Spent yesterday at N+I, mostly working on the booth so I didn’t get to see much of the show, but I did snap a few photos of the Intel booth (where Instant802 is showing a streaming video demo in conjunction with Novatec.

The morning was fairly quiet, probably caused by the rain in the area, but the afternoon was much busier. Instant802’s demo was showing off streaming media with two video streams running over the wireless LAN for the whole day.

Almost every booth in the area had an army of booth babes. Intel must have had at least 20 of them working on and around the booth area. All the other booths had large numbers of them handing out the free gifts, collecting contact information and directing people to seats in the theatre area.

Microsoft’s message was a little unusual for a show: they are pushing Service Pack 2 – a collection of bug fixes! I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody else market their patches at a trade show.

Well, not that many more. Tomorrow perhaps there will be some from N+I Japan 2004. Meanwhile, here’s a couple from the route between Shinjuku station and the hotel…

Today was setup day for the exhibition part of the show – tomorrow will be a full day on the show floor. Thursday and Friday will be back out at customer meetings.

Time to take advantage of my Hyatt Gold Passport and get a free breakfast (not least because the in-room coffee is $3 per cup – using cups with built-in filters). The place where the GP members get free pastries and coffee is the “It’s on me” Cafe and Pub. They also have free internet access here, provided using a couple of laptops and a WiFi hotspot (FREESPOT).

Might try the ¥2600 (around $25) breakfast buffet upstairs later in the week, especially if I’m waking up at 6am all week.

This time I left Saturday morning, and landed Sunday afternoon (and spent less than 12 hours in the plane). The dateline’s odd that way.

Anyway, a couple of photos from my little walk around outside the hotel tonight:

More photos later in the week perhaps, if I get a chance to take any.

Down in the Pier 39 area of San Francisco on Friday night showing some visitor’s from Japan around, and moored up down there was NCL’s first US flagged ship: Pride of Aloha.

She’s not the the largest of the cruise ships sailing, coming in at around 77,000 tons (Royal Caribbean‘s Voyager class ships come in at a whopping 138,000 tons), but still a very good sized cruise ship. Unusually for Hawaiian cruises she will also be spending all her time in the islands (rather than making a detour to Fanning Island or Mexico). This is achieved by having her fly under the US flag (a US law bans foreign-flagged ships from doing all US port cruises).

NCL’s new Pride of America, was to be making the July 4^th Hawaii sailing, but she sank in the shipyard during a bad storm back in January while still being built.

Now for the twist… it seems that Pride of Aloha is none other than NCL’s Sky – the ship we sailed on in Alaska a few years back, just after she started service. Seems that she has been refurbished and renamed ready for her new life in Hawaii (the refurbishment work was done here in San Francisco).

At the time of writing you can still watch her bridge-cam under her old name (though the index page has been updated to remove her from the list).