Yesterday afternoon I was sitting outside of a coffee shop and doing some odd jobs on my laptop when I got a random invitation to hit the beach in Santa Cruz. (That sentence alone should convince you that I’m slowly becoming a Californian.) We didn’t make it there until 6pm, and it was cloudy to boot, so the pictures are sort of dark, but it was still warm and the beachfront was busy.
More than ever these days, I find myself in the company of people who are smarter and/or wiser than me by orders of magnitude. One thing that I like to do with such people is trade book lists with them, since I’ve found that they often recommend good books that I’ve never heard of before.
To facilitate this process, I’ve made this list of books that I’ve read that I think other people will enjoy. At the bottom is a list of things that are on my to-read list. If you have a recommendation, PLEASE email me or post a comment here.
Since I moved to California, I’ve met many people who have left their homes and their families to come to Silicon Valley. These experiences and other developments in my personal life have had me thinking a lot lately about how people adjust to changes that isolate them from emotional support structures. This is why I found it somewhat appropriate that the independence/isolation tradeoff inadvertantly became the theme of the day today, as I headed to San Francisco to see a few films that were playing at the Kabuki theatre as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
After many weeks of halfheartedly trying to make it to the Black Mountain Trail in Rancho San Antonio Park, I finally did it. 10 miles of biking and 9 miles of hiking later, I’m sitting here on my bed tweaking all of the cool pictures I took during the climb.
All of you gmail users have probably tried out the integrated gtalk thingie by now. I’m still ambivalent towards it, except for one particular aspect which I find wicked cool. When you type in an emoticon, it gradually transforms the text into a stylized picture. It’s hard to explain, so get a gmail account and try it for yourself.
Not too long ago I was lamenting the lack of emoticons that have these nifty transformations. :S is one, for example. However, last night I discovered something that more than makes up for all of the negative feelings I might have towards the integrated GTalk:
It has support for that pinnacle of all emoticons, the \m/ METAL HORNS \m/
My discovery of this was completely accidental: I was talking about Ozzfest or something, and one thing led to another. After I typed it in, the friend that I was chatting to and I just sort of sat there in stunned, awed silence. It was a beautiful moment.
So much for restricting this blog to discussions of the artistic and the intellectual…
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