My Florida adventure

Holmes Beach, my home for the past week.

As soon as we exited the plane, I knew we were in trouble.

I am typing this blog entry both pool side and beach side, so I guess I don't have much to complain about. But from the moment I got onto the jetway and felt toy the hot blanket of moist air seeping through the seals, I could tell we'd be fighting the humidity -- as bad, or worse, than what I experienced during my last trip to the tropics (Darwin, Australia). And we did, the whole week.

We've spent the last week visiting Florida, mostly in an around the home of my grandparents in the Tampa Bay area. But we also spent some time in the Miami area, St. Petersburgh and Legoland in Central Florida.

We arrived at Fort Lauderdale airport shortly after 6 a.m. and it was already hot, as described above. After an adventure in and around the airport, trying to figure out how to get to our rental car, we finally got on the road. The first stop was Miami Beach, where we watched people watching what Miami Beach is famous for:



We then had breakfast at a beachside café, where we were given complimentary mimosas post-meal. The alcohol did not help our exhausted state after a red eye seated next to a baby. I did hope that we'd run into the crew of Burn Notice while in Miami, but no luck.

While I'm in Miami, wondering if it would be practical to have a mojito with Sam Axe aka Chuck Finley aka Bruce Campbell. #BurnNotice

— John C. Baker (@jcb10) August 7, 2012

Next, after a detour into Hollywood, Fla., for a car sick member of our crew, we got somewhat lost -- to our chagrin in these days of GPS and smart phones. Instead of cutting west onto Alligator Alley, somehow we ended going north, curbing along the north shore of Lake Okeechobee along rural roads. Moreover, Google Maps on my iPhone directed me to take an exit off the Florida Turnpike that did not have a cash toll plaza -- only a Sunpass (similar to Fastrack in the SF Bay Area) lane. Of course, we did not figure that out until already on the exit. So we are expecting a large fine in the mail when we get home.

Upon our arrival, Ian went straight into the pool. A pattern that was repeated later that evening and again and again and again over the next eight days.

My grandfather, Ian, myself and Charlotte during one of our many pool trips.

Most of our week was spent at my grandparents' condo on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico in Holmes Beach. What a condo! Great view of the Gulf out the back window, pool in the back and sufficient air conditioning!



(Update, Nov. 16, 2013: OK, I admit this post won't be updated. Suffice it to say, a fine time was had by all.)

Dexter Clay, a 'redshirt' who survived to write about leadership

Let's face it: it didn't pay to wear a red shirt on the original Star Trek series.

Red, the uniform color of security officers (and engineers) on the show, was a practical death sentence. One estimate showed about 1 in 7 of the Enterprise's crew was killed in Star Trek, the original series. Of those corpses, a staggering 70 percent wore red shirts.

The "red shirt" phenomenon -- when a bunch of main cast members and a guy in a red shirt face a deadly situation, it's the guy in the red shirt who dies -- became a TV trope, even parodied to great success in Galaxy Quest. So it's no surprise that when Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) began in 1987, they gave security officers another color (yellow) to wear. Still, security was a hazardous job and you kept expecting security officers to die with regularity. And, informally, us fans still called them "redshirts."

So it was somewhat unexpected during the first two years of the show when a certain officer kept reappearing. He got into a number of scraps, for sure, but the tall African-American security officer made appearance after appearance. He never got a line. He was never named. But he was never killed, either.

My real name is Dexter Clay, but my Star Trek
character never got one.

Flash-forward 20-something years, and we now have the Internet (and DVDs of the entire series). After two decades of exposure to his face, I finally got curious enough the other day to try and find out the security officer's name.

It was no easy task, even for an accomplished Googler such as myself. No name, either for the actor or the character? Enter Memory-Alpha, the Star Trek wiki. The security officer didn't make an appearance in any credits, making my job difficult. I first tried perusing a list of Enterprise-D crew members with no luck. Then, finally, I decided to examine entries for episodes he was in, in an attempt to get a name. Sure enough, in the entry for the pilot, "Encounter at Farpoint," there he was in the uncredited co-stars list: Dexter Clay -- Security Guard.

A quick, conventional Google search helped from there. With the IMDB showed only a couple credits (one episode of TNG and a bit part in a movie), Memory-Alpha showed that Clay had actually appeared in 29 episodes! That's more than such "regular" crew members as Guinan or Pulaski.

And no, he never was named or given a line.

It turns out that, prior to acting, Clay had been a professional football player, for both the 1980 Houston Oilers and the 1981 New York Jets, although he apparently never got into a game due to injuries. Besides playing the security guard in two TNG seasons, Clay also served three years as a stand-in for Michael Dorn (Worf).

Since his time on Star Trek, Clay has become a writer. His 2007 book about a high school football team, KatyNation, got good reviews on Amazon, as did his 1998 look into race relations, Black Eye on America.

Clay has apparently made it a goal of his to find out what makes good a good leader (although looking at Capt. Picard's thoughtfulness might be a good place to start), and has made numerous radio appearances in support of his book and philosophy.

While there are no copies of Clay's books at local libraries for me to review, it's sure gratifying to see at least one "red shirt" who didn't succumb to curiosity.

Unlike these guys:

The missus is on StreetView, butt ...

A couple weeks ago, I pointed out that StreetView cars are becoming ubiquitous, even showing up in my neighborhood.

Well, the new pictures came up on StreetView this week, and it turns out my wife made the cut -- although it may not be the most-flattering of angles (above) ...

Streetview cars are everywhere, even on TV

It seems Google is becoming ubiquitous in our lives (this blog you're reading is on a service owned by Google, for example), to the point where "Google" has become a verb.

Google's Streetview service has become a godsend to wandering travelers and armchair explorers (I used it prior to my 2008 Australia trip to plan walking routes around the neighborhoods I'd be visiting). It has also brought protests from those who say the service violates privacy, even though it does no such thing.

It's no surprise, then, that Google's Streetview cars have been constantly going through neighborhoods to update photos. A car was seen in my neighborhood in March, for example.

Still I was surprised that while watching "Burn Notice," about 54 minutes into last night's episode (counting commercials), I saw a Google Streetview car go by in the background (below).

The chances of a TV show shooting at the exact same time a Streetview car goes by might seem low, but -- as I wrote above -- the cars are all over the place now. It's probably for that reason that the editors of Burn Notice left the shot with the very-noticeable Streetview car in the show instead of using another take -- it's more realistic that way!

Excuse me while I Google myself in the corner

These days, it is fashionable to "Google" a person (i.e., run them through an Internet search engine -- to discover information about potential boyfriends, babysitters, neighbors, etc. You can often get a good notion of a person's hobbies and interests via the Internet (although nothing of the sort I could potentially get when I was a police dispatcher a few years back -- but couldn't due to privacy laws). Someone trying to track me down might have a more difficult time.

You see, I have a pretty darn common name. If you run "John Baker" through Google, you'd have a hard time finding me. You'd see entries on a British photographer, three baseball players (including John Frank "Home Run" Baker, who led the American League in home runs four times in the deadball era without ever hitting more than 12 in a season)* and numerous others before finally getting a hit on my old, neglected school website in 65th place. Note: This search was conducted in late December. not only do search results change over time, but they've already changed by the time I posted this.

So let's try to nail it down by adding my middle intial. Searching Google with "John C. Baker" doesn't find anything related to me until the 22nd entry (my Amazon.com profile). Even more interesting is that on the second page of the "John C. Baker" results is an old New York Times article about the 38-year-old head of a newspaper's art department committing suicide -- potentially disconcerting for those who know both my age and original career choice who miss the tiny dateline of 1906.

Only if one already knows something about me will they make headway on Google. Searching "John Baker" and adding "Glendale" (my old home town) will get my old webpage third, a story I wrote in 1993 about Rosa Parks 11th, and an old blog entry in 16th.

Adding my name to my current town of "South San Francisco" is productive, getting my website third again, with the 13th result a link to a bunch of old stories I wrote for the San Mateo Times (most with a "South San Francisco" dateline). I used to score higher on this search, but took my resume offline after getting a lot of spam.

If you're a high school chum looking for me, try searching for "John Baker Crescenta," for my old high school, Crescenta Valley High School in La Crescenta, Calif. The first three results are actually related to me: 1. A comment I made on an LA Times blog entry; 2. My link on the Alumni listings; 3. Something related to Classmates.com. I was also the subject of the ninth result (a story I wrote about taking public transit from Glendale to San Diego) and the 15th.

If you narrow down the search to "John Baker San Mateo," the first three results referred to me and if you try "John Baker Humboldt," the first two did.

The long and short of it? If you know a lot about with me to begin with, you can find out a lot more with Google. If you know squat about me, Google won't be much help.

* The other baseball John Bakers include former San Francisco Giants (and current Cincinatti Reds) manager John "Dusty" Baker," who sent me a personalized post card when he played for the Dodgers in the late 1970s addressed to the "other" John Baker.