A NEW BEGINNING!

You thought that this blog had come to an end, admit it! So did I, but blogging, like history, tends to go in circles, so in a way we are back at the beginning when it all started.

When writing this, I am sitting again in my apartment on Stuart Street in Berkeley. Rain is gushing outside, temperatures are in their 50s (10 degrees Celsius for you Europeans) and there is little else for me to do but working my trusted McBook Pro.

Whilst looking out into a rather hopeless fall of waters, I am consoling myself with the hope that my book will arrive from the printer tomorrow or at least the day after tomorrow. I have ordered 100 copies to be sent to me here, with the rest destined for Sweden and Austria; and I hope that cross-continent transport will work smoothly and bring me my books in pristine condition.

Did I say "BOOK"? "Yes", dear readers and friends, this blog has been reincarnated in a paper product, I have gone RETRO in this computer day and age. If you would care to back read some of the comments to this blog (always welcome!) you couldn't help find there some persistent demands to make a book out of my humble scribblings! Your wish was my command, dear readers. I have spent the better part of the two years since my first visit to Berkeley in abiding by your wishes.

Does it really take two years to produce a book, you say? Well, if you have the ambition to present a high quality product and, furthermore, to do all the work on your own, two years appears rather short. I  am proud to say that the book contains most of the material presented to you in the blog. This means that it contains almost 300 pages of text and pictures. I have tried to preserve, as far as possible, the intrinsic quality of the blog. Some editorial adaptations had to made, of course, but I hope that the freshness and immediacy of my earlier writing have been preserved. What is new in the book is that the 100 best pictures are being presented in full page size. I hope that this will bring out their full potential.
Of course, the proof of the pudding lies in the eating (buying and reading in this case)!

To give you a foretaste of the book, take a look at the title picture to this blog post. It is also the title picture of the book. It shows the University of California at its best, I trust, and I can tell you that this picture takes some mighty digital post-processing to accomplish; you would not be able to produce it by simply pointing your camera at the motive and pushing the button, take my word for it!