Back from San Francisco

I just got back from San Francisco, where I was manning the Zope.org booth at Linux World Expo.

The first thing I have to say is - San Francisco's climate is ideal, at least as far as temperatures go. It's jacket weather all the time. I enjoyed the city immensely, and finally got to go stand at the Pacific Ocean for the first time since a family reunion trip in Oregon in the early 1990's. Of course, I drank a lot, and had a memorable final drink with a couple of homeless people on the sidewalk at 2:30 in the morning on my last night there.

There were plenty of great shops as well, including a Prada store that I never was able to make it to. It's too bad that the big "Prada Epicenter" store for San Francisco will never be realized. And, fortunately for me, I only found one record store (which was basically next door to my hotel) with Merzbow. I broke my pledge not to buy any more Merzbow during the month of August, and have brought my Merzbow album count up to a still humble 20.

During the days, I found myself at Linux World. The show went well and I had a lot of encouraging conversations. Zope is fun to promote because it's such a unique system, for better or worse. Interestingly, one aisle over was a booth for Open ACS. I wanted to go over and talk to them and see how Open ACS was faring now that Ars Digita is long dead, with the Ars Digita ACS product being folded into Red Hat Enterprise Applications. I never made it over there though.

Linux World is not my personal bag of cats. And I found some things that made me giggle with delight. Namely, the email garden. The email garden is definitely a very nice free service that I believe is sponsored and ran by HP. But, using Red Hat and Mozilla, I found the set up quite interesting:

• None of the Mozilla installations seemed set up to have the "password manager" feature disabled. Thus, every time you logged into a web mail client, a site like Zope.org, or even online banking, Mozilla would ask if you'd like to save the password. Since it's such a public space, I hope most people said "No" or "Never for this site." I find it interesting that such things weren't disabled automatically by those who knew they were public machines.
• And here's my favorite - All of the machines had scroll wheel mice. But guess what the scroll wheel would do (at least, in Mozilla)? Nothing! Um... So, Linux is ready for the desktop? I admit - Red Hat's Bluecurve interface is nice and all, and KDE and Gnome are moving along nicely. But still - scroll wheel mice on all the computers that don't work? Someone dropped the ball here.

Finally, I had a chance to play Downhill Domination, a new mountain bike racing game for the PS2, at the Metreon. This is significant because I know a lot of the people involved with the sound and art production of this game. Against better financial judgement, I think I may go out and get this now.