I was expecting the Opus Hotel in Vancouver and the surrounding Yaletown neighboard to be cool and lively, but I was pleasantly surprised by their kid friendliness.  (We have two daughters, 3 and 5.) They happily gave us an extended checkout time of 2:30, secluded seating at dinner (for which we were very thankful!), and in general were friendly and welcoming of our children.

The surrounding neighborhood is pedestrian friendly, and has a good grocery store (the urban market) as well as great restaurants and shops. You see lots of families with kids and strollers.

The view of the False Creek waterfront is beautiful and there is an extensive set of walking and biking paths as well as parks and playgrounds.

The Roundhouse community center features a historic steam locomotive which kids love; it was the first locomotive to cross Canada.

Nearby is Stanley Park and the “Vancouver Aquarium”:http://www.vanaqua.org/home/, which puts the Seattle Aquarium to shame with its exhibits.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you should give “Google Personalized Search”:http://www.google.com/psearch/help.html a try.

I believe Google is likely combine Google Personalized Search with new Google Tolbar and Google Desktop search features to compete with the “Flock”:http://www.flock.com value proposition.

The race is on to push more and more browser state out into the cloud from the PC, and to more seamlessly blur browsing, tagging, and authoring.

Personalized Search remembers everything you’ve searched for and every hit you’ve clicked on. You can bookmark clicked hits and add “labels” (essentially tags) for bookmarks. Both bookmarks and labels are roaming and available on any PC you log in on.

The shortcoming of Google personalized search is that only things that you do in Google are available for bookmarking or tagging. Google is almost certain address these shortcomings via the Google Toolbar.

I could also imagine Google extending their existing “Blog This” button with something like Flock’s shelf. If they do so, they’d better add support for something other than Blogger. This is high on my list of borderline evil, Microsoftish sorts of things that Google does.

It will be interesting to see how Google’s effort stacks up against a new client app like Flock. The Achilles heel of Flock could be that they can’t track the Firefox releases quickly enough– think of all the security updates they have to follow. Also, Flock could be big and complex enough that they have too many bugs or too many security issues of their own to be nimble.