San Francisco

After 20+ hours long trip I finally come to Moscow from San-Francisco where our annual “sales kick-off” took place. On that meeting we summed up all the year results and had an ear for the current year. There will be a lot of interesting products and updates in condition of partnership and joint business with VMWare – but this will be told in detail on our separate partner conference in February, so we will have some soap for now.

            For some reason jet lag when flying from USA to Russia is tens of times worst than in otherwise direction. As a result here I am at 3 pm with no sleep in my eyes. Actually I wanted to write a little about SF, combined the report with a couple of bad quality phone photos but my phone did not want to synchronize with linux.

            San-Francisco is of course popular with it’s Golden Gate bridge and “cable-car” – looks like a tram using a cable that goes between rails to move instead of a usual electricity. This tram is often showed in the movies, e.g. one of them was pretty effectively crashed in “The Rock” starring Sean Connery. As this is cable move and everything else is mechanical, control this tech miracle is a real hard physical job: brakes, speed regaling and so on. Remembering that SF has a lot of heels like 30 degree angles this wagon can speed up to 100 km per hour almost like a Ferrari. You can ride inside(“public transportation” mode) or hang outside(“tourist” mode). It is fun, really.

            As we had a very small amount of time we have visited only the most touristy places like Fisherman’s Wharf(coast of a bay with a lot of restaurants, shops, souvenirs, gulls and Alcatraz views). In SF like it is mostly in all American cities is very clean air, combined with the ocean that is just great. Sea Food fans like me(especially concerning lobsters, tune-fish and mussels) feel much better though in Seattle.

            Seals are resting, catching fish and sometimes are fighting – hole year. I should say SF has a unique climate – summer are eve a bit colder then winters, average temperature is 12-17 Celsius degrees. It is happening because of some intricate flows configuration. So you need only to cross the bridge to Sosalito, rich and beautiful area, and you may have temperature higher in two times just like that. Here is a sequoia forest not very far; everyone says it’s impressing but I had no chance for visit.

            In the end we have visited a WW2 submarine. Very cramp area, claustrophobia hits very fast in the head, passages are narrow for two but this submarine contained 80 people. Torpeda-men sleeped in a 40 centimeters space right atop of torpedoes. Photos inside as I have already said are of bad quality and don’t give good picture but I may be will upload some later if there will be any interested. It was funny to know that when under water submarine was working on electricity. I mean screw propeller was working on electro batteries.

            And as always in States when you have a free day it’s very pleasant to come to starbucks in the morning, have your coffee and muffins, work the streets, where you can breath and no traffic jams, spend half a day in Borders reading new books being sited right on the floor, pass by Apple Store(almost bought myself a MacBook, and iPhone is only $399) and in the end buy a bunch of T-shirts with stupid writings…