by cg on February 27, 2010
Two mile (plus) walk, omelettes at Mike’s, two-person team coverage of an ad hoc InMenlo story catch – such was our morning. The big event was a stop at Ladera Nursery for the first plants for our long-awaited and just-finished new vegetable garden. Gardener Felipé Bustos and carpenter David Sanchez have done a great job – I’m really pleased.
We put in chard, romaine lettuce and snap peas and will be filling in plants at weekly intervals this year, to try and supply continuous fresh salads and vegetables from here on out. Dinner and a movie with a hot blonde completed this lovely day…
by cg on February 25, 2010
Tuesday found us downtown, in pouring rain, running an errand near the local Le Boulanger, the bakery and café chain, known here for it’s good, inexpensive lunches and equally good, free, completely open WiFi network. Whole virtual corporations use the place as their downtown Menlo Park conference room – the booths on the west end are particularly popular. As I prepared to make the dash from car to lunch, I noticed that Le Boulanger’s regular street person, an African-American man, was braving the rain to hold down his usual lunchtime perch – a low retaining wall – with umbrella and even a plastic wrap over his cardboard sign.
Like the woman I blogged yesterday, I find myself unaware of his name or story. But unlike Tuesday’s subject, he and I have interacted. Frequently when I have approached the door, particularly in days past, when I was even more of a mobility trainwreck than I now am, he would leap from his post and open the café’s heavy door, seeing me safely in. There were hard days as I first began reclaiming my life when this grace was deeply appreciated.
I’ve always meant to reciprocate, perhaps with a few dollars, but somehow the opportunity never presented itself. Though I was never his benefactor, he was often mine. Nowadays that I’m walking better and opening my own doors, he lets me do it, though he often enough nods and returns my observations about the weather and other small talk. I’d very much like to make a connection, but something tells me to take this slowly…
by cg on February 21, 2010
For years, I’ve seen her on the streets of Menlo Park, often pushing a shopping cart piled high with possessions, including scavenged plastic bags, plastic sheets and a dirty sleeping bag. I don’t know her name or her story.
I’ve never seen her in the company of another person: she is a solitary figure, unlike some of Menlo’s other street people who will banter with locals, and cheerily wish us good day near the entrance to Draeger’s or Peet’s.
Sometimes I’ve spotted her in line at Walgreen’s with a few cheap food items in her hands, and other times taking out food from Ann’s Cafe – she never sits in the diner, rather taking her meal from a styrofoam box on one of the benches on the sidewalk on Santa Cruz Avenue, where she sits alone, a few feet but a million miles away from the worlds of the Menloites who walk past.
Last year, I made it my Lenten discipline to reach out and become acquainted with homeless people. That quest led to becoming friends with Victor Frost, a (famously) homeless man in Palo Alto.
This year, my plan is to approach Menlo Park’ street regulars, in the hopes of making a connection, and learning their story, and telling it on InMenlo, in the hopes of bringing people into focus that we often see but don’t know. Off into the wilderness, for forty days…
by cg on February 17, 2010
It’s true, we’ve been a bit lax on gulker.com’s updates lately. Part of it is that I’m busy blogging for InMenlo, where I have to please a tough editor (get me rewrite!) with both words and pictures. InMenlo is also growing rapidly, and great post ideas are beginning to flow as our community network grows, which is keeping me busy. I like it, but don’t tell the editor – she’ll just send me out on more assignments.
Indeed, I’ve noted a couple of times how much I love being back out on the streets taking pictures and interviewing people, though I am much slower than I once was, if only because I walk so much more haltingly than was once the case. Nevertheless, I’ve managed to put together lightweight gear that makes the most of what capabilities I have. More importantly I’ve had to adjust my style, and expectations. I’m more static than I once was, which means planning and thinking through pictures beforehand. As I work more, I’m developing a few techniques that are manageable and result in (hopefully) compelling pictures.
A small Olympus digital voice recorder has joined my camera bag, a new friend that goes along with my Nikon, capturing the chatter as I try to put my photo subjects at ease. With my Bose headphones on, I now write posts and edit pictures from wherever there’s WiFi. I started this post at Peet’s then moved to the patio at gulker.com World HQ after a dense morning fog lifted, revealing the sun, and now, a balmy afternoon…
by cg on February 13, 2010
We’re spending this weekend at Cavallo Point, the hotel situated on the site of Fort Baker, now a National Recreation Area, beautifully located on the north shore of the Golden Gate, literally in the shadow of the bridge (at sunset anyway).
Linda and I stumbled upon this place shortly after it opened, when I attended the Going Green conference here a few years back. The restaurant, Murray Circle, has just improved year after year, and we find ourselves lured back to a spot that’s a short drive but a psychic world away from Menlo Park.
Today we had the additional lure of Grace, the granddaughter, whose parents brought her over for a jaunt through the Discovery Museum, a toddler paradise that’s part of the recreation area, complete with its own tot-sized Golden Gate Bridge. We’re both, fundimentally, just vegging here, and loving every minute…
by cg on February 10, 2010
Question I’ve been asking myself all evening. Since blog’s departure, indeed since before blog’s departure, we’ve had these evenings when a fatigued moi slumps into the chair at World HQ and can’t think of a thing to write about except to repeat the doubtless-fascinating tedium of his full day blogging for InMenlo, dealing with plumbing problems, et al.
We did, today, take our first HDR photo, inspired by the very nice efforts of our friend Scott Loftesness. Like most other professions, photographers are now dependent on the software in their bag – not just the lenses…
by cg on February 8, 2010
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…
by cg on February 7, 2010
Truth be known, I rarely watch football, but tonight I wanted to watch the Super Bowl, in part because of the Saints’ underdog presence, in part because I still have a fond memory of the time Linda and I spent in still-wounded New Orleans this past March, and because I was intrigued by the notion of The Who playing the (usually notoriously bad) half-time show.
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…
by cg on February 5, 2010
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…
by cg on February 4, 2010
It was a very full day for your deeply fatigued author aujourd’hui, as it was yesyerday, and he is prevented from sharing yesterday’s most exciting experience by the editor of a certain community blog, aka the spouse, at least until InMenlo runs the post.
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…
