Biking on Foothill

It was rumoured to be a rainy day, with a thirty percent chance of a drizzle. In the morning, indeed, it was cloudy and wet; and once in a while you would see a sprinkle hit the pool, the tiny drops barely able to grow circles on the perfectly smooth surface of the water. But then the clouds broke, like in summer. The front had passed and left us alone, and I was able to bike. Continue reading

Messenger, Instantly

How could I run a blog without even mentioning Instant Messenger? I don’t know. Am I becoming an expert on the matter? I have been working on this off and on since 2000, when Marshall T. Rose first started talking about his beloved BEEP (back then still BXXP) and a new generation of IM products and protocols. He was getting excited, sat down a while with a bunch of smart nerds, and there you are, out comes IMXP (soon to be renamed APEX). Continue reading

The Two Towers (2003)

Chance made me go to the opening night of “The Two Towers”, the sequel to last year’s “The Fellowship of the Ring”. A colleague had bought two tickets and had run amiss of his date, so that there was an immediate opening. We were very late, so that a lot of this review will be tainted by the spectacle of elves with elongated faces and flat hobbits. The Two Towers is the second book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Continue reading

Torrents

It’s been raining all day, in the first of a series of torrential flows that mark the beginning of the rainy season. Well, at least it’s in mid-December and not in November, like last year. The rain feels so odd here. So out of place. Especially when it’s not drizzling, but pouring like it was today. We don’t see much of that, haven’t in the last seven eight months. When it rains in California, the gutters explode. Continue reading

YEP

Year end party. Once a year, this company, too, throws itself into a frenzy for a good cause (the amusement of the employees) and spends a hopefully not startup sum to come up with an evening of fun and glory and debauched drinking. Amusing how the company keeps its headquarters in the South Bay, but thinks nothing of throwing its party in the city. Is it because the big party goers live there, anyway? Continue reading

Googlecounts

Yesterday, I had forgotten how to spell ’embarrassing’ and was too lazy to look it up on dictionary.com. Instead, I went to Google and typed in the two possible spellings I was considering: ’embarrassing’ and the more phonetically correct ’embarassing’. Never mind that my Italian suggested the single ‘r’ where I should have known better; never mind that dictionary.com and any other dictionary are the right source for this type of information; never mind that what I got was just a corruption of a search; never mind that Google itself suggested the correct spelling. Continue reading

Waking Up Early

4:30 AM. No alarm clock is bugging me, no need to wake up, the sun won’t be shining for another two hours or three. And yet, something immaterial makes my soul levitate into consciousness. All of a sudden I function in wake-state, and the logical flow of my mind is restored where it was interrupted. The transition is sudden, and sometimes it feels as if there had been one single moment when it happened, as if the soul were not, as it seems, a flowing entity, but one that makes leaps to reach from one end of the chasm to the other. Continue reading

Big Island

Just got the Big Island book from the Hawai’i Guidebook series. Seems odd that an island that big would have that few sights, and worse still that few notable ones. If I compare this with the corresponding books on Kaua’i and Maui, the density of sights and their quality seems much lower. I wonder why that is. Hawai’i sounds much more diverse and interesting than the other islands, as long as nature is concerned. Continue reading

California Rain

It’s official now: the rainy season started. California will be enveloped in clouds for a considerable portion of the next four months, drowning us in three quarters of the annual rainfall. And yet, although my biking will have to be cut back, it is not all bad. You should see the clouds lit afire by the setting sun, or the pink watercolors you’d see in the morning looking east. I sometimes try to catch those paintings with a camera, but they are as elusive as hummingbirds – of whom we see more now that they rely on the feeder to get through the winter. Continue reading

Foothill Expressway

The day is gorgeous, albeit a little chilly. Another two hours or so, and I’ll be on my bike, riding to distant lands and trying to get back into shape. Distant lands? No, my standard route is still unchanged. I leave the house, a few turns left or right, and I end up on Foothill Expressway, the Peninsula’s major biking thoroughfare. Sometimes it feels as if everybody has to ride Foothill. Continue reading