Archive for March, 2013
finally, crazy week in the Bay Area is complete. The weekend Hackathon went very well – the presentation / award ceremony was supposed to be an hour but ended up being 3.5 hours due to all the submissions. After a lot of deliberation with the judges (half of whom were in ATL where it was 12:30am Sunday/Easter night), a winner was selected and the $10,000 award money given. And then I bolted to try to catch my red eye flight back home to ATL – and just made it.
this weekend is the Hacker Dojo & Coca-Cola Hackathon. 20 hours to go and so far it is pretty interesting! Totally different culture than I am used to – the nerd / hacker culture – but super cool and kinda like it! The people here seem to love Mexican Coke so we bought a ton of it and it put smiles on their faces and energy to keep them going all night. These are a few empties in front of the Hacker Dojo logo.
after spending a week in a hotel called “The Palace” I moved down to Cupertino to a brand new Aloft hotel that costs 1/3 the price but is much more my taste. And it is a proper bed jumping hotel (not to say I didn’t bed jump in the Palace, I just didn’t like the pictures I took). So anyway, first thing I did as I walked into the room and saw that perfectly made bed was to fly onto it.
all lines converge on the ferry building. You must go there. You want to go there. You need to go there. They have overpriced items that are very tempting, especially to tourists. Go!
one might imagine that royalty has walked up and down this staircase given that it is in a hotel called the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Just another cool spiral staircase to add to the collection.
its called that cause it is certainly fit for a king and queen. And I guess those are their chairs.
I don’t generally like old, but this hotel is awesome. So many grand rooms in the public spaces. Hopefully I’ll get a picture at the pool while I am here as well – first hotel I have been at in the city that had an indoor pool.
don’t mess with this guy’s trashcan. He’ll totally attack you, as he did to some lady who tried to shoo him away.
that was our product name. The Startup Weekend experience was great. Our product wasn’t. But it could be. It was a fantastic learning experience, with the roller coaster ride you’d expect in a startup. My biggest learning was that without a strong founder(s) you’ll never be successful. And that was apparent from the stronger pitches. But anyway it was fun and glad I did it. Oh, and thanks Startup Weekend for making me feel old (my group was one of the youngest).
20 people, small room, 13 hours, programmers. You can guess it wasn’t smelling like flowers and sunshine. BTW, my team is in the front, the other guys have a giant team – but we were all so focused, we never even bothered to talk to each other. Oh, and you can’t tell from this picture, but this event is like an Apple convention. The guy in the front right is the only person out of 100 here not on a MacBook…
potentially most pedestrain picture in my 800+ history of 365, but expect more the next two days. Today was the start of the SF EDU focused StartUp Weekend. My first time participating in one. I joined with guy whose idea I really felt was solving a problem but within 3 hours we already pivoted 5 times and have since moved away from that idea a bit. Oh well – not over yet. We’ll see what happens today. At least I got a few hours of sleep which was unexpected.
ajbrustein 