JavaOne, Day 4

So it's all over for another year. It took a surprisingly small amount of time to tear down the Altio booth on Thursday evening, and the guys who clear out the Pavilion of the Moscone centre take hardly any time at all to clear out all the exhibitor booths the following day.

As you can see from the photo, we hung around the rapidly emptying hall until after lunch, waiting for DHL who were apparently 'going the extra mile' for us by turning up over an hour late.

I did make it to a technical session this morning though, the first one of the week, which was about designing good user interfaces. The talk was good - a bit more basic than I had hoped for though. There was a great cartoon strip representation of the differences between a customer's requirements, the engineer's ideas, the delivered product and what the customer actually *needs* though, which I will try and find somewhere.

Once we were finished at JavaOne, Tom and I took a crowded bus over to the Golden Gate bridge (involving more walking than we originally planned, thanks to some rubbish unsolicited advice from a 'local'). We walked across the bridge to Marin county and back again - it's an incredible structure and it was a perfect day for walking over.

Once we'd walked back we bus + walked over to Haight-Ashbury, which does have some good points, such as a few decent bars and some great cafes, but is also incredibly tacky in places.

We finished off the day with a beer at Eddie Rickenbacker's bar on 2nd street, one of the more interesting bars I've ever been in: overhead there are 20 or so vintage motorbikes, and on the bar was one of the largest cats I've ever seen, strolling from one end to the other before settling into a basket to be spoiled and fed by staff and customers.