On my last day in Florida, I went to a couple parks with my brother Mike. I’ll talk about them in my Green Valhalla blog. I did see a pretty cool Osprey at Markham Park (picture left). My flight back to California was rather uneventful, although I did get to meet up with my niece, Maggie, during my layover in DC. We met up at a Starbuck’s in the Dulles airport. She’s leaving for Australia in July for a sort of student exchange program. She’ll be there for some 4 months. It sure would be nice to visit her there.

While I was gone, Mary had seen the infamous squirrel around the house a few times. She even noticed that it seemed to be entering the attic at a junction between two roof elevations at the rear of the house. After I got home, I also noticed a squirrel sitting on the window sill of the upstairs den, seemingly watching me work on my computer. I went out back to see what it was up to, and to my surprise, saw not one, but 3 squirrels scamper through that opening! It seems like the problem is worse than I thought.

Since I’ve been back, I’ve met with Ron a couple times to work on the dishAdish website. We’re pretty much finished with the basic functionality, but we want to add a few more advanced features such as images and mapping. At some point we probably need to start trying to get more people to use the site.

Friday and Saturday I went to an entrepreneur conference called TiEcon. The conference is run by The Indus Entrepreneurs, named for it’s original South Asian roots. Now it is a multi-cultural, world wide organization. The conference brings together entrepreneurs from various industries including venture capital. There are sessions by investors and executives of start-ups and public companies on topics from how to start a company to the ins and outs of Life Sciences. There were some big name speakers, such as: Vinod Khosla (VC and founder of Sun - picture left), Nobuyuki Idei (former Chairman and CEO of Sony), Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media), Meg Whitman (CEO of eBay), and Bob Ingram (Vice Chairman at GlaxoSmithKline). My primary motivation was to attend the sessions on Green or Clean Technologies. The sessions were informative, but networking was difficult due to the sheer number of attendees (nearly 4000). I would probably be better off going to some of the TiE Silicon Valley local events. There was some pretty good food at the lunches an breaks, especially the 4′ tall chocolate fountain (picture right).

I left the conference a little early on Saturday, so Mary and I went for a late lunch in downtown Sunnyvale. We went to My Burger Place on Santa Clara. After lunch we went to the 4th Street garage across from the library. From there we watched the falcons on San Jose City Hall. I had my laptop, but could not get a good connection to watch the webcam (picture from the webcam on left), but we did enjoy seeing Jose and Clara flying around the city. Of course I forgot to bring my camera.

On Sunday Mary and I did some more yard work. One of the things we did was prune some branches which overhang our yard from a tree in the back neighbors yard. After we pruned the tree, we noticed there was a bird nest in one of the branches we cut down (picture right). It turns out to be a bushtit nest, and there are eggs in it. We felt terrible. I ended up tying the branch with the nest back in the tree with some green wire. Eventually, it seemed like the adult birds found their way back to the nest. I only hope the eggs are still intact. I guess we’ll have to watch and see. In the afternoon, we went by Don Edwards and found some burrowing owls nearby. Later we went back down town to watch Jose and Clara. Maybe I’ll blog about that on my Green Valhalla blog as well.