mushin no shin

so here we go;
sorry I haven’t written much here lately. I have no greater excuse than simply not having been in the right frame of mind.
Well. Don’t know when I’ll be back, but I’m here. And it’s Saturday night, after Christmas. It’s been a decent one. Thursday with the dad, brother, and brother’s family, at [...]

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 [...]