Each year San Francisco hosts the second largest semiconductor convention in the galaxy - Semicon West. This year I was fortunate enough to be able to attend. By procuring our own lodging in the bay area my fellow R&D co-workers and I managed to convince my boss to pay for the plane tickets out there. My older brother Jim, currently attending Berkeley in pursuit of a doctorate in biostatistics, graciously allowed me and my co-worker Matt to stay with him. (you may recall Matt from the Decavirate Conquers the Orient! article picture with Pikachu, him and me) It was crowded lodging as there were 5 people total staying in my brother's two bedroom apartment, but due to the serious lack of furniture we didn't bump into each other that often.

As the primary purpose of this trip was a vacation without taking any PTO days I left Saturday the 12th and returned Saturday the 19th - despite the fact that we only attended the conference on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The conference was interesting, but I enjoyed beautiful views of San Francisco much more. This trip I was able to visit a couple new destinations. I took the ferry from the Embarcadero to Sausalito and walked from there across the Golden Gate Bridge. Additionally, as a demonstration of some of the unfortunate limitations of the public transportation system I decided to go the Computer History Museum in Mountain View by Bart/Caltrain/bus/foot and managed to make it there from Berkeley in just less than 3.5 hours. Because of the long trip and needing to get back to catch Caltrain to San Jose that day I only managed to get 25 minutes in the museum. I still think it was worth it. They have a functioning Babbage Engine and I was fortunate enough to catch part of the demonstration. A Babbage Engine is a 19th century mechanical polynomial root calculator. This particular device has 8000 parts and is powered by a 50+ year old lady turning a big crank. It's truly astounding.

On the way home from San Fransisco weather forced me to miss my connecting flight to the Dayton International Airport and in order to avoid a 24 hour insanity festival in the Minneapolis International Airport I flew to Indianapolis and rented a car and drove home. I took a small break at an Indiana Waffle House and enjoyed okay food and delightful service from a rotund waitress named "Juicy." I was able to make it back to BullChester by 3:30am Sunday morning. All told it was an excellent trip - the only major dissapointment was that I was unable to find the time to meet up with any of the Cincinnati expatriots now residing in San Francisco. I took a great deal of photos and unfortunately this overly majestic view of me in front of Coit Tower is the best one.

Decavirate Conquers the Orient!
Posted by: joe @ 2006.01.24.0851

January 13th, 2006, (my birthday) myself and 3 of my Rite Track cohorts departed for Japan. Mainy of the more chronologically minded of you might realize that this short changed me of my governmentally endowed 24 hours of birthday time as we crossed the international date line somewhere over the Pacific. Anyways, after 3 plane flights and a bus ride, totalling 24 hours of solid traveling, we finally arrived at the Sleep Inn Hotel in Kumamoto, Japan (technically Ozu, Japan). The hotel is very well planned, from the light switch locations to the prefabricated bathroom module that was inserted into the structure of the hotel. Nervertheless, this is not the typical tourist destination and walking around town the following day we realized that were something of a novelty here. The routine is pretty easy here: we get up around 9, go for around 6 hours of training, two of which is a long lunch break, then come back to the hotel and do whatever.

Today, Monday the 23rd I got out of training and slept all day as apparently I contracted the bird flu. Most of today, I've been sleeping, but I'm about to head to the "Super Michael" which is comparable to an IGA with no dairy. It's a nice grocery store and it gives me a chance to practice my world renowned Japanese with the cashiers. Ozu is not a very crowded place, we are really in more of the countryside of Japan. On Saturday we went to downtown Kumamoto and got a better sense of what a Japanese city is like. We went to a huge open air mall comprised of two streets that are covered at about 3 stories up. Each of the streets runs for hundreds of yards and is filled with shops. Like typical guys, we traversed the entire mall and looked only in 1 electronics store. So far it has been a very relaxed and interesting experience and I'm very glad I got the oppurtunity to come here. I'll be back in 2 weeks, and like the great Marco Polo, nearly a million years ago, I'll bring back spices and tales of foriegn lands.

Posted by: @ 1969.12.31.1900

Posted by: @ 1969.12.31.1900

Posted by: @ 1969.12.31.1900