June gloom...NOT

San Diego has a saying for Spring....April showers, May flowers, June gloom. I would like to report that there was not June gloom this year. There were clouds in the morning, but they were gone by noon and sunny skies the rest of the day.

I had a great trip here for the SLA conference. It is an annual conference for "special" librarians, ie. librarians in non-traditional libraries. There were great sessions and a large hall of vendor exhibits. Today I got to take a tour of the Qualcomm library and museum which shows the history of the company. We also went to UC San Diego library, which was huge. It has been a while since I have been in an academic library. This one was built in the 70's and I thought it looked liked a spaceship. After seeing the library we went to the engineering department's StarCAVE virtual reality lab. WOW! What impressed me the most was they had an area which had 32 HDTVs, connected together, which you could use to upload HD photography and zoom in on different aspects. NASA uses this to analyze photography taken from a the discovery rover on Mars, professors use it to anaylze big data sets, and an art history professor has been using it to analyze HD photos of original DiVinci paintings...both the paintings you and I see, as well as the sketches underneath the paintings. They save their visual big data sets in special software programs and can come to the lab and visualize details. I have never seen anything like this. They also had two 3D labs (rooms) which were pretty cool as well.

San Diego had some great food, and my favorite was Katsuya. I had dinner here with the Dow Jones folks and another librarian from Dolby. We ate sushi and rolls until we could not eat any more. The Cakebread Chardonnay and sake were flowing as well. Thanks Dow Jones!

I'll give another shout out to the Omni Hotel. I love Omni Hotels, and the one here did not disappoint. All the people who worked here were super nice and accomodating, the pool was beautiful as was my corner room of windows overlooking the bay. It is one of those hotels you could live in.

All in all a great conference and free time too!

Instruments of Torture

My dark side has been looking forward to this fascinating exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Man. When I knew I was coming to San Diego I did some research to determine how I wanted to spend my time and this was at the top of the list. The San Diego Museum of Man is located at Balboa Park, which is a lovely area that has about 15 Museums and the San Diego Zoo. It was only a 5 minute cab ride from the hotel, or a 3 mile walk. I  went to the San Diego Museum of Art as well.

I arrived right when the museum opened and headed to the Instruments of Torture exhibit. It is a traveling exhibit from The Medieval Torture Museum in San Gimignano, Italy. I was not able to take pictures, but here is a link to a website where you can take a look at some of the devices http://www.corkscrew-balloon.com/misc/torture/ There were many torture devices and each included a description of how and why it was used, as well as drawings of what the "event" looked like. There were torture devices to remove any appendage you can imagine and many were gender specific. There were devices which would cause unimaginable pain, those which would provide a quick death, or those which would provide a slow death. I thought the "worst" device was a large cage. A person would be put in the cage, and the cage would be hung, usually at a crossroads in the town, and they would stay in the cage until they were completely deteriorated to only bones; what a slow and painful death. At the other extreme, I thought the guillotine would have been the "best" option.

As you can imagine, the exhibit was thought provoking as well as emotionally draining, and you had to ask yourself if people are the real instruments of torture. 

San Diego

Traveling to San Diego for business, a conference.  The security line at CLE was crazy crowded this morning, worse than I have ever seen it..flight was CLE to Houston to San Diego.  Talked briefly to this nice guy on the flight from Houston to San Diego...found out when we were disembarking the plane it was Drew Brees, QB for the New Orleans Saints.  I am not a big sports fan so I didn't recognize him...just a nice guy on the plane who lives in San Diego. 

What a beautiful city!  I am spending 6 nights here and plan on taking advantage of all my free time and experiencing the city.  Dropped my luggage at the Omni and spent the rest of the day walking around the historic Gaslamp Quarter.  Lots of restaurants and stores catering to tourists and locals.  It is really nice to see so much outdoor dining and a variety of cuisines.  A large number of people actually live in this part of town so it is a nice mix.  Mussels, fish tacos and Caymus Conundrum for dinner; a bubble bath, and off to bed early...I don't do well with time changes.  Check back tomorrow...going to the Museum of Man in Balboa Park to view the special exhibit "Instruments of Torture"!