When we left our story, I was tucking in for the night at the Pan Pacific Hotel in San Francisco.

The Pan Pacific is an expensive hotel — rooms are regularly in the $200+ range per night. I found a $149/night rate through their website, and this was my impetus for staying. The hotel’s expense, however, isn’t in things that I value: a stunning atrium, a television in the bathroom, with marble on the floors, a two-line speakerphone. In other words, it’s all about prestige and feeling important, rather than utility. The bed was vaguely uncomfortable. The staff, while capable, didn’t exceed my expectations. The soap was mediocre.

All of which suggests to me that vacuous “business class” hotels are best avoided, in favour of smaller, cheaper, more lively hotels. Ironically, like the King George down the hill where I spent the first two nights, and where my happy colleagues at silverorange remained. Live and learn.

Tuesday morning was consumed with various in-room business activities — a spot on the CBC with Matt about Super Tuesday, a conference call with Yankee, answering some email — after which I checked my bag and headed out into The City for my last day in the sun.

Tuesday was an amazing day, weather-wise. Probably 18 degrees at its best, sunny and cloudless.

I caught the Muni Metro (San Francisco’s other subway, the one that’s not BART) down to Irving Street and, by complete coincidence, ended up across the street from the oddly-named Tart to Tart, the place where Oliver and Sophie and I had cake and WiFi on Monday. I grabbed a bagel at Noah’s, a juice at Jamba Juice and then walked around the neighbourhood, which was a nice mix of business and residential, much in the same style as Mont Royal in brother Steve’s Montreal neighbourhood. I grabbed a quick (and delicious) burger at Darla’s (with very good iced tea, and world class service) and then walked up through Golden Gate Park to the Haight.

Walking up Haight to Ashbury, I encountered a peculiar sort of cabal: groups of young people, many with tough looking dogs at their side, roamed the streets. My assumption was that many of these kids stepped on a bus in Boise or Butte or Burlington with a one way ticket to the San Francisco, headed to Haight and Ashbury, and, once there, had no idea what to do other than wander around looking for enlightenment. I wish them luck.

I walked along Haight to Castro, down to Market, and then stopped in at Flax for a refill of superfluous art and design gear. While I was checking out, Daniel, broken off from the silverorange pack during their driving tour of the rich and famous of Sunnyvale, phoned to invite me to dinner, and we rendezvoused shortly thereafter for another try at Thai Ginger.

A short final wander around the Apple Store and environs, a walk down Market to the Ferry Terminal Building and a trolley ride back, a quick glass of wine and we headed down to the BART to ride to the airport.

As timing had it, taking BART would have seen us arriving in the suburbs of the airport at 10:00 p.m. for a 10:20 p.m. flight, so we hightailed it out of the BART station and hailed a taxi, which got us there in under 20 minutes.

We tracked down the silverorange mother ship, checked through security, and then settled in for a long night of air travel.

As luck would have it, I was assigned a seat with no neighbours, so I was able to stretch out and almost sleep (it’s hard to sleep on three uneven and vaguely objectionable seat cushions, but I did a pretty good job nonetheless). We arrived in Toronto at 6:01 a.m. (planes aren’t allowed to land there before 6:00 a.m., which forced us to delay departure in San Francisco), wandered around catatonic until our flight to Charlottetown and arrived, beaten down and sleepy, around noon.

I spent the following 18 hours in variations of sleepiness, and now, two days later, appear to have fully recovered from jet lag.

End analysis: warm is better than cold; snow has no redeeming qualities; San Francisco is a nice, comfortable, manageable city; I need more Thai food in my life; the silverorange boys are good travel mates. It was good to spend time with Johnny and Jodi (soon to be Islanders) and with Oliver and Sophie (soon to be North Carolinians). And it’s good to be home.

I’m due in New York City in April to do some RedHat Linux juggling; we’re planning a family convoy to Yankee in July; and, with luck, by fall we will have passports again, and will head off somewhere for more maximum fun.

My how I do love to travel.

Okay, I’m willing to accept the whole “Magic Ninety Three dot One” thing. I don’t like it, but it’s hard to be critical of a techo-posturing when it’s happening inside the soul-free puffery that is “Great Lite Rock Hits.”

But it appears, at least from the evidence presented on a brief listen to the Halifax CBC afternoon show, that there might be a movement afoot to rebrand CBC Radio One as “CBC Radio Dot One.”

I’m hoping against hope that this was a momentary slip or two by a green host, and not an across-the-board change.

Last night on Compass, Hon. Mitch Murphy, the Provincial Treasurer, engaged in open speculation about his plans for dealing with the provincial deficit. One of the trial balloons he sent up was a new health care premium. Used in some other provinces already, this is a monthly or yearly fee, sometimes income-geared, that is charged as a separate fee to every citizen in return for health care privileges.

I don’t think this is a good idea.

I’m all for paying for health care, and perhaps more than most families, I’m in a position, after the birth of a child, and three major operations for our family in two years, to appreciate the value of having high quality, well-funded health care at our disposal.

I don’t have any problem paying more for health care. As long as the system is well-regulated, available to all, and is client-centred, I’ll contribute happily.

But introducing a health care premium is going to complicate my life, and the lives of my fellow citizens. Needlessly. It’s going to require an entirely new bureaucracy to maintain. We’re all going to have to remember to pay our premiums, and staff will have to be in place to send out invoices, process payments, chase down non-payers. There are going to have to be systems in place at the doctor’s office to handle people who haven’t paid their premiums: do they get denied access? And so on.

All of this seems like a waste when we already have an effective, well-maintained system of filing, collection, and enforcement through the income tax system. A simple administrative change to the provincial income tax rate could achieve the same increase in revenue, without the need to introduce an entirely new level of bureaucracy.

So, Minister Murphy, please consider this as feedback to your trial balloon: charge me more for health care, but do it simply by increasing my taxes. Please.

Edward Hasbrouck provides a helpful update on Amazing Race 5. I can’t wait.

When Steven gets slashdotted, servers catch on fire and pagers go off all over town. When I get slashdotted, nobody notices (including me). This is the price I pay for discussing obselete technology.

Just finished an interesting conference call: Johnny was dialed in to the Reinvented Asterisk server via the VoicePulse DID number in Peterborough, New Hampshire from his home in Vancouver. My colleagues at Yankee did the same thing. I dialed in to the Reinvented toll-free number to get to the Asterisk server. And our colleague Steve dialed directly into Yankee’s office.

Six people. Two countries. Four locations. Worked like a dream, with excellent voice quality.

I just finished taping a segment for CBC Prince Edward Island’s Main Street from here in San Francisco on the “Super Tuesday” primary that’s taking place here, and in 9 other states, today. It should air between four and six in Prince Edward Island.

Next stop, November.

An abbreviated report tonight, as exhaustion fades me quickly soon.

Up at the crack of dawn. Sophie and Oliver find they are moving to North Carolina. Pick up Sophie at UC Davis and head, in the rain, into Berkeley to the chocolate factory. Much chocolate consumed, and I decide that 70% cacao is now my personal minimum. Indian fast food for lunch. Into the hills for verdant memories of [friend, not son] Oliver’s childhood. Across the Bay Bridge for supplementary chocolate and wardriving with my iBook and Sophie’s Pocket PC (very cool). Rendezvous with silverorange boys and two browser savants from the Mozilla Foundation for dinner at the Betelnut on Union St. (recommended by Ian).

Taxi to the hotel. Settle in, only to be summoned to the promise of fun by Dan. Drive Nick to the airport. Only small fun. Drive around in suburbia: many big box stores and fast food restaurants, but little fun. Daniel and I get hit with the bowling bolt at the same time, and we undertake a short but very complicated diversion into alley location, which ultimately fails, but is somewhat fun. Back to hotel. Deep sigh and resignation to sleep rather than Big Fun. Have to live purely on the residual joie de vivre of the futility of it all.

At the Pan Pacific now, tucking in for the night. Tomorrow my last dash of warm coastal freedom before the insane redeye return to snow, snow, snow.

As previously reported, this is a out-of-order episode in my western adventure, stretching back two days to Saturday night.

Saturday night we hooked up with the silverorange boys after all and, based on a recommendation from Peter Burka (present only in spirit), we walked into up, up, up to a Japanese mall food court for sushi in boats. But there was a long and confusing line, so we headed back out into the neighbourhood, and finally settled on a Japanese restaurant across the street.

The general consensus was that the food was excellent. I had a combination dinner of salad, soup, sushi, and tofu steak, and a glass of Kirin beer. During the dinner, a plan to engage in some variation of drunken karaoke emerged, so when we finished at the restaurant, we scoured the neighbourhood for an eligible location. Alas we came up dry, and so walked, somewhat sullenly, back down, down, down towards our hotel.

Once at the hotel, a small burst of new energy pushed us back out the door. There was an aborted flirt with a raucous Irish pub, followed by some aimless wandering. Somewhere along the way, the Burka boys secreted themselves off, no doubt to attend some late-nite Mozart concert. Finally, realizing that the End Was Near, we made a last-ditch attempt to rescue the night by jumping on the Powell-Hyde cable car.

At this point, somehow, I was nominally in charge of the event, and there were many sceptical looks my way as the cable car drew further and further from our starting point, and the Fun Night Activities appeared to be whittling away to nothing. We finally reached the other side of the mountain and, as luck would have it, a jazz lounge winding down for the night presented itself. We had a drink, entertained by smooth piano stylings, and then, satisfied that we had done our best to achieve maximum levels of fun, ventured back out to find our way home.

Serendipity struck as, amidst a “we’re going to need two taxis” conversation, Dan flagged down a mini-van taxi that neatly held us all. It appeared, from my backseat position, to be driven by Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. But we got there in one piece, and a much better piece it was than the crazy NASCAR-inspired taxi ride from the night before.

This morning we wrangled ourselves up for 9:00 a.m., and by all appearances our young colleagues were either all out and about, or still asleep (the only one with concrete plans was Stephen, and I’m sure he’ll report his exciting activities here). We had a moribund breakfast at a deceptively well-decorated café around the corner, walked around Chinatown for a while (our weather has been fantastic, and there’s no salve to the frigid snow-pummelled Charlottetown soul better than a warm morning walk in the sun).

And then suddenly it was time for Johnny and Jodi to head back to Vancouver, and for me to do a complex Bart-to-train dance up to Davis to rendezvous with Oliver and Sophie. By the clock on the wall, the train upon which I write this note should arrive in Davis in 20 minutes. More on our exciting Davis activities, and our chocolate-drenched Monday morning, when next the Internet strikes.

This will be a little disjointed: I’ve already written up a post about our exciting Late Nite activities Saturday, but it’s on my laptop, and I’m writing this on [friend, not son] Oliver’s desktop. So Sunday will come before Saturday night.

We got up lateish this morning, and found the silverorange boys either asleep, off to start their day, or simply not taking our calls. As such, we proceeded to a rather moribund breakfast at a place with an excellent veneer of sunflower goodness and abysmal food. This we followed with a mandatory make-up coffee, and a walk through Chinatown on a sunnny Sunday morning.

Then it was time for Johnny and Jodi to take their leave back to Vancouver, and for me to head northeast to Davis to rendezvous with Oliver and Sophie.

I took the stunningly efficient California transit system [at least by comparison to PEI, with transit that is stunningly absent] — a BART subway to the Amtrak train — from downtown San Francisco to Davis, and arrived around two. Oliver was there at the platform to meet me, and we had a pleasant lunch on the patio, followed by a strong [at least for me] cup of coffee.

We dropped in on Sophie for a bit, and then took a walk through an interesting prototypical community called Village Homes that borders their house (an interesting “backwards” approach to urban planning, with all of the houses facing a common, and the streets a secondary rather than primary feature) and the Davis Wetlands, which uses natural features as part of the city’s sewage treatment process.

Back at Oliver and Sophie’s, we had a dinner of fondue, and then sat down to watch the DVD of Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me, a film by our oddly mutual acquaintance Tessa Blake (for those of you playing the home game: I came to know Tessa through Ian; they came through PEI on their honeymoon, and then came up to Zap Your PRAM; Oliver knows Ian because he followed a link on my website way back when, but also because Sophie’s sister in law used to date Chip, one of Ian’s best friends. It is as complicated as it sounds. And more.)

Tomorrow we’re off to Berkeley to the chocolate factory. It’s also the day that Oliver and Sophie find, by virtue of VIRMP, where they’ll be moving come the end of June.

Stay tuned.