Go West, Young Man

The phrase "Go West, Young Man" was a phrase (incorrectly) attributed to Horace Greeley. One man who listened to this was Josiah Grinnell who went on to found Grinnell College. Now, you might ask, as many do, "Where the hell is Grinnell?" which works just as well for my alma mater ("Where the hell is Cornell?"--indeed, I know one guy who went to Grinnell as an undergrad, then Cornell as a grad). Grinnell is in Iowa, by the way.

I went to the more traditional west a few weeks ago, post ETECH '06 which was held in sunny San Diego. At least, it was supposed to be sunny. As I was noticing that southern Cal is not nearly as warm as advertised in early March and then hearing reports that temperatures were reaching the 70s in DC, I was thinking of how I could get my money back for failing to produce wonderful weather. Where's the Guvenator when you need him? Am I going to have to find Chuck Norris to kick Mama Nature's derriere?

The main highway near Mountain View, which is north of San Jose, is highway 101. On this road you can reach both Google on the Amphitheatre Parkway. California roads are strange right around San Jose. None of the highway exits are numbered. Further north, at Embarcadero Road, you can head towards Stanford University.

Most of us who care think of the elite universities as Ivy Leagues. The Ivy League is really an athletic conference. Perhaps the only sports they are any good at are hockey and lacrosse, and even then, a few other non-Ivies are competitive. The following eight universities comprise the Ivies: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Darmouth, and Brown. There are universities, of course, that have academic reputations similar to the Ivies, most notably, in that area, MIT, but are, nonetheless, not officially Ivy Leagues. Athletic conference. Remember that. Not a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

People who attend Ivy Leagues get snitty about that. Folks at Penn have it worse because some folks confuse Penn State (which is Pennsylvania State University, the one with the good football team) with University of Pennsylvania.

There are also other schools with good academic reputations. I grew up in the south, and there aren't a whole lot of great universities there. Among the ones people point to are: Virginia Tech, University of Virginia, Duke, Vanderbilt, Emory. And that's encompasses the following states: Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida. Heck, put the entire SEC in there (Arkansas, Louisiana, etc). I mean, there are other universities that might qualify for being "good", certainly, people are educated well enough at each states' flagship university.

As you head into the Northeast, you could include all of the Ivies, then all the small colleges in the area. Swarthmore, Amherst, Williams. Towards the midwest, you'd have Purdue, Notre Dame, Illinois, Michigan, Northwestern, Washington University. At this point, you'd jump out west. UC Berkeley, University of Washington, UCLA, UCSD, some of the Claremont Colleges.

Of the universities in the west, the one with the best reputation is Stanford University. (A close second is Berkeley, and then, I might head to University of Washington or UCSD or UCLA after that).

When I arrived in San Jose, I wanted to visit Stanford. I was trying to visit there and also meet up with a friend for lunch. This turned out to be trickier than expected. In particular, I forgot that checkout at most hotels is around noon. My friend had been out at some party or some such, and had come back in the wee hours of the morning. He wasn't expecting to wake up for a noon lunch, and wanted to meet at about 2 PM. Fine, I said. I wasn't sure he'd even meet up.

Then, I headed to Stanford. I had originally intended to get there around 9 AM, and hang out for a few hours, but I woke up rather tired, and didn't hit the road til sometime past 10 AM. By the time I found where Stanford was, it was just past 11.

For a guy who's never been to California until a week earlier, and who had been used to east coast universities, seeing streets lined with palm trees is exotic. I parked at a lot, and headed to the visitor's center. It was Saturday. Buildings at Stanford have a very south-of-the-border look, with ruffled brick roofs that make it look quite unlike buildings out east (or even north, up in Seattle). I was told that the tour group had left 15 minutes earlier, and the next one wouldn't head out until about 4 PM. I had to leave around 4 to catch my flight so that was out of the question.

I took a campus map and tried to catch up with the group. The first thing you notice about Stanford is just how expansive and empty it is. There are large buildings, but they seem to sit in isolation, at least, at some parts of the university. There's large areas of grass, and plenty of palm trees. The day was nice, if not overly warm. Sunny, with a few clouds above, it's the vision you have of California.

As I walked, I notice there were sculptures. It was more like walking through a museum than a college campus. I walked by a church with a large painting on the wall. Then, I saw the Bill Gates computer science building. They were hosting a Ph.D. admit weekend, but the doors were locked, and so I didn't try to go inside. (Excuse me, the William Gates building).

Bill Gates, of course, never attended Stanford. He was a Harvard boy, and is famously known for not completing his degree. That's OK, Sergei and Larry haven't finished their Ph.Ds at Stanford. However, Stanford is prestigious, and it's in California, and Bill's rich. He can afford. Buddy Paul Allen, who cofounded Microsoft, has his own building in Seattle, up near Microsoft land.

I walked by a Hewlett building and a Packard building (surprise, they're side by side). Eventually, I went to the Stanford bookstore to look around. The one on campus looks more like an R.E.I. with clear roofs, lots of wood, a coffee shop on the second floor, and wireless for the student population. It's a nice bookstore. I also had a bit of a headache which I was trying to remedy by gulping coffee.

I was planning to get in touch with my friend around 2 PM. Since I couldn't use my laptop to connect, I borrowed the display Mac laptops on the second floor and emailed my friend.

At that point, with time to kill, I walked around the area some more, and eventually found a hair salon. The salon only had two people working there, a woman and a guy. Apparently, they ran few hours on Saturday, but I was in early enough. I decided to get a haircut.

For some reason, I like getting haircuts at places I visit, especially on or near a campus. I've been to University of Washington, Seattle (referred to as "You Dub" by the locals as opposed to "Wash You" which is what they call Washington University in St. Louis) three times, and had haircuts at Rudy's (?) two times.

The woman who cut my hair had been living in the Stanford area some 40 years. She'd been cutting hair since the heyday of the 60s and 70s, and it was now 2006. I wonder what that's like. Working in one place, one prominent place, for that many years. Who's hair did she cut? Like many hair stylists, she talked a lot. She talked about how the price of living there was so high, how she originally didn't have a lot of training, but always seemed to know how to cut hair. She said the cut that she gave me would be no fuss for a while until the hair grew out more. That was just fine with me.

I got back to the bookstore just after 2 and headed upstairs to the Macs. Checking my email, I found that my friend has sent email some 10 minutes before 1, and was double-checking if I was going to be there. I had told him the change of plans, that he should no longer meet me at my hotel, but arrange to meet me at Stanford. He then gave me an address of a Japanese restaurant near campus.

This restaurant is on University Ave, which isn't really on campus, but certainly has a nice assortment of shops and restaurants. I was supposed to meet him around 2:30, but didn't actually arrive until 2:45, having parked my rental at the nearby parking garage.

I had sushi, my friend had a bento box. He was rather obsessed about the website he ran, which he devoted many hours of the day. It was clear that he was a bit frazzled, but then, he runs his own life. I had hoped to hang out at his place until I had to leave for the airport, but he didn't want to hang out that long. Said he had to go back to work. Things to do. He drove off in the same car he had back in grad school.

He told me there was a Border's nearby, so I went there. That was a bit of a trick as I took the wrong road to get there. I think I passed by a Whole Foods, some guy at a soccer field. It didn't help that my friend wasn't particularly specific about which direction Border's was.

It's an unusual Border's built at the site of a former movie theater, and even then, it looks a bit like a Spanish house, with a courtyard area. Despite claims they had wireless, I couldn't actually connect. I headed outside and saw an Apple Store, and headed inside. At least, I knew they had wireless. I fired up my laptop, and spoke to some friends on the east coast. It was perhaps 4 PM by then. I was about 5 blocks from where I parked.

By the time I reached my car, it was 5 PM. My flight was scheduled for 8 PM. I thought I should head there. I didn't have much more to do.

I knew I was supposed to take 101 to the airport. I had been there the day before to pick up a rental car, the result of miscommunication between me and another friend whose apartment I thought I was staying at (instead, I was at a hotel, and had a rental car, and didn't end up seeing her all of Saturday). It turned out for the better. She lives about twenty minutes further away than I was from the airport.

As I drove, I saw a sign to go to long-term parking, but I figured that wasn't where I was supposed to go. So I drove some more, and all of a sudden I see I'm passing the airport. Uh oh, something's wrong. I'm driving, for all I know, to Mexico, or at least, to Los Angeles. I'm off 101 and trying to figure out where I am, how I plan to find 101 again.

This was one of those things that's a minor disaster. But since I had left around 5 PM, I had like two hours to get to the airport, and I figured this would, at worst, add half an hour, and I was an hour earlier than planned.

Eventually, I saw a sign for 101, and figured, worse gets to worse, I head north, and I'll eventually turn around and head south again. But as luck would have it, there were signs to the airport, and I followed it. San Jose, by the way, has the most windiest roads around the airport. As I drove my rental out of the airport, I followed another car, which headed behind a barrier.

Mistake. Only people working for rental cars were heading back there. How was I supposed to know? A guy in a turban, a Sikh, I'm sure, banged on the car with the flat of his hand. He wanted me to back up, and had to hold up traffic to do so. I nearly hit the barrier itself, when he banged on the back again, and finally managed to squeeze out, and head back to my hotel.

Anyway, I'm in San Jose airport around 6ish or so. This is the week that most conferences are holding their championships. I'm sitting in the Expedia bar. Yeah, they have a bar. I'm drinking some alcohol. I eventually head to the airport, and log onto the airport's wireless. That cost a few bucks. You'd imagine most airports would all have decent wireless. Indeed, LA sucks for that reason. You can use a makeshift computer they have, but no wireless. At least, San Jose has wireless.

If memory serves, the flight is running an hour late. As it was, I wouldn't get onto the airplane at LA until maybe midnight or so, and so an hour delay didn't make much of a difference at San Diego. The layover was either in San Jose or LA, and San Jose had wireless.

Then, I flew from LA to Chicago. It was maybe 7 AM when I arrived there. Then, a flight to DC. When I arrived at DC, there were a bunch of teens that were arriving. It was probably one of those civics groups. You know, those upwardly mobile, I run for student council types, who want to visit DC. I knew their names at the time and had planned to look it up, but can't recall it anymore. The participants had t-shirts. It's times like that that I wonder all those people who trek to DC for one reason or another, especially students, since these are formative periods in their lives. What do they think of National Airport? What will they think of DC?

Jay picks me up from the Greenbelt station, and we head to Bagel Place for a cheap lunch. Jay's nice and dependable in that way. He's almost always home, and he doesn't sleep until noon on the weekends.

It's now a few weeks since this happened, and I write this mostly as a log of what I've done. I have to search my memory to recall what the whole trip was like. I find it's interesting to think that here it was, Sunday, and the day before, I was walking the Stanford campus, taking pictures. The day before I was at an Apple Store, and at a Borders, and eating at a Japanese restaurant.

And now I was back in College Park.

And the vacation was done.