San Francisco & Seattle

Dear Friends:

This week, I've been on a West Coast trip - focused on San Francisco, California and Seattle, Washington.

I started in San Francisco.  I met my new boss there, as he was speaking on a panel for a conference called Pocket Gamer Connects.

This conference is for game developers that are creating apps for smartphones and tablets.  Venture capitalists, game publishers and press were also there.  Everyone is looking for the next "cool" game for phones.  There were several panel discussions held during the two-day conference:

This was a discussion on virtual reality

This was like "speed-dating" where the game developers had 10 minutes to showcase their games to judges at each table.  There were some great ideas here:

However, the attendance at this particular show was very low.  This is the first time they've tried this show in the U.S. (it has been very successful in London and Helsinki).  So, it was disappointing.  I was able to see a couple of really interesting games, so not a total loss.

One meal in San Francisco was particularly good.  The restaurant is called Zero Zero - it's an upscale pizza/Italian place.  The pizza was very traditional Italian, which I enjoy - lots of fresh ingredients and very simple.  The appetizers, however, were the real stars.  We had avocado bruschetta and roasted cauliflower (roasted cauliflower, rosemary oil, cauliflower pureé) :

These were a delight. We could have easily made a meal of these, plus a broccoli dish. Easily.

We also held some introductory meetings at one of Amazon.com's subsidiaries.  They're called Lab126 and they are the technology arm of Amazon that works on Kindles, FireTV, etc.

This was a prelude to meetings that were held the very next day in Seattle.  We traveled to Seattle, and stayed in the very center of the city.  The weather was fantastic - a rare occurrence in my many trips to the northwest.  When the weather is this nice, it reminds me of how beautiful this city really is.  I walked around downtown and found this fun theater that still uses lots of neon lights:

The next day was full of meetings at the headquarters of Amazon.com.  We were just a few blocks from the famous Seattle Space Needle:

We held a series of classes, to help train some of their engineers on my company's technology

All of the people from my company were visiting from the UK.  I was the lone American ; ) After a very long day of presentations and technical discussions, we decided to take all the Brits out to a Seattle Mariners baseball game.  Amazon had a bunch of extra tickets, so it was free!  We decided to walk the 2 miles to the stadium, and enjoy downtown Seattle along the way.

Our first stop was Pikes Place Market.  This is one of the more popular tourist destinations in Seattle.

It really is a delightful market - full of amazing seafood, flowers and produce.  The flowers smelled wonderful:

These were giant, mutant lobster tails.  I tried to put my hand in there for comparison...

I always love to check out the produce.  My older kids make fun of me here...because I worked in a produce market as a teen-ager:

Outside of the market, there is a famous "art" exhibit.  This is unique, to be sure.  Basically, there is an alley way that is covered in colorful, decorative....used gum.  Yup, you read that right.  It was just a little disgusting (you'll have to look closer):

It goes on for quite a while.  What a crazy and fascinating "attraction" ; )

We made our way to Safeco Field, home of the Mariners.  It was a gorgeous night for a ball game:

I had a lot of fun trying to explain the game of baseball to the visiting Brits.  Fortunately, one of them was an avid cricket fan, so it was very easy to compare/contrast.  The others just enjoyed the experience.  Not great seats, but that wasn't the point:

The next day, we had several additional meetings.  We met with one company in Bellevue - just across Lake Union from Seattle.  This company had a really, really cool conference room.  It had windows from floor-to-ceiling.  The view was just gorgeous while you sit at the conference table:

I was about the finish the blog post here, when something unusual happened at the very end of the trip.  I left Seattle on a flight to Houston, Texas.  My final flight to Austin was delayed until 12:20a.  Finally, it was cancelled.  Instead of waiting an additional day, I just rented a car and drove the 3 hours from Houston to Austin.  I finally reached home around 3am.  THAT was a long day.  On the way home, I stopped at the world-famous Buc-ees in Bastrop, TX:

I'm glad it is open late!!

That's it!  Thanks for reading...