Only in the Valley...

A blast from the past: a view of the Mozilla Corporation's freezer, about 2 weeks after the Firefox 2 launch party:



Aah, the good ol' days.

There is a Halo around the Sun

Interesting - rarely see this type of effect with the sun, especially at this time of the year. Let's see what the National Weather Service has to say about it:

Area forecast discussion
National Weather Service San Francisco Bay area California
1010 am PDT Monday may 31 2010 ... day...

Taking a glance at the 12z GFS...it looks to be pulling back somewhat
on the possibility of rain in the North Bay at the end of the week.
However...the GFS is bringing lots of tpw into the district...almost
1.75 inches by Friday. This is supported by the AMSU imagery which
has a plume of well over 1 inch tpw aimed at northern and central
California. So the forecast for the end of the week will need to be
monitored closely.

1.75 inches of TPW? Jesus. I've never seen such a moist atmosphere this late in the season. (TPW: Total Precipitable Water, the theoretical maximum that could rain down. Actual rainfall amounts are usually well less than the TPW number, and for this time of year, it's usually less than half an inch.) Our weather has been very much oddball this season.

Shifting gears here, I have a story to tell. It involves a coworker and comrade in arms in the tech world. Here he is posing for a mug shot:

The story will be posted once it weeds its way through the legal system...

The Hellmouth: An Introduction

All of us who live in the Valley are tied to the fortunes of the companies and industries located here. Our prosperity, our lifestyle, and our perspectives are all uniquely Californian - what we have here in the Valley has not yet been successfully replicated elsewhere (though many have tried with varying success). As for me?

I work for a Silicon Valley company, founded in 1995, during the early dot com boom. I do various odds and ends in the computer arena, as well as an outside information technology consultancy. I've been working in technology, for various outfits (a partial list includes Mozilla Corporation, Intel, Ultratech Stepper, Globe Wireless, Solestruck.com, etc etc) and I feel I have a unique perspective to offer. Whether or not my perspective is unique is subjective - I live in my own head (as does everybody), and having been told a number of times that I can be a pompous buffoon, I am of course careful about what I do, what I say, and how I look. Vanity is the ultimate form of enlightenment.

Recreation-wise, I spend a lot of time and money in the automotive arena. We're a fairly die hard car culture out here, mostly because the VTA tends to be fairly useless. I'd love to have a world class mass transit system out here, but like the rest of America, our infrastructure has been subject to criminal neglect by the powers that be. As a result, our roads are poor and riddled with potholes; our state water situation is deteriorating; our electrical power grid is unstable. That said, Sunnyvale has managed to keep things civilized. Our roads, while not perfect, are not nearly as bad as they are in San Jose. We have an extremely well run public safety department, and the city has a massive public works project involving rebuilding the downtown area as a collection of residential high rises, and office buildings with retail space on the street level. This provides economic stimulus to our area and keeps people employed.

I have digressed somewhat, but to return to what I was saying, we have a vibrant car culture in the valley, and I am involved in the European car groups and clubs. I personally have a car that costs 69 cents per mile to operate (I have tracked all my expenses thus far), and I put on about 25,000 miles per year running from one end of the Bay to the other. If I was smart, I'd have a Camry - but alas, I have to have a 4.4 liter V8 pushing 400 horsepower to haul myself to Safeway at Homestead and Hollenbeck, and to haul me to the office near Mathilda and California. For you environmentalists out there, yes, I am part of the problem, if not the problem.

More to come...