mushin no shin

No spectacular new ideas or information here, but as a fan of San Francisco, and a fan of Henry George, I do enjoy Fred Folvary using the term San Francisco School as another name for Georgist economics.
That reminds me, I never did finish my travel diary from my trip. I can’t believe it’s been more [...]

Last night I indulged in a much needed night-at-home-doing-squat, and popped in a DVD of the Birdman of Alcatraz. Good film, interesting story about a man finding his humanity in solitary confinement by raising birds, eventually becoming a renowned expert who cured a number of avian diseases. It’s based on the true story of a [...]

Not only did i get to see The Simpsons this weekend, I also saw Rear Window at the Belcourt, so I finally get the references in this:

I’m tempted to say “It’s all connected” but I’d hate that to be taken as a subliminal endorsement for Karl Dean. Not that it isn’t one. Eh. I don’t [...]

So I saw Vertigo tonight. The cool thing for me (well, apart from seeing on the big screen a renowned film from a legendary director with a fantastic cast) was that, being set in San Francisco, it was chock full of local references - the Embarcadero, Fort Point, the Presidio, Eddy Street — things that [...]

OK, so back to the Californialog (or, for Cory, “Californialogue” : )
When we left off, it was Monday afternoon, and I’d just finished the Berkeley campus tour. I wish I’d had more time to explore the campus on my own, but I had a deadline — it was 3:00, and I had to be at [...]

After lunch, I headed in to the UC Berkeley campus. I took the tour they give for prospective students (hey, you never know, right? : )
It was a very good tour. Being that it was part sales-pitch, the guide of course made a point of telling us about some of the school’s accomplishments, mentioning factoids [...]

OK, getting back to the trip –
So Monday I hopped in the car and trekked up 880 to spend some time in Berkeley. I spent the morning wandering through the city itself, down University Ave and some of the neighboring areas west of campus.
Walking through the residential areas, I was overwhelmed by the tremendous [...]

Falling behind on the California photos & posts — where does the time go? Well here’s a quick one –
As mentioned, I made a run up to San Francisco on the Sunday night before heading back to Santa Clara for the convention; meanwhile, Mike had arrived a few days earlier and was in ‘Frisco as [...]

So for the first leg of the trip, while we were in Santa Clara for the MySQL convention, we stayed at the convention hotel which was a Hyatt. Pretty conventional Hyatt — very nice, no complaints, boringly upscale. Of course there was this, but that wasn’t really a shock so much as just a funny [...]

Mystery solved. Meh. It’s from Ask. That’s no fun.