Lotzi Bölöni's blog

I was in Sillicon Valley for a day this summer, and boy oh boy, how the names changed. The company where I worked in 2001-2002 (CPlane) of course, is nowhere, and of course the company who almost bought us is also nowhere. Our major target customers are all bankrupt, and our company investor Sun, well,… was bankr… acqui…. merged. The AT&T Research labs, where I worked in 1998 and 1999, is long time history.

So what remained? Here are the most solid institutions of Sillicon Valley.

Dittmer’s Gourmet Meats & Wurst-Haus, Inc

and

The Milk Pail Market

Sic transit gloria mundi  — good thing we can always fall back on cheeses and sausages.

Well, one of the interesting uses of Google Maps is the Walk Score website http://www.walkscore.com – from a typed in address it infers how walking friendly the neighborhood is. It seems that it looks up the closest restaurant, grocery store, bookstore and so on, and calculates the score based on whether I can walk there or not.

Without further ado: the score for our Orlando house is 12: which means: Driving Only: Virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range. You can walk from your house to your car!

I would add to this that the score is somewhat optimistic, as it does not take into consideration whether the closest destination is acceptable – in my case, the closest “general purpose” bookstore is 3 miles away, well, good luck with that.

I have just came back from Japan, where the agent conference was organized at the location of the Future University of Hakodate (FUN), a recently established engineering school which had built a “futuristic” building, which is housing the _entire_ university (although their current degree offerings are basically what our SEECS is, with some industrial engineering thrown in the mix). Their building concept was based on the idea of openness: basically all the walls are glass, the graduate student offices are in the “open air”, meeting rooms are just demarcated areas in a wide open area, etc. I thought I will share with you some of the pictures I had taken. I am not hundred percent sure I like the idea, but it is intriguing. http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~lboloni/Photos/FUN/