Back on the theme of trying new things, I went to Pittsburgh for Labor Day weekend. It was a less than 5 hour drive and I'd never been here before. I was attracted by a VisitPA promotion by Governer Rendell. I told 2 colleagues that I was going and that one website ranked the Pittsburgh inclines at night the 2nd most beautiful view in America. Both commented - Pittsburgh must have paid someone a lot of marketing dollars to get that ranking. I'll tell ya...I've personally seen a few of the other entries on the list. The mountain view of the city of Pittsburgh really does rank up there. Not sure if it's number 2 but it is beautiful. I like that all the stadiums are within the city limits.

We used modern technology to get the most out of our visit to the city. We used top 10 lists of sites to see and programmed all the addresses into my Palm based GPS navigator. Pittsburgh can be a confusing maze of 15 bridges and interconnecting roads. I also used the Internet to get a decent hotel rate. We stayed at the Radisson where they had sleep number beds (great marketing). My sleep number was 45. It was soft, but not too soft.

I brought my laptop for the free wired internet. It's great that internet is now free in hotels. I remember paying $10 a day not so long ago. Last night, while the kids were sleeping, I got a few things done. I cleaned up some images on my mom's foundation website with Gimp. It's by favorite, photo shop like, free application. I have to remember to send a small donation to those guys. They truly made something great. I plan to install it on my iMac when I get back home. I learned how to make images with rounded corners. Still have to figure how how to make the rounded edge whitespace transparent. I went into craigslist Pittsburgh to look at the jobs. I was surprised to see Google as a Pittsburgh employer no doubt going after those bright Carnegie Mellon students (famed to be a close competitor to MIT and University of Illinois). I passed by Pitt. They had a cathedral shaped building they called the Cathedral of Learning. What was once a steel and coal town seems to have transformed itself. Even the zoo was cool because it included an aquarium.

We're going swimming in the morning before checkout. We'll head to Point State Park on my quest to catch a fish while looking across the river at the stadiums where the Pirates and Steelers play. The Bass Masters tournament was in Pittsburgh this year and this was another thing that attracted me to visit here. Later, We're going to see Falling Waters later. Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the icons of architecture that I've read about and aspire to be like when building the things I build. I'm happy to say that one thing I built earlier in my career for Citicorp is still alive and running somewhere in Texas now.

I also got down to installing Pentaho on my laptop. I hope to get more an more proficient in this tool.