Hey, what do you know….the little Canon Digital Elph camera we brought along has a movie mode, so we thought we would capture a slice of the beach view at Half Moon Bay, CA.
….and a few other photos…
Farther up the Beach
Half Moon Bay, CA
Corvette with some New Friends
I’m glad we washed the car before pulling in, otherwise we probably would have been seen as quite gauche 
Posted in On the Road
After completing our expedition through wine country yesterday, today we made our way down to San Francisco with the idea of soaking up some of the bay area ambiance. We ventured from US-101 across to US-1 and winded our way down the coast line, entering San Francisco via the Golden Gate Bridge.
Point Reyes Coast Line
Driving Golden Gate Bridge
Golden Gate Bridge from South
Jumper View of Golden Gate
Fog Lifting off Golden Gate
We first drove across the Golden Gate and then walked back about halfway across before returning to the warmth of the car. (The weather has been consistently quite nice, but the shoreline has been on the cool side when wearing shorts).
After the bridge, we headed into the city and stopped at Fishman’s Wharf for the requisite bread bowl based chowder for lunch and then moved on toward Silicon Valley.
Lunch at Wharf
The specific destination in Silicon Valley was Mountain View, CA, home of many high tech companies including Google, but more importantly, today, the Computer History Museum. However, before getting there, we needed to experience the most prominent part of the bay area experience and that is….
Bay Traffic on the 101
Yes, traffic. And plenty of it. We concluded we have spent more time in traffic in the last day than we have on the entire rest of the trip – combined. In any case, we did eventually make our way down to Mountain View and the Computer History Museum where you can get your fill of computer related pornography as Jeff Atwood has called it. The museum is quite nice and has a complete collection of virtually all noteworthy computers ever built from ENIAC (and before) up through the Cray supercomputers. They also have samples of most of the personal computers models ever made going back to the original Altair computer Bill Gates wrote Microsoft Basic for, the original Apple prototype, TRS-80’s, Commodore PET, etc.
First Google Server Rack
The collection of everything there in one place really drives home the point of how much progress has been made in such a relatively short period of time. There are computers in there that cost in excess of $10M less than 20 years ago, and now they could easily be labeled worthless junk. One good picture of this notion is the following photo of a hard disk platter for the first hard disk drive.
First and Current Hard Drives
The platter for that drive is about 3 feet across. If you look carefully at the photo, you will see a modern laptop drive in the center of the spindle hole. That drive in the center has 40,000 times the storage capacity of the drive platter it is mounted to. That just boggles the mind and would bet that nobody that designed the original drive could have imagined how far the technology was going to mature. It makes you wonder what things will be like when people are laughing at our current capabilities….
Anyway, while Jeff was enjoying the museum, Sandra decided to enjoy things from afar…specifically the Starbucks across the street. Although understand that a Starbucks in Mountain View is not like just any other Starbucks. In Silicon Valley, Starbucks is in the direct path of the venture capital deal flow and even just sitting around to listen is an interesting experience. We surmised that you probably have a better probability of getting a business plan funded in a Starbucks in Mountain View that you would anywhere else in upstate New York. Think that could be true!?
We ended the day at Half Moon Bay, CA just aways south of the bay area right on the coast. We have a whole day layover here to relax before moving farther down to the coast to Monterey, CA.
Posted in On the Road
