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/ wed.htmlI guess it was inevitable that I'd wake first, being on UK time. As we were executive furries on the tenth floor there was a comfortable lounge area with complementary breakfast (cereal, juice, coffee, toast, cookies, and fruit) so I took my current book (Neil Gaiman's American Gods) to sit and read.
With a full day before the con officially started, and rather convoluted public transit into San Francisco, we opted to discover what San Jose had to offer the discerning tourist. The thick and glossy booklets from the hotel promised much.
I have to say, San Jose does seem to have a lot of restaurants, but it was also quiet. This was a normal workday to the majority non-furry population of the valley; they must have been busy at their desks though. Sitting, sipping coffee, outside the Starbucks across from the Repertory Theatre (a location described in the guide as "the cultural heart of San Jose") it was obvious we'd have to work at making it last the afternoon.
After some dithering, The Tech
Museum of Innovation provided suitable distraction for $8 a head.
In a suitably Silicon Valley way, each visitor was issued with
an RFID tag to track their progress through the exhibits, resulting
in a slightly spooky set of fly-on-the-wall webcam shots. The RFID
tag itself is a tiny IC with a fine aerial wire attached; it bears
a passing resemblance to some kind of silicon spermatozoa.
In one of the wet-labs we were invited to insert jellyfish
gene for a fluorescent green protein into a bacteria. Well,
if there's something for a fursuiter that comes a close second
to being a camera whore, its things that glow - so that
was a must.
What else did we learn? Well, you shouldn't let furries anywhere
near your clean room. Don't trust any of us to do your keyhole
surgery. Floating about like a giant air hockey puck on the
space suit jet pack simulator is silly and fun. Closed cell foam
is not a good building material in an earthquake zone. I think we
managed three earthquake simulations before the novelty wore
off.
Outside The Tech is a large Heath Robinson contraption (or for Americans Rube Goldberg machine) which contrives to make a number of sub-musical noises, and possibly tell the time, by running pool balls around a convoluted path. This was definitely worth a few minutes of our time before we headed back to the Doubletree.
There was some speculation, as we waited for the tram, as to whether
any fursuiting would have taken place yet (already a full day
before the con started). We need not have worried; there were
already a handful of suiters
(I think I saw ![[info]](../../..//images/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
radjin,
pepperthevixen - going for a fursuit endurance
record perhaps, and a few others, but I could be wrong)
in the lobby, entertaining and
confusing the still largely business audience.
Took advantage of the executive buffet, and met the highly
amusing Rensis (mottenfest), who delighted us
and a few straggling executives (such as Mr. HP Storage) with
the trials of being an artist in the furry genre. Mr. HP later
revealed that he was having trouble getting a hotel room for
a meeting on Monday. Yup, furries are impacting the valley's
economy.
Well, after a brief excursion to locate Rensis's room (it was two floors above where we looked) we had to join the fursuiters. Of course, no one was going to recognise me, and I had no badge to identify me. Several folks tried to examine the tag on my collar, but I suspect "I have an Identichip, please scan me" wasn't especially helpful.