Today (at one of the bookstores I visited) I learned about the Google Pinyin program. It lets you type entire phrases quickly in Chinese. And it’s free.
I walked my poor feet all over downtown San Francisco today. I took the free hotel shuttle to the San Francisco airport and caught the BART train to the Civic Center station. Adam (my cow-orker that came here with me) and I walked to Japantown to check out some stores and had a nice lunch. I had Kitsune Udon and some California rolls and just a little bit too much wasabi. I always seem to make that mistake.
Anyway, we parted ways there and I took a taxi to Chinatown (it was an even longer walk than it was to Japantown). I walked all up and down the streets looking for bookstores. I found four of them, but none of them had the books I’m looking for, which was a terrible disappointment. They had a newer version of some, but not the ones I wanted that will complete my collection and look great together on my shelf.
I stunned the locals with my mad Chinese skillz 
Met lots of nice people, but nobody had what I wanted so I ended up walking back down to Market Street where the BART trains have their stations and got a ticket back to SFO, then rode the shuttle back to the hotel. My feet are killing me, I think I walked about four miles today, on concrete and asphalt.
Yesterday at the conference, Joel Spolsky (of Fog Creek Software) gave a hilarious keynote speech about great software, mentioning what he called:
The Formula:
Make People Happy
Think About Emotions
Obsess Over Aesthetics
What I found much more amusing was an off-hand comment he made about some obscure (at least I’d never heard of him) actor and the number of hits you get when you search for him on Google as compared to someone like Brad Pitt. Then he said my mom has more Google hits than this guy, which got a lot of snickers from the audience. I don’t know if it was supposed to come out like that, but it was pretty funny.