Monterey vs. Taiwan

So I had another business trip last week. However, instead of the usual Asian tour, this time it was stateside. In fact, I even traded one of my Asain adventures for a kicking it in Caly. This was for "Bacus" aka, SPIE Photomask (http://spie.org/x6323.xml). It had exciting topics and presentations such as:

Mask blank material optimization impact on leading-edge ArF lithography

193-nm radiation durability study of MoSi binary mask and resulting lithographic performance

MegaSonic cleaning: possible solutions for 22-nm node and beyond

I stayed at the local Marriott, which luckily was offering a discount to all conference attendees (quite convient since there was a direct connection to the conference center via a walking bridge). There were also multiple sessions in the Monterey conf rooms (including our lunch and dinners).

If you know Monterey, you know that it's famous for it's aquarium. One of the dinners was at the aquarium after it was closed to the public. They have lots of exhibits talking about how too much fishing is going on in various places, depleting the ocean's fish population. And yes, they did server fish at dinner.

Here are some pictures of a really weird looking fish (it looks even weirder in person). I think it was a sunfish.

Here are some of the seahorses they had on exhibit

Here's a picture of the bay from the pier. If you can believe it, the last day I even walked around some after the conference finished!