Archive for December 7th, 2009

Honestly, does anyone have any clue as to what google is doing, or what its priorities are in terms of products and services?

There, I got to the point.  So now allow me to preface…I know that Google is working on a ton of things at once and that none of them are easy.  It’s not easy to make something like Google docs.  So I know it takes time, and that there are going to be lags that make it seem like Google is disjointed when in fact each product team is working diligently on their little areas or features or whatever.  But I still can’t figure out why they have their heads so far up their butts.

Also, please note that I don’t think of myself as either a Google hater or a fanboy.  Google has some good stuff, and they are pretty darn creative.  But they also have their flaws.  My issue, here and now, is that they clearly have resources of amount X, and that they have shown at least a few times when they have not spread that amount effectively.  I’ll give examples of both great and terrible allocation of resources.

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While visiting my wife at her workplace down in Templeton, in California’s Central Coast region, I took some time to do some hiking.  First stop was the Los Osos Oaks State Preserve, which might actually be in Morro Bay rather than Los Osos.  It’s pretty close, I think.  Quite accessible from the Templeton/Paso Robles/Atascadero area – maybe 30 minutes if you average all three starting points.

I read about the preserve in the Sierra Club’s Trail Guide for San Luis Obispo County.  I was drawn by the description of these 800 year old “dwarf oaks,” which are HUGE and have branches so long and so heavy that they have touched back down to the ground for support, then grown out from there.   They really are impressive.  It’s described as “mystical” in the book and that’s actually not a bad description.  I went around noon which made it a bit less so, but I can see a morning hike being quite atmospheric.

The hike is also a level one, and relatively short.  Maybe 100 ft in elevation change and about 2 miles, I think, based on the loop I did.  I spent about 2.5 hours there (note: I’m a slow hiker due to stopping constantly for photos).

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