Day 3: Richmond Costco Bark Park -- Mitch and Simeon's Excellent Adventure to Berkeley 2/15/08 - 2/19/08

Simeon was really tired and grumpy this morning. I hope he can cheer up for the judges and take home another victory. We had breakfast at "Nations" again. I plan to buy new tires for the car at the Richmond Costco. Arnold is meeting me there at 10am, after which we shall ask the GPS for ideas about what to do. When our family lived here from '92 to '05, Richmond was the crime capital of the area, with more violent crime per capita than any area city, even more than East Palo Alto.

http://www.cityrating.com still ranks Richmond among the worst US cities. I remember visiting the Richmond high school to try to get the kids away from drugs and into computers a few times. The school was like a prison.

Arnold is great. We walked around the bark park next to Costco (Point Isabel Regional Shoreline) while waiting for Costco to put on the tires. There were dozens and dozens of doggies off-leash, swimming, flirting, fighting, and playing. From Point Isabel you can see the golden gate, the bay bridge, and a big Island -- I think it's Angel Island but it seems too far North, opposite Tiburon. You can see the bridges behind the doggie pictures I snapped with my phone.

Arnold is hard pressed to hire a large number of people for his new start-up http://www.reardenlabs.com/ where he is running all of networking, operations, data center, systems administration, and operability engineering. He wants Simeon to interview there for a summer job. The social network of people we formed at Synopsys in 1992, including the SAGE professional organization, the kernel of Operations people at Netscape, WebTV, TellMe Networks, GNAC, and others has mostly splintered and disintegrated. Mark Verber is coasting along at Metaweb; J and Rory are at Ooma.com; none of the great people we nurtured are interested in another start-up. A few nibbled but turned down Arnold's offers. So Arnold is looking to create a new community of more junior people who have fire in their bellies and want the intensity of a start-up environment instead of a relaxed, comfortable, big place. He will probably raid Google and Yahoo now that their stocks are gliding down towards the toilet.

Arnold is also very active at the Christa Mcauliffe school in Cupertino. He showed me a movie on his phone of their last week-long field trip outing. It was interesting how the kids had to plan and execute their homesteading simulation. Arnold claims that phones like ours with large displays will completely replace wallet snapshots and small photo albums. Maya suggested lunch at the Pacific East mall where most of the shops and restaurants had no English translations of their Chinese (Taiwan) signs and menus. The food was good, the service was slow, and the mall was nice.