A “European” Evening in California

My family and I spent an evening strolling around after dinner at Santana Row in San Jose last night. Santana Row is fairly new shopping mall with a “European atmosphere,” a trendsetter in the shopping mall industry. Apparently every recent mall project in California wants to be just like Santana Row. Here’s what it looks like:

Note the interesting elements such as narrow streets, open seating areas, lampposts, strings of hanging lights, building façades, mixed residence and retail, and outdoor dining areas. (That’s Left Bank at the right edge of the picture.)

If you squint a lot, this does kind of feel like you’re in Europe. Especially if you position yourself downwind of somebody smoking.

My wife said this place reminded her of Downtown Disney.

It’s true. If you peek around the corner, there’s the gigantic parking structure, and the intersection of Stevens Creek and Winchester Boulevards, each with six lanes of traffic and massive congestion so typical of California.

More pics below.

The palm trees kind of ruin the Europe-like effect.

I have to say, though, that this was a remarkably pleasant place to spend some time on a late Spring evening in California.

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Meet The New Blog, The Same As The Old Blog

Welcome to my new blog. Why a new blog, given that I have two others that I’m not using?

I wasn’t using those other blogs, not because I didn’t have time to blog or ideas to blog about, but instead because I felt inhibited blogging on them.

It’s easy to explain why I wasn’t using the java.net blog. I created it for the phoneME project, part of the Mobile & Embedded community that Sun created on java.net around open source Java ME. That blog was tied to that project and that community. I haven’t been involved in that community for nearly two years, so it didn’t seem sensible for me to use it.

The S Marks The Spot blog is a bit harder to explain. I’m a Sun employee, I have been for a long time, and I’m not intending to leave anytime soon. Sun lets its employees create blogs on blogs.sun.com, but not everything there has to be Sun-related. In fact lots of people post lots of non-Sun things on their Sun blogs. Sun has a fairly liberal blogging policy that even encourages this. Furthermore, after a blogger leaves Sun, their material normally is preserved for viewing (though they can’t post anymore). I think it’s great that Sun has this policy. So why don’t I take advantage of it?

I did for a while. But after a while I noticed that I’d have ideas but I wasn’t motivated to write them up. Sometimes I’d even write up entries but not post them. I had built up a lot of internal resistance to posting there.

It took a while, but I finally figured out that the problem was the ambiguity inherent in having a “personal” blog on a corporation’s website. Is my Sun blog about me, or is it really a “corporate” blog written and edited by me? This ambiguity is reflected in how I describe it: “my Sun blog.” Is it my blog or Sun’s blog? The ambiguity is also reflected in the flame-wars that have popped up several times on Sun’s internal bloggers mailing list. The argument is between those who believe blogs must be personal and authentic, and those who believe that blogs are a tool of marketing and communication and should be used to their fullest advantage. The first group of people think that blogs in the second group are somehow invalid.
I actually think corporate blogs are fine. After all, I don’t expect Jonathan’s blog or our corporate counsel’s blog to do much other than represent the company position. But I didn’t want a blog like that. Worse, I didn’t want to create a personal blog on sun.com and have to try to convince anybody that it wasn’t a corporate blog.

And, in case it hadn’t occurred to you, I should mention that Sun has announced, but not yet executed, layoffs of up to 18% of its workforce. Whether or not I survive this round of layoffs, it’s a reminder that I won’t be at Sun forever: yet another reason not to invest in a Sun blog.

So here we are. Maybe this shouldn’t be viewed as a new blog, but as a continuation of my old blog. I hope for it to become everything that I wanted my old blog to be, but never became. Welcome.

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