Friday, May 16, 2003
Hello from San Fran!
I'm on the way to Japan and on layover for another hour or so. Being the slacker I am, I didn't pack until this morning (oh you should have seen the madness) and put off the site launch for my blog until now. I was kind of betting on there being internet access, what with the tech culture up here and all. I wasn't disappointed - I'm at a free high-speed internet station courtesy of Intel. They're showing their new Centrino processor with laptops bolted to these purple Alice In Wonderland floating thingys and I gotta say their pitch is working on me - this thing is pretty fast!
So I've officially started my vacation, woo-hoo! I've brought a bunch of reading with me for the nine day trip and I have a feeling I'll power through a lot of it in the 11 hour marathon flight in front of me. Books: What To Do With My Life (a bunch of interviews of people across the nation), two books on Flash usability, the O'Reilly book on Information Architecture, and Thoreau's Walden Pond. A nice little mix, should be interesting. That's all I could bring my back to bear, but I'm such a bookworm on vacations that I'll probably have to get more sometime there.
Don't Worry, No Spoilers Ahead: I saw the Matrix yesterday with work folk and it was a blast. It was a strange feeling to watch a movie with such strong Japanese influences the day before flying there and there were two related movie trailers as well: Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, both set in the land of the rising sun at different time periods. They both looked... interesting. We'll see if my inner movie snob likes it.
One of the Intel guys overseeing this little hub just asked me if I'm keeping an eye on my flight time - good call! I could totally see myself getting absorbed into the web and losing track of reality just long enough to miss my connection, even for a nervous nelly like me. I thought getting addicted to TV was bad - the internet is so interactive in comparison to other more passive forms of communication and takes so much more brain power, for better or worse. Makes me wonder - can web access in those new Mercedes really be such a good idea? You know someone's going to try to check hotmail at 80 mph and kaboom!
That's it for now, I'm leaving myself 5-10 minutes to email my blog URL to friends and post it on message boards, something I intended to do
last night this morning right now. I'm going to keep posting pretty regularly and maybe even get to upload some pictures - stay tuned!