America

I first visited the United States in 2004, destination Silicon Valley. With three suitcases filled with equipment, I and my colleagues were roadshowing a 3D camera and a face recognition system to the Sandhill Road venture capitalists. Bottom line: it didn't work that time -- we were trying to boil the ocean; it was a mistake to educate the market; we had no "socket" -- in short, if you cannot resist the masochistic desire to be humiliated with style, come to Sandhill Road! Eight years later the ocean must have been boiling already, the market educated enough, and the socket wired and online -- at least, that's what Intel thought when it bought our company. But this is a totally different story. My schedule then was quite packed, but I left a free day for sightseeing, rented a car, and went to San Francisco. One of the first things I visited was the old Presidio which, among other things, hosts a collection of Great Depression murals. Apparently, the main goal of commissioning these frescos was to create jobs rather than undying masterpieces — consequently, they have little artistic value. However, I was looking for a specific image titled Peacetime Activities of the Army depicting the old Presidio Army command building with the star-spangled banner proudly flying on the mast at the center. I paid little attention to this historical nonsense, as my attention was drawn to the figures of Maria de la Concepción Marcela Argüello y Morago, the daughter of the Presidio Commander Don José Argüello, and Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov, a Chamberlain at the court of the Russian Tsar Alexander I, her promised husband.