Venue for UBL meeting 3-7 November 2003

[jon.bosak@sun.com]

UBL members,

Having agreed to hold our next UBL TC meeting 3-7 November 2003 in
the San Francisco bay area, we must now decide the venue.  We have
two choices: Sun's campus in Menlo Park (where we have met several
times before), or Sun's drop-in center in downtown San Francisco.
Below I've listed what appear to me to be the salient
considerations.  Please reply to this message no later than COB
Monday 18 August indicating your preference.

Jon

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Menlo Park advantages:

 - Most of us know where it is by now

 - The meeting rooms are quite good

 - There is an excellent cafeteria on campus

Menlo Park disadvantages:

 - The only available hotels are in Palo Alto, several miles away

 - Security is a hassle

 - The meeting rooms may not be located very close to each other

San Francisco advantages:

 - The office is in downtown San Francisco, two blocks from the
   Moscone Center and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

 - There are many excellent hotels and restaurants within walking
   distance of the site

 - There is a BART (subway) station just three blocks away, which
   means that you can easily get to the meeting from many places
   in the bay area without driving

 - BART now runs directly to San Francisco airport, so if you got
   a hotel room near a BART station, you could in theory go the
   whole week without renting a car

 - The meeting rooms are quite near one another

 - Bob Glushko has offered to host a day in the wine country on
   the Sunday preceding or the Saturday following the meeting,
   using his home in St. Helena as the base; San Francisco is an
   hour closer to St. Helena than Menlo Park is (about 1.5 hours
   vs. 2.5 hours)

San Francisco disadvantages:

 - The drop-in center is on the fourth floor of the building

 - The meeting rooms have conference phones and white boards, but
   the rooms themselves are not as nice; in particular, the
   acoustics are not as good (the rooms have concrete floors)

 - There are no dining facilities on site, though there is a small
   break area with coffee, hot water, tea, microwave, and
   refrigerator just a few feet from the meeting rooms; so you
   will have to go downstairs and walk a block or two for lunch
   (on the other hand, this also means that you're only a block or
   two from a bar after the meeting)

 - The venue is an hour away from Silicon Valley, so if you're
   trying to double up on business in the Valley, it's going to be
   less convenient (though with the recently completed
   BART-CalTrain link in Millbrae, it's a lot better than it used
   to be; you can now go directly to downtown Sunnyvale, Mountain
   View, Santa Clara, and San Jose by train)