Back from San Diego

You can take my lack of posting as an indication that I had a great time in San Diego. I just didn't have time to sit down in front of the internet very much. Of course, who wants to sit down when the world outside your window looks like this:

A Room with a View: The View from the Sheraton San Diego at the Marina

From our hotel room on the 11th floor we could survey all of San Diego and the lovely harbor around us. It's difficult to tell, but on the right side of the picture is a naval base. The big grey thing that you see is an aircraft carrier, (I think it is the USS Nimitz, but I am not exactly remembering the ship number). While we were there, there were a total of four carriers in port, if you include the USS Midway, a decommisioned carrier that is now performing museum service duty. Also docked (briefly) while we were there were the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS Carl Vinson (which we had seen before when we took a trip to Seattle). Although we didn't see her, apparently the USS Ronald Reagan was due in soon, as well, as a result of some big training exercise that is scheduled to occur. To give some sense of the scale of these boats, here's a picture that John took of me in front of the Midway (which is about 200 feet shorter than the current Nimitz class carriers).

USS Midway in San Diego

(John took a lot of other pictures, but I will spare you all the photos of planes and gun turrets and landing gear, which, while cool, probably are more interesting for John than for anyone else.)

We learned an interesting fact about the carriers while we were touring the Midway on Monday. Apparently, ever since the attack on Pearl Harbor, there is some kind of military rule that states that there will never be more than three carriers docked in any one port. However, due to some significant training exercise that is happening soon, there could be a lot more than three of them in the area. One morning, I got to see the USS Abraham Lincoln heading out to sea. All I can say is "Wow".

Actually, the seeing the Midway (which is on the left side of the picture near the cruise ship) and getting a chance to meet some of the veterans who served in various branches of the US military did make me stop and think for a while. Many people have given up a great deal to protect this country and her allies. While I may not always agree with the reasons, I do have a deep respect for those who choose to serve.

But we didn't come to San Diego to see the Midway, we came for the QualComm BREW 2004 Developer's Conference. Well, "we" is not, perhaps, the right word. John came for the conference, I came for the weather and the chance to see a good friend. BREW is the OS platform that QualComm has created so that you can run applications on your cell phone.

It's not that difficult from the Palm OS, so I was kind of interested in finding out more, but the conference was completely booked. They were pretty serious about checking IDs so I figured there would be no chance that I could sneak in and hear about some of the cool geeky things going on. But one of the people from John's company got sick and couldn't come to the conference, so John's manager transferred his registration to me. How cool is that? (At least if you are a geek girl like me?) I actually got to go to a few interesting sessions, and to the big party, which featured the B52s. Now, as both geek girl and child of the 80's this was about as cool as it could get. I never thought I would be dancing to live by the artist "Private Idaho" and "Rock Lobster". You can bet I'll be tagging along next year when this conference happens again.

On Wednesday, I got to go to the famous San Diego Zoo with a good friend and her beautiful five year old son. There's nothing quite like tromping around a great zoo with an enthusiastic child. We saw Pandas and Hippos and Elephants and all sorts of other interesting wildlife. But I never got out my camera once -- I was too busy soaking it all in to remember.

Did I do any knitting? Not much. I did finish a scarf for the friend I went to the zoo with. She's been going through a rough spot, lately, and I wanted to make her something special.

Red Eros Scarf

I know I swore that I would never make another one of these scarves because EROS makes me crazy, but I just thought the red would be perfect -- and I had just learned a little trick to make the knitting easier. You can find the pattern here. It's a very easy scarf, and I've yet to make one that didn't make it's recipient happy. Here's a closeup of the ruffly edge of the scarf:

Eros Scarf Detail

What's the trick? Well, make the garter stitch happen by purling the whole scarf. It goes a lot faster (even though you're purling) because its much more difficult to split the yarn with your needle coming at the loops purlwise. This scarf is also where I learned to make the worlds easiest ruffle -- cast on twice as many stitches as you want for the body of the scarf, knit as many rows as you want the ruffle to be, then K2Tog all the way across the row.