The roads I take...

I finally managed to get my photos from last October's trip to California sorted out to a smaller "best of" collection that I also find useful for putting up in a public web gallery.



And as I was traveling with a DSLR and a zoom lens for the first time, I finally could take some shots I couldn't with just the pocket camera in previous vacations.



Not enough with that, though: I got invited to Mozilla's all-hands event taking place in the first week of April in Mountain View!



This means I'll be back to California quite soon, flying off next Saturday, April 2. For everyone who wants to meet up with me, I'll stay the week after the all-hands for some chance for additional work (meetings) but also some fun, so contact me if you want to meet up then!



And else, have fun taking a look at the pics!

I have mentioned it previously, and now it's coming up really fast: My personal browser start page says I have "2 days, 17 hours, 36 minutes" left until take-off to a trip that will lead me to the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley and the Mozilla headquarters.

I hope to be working next week (October 4th through 8th) from the Mozilla headquarters and having a number of meetings with different people working from there, on a mission to improve communication and cooperation between different parts of Mozilla and the SeaMonkey project.

If you are around in that area or at Mozilla, please contact me via email or on IRC and I hope we can arrange meeting up - after all, talking to people involved with Mozilla is what I'm there for.

Of course, being out of my usual environment, I'll try to have some fun next to the work engagements, and so I already have tickets for a Friday night Country Music concert (Rascal Flatts, Kellie Pickler, and Chris Young) and a Sunday night football game (Eagles @ 49ers) - and I'll probably take most of the second week I'm there to drive around (I have a rental car for the whole stay) and do some sightseeing and relaxation, though I haven't planned details yet.

In any case, I'll spend most of this Friday (Oct 1) at airports and on planes to get there, and most of Oct 17/18 traveling back the same way.
I should be around on and off on IRC the first week of those two, but probably not or very rarely the week after - still I should be back in Vienna with some time left before the core SeaMonkey community will convene here.

Oh, and I hope to get even better photos than on previous trips due to having an (older, but still quite decent) DSLR with me in addition to the good-quality pocket cam I usually took all my pics with.

Just discovered:

Go to http://www.openstreetmap.org/ - enter "Mozilla, Mountain View" in the "Search" box - press "Go" and see where the red arrow points to!

This even can stand a comparison to Google Maps, where the pure map is telling you much less about this area...

It took me a while, but finally I uploaded a "best of" containing 100 photos from my USA trip (California plus Las Vegas, see my Google map for waypoints, green and special symbols for visited spots) up to the galleries on my site.
I even added comments to all images so everyone should know where they were made. Once again, thanks to preed for the great Bay Area plane tour! Oh, and don't look for Mozilla pictures, I figured the experiences there were better than my pictures.

As mentioned here before, I'll visit California in April. As I'll be there with a good friend of mine who is a first-time-visitor to the USA, we'll do a round trip, but I'll have a few days in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Mountain View, where I'll surely visit Mozilla headquarters and would love to meet as many people as possible.

We didn't set our plans in stone so that we can be flexible when being already over there, but current plans for our schedule are roughly as follows:

• Arrival: about noon Apr 05 at SFO airport
• Apr 05-07: San Francisco / Bay Area (7th: Mountain View / Mozilla)
• Apr 08-10: travel San Francisco - Yosemite - Sequoia - Las Vegas
• Apr 11-12: Las Vegas, travel to Los Angeles either 12th or 13th
• Apr 13-14: Los Angeles area (maybe until 15th)
• Apr 15-16: travel Los Angeles - San Francisco area
• Apr 17-19: San Francisco / Bay Area (18th: Mountain View / Mozilla)
• Departure: evening of Apr 19 from SFO airport

If you want to meet me in the SF Bay Area or somewhere on my way, I'd be happy to meet many Mozillians over there, just contact me either via a comment here, via IRC or via email, and we can surely arrange something!

While getting ready for my flight to Brussels today for the FOSDEM 2008 conference, I also booked the flight to San Francisco - I'll be staying in California with a good friend of mine from April 5 to 19! We'll spend a few days in the SF Bay Area and I'll visit Mountain View and the Mozilla Headquarters for sure, but we'll be on the road a lot on a round trip to also experience the wide land and to visit Yosemite, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

I'm looking forward to both those trips - but for this weekend I'll be concentrating on FOSDEM