Another election thought - the Supes

Obama kind of neutralized his appointment of liberal humanist Sotomayor by also naming his conservative constitutionalist professor Kagan.

It is not unlikely that whoever is elected with be appointing as many as FOUR justices.

Ginzburg is 79.
Reagan's two guys Scalia and Kennedy are 76
Breyer is 74

Lately, justices have retired rather than die in office, and there is less tolerance on the bench for a justice who can no longer handle the work load and pressure.

Thought For Food

Someone in the cast just finished a contract at Tivo, and we were discussing the abysmal food choices there. Which led me to think about food at the many places I have worked:

Motorola: break room has soda machines which sometimes are out of diet stuff for days, there is a frozen food machine which stopped being able to keep ice cream or food frozen a long time ago, and a candy machine. There is only one place, a hole in the wall, in walking distance, but plenty of restaurants along El Camino 5 minutes' drive away. And some more in the other direction, about the same distance. It's routine to get a small group together, especially on Fridays, and car pool.

Tivo: There's a break room with no food, but an ice cream machine which works by a vacuum hose sucking out your $2 choice. Also in the break room is a very limited choice of a 3rd-party box lunches, and they also get Waiters on Wheels (or something like it) delivering. And there's a roach coach most days.

Netflix: Free soda, free box lunch from a 3rd party, often all taken before 1 pm. Every now and then we found an insect in the salad. Real bread was rare, most sandwiches were on some spongy substance. Across the street there is a tiny, expensive Chinese place with mediocre food, but last year a pizza and American food place opened up, sort of a sports tavern.

Cisco: There was a good cafeteria in the next building, but they shut it down. Next nearest was a building down the block. Lots of good places near Ranch 99.

Microsoft Mountain View: One building has a big cafeteria with good prices. Very close to Shoreline Park, which has Michael's at the golf course and the café by the lake. In the other direction are a handful of good places too. And there's a 7-11 and Starbucks on the next block.

Kasenna Sunnyvale: no longer around, it was near Lockheed. Nothing in the building. One sandwich place and a lousy Chinese place a fewblocks away. We sometimes drove to McCarthy Ranch for food. I rode my bike to work a lot, so lunch was at the sandwich place.

Kasenna Mountain View: Nothing in the building, but close to Shoreline Park, same routine as Microsoft MV. Since we were a spin-off of SGI, we could walk to their HQ building across the street which had a great cafeteria. That's now Google HQ.

Sony: I don't remember if there was food in the building. I don't think so. We mostly went to Alviso or McCarthy Ranch for lunch.

Roxio Santa Clara: Several places (including Starbucks) in the same block. Mission Coffee Roasting Co. is now closed, was down the block. And across the street behind SCU was a place which had 40-alarm sauce. Sometimes cow-orkers would go to the hospital after eating there, burn victim's unit. Seriously.

Roxio (Adaptec) Milpitas: Small break room in the building, maybe some soda machines, lots of restaurants nearby.

Ipix (Bamboo.com): Nothing in the building, but this was in downtown Palo Alto, fine food central.

Microsoft Redmond: Huge cafeteria across the street, after 7 catering brought a hot buffet to our section (a legacy from before they bought VXtreme). Not much edible nearby.

VXtreme Sunnyvale: Within a block of Kasenna Sunnyvale, same lack of everything nearby, but this place provided free soda, free chips and candy, and at 7 there was hot food brought in from one of the many Mountain View restaurants.

VXtreme Palo Alto: across the way from Stanford Shopping center, lots of good eats, plus free soda, free chips and candy. There were only 20 of us there, I don't think we got dinner there. But we may have.

Starlight Networks: Nothing in the building, limited choices in the area.

UB Networks: Small break room, many of us bought the company-discounted Great America passes and walked there for lunch. There were also a few nearby places.

HP Labs: Big cafeteria down the hill in the corporate building, nothing in Labs that I recall. Near enough to Stanford and many eateries on El Camino which serve the college crowd.

HP Bldg 50: Cafeteria in the building, Valco shopping center nearby.

HP Mountain View: Cafeteria in the building, or maybe it was in the building attached to ours. Limited choices nearby.

HP Santa Clara: Now inhabited by Applied Materials. Break room in the building, Sizzler and Peppermill nearby.

Televideo: Deeply discounted Koren food cafeteria in one of the buildings, limited choices nearby.

Bizcomp: My first day they introduced me to Togo's down the block. There were about 40 people in line ahead of us, and we had our food in 5 minutes. Awesome. We ate or took out from there a lot. And St. John's burgers. And a tiny but excellent Thai place.

Leasametric: Nothing anywhere. We mostly brought our lunches. Sometimes went to Fashion Island, but there was not much there.

And the rest of my tech jobs were field repair, so I ate where I wanted to near wherever they sent me. Let's not even talk about my newspaper jobs. :-(

Thursday

Felt like Friday. Work went slowly, I had to wait for an engineering expert to help troubleshoot, and he didn't break free till 5. And then he worked with the lab IT guy instead. That's fine, because by the time we did that, we decided the issue was bigger than just the one bug I filed.

Home, the backup camera for the new in-dash system arrived, but none of the other pieces.

Rehearsals were almost fruitful. Lots of boring dance repetition, and the time wasters were:
- They don't need the non-dancers for 90% of the three numbers, they could have done our small bits and then come back to beat up the dancers.
- The set is still not safe, and far from complete.
- We had new set pieces (tables and chairs) to deal with
- We could not use the whole stage (They taped the floor to show where missing pieces of the set would block us)
- The big-voiced producer made a lot of needless noise 
- Most of the cast can't shut up. There are loud conversations after each number, and whenever some people are off-stage.
- The orchestra is missing parts. That is, there are instruments which need to be there which are not, and there are two LONG dance breaks where nobody is playing anything resembling the melody because of that.
- Clarinet player kept practicing when director was giving notes.

Other than that, it was a ton of fun.

The clue fairy finally found them at 8:30 and had most of us sent home.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Kaiser - pick up insulin
Rehearsal is a full run-through "with props". We have mostly never seen any props. None. Ever. Or the props person, of whom there may not even be one.