Author: Aaron Weber

Spam is Good

Spam is useful, because it tells me I’m not cut off from the world. It’s like a little ping sent out from the universe. When I check my mail and there’s nothing in the Inbox, I know that my system is still working because there’s a message or two in the junk-mail filter. Thank goodness for that, or I’d feel cut adrift.

Places

If you get into a cab in Silicon Valley and ask to be taken to any hotel in Mountain View, the driver seems pretty likely to ask if you’re involved with Google in some way.

I don’t think I like Palo Alto all that much. I mean, it’s all pretty, but it doesn’t seem real to me. I like San Francisco a lot more. I found a very cute bookshop, where I got a copy of “Thief’s Journal” by Jean Genet, but when I got to the cash register I was surprised to be charged nearly twenty dollars for a used book.

My experience may be tinged by spending nearly an hour today trying to find taxis, and by one taxi getting pretty badly lost, to the point that I had to call the hotel and get directions and write them on a piece of paper; the driver was then unable to read my directions without reading glasses, which he kept slipping on and off as we lurched down Castro Ave. Did I mention that the transmission was slipping?

Silicon Valley, not Silicone Valley

Today I had lunch with an old family friend who has returned from think-tanking in India to live in Palo Alto and get a Ph.D. in energy policy at Stanford. He seems happy. He is the sort to pick a neighborhood based on its school district, because he plans to have children and raise them where he is right now. He is happy.

The various neighborhoods of Silicon Valley have all begun to blur together for me, although I did have a wonderful bowl of noodles at a place on Castro St., and a couple of good beers over at the Tied House Brewery, both in downtown Mountain View. Still, downtown Mountain View doesn’t have the walkability and neighborhood feel that Davis Square does. All the local weeklies have page after page of ads for plastic surgery.

I’m wondering how far I’ll have to commute to find a place like the one I’m in now. SF is great– but it’s an hour at least from anywhere that seems to be hiring. And if I like Somerville so much, why am I looking for work so far away? Perhaps I should spend a little more time developing my Boston-area search next week.

Book recommendation

It has also come to my attention that Running Linux, 5th Edition has gone to press. If you know anyone who could use a good practical guide to Linux, I highly recommend it. Also, I wrote one of the chapters. The new edition is expanded and updated, covering new versions of GNOME, KDE, the kernel, and more.

The food sucks and the portions are too small

I’ve been browsing lists of small technology companies in the SF and Boston areas. Many of these small companies have terrible websites. Each is bad in its own special way. Some have too much markety jargon (“the leading provider of software solutions that enable service providers to accelerate the creation, control and delivery of high-value applications as hosted services?” Nobody’s accelerating anywhere with that kind of turgid copy.) Some sites are from web design companies who can’t design a navigable UI to save their lives– or who have a variety of dead links in their menus.

More informative and more interesting, though, are the sites for industries that time forgot, like Viable, provider of CAD solutions for Jacquard looms. It reminded me that the tech-driven industry has been living in Boston for a long time: Lowell was founded shortly after 1820 for those newfangled mills.