photos posted live from the field with a mobile phone camera
David Byrne speaking at Berkeley about Powerpoint.
David Byrne about to speak at Berkeley about Powerpoint.
David Byrne...
David Byrne, about to speak at Berkeley about Powerpoint.
Straight ahead in the distance, in the center of the shot: the Golden Gate Bridge.
I took a break from studying to finally visit the top of Berkeley's Sather Tower. It's been especially clear the last few days... Here, you can see my department's building (South Hall) in the foreground.
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I've been studying for midterms in Berkeley's Doe Library all day. I stepped out for a candy bar a few minutes ago and noticed a crowd gathered in front of the main entrance. There was a movie shoot going on; this scene features Richard Gere holding a little boy's hand and guiding him up the steps and into the main entrance. Here's the kid (the little guy casting the big shadow). Gere's in the other photos; he's the big guy with silver hair in a brown jacket. A little on-site nosing around revealed that the movie is called "Bee Season," and a little Googling around revealed that this was the title of a recent novel about a little girl who wins a spelling bee. The novel's reviews on Amazon make it seem that this story is to language what the movie "Pi" was to mathematics. Anyway, in the novel, the father of the little girl (and her young brother) is named Saul, and on the shoot one of the other characters refers to Gere as Saul, so I'm convinced it's the same story.
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Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, speaks in Berkeley.
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I really appreciate the fact that Michael Moore is out there taking a stand against so many things that are screwed up in this country. But this speech struck me as even more tragic than his books and movies and TV shows.
Here's the tragedy: Moore has a tremendous talent for raising consciousness and he could really use it to fix things if he'd focus on one or two of the big issues that so many Americans of all religious, political and social stripes would become enraged about, if they simply learned the facts about these matters. Moore could educate all sorts of people and bring them together to fix these overarching problems.
Instead he pontificates about every issue under the sun. Every one of these strongly-worded yet tangential opinions alienates a group of people. Before long he's wasting his breath and preaching to the choir, to the small circle of people who consider themselves to be radical old-school liberal Democrats. Sure, he gets them all fired up, but that small circle tends to be all fired up anyway. Moore convinces everyone else on the planet not to take him seriously.
I love the guy but he saddens me. Michael Moore has so much potential to enlighten so many people, but it's drifting away because he won't focus.
Here's today's sunset from my roof.
San Francisco takes up the left half of the horizon and the Golden Gate Bridge is just to the left of the sun, which is setting over the Marin Headlands. But with such poor photo quality, I could be in New Jersey for all you know...
This is the Hearst Mining Building, home of the new Berkeley Institute of Design.
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They say this grove of Australian Eucalyptus on the Berkeley campus is the tallest stand of hardwood trees in North America.
I finally made it to Berkeley's Valley Life Sciences library, and here's what greeted me on the way in.
This is on the bathroom wall at the Missing Link bike co-op in Berkeley.
Note feature #3: this stuff "stains attacker green for up to one week for easy identification."
[ Text added at 8 pm: ] This is a week full of coincidences. I've already hit it off well with another student in my department at Berkeley, Joyojeet Pal. Now it turns out that he's known a dear friend of mine, Manisha Tomar, for years. She and his mother are old friends. He recognized Manisha in an earlier photo on this site.
Then came another helpful coincidence. I took a break from studying to grab a plate of lasagna and to enjoy the sunset from the cafe in Berkeley's International House (above). See the people in the photo? They were sitting next to my table, and they just happened to be in this sunset shot. After posting the photo I sat down to eat and I overheard the woman describing her experiences working as a user interface designer and consultant for software firms in Asia. Now she's apparently preparing applications for business school. The man she's speaking with poignantly advised her and he revealed some good dirt about the schools and a couple of entertaining war stories from the field.
It turns out that user interface design is my specialty and I'm seriously considering consulting overseas after graduating, so I picked up a few good tips and got a good sense of the current state of the industry from two insiders as I enjoyed dinner and the sunset. Life is good.
Parker took much better parade photos.
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