2004-05-30 17:02 UTC Spring 2004 Travelog: Part 5 (Lick Observatory)
The weekend. David had bought himself a Linksys wireless router when we went to Fry's on Friday, and on Saturday he installed it. It was disappointingly easy. Where's the fun if things Just Work? (Actually it turns out it didn't Just Work; the ethernet ports were broken.)
In the afternoon Ben, Kerz, David and I went up to the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. It was a really nice ride with some great views of the valley. I hadn't realised quite how much smog there was here. It's rather scary. I don't remember seeing smog back in Norway.
We were given a nice talk by one of the amateur astronomers lucky enough to get himself a job at the observatory, and then drove back home. On the way, Ben was annoyed by a Toyota driver who was weaving all over his lane.
Yesterday evening David and I went to Andale Taqueria in Palo Alto. I had a small chicken taco. It was good. Today I'm planning to go to San Francisco to meet Bloo and see Shrek 2. Ought to be fun.
The agenda for the workshop is now available. Looks like David and I are going to give a joint presentation tuesday afternoon. We're right before Microsoft, which could be interesting.
I'm very much at a loss as to what to expect from this workshop. On the one hand I really can't see us convincing everyone else that the solution is to continue down the HTML path. After all, it's not in the interests of most of the other attendees. Many of them are wanting to sell SVG, XForms, or XHTML products, and most of those who aren't are probably more concerned with developing a good theoretical solution than addressing the unfortunate pragmatic needs of today's authors.
I guess this is a case of "wait and see".