RJ Auburn - One Step Beyond

After searching the web for cool coffee shops while visiting New York last week I figured I would go on and do my part and contribute my thoughts on the Santa Cruz options. The best ones are:

The Ugly Mug, Soquel - The ugly mug is a great place to hang out especially if you have kids. They have a nice kids play area with toys, kid sized drinks and free wireless for the geeks of course :-) The staff is always friendly and it’s just a nice place to hang out and spend a few hours geeking away. They also have a good selection of baked goods.

Caffe Pergolesi, Santa Cruz - This is a fun place to hang out and people watch while working on the free wireless. The baked goods are so-so, and it’s not as kid friendly as the ugly mug but if you want to go watch the local freak crowd it’s a great place to be. You get a mix of everybody coming in and you never know what you will see next ;-)

Lulu Carpenter’s, Santa Cruz: This is another good place to just hang out. Not as much of a freak crowd here so if you need to take a business colleague for coffee this is a good option. They do most of their baking onsite and their apple turnovers are wonderful. BTW, when you order a large coffee you really get a large coffee. It’s a 20oz glass of goodness so make sure you really want a large cup before just jumping in ;-) One word of warning is that their firewall does not seem to work with VPN’s so well. I have not been able to get PPTP to work so if you require VPN you might want to keep this in mind

I’m sure most of the frequent flying out there already know about seatguru.com but in case you do not you should ;-) They have seat layouts for all the planes used by the airlines and lets you see detailed seat maps including comments about how good they are compared to the other seats on the fight. They also show you where the power outlets are if your flight has them. On that note I love how American has power in coach for almost every domestic flight. Makes my cross country flights much more productive!

“Best moment” from SpeechTek from the folks at the SpeechUp Blog:

—-
Microsoft presenter showed the MSS & SASDK during the tools demo session. Each vendor had ten minutes to present their tool. After his presentation there were exactly two questions:

1. Does it support VoiceXML?

2. Will it support VoiceXML in the future?
—-

I personaly find this very amusing. I only wish I was there to listen to the Microsoft reponses to these two questions ;-)

Wow! What a perfect NYC day. The weather today is great! Not cloud in the sky and not muggy at all. I am off to J’adore (the pastry place from yesterday) with Ken Rehor and then to the Upper East Side. Shame I have to head out of town this afternoon…

So for the afternoon I met up with Ken Rehor for lunch in Little Italy. Ken knew of a place there that he has gone to for the last 15 years or so and it was indeed very good. After that we headed to one of the pastry shops in the area and got some really good chocolate cannoli and espresso.

After pigging out we started our trek back to our respective hotels. Sadly at this point the rain started and we were having a hell of a time getting a taxi (at least I got good use out of my hat and coat!) . We decided we would just walk towards our hotels and see how it worked out. In the end we ended walking all the way (about 40 blocks) to Ken’s hotel and I hung out there for a while as my feet were killing me after walking all morning.

We spent an about an hour geeking and looking at pictures of antennas. Yes antennas…. He showed me telcodata.us and after playing around to see what kind of CO ran various phone numbers we saw a link to pictures of all the cell phone towers in Santa Cruz county! This entertained us in ways that normal people should never understand ;-)

After a while I decided to head back to my hotel and relax there for a bit. I had been hoping to get uptown to the museums but by this time they were all closed. That will be my first task for tomorrow!

Just dropped by the Apple store in SoHo. It’s a very nice layout. Almost the same layout as the SF store with some minor modifications. I was able to get a new Power Adapter to replace the one I lost this week at the show. Sucks to have to buy another one but at least I had a emergency spare at my hotel to get me through the week.

I also got to see the iMac G5. They had a 17″ model on display. Very nice, I am going to have to order the 20″ model when I get back from my upcoming trip to Orlando.

Time to explore the district for a while. Maybe I will catch some lunch in a bit and then head uptown.

Well blah… It looks like it’s going to be a rainy day today. As I woke up
this morning it was pouring rain like crazy. I decided to get a rain coat as
I do not have much of anything with me. I figured I would run by Macy’s for
something. Of course when I arrive and it’s raining like crazy I find that
they do not open for another hour. There does seem to be a H.M store across
the street. They had some good priced stuff and I was able to pick up a coat
for certainly less than I would have at Macy’s so maybe that worked out for
the best anyway. Of course as I am leaving the store the rain starts letting
up… My luck ;-) It still looks like it’s going to be raining off and on
all day however so the coat wont be a waste.

Just found a cool bakery that has really good chocolate croissants and I was
able to use the cellular data card to get online.

Next stop will be the Apple Store in SoHo. I may walk around for a while in
that area and then try to get uptown to at least drop by the museums and
stuff.

As promised in yesterdays SpeechTek sessions here are copies of my presentations:

• Next Generation Platforms (pdf or html)
• CCXML (pdf)

Hope everyone enjoyed sessions!

Sadly there seems not to be any WiFi access at SpeechTek. In this day and age I have to admit that I expect wireless at tech conferences that I attend. It’s hard going back in the the dark ages without internet access everywhere. I know it’s expensive to provide at hotel locations but it’s an item that for me is a big event killer.

Today Voxeo and Paraxip announced a partnership where we will provide our Voxeo Voice Center platform integrated with the Paraxip Open Gateway VoIP solution.

Paraxip will also be offering our CCXML engine as part of their standalone gateway product, bringing a new level of call control features to the VoIP gateway market.

Just in case you have not looked at the Paraxip solution before it’s a software based VoIP gateway that uses traditional Dialogic cards for the telephony interface. What it brings to the table is a level of flexibility for IVR type features that some of the other gateway providers just can not match. well worth a look if you have not seen their stuff before.