My trip to Phoenix was great! Business-wise, we had two meetings, one full-day meeting on Friday, and one half-day meeting on Saturday. It was great to finally meet everyone face-to-face, and we really got a lot of details sorted out about the new product we’re developing.

The hotel we stayed in was amazing. It’s called the Wyndam Buttes, and it has an amazing view of the city, which really shows how flat Phoenix is. The thing I was most impressed with was how they had built the entire hotel to be multi-layered, up the side of the hill (one of about 2 hills in all of Phoenix). As a result, instead of one big pool and a couple of jacuzzis, they had two big pools, connected together, with stairs going uphill to the two jacuzzis, and a water slide descending a level to a smaller pool, which was right outside my room. The “ground floor” where we entered the hotel, was actually the fifth floor, and you accessed the lower levels via elevators across a skybridge. Even the lobby was designed to look like the outer desert, complete with a waterfall, emptying into a coy pond in the restaurant downstairs, which flowed outside down another waterfall emptying into the pool.

Our first night there, we had an (expensive!) dinner at the “Top Of The Rock” restaurant, where I got a nice view of the sunset over downtown.

After I got home, I had a nice birthday. Just about everyone came over, and we drank White Russians and watched Scratch, a documentary about hip-hop and turntablism. Eric gave me an awesome bottle of vodka, and the next day, a bunch of us went to ElectroFish, a local sushi bar that plays downtempo music.