What Was New: November 26, 1999Carmel, Monterey, LA, Oracle, Getty, Los Angeles(Gregory Melle's Web Diary / Blog)
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| In mid-November I attended the Oracle OpenWorld show in Los Angeles. I drove to L.A. and could not resist making a few photos. (Actually I made a lot -- this is just a small sample.) |
I started in San Juan Bautista with a stop for a few photos and some coffee. The waitresses at the Mission Cafe were feeding a local street rooster.
I drove through Pacific Grove and then took the 17 Mile Drive along the coastal golf courses of Pebble Beach to Carmel. They are all lovely places but I am more comfortable living in a place where real people actually work. I think that I would prefer living in someplace like San Juan Bautista or Armstrong, BC to living in Carmel or Beverly Hills. Some places are great for visiting while others are places to get things done. Another example is the laid back vacation lifestyle in Australia in comparison to the working excitement of Silicon Valley. There are even a few places great to both visit and work in; examples are New York and London.
The night was spent in Pismo Beach. It is an attractive and low rent version of the more famous resort towns. I was surprised to see so many beach walkers out early on a Sunday Morning. I spent time on the pier trying to catch a good surfing photo -- but snapping the shutter at the right moment is very tricky.
In this area it is much drier than the forests found further north. Much of California is quite sparse.
27 miles north of Santa Barbara I scrambled up a hill to get the best view of these railway and highway bridges. The second photo is a Malibu beach view.
The computer show went well. I collected lots of free pens, bags,
t-shirts, hats and software.
Breakfast, lunch, dinner and drinks were generously provided. One evening
they even rented the Universal Studios theme park for our private party.
Oracle is a database software company.
They -- along with Sun Microsystems -- are the biggest software forces
pushing business onto the Internet. The show was in the immense Los
Angeles Convention centre. In most of the keynote speeches you could see
better by watching the big projection screens. Oracle's Ray Lane brought
his youngest son out while he introduced Scott McNealy from Sun. The
second photo is looking north from the new Staples Arena which is next
door to the convention centre.
I took some sightseeing time at the end. Los Angeles is not famous for it's downtown but actually has some impressive building architecture.
They even have the world's shortest railway to get up one steep hill. Angel's Flight rises a 33% grade for 515 feet. This cable railway was built in 1901 and tickets cost 25 cents.
I visited what is referred to as the new J. Paul Getty Museum at The Getty centre. It has a magnificent hillside location north of Sunset Boulevard near Santa Monica. Most visitors arrive by tram. (Parking requires advance reservations). I was lucky to arrive just as the sun was setting.
Even though the art was magnificent the building impressed me just as much. The last of this group is the station for the return tram trip.
Examples of the art inside include these Rembrandt paintings. The first is technically perfect work made as a young man. The second is a painting done 30 years later that could have been made created 300 years later.
On Friday, before I left town, I was off to Wilshire Boulevard for a quick trip to both the Petersen car collection and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. They both contain equally valuable visual treasures. Petersen had fewer American muscle cars than on my previous visit. It did have hot rods such as this "1934 Ford 3 Window Coupe Hot Rod" and this "1932 Ford - Bob McGee High Boy".
The county art museum is just across the street. Between the buildings and the street is the LaBrea Tar Pits. They are famous for the many Saber Tooth Tiger and Woolly Mammoth bones pulled from the tar.
They have a good Rodin collection which will be shown elsewhere.
Unfortunately special exhibits and construction hid some things that I had
planned to see.
About the same time that the Dutch masters were doing their thing some
Japanese master was creating this jar - an example of impressionism in
clay. It now resides in the City of Angels.
On my return trip I drove up the East side of the Sierras. I spent the night in the town of Mojave. The local airport has a lot of aircraft stored in the desert air.
At Lone Pine one can see a magnificent view of the high Sierra. Mount Whitney is the highest mountain in the lower 48 United States. It is one of the lower bumps in the middle of the first photo. The second photo is a few miles at the site of the WWII Manzanar detention camp.
Finally a view near Mono Lake with and another taken as I headed back into the mountain passes. I was all prepared for deep snow since many of the highway passes were already closed for the winter. As normal in California, the secondary highways are neglected as the major budget money is spent on multi-level freeway interchanges. I was surprised to find little snow but the fog was extreme and the road had no shoulders. Thankfully there was little evening traffic on Highway 88.
I am back in San Jose -- hard at work on my computer projects. I have deadlines to meet in early December then I should have a few weeks free for the holiday season.
| Earlier Page - November #1 1999 | Later Page - December 1999 |
