This page features every post I write, and is dedicated to Andrew Ho.
At the party we explained that we would soon be moving back to California, but could end up back on the East Coast in a few years. The host said he’d put us down as “Bi-Coastal Curious.”
I visited a friend at El Camino Hospital before heading to work. From the hospital, I took Sleeper Ave to the Steven’s Creek Trail, which actually ends at Sleeper. They’ll be extending the trail over the next few years with a bridge over 85.
Not quite a saga of the prairie, no . . . just the power lines doing their own thing, branching out across the highway, as we little people peddle beneath.
The newest feature is I moved the bookshelf from shoulder height at the back of the cube to waist height on the outside of the cube, which I can do, since I sit at the end of a row. The new low shelf space is where I share coffee and where snacks can be distributed. This also increases my “visibility” and opens up opportunities to chat with coworkers. Sort of the opposite of when I worked remote last year.
In the middle of the shelf is Rick Moranis from the Ghostbusters, a little homage to one of my favorite movie dialogues. Above, is my small collection of Hello Kitty plush dolls, each a “rescue” found at thrift stores or even on the streets of the Sunset district in San Francisco. To the left are photos of my Cisco-IronPort lego logo integration effort and a cool visualization of my LinkedIn network.
Center, you can see the back of my work laptop, a Lenovo W510 with an SSD drive. (I love SSD drives.) Some low-light flowers, a tall desk chair I nicked from an abandoned cubicle, and to the right, my Lego Cisco logo, which I had disassembled for repairs and which I think I’ll keep in San Jose for now.
Near the end of the bicycle version of my commute I ride along a creek. I could tell from Stephen’s Creek that the water was high, so when I rode the ramp down to this underpass I wasn’t surprised. I took my bicycle around this water, through especially sticky mud that threatened to suck off my shoes, and which globbed on to my bicycle, smeared on my pants.
Last week I looked in on a project I completed a few years ago, to integrate the Cisco corporate logo with the IronPort corporate logo. Some bricks had gone out-of-order over time and when I attempted to put them back in place I realized that since everything fit just so I couldn’t get it figured out without the blueprints . . . which are stored on my old laptop at Cisco’s main campus in San Jose. So, I took the thing apart and down to San Jose for reassembly. I figure I’ll keep it on display at Cisco for a while, so I removed one row of white bricks to make a 4-brick-deep base.
We had an outing in Berkeley this weekend, but since we weren’t the only ones planning to kick it in Berkeley we parked at Fremont and took the BART in. The architecture here felt to me like an Alien Temple you might see in 1950s Sci-Fi.
This photo was passed through the “Equalize” filter, which brought out more of the colors and also a crispness that made the original look more “muddy.” In my mind, the 1950s were a time of sharp lines and solid colors, and BART itself is a beautiful, optimistic 1950s vision of the train of the future.
I was tipped off that a bag of potato chips was hanging loose in the vending machine. I wasn’t desiring potato chips, but I felt obliged anyway to whap my butt against the side of the vending machine to see if I might dislodge them and therefor acquire one of my favorite cuisines: free food! Many a time in college I procured errant candy bars from the vending machines in the Digital Computing Laboratory building by wielding what I refer to as my magic ass.
Alas, my magic ass did not succeed this time. “Dude, just put in 75 cents, you’ll get two,” suggested a coworker.
“But I don’t want BBQ potato chips. I’m only interested in dislodging free food!”
I did buy a Snickers bar, just because, but it is still in my backpack, uneaten. I’ll wash it down with a coffee at some point.
I have fallen off the bandwagon of late, but now that I have freed up some time I’m fixing to retroactively post photos. I make up my own rules.
I visited my team in the San Bruno office on Thursday. We grabbed Taqueria San Bruno, and it was good. The food came out slow so my coworker and I downed two bottles of Mexican Coke each. What is Mexican Coke? Coke from Mexico, made with cane sugar. The other coke we get from Mexico I think mostly originates in Columbia, and that is not my preferred formulation.
During my year-in-New-York, one thing the MTA began doing in earnest was to install countdown clocks, which are a really nice feature to let passengers know what trains are on their way and how long before they arrive. But Bergen St also has a little more sentimental value for me because I believe it may be the first New York subway station I ever entered, back in July, 2001 when I visited relatives in Park Slope. My first day in Brooklyn, I got layed off via mobile phone. That same week I trekked up to the World Trade Center towers and figured I’d save my $25 and visit the top next time. New York is always changing, and these countodown clocks help give folks a better glimpse of what may be ahead.