Oh, the delight of a California commute, as seen from a lane other than the “commuter lane”. The Bay Area has the fascinating ability to spawn traffic jams, any time, anywhere, day or night. Pair this with the scariest drivers you can find (who despite the numerous freeways here have yet to learn how to merge into a moving freeway without bringing traffic to a grinding halt, are happy to make cars back up for several miles to get their daily dose of gawking, and just in general are the kings and queens of causing dangerous traffic situations for no good reason), and you’ve got yourself some of the worst traffic ever.
On a more serious side note, I wish there was better public transport to get all these people off the streets — while I realize it’s somewhat of a chicken-egg problem (only well-frequented public transport is good, and only good public transport will be well-frequented) but urban sprawl throws a serious monkey wrench into those plans if driving, including heavy traffic, still only takes half as long a the train, even if you live virtually next to the train stop. Can we redesign the Bay Area real quick, please?
Oh hey! Looks like I’m a permanent resident now! “Welcome to the United States of America”? Well thanks!
Oh, corporate pinboards could be so incredibly boring — if it wasn’t for posts like this.
This farmer was visibly happy to sell carrots to Tara.
Mmmmh, finally an actual Bavarian-Style Hefeweizen! Thank you, Trader Joe’s! Also, funny how they changed the branding on these bottles since last week. It was Trader Joe’s before and now it’s Josephsbräu, both from San Jose. By the way, if the label design looks familiar (Gordon Biersch, anyone?) there’s probably a reason for this 
After my old desktop computer started getting crashy and happily heated up the room by just being on, I started looking for more economical (and ecological) alternatives and went for this mini-board with an AMD processor and no fan (ooo!). It has a dual-core CPU with 1.6GHz, and now sports a whopping 8GB of RAM. Finally, I also got a new power supply, because the years-old 550W thing I had in there was probably about as energy-efficient as your average Chevrolet Suburban.
I can do something on my computer for longer than 20 minutes without it crashing and be nice to my power bill? Win!
Granted, I probably can’t play any serious games with it, but I don’t do that anyway.
A shadow of myself, on a tree in the sunset!
The future has arrived: Video conference with colleagues (and a vendor) this afternoon.
Remember those action movies where the villain shows up on a big video screen and laughs evilly? Yeah, this is kind of like it. In Mountain View, I was visible in superhuman size on a 50-something inch screen. MUAAhahahahaha.
