A week or so back I tried to take a friend and his wife, visiting from the UK, up to Equinox – the rotating restaurant at the Hyatt Regency hotel in San Francisco. We were not actually going to go for dinner, just a dessert in the cocktail area – dinner is way over-priced for the quality of the food on offer, though the view is hard to beat, especially on a clear evening.

It would seem though that the restaurant has been closed to be used as a “Human Resource Control Center” for dealing with the hotel workers strike that was going on in San Francisco at the time. Not sure why they needed to use the rotating restaurant for this, as opposed to a couple of empty rooms, but it sure was annoying!

Heading home after a week in Japan. Friday night I find my way to the Kansai Airport Washington Hotel in nearby Rinku Town (we had been to a meeting in the Osaka area, so it made sense to just stay in a hote here and fly back directly from Kansai Airport.

The hotel was OK. The rooms are very small, but everything is new and clean. The only downside to the hotel is that the free airport shuttle stops at 10:23am and doesn’t resume until after 3pm. That means that for me to catch my United Airlines flight departing at 3pm and I needed to catch the 10:23 bus. To make it worse, the UA checkin area doesn’t open until 12 noon.

Kansai airport is new, but as inefficient and confused as most at the moment. The gentleman in front of me had a tiny pair of nail scissors removed from his bag and placed in a large cardboard box by the UA security team. He then carried that box through airport security (where they x-rayed a box with just the scissors in it) without even a question.

On the plus side though I am connected wirelessly for free here at gate 17 waiting to board (SSID: kixmbl) – something even SFO cannot manage – the wireless there doesn’t make it out to the gate areas where most people would actually find it useful.

In about 12 hours I should be back in San Francisco ready to repeat Saturday.

Friday morning, and after meeting George, an old friend from Wind River who is living part time in Tokyo now, it was off to Shinagawa to catch the Shinkansen to Osaka.

Before leaving, I snapped a few photos from the window of my hotel room, on the 17^th floor of the Century Hyatt, and also one of the train as it pulled into the station (rapidly).

Spent the morning at N+I again, not working on the booth this time though. On the way back Satomi-san took me to a place near Makuhari Messe train station that serves Japanese pancakes. Now, this experience includes not only eating the food, but also the fact that the cooking is done on the table in front of you, by you – self-prepared pancakes in a restaurant!

The centre portion of the table is a gas powered hot plate which is lightly oiled and then has the raw pancake mix, including all the filling, poured onto it. At the start of the cooking process it looks like this:

Turning a couple of times through the cooking process, and then adding the special pancake sauce and some mayonnaise and the finished result looks like this:

Tastes great too (and many thanks to Satomi-san for cooking this one for me).

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).