Wow it's been a while...

...since I last updated this thing. Well, stay tuned, because tomorrow I start a 3 month vacation from work after about 9.5 years! (over 6x the average silicon valley tenure for most people in technology companies!)

But first - some interesting things I did this weekend. Went to the Golden Gate Lotus Club Autocross on Saturday to get a feel for the limits of the new car. Met up with one of my coworkers, Greg, his buddy Vic (driving a Mazda Rx7) & a friend of his, Caroline (driving her Audi TT). It was interesting comparing the Exige to the mid-engined Formula Russell cars - they rotate very well under trailing throttle application.

Sunday I went to see the University of California Botanical Gardens in Berkeley with Sarah and her friend Sharon. Was a good opportunity to take some pictures of different things...
The blue flowers are from some plant that sounds like "Liza Minelli", the Corpse bloom on the left was close to 5'5" and was supposed to reach full bloom the week after we were there... (supposedly along with the aroma of rotting flesh...), bamboo forest (small version of what we saw in Japan), and one of 40 different varieties of Lavender...

But seriously...

OK - now that I think I've gotten that onslaught game out of my system, I might suggest reading two rather thought provoking articles:

1) Fast Company did a really enlightening article on the bottled water industry... Americans spent $15B on bottled water last year! Makes me want to just fill my Nalgene and use that all the time now.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-message-in-a-bottle.html


2) I had not heard of Hans Rosling before. But I have heard of TED - the annual conference on Technology, Entertainment and Design - where there are usually some really smart people pitching some really great ideas. This talk by Hans on "New Insights on Poverty and Life around the World" was no exception - it converted boring statistics like population, GDP, per-capita income, etc into some really interesting graphical representations - and really got his points across. I believe Google has since bought the software.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/140

Cheers,
-Darryl