Barbara Stanwick was a notorious Hollywood lesbian.

This quote is attributed to both Buckminster Fuller and Tim Leary: California is what you get after 20,000 years of people saying, "Screw this, I'm headed west."

I had a personal run-in with an Israeli "art student".

At the time I was working for Broadcom, whose stock had gone up about 400% in a year or less. This was in early 2000, just before the bottom fell out of the dotcom stock market. They were clearly an industry leader, and if you believed the company's story, it was destined to be the next Hewlett-Packard. (Though later it restated earnings by a billion dollars after the largest stock option backdating scandal in the industry broke, and the founder was indicted for, among other antics, smoking so much ganja on his private jet that the pilot had to use an oxygen mask to land on the right planet.)

We had just moved into a new building and I was located near the front. A few days after the move, as we were still unpacking, a middle-eastern-looking fellow suddenly walked in past the receptionist and entered the front section of "cubes". He looked somewhat agitated and was clearly casing the joint. I walked up to him and asked him if I could help him. He focused on me but seemed to be trying to get the layout of the area at the same time, flicking his eyes around right and left.

He said he was an Israeli art student and wanted to know if we wanted to buy any of his art. He didn't have anything in his arms, so this made little sense and my internal alarms went off. I got close to him and told him to take a hike. He didn't flinch at all (I'm 6 foot and 275 lbs) and I remember thinking that from his nervousness (he was also sweating) and general demeanor he might be on speed or cocaine. He just started babbling about selling art prints while trying to look around. I kept telling him to leave loudly and edged him back toward the door and he finally left.

About 15 minutes later one of the engineers walked up to my area out into the lobby to speak to the receptionist, who came and got me. He said that there had been a guy hanging around one of the back doors who had "tailgaited" into the building when an employee used his card to enter. I went into the back and it was the same guy, who was moving rapidly up and down the aisles of cubes as if looking for a particular office or person. When he saw me he took off at a very fast walk back through the front of the building and out the way he had originally entered.

In retrospect, they picked a good time to try to penetrate the building. The phones and security equipment were not completely functional because of the move, and strange people were in the building moving equipment and installing it. A camera was stolen from my cube a day or two later.