well i am here in san jose. wheeeeeeeeeee…

i am in the hotel, having been out for sushi with brad and jason and a chap from nortel/alteon who i had not met before, but who was a nice chap, even if we did have fun trying to cram into his saab 9000 aero with integral boat-mast and boom running the length of the car from trunk/boot into the cockpit.

the flight was moderately hellish; cramped at the back of a 747 bext to an irish chap and a brit, but behind a couple and their 3yr-old sprog, the father of whom insisted upon rocking his son to sleep by first reclining his seat back as far as it would go, following up by bouncing back and forth like in a rocking chair, so that (a) i nearly lost use of my knees, c/o the tray table banging into it, and (b) i got quite intimate with the state of his hairdo.

you can’t complain, though. it’s fatherhood.

someone once told me that the problem with two-year-olds was that they were too small to carry a conversation, but too big to microwave; i am not that negative about kids, but i could never eat a whole one.

one upside of so much dead time, doing nothing and going nowhere at speed (travelling without moving?) was that i had the time to really get into jupiter’s travels, a book by ted simon detailing a round-the-world-tour on a motorcycle that he took, between 1973 and 1977. it’s considered a classic of the genre, and i know some friends who would be enthralled by the sense of community he describes amongst some of the people that he meets, but it’s not as good a book as it could be – the focus tends to jump around, at one point he berates passing through an african country in three days and not really seeing it, and half-a-book later, he skips through three countries with a paragraph apiece.

i get the feeling that the book was finished in a rush. certainly that is what i will have a problem doing now.

for more on the book, see http://www.mcn.org/b/jupitalia/

anyway: i managed to get a little sleep – putting my arm to sleep in the process – and disembarked, cleared customs, and got the car with little fuss, but determined that i needed something nice.

thus it was that i went to one of my favourite haunts in this area, the peninsula fountain in palo alto, for a real chocolate milkshake, and burger. if the americans do one thing really really well, it’s junk/comfort food, and this place is superb; hopefully i will be going back, early wednesday morning, to have breakfast with casper.