06.12.07
Posted in Business, Technology
at 8:56 am
by Dave Badtke
Because PCs have always been less expensive than Macs, because businesses favor PCs over Macs, because over the years I’ve bought software for PCs that would cost a lot to buy again for Macs, because I long ago worked for GE when it decided to put a rather worthless Windows PC on everyone’s desk — we would turn it on, look at the crude Windows, sniff it as though it might be something dead that we should bury in the grass beyond the parking lot, and go back to working on our Unix-based Sun workstations — because of all of these reasons and more that I’ve forgotten, I long ago began purchasing PCs so that my home and work computers would be compatible.
Years later here I sit writing my blog on a PC, but with a change today since Steve Jobs yesterday announced that Apple’s Safari browser was available for PCs. Analysts were underwhelmed. They were looking for a big announcement, but all they got was a browser. Down the stock price went.
But wait — could there be something more here, I wonder, as I type away in a window in this new browser? For years I’ve been saddled with a marginal operating system that always manages to crash at the wrong time or that makes networking harder than it should be or that just pisses me off because the software we were using on Sun workstations was so much better, and that was many years ago. Why do I need all this Microsoft-compatible hardware and software if I can now wirelessly connect to the Internet?
I blog away. I upload pictures. I get on my browser, in this case Safari with its very classy interface with tabs, which took me a couple moments to find, and I write this on my website server, not really caring that I’m running Windows. Clearly this is the future as network bandwidths increase and more and more applications adopt a browser approach that is independent of the computer’s operating system. Sure Adobe doesn’t do it yet with their Creative Suites, but they will. And then I’ll be able to create pages using Adobe applications running on my website server.
Won’t it be grand when we can carry around a paper-thin device with a battery that lasts forever that we can use to get all our computing and networking and communications done without complaining about Microsoft? Sure I may be an old guy. Sure I may be dead when it happens. But I can look forward to the future anyway. Hope springs eternal, don’t you know.
But maybe we’re not there yet. In trying to change my WordPress options using Safari, the browser crashed. Apple made it easy for me to send an error report and Safari is still in Beta, so I’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, checking back from time to time to see how Safari’s doing, I’ll continue to use Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a rebel living on the edge. Bah, humbug Microsoft.
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05.30.07
Posted in Business, Places, Family
at 10:14 am
by Dave Badtke
Yesterday we had the pleasure of visiting with our niece, Katrina, her husband Zimran, and their friend Joel. Katrina, who recently finished her residency in Boston, is an emergency room physician who moved out here to work for a hospital near Los Altos, where she and Zimran live. Joel, who is South African but lived for years in Chicago, just finished his first year at Harvard Law and is heading off to Israel for a summer internship. And Zimran, who works for Creative Good, knows a lot about a lot, by which I mean that I can pretty much ask Zim a question about most anything and then sit back and listen with fascination to his response. (To get a sense of what Zimran knows and has done, check out his blog winterspeak.com.)
For example, there’s a large fish tank in their dining room. 
I pointed at it and asked Zim about the fish — they were small and, I thought, blue — that were swimming about in the large enclosure, with coral and seaweed and an eerie, ethereal light that seemed to be encouraging the seaweed and stuff growing on the bottom and sides of the tank. Zim told me about the fish, green chromis I think, that like to school and can handle significant changes in the tank environment, though Zim talks fast and was quickly on to the topic of tank filtration, opening up the cabinet below the tank to expose the whirring mechanisms that control temperature and salinity and chemical composition and nitrogen cycles and stuff like that, I think, though my head was spinning with details and I wasn’t taking notes.
I’m sure Zim could have talked on this and any number of other topics for as long as we were willing to listen, since he likes to get deeper and deeper into the details, philosophy, psychology and unintended consequences of whatever he’s thinking about, but then Katrina told us that Zim has a quota for such discussions. While I’m not sure how she measures Zim’s eclectic discursions, it seems that the threat of something like a warning bell urges him to move on to the next interesting idea.
Joel, who met Katrina and Zim when they were all undergraduates at Harvard and who was part of a rather large “family” of students with similar interests that brought them together when they were juniors and seniors, is like Zim in his ability to hold forth at length on subjects as diverse as the political history and future developments of Africa — he worked for the opposition party in South Africa before returning to Harvard — and legal issues. After my wife told him about a case pending before the State Supreme Court tomorrow, Joel was able to summarize its main points and highlight its importance with details, it seemed to me, that my wife hadn’t even told him about. Quite amazing.
So we had a great evening, made even better because Zim likes to cook, and he’s a good cook. After Zim’s grilled chicken and garlic bread and Joel’s salad, we had Bonny Doon Vinyard’s NV Bouteille Call dessert wine, which tastes like raspberries and blueberries and I don’t know what else. Into this sweet drink we dunked brownie edges. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Well, they’re a different kind of biscotti made by Sugardaddy’s Sumptuous Sweeties, famous for round brownies. 
You’ve got to see this stuff to believe it, and taste it too. The biscotti dipped into the wine was really, really good. Zim told us all about it, Katrina warned us not to leave out the apostrophe when searching for the website or we might be surprised by what we’d find — would I ever do that? — and Joel added color commentary. A great evening of adventure!
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05.08.07
Posted in Business, People, Places, Sailing
at 9:32 am
by Dave Badtke
One of the joys of writing for a local newspaper like the Benicia Herald is that I get to sit down with people for an hour or more to listen to their stories.
Well, you might say, you’re not living in New York or Los Angeles or Tokyo or London or Paris or even, for that matter, in San Francisco, where there’s a chance that around the next corner you might meet a celebrity or mover and shaker. And you’d be right that the people I meet aren’t the famous and fabulously rich and influential — they’re people who don’t feel comfortable in the spotlight and usually cringe when I pull out my camera — but they’re interesting and always surprising because like all those people you know so much about from watching too much TV or from guiltily reading tabloids while you wait in the grocery story checkout line, these people have spent their lives getting an education, developing skills, creating careers, supporting their families, having interesting experiences and serving others.
Such is the case with Elizabeth Vazquez who, along with her partner Chuck Bowen, owns Galley Cafe, a fantastic, inviting, comfortable little restaurant with a beautiful water view at Glen Cove Marina. Elizabeth was in the Army in the 70s and then recently served in Iraq. She has worked as a social worker advocate for the homeless and recently earned her paralegal degree at St. Mary’s College in Moraga. And she and Chuck, who live in a houseboat in the marina, make wonderful breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks at Galley Cafe in addition to catering special events. But for more about this you’ll need to read my Sunday Column on May 13 in the Benicia Herald.
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