cuchillo

So I wasn't going to compete in the coding competition at VSLive, but this guy from Texas needed a partner. We took on the Swedes (in the chef hats) and another team that just met. We finished one problem, but didn't finish the next one we chose which turned out to be too ambitious. One hour is not much time. The Swedes finished several, and the other team found code online that scored them lots of points.

We got third place (of three teams). My partner and I each got a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Professional, which rocks. When Andrew, Pavel, and I left the Moscone Center we realized that we had not left the building for 14 hours. Long day.

Yesterday, Pavel and I flew in to San Francisco for VSLive. It's a nerdy computer programming conference in case you didn't know. Andrew from Boise met us here. I know Andrew from the good ol' days in the Air Force. It's always great to see him.

It was a full day. I woke up at 4:30 AM and Pavel and I got to the airport and through security just in time to hear, "Lance and Pavel your plane is leaving" being announced over the loud speakers. But we made it.

In San Francisco, we went to the ABC Restaurant for lunch. It still rocks. After that we headed to Russia Town to find a bookstore so I can could get a book about Vysotsky for my paper on Post-Thaw Russian Literature. Andrew said, "why don't you just check Amazon?" In Russia Town the bookstore was closed. It looked like it might be permanent. At a small video store, I asked the man behind the counter if he had any books on Vysotsky. He had a picture of him on the wall. He didn't, but he suggested that I look on the Internet.

Then we went to the coast and hiked a bit. It was foggy and misting quite a bit, but we caught glimpses of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was nice to get out of the rain and catch a ride to Fisherman's Warf. Rocky, if you're reading, the mini donuts rocked.

Today we're off to the conference. Actually, the pre-conference. Rockford Lhotka is going to be talking about building distributed object-oriented apps in .net 3.0. It should be good.