San Francisco / Sacramento, DreamForce and Chad Ocho Cinco

---

I was out in San Francisco for DreamForce by SalesForce.com. There were about 20,000 attendees this year to be part of the discussion on technology. A big topic this year was cloud-computing, as SFDC is pretty much the go to source for cloud trends. The big announcement was SalesForce Chatter that will launch next year. Marc Benioff, SalesForce.com CEO, kicked off the conference with a very long winded speech where he tried to solidify his own importance. Rivers of people left before the keynote was finished; I was swept up as well. Gen. Colin Powell was another story. I was amazed with how engaging the General was. He talked about the low marks that he received in college and his affinity for technology. He spoke about his years with the Regan administration and how he was sent in to speak with Gorbachev before President Regan. He did a pretty great impression as well. One of my favorite quotes: “It's easy to watch the evening news and feel like much is going wrong, but if you look at the last 20 years, a lot has gone right.”
Jack was not all work though. I went out to dinner with colleagues every night, finding some great restaurants in downtown San Francisco. My favorite was a place called, Colibri, which is an amazing little Mexican Bistro. If you make it there have the churro desert, muy bueno. Another great place was a little Italian restaurant called Café Tiramisu, which is tucked back in an alley but had some amazing food.

Outside of eating the Black Crowes performed at the conference. I am a fan of a few of their songs, but too often it just sounded like they were in a jam session. They would play these ten minute long instrumentals that turned me off a little bit. Open bar so no one minded too much. We also made it to a dance club which was a good time with some gorgeous dancers, which I certainly enjoyed.

After the conference on Friday Jeremy W., a friend from Omaha who moved to Sacramento in June, came into San Francisco to spend the night. We grabbed a pint at a local pub and then made our way to the liquor store to pick up a few provisions for the evening. Another friend from Guadalajara, Mexico, Montserrat, came in to the city as well. She moved to San Fran in August. We had a few drinks in the hotel and then made our way to dinner. I took them Colibri which I referenced previously. After dinner there is some debate on whether we went back to the room or straight to the piano bar next. Either way, it doesn’t really matter, we made it to the piano bar, J. Foley’s, at some point in the evening.

I love dueling piano bars and J. Foley’s has a pretty impressive one. Jeremy thinks it is pretty funny that we walked into the place and I beelined to the stage where I started singing and suddenly had some chick on stage dancing with me. What can I say? That is just the way I roll. I am still trying to recover my voice from singing at the top of my lungs all night. Anyway, it was a great time and we met a ton of people. Two of my favorites were Sossie from Lebanon and Teodora from Bulgaria. We all went back to hotel room after closing down J. Foley’s and continued to get retarded. Teodora and Sossie went back to their hotel and the three of us crashed. The last time I looked at a clock it was 4:30 am.

We were woken up by a maid knocking on our door at 8:03! Who the eff comes and checks on a room at eight am? Anyway, we were up and didn’t go back to sleep. I thought it was very funny to say, over and over again, in my best Thai accent “Mr. Brent, you want massage?” and “Where you going handsome man?” We got some breakfast and tried to piece together our night, which was very entertaining. After getting cleaning up we took Montserrat to the train station, and saying our goodbyes, we headed off to Oakland to do lunch with Chad Ocho Cinco.

So here is the deal, Chad, formerly Johnson, Ocho Cinco buys fans lunch in every town that he goes to. I know this because Jeremy follows his Tweets, I didn’t even know that Ocho Cinco did Twitter. So Chad puts this message out about where he is eating and it is just across bay bridge so we go. We get in line and are one of the lucky ones that get to go to lunch with him. It was pretty crazy. We were hung over and felt like garbage but it is a crazy story and I am very glad that we went. I got Brock an autograph and I got a photo with Chad Ocho Cinco out of the deal. Well worth it.

After lunch we take off to Sacramento. Once there we head to a bar called Players that has the Husker game and the UFC fights on. We killed a few pitchers of beer and moved to Red Bull vodkas so we didn’t fall asleep. But we walk in and the first seats open are next to some kid that Jeremy knows from Omaha. Small world. After the fights are over we head back to Jeremy’s place, but first we grabbed some In & Out Burger though, (I was going to roll with a couple of singees, but opted for the double double instead… I massacred that burger). I am fading pretty fast, but he makes me a drink and I am ready to go. We made it to a bar called Stockholm, or something like that. We met a ton of people, found out the bar tenders boyfriend is a good friend of Jeremy’s, and she hooked us up with drinks. We closed the bar down at two or two thirty and headed back home, where we found some much needed rest. We did not move until after 11:00 am and it was glorious. I flew out later that afternoon and that ended this trip to Nor*Cal. I would mark this trip up as a success for sure.

---

Photos

DreamForce
Keynote

Lamp
I saw this on my walk to the conference

China Town
Brook, Jay and I grabbing a drink on the way back from dinner.

Group photo,
This group wanted a photo with the idiots that walked in and started dancing on stage!

Comments

[San Francisco maids]

How much do you remember of the conference? It looks more like you went to San Francisco to paaaarrrrttttyyyyy! (LOL!) Hope you had a very good time with your friends.