woke up about 10 today.  This is NOT normal but was a need today because our flight was delayed about 4 1/2 hours.  What was supposed to be a 12:30 AM Eastern arrival turned into a 5 AM arrival from San Francisco.  We went primarily to attend a WordPress conference called WordCamp.  Hopefully the fruits of that make me:  1.  a better blogger 2. a better marketer 3. a more strategic thinker.  It was half interesting.  By that I mean that it was in reality geared to software developers more than users and while I hear that tech-speak at home and work a lot-I don’t claim it.  I can write some and look at other peoples online stuff (ie code or design) and copy it a little but I am definitely a ‘user’ by the definition of WordCamp.  There was a developer track and a user/entrepreneur track.  I felt overall it wasn’t geared to new users but rather definitely people who already have enough knowledge to get the jargon.  A few things I noticed about WordCamp-developers love:  jargon (silos were referenced a lot), Lego, fuzzy animals and He Who Shall Not Be Named.  Also noted, great forward thinking about social media and the democratizaton of the web (see the jargon?!)  I will be watching some of the speakers talks again on wordpress.tv and am hoping to reinforce and further what I got from the conference.

Anyway, we flew out on Thursday morning and arrived pretty early in the day thanks to the 3 hour time difference.  We dropped our bags at our hotel and set out walking.  And we walked, and walked and walked for 5 days.  I guess we logged about 25 miles on foot plus some healthy cab rides but we were able to make a great deal out of a small amount of time.  We headed for the San Francisco Ferry Terminal for a lunch with a huge crowd of both office workers and tourists.  After lunch we kept going boosted by a check-in on Foursquare that noted there was a Banksy piece that was somewhat preserved.  So, we struck out on foot to find that the art was on a wall in Chinatown.  Someone had tried to preserve it but a huge piece above it seems to have played some havoc on it which is a little sad because the piece was pretty cool.  It now sits under plexi and under some Chinese dragons and a smear of paint drippings.  I suppose graffiti style art is ethereal at best.   We got to walk through Chinatown too which we hadn’t thought of prior to getting there.  It was another world – kind of like Little Havana in Miami.  We don’t often get out of our all-American box but it stretches the mind to see things that are really right next door.