Circle the Bay: Day 16: El Cerrito Plaza BART to Berkeley Marina

Day 16: El Cerrito Plaza BART to Berkeley Marina
(El Cerrito to Berkeley)

Circle The Bay Part 3

May 30th 2018

8.1 miles in 1 hrs 46 mins

(Total: 272.0 miles in 50 hrs 17 mins)

A pod of pelicans feeding in the Albany Mudflats State Park

Some days I just want to let the photos tell the story, which also indicates a bit of disconnect between the thoughts in my head and the terrain I'm traversing. And it's the usual culprit of wondering what my future is in the world of computing, if any. As a young man I dreamed of doing something profound in the space of distributed computation. And I did accomplish that goal with my last two startups, one makes a chip with 16K processors on it, the other makes chip that run down to a quarter volt, linearly increasing efficiency with linear slowdown of performance (can you imagine a car that gets twice the gas mileage if you travel half the speed?).

But I find the the skills and perspective I have that contributed to these out-of-the-box Silicon Valley success stories are not the skills in demand at established players, which quickly drift from the need to innovate in technology to the need to innovate in marketing to investors. I've always looked for an effective partnership with those of the other orientation, but it hasn't worked out that way yet. So I'm on the free market again. Anybody want to work with me to create the next blockbuster semiconductor startup? Interested parties should already have their tickets to play billionaire-ball in California, otherwise why bother (to build a VC backed semiconductor startup in California).

Tasteful Graffiti

Decorated rip-rap on the Albany Bulb

Ok I had to write something about the graffiti on the concrete rip-rap that still exists at the end of the Albany Bulb, an outcropping of bayshore just south of the Albany Mudflats State Park. Rip-rap usually makes me feel bad, in that most of it is concrete trash left behind by the previous century of civic and corporate construction. But this secluded decoration of any exposed piece of rip-rap was very artistic, and brought it up to be a place of beauty and contemplation that equaled the bay vista in front of it.