The roads I take...

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.

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

I'm currently planning to do a trip to Mountain View and the San Francisco Bay Area in early to mid-April, staying there for about 2 weeks, and I'd be glad about any tips you have for me when going there.

My main focus on that trip is Mozilla (out of interest of course, but also so that it counts as a business trip for financial authorities), so I'd be happy to talk to Mozilla people to about organizational, platform and SeaMonkey stuff - but probably also any other topics surrounding our great community.

Of course, I'd like to learn about the attractions of that part of California as well (though I already have been to a few of them about 13 years ago on a family vacation), so if you can tell me some must-sees, I'm happy about those as well - esp. the insider tips

If there are any special events in that timeframe, I'd also like to know about them - Mozilla events of course, but also if there's some Country Music (which I really love) or sports event of interest - I'll probably travel with a first-time-US-visitor who is a big American Football fan (I know, out of season, so bad time for that) and also likes Basketball, Baseball and such stuff, so it would be good to find some interesting stuff for him as well (his day job is something like talking hexadecimal or such, he calls that programming car control units).

I'd also love to know about hotels you could recommend in that area, I'd like to pre-book at least parts of my stay in a hotel, either via my travel agency or some insider knowledge from over there

Of course, if you want to meet me there, I'd like to know as well!

So, please help with with any tips you have for me - either comment here, contact me on IRC ("KaiRo") or via email (kairo@kairo.at).

Thanks a lot - and I hope to meet you if you're in that area at the same time!