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…and mazel tov to their parents Lisa and Bart, too! What a wonderful day this was for all of us who shared in their “simcha”. The kids (who are twins) were superbly prepared, and the “ruach” of the day was infectious. Their family roots go very deep into our community, and it was a rare treat that there were four generations in attendance, including all four grandparents, and even a great-grandma!
Ashley and her family and friends celebrated her big “simcha” this weekend with a wonderful service at Peninsula Temple Beth El and a truly non-traditional bat mitzvah party at the Supper Club in San Francisco. I’ve known her family for a while now, as her older sister and my son were “an item” for a while in middle school. They’re a fun bunch and I really enjoyed myself.
Jonathan and his family and friends gathered to celebrate his bar mitzvah this weekend. He was well-practiced, and it was a beautiful day at Temple Beth Am in Los Altos and evening at the Stanford Faculty Club.
Update (August 19, 2008): Intel have announced that they’re jumping into the Solid State Disk business: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10018837-64.html
I am amazed at Moore’s Law. For those who may not be familiar with this great piece of computer history, it goes something like this…
Way back in 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore wrote in a research paper that he believed that the number of transistors able to be placed on a circuit board would roughly double every two years. He could not envision this continuing beyond even ten years, when that would place over 65,000 transistors on a single board. Imagine his delight all these years later when he sees things like this.
Digital cameras record their images on “compact flash” or “SD” memory cards. The SD cards are considerably smaller, and are becoming more favorable because of their size advantage. Their capacity has now caught up with their larger siblings, as evidenced by Kingston’s announcement of a 16 GB SD card.
I won’t bore you with yet another accounting of how much of the Library of Congress would fit on that one card. 
But consider this:
Currently the largest available conventional hard drives are one terabyte (that’s roughly one thousand gigabytes, or 1 million megabytes) in size. They’re available from all the major hard drive manufacturers. So I did some math and imagined if you were to build a storage device made up of not a high-speed magnetic platter, but a whole bunch of these little SD cards.
The SD card spec says that the cards must be 24mm X 32mm X 2.1mm in size.
A standard 3.5” one terabyte hard drive is roughly 26mm X 101.4mm X 147mm in size.
So, based on my redimentary calculations, that means if you were to attach a whole lot of SD cards together (I figure 200 would work) so that they could fit in the same space, you’d end up with a solid state storage device which requires very little power, weighs 40% less than a hard drive, and stores over three terabytes. And it would work a lot faster than a hard drive, too.
Unfortunately, at a retail price of around $230 each, this whiffy storage device would cost you $46,000. But remember Moore’s Law, and just wait a few years!
[Update as of Feb 1, 2008] As if to prove how quickly things change, today I saw that Sandisk has announced a 32GB SD card. So take the calculations above and double them. Except for the price, which is $350, so the cost of your 6.5 terabyte solid state disk would be a nice round $70,000.
(Images courtesy of Kingston, Inc. and Sandisk, Inc.)
My dear friend Ken Wornick invited me along with him to document some of his work today. Ken is a devoted and talented winemaker, and his La Honda Winery in Redwood City is totally a diamond in the rough. He’s also the proprietor of Post & Trellis residential vineyards, and has built some beautiful vineyards all over the San Francisco Bay Area.
Ken’s objective is to decorate the walls of La Honda with some beautiful, large prints of some of their vineyards. So we headed of very early this morning with just enough gear to be able to shoot out in the fields. It was a terrific day, capped off by an amazing lunch at the awesome Village Pub in Woodside.
Ken promised he’d write wrote about our day in his blog, so check him out when you have a chance!
Here are a few photographic highlights of our day:
Halie is celebrating her bat mitzvah in a few weeks, and she and her mom stopped by my studio for a portrait today. She has the most wonderful freckles and her personality is a perfect match for her brilliant pink sneakers.
I can’t wait to celebrate with her and her family and friends.
In April of 2007, I had a remarkable opportunity. I was asked to film an brief interview with His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama in San Francisco. I wrote a story about this extraordinary day (and the days and days of preparation which led up to it) here. Please give it a read if you’re curious.
On the eve of the opening of the Olympics in the Peoples’ Republic of China, I thought it might be time to share this work with you here. I’m really not trying to make a political statement, but rather I just want to share the words of a man who touched my life in a real way that day last year.
It is copyrighted material, so please understand that I am exercising my rights as a citizen journalist to share this material with you. So without further ado, here is the piece.
We had a lovely morning adventure today. We loaded up the kids and went out to Año Nuevo state beach in search of their resident Elephant Seals. Although it’s neither the mating season or the breeding season (the most popular times to see them) we wanted to have a day. So off we went. We parked in the main parking lot and walked the 2.5 miles or so down to the beaches where the seals congregate. At this moment in their year, the seals are molting. It’s primarily the large males who are on the beaches alongside the juveniles. The mature females are somewhere out in the Pacific between Pescadero and the Hawaiian Islands loading up on squid.
Anyway, we ran across a couple of pups who were actually up and (sort of) about. Both were kind enough to offer me the opportunity to photograph them and photograph them I did.
I’m honored and excited to be celebrating and documenting Hannah’s bat mitzvah this weekend. We had a fun portrait session so that she’d have a nice, recent (and accurate!) photograph of her for her guests to sign.
