And the morning light comes streaming in…

Our gardening crew recently pruned our way-overdue redwoods, which has allowed the morning sun into the family room for the first time since I’ve lived in this house (18 years now). For about an hour, the light is wonderful, and I sit at my desk with all the lights out, enjoying the warm glow…

A few thoughts on Anathem

A lot of commentary on Anathem, Neal Stephenson’s latest, has come my way lately. One correspondent shied away from it, agreeing with Washington Post reviewer Michael Dirda: “much anticipated, in places quite brilliant, but ultimately grandiose, overwrought and pretty damn dull.” Others are put off by the sheer size of the work (937 pages), and [...]

Collapse

It so happens, during these very interesting times, that I’m reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, his fascinating study of societies that underwent sudden, disastrous decline and the causes that lead to those crashes. Diamond studied the fall of both ancient (Easter Island, Maya, the Norse Greenland Colonies) and modern (Rwanda, Haiti) societies, and comes up with [...]

Neal Stephenson on the topic of me

From Anathem: “I thought that I was  like a man lame in one leg, who had learned to move about well enough that all awareness of his  disability had passed out of his mind. And yet,  when he tried to go on a journey, he kept finding  himself back where he had started, since his [...]

We return to the Left Bank

The Left Bank, Menlo Park’s ‘French’ Bistro (and member of a 6-restaurant Bay Area chain), has reopened after undergoing a remodel. The basic layout is similar, though spruced up, and the menu is, too. Linda and I used to eat here every Sunday after the 5 PM service at Trinity - we got to know [...]

Days of sad news

We spent Saturday in Potter Valley, attending the memorial service for our cousin Kelly, who died after a bout with pancreatic cancer. It was a real-deal small-town event: everybody in town was there. Someone donated a steer, more neighbors barbecued it and others brought dozens of side dishes to feed the 500 or so people. [...]

Linda at the pumpkin patch

Few things make my dear spouse as happy as shopping for Halloween pumpkins, preferably at the kind of ‘pumpkin patch’ that is usually crawling with families with young children. Linda found 4 suitable pumpkins and a bag full of small pumpkin-shaped gourds to spruce up our October household. This year, Grace will be coming over [...]

Some very nice photos

My friend Scott Loftesness is an amateur photog - and a pretty good one at that. He’s posted some photos from the California International Airshow on Flickr. Scott’s also a fan of HDR - high dynamic range - photos, pictures that require a bit of Ansel Adams-like craftsmanship in this ‘easy’ digital age. Scott also [...]

Anathem, yet again

Well, we finished reading Anathem, Neal Stephenson’s new, 960-page novel thanks to our Kindle (thoughts on Anathem TK). The Kindle is so light (it weighs some 10 ounces with its ten or so books and 2 daily-delivered newspapers) and easy for me to handle that it goes everywhere - CalTrain, S.F. Muni, treadmill at the [...]

Need a job? The CIA is hiring

Linda and I both took note of an ad spot running on local radio station KFOG. The CIA is, it turns out, recruiting employees. Curious, I went to the web page referenced by the announcer, and found this particular job opening for a ‘Core Collector‘ where you’ll “serve on the front lines of human intelligence [...]

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