Midnights Children
I’m back in Israel now, but here are some random thoughts from my last trip.
- EMC has an indoors swimming pool
- In Brookline, Boston , one can not park between 2-6AM. What a polite way to discriminate minorities.
- One can consume a lot of culture in an eleven hours day flight.
- “The Fighter” is a great movie. Lots of great boxing scenes and not too tacky.
- Reading through Salman’s Rushdie’s first novel. Extremely talented, but his later work is more elegant. Correction – the first 200 pages are a bit disorganized, but the book keeps getting better all the time.
- “Topic Thunder” is a very funny movie. Or maybe it is just the lack of oxygen
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- Got an upgrade to business. Thanks to 100,000 miles in 2010. The Sundae is the best part, but the desert port was also nice
- Hilton is better than Best Western. Even if it is the Hilton Garden-Inn. Upgraded me to the suite. Now I have Two 50″ televisions in the room.
- No compact cars left for National. They gave me a Mini-Van with 8 seats ! I would never be able to park it in Tel Aviv. I feel like a soccer mom.
- Back to Stanford after 24 years. It seems much bigger now. in 1987 I remember I brought my IBM-PC diskette to practice my turbo pascal skills during the summer. They did not have PC labs at the time. Now I’m standing in the William Gates building . The Marguerite is still here.
- Funny quote from the directions to Stanford
- Note that not all of the entrances to the Gates Building are labelled as such. The entrance nearest the parking lot is labelled “Gates Bldg” in a new wooden sign, and another entrance is grandly labelled “Engineering Fund Venture Laboratories.” (Stanford’s Engineering Venture Fund donated the “naming” gift of the B-wing after William Gates of Microsoft donated the “naming” gift of the A-wing.)
- I meet more old Israeli Check Point friends in California than in Israel
- There is a restaurant in Mountain View that’s open after 9PM ! (XANH)
