Fall Concert Season!

Two new music artists I like (and have mentioned here before) had shows added in SF recently, which gets me more excited for this fall’s concert lineup. Here is what I’m going to as of now:

Wed, September 22nd – Local Natives @ the Fillmore

Sat, October 2nd – Arcade Fire @ the Greek Theater

Tue, October 19th – Jónsi @ the Fox Theater

Tue, October 26th – Sufjan Stevens @ the Paramount

Thu, November 4th – Two Door Cinema Club @ Slim’s

Wed, November 10th – Delorean @ the Great American Music Hall

Pretty excited – six artists, six different venues. Interested in coming to any of these? Is there a show I’m missing out on? Let me know!

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Heat Wave

While much of the country has already been through the wringer of a heat wave, San Francisco just now got its first taste of one. It got up to 95 in the City and was hovering at triple digits down in Cupertino in the late afternoon.

And it is a balmy night — at 12:45am it’s around 85°F in my room. This brings to mind a song I’ve been wanting to post ever since summer was on the horizon, but now it’s finally appropriate:

Animal Collective – Summertime Clothes

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Sweet summer night and I’m stripped to my sheets
Forehead is leaking, my AC squeaks and
A voice from the clock says, “You’re not gonna get tired”
My bed is a pool and the walls are on fire
Soak my head in the sink for a while
Chills on my neck and it makes me smile, but
My bones have to move and my skin’s gotta breathe
You pick up the phone and I’m so relieved
You slide down your stairs to the heated street
And the sun has left us with slippery feet
And I want to walk around with you
And I want to walk around with you
And be here with you, we’re goin’

It doesn’t really matter, I’ll go where you feel
Hunt for the breeze, get a midnight meal
I point in the windows, you point out the parks
Rip off your sleeves and I’ll ditch my socks
We’ll dance to the songs from the cars as they pass
Weave through the cardboard, smell that trash
Walking around in our summertime clothes,
Nowhere to go while our bodies glow
And we’ll greet the dawn in its morning blues
With purple yawn, you’ll be sleeping soon
And I want to walk around with you
And I want to walk around with you

When the sun goes down, we’ll go out again
Don’t cool off, I like your warmth

Let’s leave the sound of the heat for the sound of the rain
It’s easy to sleep when it wets my brain
It covers my rest with a saccharine sheen
Kissing the wind through my window screen
The restlessness calls us, that I cannot hide
So much on my mind that it spills outside
Do you want to go stroll down the financial street?
Our clothes might get soaked, but the buildings sleep
And there’s no one pushing for a place
As we end up at an easy pace
And I want to walk around with you
And I want to walk around with you
I want to walk around with you
Just you, just you, just you…

I just love the lyrics and it’s one of my favorite songs. Stay cool, folks.

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Deconstructed S’mores

I’ve had this idea for a long time, and this past weekend I finally tried executing it: deconstructed s’mores. I envisioned a jumbo marshmallow, with an interior cavity filled with liquid chocolate. The marshmallow would then be dipped in chocolate, then wrapped in a graham cracker crust. Check out the results:

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Injecting chocolate into the marshmallow

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Applying the graham cracker crust

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The finished product (the plain chocolate one was a test vehicle)

At the dinner party yesterday, a few people tried these “deconstructed s’mores” and were quite positive about them. I haven’t tasted them myself yet, so that was quite a dose of encouragement. Cause you know, if this Apple thing doesn’t work out, then this is all I’ve got! My next steps are to acquire proper jumbo size marshmallows, improve the chocolate melting SOP to achieve more optimal consistency and smoothness, and investigates ways of increasing throughput of the chocolate coating step. I also want to start some DoEs to see the effect that different cooling approaches have on final texture consistency.

(man, so this is what happens you start thinking about culinary experiments in a similar way to optimizing an iPod line flow? now I need to line up my testers, hehe)

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Sunday Night Dinner

Another successful Sunday Night Dinner yesterday, thanks in large part to our guests. The cast of characters: Julie, a fellow Noe Valley resident (roommates with Wendy now) who started as an intern at Apple back in 2008 and is there full time; Brandon, a colleague of Julie; Gloria, former resident of iPodland who is now colleagues with Troy at Flipboard; Dustin, which you all have met before now; and Gloria’s friend Jack.

Gloria just flew back into town from a wedding, but the timing was perfect so I ended up picking her up at the nearby Muni stop just as Dan and I finished getting groceries. Dustin had biked down to Half Moon Bay and camped there by the beach last night, and just got back into town. He’s been training for his New Zealand bicycle touring trip in a few months. Dan and I had actually spent the afternoon with Brandon and Julie at the Stern Grove festival concert.

Tonight’s menu: grilled salmon for the omnivores, grilled portabello mushroom cap with basil/rosemary infused goat cheese with crushed garlic for the veggiesaurs, with sides of roasted sweet potato fries, grilled corn, and green beans.

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Gloria looks after some sweet potato fries

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Brandon got the bread ready for the appetizer, served with brie and goat cheese

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Gloria and Dustin

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Pot o’ roasted corn

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Julie serves up some sweet potato fries. We did them two ways – one batch skinned and trimmed, the other ‘dirty’ style, just as unprepped as you could get.

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Dessert – boozy peaches with cream. Brandon made perfect slices of peach and we let them sit during dinner in vanilla and brown sugar. I used my immersion blender and whipped some heavy cream with some brown sugar and Maker’s Mark whiskey. I wanted to top with toasted pecan crumbles, but accidentally burned the pecans in the oven. Sigh.

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Dustin did a quite a nice job with the presentation!

I heard the salmon turned out well, and Dan’s fine hand at roasting the portabella mushroom caps for Dustin and me was well appreciated. The slightly melted goat cheese over it with rosemary was excellent. For second dessert (because why not?) we had a berry pie that Gloria brought from Mission Pies.

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New Music: Subiza by Delorean

This one comes with a hat tip to my buddy John, who always is listening to something new and cool. Delorean (yes, named after that car with the flux capacitor) hails from Spain where they found success in re-imagining the local dance music scene. The end result to my ears is music that is upbeat but not frenetic, easy to listen to but intricate in their drum beats and sampling. Upon first listen, I was reminded most of Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion but these guys are much more consistent and accessible.

Here are two songs for you to check out:

Delorean – Real Love

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Delorean – Infinite Desert

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Heads up Bay Area folks – Delorean is coming to the Great American Music Hall on Wednesday, November 10th. Who wants to come with?

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New Music: The Five Ghosts by Stars

Stars, a longtime indie pop band out of Canada, released their eighth album or so this past June called The Five Ghosts & The Seance. I heard it via Troy one night and it caught my ears.  The sound and harmonies of the two lead vocalists really shine here, and the penchant for swelling flourishes remain true to the Stars’ style (see the near end of Fixed). The theme of ‘ghosts’ run through out the album, which actually reminds me also of the Freelance Whales’ Weathervanes. Try these two songs:

Stars – Dead Hearts

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Stars – Fixed

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The Nifty Fifty

A few weeks ago (maybe a month already? time is flying back like a jet these days), I picked up the nifty fifty, a 50mm prime lens. A “prime” lens is one that has a fixed focal length, meaning you can’t zoom with it. The advantage though is it’s capable of low f-stop numbers, which means its aperture can become very wide and this results in a shallow depth-of-field. Or put another way, it helps you achieve the coveted ‘blurred background’ look more easily. This lens can go to f/1.8.

Here are a few shots I took with it with the first two things around when I put the lens on. Predictably, it’s the lens that I just removed…..and an iPod. :)

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Michael’s Birthday, Dolores Park, Sunday Dinner

We went out to celebrate Michael’s birthday on Saturday, and first stop was dinner at Suppenküche, a German restaurant in Hayes Valley that is simply wunderbar. The ambiance immediately reminds me of a real German beer hall with arched ceilings, simple pine wood tables and benches instead of chairs, and of course — an incredible beer menu. Speaking of the menu, it was tickling to see it written with Deutsch as the primary language,  with English as subtitles.

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We got a giant Bavarian pretzel, and Michael got a 2 litre boot! At least four different Bavarian hefeweisses dotted the table, and they even had Augustiner, a beer beloved by a German friend of mine from Sweden. The wait staff was terrific — we had brought a cake in a pan that Karla made herself. They smoothly took it when we entered and kept it in the back until it was ready. They even found some candles for us, and then served it out in plates after Michael blew out the candles. Before we left, they thoughtfully cleaned the pan out before giving it back to us.

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Afterwards we walked over to the Haight and hit up Toronados. We had an early dinner, so it wasn’t too crowded.

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After Toronados we went to 330 Ritch. The DJ was actually rather good, much better than the Pink Mammoth DJ at Club Mighty where we went for Karla’s birthday.

I woke up late on Sunday, went to brunch with Troy at Toast, then walked up to Dolores Park. Lately I’ve been reading Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. It’s the first large bit of fiction I’ve read in a while, and quite good so far. It’s narratives weaves together World War II adventure, cryptoanalysis, a modern tech startup building a data haven in east Asia, and two parallel stories that bridge two time periods. I’ve been reading it for about two weeks, and I’m about 650 pages in. So far so good!

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Dolores Park was, predictably, gorgeous. I walked home from the park. We’re trying to start a tradition of Sunday night dinners at our house, where we cook food and invite friends. Today we invited Andrea and Vanessa, and Alice and her friend Paul. I met Andrea back in 2008 when I was an intern at Apple — he worked down the hall on software for the Nano. He’s in another department now at Apple, but I often see him at Caffe Macs, invariably talking in Italian with a cadre of fellow Italians. Mariani 1 misses him. He and his wife actually just moved to the neighborhood, a half dozen blocks away. We really do have a nice community now!

Alice made an appetizer of goat cheese and figs on baguette, and Andrea used a rolling pin to make an Italian appetizer called piadina, an flatbread with fresh mozzarella and panchetta. I was surprised to see that it took on the texture and taste of roti. We used a wok (thanks Dustin!) and made a stir fry with tofu and chicken. For dessert, they took fresh cut peaches, peaches & cream ice cream, and topped it with amaretto biscotti crumbles.

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Prepping the dessert

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Delicious.

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Vanessa and Andrea

Yeah, I’d say the weekend was a success.

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Castle Crags Video

Just a quick update – I put together a video/photo compilation from the Castle Crags camping trip. I’ll be honest — the night shots were just me trying out the new camera!

Click here to watch in HD.

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Caitlin and Dale visit SF

This past Saturday I got a phone call from Mary — Caitlin and Dale were in town! Having just finished the bar exam, Caitlin figured it was a good of time as any to make it out west. They drove up to the City in the afternoon, and got to see the house. We headed out towards downtown, Lombard St., the Embarcadero, etc. I had told Caitlin and Dale as we hit the road that “you’re guaranteed to see at least one interesting thing every time you venture into the CIty”, and sure enough we got it. We were circling the Ghirardelli Square area for parking, and saw a car stopped in front of us. No big deal — usually someone is parking up ahead. In our case though, the guy gets out to have some heated words with the car in front. The other one says angry words back. And in a blink of an eye, a full on fist fight erupted in front of us. A ripped shirt was thrown to the side, and the two ended up squaring off, fists raised, right in the middle of the street.

Well then.

Fortunately, a burly MUNI driver walked up, separated the two,  and pointed them to their cars. They got in, and drove off. And that was that. Anyway, we headed out to the Marin Headlands with its great views of the Golden Gate Bridge.

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Haha, nice one Matt.

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^ Mary took this one!

After Marin, we finally made it to Ghirardelli and got hot chocolate and sundaes. Now before you ask — yes, it’s perfectly acceptable to enjoy hot chocolate in the summer time. It’s San Francisco! Hehe. Later that night I headed down to Menlo Park to have dinner with them. It was so great to see them! And that reminds me…I need to have Mary and Matt over for dinner and cook up a feast for them…

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Castle Crags State Park

Last weekend I headed up to Castle Crags State Park for some hiking and camping with friends. The cast of characters: Tim, who I went to Yosemite with when Terrell was out here in 2008; John, who finished grad school at Berkeley in energy and resources; and iPod hardware super intern Dustin. Tim and John were part of the Park Scholars program at NC State, so there’s the other connection.

Tim, John, and I had been kicking around this idea for a while, and suddenly campsites started to open up mid-week and we lit the greenlight. Dustin was game, so the quartet was complete. We hit the road early Saturday morning, picking up John in Berkeley and settling into I-505 to I-5 as the sun start to rise. Castle Crags State Park is located up near Mt. Shasta, which is rather far up north. However, because you stay on I-5N for nearly the whole time, it’s actually in the same approximate driving-radius-from-SF as Yosemite or Tahoe. It jumped out at me for its impressive rock formations and, of course, campsite availability.

We got there around 11am, saw that the ranger was super chill, and setup camp early. It was warm, and so we headed down to a nearby river trail. Streaming and flowing the whole weekend was countless pop culture references, internet memes, mathematical puzzles and riddles, and stories.

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Tim takes very good photos, and helped explain how to get some difficult shots. I brought along my new camera, so I was eager to learn from him. We came across this stream, and he suggested: “use the smallest aperture you have, set the ISO to the lowest you can, set the exposure to +2 and spot meter on the brightest part of the stream, and everything will fall into the right place.”

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….wow.  Dinner that night was a bit nicer than one might expect from camping: fire roasted corn (literally), mushroom risotta, and sausages (courtesy of Trader Joes, whose apparently “standards” precludes them from carrying marshmellows! fail).

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Cards followed of course, along with two bottles of Two Buck Chuck, and a large box of strike anywhere matches.

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The next day we headed up the Castle Dome trail to the top of the crags. Just 2.7 miles one way, but with a 2400 foot elevation climb. Hoo-rah. It was another hot day too — 90F to 95F on the trail. It was a good hike — especially as you approached the top and you started getting into the granite rock structures.

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We missed a switchback and ended up trying to scale a crag, but got set back on course.

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Finally we make it to the top of the trail, and then Dustin navigates a path farther up until we find ourselves at the edge of a cravasse, with an imposing view of the Castle Dome, and Mt. Shasta off in the distance. We plop down in the shade on a ledge, and enjoyed the view during lunch:

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To our left, the rest of the “Castle Crags” loomed.

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We were tipped off by a fellow hiker that 1/3rd of the way down the trail, there was a short turnoff to a natural spring that supplies the campsite below with water. We found this shaded grove and it was a welcome respite from the heat. The water was wonderfully cold, and we dunked our heads and shirts in it to cool down.

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Dustin spotted a deer on the trail on the way down, and looking out on our left towards Mt. Shasta we could see the lenticular clouds roll in.

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We got back around 7pm or so, and started headed back to the City. Dinner was a stop at Olive Garden (hah, I know. You had to be there), and then we finally rolled back home around 1:30am. Well worth it though — a great weekend with friends, discussion, beautiful scenery, and lots of laughter.

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Big Sur Hiking, World Cup Brunch, Moroccan Tagine

Two weekends ago I headed down to the Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park in the Big Sur area for a day of hiking. I went along with a Meetup.com group dedicated to going on outdoor outings every weekend around the Bay Area. The trips are organized by Julio, who does policy outreach at the Sierra Club. As I discovered during the hike, his focus area is actually in residential energy efficiency and retrofitting — we talked more in depth about it and he knew some of the professors I had at Stanford in the energy space.

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Julio

Overall the day went quite well. The turnout was quite large — 27 — and we did about 2.5 short hikes to different parts of the park. The best part was meeting all the people, many of whom are people I would never really have the chance to run into in my daily routine. A health quality reporting analytics person at Kaiser, data mining engineer at Oracle, an about-to-be-practicing therapist, an ethnographer at Intel who looks at consumer electronics five to ten years out, etc.

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I carpooled with Irena and Nema, a graduate student in English at Stanford and a banking specialist at Wells Fargo. We headed back before the rest of the group went to get dinner, and ended up rolling back into Palo Alto at around 9pm. A long but good day.

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I ended up crashing at Nader’s place in Sunnyvale to save a trip back up to the City, and tomorrow we met up with Lux, Lei, Amit, and Edward for brunch at Hobees (omg giant coffeecakes!). It was our usual fast-paced conversation and it’s something I always look forward to. After brunch we hopped across the street to Stanford to watch the World Cup final at the international student center. I was rooting for the Dutch (who I had picked to win before the tournament started), but boy there were a lot of cards. I think the officiating was a bit more biased against the Dutch, and it wasn’t until they were playing 1 man down for ten minutes that Spain finally scored. Still, it was a first time win for Spain, so that’s pretty cool.

We ran into Feng and Doug at the viewing and we took a stroll at the newly finished Science and Engineering Quad (SEQ). This completes the new plaza around the Y2E2 building, and is the new home for the School of Engineering, the MS&E department, and nanosciencess. The courtyard looks really great.

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The octagon wing on the left houses the new robotic Engineering library and was sponsored by the founder of Nvidia, a Stanford alum.

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Terraced stair areas where people can hang out during lunch.

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Feng and Doug

Mozzi had called asking about dinner plans, and I offered up the idea of a Moroccan tagine over coucous with a greek salad. Game on. I sent out a quick invite, and later that night Mozzi, Alex, their friend Elena (who at UCSF this summer doing research) came over to help make dinner. Wendy and Michael also were able to make it, and it was a great finish to the weekend. This is when I thought I’d in peaches to my greek salad, a move that went over quite well!

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Finally made the jump

…to a digital SLR camera. Early last week my Canon EOS 550D/T2i arrived and so far it’s just been on one outing. Still learning a lot with it (especially how to fine tune exposure and metering types on the fly), but I’m liking it a lot. Full HD video capture is one of the major reasons I went with the 550D instead of the 50D. I enjoy the craft of film — though admittedly I haven’t made time to get into making short works yet — and having the capability in a DSLR gives me a lot of versatility and capabilities due to the full suite of lens you have at your disposal. Finally, I can do stuff like focusing pulling:


(click here to watch in HD!)

As I work on finishing my backlog of posts over the next week, you’ll start seeing photos from it pop up. I’m also eager to go on some photography walks around the Bay.

Next up is to buy two lenses: a 50mm prime first, then a zoom after that. If you have advice, I’d love to have some!

Update: The smallest video size for YouTube video embeds is 560 pixels wide. The time has time to redesign my website to widen the main content pane…another weekend task.

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