<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier">The Mountain</a>: morning, noon, dusk. Happy Thanksgiving!</p>

<p>We saw quite a show on the ride home tonight – even the iPhone gives a sense for the colors and what looked like a sky on fire.</p>

<p>My silence of late is attributable to having spent the better part of last week at <a href="http://www.ebay.com/">eBay</a> attending the <strong>Next-Generation Distributed Systems Summit</strong>. I was fortunate, in time and invitation, to attend, meet some really amazing technologists and learn a Tremendous amount (thanks <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blueberries-Picture-Puffins-Robert-McCloskey/dp/014050169X">Little Bear</a>). I’m still consolidating my final notes and thoughts on…

<p>When it rains, it pours – literally and figuratively. I left the house today in a pretty steady rain, managed to get about a mile from home and then stopped. My rear tire, fine on Friday and over the weekend, went flat! After a quick cyclocross run home, Pig and I made the next boat. Ugh.</p>

<p>Series: <a href="/2008/07/15/sunsets-flowers-and-the-olympic-mountains/">Sunset</a> > <a href="/2008/07/16/sunrise-flowers-and-the-olympic-mountains/">Sunrise</a> > <a href="/2008/07/18/heather-park-trail-an-enchanted-forest-and-views/">Heather Park</a></p>

<p>I recently arrived back from Israel. It’s a country I knew very little about prior to going and what I did know turned out to be more a product of the media than I realized. I spent most of my time in a suburb of Tel Aviv and couldn’t tell it apart from any other area affected by the growth of the high tech sector over the last decade. I went with visions of soldiers walking around with rifles but instead found surfers, runners and a generation of Israelis abandoning their…