Lisa Near Stinson Beach 

View from the top of Matt Davis Trail 

Fenders
I loaned my rain bike to a visiting Googler, so I spent Sunday afternoon installing fenders onto my commute bike. It took a couple of hours and a few zip ties and quite a bit of patience, but when done, the bike has fenders that are quiet, which is very nice. I guess I'd always been intimidated before by fenders, but I really should never have been.

Scarlet's Blog

Not a must read blog, but it's well-written, which is something I can't say for every blog on the web.

Backpacking no more

The lonely planet guides have been getting steadily worse over the last few years, and this article explains why. When the owner of the company repudiates the mode of travel the company was founded to serve, it's quite clear that no one there takes the work seriously.

To be honest, I'd never found much use for the lonely planet guides. As a cyclist, their guides focused on towns, rather than the places in between towns, which are by far the more interesting things on a trip.

Piaw & Lisa, Sequioa 2004, Summit Road, Santa Clara County 

Piaw & Lisa, Sequoia 2003 Canada Road, San Mateo County 

Read Moneyball

Moneyball by Michael Lewis is about sabermetrics, the science of using statistics to actually figure out what's important in a baseball player, and then putting together a team based on undervalued skills. It's a great book, but unfortunately, it seems that by writing the book, Lewis has actually hurt the ability of the Oakland As to do what they were doing before: get great results with very little money.

From Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch

The first and easiest friends I made at college were football fans; a studious examination of a newspaper back page during the lunch hour of the first day in a new job usually provokes some kind of response. And yes, I am aware of the downside of this wonderful facility that men have: they become repressed, they fail in their relationships with women, their conversation is trivial and boorish, they find themselves unable to express their emotional needs, they cannot related to their children, and they die lonely and miserable. But you know, what the hell? If you can walk into a school full of eight hundred boys, most of them older, all of them bigger, without feeling intimidated, simply because you have a spare Jimmy Husband in your blazer pocket, then it seems like a trade-off worth making.

The Universe is a d20

The other blog I recommend is Brad De Long's. Of course, I'm a Cal alumni, so the fact that he's a professor at Cal scores plenty of points with me.

What a great interview with Paul Krugman! Paul is the best political columnist today, bar none.

Commuting to work: It turns out that the Mary->Middlefield->Shoreline->Charleston commute is the shortest by far. 8.95 miles, and I'm mostly at 19mph on the long stretches between lights. Avg moving speed was 17mph, and the total commute time is about 30-40 minutes.

Heard Dylan Casey talk at the Western Wheelers club meeting. A fun guy! I got him to autograph a card for Lisa. He wrote on it: "Lisa, will you be my stoker?" The rest of the guys at the club teased me about how Lisa wants a more powerful Captain.... He climbs Old La Honda road in 13 minutes. Lisa & I do it in about 31 minutes. I should time myself one of these days. Maybe I can do it in 25 minutes, but I don't think I can do much better.

Day 3 at Google, first bike commute. It was supposed to be 10 miles, but getting lost and going on exit too far on Stevens Creek Trail put me at 11 miles. Not too bad. Still took 40 minutes or so, though. The nice thing is when we move to the SGI building, that'll shave a couple of miles off my commute.

Day 2 at Google. I ran into Jeff Dean, one of my grad. school cohorts. Turned out that he was on my hiring committee. I told him that I was surprised that he didn't say, "Hey, I know that guy, he dropped out of grad. school!" He said, "That's exactly what I said!"

Wandering around all the buildings, I was impressed by how big the company is. I easily got lost just walking around. I guess this is what happens when you've spent most of your career at startups and other small companies. Google is easily the biggest company I've ever worked at, since my internship at Bellcore 12 years ago.

Performance Bicycle Online has a club sale on Wednesday. 20% off, $75 minimum.

First day at google. Another reason to join google: you get an upgrade to Blogger Pro.

First day at Google. What fun! New jobs are always interesting, even if they're a little confusing.

I start to blog. What an utterly trendy thing to do.