Here are my Twitter posts on the first day of my trip to CHI 2011, which was held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

• At SFO Terminal 3. Longest security line I’ve seen in years. I better make my flight, which leaves in 1 hour.
• @tsatracker SFO Terminal 3 economy security: 24 minute wait
• At YVR curbside, waiting for my cousin to pick me up. The smokers are ignoring the designated smoking area, yuck.
• Eating lunch at a Taiwanese restaurant with my cousin in Richmond. Traffic here is horrible. SkyTrain would have been faster.
• Visited Granville Island, a great public space filled with art studios, shops, and a food market. Couldn’t resist buying maple caramels.
• Had more Taiwanese food for dinner to go along with lunch. Pork hock: sounds so odd, tastes so good.
• CHI 2011 iPhone app requires iOS 4.2. No way I’m using 4.2 on my iPhone 3G. Should have brought my Nexus One.

Saturday, April 23

• When setting your alarm for a morning flight, make sure it’s set for AM, not PM. Parked in short term and just made it.
• Don’t remember so many NYC subway service notices, but managed to get to the hotel anyway. Late night pizza nearby for dinner.

Sunday, April 24

• For brunch, meeting up with Sabrina, old HCI/IBM friend, and her husband Steven, who turns out to work for Google! Small world.
• Awesome brunch at Balthazar in SoHo. Eggs Norwegian with smoked salmon and hollandaise. We got lucky: no wait!
• Visited the Morgan Library, as in JP Morgan. Amazing collection and buildings. They have 3 Gutenberg bibles!
• Surprised the ice skating rink is still up at Rockefeller Center
• It was beautiful earlier today, but now it’s a downpour. Luckily we have umbrellas. Yay NYC weather.
• For dinner, had the best pastrami at Katz’s Deli. I always make a trip there when I go to NY.

Tuesday, April 26

• I keep forgetting how much humidity affects how warm it feels. 70º in NY easily feels 5–10º warmer than in SF.
• I also don’t feel the need to wear sunglasses in NY like I do in SF. The sunlight is much more diffuse (humidity? pollution?).

Wednesday, April 27

• New cafe in Google NYC opens today! Gorged on fried calamari.
• The theme of the new Google NYC cafe is street food. There’s an actual food truck in the cafe, serving dessert.

Thursday, April 28

• At a colleague’s apartment west of Midtown. Great views from the roof, and great Turkish food delivered for dinner!

Friday, April 29

• Tried to go to Ippudo for ramen, but the wait was literally 2 hrs. Went to Rai Rai Ken instead, which was solid.
• Vince was still craving pizza, so we went to John’s Pizzeria & got half cheese half sausage. Excellent, highly recommended!

Saturday, April 30

• Amazing hot fresh bagels at Brooklyn Bagel. Didn’t realize they could be so good!
• Visited World Trade Center. Unbelievable number of tourists. Didn’t realize so much of 1 WTC is already built.
• Awesome gelato at L’Art del Gelato in Chelsea Market. This trip has been a home run foodwise.
• LIRR to JFK is a bit more than the subway but 20-30 mins faster. And both are MUCH cheaper than a taxi.

• @landay I find iPhone’s UI still has more polish. Plus, I’m still in an AT&T contract, and Nexus One doesn’t support AT&T’s 3G frequencies. in reply to landay #
• @j_lin Google Voice also avoids the annoyances of voicemail. in reply to j_lin #
• Whatever happened to the opening crawl in Star Wars? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8O8YbnworA (via Gizmodo) #
• Who says an iPad won’t fit in a pocket? Just ask Stephen Colbert: http://bit.ly/9UKqt0 #
• @landay Nexus One supports three 3G frequencies, but the other two are used in Europe and Asia. in reply to landay #
• Combating bribery by giving “cash” worth nothing: http://bit.ly/c7XnVR (via @landay) #
• Just saw a “free iPad” ad in Facebook, which screamed “BS”. A quick web search led me to a Technologizer article: http://bit.ly/bIQjZo #
• Where the heck did January go? Soon it will be 2011! #

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Last week was the most action packed I’ve had in a while. Between Monday and Saturday, I only spent Wednesday night at home:

• Monday: to the Computer History Museum for a panel on the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, my first computer
• Tuesday: ice skating with friends at the Sharks ice skating rink near Spartan Stadium
• Thursday: to Stanford to view the final presentations of CS 147, the undergraduate human-computer interaction class
• Friday: a hot chocolate tasting party with friends from Stanford, followed by hanging out with other friends from Caltech
• Saturday: up to San Francisco with high school friends, to the Legion of Honor for an exhibition on Marie-Antoinette and Le Petit Trianon, the De Young Museum for a reception with the artist in residence and a high school classmate, Anli Liu. Then another high school friend joined us for dinner.

Not surprisingly, on Sunday I decided to relax. In my case, that meant reading through a bunch of newspapers and a couple of months’ worth of my friends’ blog entries. I picked up a few interesting tidbits on the way, which I’ll write about over the next few entries.

I was recently helping out Ron with his Ph.D. defense talk, and sent him slides from my talk as a reference. He said, “By the way, your last slide is amazing. best defense slide ever.” My last slide was titled, “What has happened since I entered grad school.” So are some of the notable products that were released and events that occurred what I was a graduate student:

• USB
• DVD
• Wi-Fi
• DSL
• Java 1.2 and Swing
• XML
• digital cameras gone mainstream
• cell phones gone mainstream
• the term “open source”
• e-mail worms
• spam from Nigeria
• Google
• Windows 98
• Y2K
• Napster
• Haas Pavilion
• “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire”
• Pac Bell Park
• President Clinton’s impeachment
• Osama bin who?

This past weekend kept me quite busy. On Saturday I met a college friend for lunch and then went to a potluck dinner with my high school friends. On Sunday I met up with another college friend to go the dragon boat festival, where a friend I’ve known since elementary school was racing. Afterwards I went to a housewarming of a friend I met when I was in graduate school, and a co-worker of mine was also there.

So that’s at least one person from five major phases of my life. If only I’d met up with someone from my birthplace — it would have been a clean sweep!

Last Wednesday, I joined Jon and friends to go see Avenue Q at the Orpheum Theater in San Francisco. In case you haven’t heard of it, think Sesame Street meets South Park. A case of humans and Muppet-style puppets work through their 20- and 30-something angst, and sing about love, purpose, and Internet porn. (These videos of the original Broadway cast and the London cast are good introductions.) It was absolutely hilarious, and I thank Jon for noticing it was coming to town and grabbing the tickets.

Unfortunately, Avenue Q has already played its last date in San Francisco, but if you’re happen to coincide with the rest of their national tour — or you live in New York or London — go see it!

For me, the fun didn’t end on Wednesday. Last year, Avenue Q put out a book that looks to be as irreverent as the musical. I got it from HamiltonBook.com for 73% off (woohoo). I’ll probably also buy the soundtrack. And there are a ton of Avenue Q videos on YouTube. My favorites include the cast in a presidential debate (part 1, part 2, part 3) and exploring London (part 1, part 2 — not safe for work!). Also, Avenue Q meets Wicked, Fiddler on the Roof, and the boy band Take That. Remember “Back for Good”? I prefer the puppet version.

I’m in the newspaper! Of course, it has nothing to do with my day-to-day job. Instead, I was photographed talking to the photographer of the new Lincoln Highway book:

• Along the Father Road, Contra Costa Times, August 11, 2007

This complements my appearance in Bay Area Backroads on KRON 4 about road rallyes:

• Windows Media Video: low bandwidth (8.2 MB) or high bandwidth (19.5 MB)
• Transcript

From July 4 to August 4, I watched four movies in the theater, which is probably more than the previous two years.

In between, there was also a little bit of high culture: Shakespeare in the Park in Cupertino. The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival put on an excellent production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I particularly liked the modernistic staging — the angels were punks, and Lysander wore a Public Enemy T-shirt.

After work today, I made my way up to Book Passage in San Francisco’s Ferry Building to catch the endpoint of the tour for the new book, The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate, by Michael Wallis and Michael Williamson. The Lincoln Highway was the first road across America, yet lately it has languished while Route 66 gets the glory.

However, just as Mr. Wallis’ 1992 book, Route 66: The Mother Road, helped revive national interest in that historic highway, I’m hopeful that the Michaels’ new book will spark new life in the “Father Road.” Already, it’s gotten huge press, from the New York Times to KCBS AM. They’re even going to be on The Colbert Report, and Bill O’Reilly has also expressed interest in interviewing them.

I asked the authors why they decided to write a book on the Lincoln Highway — hadn’t Wallis already covered similar ground with Route 66? Mr. Wallis said he was “tired of the Lincoln Highway being referred to in the past tense.” Mr. Williamson said that lots of people have traveled Route 66, and now they want something different. The Lincoln Highway provides that opportunity.

Being the webmaster of the Lincoln Highway Association gave me huge street cred: as I was getting my book signed, Michael Williamson turned to Michael Wallis and said, “He’s the real deal.”

I’ve posted my photos of the book tour in my Flickr account, including my photo with the authors, when Michael Wallis told me I was “the safest man in San Francisco” at that time.

By the way, for dinner I went to Mistral Rotisserie Provençale in the Ferry Building and got a ¼ roast chicken with broccoli and potatoes for $7.75. Not super cheap, but well worth it.