I found a couple of interesting videos shot by a mountain biker a couple of years ago, one at the summit of Montara Mountain and one on the descent via mountain bike into Montara. Kind of interesting if you haven’t been to the top before. Enjoy.

If you purchased $1000 of Bank of America stock one year ago, it would now be worth $204.

With Citigroup, you would have $147 left of the original $1,000.

With General Motors, you would have $0 left of your investment.

But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of BEER one year ago, consumed all the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling price, you would have $80.52 and a bad hangover.

Based on the above, current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

It’s called the 401-Keg Plan.

OK – it’s not that funny, but a little gallows humor can’t really hurt, right?

State as of June 1, 2009


For those of you who do not live on the San Mateo Coastside, you may not be tracking the $300M project that has been underway for a few years now to dig two tunnels through San Pedro Mountain between Montara and Pacifica by passing the always treacherous Devil’s Slide portion of Highway 1. This project was contemplated for decades with many options presented, finally, in 1995 the residents of San Mateo voted on Measure T giving the project a kick start. Active construction got under way in fall of 2007 and should be completed by 2011.

Thus far, two, 1,000 foot bridges and the tunnel maintenance facility have been completed and as you can see from the image above (courtesy of Caltrans) the tunneling is now at the halfway point. Rather than using one of the large tunnel boring machines, the team opted for the New Austrian tunneling method which consists of removing material (scraping, digging, and blasting as conditions dictate) and then immediately erecting a set of steel arches which are covered in concrete so that only the active digging area is the only spot unsupported at any given time.

I’ve posted some photos of the project below, enjoy!


Tunnel Entrances at the south side of San Pedro Mountain

A view of the tunnel interior

Another view of the tunnel interior

A view out of the tunnel looking south toward Montara

Array of equipment being used close to the working face

Continuous digging machine, the head breaks up the rock at the working face and arms collect the scree onto a conveyor belt which loads into a truck to send to the fill pit

Working on the arch, drainage, and concrete cover used in the New Austrian tunnel method

Digging with an excavator at the working face

I’m going to do something I haven’t done in a long, long time. Recommend a Microsoft product: Bing.com search engine. It’s actually good, the results are reasonable and I love the added information it brings to me when searching rather than having extra clicks to dig for it. Now, is it a Google killer? Hardly. But it is the first viable alternative to Google the industry has seen in some time.

I recommend you give it a whirl (don’t forget to tweak the search options in the top-left corner for optimal results…) Try bing.com.

While we’re at it, I also quite like Wolfram Alpha, not a search engine, more of a science and reference engine – it’s also quite good at what it does (hype from a few weeks ago notwithstanding.)

For the third year in a row, my daughter and I attended the Maker Faire in San Mateo this weekend. While we both managed to have a good time, the crowd is now overwhelming, or perhaps the venue is simply way too small. The crowd was so thick at times, I had difficulty getting the two of us through from point A to point B.

As an example, we were 15 minutes early for the lifesize mousetrap and couldn’t get close enough to sneak a peek – highly disappointing to the munchkin who wanted to see the safe drop on the mouse’s head. We also couldn’t see the mock naval battles, the powertool drag races, or robot fighting on account of the crowd of large, relatively rude, people.

However, fun was had with Cyclecide’s bike merry-go-round, Emiko-O’s make your own jewelry, some great alternative instruments made out of old pianos, the Lego jeep, and my daughter loved the mobile muffins. So, we’ll try again next year, but here’s to hoping they get a better, bigger venue where the crowd can be handled a bit more efficiently.