Golden Gate, Yosemite and birthdays
October 1, 2006
A lot of things have been happening recently, so I guess I should write an update. Sorry for my french readers, this is going to be another post in english. I feel increasingly uncomfortable writing in french when immersed in an english speaking world.
Last you heard of me, I’d just started work at Google. Before that, I went up to San Francisco with Daniel. Our objective: Walk the Golden Gate bridge. It actually went slightly wrong: we went on Labor Day, and San Francisco was home to an equal rights march on that day. The so-called day laborers do not have the privilege of getting this day off, and are generally treated as little more than indentured slaves. The practical impact for Daniel and me, two tourists oblivious to the backstory, was that busses weren’t running in half of the city. Never mind, that gave us all more reason to walk down along the shore, past the marinas and beaches towards the Golden Gate.
After a week of work and training, I went with Saul, Damian and Damian (a different one) for a weekend in Yosemite, a nature reserve east of San Francisco, near the border with Nevada. We drove through the park on Tioga Pass road, stopping frequently for the photo opportunities, and to stare off into the wilderness. You hear a lot about the US not being very green, but this park is the size of a french department, and it’s heavily protected.
After a few hikes, lots of joking about how we’re going to get eaten by bears, and some more driving, we ended up at Mammoth Lakes, on the other side of Yosemite, for a night at the hotel. I got to watch Fox News, which was disturbing, and some South Park, which was disturbing in another way: the number of commercials on US television is frightening. It seems the show only goes on for about five minutes before it cuts to a minute or two of commercials. Now that I’ve seen this, I understand why DVRs with the ability to fast-forward through commercials are so popular. It’s because they cram your mind full of the crap.
The next day, before heading back to Yosemite, we stopped off at the Mammoth ski resort. During the summer it’s obviously not very active, but still enjoys a relative occupation by kamikaze mountain bikers. The crazier ones take the gondolas up to the top of the nearby peak, and then proceed to suicidally bike down the side of the mountain. Complete loonies, the lot of them. We were much more conservative, and just rode up to the summit for the view, and then came back down. Good thing that we didn’t stay up there, despite the beautiful weather, it gets cold when you’re 8000 feet up.
We then proceeded to drive to another beautiful place around here, Mono lake. It’s a salt water lake with fantastic calcite rock formations. Hundreds of years ago, there were underwater springs at those places, and that built mineral columns that are now above the water level. It was worrying to see that the water level has receded a lot since those days, due to Los Angeles diverting a lot of the streams that fuelled this lake for drinking water in the city. A Sierra Club initiative is now controlling use of the water upstream, and implementing a resolution to bring the lake back to its level of 1969. When it reaches that level, it’ll engulf all the dry ground for 20 meters around it, and it will presumably be even more beautiful than it is now.
You might also know that it was my birthday a couple of weeks ago. To all those that sent me birthday cards: thank you! It’s all the more touching to receive these when you’re halfway across the world and somewhat lost.
On the day of my B-day, there weren’t many people around in the open source team. My boss, Greg, was on the other side of the world spreading the Word of open source, and in general many others were working out of office. So, I went for a symbolic drink at an irish pub in Mountain View with Saul and Damian. And it was good fun, but it somehow lacked sufficient quantities of alcohol. This is my 21st, which is a very big deal in the US (it’s the legal drinking age). So I feel that, to completely sample the American experience, something more devastating was needed.
Yesterday, Greg was back from his travels, so I put out the idea of the open source group going out for a drink or three. Sadly, many were busy, so it ended up being me, Saul and Greg. It was an excellent evening as far as I’m concerned. Drank some home-brewed beer at the Tied House, and some cocktails at another place whose name I can’t remember. During this evening, I also discovered that Greg shares a lot of my tastes in music. We poured some money into the jukebox, and the songs Greg put in the queue all really appealed to me. So, my boss is an uber-geek, has had a hand in a lot of technologies I now use daily, has great taste in music, and overall is just this insanely great (or greatly insane? Both are fine with me) guy. I’m spoilt.
Anyhow, this belated birthday celebration rocked. And I now really feel at one with this quote I came across today:
<Uki> i don't feel much different, this whole being 21 thing
<Aphelion> in that case, you did it wrong. go back and try again, this time with more vodka.
Peace, out.