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January 18, 2009

My Crazy Week In San Francisco

Macworld Expo was last week, which meant I spent the 4th through the 11th in beautiful (and sunny! and cold!) San Francisco working the show (and enjoying a bit of sightseeing toward the end of the week).

A few notes from the trip:

• Unlike my gig in Planning, Program Managers don't travel all that much, and it'd been a while since I'd spent time sitting at an airport gate. Turns out they're fantastic for getting caught up on a huge backlog of video podcasts (which may have built up while, say, the city of Seattle was buried under a blanket of snow).
• In addition to being a winged child-care center, Alaska 316 was a pretty bumpy ride. I'm generally relaxed about flying, but the plane was shuddering violently for protracted periods of time, and I found myself looking out the window, wondering if the damn wing was going to fall off.
• (Not to be too morbid, but it was one of those flights where I was glad I'd told Elaine I loved her before boarding.)
• After landing (safely!), I gathered my things, waited my turn, and exited the plane, only to be greeted by the overwhelming smell of bacon in the concourse. This is, I think, a good omen.
• Things That Make San Francisco Awesome, #4566: the mayor's first name is Gavin.
• The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) light rail system was expanded to the San Francisco Airport a few years ago, and I was excited to give it a try. BART's a bit different from other transit systems I've used. For starters, they don't use "zones" to determine fares (where travel inside one zone is one price, going between zones is another price, and so on). Rather, every BART stop has a table that lists all the stations, and shows you the price to get from your current station to your destination (in my case, it was $5.40 to get from SFO to downtown, one way). This is confusing and cumbersome.
• Second, BART tickets aren't single-use; they're stored-value, which means you buy a certain amount of credit from the machine, and the machine spits out a ticket with the credit encoded on it. Again, strange - it means you, the passenger, carry all the risk with the ticket. If you store your ticket too close to a magnet (or a cell phone!) which strips the encoding, well, you're out of luck. This wouldn't be so bad for a single-trip or day-use thing, but these are the same cheap cardboard tickets you get everywhere else (think "bake sale/raffle"), and they don't exactly hold up over time.
• Another note: when buying your ticket, the machine will want to sell you $20 of credit right off the bat. That's not such a hot deal if you're only using the system to get in and out of the city over the course of a week. Just buy what you need, when you need it.
• (Oh, and the damn machines don't take AmEx. Not so friendly for the business traveler.)
• The ride into the city was about as uneventful as you might imagine. Trains run every 15 minutes; the trip is almost exactly a half hour (we were under way at 7:42 PM; we arrived at my stop at 8:11 PM). Easy-peasy.
• (Reminder: Link Light Rail opens July 3 here in Seattle...)
• The Macworld people held a two-day "Power Tools" session on Monday and Tuesday, focused on helping people get more from their Macs. Microsoft agreed to participate, with Program Managers from each of the Mac Office applications giving a 60 - 90 minute talk about advanced or overlooked features. Stuart and I split the 90-minute Excel session on Monday afternoon, and it seemed to go fine - no major gaffes, no f-bombs from the podium, nothing caught fire. As I understand it, all the Power Tools sessions were videotaped and will be made available on YouTube sometime soon. I'll post a link when I get one.
• The big news from the Apple keynote on Tuesday was, to my mind, the end of Digital Rights Management in iTunes. The labels have, apparently, realized that DRM annoys legitimate customers, adds complexity to how people enjoy music, retards interoperability (and innovation), and, most damningly, doesn't do a thing to help stop piracy. They've finally hit stage 5. I never thought I'd see the day.
• (Since the announcement, I've dumped a good $50 stripping DRM from songs in my library, and will finish the process once Apple's entire back catalog is re-encoded.)
• Other keynote thoughts: the new iLife is incredible. I love the "Faces" stuff in iPhoto, but feel bad that Apple just shot FlickrExport in the head. iMovie, it seems, has long since abandoned any pretense of being an "entry level" application. I mean, yes, it's easy enough to use, but holy cow it's powerful. The stuff you can now do with the app - free with every Mac! - is astonishing. And finally, the new GarageBand is a classic example of what Apple does best. First, start with a great app. Then, identify the reason(s) people aren't using/can't use it (in this case, it's because people don't know how to play an instrument). Third, develop a slick system to teach people how to play, thus a) overcoming a market obstacle, and b) differentiating your offering from all of the other music apps out there. Finally, add a bit of sex appeal by having celebrity musicians teach you how to play the songs that made them famous. So cool.
• Overall, the Macworld show was much less trafficked than in previous years, seeming to run about at about 60% - 70% of last year's population. I wonder how much the down economy is driving this, or if enthusiasm is waning now that Apple isn't coming back.
• For all that, I love working the booth (the Excel kiosk, natch), and had some great conversations with people about Office, Excel, and Mac stuff at Microsoft generally. People are using Office 2008, and really like it - I was surprised at how sophisticated some of the questions were, and got some wonderful suggestions for ways we can improve future versions. Customers rock.
• Elaine flew down Wednesday night, so we could stay over a few extra days and enjoy a mini-vacation. (She was a sight for sore eyes, let me tell you.)
• We decided to use San Francisco MUNI for sightseeing. MUNI has a solid bus system, but it's a bit arcane to get used to. Bus stop information, for example, is spray-painted on light poles, which I'm sure saves the city money but a) is hard to see unless you know what you're looking for, and b) even when you do see them, they look fake. Grr.
• Thank God for Google Transit on the iPhone. The new iPhone Maps application (with the 2.2 firmware) introduced "transit" directions, which meant we could simply enter our starting point and destination, and Maps would tell us which buses (or other rail systems to take). Awesome, awesome, awesome.
• Another good resource: NextMuni.com, which is much like MyBus.org here in Seattle. Just tell the system which stop you're at, and it'll let you know how soon the next bus will be along.
• Operationally, the buses seem safe and well-thought-out; I counted 5 video cameras on the bus itself; each bus also has a nice digital reader board next to the driver that lists the next upcoming stop. Seattle Metro could learn from this.
• San Francisco is a really wonderful city to see from a bus. Packed with people, vibrant, something interesting happening every 10 feet. You miss it when driving. Trust me.
• One of our stops was the Palace of Fine Arts. It's gorgeous at 4:30 PM - the light is perfect - and it's got a nice small lake and running path. With all the strollers, joggers, and birds, it's got the same general feel as Greenlake (only smaller).
• The cafe in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art makes a damn good omelette.
• Our friends Kim and Steve took us up to Twin Peaks (by Sutro Tower) for some amazing views of the city, followed by a trip to the new California Academy of Sciences. The Academy is a recently-rebuilt science museum, and it's just incredible - modern, smart, wonderful. We only got a few hours in the place, but it's the sort of thing that's genuinely don't-miss.
• (Oh, and the fish and chips in the cafe are really yummy.)
• Our hotel had a pretty good selection of cable TV channels, including two I don't watch a lot: CurrentTV and BBC America. Current is a lot like watching YouTube - it's all user-submitted content - and its sheer randomness (you never know what's coming next) is hypnotic (Exhibit A: "Internet Porn & You", which I kind of can't believe made it on television). BBC America, on the other hand, was running a lot of the new Dr. Who, and, again, I got sucked in.
• The flights home were simple, fast, and easy. Which made me think about the crazy-bumpy ride down, and the damn wing falling off all over again. Grr.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 18, 2009 10:45 AM.
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