it's a vain pursuit but it helps me to sleep — LiveJournal
Nov. 14th, 2019
12:00 pm - Photopost
February lights.
Hills' eyes.
Iconically yours.
Miami A.
Gator city.
Cautionary tale.
Stanford sojourn.
Final party.
Jersey shore.
Monkey see.
Tree door.
Final game.
Fire works.
Ancient enemy.
Desert rose.
Surfing niece.
Oakland heart.
Long sought.
Shasta trail.
Magnum size.
Shrouded Ararat.
Favourite city.
Hyde dawn.
Fjord view.
University town.
Running route.
Ice water.
Arctic mountains.
Coal mine.
Seed vault.
Auroral night.
Satellite shoot.
Private jet.
Curtain call.
Sep. 7th, 2018
Aug. 22nd, 2018
11:19 pm - It's about that time of year
Elephant seals, Point Reyes.
Maine sunset.
I was in Toronto for like two hours.
Crabbing it up, Fishermans Wharf.
Bay to Breakers, being Bay to Breakers.
From a hallucinatory overnight in Vancouver.
VR can be heroes?
Baywatch, Venice Beach.
Patron saint.
As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.
Up before the market.
So sans guile.
Brooding Zug, aka the Crypto Valley.
I like this Lausanne watchtower selfie more than anyone should.
The billionaire beside me has a pretty nice lawn.
Niece and nephew.
Benched.
Reach for enlightenment.
Brooklyn Bridge by night.
Vegas veterans will note that these fountains are not usually photographed from this vantage.
The UFO twirled and yawed above the thrashing masses.
Neon Museum.
Weird weekend; about sixteen hours later, I found myself about as distant as this from Mark Zuckerberg.
Mar. 21st, 2018
08:52 pm - Quarterly photo post!
Be still your beating hearts:
California sunset.
A. gets some perspective.
Windy run.
Learning to fly (which is going slower than I'd like, but well.)
Marin tangle.
Hudson hawk.
Sunset gazing.
Where's that confounded bridge?
Space Coast from ghost to ghost.
Moments later, a soldier bellowed at us "No pictures!" Then we went in.
Spectacled selfie.
Hong Kong shutter.
Peninsular lanterns.
Harbour view.
A tiny and fairly representative fragment of Shenzhen's skyline.
One of the many famous electronics markets.
Light-emitting dreamscapes.
Circumjacent!
Shenzhen is not the least crazy place I've ever been.
I mean.
When in doubt, make it spectacular, right?
I don't think this Hong Kong Airport ad is for a horror movie.
Hanoi tiger I.
Hanoi tiger II, at the Temple of Literature. Why doesn't every city have a Temple of Literature? Anyway I went and was not revered as a demigod. What is the point of being an author anyway.
Westlake blues.
Gone kayaking, Ha Long Bay.
Android's panorama stitcher could use some deglitching.
Karst portal.
I happened to look out the ferry window and see this bridge under construction. I was a good 20km from both Hong Kong and Macau at the time...
Macau is only scarcely less surreal than Shenzhen.
When in doubt, blinky lights.
Blockchain conferences are usually terrible but I attend some anyway.
Storm warning, Santa Cruz.
Dec. 12th, 2017
09:53 pm - I feel sickly so let's dump some photos on y'all
Why, yes, since you ask, I have been travelling a lot in the last six weeks, even for me. With more to come before the end of the year...
Hyde Park camel.
Thames sunset.
Cinema delenda est.
Beach mosque.
What's left of what the Romans built atop Carthage. (There's almost nothing left of Carthage.)
In the medina.
An actual Carthaginian relic. Uh, maybe it's for the best that they were destroyed?
Wacky lobby of my wacky (US$30/night) Bizerte hotel.
Tunisian dawn.
The northernmost point on the African continent.
A good long walk, that.
Cap Blanc.
Edmonton sunset.
Golden Gate sunset. From 2,500 feet up, from an airplane I was flying, which was pretty cool.
Brooklyn, baby.
Ruins from the Santa Rosa fires.
Bodega Bay.
Alameda.
Yours truly.
Brooklyn again, baby, for the second time in two weeks. Well, it got me my third year in a row of Star Alliance Gold status...
Hangar One, Moffett Field.
Swans all in a row.
Oct. 30th, 2017
09:39 pm - creeping towards november
Hi! It's been an interesting year. Some good stuff: S.'s migraines are essentially gone, as discussed here. Also, I've been formally named CTO of the ~80-person tech consultancy where I've been working for the last mumblemumble years, which seems to be a bigger deal to other people than it is to me. Also, I have become a terrible cliché and have begun taking flying lessons, with an eye towards getting my private pilot's license, which will explain some of the photos that follow:
East Bay sky.
Moss Beach.
Nuyorican.
The shirt worn by the wunderkind to my left has become somewhat infamous in tech circles. Photo by Steve Jurvetson of all people.
All in all, you're just another piranha skull in the wall.
The southern deserts are full of hidden treasures.
Nostalgic sigh; Muskoka.
Demo flight over San Francisco in a Cessna 172.
Sometimes I'm newly amazed I live walking distance from here. (A 45-minute walk. But still.)
Pennsylvania, of all places.
South of Santa Cruz.
Is there sand? Is there sand? Are you kidding me? This place is...
Sunset from the cockpit of my first proper flying lesson, in a Diamond DA-40.
Just another goddamn robot talking about the goddamn blockchain.
'Tis the season.
Sep. 1st, 2017
10:31 am - cross-posted by hand from DW
My last LJ post was in January, huh? Wow. Well, here, have a few images from the months since:
Brooklyn, baby.
They greened the Berkeley Marina.
Park tangle.
Reykjavik snowstorm.
West Edmonton piracy.
Kwajalein atoll.
Pohnpei selfie.
The surreal ruins of Nan Madol.
Down at the Truk Stop.
Guam shadows.
Tokyo Fish Market.
Tokyo Cephalopod Market.
Tokyo Metropolitan Building No. 1.
Cometh the hour, cometh Godzilla.
Shibuya shopping.
Shinjuku by night.
Skyscrapers and cherry blossoms.
City of angles.
Devil's Slide.
Accidental horror still.
Barcelona gold.
Barcelonicons.
In the shadow of David.
Arno sculling.
Anyone for Assassin's Creed LARP?
There's a twelve-book series here somewhere.
Waiting for the gondoliers.
Chimpancoffee?
Is it sunken treasure if you deliberately sink it?
Whatever you do, don't look up.
At least Hirst can make fun of himself.
See?
A dragon of Ljubljana.
Sloveniascape.
Inside the clock tower above the 80.
Joshua Tree.
S. communes with cuttlefish.
A. atop the belvedere.
T.O.
Oh, Canada.
Portrait of the artist as a mad scientist.
S. at Devil's Slide.
Piano garden.
(I think my last) Black Hat.
Vegas, baby.
The west is the best?
Dec. 2nd, 2016
09:10 pm - viva cuba libre
I went to Havana. It was sadder than I expected; it's pretty much a picturesque disaster area, where a block from the Prado (Havana's famous promenade) people live in half-collapsed buildings, and on the day I left, down the street from my AirBNB -- yes, that's right! -- people were excitedly queuing to buy tomatoes. Lifestyles seem to mostly range from grim stagnation to quiet desperation, unsullied by much in the way of aspiration or hope.
(I know, I know: "under capitalism, man exploits man, but under communism, it's the other way around!")
Anyway. Picturesque, like I said:
The Grand Theater at night.
Imperialismo Yankee!
Not atypical building, Havana Veija Sur.
The revolution is a town?
Desk set.
A well-documented door.
Facing the sea.
Continuously defend the revolution!
The classic cars are everywhere.
Not atypical building, Havana Centro.
Heroes of the revolution.
On the Sunday after Fidel's death, Plaza de la Revolucion was not exactly a hotbed of fervor.
Snapped furtively, but they didn't seem to really mean it.
Wanna bet?
Centro, again.
...Yeah, I got nothin'.
The beaches, as every Canadian knows, are lovely.
Spontaneous memorial.
Ready taxis.
Those were the days...
I'm pretty sure I wasn't supposed to be here.
Not especially Cuban, except that it's holding up a ruin, but I like this shot a lot.
It's a very pretty city.
This felt a little Dr. Strange.
Centro.
Probably my favorite street art.
Havana Vieja cobblestones.
The vestigial Chinatown.
Bullet holes from a (non-Castro-related) student uprising / attempt to kill Batista in 1957.
Sep. 26th, 2016
06:32 am - A continent a week
Here, have some pictures from the UK and UAE:
Dawn runs in Hyde Park are the best thing about jet lag.
Though the swans are pretty cool too.
In Brixton, my old home.
The inspiration for Ballard's High-Rise.
They finally finished the King's Cross renovation, and it looks great.
View from our hosts' Abu Dhabi balcony.
This is apparently how I look to three-year-olds.
The beach was bilingual -- English and Russian.
Etihad Towers, through which Vin Diesel jumped that hypercar in Furious 7.
The taste of home. Sort of.
The emir's palace is quite palatial.
Bit of a cult of personality going on.
Jumeirah, a suburb of Dubai which was basically just sand when I was last there twelve years ago.
If there's a more cyberpunk suburb anywhere, I'm sure I don't know what it is.
Probably my best shot of the trip.
They don't call it the Empty Quarter for nothing.
Desert mountains.
Goin' out divin', and we're ... gonna see tu-u-u-urtles...
Hazy day.
The Gulf of Oman has lovely beaches.
A rather magnificent mosque.
Now back, and jet-lagged, obv. Full set here.
May. 29th, 2016
10:08 am - Fear and loathing in the Hôtel de Ville
Life advice: if anyone ever offers you an all-expenses-paid press junket to Paris, bite their hand off. Not just because it's an all-expenses-paid week in Paris, although that's obviously nice too; because the whole journalist-on-a-junket experience is so strange and surreal.
How so? Well: We guzzled champagne with Moët Hennessy's Chief Digital Officer at the French Open while projection-mapped art played on a jeroboam above us. We ate chocolate and drank wine beneath the rococo forty-foot-high painted ceilings of the Hôtel de Ville. We danced and drank rosé (are you beginning to see a theme here?) at an open-air bar on the banks of the Seine. We spent time with "France's Steve Jobs" Xavier Niel, the CEO of a major French bank, a cabinet minister, and the deputy mayor of Paris. The mayor herself blew us off at the last minute, alas.
They mostly clearly saw those encounters as unpleasant (the cabinet minister, one Axelle Lemaire, born in Canada, was outright scathing about "the American media" perspectives of France; unfortunate timing, given that the nation was half-paralyzed by strikes while we were here, and her government's approval rating is slipping towards single digits) but necessary, because apparently people have begun to view tech journalism -- tech journalism! -- as somehow important. This is *hilarious*, of course.
(The exception to that rule was Niel, who seemed like a pretty cool dude, and I think actually enjoyed hanging out with us at the legitimately awesome new engineering school he has built.)
We -- about twenty of us, half from Asia, half from America, chauffered / herded from place to place in three minivans --- had startup after startup after startup trotted before us to give their pitches, as if we were VCs. The French government is trying to make Paris a tech startup hub, in its own very French way, and is trying to get that message out.
It offers some pretty sweet deals; La French Tech Ticket offers startups €25K per founder, a one-year residency permit, logistical assistance, and free co-working space, in exchange for ... nothing. They take zero equity. Zero. They're so bought in to the cult of the startup that they're willing to pay that just to foster a startup ecosystem. I know, right?
(Niel the multibillionaire, being Niel the multibillionaire, clearly thinks the government approach is ridiculous half measures, and is building a massive complex near Bercy to host 1,000 startups -- yes, you read that correctly -- all of which he will presumably take an equity share in. Construction is already well underway.)
Fortunately we also had a bunch of spare time, not least because as the week progressed, more and more of us dropped out of the scheduled events. (I was one of three to attend the last one.) I went roaming around the city, dined at my favorite Italian restaurant ever, had dinner with 
phrawzty, went for some excellent runs (past la Tour and along the Seine; around the Tuileries; around the Jardins de Luxembourg), caught an old film noir flick on Rue Champollion, drank wine and played foozball with our conference host, went drinking with Scoble and a really cool guy who was on the original iPhone team, roamed La Défense a bit, watched the Champions League final in a crowded bar, etc., all of which was great, but most of which can be done whenever I come to Paris. The junket, though, that was some weirdness.
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