San Francisco, The Ancestor's Tale, and whatever other random thoughts strike me while I write about those two

The movie Click could not have come out at a better time for me. Normally for a major event at work (usually a tapeout - sending the chip off to be made) I'm willing to work a lot of extra hours knowing that it is a temporary situation. This time I felt the same way but I put a time limit on 80 hour weeks (it was around the original tapeout date) and now that the tapeout has been delayed multiple times I'm very glad I did (if you don't get the intro about Click - watch it again). Anyway, for the chip I'm working on Cameron works with a company up in San Jose so I've been spending a lot of time up there and will be heading up again this week (as usual, if you read this and know where I live, please don't rob me). Last time I was up there I stayed over the weekend so I got to see a bit more of San Francisco and San Jose. I walked around China Town and Little Italy in San Francisco - very cool area, will definitely try to get there again. San Jose - I thought Pal Alto and some of that area a bit north of San Jose was interesting looking, but I'm yet to be impressed by San Jose itself (except of course for seeing every tech company you have ever heard of). I did go to Japan Town in San Jose - it was a bit small but I went to a restaurant where you sit at the bar and they have little boats going around a moat and they are carrying plates of sushi and you just grab the plates you want off the boats. Oh - so the actually interesting thing I did up there was go out for a $500 dinner (for 3 people) at the Village Pub. It sounds like a little nothing place, but is apparently one of the places VCs go to make deals. One of my co-workers somehow had a $500 gift certificate so we decided to spend it to celebrate finishing the chip (or so we thought).

I just finished The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. I wanted to learn more about evolution. I think that you can defend the teaching of evolution without knowing much about it based on trusting the scientific community, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to also know something about it. The book had some good info on evolution (I feel a bit odd telling Dawkins that he had some good info on evolution...). Although a lot of the book is more zoological in nature (not that I really know anything about zoology other than what I figured out from this book). The book starts with humans and goes backwards through time and points out as our ancestor line meets up with that of other animals, plants... The thought is that going forward through time makes it seem like evolution had a direction in mind and at every splitting point you have to decide which direction to follow, vs in this case he makes on arbitrary choice to start with humans. I found the end interesting, he gets more into concepts of evolution and talks about the role of bacteria in plants and animals. I knew that there are a bunch of bacteria in our bodies and that some are good but I had no idea the degree to which we depend on them.

Well nothing else really came to mind while writing this so I guess the absurdly long title was for nothing.