Los Angeles

This week, I was in Los Angeles, California.  Land of eternal sunshine...smog...Hollywood...and traffic.  Seriously, though...you have to take traffic into account for everything that you do.  We spent hours in traffic, each day we were there.  It's one of the reasons that I'm happy that I don't live there anymore.  At the same time, there are lots of things to love about Southern California.  I'll save that for another post.

I was in LA to participate in a press conference for my company.  I arrived late in the evening, hungry, and found one of my favorite fast-food places...Baja Fresh.

I have a special place in my heart for their Pico de Gallo, and the awesome steak Burrito Ultimo:

The first full day that I was there, was filled with meetings.  One of them was really interesting.  We went to the corporate headquarters of Mattel.

As most of my friends know, I have a love of toys.  This made the meeting rather interesting.  Afterwards, we were taken to their company store - a miniature Toys R Us in their building.  While there, I ran into several walls of Barbie.  One item surprised me:

This is a 5-inch tall couch, designed by Jonathan Adler.  For those that don't know - he's a really, really famous designer.  I found this crazy.  However, I've learned that the Barbie audience is divided into two groups. One is little girls, age 3 to 10.  The other is "older" women.  They collect Barbies and Barbie-merchandise like crazy.  This couch is for them...

I stayed at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel, in the area of Los Angeles called "Century City" - about a block away from the Fox Television studios.

But the best part was that the hotel was located only 3 blocks away from the Los Angeles LDS Temple:

The rest of the time in LA was spent working on the press conference that I mentioned before.  We brought press from all over North America and Europe, to the event.  We introduced some brand-new products and this group of press handles some of the really technical aspects of our PC products.  I can't talk about the details, as we give the press a bit of time with the actual parts, before they publish their news stories.  They're not allowed to publish them until a specific date.

We used a building in downtown LA called The Exchange.  This used to house the Los Angeles Stock Exchange from the 1930s until the 80s.  Here's a photo from 1938:

And how the building looks today...

Inside, we had a HUGE stage created for the event.  Our PC graphics cards are capable of displaying images on 3 screens, all at the same time.  We fitted the stage with 3 giants screens, as well:

The press conference went really, really well.  My part of the program was fun, as I was able to talk about games and game technology.  We showed some of the latest and greatest games that run on our computer hardware - some great eye-candy.

We invited the sunglasses company Oakley to the event, to show off some of their new 3D glasses:

Overall, we accomplished everything we wanted to - and had some fun in the process.  Next week, I'm off to Asia...