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The 1998 Silicon Valley Almanack

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"Information Is Power"

W hen American settlers arrived in the place that would one day become Silicon Valley, many of them had two books in their saddlebags: a Bible, of course, and an old Almanack.

The Almanack contained "the Lunations, Eclipses of the Luminaries, Sun & Moon's Rifing and Setting, Time of High Water, Judgement of the Weather, &tc"--all information pioneers needed to get in touch with the place they would thereafter call home.

The 1998 Silicon Valley Almanack is designed with the same goal in mind--cranked up a notch to suit the times.

We left out the tide charts and soil maps, but we have included Many Pages of Useful Information, With a Mind Toward the Busy Valley Resident. And, of course, we've spiced the mix with a time-tested dose of "&tc."

In these pages, readers will find scores of pragmatic insiders' tips--on competing in the New World's tightest housing market, and locating reliable child-care; on urban hiking, auto repair and party planning. Our writers have also included what old-timey scribes might have called "fanciful larks"--ideas on carpool-dating, sexercising and producing your own punk-rock show.

We have chronicled here ways to seize hold of the responsibilities of local citizenship, and we've also assembled a guide to some of the soul-satisfying funspots that dot the valley, end to end.

This Almanack grew out of an annual project launched in 1990, timed to coincide with Metro's fifth anniversary. In those years, Metro had done what the best newspapers hope to do--built a solid community of loyal readers. What was then called "A Users Manual" was a first-ever effort to catalog the resources that this community could draw from to make life in the valley better.

In the years since, our community of readers has grown tremendously--as many as a quarter-million people pick up Metro every week. And so this place we call home has grown, and all the capsules and listings just won't fit in print.

Luckily there's the World Wide Web. This Web site contains an expanded version of what's in print, and this will continue to grow over the coming weeks and months.

But to present the full picture, we must light the coal-burner under the steam drill and fire up the presses again next week, as we have for the past 13 years.
Edited by Eric Johnson



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From the March 5-11, 1998 issue of Metro.

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