San Jose, CA to Appleton, WI

Yellowstone.

Little Bighorn Battlefield.

Devil's Tower.

Mount Rushmore.

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.

San Jose

I've lived in San Jose since 2009, but I'm just now giving San Jose the tourist treatment I've given other towns.

The first European settlement in San Jose was the Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe, founded in 1777 when California was still part of the Spanish empire. In 1791, the Pueblo moved to what is now the Plaza de Cesar Chavez, downtown.

The Luis Maria Peralta Adobe, 1797, is the last remaining vestige of the Pueblo.

California passed from Spain to Mexico in 1821, then to the United States in 1848, and San Jose became California's first capitol under the U.S. A plaque near the Plaza de Cesar Chavez marks the location of the first California congress building.

Here are a few typical views of downtown now. The first is looking down First Street, and the skyscraper in the background is the Bank of Italy Building (1925).

San Jose has a postmodernist City Hall designed by Richard Meier, who also designed the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Downtown has a lot of murals.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who famously protested on the Olympic medal stand in 1968, were from San Jose State University. A mural near City Hall remembers the protest.

San Jose is the south end of Silicon Valley. A lot of tech companies are headquartered here, like Adobe, Ebay, PayPal, and Cisco. Intel's headquarters are just outside of San Jose in Santa Clara.

The Adobe building has the San Jose Sempahore, four illuminated disks that transmit encoded mystery messages. The first was discovered to be Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 in 2007, and the second was discovered to be Neil Armstrong's "one small step for man" speech in 2017.

Lick Observatory is just east of San Jose. The observatory has some historic instruments, including the Great Lick Refractor, which discovered Jupiter's moon Amalthea (1892), and the Crossly reflecting telescope, which discovered Jupiter's moons Himalia (1904) and Elara (1905).

The observatory also has modern instruments, including the Shane 3-meter telescope.

I found the drive up to the observatory harrowing, with sheer drops on the side of the twisty road, but it seemed popular with bikers and motorcyclists. I did see a ginormous spider on the drive up, which I think was a tarantula.

The observatory's benefactor, James Lick, is buried under the observatory.

The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum is west of downtown. The museum has artifacts arranged by time period, a walk-in replica of an underground tomb, and reproductions of some key items like the Rosetta Stone and Code of Hammurabi.

The museum has some mummies, including the "mummy from Usermontu's coffin."

San Jose's hockey team, the Sharks, play at the SAP Center downtown, which is also a concert venue.

The San Jose Earthquakes, the soccer team, play at PayPal Park next to the airport.

The San Francisco 49ers footbal team actually play in Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, just outside San Jose.

I'm a long-time gamer, so San Jose's game stores are some of my favorite places in town. Game Kastle Santa Clara is near the airport.

Illusive Comics split off a game store a few years ago, Isle of Gamers, but now they've recombined the comics and games stores into one store in a new place. Here's a pano of the inside.

Among the famous people from San Jose, the ones that jump out at me are Cesar Chavez and Steve Wozniak. Cesar Chavez was a California labor leader who founded the National Farm Workers Assoication, which later became part of the United Farm Workers; "his world-view combined leftist politics with Roman Catholic social teachings." Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs and designed the Apple II home computer, their hugely successful first product.

San Jose is a million people, but it's often overshadowed by San Francisco, which is forty miles north and more of a cultural capital. I was told once that people write songs about San Francisco but not San Jose, but actually Do You Know the Way to San Jose is about San Jose.