Mountaintop experience with Rheingold

On Monday afternoon we visited Howard Rheingold at his Marin County home, a cottage nestled into a lush California garden. On good days, which I suppose most are (Sunday was), his "office" is a wooden chair under a plum tree. His sunflowers are 10-12 feet tall. That would have been special enough, but there's more.

He drove us up to Mt. Tamalpais State Park where we hiked among redwoods, sometimes straight up it seemed, to a gorgeous peak with spectacular view of the Bay.

A few more pics are posted on Paul's flickr page. (Clearly I need a flickr account myself!)

From there we headed to Half Moon Bay, where Paul is among the Brainstorm Techies here at the luxurious Ritz-Carlton. He's twittering up a storm. At this moment he's going crazy over Neil Young.

We'll be heading home tomorrow. Only regret on this great trip is not having packed enough sweaters. But if you're one of GreeneSpace's Chapel Hill readers, I realize you might find it hard to sympathize.

Colorful San Francisco

David Silver, his wife Sarah Washburn, and their friends James Jacobs and ShinJohng Yeo spent the day yesterday showing us their San Francisco: the Mission, Castro, Richmond, etc.

Here's a portion of the fabulous murals on the Women's Building.







One of many murals lining both sides of Clarion Alley.












Schubert's Bakery, on Clement St. Viennese opera cakes and other European delights served up by friendly Asians. We shared a slice of Swedish Princess cake. For more photos of this and our later Vietnamese dinner at La Vie, see David's flickr.

Bay Area bits & bytes

View from Grizzly Peak, Berkeley, near the home of our hosts, Lee Douglas and Betsy Strode.







Alma Kunanbaeva of the Silk Road House Cultural & Educational Center, Berkeley. Alma and her husband, Izaly Zemtsovsky, are friends of our friends David and Mary Alice Lowenthal, but we found out that we have another friend in common: Kazakhstan scholar Paula Michaels.







A stopped dog tells no time: amusement on the way to breakfast on Sutter St., San Francisco.







Plastic dinosaur (made in China), part of "Half-Life of a Dream," exhibit of contemporary Chinese art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.









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Keith Haring sculpture, near SF MOMA. Earlier, we saw his tryptich at the AIDS Chapel in Grace Cathedral.

Internet Archive visit

Safe inside the Presidio, around the corner from the barracks of the legendary U.S. 30th Infantry Regiment (now being transformed into the Walt Disney Family Museum), is the headquarters of the Internet Archive, where we were greeted warmly by Brewster Kahle. We arrived just in time yesterday for the Friday lunch, a weekly event where everybody gathers around delicious food and talks about what they've been doing for the past week. A half-dozen of the folks were interns from Creative Commons. Paul was in his element; me, happy to be there.

San Bruno to Berkeley

YouTube's headquarters is in San Bruno in a beautiful green building designed originally for Gap, Inc. by William McDonough. We got there just in time for lunch with Obie Greenberg, a YouTuber whom Paul had met recently on the UNC campus. A healthy buffet lunch is free for employees (and their guests). There's obvious payback to YouTube from this model, keeping workers working while munching their Mediterranean salads and their watermelon sorbet. (I understand this is the Google model as well.) But it looks like it does the trick! Seems like a fun place to work.



Up in Berkeley, it was a great day to walk around the University of California Botanical Garden. Just our luck to be there the day of a rare blooming of the Corpse Flower (Titan Arum; amorphophallus titanum). Said to have a terrible smell at times, we couldn't smell it (at least I couldn't), but we could admire it's awesome beauty. (The Italian arum in our yard is a puny relative.)

Out west

On vacation. What a lark, what a plunge! Arrived in San Francisco yesterday, spent some time in OCLC's Research Libraries Group office in San Mateo, where I got to hear my lovely and talented spouse talk informally for about an hour and a half about ibiblio and how it started and what makes it work.

Had a delightful dinner with Dan Gillmor and Noriko Takiguchi at Roti, a great Indian restaurant in the upscale town of Burlingame.

Then for the night at the Inn at Oyster Point. Today, on to Berkeley.

The view from Oyster Point toward Gertrude Stein's Oakland.