Made two mistakes: 1) left power cable at Google. 2) Left lights on rental car.

The loss of the power cable made every talk a Mission impossible type adventure – certainly helped prevent me from lingering self indulgently on slides (it’d be fun to make this a rule at conferences – take too long, your laptop shuts down automatically).

The dead battery in the rental car at least stopped me from worrying about the power cable.

I had thought I’d get up early Thursday morning, stop by Google and retrieve the cable, but the lack of anything resembling power in the battery of my car made this impossible. Tip: the extra money for hertz is worth it. They had a service person there to give me a jump in about 45 minutes (btw: the Sheraton folks refused to help – “against policy”. To jumpstart a car? They have a policy for that?)

I managed to get to Macromedia, on Townsend st. in San Francisco early – walked around. Odd neighborhood – semi-industrial, but with mostly high end designer furniture and home decoration stores. The one lunch spot I found didn’t open till 11am, so I went for a walk around. The Macromedia building stands out on the street – it’s a beautiful brick building with steel awning over the front stairs.

Inside I used their self-service visitor terminal to create an id, including a photo (taken from said terminal). This was the coolest id creation thingy I’d see on the whole tour. Everyone, except Sun, had systems like this one, but the whole self-photo thing was unique to Macromedia.

I was in a small room near the lobby – but we filled it. About 30 or 35 people, mostly program managers, with some documentation, engineering and design/usability folks. The group was great – lively, asked lots of questions, and made the session more interactive than average. During Q&A. which went for a good 25 minutes, someone asked the perenial PM question “Is your sock drawer organized by color?”, To which, after faking offense at the question, I answered “I don’t have a sock drawer”, and left it at that. How mysterious.

After grabbing a cookie from the pile of foodstuffs for the talk at the back of the room, I thanked Cecilia, my host, for having me, and headed off down to San Jose, for Adobe – my last stop on the tour.