Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley sits between San Francisco to the north and San Jose to the south, and a lot of big tech companies are there. I worked there for fifteen years, at Google, Facebook, and Magic Leap.

I worked at Facebook (now Meta) in Menlo Park, on the Classic Campus. The Classic Campus was originally the Sun Microsystems campus, and the back of the Meta sign there is still the Sun sign. Sun built Unix workstations and created Java; Oracle bought them in 2010.

The Classic Campus courtyard.

Facebook's newer buildings nearby were designed by Frank Gehry. Here's my old friend James visiting.

A tribute to Alan Turing inside the new buildings.

Stanford University is in Palo Alto. A lot of Silicon Valley's tech companies originated at Stanford, like Hewlett-Packard, Sun, SRI, SGI, Google, and Yahoo. The most prominent landmarks on the campus are the Hoover Tower and Memorial Church.

The infamous Stanford prison experiment was conducted there, in Jordan Hall. I like the undergraduate Stanford Shakespeare Company.

University Avenue nearby, posh dining and shopping.

I worked at the Googleplex in Mountain View for ten years. Buildings 40-43 were the heart of the campus then, and they were originally the SGI campus; SGI's Unix workstations dominated high-end graphics before PCs became credible graphics engines in the late 1990's.

The Tyrannosaurus at the Building 43 entrance.

The famous Googleplex campus bikes, and my sister's kids trying them.

The Computer History Museum is a few blocks south of Google.

NASA Ames is just east of Google. Its giant Hangars One, Two, and Three were originally built to house blimps and are conspicuous from US 101. Here's a U2 spy plane on display outside Hangar One.

I worked at Magic Leap (the AR company) in Sunnyvale for two years. A hawk had a nest on one of our window ledges when I worked there; here's a different (I think) hawk near the entrance.

Many of the buildings surrounding Magic Leap were the Atari campus back in the day. Atari had two world headquarters there - one for the Atari 8 bit period and one for the Atari ST period - but they've been torn down just in the last few years.

Apple is in Cupertino. 1 Infinite Loop is Apple's longtime headquarters.

Washington, D.C.

I was a tourist in Washington, D.C. for a few days in February. I last visited in 1998 with my old friend John.

The Capitol building, Washington Monument and World War II Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial. My friend Buck suggested shooting the monuments at night.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial is on the Tidal Basin, across from the Jefferson Memorial.

The Eisenhower Memorial is near the Air and Space Museum. The MLK and Eisenhower memorials are both new since I last visited.

I went to the National Museum of American History, on the mall. Hank Aaron in his Milwaukee Braves gear.

The museum had a nice section on Silicon Valley, which was kind of a miniature Computer History Museum. Among other things, they had a Xerox Alto and an Altair 8800.

The National Gallery of Art was the high point for me, lots of great stuff there. This picture is Degas's "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen." I like Waldemar Januszczak's Perspective art documentaries, and he discusses this piece at length here (at 28:29).

I went to the National Archives to see the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. I was surprised that they also had an original (of the 1297 version of the) Magna Carta. Pictures aren't allowed inside the building but here are some kids skating outside it.

Ford's Theatre.

Arlington Cemetery.

Here's an old picture of John walking next to the reflecting pool, from our 1998 visit.