What a great, great day in Paris. Following a good night’s sleep, we got up and out by 11 a.m., slowed down by blogging Dad, and took the Metro to the Opera stop. Our mission — our once-every-trip experience with Orange, the French mobile phone company. We had three phones left over from our last trip, and in order to revive them (and thus be able to let the boys […]
We were not particularly looking forward to the act of travelling to Paris, what with the drive to the airport, the waiting in lines, the passage through security, the waiting to load and, of course, the flight itself. But everything went perfectly, absolutely perfectly — we timed our trip to the airport perfectly, the plane was exactly on time, the flight crew was wonderfully friendly, the food passable, Suzie and I […]
This may not count officially, since we’re still at SFO, already tired and not even yet on the plane, but this is the first blog post from the latest France trip. Already it’s great, hearing people speak German and French and Chinese in the gorgeous new International terminal. Hard to believe we’ll be back in Paris in 12 hours. Wish us luck everyone with the boys on the plane – […]
Funny juxtaposition today in one of the sites I regularly watch. This article describes new research in a type of material that can capture and store gases, which is summarized as: Chemists report the “ultimate porosity of a nano material” and records for carbon dioxide storage capacity and porosity in an important class of materials known as MOFs [or metal-organic frameworks]. Porosity in materials is essential for capturing carbon dioxide. […]
I golfed today for the first time since I’d broken my arm. I had to be half talked in to going to the very pleasant, pretty, and laid back Ponderosa Golf Course in Truckee. Not without some trepidation did I approach the first tee, both because it had been well over a year and a half since I’d golfed and, more importantly, because I feared screwing up my arm if […]
The Fourth of July weekend isn’t usually thought of as a time-marker, like New Years Day or Thanksgiving, but it’s become that for me. Last year at this time I had an accident on my bike, briefly described here, which turned out to be more serious than I’d thought, and which left me oddly discombobulated with thought of my own mortality and insignificance. Maybe because of that — or maybe […]
Reports suggest that the Pac-10 Conference is on the cusp of inviting four Big 12 schools (Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State) to join the Pac-10. This follows the announcements yesterday that Nebraska was leaving the Big-12 to join the Big-10, and that Colorado was leaving the Big-12 to join the Pac-10. I can rationalize the Nebraska move into the Big Ten. Nebraska fits in geographically (it’s almost Midwestern) […]
Apologies to my friend Randy Boyd for this, but I chafe at the hypocritical pounding BP is taking from the media and the public about the oil spill in Gulf of Mexico, for two reasons. First, this was an accident. Does anyone really believe BP wanted this to happen? It’s going to lose billions and billions of dollars out of pocket, and God knows how much more in public goodwill. […]
I have an unusual background for someone in the public sector, having worked for a number of years in the private sector not just as a consultant, but actually in a private enterprise. In the private sector, it is a gospel fact that government in California is bloated at all levels — too many employees doing too little work. But like many gospel facts, it turns out that this one […]
There is a woman here in Sonoma County who transmits on Twitter various and sundry pieces of information and gossip (much of it presumably unconfirmed) about the local political scene. Tweeting under the name “SRPolitics,” she has chosen to conceal her true name, taking as her on-line identity a photo of John F. Kennedy, for reasons that aren’t clear to me. My initial reaction to this was irritation. Dealing in rumors […]