Book Review: Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022). Chris Miller.

I was intrigued this morning to read an article about a growing problem in the latest iterations of new generative AI products. This problem has been recognized and widely discussed for the last several years, but apparently in many cases, it’s not being solved as the AI software and systems become more sophisticated and complex. Apparently it’s getting worse, much worse. That problem is “hallucination”, the tendency of AI systems to make up “facts” in response to queries. 

 

When I read news like that, it tends to support a gut feeling of mine that the current hype about AI and how it’s going to change everything for the better is at the very least overblown, and perhaps completely wrong, a sci-fi fantasy from our tech leaders’ childhoods that in reality could become a dystopian, dangerous nightmare, rather than a wondrous achievement for humanity. But that’s a larger topic for another time.

 

In the meantime, our current computer systems, our phones, the internet and all the electronic information technologies of our era have become indispensable resources for every aspect of our lives, at work and at play. Through the accumulated scientific knowledge and engineering of the recent past, these things all exist, and most of us take them for granted. We don’t tend to think about them that much, but perhaps we should.

 

Most of us probably don’t think about how critical computer automation has become to our survival, as more and more of our societal life support systems, our roads, our airspace, our banking system, our hospitals, our communications and so many other parts of modern society are put under computer control. Very few of us actually know much about how these things came to be, how they work, or what it takes to keep turning out the steadily more powerful automation products we all use and rely upon.

 

This is why Chris Miller’s book Chip War is the essential book for understanding many aspects of our current situation. It starts at the beginning, telling the history of the invention of the transistor, soon followed by the development of the integrated circuit (known as a “chip”), a small electronic component onto which many transistors can be printed using a highly refined photo imaging process. He also provides a clear description for the lay reader on how these inventions function, and why they are essential to the creation of computers and the internet.

 

From that necessary introduction, he then tells a much longer and more complicated story about how the initial inventions were steadily improved and disseminated around the world over the past half-century. He focuses on important individuals at each stage of development, and how certain companies and countries competed to dominate different aspects of both ongoing creation of better chip designs, and the actual production of the chips based on the designs.

 

As someone with a long history in IT and computers myself, I knew some of what was in this riveting and important book, but I learned so much more, and it was fascinating.

 

Miller talks about the different approaches taken by important countries over the decades to try to gain access to the newest and best designs and products coming out of the U.S.A. For example, he traces how the Soviet Union and then Russia after the Soviet Union’s collapse tried to simply steal the latest technology from the West, both the designs and often the chips themselves. As he explains, this has kept Russia consistently a decade behind the United States and Europe in the types and quality of chips it could produce or consume in mass.

 

In China, however, they took a different route. While trying to build up their own research and development capabilities, the Chinese focused on creating advanced manufacturing for some types of chips, especially memory chips, as well as building factories to create integrated products like circuit boards, and consumer products like PCs, laptops, and smartphones. It wasn’t that they didn’t also steal the latest Western technology whenever they could, but they did vastly more than Russia to also develop their own advanced research and manufacturing capabilities. As a result, they own or dominate some important segments of the global chip manufacturing and high-tech product market.

 

In the United States, where the technology was invented, the top companies dominated most or all aspects of creating the latest, most advanced chips for several decades. But over time, some of the premier companies were out-competed by a few companies in other countries, and merged or went out of business.

 

The United States, particularly with companies like Intel and AMD,  still retains dominance in the development of the new designs for the latest generations of chips, but several other countries now have companies in that race. In the meantime, the United States, and almost all other countries, have ceded control over the production of the most vital chips – the CPUs, or Central Processing Units that control the operations of all computers – to a single country, Taiwan, and to a single company there that has been willing to make the huge investments in equipment and facilities required to be able to produce the current and near-future generations of processor chips.

 

The story of how that happened, how the United States and its premier chip companies lost the ability to manufacture its most vital computing components after designing them is just one fascinating tale from this exhaustive history of the chip industry. And it is an absolutely vital story to know and understand, in order to better comprehend some major political issues we now face.

 

For example, knowing that Taiwan is the world’s sole source for producing the latest and best CPU chips explains why the question of China’s desire to take back control of Taiwan, and the West’s need to prevent that has become such a perennially vital national security issue for the United States. Being aware of this situation also explains why all recent American administrations have wanted to bring chip manufacturing back to the U.S.A., with only limited success.

 

Chip War is filled with these sorts of “how did we not know this?” stories and background. It also drives home as few other things I’ve read, how absolutely dependent we have become on computer chips, on the same level of importance as the oil and energy resources that drive our economy. It’s also a very enlightening history of the brilliant people, the companies and countries that have created and improved these magical little devices that are now embedded in so much of the smart environment in which we now live. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Abundance (2025). Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson.

I have long been an admirer of Ezra Klein, his writing and his New York Times podcast The Ezra Klein Show. In my opinion, he is one of the most influential public intellectuals in American life today, because of his deep and wide knowledge of politics and public policy, his unflagging curiosity about life and the way the world works, and his excellence as an interviewer of other important thinkers, whether he agrees with their opinions or not.

What demonstrates to me his importance as a thought leader is the number of times his writings and podcasts have introduced important and original new ideas that have overcome initial pushback and skepticism to eventually be widely recognized as true and important insights, at least by the liberal-minded part of the population.

In Why We’re Polarized (2020), Klein did a deep dive into the data about social divisions in American society, finding both new and surprising explanations for our political and social polarization, and identifying forces and effects (particularly in our media environments) that are further destabilizing our democratic political systems.

Then in early 2024, he shocked the Democratic Party and many of its supporters with his column in the New York Times advocating that Joe Biden should not run for re-election, based on Biden’s age and age-related inability to run a dynamic, effective campaign despite a good record of success in office. This bold and perilous opinion on Klein’s part was met with intense hostility and opposition from within the party apparatus, only to be eventually accepted and embraced by the party and the electorate after Biden’s disastrous debate performance.

In his latest book, Abundance, a collaboration with co-author Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic and also a podcast host, Klein and Thompson build a conceptual framework for understanding why the Democratic Party and the left in general have lost the support of much of the population they have been trying so hard to help.

The principal problem they identify is the extent to which Democratic-led state and local governments have failed to provide the abundance they’ve promised, particularly in blue states like those on the West Coast. They provide a litany of examples of good promises unfulfilled, like the multi-decade high speed rail project in California, and the homelessness crisis and lack of affordable housing in major urban areas long governed by Democrats.

The primary reason they identify for this ongoing failure, despite the best of intentions, is the inability to build public infrastructure quickly and at a reasonable cost, such as  rapid mass transit, highways, more urban housing, clean energy projects and the like.

Klein and Thompson make the argument that Democrats and progressives should develop an exciting and positive vision of an abundant future, where our national wealth and high technology is used to build the kinds of cities, social amenities and clean environment people want to live in.

But the authors also suggest that Democratic leaders need to come to terms with the underlying reasons for their failures, such as NIMBYism, and the well-meaning over-regulation of public construction projects, which give the more affluent individuals and groups in communities the ability to endlessly delay and drive up the cost of projects they would rather not have in their own back yards.

In this argument, they are echoing an analysis I read recently in another new book, Why Nothing Works (2025) by Marc J. Dunkelman, which provides a longer-term historical account of how progressivism has always harbored two countervailing objectives that tend to create problems when out of balance. One of progressivism’s objectives has been to encourage strong government that can do good things for the people effectively, and prevent local obstructionism and corruption, but at the same time, it has also sought to protect the rights of individuals and communities against too-strong governments and corporations. These two objectives are in constant contention with each other within progressive thought.   

In Abundance, Klein and Thompson develop a similar argument, suggesting that Democrats over the past few decades have put in place so many administrative obstacles to getting things done, for the purpose of protecting the environment and the interests of their many minority and special interest constituencies, that the kind of grand achievements we used to be able to do as a society, like building the interstate highway system or sending men to the moon, can’t possibly be done rapidly or for an affordable price anymore.

The authors point out that the result is not only that fewer people vote for these Democratic governments and candidates, but in many places, people actually vote with their feet, moving to states where less liberal Republican administrations can provide cheaper housing, mass transit, highways and other desirable infrastructure and services because of the lesser constraints on governmental power and overreach.

If any of this (like the call for fewer regulations) sounds like an argument from the right, it isn’t. Klein and Thompson explicitly direct their arguments internally toward the left, in the hope of influencing liberals and progressives to see the value of diagnosing and fixing their own failures to build as a way of winning back votes and much of the popular support they have lost.

They also strongly contrast their abundance approach, the idea that creating social wealth and benefits creates a more just, fair and prosperous society, to the Trumpist “scarcity” style of politics, which constantly hammers away at the idea that there isn’t enough of anything, and whatever wealth there is, someone else is trying to take it away from you.

Abundance is not the last word on how Democrats and liberals need to reinvent the party, or fix all their problems. There is much here to debate, to consider and investigate further. But there is little doubt that Klein (with Thompson) has again written a groundbreaking, provocative book that is launching another movement or tendency on the left (“abundance” theory) that will become an important influence in liberal thought in the near future. Very highly recommended.

Book Review: The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel. Genius, Power and Deception on the Eve of World War I (2023). Douglas Brunt.

During the past year, I've read a number of excellent books that seemed to resonate as part of the backstory to some of the most urgent issues of our time. I will be reviewing several of them over the next few weeks, but this book seemed to be an intriguing place to start exploring some of these missing threads from which our contemporary world has been woven.

Everyone has heard of Diesel engines, the rugged machines that power much of our transportation across the globe, from ships, to trains, to trucks, cars and airplanes, as well as giant electrical generators and many other industrial and military applications. But far fewer of us know the story of the invention of the Diesel engine, or what was so significant about it as opposed to the other internal combustion engine designs of the modern era. 

 

Despite having reached a stage in life where I know quite a bit about history, this fascinating story about a crucial modern technology was almost a complete surprise to me. It begins with an account of the formative years of the inventor, Rudolph Diesel, starting with his impoverished childhood in France, Germany and England in the late nineteenth century, during which he managed to obtain an excellent engineering education despite his family’s poverty,  because of his prodigious and obvious mechanical genius. 

 

The author also introduces us along the way to John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil, and traces Rockefeller’s drive to create monopolistic control over the miraculous new energy source of the twentieth century: oil. This profile was also very enlightening, in showing us how Rockefeller sought to steer new industrial and popular energy technologies inexorably toward those that used his petroleum products as fuel, even as other possible sources of energy were being discovered and tried at the same time.

For example, Rockefeller first pushed to replace whale oil for city lighting with kerosene, a refined oil product, only to have kerosene’s future in the lighting market rapidly eclipsed by Edison’s electric light bulbs and the creation of early electrical power grids. With the market for kerosene lighting collapsing almost as quickly as it had opened, Rockefeller then became determined to see that all powered means of transportation should use the newly-invented internal combustion engine, which required highly refined petroleum products like kerosene and gasoline to function.   

Diesel’s remarkable engine design came into being at the exact same time the internal combustion engine was being invented. What was different about Diesel’s engine, though, was that rather than relying on the inherently combustible and explosive nature of gasoline, his engine used mechanical pressure on the fuel to create the heat needed to make the fuel combust. 

 

This meant that a diesel engine could run on many different types of inert, safer and more stable fuels, as it still can today, including fuels that could be created without needing to have oil wells or refineries. It could run on many types of vegetable oils, for example, like the bio-diesel fuels of our era made from corn or used cooking oil. And once Diesel had the engine fully designed, and the problems worked out, these engines proved to be simple and utterly reliable.

 

Rudolph Diesel apparently was driven from an early age to develop this engine for two reasons: first, to massively improve the efficiency of an engine’s use of fuel, compared to the pitiful 2% efficiency of the coal-burning steam engines of the nineteenth century. Second, Diesel wanted to provide endless and accessible “clean” power for the betterment of mankind, in contrast to the smoky miasma produced by coal engines. He appears to have been very much an idealist in that sense.

 

Nevertheless, when his engine invention took off on the world stage, he became a very wealthy man, one of the richest and most important men of the age. His story of brilliant invention, and then growing wealthy and famous on the basis of his world-changing new technology, is familiar. It's very much like the stories of the tech titans of our own era. But as with some of the more well-meaning tech entrepreneurs of our age, at a certain point Diesel could not avoid politics, nor business and engineering competition, at a time when the world’s major power technologies of the twentieth century were being invented. 

 

Brunt then explores a number of the important cross-currents Diesel had to navigate throughout his career. Diesel had to compete with the invention and rapid development of the internal combustion engine, and its backing by Rockefeller, who was determined to prevent any power plant type becoming dominant in the world market that did not require his oil. 

 

Diesel also had to keep innovating and improving his engines, managing his licenses and patents in many countries, and solving problems created by foreign engineers as they tried to implement his designs. And eventually, he had to come to terms with the fact that political leaders in numerous countries – especially Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany – were intent on using his marvelous engine design to power war machines, like submarines  and battleships, uses of which he morally disapproved. 

 

This is all fascinating history in its own right, but there is an added twist Brunt unveils toward the end of the story. It turns out that Rudolph Diesel disappeared, at the height of his fame and fortune, just before World War I began, apparently by falling or jumping overboard off a channel ferry on a night trip from France to Britain.

 

You can imagine the public fascination and uproar a mysterious and improbable disappearance like that would set off today if it happened to one of our major tech celebrities, particularly if the stories in the news kept changing and becoming less believable as the days went by. But the mystery was never solved. Brunt does a nice job laying out the threads of the mystery, reviewing the various theories that came and went, and then coming up with a startling but very plausible answer of his own as to what really happened to Rudolph Diesel.

 

This is an excellent piece of historical writing about an essential figure in the development of the modern world, whose remarkable story, and fame and fortune, somehow vanished from popular memory with the passing of time, and with his own mysterious disappearance. He may be gone, and mostly forgotten, but his remarkable invention still powers much of our world, even if in the end most diesel engines are powered by one of the oil-based fuel products Rockefeller and his heirs owned and controlled, and not one of the other non-petroleum fuels Diesel preferred.

 

Reading this book gave me new perspectives on the history of the engine technologies and fuels that power our world, and how those decisions were first made. It also reconfirmed the extent to which Big Oil, since its inception just as today, has been hyper-focused on pushing our society and its technology choices in ways that favor their profits and their political and economic control above all other factors. I didn’t know this particular part of that backstory, and I’m glad I do now. Highly recommended.

 

Book Review: The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (2025). Chris Hayes.

I heard on the news last night that this brand new book by the popular MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes has zoomed to the #1 position on the New York Times bestseller list, only a couple of weeks after its release. Having now read it, and given the political trends of the past few years, and the chaos flowing out from the new administration since January 20^th, it’s not hard to understand why.

The topic of attention, and the adverse effects that our modern communications and social media technologies have on us as individuals, as well as on our political and social systems, has been much discussed and analyzed recently, in magazine articles, books and on TV. Given all that “attention on attention”, it might be tempting to assume Hayes’ book is just more noise on a by-now tired subject. But it is no such thing. Instead, it is a deeply thoughtful and well-researched volume, written in a clear, honest and accessible style, which is a pleasure to read.

 

Hayes makes clear from the outset that he is bringing two very different sets of eyes and perspectives to his analysis. On the one hand, he is one of us, a person of our time and place, who constantly uses and is frequently disturbed by his own use of social media on his smartphone, and the troubling effects it has on his own mind, his ability to focus and his relationships with family and friends.

 

On the other hand, in his professional role as a cable news host, his success is completely dependent on his ability to understand and use the tools of manipulating and commanding the attention of his viewers, to keep them watching, and his advertisers happy. So he is able to bring both his personal, subjective feelings and his informed, rational understanding of attention in our current media environment to explore many important aspects of attention, and to explain why and how the ability to control attention has become the most important currency of power and control in our society.

 

In the process of his wide-ranging exploration of this vital topic for understanding what is happening right now in our society, our lives and our politics, he writes beautifully and with real insight about many aspects of attention.

 

He begins with an explanation of the book’s title, which is a reference to the scene in the Odyssey, where Circe warns Odysseus to plug the ears of his ship’s crew, and tie himself to the mast, to avoid being lured to death by the Sirens. He continues to revisit that analogy throughout the book, which he uses to portray the constant conflict between our desire to be stimulated by interesting things in our environment, and our need to filter out and block distractions.

 

From there, he’s off on a fascinating trip through many aspects of attention. He talks about “moral panics”, and many of the past instances through history where new technologies were greeted first with delight and amazement, then with fear, because of their perceived harms to existing modes of attention, focus and memory. He compares and contrasts those “moral panics” to the present moment, and the phenomenon of social media on smartphones.

 

Hayes moves on to discuss the purpose of attention in the human and animal worlds, and the forms it takes, including voluntary (when one deliberately focuses), involuntary (when we respond to startling noises or threats in our environment) and social (the conscious and unconscious attention we pay to others, and what they are saying and doing). He does a nice job of surveying some of the earlier theories of psychology and philosophy relating to attention and our human lives, and the strengths, weaknesses and relevance of various ideas from the past.

 

One area I found particularly intriguing was his discussion of fame and celebrity, and how it affects and disrupts social attention for both the famous person, and the people observing and interacting with that famous person. It’s unusual to get such a perceptive, self-aware and relatively modest account of the subjective personal experience of celebrity from someone who is himself quite famous. I appreciated the fact that he recognizes the conflicting responses he and other famous people have to being “important” and instantly recognizable, and could reflect thoughtfully upon both the positive and negative aspects of it.  

 

Inevitably, his narrative leads him to draw conclusions about how social media and our current information and media markets have essentially turned our attention into a commodity, like labor in the Industrial Age, that has been expropriated from us by monopoly capitalism. He then turns to the problem of Donald Trump, and how his mastery of the ability to constantly bring attention back to himself, even if it’s negative attention, has led him to his current domination of the American political scene.

 

This is one of those books that is too sweeping to be fully summarized in a review. But it is well worth reading, both for the pleasure of following Hayes’ ideas and insights, and for the assistance it provides us in thinking about our own lives, and how we might begin to reassert control over the devices and social media apps that have so powerfully captured our own attention. Highly recommended.     

Personal Note: It's 2025, and I'm Back!

Hello! It's been quite a few months since I posted anything on here. I just wanted to let you all know that I'm still here, and getting ready to become more active writing for The Memory Cache again.

You may recall that last spring (2024), I mentioned I was working on a sort of memoir, using a web site called Storyworth as a tool to write a year's worth of answers to weekly questions from the site about my life story. The end product of all these questions and answers will be a book.

 

It turned out to be a non-trivial project, which took most of my available time and energy for creative projects in 2024. On top of that, we lost several dear members of our family this past year, and had some of the other types of personal disruptions and distractions typical of normal life in this post-pandemic era.

 

Fortunately, my wife and I also had frequent grandparenting opportunities throughout the year, and a lovely trip to Europe and the UK in the fall, our first trip abroad in a long time. So the year was by no means a total waste. It just wasn't that productive for me in terms of making new music, and my blog writing.

 

Now it's a new year, and I'm hoping to refocus again on resuming songwriting and recording, and doing more writing for public consumption. Happily, my Storyworth memoir project is nearly finished. The rough draft is complete, and I just need to edit it, add some photos, and have it produced as a book, which I expect to complete by mid-year 2025.

 

As I'd said back in the spring, this book won't be for public consumption, but there will be a few copies available for close friends and family. In any event, I'm really proud to have completed writing it, and to have had the opportunity to share my life story with those who are nearest and dearest to me. It was also very rewarding to have a chance to time-travel back into my own past, and remember and reflect on so many of the things I've done, and different people I've known.

 

In any case, with 2024 behind me, my hopes for The Memory Cache are to resume writing occasional reviews and summaries of good books, movies and TV, and maybe also doing some commentary on other topics. Obviously there will be plenty of important topics out in the world for the next few years to think and write about. I won't commit to a fixed production schedule, but I do hope to share my thoughts and information regularly, at least a couple of times a month, beginning next week.

 

One other thing I'm hoping to do soon is to start using Substack as another way to distribute my writing for The Memory Cache. I will be establishing a presence there, and moving my mailing list there as well, so subscribers can have each article I post on this site emailed to them via Substack if they want. I don't currently have any plans to charge money for that, although perhaps in the future I might - who knows? Never say never, I suppose! But for now, it's just another way to share my writing efficiently, and distribute it to a wider audience.

 

One other detail to share. I haven't yet made a decision about leaving Meta social media apps, which a lot of people seem to be doing lately, but I have added an account on Bluesky. As with my Facebook and Instagram accounts, you can follow me on Bluesky at @wayneparkernotes. I won't post often, but when I do, you'll find me there for sure, even if I'm gone from Facebook and Instagram by then.

 

So, happy new year to you all! And I hope to have something new for you to read here very soon.

TV Review: 800 Words, Seasons 1-3 (Acorn TV).

Hello, and happy late summer!  I noticed my last few reviews were on rather weighty topics, in the midst of a nerve-wracking and perilous time here in our country: assassination attempts, shake-ups in electoral politics, the rising heat around the planet, and another dangerous wildfire season. So for this post, I’m going to share a lighter treat.

 

Given what’s been going on in the real world and the news, I was beyond pleased to discover a truly delightful, happy and enjoyable dramedy (drama/comedy) from Australia on Acorn TV. It’s a number of years old (it wrapped in 2018), but perhaps it just never made it here until recently to any of the likely streaming venues. Or maybe I just missed it for a while. In any case, it’s one of the most pleasant TV series surprises I’ve stumbled upon in quite a while.

 

The basic plot is this: George Turner, a middle-aged newspaper columnist from Sydney, has lost his wife of 20 years, run down by a speeding car in the street. A year has gone by, in which he’s tried to recover from his grief, and help his two high-school age children (an older daughter and a younger son) get their lives back on track. But it’s not really working, at least not for him. So in a moment of impulsive desperation, he decides to move the three of them to Weld, a small surf town on the coast of New Zealand.

 

His reasons for uprooting the family, and going to this particular little rural community, seem to be nothing more substantial than the fact that he used to go there on summer vacations as a kid, and he’d never managed to learn to surf back then. He thinks perhaps he can learn how to do that now, and maybe also get himself and his family back on track, in this nostalgically-remembered far-away place, where he won’t constantly be surrounded by reminders of his beloved wife.

 

George’s job is one that is transportable. He writes regular columns about life that always total exactly 800 words (hence the title). As he moves the family to their new home, his process of writing and reading the column out loud to the viewers becomes the mechanism for sharing his own internal monologue about the process he’s going through with the viewers.

 

That’s the situation as the series begins. What makes it so funny and heartwarming is not just the interactions of the three family members (and the late wife, who makes occasional appearances), but the delightful ensemble cast of oddballs and quirky local characters, and the encounters this little family of Australian outsiders immediately begin to have with them as soon as they arrive.

 

There are a number of very charming romantic plots occurring throughout the series, as all the local unattached women check George out and vie for his attention, while the two kids (Shay and Arlo) enroll in their new high school, and begin to get to know some of their local schoolmates. There are also “big city people” versus “small-town country people” themes and subplots, and intriguing stories about some of the histories and relationships of the various white folk in town with their Māori neighbors (who are also sometimes family members).  

 

And of course, there is all the comedy and drama of the dad, the daughter and the son at the center of the story, as they each slowly grow wiser, become community members, and come to terms in their own ways with the loss of the wife and mother.

 

In trying to come up with an analogy to another TV show that had a similar feel, I immediately thought of The Gilmore Girls. That had a similar kind of story about a small family of strong individuals, with a sad backstory, who were constantly fighting and arguing with each other, and getting into comical situations, but also clearly loved each other. It also featured a gossipy small town setting, full of amusing and eccentric characters, who surround and support the family members at the center of the story.

 

800 Words has the added benefit (for we Americans, anyway) of being set in the beautiful South Pacific island location of New Zealand, with their fun accents, and their very different culture and history from ours. It’s such a treat. Even with the Olympics going on, and all the electoral upheaval, we couldn’t help but binge all three seasons this summer, until we’d reached the very satisfying series conclusion.

 

I did notice and was actually impressed by the fact that this show only lasted three seasons. I’ve often thought in recent years that many good TV shows go on for far too long. The writers and producers often start with an intriguing situation, and initially do a good job of exploring the characters and how they might react to a number of plausible scenarios, but then try to keep it going year after year, long after the original story and situation still justifies it or can keep our attention.

 

The producers of 800 Words didn’t do that – they told a rich, complex story about believable, likable people and their community, played the various plotlines out to a lovely set of endings and resolutions, and then walked away from it, leaving the audience satisfied and feeling good about how it all worked out. That’s how it should be done!

 

I found 800 Words to be remarkably uplifting. I really loved the whole series -- it made me genuinely happy to watch it. I also thought the casting, acting and screenwriting were all excellent, and there was plenty of beautiful scenery thrown in, along with the occasional nice surfing clip. Truly, I enjoyed everything about it. Very highly recommended.