'Frank Lloyd Wright Building'

Today was the last day of the MacIT conference and a short day at that just two sessions up till 12:15 pm:

9:00 AM – 10:30 AM: Microsoft® Office for Mac SP2 – improved Exchange server support

Marcelo Wolff, Product Manager and Mary Starman, Group Product Manager, Microsoft Corp.

10:45 AM – 12:15 PM: Add Automator to Your Arsenal

Sal Soghoian, AppleScript Product Manager, Worldwide Product Marketing, Apple. As a newbie to MacWorld it was all new and exciting. To some extent it did not live up to it’s reputation though and I did here some old hands griping about the quality of the conference and the number of sessions that were cancelled etc. I personally did not experience any of these problems. In my case the experience was comparable to the first time I went to London in my late teens. Growing up in Australia of WASP heritage, London had been built up in my expectations to such a extent that the reality was never going to live up to the daydream in my mind. I still found it a fascinating and wondrous place in the end though. Visiting MacWorld for the first time was rather like that.

Unfortunately the next thing on my priority list was laundry. I’ve not used a coin laundry for years so it was a bit of an adventure for me particularly as whilst the coin laundry was only a block or so from my hotel it was several blocks in the wrong direction of the social stratum.

After laundry I returned to my role as traveller. A tourist map I had revealed a ‘Frank Lloyd Wright Building’. It was to be found at 140 Maiden Lane and currently houses the Xanadu Gallery which specialises in Tribal/Folk Art. Turned out to be a real win-win situation for me. First of all I could view the work of one of Americas most celebrated Architects/Designers and I also brought some antique ‘Wayang Kulit’ (Javanese Sadow Puppets) for Yacinta. The building was originally the V.C Morris Gift Store which Wright designed in 1948 [link]. The outside was a large sandy coloured brick edifice with a cave like entrance. The inside is more difficult to describe. Luckily I took several photos of the interior.

I spent the late afternoon and early evening in Chinatown reputed to be the largest Chinatown outside Asia, but then America has a reputation for claiming that the have the ultimate or original of just about everything so I take this claim with a grain of salt. It was pretty big however and I spent a long time mooching through shops and had a very good, inexpensive dinner.

Speaking of grandiose claims, when I returned to my very modest hotel in the evening I discovered that it was playing host to the Worldwide Newton Conference 2006 a device I thought had gone to meet its maker many moons ago.