Launch, Dreamforce, TechEd, BUILD, MEC, GPU Technology Conference, BlackBerry JAM, Nokia Lumia Launch, Windows 8 Launch, Windows Phone 8 Launch, SharePoint Conference, SNS Predictions Dinner
Countries: USA, Spain, Jersey
Wine Festivals: Paso Robles Gragiste Festival
Wine Areas: Woodinville, Lodi, Livermore, Napa, Paso Robles, Willamette Valley, Santa Cruz Mountains
Shuttle flybys: OV-105 Endeavour over San Francisco
US States visited: California, Washington, Nevada, Florida, Oregon, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania
US National Parks visited: Yosemite, Philadelphia National Mall, Canaveral National Seashore, Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier
Airports: LHR, LGW, LAS, SEA, SFO, LAX, MCO, JER, AMS, EWR, JFK, PHL
Highest altitude: 9,943 ft at the Tioga Pass

And now on to the next year. Where will it take us? So far it's starting with the usual January US trip for CES and then... Well, it'll be fun whatever, and wherever!

"I've got a ticket to the moon
I'll be leaving here any day soon
Yeah, I've got a ticket to the moon
But I'd rather see the sunrise in your eyes."

I've always thought sunrise would be a good time to see spaceships, the bright dawn light as the rocket rises up through an empty sky. But now it's a thought that's tinged with melancholy, as I'll remember a foggy morning on a pier in San Francisco, as I waited with a crowd of people to see the final flight of a space shuttle.

With the ending of the space shuttle programme the various orbiters were distributed to museums across the US. The last to be moved was OV-105 Endeavour, on a cross country trip from Florida to Los Angeles, ending with a flypast of space industry sites across California (with a detour to San Francisco). As it was the final day of the conference I was attending, I decided to skip the first few morning sessions and head down to the Embarcadero to watch for the shuttle on its carrier 747.

The dawn mists were slowly clearing off the Bay as I walked down a pier next to the Bay Bridge. There were just a handful of us there, so I was able to grab what I though would be a good spot.

Like much of the space programme, the shuttle was late. The pier slowly filled up, and as we waited we watched pelicans float past, sea lions cavort in the waces, and a parade of various ships pass under the bridge.

Then someone saw it, in the East Bay haze, slowly heading over Oakland and the giant cranes of the harbour. The carrier headed north, over the port cities and round to the Golden Gate for a photo opportunity. The distant aircraft was hard to see, but we expected it to return...



So we waited.

Then it was there, coming in from the south of the City by the Bay, curving round over the Bay Bridge and up back to the Golden Gate, before heading to the NASA sites down by the South Bay. Bright white in the morning sun, Endeavour and her carrier 747 were followed by a jet fighter as it slowly lumbered around the bay, low and slow - just the right speed for the city's massed array of cameras...

Here are some of the pictures I took of that final pass over the Bay.









And it was gone.

The last flight.

A couple of hours later it was on the ground in Los Angeles, ready for a final road journey to a museum, never to be in the air again.

Time for a new space age.

[More pictures, including the two launches I saw, in my Space Shuttle set on Flickr]

Driving down the Blue Ridge Parkway, if not the longest, then certainly the narrowest, US National Park, we stopped at Brinegar Cabin, in North Carolina. It's a beautiful spot (at least in the spring), a hollow in the top of the mountains, with a cabin looking east down a valley.

I was walking round the cabin, looking for things to photograph, when I met...

...IT!

I can only describe it as the Incredible Hulk of bees. Pumped up on what must have been steroid infused pollen, it was the size of a small hummingbird - and it wasn't happy. Oh no. The demure drone of a British bee was replaced with a whining rasp, as it stood me down in an ominous hover. This was not going to end well...



Brinegar Cabin, North Carolina
May 2010

Standing on a beach, watching the sun fall off the edge of the world, the light does amazing things. Sometimes you have a camera with you.

Evening on Laguna Beach, just south east of LA, and a gull heads north up the strand. Its body is silhouetted against the sky, its wings reflecting the golden light of the setting sun. The exposure blurs them slightly, turning feathers into fire, and a common bird into a phoenix, flames licking its body as it heads to its nest for its final immolation.



And then it reminded me of a Thomas Dolby song...

Metal bird dip wing of fire
whose airlanes comb dark Earth
the poles are tethers we were born in
on the brink of a whole new deal
on the floor of a hotel bar
I'm staring right into the light
and I'm drawn in like a moth
and I'm flying North again...

Laguna Beach, California
May 2010

We're in the middle of a short inter-conference roadtrip, driving from Silicon Valley to the fleshpots of Las Vegas.

We could have taken the easy way, down the coast to Cambria and then straight across California to Bakersfield, before a quick hop over the mountains to the Mojave desert and a straight run to Barstow and then to Vegas. Instead we've headed north and east, past Sacramento, driving over the crest of the Sierra Nevada, before making a complete circuit of Lake Tahoe, and finally finding our way onto Route 395, the East Sierra scenic highway.

The sun was setting over the mountains as we passed Topaz Lake, illuminating an impressive line of lenticular clouds.





A beautiful end to a long day in the mountains.

A scan of a document that can't exist. Yet...

Actually it can, I was in Terminal 5 recently getting a tour of the systems being installed, and they ran a test of the new self-check-in kiosks.

Mary and I will be in and around San Francisco, San Jose, Silicon Valley and the Bay Area at the beginning of October.

If you're a PR or a company representative, get in touch, as we're looking for technology companies to visit whilst we're there.

We're interested in everything from enterprise architecture to desktop applications, with a particular interest in mobile and social technologies, as well as tools for managing service oriented architectures.

Want to give a US client exposure in the UK? Drop us a line!

This is something in the way of an experiment to see if I can use this blog as a tool for handling pitches and RFIs

If you're in the UK and want to find out what airline flies where from where, Flightmapping.com seems to have a pretty comprehensive database (even if its flashy European map isn't quite as accurate).

Just ignore all the adverts...

...and the Virgin upgrade fairy smiled on us and our collections of air miles, so we got a decent night's kip. We helped that along with the usual trick of getting the last plane out and spending the day tiring ourselves out (this time touring Manhattan Island by tower and by bus).

Normal blogging to be resumed shortly (jet lag permitting)

...to New York and Brooklyn for an Office 2007 reviewer's workshop, then to San Francisco and the bay for the AJAX Experience, down to San Diego for FIRe and wrapping up with WinHEC in Seattle...

Whoosh!

Back nearly in June.