Canonical has generously offered to pay my way to the Ubuntu MountainView developers summit in November, to bring some extra points of view from the GNOME project.

I’ll arrive on Thursday evening, so I can spend Friday taking a look at San Francisco. I need to find a relatively cheap place to stay for 2 nights. This will be my second free junket of the year, though the last time I spent most of my tourist day in the hotel with a nasty cold. The California sun should make that unlikely this time. If anybody would like to meet to eat vegetarian on Friday night (3rd November), just comment or email me.

I have a strange adolescent star-truck enthusiasm about visiting the west coast for the first time – and only my second time in the states. Back in my early pre-internet twenties, I wanted nothing more than to go work in Silcon Valley, because it seemed like the center of the software world. I probably would have done it if the visa restrictions hadn’t required a university degree. Now I feel that southern California’s urban sprawl is probably as characterless and disfunctional as the U.K.’s Thames Valley where I lived at the time, and I’m content to enjoy the quality of life in Europe, working with the world’s best software people via the internet. But I suspect that visiting the Googleplex will still feel special.