Last Day in San Francisco

Yesterday (6/22), after the CPOE conference finished up at around noon, someone from Vanderbilt, someone from McKesson, and I went to Yank Sing for dim sum. It was quite expensive. I don't remember how many dishes we had, but the total bill was $75. There were a lot of dishes that I hadn't seen before including a dim sum version of Peking Duck.

After lunch, I went to Alamo Square to see the Victorian houses around there, Golden Gate Park to see the Japanese Tea Garden, and then to the Golden Gate Bridge.

For dinner, I had a duck dish, a corn bread side dish, and crepes with cajeta and vanilla ice cream for dessert at the Colibri Mexican Bistro.

This morning I took the BART to Oakland and had an uneventful flight back to Nashville.

Day One at the CPOE Conference

The talks at the conference so far have been moderately interesting. For me, the most interesting was a short talk during lunch about Human Factors Engineering by the product manager for Soarian (Siemen's CPOE system). From what I saw of Soarian it looked pretty interesting. It's web based, but I'm not sure if it works in anything but Internet Explorer. It also seemed a bit slower. I think this may be due to the complexity of it's web based UI. They should have tried just keep things simple.

After the conference had adjourned for the day, I went with two other people from Vanderbilt to Fisherman's Wharf for dinner at Bubba Gump's Shrimp Co. Restaurant.

SBC Park

My seat at SBC Park was in the View Level on the third base side such that I could see right down the first base foul line. Overall, the stadium was nice, although I like Petco Park better since I like the fact that the concourses are larger and less cramped. The Giants beat the Diamondbacks 8 to 3, so the Padres gain another game in the standings.

First Full Day in San Francisco

I took a bus the the Palace of Fine Arts this morning. This is where Sean Connery's character meets his daughter in the movie "The Rock". From there I walked toward the beach next to the bay to see if I could get a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge. Unfortunately, it was foggy. After that, I took the bus to Ghirardelli Square and took some pictures of Alcatraz. I then walked through Fisherman's Wharf and then down to the Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. By this time, the fog cleared up a bit, so I got some pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge (although by this time, I was much farther away than I was earlier). From Telegraph Hill, I walked through China Town, had lunch (Dim Sum), and then continued on to SBC Park to buy a ticket for tonight's Giants game versus the Diamondbacks.

In San Francisco

I arrived in Oakland International Airport this afternoon and took the AirBART shuttle to the Oakland Coliseum station in order to take the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train to the Powell Street Station. The train was definitely not as user friendly as the trains in Japan. For example, there are no screens in the cars to tell you what the next stop will be and the announcements are said too quickly with poor enunciation. Maybe it was because I got use to them, but the announcements on the trains and busses in Japan were much easier to understand.

The hotel I'm staying at is the Grand Hyatt San Francisco which is next to Union Square. It's a couple of blocks from the Powell Street BART station whose Stockton Street exit is right next to the Apple Store. It's also a couple of blocks from Chinatown.

After checking into the hotel, I walked about 1.25 miles to Nihonmachi (also known as Japantown). I found a Japanese sweets store which sold the exact same box of sweets which I brought back from Japan. It was a bit more expensive here ($14 vs 1000 yen). I ended up buying one box of green tea flavored assorted sweets (Ocha no Tsudoi) and another box of a single type of green tea flavored sweet (Maccha Komichi) which looked interesting since the outer shell is transparent. I also bought a DVD (Battle Royale 2). Since it was around dinner time, I decided to eat at one of the restaurants in the main mall. Just like in Japan, most of the restaurants had wax models in the windows. Upon entering you are greeted with the standard Japanese greeting (Irasshaimase!). Unlike in Japan, the waitresses obviously speak English as well. I ended up ordering some shabu-shabu since I did not get a chance to eat that in Japan.

On the way back to the hotel, I made a detour and walked around the financial district and a small bit of Chinatown.

BTW, internet in the room is $9.95 for 24 hours. Hopefully Vanderbilt will reimburse me for it.

CPOE conference in San Francisco

I'm going to be attending a conference ("Decision Support for CPOE") in San Francisco on June 21 and 22. I'll be arriving in Oakland on 6/19/2005 and flying out on 6/23/2005. From the program it sounds like the target audience is actually higher level hospital administrators, but the person I used to report to at Vanderbilt is one of the speakers and encouraged some of us to go.

Unfortunately, the Napa and Sonoma Wine Country Tour got cancelled due to lack of interest.

Apple on Intel

From what I saw on the streaming keynote address, it appears that the Jobs and the presenters where very careful not mention what sort of Intel chip is going to be used. Apple would be very stupid not to be going with 64bit chip from the get go. Their Universal Binary Programming Guidelines currently only speaks about IA-32.

Looking at the guidelines, it appears that even if an application is properly written and is just a recompile away from becoming a universal binary, there are some very subtle issues which might not be readily apparent until some heavy testing is done. For example, on the PowerPC, when a float is cast into an int, but the value is too large to be represented, the int gets assigned INTMAX, while on an x86, it gets assigned INTMIN. Also, an integer divide by zero is fatal on the x86, while on the PowerPC, zero is returned.

Hopefully, Rosetta (the dynamic PowerPC to Intel translator) will work well since I'm sure it's going to be a long time before a lot of applications are rebuilt as universal binaries. I almost think that come 2007, it might still be smarter to buy a G5 rather than an Apple Intel box due to software availability.

I'll probably buy a G5 within the next year or two, but I'm definitely not going to make any big software purchases (especially multimedia type apps) in the near future unless absolutely necessary since I'm not going to want to upgrade again once the software gets recompiled as universal binaries.

Apple Store at the Mall at Green Hills

The Apple Store at the Mall at Green Hills had it's Grand Opening today. The line to get in was very long. The first 1000 people got free T-shirts. The packaging was typical Apple (meaning nicely designed). The T-shirts were neatly rolled into a plain white box with a glossy silver colored interior and sealed with a silver Apple sticker.

Falling ceiling tiles at work

I'm not sure what happened, but a ceiling tile collapsed in the tunnel between the building where I work and another. Lots of gravel and dust spewed out.