San Francisco (cont)

No rain and a nice walk from the motel to Moscone West where most of the presentations were occurring. The sun was even breaking through the clouds. Most of the presentations I attended were within the Cryosphere program and focused on snow and ice in the polar regions. The Moscone Center wi-fi is pretty pathetic as you might expect with some 20,000 attendees. But I arrived with no shortage of connectivity options. The iPad has Verizon LTE, the iPhone has AT&T LTE and the Nexus 4 has T-Mobile HSPA. All have connection sharing via Bluetooth, wi-fi and USB. Right now, I have been using the iPad as the Verizon service is fantastic. AT&T isn't too bad this year either. The hotel free wi-fi is barely functional and is there just so they can advertise that they have free wi-fi.

After a morning of listening to talks, I went out in search of lunch. There was a decent selection of ethnic food at the Metreon food court across the street From Moscone West. I ended up getting lunch at the Inay Filipino Kitchen not because the food sounded good but because the line wasn't too long. I've never had garlic fried rice and it was fantastic. Wonderful flavor. That's something I'm going to be trying to make. The photo is one from the Internet. I think you will be hard pressed to find bad food in San Francisco. I had an audio conference this afternoon and just used one of the comfortable meeting alcoves at the Marriott Hotel for several hours. GoToMeeting using Verizon and audio-conferencing using AT&T.

Here's a little bit of moto content. On the way back to my motel, I passed an interesting store front. It is the meeting place of Piston and Chain, a local motorcycle club. The have bike lifts and tire machines available for rent to their members as well as an assortment of tools. Some of the bikes were for sale (lower group) and some were just on display (upper group). A couple that I had never heard of like a Laverda. One of the members came by to chat and it looked like an inviting place.

There's an open house every Wednesday evening. I may stop by since it's less than a block from the motel. The "Nice bike" card is one that they leave on someone's bike that they see parked inviting them to attend. Kind of nice.

Something interesting that I just noticed is that Verizon is IPv6 enabled. I have this Chrome extension called IPvFoo that shows the IP addresses for the content on any web page and as you can see, connections to most of the servers are via IPv6. For the real geeks, my guess is that Google has an /40 allocation with addresses beginning with 2607:f8b0:40, that is 40 bits of network address assigned to Google and 24 bits of subnet that they allocate followed by 64 bits of host address. And they are manually addressing their servers. The only times I usually see this kind of IPv6 connectivity is either in my office or at Internet² events. Way to go, Verizon! (I'm an IPv6 champion)