Saturday I went to my second former West Coast-employees' lunch, the third lunch overall I think. It was held at Harbor Village Restaurant in the Embarcadero Center. The EC is a really nice place, sort of an upscale outdoor mall, spread over four blocks, three levels with walkways over the in-between streets. Harbor Village is on the second floor of the fourth block. Right outside there's some sort of water fountain and an open-air courtyard with a spiral walkway connecting each floor.

Since I was going to go gaming afterwards, I drove to Shannon's and left my car there and took the BART to San Francisco. First I went to the post office and checked my PO box and got the latest issue of Operations, The Gamer's house organ. Dean Essig, the big boss has an Outbrief that he writes in each issue. Usually pretty interesting thoughts on the wargame industry and the problems and rewards of running your own company.

This time it his comments about a survey he ran last issue (this is a quaterly magazine). This is the number of responses for this or that and the general trends. Plus some weird complaints from people like someone complaining about Dave Powell's (one of the principal designers) politics on the email list. And someone complaining about the "Proudly Made in the USA" flag and phrase on the game boxes. He didn't comment other than point them out as unusual complaints.

The reason I bring this up is that last week there was this most annoying thread on The Gamer's list about the "Proudly Made in the USA" label. It was two people, one Swede and one American, with the occassional comment by a bystander and lots of people pleading them to stop. Sort of an European "isn't that arrogant" opinion with the natural "duh, we're better" rejoinder. And apparently the list moderator was taking a few days off because nobody was stopping it. Oh well, some people are just stupid.

Anyway, back to the narration. The Berkeley BART station now has (or maybe I just didn't notice) a bicycle station where people can check in their bikes for the day. The BART is 30+ years old, quite noisy, yet still a comparatively nice ride and relatively efficient. I like riding in the first or last car. Easier to get a seat because most people congregate in the middle cars (which end up closer to the stairs and escalators). Front car is a bit safer since that's where the conductor is.

When I got there Jessie Lee was already there. So was Greg Welliver, who I haven't seen since I left West Coast. A good guy and too bad he's too old to get out of WCBS. Rita was also there. I think she was in accounting. Later on Fred showed up and there was also Greg's friend whose name I forgot. Bea Cary was there, this time alone. Cynthia also showed up, though a bit late. Peter Huang showed up very late. Patrick Huber finally made it, looking trimmer and more fit than I remember. Chris Chin-Wong and a couple of other people whose name I forget were there too. For some I associate most of them as being in accounting, which is a big dual-department at WCBS and we interacted a lot with the people there. Steve Chan from the IS department (and he still works at WCBS) was also there, though Sam couldn't make it.

So, what's new? Greg said that WCBS is up to 102 stores, and still only one full-time person handling store support, though Lonnie To is still there to help as a part-time consultant. Fred is selling his house in South San Francisco (actually, near CSUSF which I think is South SF). I didn't look at the sheet but I heard it has a second floor suitable for tenants and it's priced at $340k. Bea is going to Europe this summer with a friend on a three week vacation. Starting in Sweden and ending in Greece. Patrick is working for 1st FB (?), some brick-and-mortar bank. He's a sysadmin there and he's still learning more and more Solaris 7 administration. There's also an Oracle database he has to work with.

That's all I picked up (I was at one end of the table). The food was great and I ate the usual dim sum dishes plus some others that I hadn't tried before. It's a nice restaurant and the employees were friendly. When we got there at 11:30 it was pretty empty. By 12:30 it was full and when we left at 13:30 it was still mostly full. There was this deep-fried breaded shrimp that I never had before that was quite good.

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