I’ve been a bit remiss about posting blog entries recently, but I wanted to write something about my recent vacation in northern California at the beginning of the month (I’ll try to add some pics later).

It was great to see old friends in the San Francisco Bay Area — especially as New York was experiencing a brutal cold snap when I left, yet I was enjoying leisurely breakfasts al fresco on the sidewalks of Cole Valley (near Upper Haight) in warm Spring sunshine in San Francisco!

Although I was on vacation, I also went to half of a Library of Congress event on users and uses of bibliographic data held at the Googleplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, since I had plans to meet friends and former co-workers from RLG — located across the street in Mountain View — for a drink that evening anyway.

The Googleplex is massive — they took over Silicon Graphics’ old HQ, plus a lot of other adjacent properties — and is still growing. But apart from the refrigerators of free Odwalla drinks and computer programming tips pasted above the urinals, it was much like any other corporate office environment. In the end we persuaded quite a few folks from the meeting to join us for a beverage in the bucolic setting of Michael’s at Shoreline.

After a few days’ in the Bay Area, my ex-girlfriend Jessica & I drove up to north Lake Tahoe to join some friends for a long snowboarding weekend. We were blessed with light traffic on the way up and beautiful, warm spring skiing conditions that lasted for the entire 4 days I was there. We rode at Alpine Meadows for the first two days, Northstar on the third day and Sugarbowl on the way home — and every day was great. I even managed to get a bit of a tan!

The cabin was a lot of fun too; great crowd of people, big communal dinners, copious beer and margheritas, a ping-pong table and assorted games around the log fire.