Saket Vora

Quite a satisfying week! My (two) projects at Apple were in full swing and I was keeping quite busy with them, often staying late in the evening. On Tuesday, all the iPod and iPhone interns (about 25 of us?) had a lunch with Tony Fadell, the SVP of the mobile group. He was much younger than I thought, and his lengthy background as a computer engineer and in product development left me impressed that though he was an SVP, Fadell truly knows his stuff. On Tuesday, I also met up with Brent, Terrell, and one of Brent’s friends from NC State - Alex Guichard. Alex did his B.S. in materials science and is finishing up his PhD in matsci at Stanford. He knows Amit (same program). He just got married and we talked about all the crazy stuff that surrounds weddings. Terrell is getting married this fall, and of course we all know who’s tying the knot very soon.

On Thursday, the interns got hear from Jonathan Ive, the famous industrial designer at Apple.  This was probably the second most anticipated speaker event, after Jobs of course.

Now, a group of us are headed to Yosemite for the weekend. I’ll be back Sunday night.

After an incredibly frustrating morning wasted at the DMV, a long lunch with Andrew (one of Naman’s acquaintances that I’ve gotten in touch with out here) finally set the day straight. We talked about a lot of things — topics that don’t often come up with other people I’ve talked with. He’s been a wonderful sounding board. He offered this:

It may be when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

          -Wendell Berry

Over the weekend, I migrated my photo gallery to the popular online photo site, flickr. Yeah, all 3,900 photos. I’m disappointed in the clumsy way of organizing collections and sets, but flickr is more integrated into online services compared to my existing solution, the open source program Gallery2. I won’t take down the old gallery, but just letting you.

Flickr photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/saket_vora/

On Sunday I decided to take an impromptu trip down to Big Basin Redwoods State Park which is about an hour south of Palo Alto. I’ve been wanting to go down there earlier, but the recent northern California fires stalled the plan. The route there is very windy — the kind of driving that makes you sit up and grip the wheel, quite fun.

After arriving at Big Basin just after 2pm, I set out on an 11-mile hike that would take me to Berry Creek Falls, Silver Falls, and Golden Falls, before circling back towards the park headquarters. The central trail, Skyline to the Sea, indeed takes a 12-mile journey to Waddell Beach on the Pacific.

I finished the hike in just over 4 hours, felt pretty good about the pace I was keeping. The trail went from lush redwood forest to scrubby forest to chaparall and back again. I finished off the hike with an It’s It (i’m sure Peyton would be proud) and a peanut butter sandwich. Yum.

After coming home I watched The Namesake, based off the novel. This story is like a punch to my stomach - it hits so close to home it’s almost painful.

February 21, 2008

July 10, 2008

Can’t wait for college football to start up, right? …..right?

I stumbled across this today: COST 298 Conference: the user and the future of information and communication technologies. The conference is taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark and they used a picture of Nyhavn that I uploaded to the Wikipedia entry on Copenhagen. I took it in the autumn of 2005. The conference webmaster kindly credited the photo too. Thanks!

After arriving back home, I biked over to Green library to return the two DVDs I rented. On my way in, I ran into Amit and we chatted a bit. He’s prepping for an overseas trip and a visit in Cambridge for graduation. I returned Michael Clayton and There Will Be Blood and picked up No Country for Old Men (catching up on films I missed last quarter). On the way back, my friend Jonathan shouts out as I’m about to cross Campus Dr. and Escondido and I swing around to stop. We chat for a while and then Siddharth rode past on his back and circled around to join us. Siddharth and I were partners for RF Circuits lab last quarter and now he landed an internship at our prof’s company, ZeroG Wireless. We’re excited cause he gets to hear stories from Tom Lee all day. We stood there talking for a while when Kamal rolls up after waving goodbye to a friend. Another fellow EE 414 veteran! A bit later, someone says “Hey Saket?” and I turn around and wouldn’t you know it — it’s Nader’s dad! His company landed a nice contract with Cisco so he’s been traveling often to San Jose. I’d often join him and Nader for a late night coffee out on University Avenue. I catch up with him and then he takes off, then a few minutes later Nader approaches our little group wondering where his dad went. They meet up later and head off on an evening walk, while our group starts to disband.

What started as a quick trip to the library turned into two hours of catching up with quite a few friends. I love it.

We went to the San Francisco Zoo on July 4th. A Sumatran tiger was playing with its cubs (triplets!) and there were two grizzly bears there!