The usual Silicon Valley Hack Pack showed up -- Quentin, Don etc. I arrived with my former colleague at the Financial Times, Louise Kehoe. Louise, by the way, is doing some interesting work as a media consultant. Louise has been around for a long time and she knows a lot about the underbelly of Silicon Valley. I’m hoping to convince her to write an occasional guest column for Silicon Valley Watcher.

Heard the one about the a men's room encounter between Bill Gates and Joe Kraus, founder of Excite.com during the dot-com boom and more recently of JotSpot?

Surprise! A study commissioned by IBM finds no increased cancer risk for employees in a Silicon Valley plant and two others.

It's been a tough week for Silicon Valley and the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Most of us voted for Kerry (over 80 percent in the city of San Francisco) and it's difficult watching Bush smirk and sneer as he enjoys his moment in the sun. There was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth on Wednesday. High tech executives remain unsure what opportunities may unfold, or slam shut, in the second Bush term, while California as a whole braces for payback after having voted for Bush's opponent, and for embracing lifestyles that infuriate Bush's right-wing, fundamentalist Christian supporters. But even as reality sinks in, Silicon Valley finds some reasons for hope.

The Tube can't claim all of the live video action in the Presidential election and its aftermath. At-work viewers tuned into online video streams in large numbers, demonstrating an online advertising market of vast potential.

Bush voters may have embraced his anti-stem-cell politics elsewhere in the US, but Californians soundly rejected them, paving the way for Silicon Valley to take a bio-tech lead.

While half of US voters digest their disappointment in the results, a silver lining may be found from studying the election as a real-time seminar in online marketing techniques.

Is a new kind of entrepreneur taking over in Silicon Valley?

Blogs starred in the election night drama, but reviews of their performance are mixed.

How deep have computers penetrated the humanities? Pretty darn deep, judging from this recent Call For Papers to be presented at a Canadian conference next year.

A University of California, Berkeley researcher has developed a new way to animate viscous, bubbling, and oozing fluids that promises to make "movies, videogames, and even surgical simulations much closer to reality," writes David Pescovitz in the latest issue of Lab Notes, a publication of the university's engineering department.

That's what they call Fred Terman, subject of a new biography, Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley, by historian C. Stewart Gillmor, published by Stanford University Press.