I made really good progress on the furnishing of the apartment over the weekend. I have somewhere to sleep, somewhere to put my socks and t-shirts, somewhere to shelve some(!) of my books, etcetera. There’s a TV, and WiFi, and a bottle of wine in the fridge. Today I started transferring my clothes from the…
Read More Counting down….Tomorrow is the first anniversary of 9/11 that I won’t be able to visit the memorial at Sun (see picture) to my friend and colleague, Phil Rosenzweig. I hadn’t thought much about the fifth anniversary until I read this powerful essay by Martin Amis in today’s Observer. And that put me in the mood to…
Read More Remembering 9/11So Michael Schumacher has announced his retirement at the end of the season. During today’s Italian Grand Prix, the commentators seemed to spend more time speculating about this than they did actually describing the race…. I’ve never been to Monza, but some day…. When I think of Formula One, the first image that comes to…
Read More The end of an eraScott Adams captures the zeitgeist: All non-fiction best-selling opinion books are nothing more than your own opinions fed back to you with seasoning. Ann Coulter sells to conservatives who agree with her. Al Franken sells to liberals who agree with him. And they do it brilliantly, in my opinion. And what happens if you violate…
Read More Tell me what I already believe… and make it funnyIn a piece entitled The Inanity of Dinesh D’Souza, Ed Brayton takes on the erstwhile right-wing wunderkind. Apparently D’Souza is now arguing that the real source of anti-western jihadism is not oil, or Saudi politics, or Iraq, or Palestinians: it’s all about the provocative nature of the Western liberal life-style. Brayton skewers this argument up…
Read More The clash of culturesI’m coming up on the end of my fourth week at Amazon, and I’ve been in Seattle 30 days. So… how are things going? On the work front, I’m enjoying myself immensely. The Amazon environment is dynamic and fast moving, which inevitably means confusing and surprising. One very useful thing is that everybody’s badge photo…
Read More Progress report (fairly mundane stuff)We took the Seattle Locks Cruise this morning, starting from the southern end of Lake Union and finishing up at Seattle’s Pier 56. There are a bunch of photographs here in my gallery. Yes, I did snap the “Sleepless In Seattle” floating house, but I think the rest of the pictures more than make up…
Read More Seattle Locks CruiseFor the last year and a half I’ve relied on my Treo 650 for mobile phone service, web browsing, corporate and personal email, ad hoc photography, and the occasional game. It’s served me well in the US, India, and Europe; I’ve even used it to blog. But it looks as if I’m going to be…
Read More Time to switch?Today I discovered one of the most beautiful places in Seattle: the Japanese Garden in the Arboretum. It’s “a 3 1/2 acre formal garden designed and constructed under the supervision of world-renowned Japanese garden designer Juki Iida in 1960.” Only one thing went wrong: I left my camera back at my office, so no pictures.…
Read More Seattle Japanese Garden