what campaign for berkeley?

Where are all the lovely students' faces?

I'm not sure if I like this invisible wall--the January version--better than the covered trashbag version we had last month. Oh well, I'm sure the Operational Excellence folks have something even better lined up this term...

from conference halls to the malibu beach

The day started watching the sun rise from the LA Convention Center before presentations started...

And finally able to look up toward the sky again after presentations finished.

And then...the beach.

Bubba and Rosie in the back of the car. Bubba likes eating seaweed and Rosie can take Bubba in a wrestling match any day. Fun evening with Jen & family!

a few hours at mishka's

So....my resolution to blog every day until the end of the year through december didn't really last that long, wasn't quite up to @elemveee's incredible one-photo-a-day stamina that's been an inspiration these past few months. Perhaps things will 'resolve' themselves when the new year comes.

But it's a little early for that kind of talk right now. On the flip side, I've been tempted to continue my brief little foray into the world of Yelp with some reviews of familiar places over the past few weeks, and maybe that, too, will come. But it's hard when you're sitting in places that are so layered with memories, to see them as objectively (or, at least, as objects) as you do when you're somewhere less familiar.

Which brings us to today, Christmas Eve, at Mishka's Café in Davis, along with the realization that the charger for this computer may be sitting 90 miles away in Berkeley...let's see if we have enough battery to finish this post after things of more consequence...

2:40pm. Now, a few hours later, after having sent off a job application and while digging in for another, I feel like I'm finally settling into this place. Some big band and decidedly old music on an appropriately low-res sound system underlines all the conversation and activity behind the bar. And there is conversation, and there is activity: even though classes have ended and families are gathering for the holiday, there is a group of students with books up on stands, vigorously debating this and that enzyme group. Two or three computer users (geeks) like me sit facing the wall, plugged in and logged on, comfortable until the next bathroom break. I have my back to the wall, facing the bar and numerous other tables that populate the front, middle, and more internal spaces that are marked out by the patterns of tables and what looks to be a giant cream separator in the middle of the room. The cappuccinos have been nice (I'm on my second) and I can't complain about the prices, having come from Berkeley and San Francisco, where it seems like they're even trying to make money on the cream cheese that they sell with the bagels...

as the landing gear retract for flight...

Sitting in SOMA's Epicenter cafe and for whatever reason was moved to write my 2nd review on Yelp. I thought about cut-and-pasting it here, but what would be the point of that? Can a Yelp review capture the sultry, moody, evolving ebb and flow of a moment in a cafe? Should it be rated by the life and voices and motions and postures and chewing sounds and laughter of the people who sit, mill, stand, work, talk in a given window of time? While the air recycles at 30,000 feet?

Can a blog post?



Maybe, and maybe not.

bob & bill's big bike adventure

Truthfully, I didn't know where to post this, since it's both a Brushhead Bob post and a Nomadologistic post. So here it is, on both.

Anyhow, Bob and USB Bill came along for the ride from Berkeley to Livermore for Thanksgiving day yesterday, helping to make sure that human companion burned off enough calories to sustain the feast in the evening. Much of their journey was chronicled in photos, all the way from the hills of Berkeley and Tilden Park, to the backroads of Orinda and Walnut Creek, to the East Bay hills south of Mt. Diablo, to the exhausted victory nap on the driveway of mom and dad's house.

Click on the map below to go to the album of photos. Enjoy!

p.s. Yes, Bob's doing OK.

ahh, rain.

Sitting up in the perch at Caffe Med for a few hours this morning, trying to get a handle on job applications and wanting to be outside playing in the puddles, or listening to the sound of the wet tires on pavement...

halloween hyperreal

I just offered this up on Twitter, because, well, it's true, of course:

Standing in line at a cafe on a bright autumn day, my eye scans the scene and is immediately drawn to...a lit computer screen. #hyperreal.

On this Halloween afternoon at Strada, where the Jolly Green Giant walked by with a nonchalant air as I was locking up my bike, when you're given permission to be a side of yourself who is actually someone else, I'm tempted back to the ideas of Umberto Eco, Jean Baudrillard, and myriad others who probably have thought such things but whose ideas weren't published in the 'right' form, the idea of the hyperreal, "absolute unreality as real presence".

But I'm not feeling it in the occasional Halloween costume that saunters by, as much as I am in the ubiquitous medium that populates cafe tables, desks at home, offices, and indeed people's pockets: screens. Screens, the rectangular, shimmering surfaces into which we peer, to which I've paid my homage to before on this very blog (saying the same thing this time? Perhaps...), the 'windows' that Anne Friedberg has done much to describe in her recent book, too.

I'm not sure if there's a profound statement to be made about this today, just a noticing, a marking, of how easily, how naturally, my eye is drawn to them, as are the eyes of others, to those spaces where reality seems somehow so much more real, or is it enabling, than the plain old blue sky and yellowing leaves on these patio trees. Is it strange that this day of costumes should be an occasion for seeing screens, as opposed to looking directly at what lies within them?