This is my first day at Mylo, a two-month-old startup which is going to do something with digital photography workflow management. After this afternoon’s all-hands meeting I’ve learned I’m not supposed to say more than that in public, but the pitch that got me on board was significantly more interesting.

The ride in to Bellevue this morning was about as pleasant as a commute ever gets: I even touched 85 mph at one point as I crossed Mercer Island. This at 9 AM, even! Perhaps I just got lucky today, but it could get a lot worse and still be a pretty reasonable trip.

This new Macbook with the Retina display is nice. I have sharper-than-average vision and have always been able to make out individual pixels, even with anti-aliasing, but with this screen the text might as well be perfectly smooth. It feels unreal, like it’s not actually a computer screen but some faked-out Hollywood movie prop.

Mountain Lion, though – ugh. It took almost two hours to track down and turn off all the annoying iOS-derived frippery and make it act something like a reasonable desktop machine. (Check out Lion Tweaks if you are interested in doing the same.) Seriously, people, if I wanted to use iOS, I’d be using an iPad. And I don’t, so I’m not, so please stop shoving that stuff down my throat, ok?

Oh, well, there’s nothing to be done about it. I don’t love the Mac OS anymore, but at least it doesn’t suck any worse than anything else. Apple just stopped caring about people like me after their consumer electronics business took off, and the tail has obviously been wagging the dog for some time now.

There is no electric vehicle charger in this building’s parking lot but there are chargers in the two adjacent complexes, and it’s possible they may install one here too. I think my electric motorcycle project is going to move back on the “active” list as soon as I’ve finished the chandelier.

Bellevue is a strange place. The building height distribution is bizarrely bimodal: there are the old one- and two-story suburban buildings, the background level of the whole area, and then there are the twenty-plus story highrises stacked up among them; there is almost nothing in between. I would guess that there are a total of maybe three buildings greater than two but fewer than twenty stories tall in all of Bellevue.

It’s obvious that someone is trying to build a city here from scratch, that the density has not developed organically as a function of demand. I wonder if this is a little bit like people must have felt in Dubai, as a mile of skyscrapers erupted in the center of what had been a sleepy little desert town? There’s no reason for there to be a city here, except that some rich dude decided he wanted to build one, and now you have sprawled-out suburban mall style buildings laying across the street from towering glass-and-steel highrises. It makes no sense, and yet here it all is.