the designer sat at his drafting board

[calimac]

My brother is visiting, and, as due to late flight arrangements he's using SFO instead of SJC, he's for the first time staying at a hotel up in that direction. This turned out to lie in a wilderness of shopping center, somewhere between San Mateo and Foster City. After I successfully but by blind faith in the instructions got him there, I took a look at a map, and concluded that the whole neighborhood must have been designed and laid out by a city planner punch-drunk with power, especially with what he could do with freeway entrances and exits. Reminded me of Jordin Kare's fictional engineering-machine designer:

And just to make a machinist squeal
I'll have him machine it from tungsten steel.