I left my ♥ in San Francisco.

I love San Fran. I was fortunate in my early career to work at a dot com in downtown San Diego. I love spending time in "downtowns." You can walk everywhere, public transportation is usually cheap and easy, you can people watch, and usually the architecture is grand and historic.

Last week, the city sent me to San Fran to attend the Google I/O developer conference. I was in heaven. I got to meet the authors of several blogs I read daily and got to be in the same room as Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra and Vice President of Search and User Experience Marissa Mayer. They shared a huge insite into why Google shares it's information and technology with us developers...."Richer web apps --> more users --> more usage --> more revenue."

I took lots of pics, available on my flickr page here, and I've selected a few to share with you here.

First off...air travel. I love to fly, I don't do it enough, and even though work was paying for it, its hard to pay more than Southwest Airlines, anything else compared looks like robbery, plus I like Southwest.

That was my plane. I sat myself on the left side so on the way, I got a great look at Catalina Island.

Thanks to Google Transit (a mashup of Google Maps and Public Transportation information) I learned that it would cost me only $6.00 to ride the BART train to my hotel, which was a block from the BART Powell station.

I stayed at the Mariott, which was a block from the Moscone Center where the conference was held. The room was really nice. Fit for a king, or a webmaster.

I figured once I got to the room I'd bring up Google and search for something or somewhere to go. The hotel didnt have wireless, and who carries cat5 cables around anyway. So I figure the Apple store was a good place to start.

The Apple store was bad ass. Other than selling every product they make (big surprise), they offer classes on how to do something on your mac. I sat through the Podcasting class that showed how to use the Garage Band software on my macbook. The stairs were cool too.

Once I got my cable I surfed the net for how to get to Chinatown. Turns out it was only a few blocks away so I went on a hunt for some good Chinese food.

I realized after looking at all the menus on the few restaurants I saw, that I like American Chinese food, mmmm peonys. So I walked through the financial district on my way to the embarcadero.

The water front was cool, a great view of the Bay Bridge.

Then with my stalking abilities, I tracked down the home of the San Francisco office for Google. They are on the fourth floor of this brick building.

Then I walked home and ate at a Chinese food place next door to the hotel, I was let down, Peony's needs to open a restaurant in San Fran.

The next morning I got up bright and early and checked into the conference. They transformed the Moscone Center into Google Developer Central.

At breakfast (bagels) I met a gentleman who spent the last three years in China geocoding a bunch of train stations on Google Earth. Im sure he was excited that Google announced during the conference that we can now embed Google Earth into our webpages now. (I know you all dont care but thats huge step in technology.)

Below is the entire keynote from the Conference titled "Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud." It was real exciting to see the future of Google. And now i'm super excited to get a phone with Android when it comes out (Google's mobile phone operating system)





After the keynote I attended several talks about Google Maps API (coding language). I cant wait to start using what I've learned on the City's website.

After the first day's events, they had a party in the grand ballroom called "Google IO After Dark" with tons of food, games, and a concert. I stopped drinking a month ago as part of my wellness plan, but I couldn't pass up the fact that Google was buying me a drink, so I had one to be able to say that :)

The next day I attended sessions on websites in general, "Making Faster Websites," "Making Search Friendly Websites," and "Using Google's Visualization Tools" just to name a few which all were awesome.

The conference didnt seem very long, I only got to attend like 8 sessions out of 90+ but I am looking forward to Google publishing all the sessions on YouTube later this week.

Overall I had the best time! Google is awesome and I for one welcome our new overloards :)

I'll leave you with a beautiful shot of La Jolla on my return trip.