Spent the last couple of days in the US, in New York, Palo Alto and San Francisco and had a blast indeed. Over the next days I'll be summarizing the most important events of that journey to all those places I knew but from the movies and those voices and faces I knew but from the web. This risks becoming rather verbose, so I don't expect you guys to read all of it ā but I can't help sharing this :)
So.. the first 4 days were the holiday part of the trip, doing what you do on your first NYC visit, exploring Manhattan and Brooklyn with big eyes, enjoying the view from the Empire State at 2am, and so forth. Apart from the usual tourist stuff I met formidable geow***kers Bernhard and Gregor (he, talked him back into blogging ;)), both at Google New York and working on Google Maps. Great guys, like them a lot. The free food at their in-house restaurant was remarkable, their infrastructure is pretty nice, notoriously. The playground area the company's offices are known for seemed definitely underutilized, but as Berni remarked: just having those rooms makes a real difference. Google and their maps actually stayed with me all along the trip: this visit in the Meat Packing District, then in the Valley helping to find my way around, and finally to my last scheduled appointment, WhereCamp2008 at Googleplex, their mighty mothership. But more on that later.
The schedule was too tight for my preferred liveblogging mode, and with Geneva's Linuxdays today, the local Atlassian User Conference on Monday and the Internet Briefing Conference on Wednesday and Thursday the pace will stay rather high ā so thanks for hanging on.
Next in this series: The first day in Stanford, at the Center for Internet & Society of Stanford Law School, meeting amazing folks like Bruce Cahan, legendary Bill Moggridge and Bill Cockayne, all in one day.