A short love note to the Claremont Diner

This place is great and, even better, you can walk to it from our house. The people there are always super friendly, it is cheap and the food is very nice. It has all the good things that a traditional American diner should have, without all the artificial 50's pretensions that most 'Frisco diners have.

The people who run the place must be old radio fans, and the shelves of the Diner are full of vintage radios, makes me miss my four or five old radios that are back in my storage locker in Edinburgh.



Even better, they have a model train that runs around your head when you are eating - great!

And it's next door to this areas only decent pub, the Graduate. Free popcorn, a decent jukebox and Blue Moon on draft- does it get any better than this?

Claremont

I'm staying the night at this beautiful hotel in Berkeley at the moment. I'm at an "offsite" which is a bunch of us Sun people getting together away from the phones and e-mail for 2 days to strategise.

Seemingly this is one of the few wooden hotels left in the Bay Area, all the others burned down! Our meeting room has some wonderful views over the Bay to San Francisco and the Bay Bridge. I must try to get some pics of that tomorrow.

Off to India on Saturday, more on that later. I'm not looking forward to the journey.......