The Tinderbox Weekend trip went pretty well. It was held at the Hotel Rex, which is located near Union Square in San Francisco. Meeting a bunch of other Tinderbox users (some of whom I've communicated with before via email or weblog comments) was pretty interesting! I wasn't the only person using OS X, and even more surprising there was another Newton user!
I hadn't been to San Francisco since I was a little kid, so I spent some time walking around the neighborhood with a camera. It reminded me a bit of a Japanese city, but with wider streets and older architecture. I'm sure there are other American cities like that, but I'm used to cities like LA. It was gloomy and overcast almost the entire time, but San Francisco is famous for bad weather, so I wasn't surprised.
The city (or at least the parts I saw) had a run-down, shabby appearance. It was fine as a place to visit and photograph, but I certainly wouldn't want to live there. Most of the hotels in the area (and there were many of them) had something going on in front, which involved a bunch of grown men and women shouting, banging on pots, and generally acting like a bunch of two year olds. Most of them had signs saying "locked out," and from their behavior it was pretty easy to see why their (hopefully former) employers would lock them out.
On Saturday night most of the group went to dinner at a really fancy restaurant (meaning incredibly expensive food in very small portions). The food was nothing special, but the conversation was very interesting--Al Hawkins had some great stories from a cruise for Mac users that he'd gone on. This led to some suggestions that there should be a "Tinderbox cruise" sometime.
Some of us (myself, Mark Bernstein, Elin Sjursen, and Doug Miller) had lots of time between the end of the conference and our departure times, so we walked around a bit on Sunday afternoon. There was a film crew working at another hotel nearby, and I was pretty amused by all the excitement it caused. Here in LA it's unusual if I don't see a film crew at least once a week, so I enjoyed watching the reactions of people for whom it was a novelty.
We went to the Starlight Room, located at the top of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, to enjoy the view. Getting in turned out to be rather a strange experience--it actually opened a bit later than the advertised time, and the elevator button that goes to that floor didn't work until it was actually opened. As a result, we all spent about ten minutes riding elevators up and down the hotel, waiting for the top floor button to be turned on. Elevator silliness aside, the view was worth the trouble. I took lots of pictures, some of which will hopefully turn out well.
Overall, it was an entertaining and educational trip, and I'll definitely return if it becomes an annual event.
11:10:45 PM 
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