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Okay – this post is a sign that I’m not afraid to admit silliness. So a few days ago I was watching a TV documentation about the new Venetian resort in Macau:

Supposably it’s even bigger and nicer than the one I’ve been to a few times in Las Vegas:

Now the kicker though:
A couple of days later when reading a magazine article about how Venice, Italy is about to sink when the sea level rises just a few inches I had my brain stop for a second or two.
When looking at the Piazza San Marco…

…I actually thought…

Oh my! There’s a Venetian in Venice too now!

Yea. I know. … Don’t say anything…

As requested, here are a few more pictures of BMWs impressive new delivery center – the ‘BMW World’ in Munich. It’s funny, the only other folks I met that were there as early as me was a friendly elderly couple from Los Angeles, who were there to pick up their 535i (about 4 hrs later).

Yesterday I dropped off my car at E.Harms in Frankfurt to have it trucked to Bremerhaven hopefully shipped to Port Hueneme this weekend. The whole delivery time is estimated to be around 8 weeks. Urgh.. those will be tough!

Yes, people are THAT crazy here. I guess the (now-revised) $5K-if-you-buy-a-envirofriendly-but-freakin-ugly-Prius (TM) program has been successful…

I love going to LA. Usually I spend more time in the West LA area, but this time I used our Anaheim hotel location to focus more on the OC. The LA area beach cities are awesome – may it be Manhattan Beach, Newport or Laguna Beach – everyone has their unique flair.

I know as a kid my Disney hero clearly was the underdog: Donald Duck. I just looooved the guy. It took me a few… well… decades really, but I finally managed to get a little hugging and photo shooting done with Donald tonight at Disneyland in Anaheim, CA! And oh yes, that’s Pluto in the back trying to sneek into the picture as well.

Tomorrow I’ll be on my way (thanks to the support of the Virgin America folks) to LAX and then to Anaheim for Google’s yearly ski-trip! Oh wait. There’s no skiing in Anaheim. So what’s this all about?

Well it turns out that Google with it’s 16,805 employees is now so big that we cannot by any means rent enough rooms in Tahoe, so it was decided to give us a choice this year:
- Camping at the Pinnacles National Monument south of Salinas, CA (bring your own tent!)
or
- Disneyland! Google’s got the whole park just for Googler’s after 8pm on Tuesday.

Nuff’ said. Gotta pack my bags!

PS: I decided to rent a car, so as to be more flexible. Don’t really wanna hang out at Disneyland all day…

So I had a literally last-minute idea of driving down to Los Angeles, while I had my usual morning coffee at Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto Thursday morning around 1030ish. Going home, getting a hotel and packing my bags didn’t take long, so I was up and running and right on the road just about an hour later. The drive down 101 was wonderful, no traffic, sunny and warm. As was my time in LA. I think I really like it there. Shopping it up and having dinner in Beverly Hills, dancing in WeHo or strolling along Venice Beach…hm…
I wonder if I shouldn’t look for my next job in the West Los Angeles area…

Driving down on 101 South (near the University Avenue exit in Palo Alto) a cute little billboard sign from our colleagues of Yahoo! awaits you.

I’m wondering who they actually try to reach with this. The billboard is placed against traffic on the leftmost side of an 8-lane grade seperated highway and partially obstructed by bushes and poles, but hey – whatever spreads the mobile word is good for everyone, I think.

I won’t actually comment on the accuracy of their billboard statement. I’ll just quote Wired:
“Yahoo jumps ahead of Google on mobile phone search [Reuters]
Cleverly phrased to sound like a market share story, it isn’t. It’s just one of those weird “news” stories that takes a jolly, light-hearted editorial tone, like a sports report, because the writer knows he’s just writing a fluffy marketing piece. Here, it’s about a new search app for mobiles, with which Yahoo vaults ahead of Google by delivering relevant answers, after making strides in recent months. Yahoo’s service serves up a list of actual information and flickr images (surely the only kind!). That the whole thing plasters your phone with ads is left to the penultimate graf.”

PS: Too bad that the 3/20/07 quote is also a week before Google launched the new Google mobile search experience…

One of the irregularly recurring series of the blog will be focussing on cool, unusual or sometimes even just touristy places to see around the Bay and the world. Kicking off the series will of course be in honor of my alma mater: Stanford University.

Stanford is not just the first place to mention because I loved it there, but also because the Stanford campus is one of the most beautiful university campuses in the United States.

Palm trees line the whole campus including Stanford’s famous Palm Drive

Memorial Church – or MemChu – was built in the late 19th and early 20th century and nearly destroyed only a few years later in the great 1906 Earthquake. By the way – this picture is one of the regularly featured sceneries photographed at the digicam website dcresource.com among other Stanford vistas.

The Main Quad – heart of the campus.
By the way – to check out more images from the Bay Area and other cool places, such as Istanbul, London or Los Angeles – check out the Galleries section at waschbusch.com.