We continued, this morning, to work from Peet’s coffee house, Menlo Park’s all-but-the-cheapest satellite office space (Le Boulanger is slightly cheaper but the WiFi has been broken for awhile).

For $2.60 (cup of coffee, own mug is $1.60; refill for $1.00) we got a small table and 2 hours of fast, stable WiFi – enough time to move a 3-photo layout over from Mobile Me to InMenlo and write some notes that will later be a Valentine’s post, after a little editorial polishing.

We also caught up our email, both personal and InMenlo, while three women at the adjacent table were busy planning a new food product launch. Wired mag has an article this month about how easy it is to productize things, even if you’re a garage operation, but my table mates were way ahead of the curve. Two women had a tasty snack that they were whipping up in their kitchen, much to the delight of their family and friends and a growing word-of-mouth audience.

The third woman was an expert at taking tasty, appealing items from the kitchen to the food plant and thence to distribution via the likes of Costco and Trader Joe’s. She even had advice on ways to offload the financial risk from the entrepreneurs to organizations with deeper pockets while retaining control of the product and potential profits. Yet another fascinating Peet’s overheard conversation…

True I was absent for the 3rd quarter, picking up our take out dinner at Mayfield Café, but I even drank a beer and ate some chips and dip and talked with Linda about John Madden’s assessment of the Saints’ offensive line – the whole 9 yards (make that ten and a first down). Linda was sufficiently impressed that she blogged about the event, including my adventures (believe it or not) at a Super Bowl in Miami 20 years ago. I’m touched, dear, really…

Willow Garage, a robotics research facility here in Menlo Park, may be my most favorite InMenlo assignment to date. This past Wednesday, CEO Steve Cousins was kind enough to take me through the large, bustling plant, where there are futuristic wonders  to be discovered at every turn.

Privately funded Willow Garage is developing advanced robots – both hardware and software – with the goal of advancing robotics to the tipping point (still thought to be many years hence) at which the field will advance rapidly to the eve of, say, affordable domestic robots that can load dishwashers and perform other simple chores (remember Rosie the robot maid on The Jetsons?).

With nearly as many robots as humans, the corridors at Willow Garage are busy. Autonomous robots known as the PR2 (Personal Robot 2) can navigate the halls, open doors (first making sure the door is unlocked by gently trying the knob), find outlets and plug themselves in to recharge.

Another robot, the tall, thin Texas model, allows remote workers to interact with on-site peers via ‘telepresence.’ Indeed, while I was photographing robotics program co-director Eric Berger (inset photo, above), Dallas Goecker, a Willow Garage engineer who lives in Indiana, came over to see what was going on (you can see “him” in the background of the larger photo on InMenlo). Earlier I photographed designer Curt Meyers with some 25 of his “Texas” model, known plurally as “Texai” (top photo).

Willow Garage, in keeping with its mission, is an open source developer, and makes its software, including contributions to the Robot Operating System available online. The institution is in the process of making the (reportedly) $500,000 PR2 available to researchers, also free. We were impressed. Wow…

The fatigue, by the way, was earned and not some cancer artifact (for a change) – we’ve just been very busy. Rehab (today at UCSF in the City), taxes, an insurance switch, a sewer line that keeps backing up, InMenlo assignments, closing the books for 2009, my domestic responsibilities… well, I’ll stop now.

We can, however, reveal our big excitement (other than the embargoed item referenced above) was that we found a need to extend our new photo friend, light stick, to do special effects: in this case to produce photos that had that Wired Magazine “weird science” look – the spooky blue glow, the hot magenta/red highlights et al.

Normally, this is done with studio strobes covered with expensive theatrical gels, but your hemiplegic-but-mobile photog managed to extend his battery-powered setup by buying some colorful acetate report binders in the office supplies section at Fry’s this morning, and, after trimming them with scissors, gaffer-taping them over the strobe heads. Final cost? $3.95 plus tax. Can’t wait to share some of the pix…

Since almost no one noticed a product unveiling at Apple last week, or, at least, one aspect of said event, I feel called to step up, and weigh in. Apple, some may have noticed, announced that it was designing the silicon for the new iPad, as well as writing the OS and the core applications. One august journal proclaimed “a new direction” for Apple.

Us iGeezers just say “Huh?” We remember the first Mac, and most all subsequent Macs until Motorola et al. dropped the PowerPC chip – Apple software, wed to Apple hardware, with Apple apps for frosting – the complete Apple lock-in (or attempted lock-in) – not exactly a resounding success, judging by the vast number of PCs in the world now enrolled in botnets.

This, really folks, is Vintage Steve, doing what he did in 1984, except with the added touch of trying to also control the means of all future media distribution thrown in for good measure.

Don’t get me wrong: I own a little Apple stock, and I wish the company all the success in the world. And it’s not that Mr. Jobs has been standing still for 26 years. In that time he has been able to, for example, revolutionize music delivery.

And I think he’s right that, these days, people are not averse to lock-in, just so it works, and works smoothly and elegantly a la iTunes. My digital life is a patchwork of devices, places, protocols, cords, tethers and messy complexity. My iPhone already has knocked a couple degrees of cruft off that needless confusion and iPad stands poised to move the ’simplify’ needle another few notches out of the red ‘Hopeless’ zone, and, possibly, much further. Apple, the ‘benign Microsoft?’ Probably not…

Me: You have a better offer?

Blog: Oh, dude, don’t go there! It’s not like I haven’t learned a lot here in Geezerland. What was that thing you did, desktop punishing?

Me: That was desktop publishing.

Blog: Whatever, but it was kind of like, seminal, you know what I mean? You used a computer to lay out content, even though the UI and delivery protocol (bits! fer crissake) was hopeless. I kind of got the whole framework from the core where it all began. But I just have to move on dude…

Me: It’s that we don’t have video podcasts isn’t it?

Blog: Dude, that’s not the half of it – basically, you got nothing. This pop stand’s looking dark and deserted, if you catch my drift. 2D is so, um, 15th century you know? Monks and parchment and, like, Gutenberg, man. Look at the hit logs, look at your seven readers – only four of them even bother to follow you on Twitter.

Me: So, you’re gone…May I ask where?

Blog: Dunno, but some very wired cats with a hot Facebook game need a blog, bad. I’m gonna go over and wow them.

Me: Do you need a recommendation?

Blog: Um, no, dude, and, uh, if you don’t mind, if someone calls or emails or texts, you never heard of me, OK?

Guess we’re on our own from here on out…

The usual traveling one-light setup consists of a monobloc (an integrated power supply and strobe/modeling light), an umbrella or softbox, a light stand sufficiently robust to support the usual, ruggedly-built 200 or 400 watt-second device and all the small stuff – cords, flash meter, sand bags, gobos, grip gear, cameras et al. etc.

Needless to say, it took me about a half hour to set up, and bless ‘em, Tuck and Patti were completely understanding, but that’s not going to often work for me or most of the time-pressed people I’m likely to shoot these days. I’m slow enough getting in to their office, as it is.

So I’ve been trying to think of a very lightweight, easy to set light that I could handily take along to assignments. One of the (nice) dirty secrets of the latest-gen digital cameras is that their noise (aka ‘grain’) figures are very low. One needed to tote serious power in order to reliably get a decent f-stop on Ektachrome 100 – not so, these days. Modern DSLRS have image quality at ISO 400 (DX-format) and even ISO 1600 (full 35mm frame format) that one was reserved for fine-grain transparency film.

Indeed, AA-battery powered strobes will provide sufficient light for many applications, particularly when a 460-pixel-wide image is the target medium. So we’ve been web-surfing, cruising the product offerings, and come to see I’m about the last photographer to notice this datum. There are a ton of relatively inexpensive products available to make a cheap, portable light source, a number of which I snapped up at Keeble & Shucat this morning.

Anyway, we’ve come away with a very light, relatively easy-to-set-up thing we call the ‘light stick,’ basically a modern version of the light 1930’s photogs christened the ‘bare bulb.’ We used it today, but I’ve promised InMenlo not to publish the photo before they do. Short take… I like it…

Only problem is, it wasn’t. For some reason, I’ve had it stuck in my mind, probably for decades, that gibbous referred to “hazy” or “obscured.” Linda replied that she thought that gibbous referred to the shape or phase of the moon, which, indeed, proves to be correct (less than full, more than half).

Later in the evening, as we departed the Mayfield Café, I observed that the moon was “less gibbous,” given a clearing sky. Wrong on both occasions, it would seem…

Thus gulker.com misses posts, and I’m not even conscious of it – the days are full and rush by in such a blur. I only just noticed there was no post yesterday.

Today was a ‘down’ cancer day physically, and my 40 minutes on the treadmill and hour on the weight machines did not come easily this morning… a couple times I almost through in the towel, but in the end I didn’t, and finished everything – I felt good about that when I hobbled out of the Y. After that, we made a Peet’s stop where I scanned for news of the iPad ($499? Way to go, Apple…), followed by an appointment with Guy’s Plumbing, followed by an InMenlo assignment, followed by two hours with the Medicare web sit up on one monitor and my COBRA site on the other, then quick shower before starting dinner, which was a mini-disaster. Dover sole became Broken sole because of a defrosting incident, but the artichokes were OK. Anyway…