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!