Odometer CC-BY-NC Patrick Phipps on Flickr.
Last week, my personal odometer rolled over; I turned 46 while in San Francisco. As a result, my birthday was a bit different than usual.
I had a meeting planned for midday at the Internet Archive (more on that in a bit) and otherwise planned on exploring the city — at least a few things I’d yet to see.
Tina joined me for the morning and then I was off on my own for the afternoon. I really had a lovely day — despite getting overheated — and Tina returned to the hotel room with birthday cheesecake! So while it was different, it was still a very good birthday.
The whole trip was almost flawless for me. Two great flights (and two hitch-free customs entries), a very convenient little hotel, a great conference (a little overwhelming, but manageable), pride festivities just days after the marriage equality ruling, time to explore, great food, reduced media consumption, great weather, and the highlight of getting to see inside the Internet Archive.
When I realized I was going to be in SF for a library conference and could get to the Internet Archive, and knowing, too, that our library had just purchased equipment from IA, I asked our head librarian if he could arrange for me to get a demo of the equipment. He did — and IA also sent out an invite to all ALA attendees for a tour. I ended up doing both.
The tour was Friday evening and it was very exciting for me to be there. I have long evangelized IA (some people are probably tired of my suggesting, promoting, and sharing about their work) and it was honestly a little bit of a pilgrimage for me. Going back on the Tuesday, I got a one on one demo of the Tabletop Scribe equipment and accompanying software. It was very worth my time. Before I left, the staff even made sure I knew how to get where I was going next by looking up and printing out bus schedules from Google Maps (which for SF gives transit info in real time).
(I have to add, I was ridiculously happy to note the flag flying outside IA is simply the earth.)