Concerning the San Jose trip:
I worked late Sunday night on some design issues and instead of sleeping I decided to stay up all night and leave at 04:30 to catch our 07:00 flight out of Indy. We stopped in Denver briefly where the altimeter on the plane did indeed indicate that we were about a mile high. Upon arriving in San Jose at about 10:15 we took a long cab ride out to our hotel. We waited until the last minute to arrange things, and as such we ended up quite a ways from the center of town.
We decided to explore a bit and after a very long walk we stumbled across Aqui a nice Cal-Mex place. Despite being tired we roused ourselves from our hotel room later in the evening and went to explore down town San Jose. I got my conference badge and we wandered the streets for a bit. We were not too hungry after our late lunch so we had appetizers and beer at Gordon Biersch.
On Tuesday E.B. and I grabbed the last CalTrain from Capitol to Diridon and walked the mile or so to the conference. I passed the badge to E.B. and he went and watched Bill Gates give his keynote. I got my exhibitor badge and went in to help Krinsky man the TriCipher/Arxan booth. Around noon E.B., Sara, and I got together for lunch at Bella Mia. In the afternoon sessions I had the pleasure of hearing Xiaoyun Wang discuss her groups findings on collisions in major cryptographic hash functions. While her English was halting and her work very technical it was still interesting to see how she has optimized the collision path against SHA-1. At dinner time Sara took me to Sino for a lovely Saint Valentine's Day dinner. In addition to a very nice modern Chinese atmosphere and good food we also consumed a bottle of 2004 St. Supery Sauvignon Blanc.
On Wednesday our trip to the CalTrain station was partially blocked by police tape. As it turns out someone was killed with a machete at the hotel adjacent to ours. We were both able to watch the keynotes including one on Indian Mathematics. For lunch we ate at The E&O Trading Company. E.B. and I continued to trade the pass back and forth through the afternoon. Although the quality of the talks on Wednesday seemed somewhat worse than Tuesday's. We all had dinner at Blake's Steakhouse. We didn't do much else because after so many late nights we all decided to turn in early.
Thursday was our last half day at the conference. The keynotes were not interesting, but we watched a few of them. We met up with E.B. at 11:30 or so, had lunch at Il Fornaio, and headed to the airport. Our flight was delayed and we nearly missed our connecting flight in Phoenix. They piled us on the electric cart as soon as we exited the plane and rushed us to our next plane. At 00:45 on Friday we touched down in Indianapolis. And despite exhaustion I managed to drive home safely in terrible weather.
I worked late Sunday night on some design issues and instead of sleeping I decided to stay up all night and leave at 04:30 to catch our 07:00 flight out of Indy. We stopped in Denver briefly where the altimeter on the plane did indeed indicate that we were about a mile high. Upon arriving in San Jose at about 10:15 we took a long cab ride out to our hotel. We waited until the last minute to arrange things, and as such we ended up quite a ways from the center of town.
We decided to explore a bit and after a very long walk we stumbled across Aqui a nice Cal-Mex place. Despite being tired we roused ourselves from our hotel room later in the evening and went to explore down town San Jose. I got my conference badge and we wandered the streets for a bit. We were not too hungry after our late lunch so we had appetizers and beer at Gordon Biersch.
On Tuesday E.B. and I grabbed the last CalTrain from Capitol to Diridon and walked the mile or so to the conference. I passed the badge to E.B. and he went and watched Bill Gates give his keynote. I got my exhibitor badge and went in to help Krinsky man the TriCipher/Arxan booth. Around noon E.B., Sara, and I got together for lunch at Bella Mia. In the afternoon sessions I had the pleasure of hearing Xiaoyun Wang discuss her groups findings on collisions in major cryptographic hash functions. While her English was halting and her work very technical it was still interesting to see how she has optimized the collision path against SHA-1. At dinner time Sara took me to Sino for a lovely Saint Valentine's Day dinner. In addition to a very nice modern Chinese atmosphere and good food we also consumed a bottle of 2004 St. Supery Sauvignon Blanc.
On Wednesday our trip to the CalTrain station was partially blocked by police tape. As it turns out someone was killed with a machete at the hotel adjacent to ours. We were both able to watch the keynotes including one on Indian Mathematics. For lunch we ate at The E&O Trading Company. E.B. and I continued to trade the pass back and forth through the afternoon. Although the quality of the talks on Wednesday seemed somewhat worse than Tuesday's. We all had dinner at Blake's Steakhouse. We didn't do much else because after so many late nights we all decided to turn in early.
Thursday was our last half day at the conference. The keynotes were not interesting, but we watched a few of them. We met up with E.B. at 11:30 or so, had lunch at Il Fornaio, and headed to the airport. Our flight was delayed and we nearly missed our connecting flight in Phoenix. They piled us on the electric cart as soon as we exited the plane and rushed us to our next plane. At 00:45 on Friday we touched down in Indianapolis. And despite exhaustion I managed to drive home safely in terrible weather.