Billionaire Investors start paying attention to peak oil

For the past few months he's been holed up in hard-core research mode—reading books, academic studies, and, yes, blogs. Every morning he rises before dawn at one of his houses in Texas or South Carolina or California (he actually owns a piece of Pebble Beach Resorts) and spends four or five hours reading sites like LifeAftertheOilCrash.net or DieOff.org, obsessively following links and sifting through data. How worried is he? He has some $500 million of his $2.5 billion fortune in cash, more than ever before.

It does seem strange that if you believe an oil-induced crash is coming you wouldn't be invested heavily in oil stocks. Then again, if I was heavily invested in oil stocks, I wouldn't tell Fortune magazine, either, unless I was looking for a quick cash out.

Yajie at Windy Hill Summit

Yajie asked me why I turn on the flash when shooting during the day, and ironically, this photograph provides an excellent example. The sun was shining from the right, which would have created dark shadows along the left side of her face in this picture. The fill flash from the camera lit up the side of her face enough to provide definition (without over-powering it), while also giving us a little bit of fill-light in her eye to liven it up a bit. This technique works well on both people and animals.

Artist's Light

Looking South from Windy Hill OSP, you can see ridge after ridge. The little bit of haze today gave it a dreamy feeling. 

View of the Pacific from Windy Hill OSP

Windy Hill Open Space Preserve is one of several spots along the coast where you can see the Ocean and the Bay at the same time. (The others being Russian Ridge and Black Mountain summit)

It wasn't as clear today as it was yesterday, but it was still beautiful. 

The Beautiful South

I've been listening a lot to Carry on Up the Charts recently. The lyrics are cynical, and not the typical love song pop that you hear, but it's coupled with very listenable, peppy music which sounds really good. They are very much worth a listen for those of you who actually pay attention to the lyrics of a song: the duet, "A little time", is worth the price of the entire album.

Strangely enough, when searching for information about the band, the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy provided the best data.

View from Kings Mountain Road

I neglected to shoot a picture of this last week. The haze is probably smog from the windless days we've had recently. The Bay Area has great air quality only because the ocean wind usually blows it inland to Fresno and Sacramento valleys. With an off-shore flow the last couple of days that hasn't been happening. 

Christian Overtones in Narnia

When in the first volume he sacrifices himself in order to redeem Edmund, and in the last leads the talking animals to a beautiful afterworld, it's so easy to see Lewis ringing his Christian themes that you marvel at how you utterly missed them as a child. But miss them you most likely did, and for good reason.

Meghan O'Rourke might have missed them as a child, but I absolutely did not, steeped as I was in a mission school, The Anglo Chinese School, with its weekly preachings and daily devotionals. In fact, even as a child, the Christian allegories were so distracting that I found myself much preferring the Chronicles of Prydain by Llyold Alexander, with its Celtic myths and its sad sad stories of growing up, facing your responsibilities, and being true to yourself. The place in the books where Taran gives up magical wisdom, and later where he has to give up his true love strike a cord in me, even years later as an adult, while Narnia's Christian allegories are a pale shadow of the bible itself, which has far more interesting stories.

View of the beach from Highway 1 along the San Gregorio Coast

It was so unusually clear today. The views were gorgeous, and well worth the effort. Every so often we get these off-shore flows that sweep all traces of fog away from the coast, and when that happens, you need to take advantage of it! 

Tanya makes it to the coast.

Today, Tanya made it to the coast and back on a bicycle for the first time (and couldn't have picked a better day to do it!). Congratulations, Tanya! 

Free WiFi coming in Sunnyvale!

It's about time! Mountain View is getting it from Google, but Sunnyvale should definitely be right up there in terms of tech savvy Silicon Valley residents as well. The ads are a small price to pay for free access everywhere. I'm excited.

Cultural Controversy in "Memoirs of a Geisha"

Looks like the Japanese are mad that Chinese women play the lead characters (who are supposed to be Japanese) in the movie, and the Chinese are mad because the lead Chinese actress (Zhang Ziyi) is depicted as having sex with a Japanese man. It sounds funny to me too.

Of course, it does remind me that me and a few of my Chinese colleagues have been mistaken for each other by our non-Chinese colleagues/friends. I try not to be offended on the occasions when it happens (and some of the ones who make the mistakes do eventually become genuinely good friends), but it's still a little annoying.

In any case, when I was in Berkeley in the late 80s/early 90s more than one Japanese tourist came up to me and tried to speak Japanese to me. It was those encounters (as well as my general enjoyment of Japanese cartoons) that led me to eventually take Japanese classes and then get good enough at Japanese to get into lots of trouble.

British Walking Series: Coast to Coast Path

I bought this after perusing the original Wainwright book. It's fairly recent (2004), has color photos that made Lisa want to do the trip, and has lodging information, which was missing from Wainwright's book (and which wouldn't have been useful either, since his was written in 1974). The first 50 pages of this book pay for the cost of the book just by itself. There's a short biography of Alfred Wainright, which seems to prove Malcolm Gladwell's point that it takes an extremely unhappy person to do great works. There's multiple pre-laid-out itineraries set out by lodging type, pace, and recommendations for places where we might want to stay for more than a day.

While the original Wainwright book is worth getting because it's such an awesome book, this one is worth only getting if you're actually planning to do the trip soon. However, I suspect that this is the one that will prove more useful on the trail itself.

View from the top of the PG&E trail

It was such a clear day today that we easily saw all the way to San Francisco. 

First rain cape ride...

It's been raining a little bit recently, but I've been lucky to only see drizzle, so what I've been doing is keeping fenders on the bike and just riding in the rain (not a bad way to go, if you ask me). But today's rain started off a little harder than normal, and the forecast was for really bad weather. Nevertheless, by the time I got to work it had stopped.

With a raincape and fenders, rain riding is not bad at all, as long as there isn't a headwind. I'll happily ride in the rain, and I'll happily rind in windy conditions, but the combination sucks and is one of the few things that will make me drive to work voluntarily. Having a shower at work, of course, is essential, but I've found in the past also that it's actually warmer in winter when it rains than when it's sunny.

Richard Thompson Live

John Bayley talked me into buying Richard Thompson's latest album Front Parlor Balads, which I enjoyed quite a bit, so when I saw that he was playing in Saratoga I bought a ticket. (Lisa couldn't make it, and everyone else I spoke to said, "Richard Who?")

The concert was amazing, and he's an great performer (he did the entire thing with an acoustic guitar). He's playing again tomorrow, so if you've got tomorrow night free, there are still tickets available. I will definitely see him again, and the next time, I'll buy 2 tickets and drag a friend along.

The Coast to Coast Walk

Lisa & I are doing the coast to coast walk next year, and as part of my research I got a copy of the original book by Alfred Wainwright. And what a gorgeous book it is! You should own a copy even if you have no intention of doing the walk --- it is that pretty. The book is entirely hand-written, and the illustrations are done in ink by Wainwright himself. Wainwright hand-wraps and hand-justifies the entire book, and does it without the use of hyphens! (The book was written in the 1970s, before cheap wordprocessors but there were definitely electric typewriters that were very popular by then)

The text itself is written in an old-school style, assuming that the reader has already decided to do the route and does not need to be led by the hand or persuaded that this is a good idea.

Highly recommended.

Well, it's not too late to abandon the coast to coast idea and stay on in Patterdale. There is nothing ahead as good, admittedly --- the big fault of doing this walk in a west to east direction is that the best come first. Anyway, please yourself. Stay if you want to and I'll carry on alone, and no hard feelings. You'll think of something to tell the folks at home... Mind, you might find yourself thinking in the next few days about Shap and the limestone plateau beyond, and wondering what Swaledale is really like and whether the North York Moors are as attractive as people say. Yoou could have regrets. And (let's be clear about this) you can't expect to get your money back for the book if you prefer not to continue the walk... Coming with me? Good. I thought you would.

Fortune on Andrew Grove as a manager

But Kinnie and Carter had trained at the Grove school of management—Grove's MO as a leader has always been to depend on "helpful Cassandras" to make sure that he doesn't win an argument he ought to lose. The two were blunt. "Andy, you can't do this," Carter said. Abandoning CISC for RISC, they argued, would truncate one of the most profitable franchises in business history for ... what? Leveling the playing field for Intel's competition? When the discussion ended, Kinnie and Carter had achieved a feat of monumental difficulty. They'd won an argument with Andy Grove.

The smartest managers instinctively understand that to manage effectively they need to surround themselves not with "yes-men", but with people willing to question and honestly state the truth. People who habitually do so, however, are not people who are comfortable to be around, and it takes truly great men who can set aside their egoes and truly listen and value those people.

My favorite view of Mountain View.

 

Black Mountain Summit

Left to Right: Shyam, Me, Yajie. 

Black Mountain

At last, a clear view all the way to the Ocean from the top of Black Mountain!