A Phoenix

San Francisco is one of the greatest cities of the last hundred years. It sparked the Summer of Love, helped launch a global music movement, and became the definitive epicenter of modern technology.

I grew up 69 miles south in Morgan Hill, back when it was mostly farmers and ranchers, but I spent plenty of time as a teenager hanging out in the Haight. As a kid, outside of Santa Cruz and the redwoods, my favorite places were the Exploratorium and Alcatraz.

San Francisco still leads the world in innovation, and today it sits at the center of the AI supercycle. I live in San Diego now, but I’m in San Francisco a few times a month since OPAQUE’s largest office is on New Montgomery (just down from House of Shields — and old haunt of mine in past tech super cycles) in the city and many customer and partner conversations happen in the Bay Area.

Like the phoenix, San Francisco has a habit of burning down and rebuilding itself. After the 1906 earthquake—and again after the pandemic—the city was declared finished, only to reemerge around the next technological inflection point. Today that rebirth is happening through AI, with talent, capital, and experimentation reconverging as platforms reset. The metaphor works not because it’s poetic, but because SF’s history shows renewal follows real innovation. Often I’ll hear people bemoan the destruction of SF during the pandemic. Don’t count on it. This Phoenix always rises again, renewed, different, but always beautiful.

My rituals: Run along the Embarcadero and back through China town. Zevi for lunch, Working Girls across the street from OPAQUE for coffee and a bagel (hi Max), and Fang for working dinners.

Some cities shape who you become (as is the case for me with SF); San Francisco keeps shaping what comes next, globally.

Trip Reflections from the United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates creates quite an impression. The country is anchored in a rich and long history that stretches from pre-history to ancient desert trade routes to coastal pearl-diving villages, yet it’s moving at a pace that makes western ambition seem tired. It feels decades ahead of the United States. Dubai’s kinetic and surreal skyline is a striking contrast with the historic old town. Abu Dhabi has a kind of cultural gravity and an incredible mosque. The quiet vastness of the Sharjah desert…I love the desert. The visuals were literally awesome and the people were warm, welcoming, and high-integrity.

I was there last July and I’ve been meaning to write about it. It was in the 90s F and humid. I still managed a 3-4 mile jog every morning. It was the equivalent of a Florida Summer, but it was unusually cool for that time of year.

As always, some brief history—because I love it. Human settlement on the Arabian Peninsula dates back over 100,000 years, with archaeological sites in the UAE showing early stone-tool industries, Bronze Age metallurgy, and extensive pre-Islamic trade networks linking Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Indus Valley. Coastal communities relied on fishing and pearl diving for centuries, while inland tribes moved with the seasons across desert oases. By the 16th century, European and regional powers competed for influence along the Gulf’s strategic maritime corridor, but the interior remained defined by tribal alliances, trade, and pilgrimage routes that shaped the region’s cultural continuity well into the modern era.

Some more interesting facts :

The UAE hosts one of the world’s oldest known pearling cultures; divers once descended 20-30 meters on a single breath, and many coastal towns still map to historic pearling fleets.
The traditional wind tower (barjeel) is an indigenous form of natural air-conditioning; entire neighborhoods in old Dubai were engineered around passive cooling centuries before electricity.
The Arabian oryx—once extinct in the wild—was reintroduced through UAE-led conservation and is now one of the world’s most successful large-mammal recovery efforts.
Sharjah’s Mleiha archaeological zone contains a 130,000-year human migration trail, one of the oldest documented routes of Homo sapiens out of Africa.
The date palm, a cultural and agricultural backbone of the Emirates, has supported food security for over 7,000 years; today the UAE maintains global gene banks to preserve lineage diversity.
Dubai Creek is a natural inlet that enabled centuries of Indian Ocean trade; its shape and depth dictated the city’s earliest merchant settlements long before oil or skyscrapers.
The Empty Quarter (Rub’ al Khali), which covers part of the UAE, contains dune systems that migrate up to 30 meters a year—an environment that shaped Bedouin navigation, camel-breeding, and oral poetry traditions.
The falconry heritage is so integral that UAE falcons carry their own passports for international travel; it reflects a conservation tradition that brought the once-endangered saker falcon population back from collapse.

I was thrilled to experience this place firsthand. Awesome is the best word to describe it. I look forward to returning to explore more.

South Park Walk

South Park grew out of the 1905 Bartlett real-estate development, one of San Diego’s earliest streetcar suburbs. The 30th Street trolley line pulled middle-class residents south of Balboa Park and produced a dense run of Craftsman and Spanish Revival homes that still define the neighborhood. The area later became a small commercial district anchored by independent shops and cafés as postwar suburbanization bypassed it. Its present culture reflects that streetcar DNA: walkable blocks, preserved early-20th-century architecture, and a steady community focus on historic conservation.

Freedom

Indigenous Bees

Avignon: A Brief, Photogenic History

Avignon sits on a limestone outcrop above the Rhône, a strategic perch that’s drawn humans since prehistoric settlements ringed the riverbanks. The Romans formalized it in the 1st century BCE as Avenio, a fortified trading post tied into the Via Agrippa road network. The bones of that layout still shape the old city’s narrow lanes—perfect for close-up architectural shots of stone textures and surviving Roman foundations.

Everything changed in the 14th century, when the papacy relocated from Rome to Avignon—first under Pope Clement V, then firmly established by John XXII. For nearly 70 years, Avignon was the administrative and spiritual capital of Western Christianity. This is the era that produced the massive Palais des Papes, Europe’s largest Gothic fortress-palace.

Across the river, Villeneuve-lès-Avignon emerged as the papacy’s defensive counterweight. When the popes settled in Avignon, they needed control of both banks of the Rhône to secure trade, movement, and military access. The French crown—keen to assert influence without directly challenging papal authority—established Villeneuve as a royal town. To anchor that power and guard the river crossing, the French built the formidable Fort Saint-André atop Mount Andaon.

The fort’s purpose was twofold. Militarily, it dominated the Rhône valley and kept a watchful eye on Avignon itself. Politically, it was a reminder that even while the papacy ruled the city, France controlled the high ground. Its massive walls and twin towers still photograph beautifully: clean sight lines, panoramic overlooks of the Palais des Papes, and vantage points that show how the Rhône once defined borders, loyalties, and strategies.

Taken together, Avignon and Villeneuve tell a single story—one city holding spiritual power, the other holding the heights—shaping a medieval landscape that still reads clearly through a modern lens.

Winter in Paris

J’adore Paris

Thirty-six Frames

I started a photography exercise of photographing a subject thirty-six times with pre-fixed constraints and from different angles, composition, and camera settings. Thirty-six because this is how many shots a roll of film usually had.

**Art is the output of one’s passion for improving the world.**

It’s an exercise in mindfulness and presence. You might enjoy this too. Here’s the pattern.

36 Frames Challenge

Pick a single subject/location. (e.g., a café corner, a stairwell, a street intersection, your kitchen sink at noon.)
Set constraints.
- One lens/focal length.
- No burst mode. No “chimping” (don’t check the screen).
- Meter once, then adjust only when the light changes.
Warm‑up (frames 1–6). Explore angles: high/low, near/far, front/backlight.
Light study (frames 7–18). Track how light shapes form: side‑light for texture, backlight for rim/flare, open shade for skin.
Composition study (frames 19–30). Work one idea at a time: leading lines, layers, frames‑within‑frames, negative space, symmetry/asymmetry.
Decisive moments (frames 31–36). Wait for timing: gestures, overlaps separating, clean backgrounds.

Edit immediately

Import, hide filenames, and star only 5. No ties.
For each keeper, write one sentence: “Side‑light revealed texture on the brick; foreground blur added depth; subject isolated against shadow.”

Settings shorthand (use as a start, then adjust)

Daylight street: f/5.6, 1/500s, ISO 200.
Indoors window light: f/2–f/2.8, 1/125s, ISO 400–800.
Night city: f/1.8–f/2.8, 1/60s (brace), ISO 1600–3200.

Variations for different goals

People skills: same subject, three distances (full/half/close), one expression per frame.
Monochrome study: shoot B&W only; look for shape/contrast.
Geometry day: only leading lines and negative space.
Color hunt: anchor each frame on one dominant color + a counterpoint.

As much as I love photography, it’s a shame photos are shared on Instagram where one can’t really see and experience them fully.

Enjoy. 🙂

The Carrier Bag

In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K. Le Guin argues that storytelling (and human culture) shouldn’t be defined by the linear “hero slays monster” narrative (the spear or arrow), but rather by a “carrier bag” model: stories that gather, hold, and weave multiple voices and experiences into a dense and consumable package.

Many scholars believe the carrier bag was the earliest human invention. It makes sense because before a weapon to kill for meat there was the forager and the forager requires a means of carrying and storing surplus.

This concept changes the very nature of story, technology, and business. All of which are commonly communicated as a conflict. The hero slays the monster. The winner vanquished their foes. However, there’s another way to see a story and human endeavors. That of a collection, a process, a gathering and storing of progress.

I see all human endeavors as art. Travel, exercise, business, and technology. Building a company or a new technology doesn’t have to be approached as a conquest. It can be seen as an act of collection for the greater good. We gather ideas, constraints, possibilities, people and carry these forward in a fungible form in an effort to advance and improve the experience for all people. The value isn’t domination it’s the creation of freedom through new possibilities.

Update: my wife told me she now understands why I buy too many bags.

The color of joy

My wife is in a writing workshop. We’re each taking a prompt and writing for 10 minutes and then reading to each other what we wrote. It’s fun and connecting. 🙂 This was our first run on the color of joy and the color of grief. The grief one is too personal to share.

There are these moments in life when you can see past the veil of the world that’s bigger than our reality. The filters are removed and you can glimpse the truth of life. The awesome wonder and magic of it all. The limitless possibilities. The boundless beauty. We’re filled with joy from the wonder of it all. I’ve seen this most often through the eyes of my children when they were young and still close to the divine. Before the world layered its gauzy clothes of trauma and fear over their eyes. I’ve had these moments alone in nature. Seeing the vastness and age of it all in geological, not human time. And I’ve had this experience riding motorcycles on empty roads into the oblivion at the edge of the world, beyond human perception. This bliss, this pure joy in the wonder of it all is the bright yellow of the universe that shines through our souls and connects us with all things alive, dead, and yet to be born.