The Reverse Commute On Wednesdays I drive down towards downtown San Diego, which is where the University of San Diego is located. I was a commuter in New York City for years, but have never been in that groove (a.k.a. rut) here in San Diego. I teach from 7pm to 9:50pm on Wednesday nights and will do so through May of next year (actually 7pm to 8:50pm in the Spring). That has me leaving home…
The Hallowed Halls I am once again sitting here in the hallway of a building on the campus of the University of San Diego, where I am an adjunct professor in the graduate business program. When I was at Cornell’s graduate business school for ten years, I was not alone as an adjunct professor, but it was not like here. I do not know, nor do I plan to investigate the exact balance between full-time…
Bootstrapping Bootstrapping is a complicated word. Much more complicated than I had imagined until I started looking into it. I would ask you to play along with me and make a note to yourself about what you think of when someone uses the term bootstrapping. I don’t want to bias your thought process by adding a context. The term derives from the small leather loop or tab at the back of a man’s boot that…
Traveling to Enlightenment We went to see the new Ridley Scott movie The Last Duel last night at the local Angelika Film Center. Once again, it was very lightly attended with a mere 8-10 people in the well-appointed theater. The film is set in 1386 or so and chronicles what was the end stages of the Middle Ages in Europe. The movie makes reference to the economic hardship to noblemen and their estates by virtue…
Ode to the Agave On my 2.5 acre property on this sunny hillside, I estimate that I have three hundred agave plants of all sizes and several shapes. I have a series of books on succulents and cacti by Jeff Moore, one of renowned horticultural experts in the field. One of those books is a massive picture book titled Aloes and Agaves in Cultivation. The first 197 pages are dedicated to Aloes with the next…
To Mask or Unmask We are all created with multiple personalities, or at least multiple personas. We would all like to think we are the same person with everyone, but that is simply rarely the case. We are all made up of layers. I know that when my mother was alive, when I was with her, especially at her condo in Las Vegas, I was a respectful and dutiful son. I cared about what she…
Water for Lizards The Sara Gruen novel, Water for Elephants sold 10 million copies and became a hit movie staring Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson and Christoph Waltz. It caught my fancy because it follows the circus life of a young man who must drop out of veterinary school at Cornell and takes to tending elephants for a job. Elephants are strange beasts that inspire all sorts of imagination and whimsy. They are the largest land…
All About Tesla No matter which way I turn these days, I am running into Tesla. TO start with, as I have reported, I own a Tesla X that is now five years old and has a whopping 11,000 miles on the odometer. I have full autonomous functionality on the car and have used it only a half dozen times to show friends how it works. Quite frankly, I’m not a fan of autonomous driving,…
The Antisocial Network Facebook can’t seem to help itself from getting in the news at every turn. It has achieved what I’m sure many people would have declared as unlikely and that is to get just about everyone against them. Watching the 2010 Jesse Eisenberg rendition of Mark Zuckerberg as he spawnsThe Facebook from his Harvard dorm room out of spite for the woman who spurned his affections, you do get a prescient view of…
Chasing Projects My back hillside is finished. My Garden is done and perhaps overdone. My patio area is complete. My games area is ready and waiting. Even my Fairy Garden is set until the next change of season. What then to do with my abundance of time, enthusiasm and need for accomplishment? I guess I now have to rely on three sources of new projects. The obvious first one is to consider what I can…