After posting about our time in Boston and Los Angeles, it’s now time to talk about San Francisco. Before finally (in the next post) getting around to the whole point of the trip. Let’s hope it’s not too much of an anti-climax.
On Monday of last week, Dagmara and I arrived in San Francisco after a short hop from LA.
Seeing the Marin Airporter brought back lots of memories from when I lived in San Rafael from 2000 to 2003, back before Uber and Lyft made airport drop-offs a breeze. I can’t count the number of times I took the Airporter from downtown San Rafael or Larkspur, back in the day.
For this super-quick stop in the Bay Area we were staying over in Berkeley Marina: as mentioned in the last post, the RSAC event at the Moscone meant the downtown hotels were either unavailable or unaffordable. Still, this is a nice part of the Bay Area, too!
I try to take lots of pictures of the local flora when I’m over, as I know they will trigger lots of fond memories for my wife. We have California poppies planted in our garden in Switzerland for exactly this reason.
When we booked this hotel we looked into getting a water taxi to take folks across to Pier 9 - it would have been a great way to commute! Sadly it didn’t end up happening - another time, perhaps.
Walking around the hotel was actually great - not just for the views but for the nearby dog park where it was easy to make new four-legged friends.
When walking we came across this funny looking boat. Apparently it’s made from two separate boat hulls with a spacer in-between. More details can be found here.
It’s always great to catch up with old friends in the Bay Area. I was really happy that a bunch of the AutoCAD team were in SF on Tuesday. I hadn’t reached out ahead of time, so it was really lucky they happened to be there.
It was also great seeing current Research Engineering colleagues. I’ve known both Hans and Clayton for at least 25 years. Wow.
I also managed to catch up with one former colleague, Elise. It was too brief a catch-up, but better than nothing!
I only ended up taking BART once during this trip, for a scoot along Market Street to the office. Outside of commute hours, clearly.
There’s a new statue at the Embarcadero, a huge mesh sculpture by Marco Cochrane.
It’s really impressive, although I admit I went past it once without noticing it was there. I was probably checking my phone. Sigh.
I still haven’t taken a Waymo… I must install the app and make that happen on my next trip. It was fun seeing this one get paralysed on a crossing by the Embarcadero. I took this photo just before a swarm of people walked around it.
I did take a lot of Lyfts while on this trip. A real stand-out was a trip I had with Khaled, who had completely engineered his own combined rear-view and dash cam system, fully integrated into his vehicle. He could split screen between rear and front views, go back in time to get information that had been recorded days before… he’d even hooked into the reversing light signal so that he could switch modes when the car was put into reverse.
He did a really nice job of integrating the hardware discreetly, too.
On our way to the airport on Wednesday we stopped by Stanford University to visit Iro Armeni’s new Gradient Spaces Lab. If you’re unaware of her lab’s work, be sure to check this article written by Iro some time ago. It presents a really interesting possible future vision.
The lab contains a lot of interesting capabilities for simulating virtual and mixed reality experiences, as you would expect for a “Gradient Space”. I’m really excited to see what comes out of Iro’s lab over the coming months/years.
With that I headed to SFO to fly home to Switzerland. Dagmara headed onwards to Las Vegas, to attend our annual TechX event. It’s the first one I’ll have missed since perhaps 2011, I think, but I have a good reason: I’m heading to Venice for the opening of the Biennale and the final session of the Neuroscience and Design class I’ve been attending. Something I’ll be reporting on in the post after next, I expect. I’m really looking forward to this: I’ve been to Venice but never to the Biennale, and I think it’s going to be a great experience.
I also admit to wanting to get home to Daisy. When I walked through the door she “claimed” my hat - something she does whenever one of us leaves her for any length of time, be it with hats, hairbands or socks - and I’ve been enjoying walking with her over the last few days. It’s very grounding after a busy work trip.
In the next post I’ll talk about our "Encoding Experience" events in Boston and SF. Check back soon!
