Dinner Cam Strikes Again

Well another day, and another set of images, I will start with the view from the room, its not great as it looks in on the court yard and pool (note the pool is on the 16th floor, and I'm on 17.)

In the lobby today they also had some hotel staff pumpkins, and since pumpkin's are the theme of the day I thought I might share a few of my favorites.



We had a break in the sessions today (and by break I mean there was a time slot right after lunch that didn't have educational sessions, but vendor sales pitches, which in my vocabulary is the same as a break.) So I headed down to visit a building that was assume in its magnitude and architecture; the Westfield San Fransisco Center, aka the mall.




After the mall it was on to the Apple store,

With the glass stairs,



And Glass Bridge,
Both exceptionally cooler in person (I was really rushing with the camera today sorry.)

Finally it was on to the main event you have all been waiting for, what did I eat for dinner :)

We set out to a local restaurant named Kuleto's Italian Restaurant, thanks to our IBM rep Alok we enjoyed a gourmet meal. We started with an sampling of 5 different appetizers, that I'm sad I didn't get on the camera, and I can't really do justice to them in text, suffice it to say they were all delicious combinations of interesting tastes in balance and opposition.

As for my dinner, well I had a fillet mignon beautifully grilled with Gorgonzola tortellini and some greens in a vinaigrette

Dessert, mmm dessert was a blueberry creme brule to die for, it wasn't that photogenic, but here it is,



Well that's todays wacky news, as for the conference, I learned a lot about the capabilities of WESB and WPS, for those not in the know WESB is WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, and WPS is the WebSphere processes servers. Both are different application runtimes in the WebSphere stack that enable SOA. At the rate these products, and the tooling are developing, developers are soon going to be obsolete. Interestingly, IBM for years has said that ESB is an architectural concept, not a product, in spite of products from other vendors which would beg to differ:
Which either for fun, or maybe because it is a popular beer IBM has had stocked at all the meet'n'greets.

After IBMs years on the architectural fence, they finally decided to up the anti and add a middle ware product to support an ESB architecture. So, so long ESB, and long live ESB.

The other product of note is the DataPower/IBM SOA Appliance. Sounds like an awesome product for off loading XML work to a piece of hardware, like one might off load routing from a server to a router, or load balancing etc. My only problem is I can't get the techies and sales men pitching the product to shut the hell up about the magical things it can do for security, and tell me how I'm going to save CPU cycles from XML parsing, but maintain the flexibility of an SOA interface.

Well, I'm beat, and still digesting, so bed for me. I will have lots of great stuff tomorrow since we are going to the Exploration.

Night from the West Side, Yo!