The Perfect Store (M. Cohen)

The Internet is built on the resilience of four big players: Yahoo!, Amazon, Google, and eBay. I had the good luck and fortune to work for Yahoo! for two years and got in touch with the inner working of the Internet in a very exciting way. But if I had to say what company exemplifies the power of the Internet more than any other one, it would be eBay. Networks accelerate transactions. Continue reading

Mimosa

What a beautiful day! It was sunny, and it was warm for a winter day. Spectrum was a huge ride, and everyone that owned a bike seemed to be on Foothill Expressway. Well, except for me, who was stuck in a car going to the gym and then to pack for my upcoming move. The acacias are in full bloom. What a wonderful sight, what a marvelous smell!

Broken Shifter

Not too long ago, the left shifting cable broke. Now, they always break at the top, in the shifter, just to make your life more miserable. You have to get rid of the barrel that hold the cable in place, and unstick it from wherever it decided to go. The left one was fun. I didn’t know shit about shifters, and I unscrewed everything that was unscrewable. And all of a sudden a loud POP, and the front cap of the shifter was gone. Continue reading

Cycling - Overview

Everybody that knows me more than just casually knows that I am an avid bicyclist. Not a fast one, maybe, but a commited one, someone who waits all week for that Saturday ride, someone who commutes to work on his bike, someone who won’t even fix his car so that he’s got no excuse not to ride. Seemed quite logical to have a section of this site devoted to biking. Here you’ll find a little of everything, a bit out of sequence, but with the very best intentions. Continue reading

First Sunny Day of the Year

Saturday. Weird mood, with a strange fog hanging over the Valley. I had met the founder of one of the most successful startups in town yesterday. Athletic triathlete, a 17 on OLH. (If you don’t know what that means, it’s 17 minutes up Old La Honda). He inspired me to get up and get riding. First a ride to the coffee shop on Hollenbeck and Homestead. There I saw the Spectrum group departure location for the first time. Continue reading

Dark Is the Winter

Haven’t been able to ride much lately. It has been raining a lot, and when it wasn’t raining, I was working. Sunday I ventured a ride. Not much of it, just up and down Foothill Expressway, dreaming of the spring and my next climb of OLH. Maybe this year I can break the 20 minutes.

2003

Imported Photo Album Continue reading

Sunny Weekend

Yes, they do exist! The sunny winter weekends! This one was particularly nice, albeit freezing cold. I skipped the Saturday ride (too lazy) but got to see the huge bunch of Spectrum riders on my way back from the gym. And today, Sunday, I dismissed the tiredness of the guy that has been working (on Saturday) until 4 AM in favor of a short ride up and down Foothill. It was fun. Continue reading

Long Time No See

Wow! It’s been a really long time since I last went on a ride! It’s California winter, right now. In case you haven’t read “Guns, Germs and Steel”, this means it’s raining incessantly, and has been doing so since I started my new job, beginning of december. New gym has new classes, and if I am lucky, I’ll be able to do some of the spinning there. They are very proud of their instructors and equipment, and I fear I have been scared by last year’s fall too badly to go in the rain again. Continue reading

The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (P. Bronson)

There you have it! What a wonderful, funny book! Po Bronson is an amazing author. His prose reads very smoothly, he strikes the right balance between patronizing and geeky (which may be just because I am in the same balance point) and he is amazingly witty. The First $20 Million is the story of a group of geeks that create their own startup doing … Java. Well, in the book it’s something entirely different, it’s a cross-platform scripting language that compiles once and runs everywhere. Continue reading