I Love the Bay Area

Dear Friends, I’ve been informed that my radio piece on a new startup that is bringing wireless Internet to BART will be on Morning Edition tomorrow (July 7). It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams). New York – 5 am to 9 am Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org Washington, DC – 5 am to 10 am Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org Los Angeles – 2 am to 9…

While it may not be as close and convenient and convivial as The Trappist — William Brand points to the recent opening of La Trappe, a new Belgian bar and restaurant in North Beach, across the Bay. This is definitely going to be my pre-Bimbo’s dining spot. 🙂

No offense to Steve Lohr, but I’m not really sure what the point of his piece in today’s Times “Silicon Valley Shaped by Technology and Traffic” was. As far as I can tell, the main message is “geography matters.” Is this news to anyone, in late 2007? Really? Alan Wiig had a much more interesting comment on it than I ever would: Yeah, there is at a book about this from at least ten years ago. I dislike the analogy…

How come no one told me that the prime minister of Estonia, Andrus Ansip, was in San Jose last week? Anyway, he was there to open up a new “tech embassy” downtown. (I’m assuming that this is the first of its kind anywhere in the world.) SJBJ: “Silicon Valley changed the world, Andrus Ansip told a small gathering of reporters and city hall officials Friday afternoon. “All of our companies would like to cooperate more with the companies in Silicon…

This time from Chrome Bags:

I have a small but (hopefully) growing collection of Bay Bridge iconography, including a poster from Bay Bridge Coffee. On eBay I found some neat stuff, including a stamp that I just bought:

CQ: Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists. The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area. The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd…

I was with Boyk and Michele today in downtown Oakland, and we happened to park in front of a new Belgian beer bar that’s about to open up on 8th St. at Broadway. Dude, Belgian beers! Right here in Oakland! The Trappist: The Trappist is owned and operated by Aaron Porter and Chuck Stilphen. We strive to bring you the finest beer available, served properly at the correct temperature and in the correct glass. Our bottle list features over 120…

Todd Lappin managed to find some really neat snapshots of the Bay Bridge under construction from a local electrician who moonlights as a photog. I’m a union electrician (Local 6 San Francisco). I’m the guy on the job who will climb anything, anywhere, so I usually get really good jobs. A lot of guys are afraid to climb tower cranes and hang off walls, but I have no fears as of yet (except roaches). I started taking pictures at work…

Dude, how is it in that in four (ok, three) years at Berkeley, no one told me about the tradition of streaking through the Main Stacks? Damn, I missed out.