Today three of us (I was also giving a ride to a friend of my new friend, who joined us later in the evening) drove from Cambria back up route 1 to Silicon Valley. This is not a place one can find on a map, rather a virtual (no pun intended) area spanning San Jose, Santa Clara, and Palo Alto, and it where all the big IT firms are based.
My natural interest in the subject lead me to Intel, past Sun, to Google. Intel had an interesting, but very basic museum, which I enjoyed. The assistant insisted I ask him a question, so I did, and he could not answer it (is the silicon doped or used simply as a substrate? Just as a substrate is the answer). Google, on the other hand, was quite disappointing. I went to the visitor lobby, and enquired about what one might see, and I was rather rudely dismissed: "Google is a closed campus and we don`t allow visitors." I had to settle for a photo of the street sign. There were a lot of geeks in Google tee-shirts wandering around either deep in thought or deep in a mental vacuum.
I drove to San Francisco and dropped my passengers at the park before heading to the house of my friend from University, Lisa. It was wonderful to see her and to catch up, as well as to eat a delicious home-cooked roast dinner. Hers was the first familiar face I had seen in weeks.