Archive for 2008

September 14th, 2008 by alephnaught

MOCA and Little Tokyo

We decided to visit the main MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art), which is just down the street from Little Tokyo. We parked across the street from the Disney Concert Hall, which was designed by Frank Gehry, who designed the Millenium Park Pavilion in Chicago.  The building is really neat but slightly out of place among […]

September 14th, 2008 by alephnaught

American Born Chinese

Title: American Born Chinese Author: Gene Luen Yang Paperback: 240 pages Publisher: First Second (September 5, 2006) Language: English ISBN-10: 1596431520 ISBN-13: 978-1596431522 This is a graphic novel whose apparent plot is the story of three Chinese: a monkey king, a young boy, and a stereotypical “chinaman” from the turn of the century.  These three […]

Posted in Books, Tags: ,

September 13th, 2008 by alephnaught

Singing Bowls

Title: Singing Bowls Paperback: 108 pages Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass,India (November 2002) ISBN-10: 8178221039 ISBN-13: 978-8178221038 I’ve wanted to purchase a Tibetan singing bowl for a long time.  I found this book in at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena; I figured this might give me the push to purchase a bowl. I found the book […]

September 6th, 2008 by alephnaught

Studio City, Burbank and Bergamot Station

We drove over to Studio City and had lunch at Art’s Delicatessen & Restaurant on Ventura Blvd.  The food was really good – it was nice to find a good deli here. We stopped in a small gift shop that’s going out of business and ended up buying a Piero Fornasetti self-portrait plate for $80; […]

September 6th, 2008 by alephnaught

New York Times article on micro-blogging

There’s a long, pretty good article on micro-blogging today, Brave New World of Digital Intimacy (I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You). The article presents a reasonable short history along with some good psychology research related to micro-blogging.

Posted in Computer,

September 5th, 2008 by alephnaught

Competitive Strategy

Title: Competitive Strategy Author: Michael E. Porter Paperback: 416 pages Publisher: Free Press (January 19, 2004) Language: English ISBN-10: 0743260880 ISBN-13: 978-0743260886 I found this book used at Op Amp Bookstore in Los Angeles. I figured this would be a good one to read, as it should help connect some of my IT strategy thoughts […]

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September 3rd, 2008 by alephnaught

Daedalus’s Children: Part Two of Two (Star Trek: Enterprise)

Title: Daedalus’s Children: Part Two of Two (Star Trek: Enterprise) Author: Dave Stern Mass Market Paperback: 384 pages Publisher: Star Trek (April 27, 2004) Language: English ISBN-10: 0743476468 ISBN-13: 978-0743476461 This is part two of a two part series (my short review of part one is here). This wraps up the alternate universe adventure nicely.  […]

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September 2nd, 2008 by alephnaught

Toastmasters award

I won best speech of the day at Toastmasters today – here’s a picture I took of me and the award: My speech, the second in the Toastmasters series, was on the differences in cultures between Saudi Arabia and The Netherlands.

Posted in Personal, Tags:

September 1st, 2008 by alephnaught

Frozen River

We just got back from seeing the movie “Frozen River” which stars Melissa Leo.  Ms Leo was a star of one of our favorite TV series of all time, “Homicide: Life on the Street.” The movie involves a woman whose trying to get a real house after her husband runs off; he’s a former gambling […]

August 31st, 2008 by alephnaught

Santa Barbara

We woke up Sunday looking for something to do.  Aviva wanted to go for a drive.  I suggested we go out to Santa Barbara.  So Aviva, Basil and I packed into the Prius and headed west. It took about two hours to get out there because somebody got rearended on the highway; auto accidents around […]