Saket Vora

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.

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.”

….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).

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

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.

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

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Terraced stair areas where people can hang out during lunch.

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!

…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.

This past Sunday I did an impromptu dinner that Mozzi, Alex, their friend Elena, Mike, and Wendy were able to attend on short notice. Trying to think of something different, I went with a dish I’ve made before with some success — a Moroccan style vegetable tagine served over couscous, with Greek salad and bread. Mozzi and Elena arrived early and helped me prepare the dishes.

Everyone was quite happy with the Greek salad. The special ingredient: peaches! I just took your basic Greek salad — chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, red onion slivers, halved Kalamata olives, a generous helping of crumbled feta, splashes of olive oil and red wine vinegar — and added some fresh peaches to it. I had used yellow peaches because that’s all that were ripe at the grocery store, but I think the lovely nuanced sweetness of the white peach would play phenomenally in a salad like this. White peaches are one of my favorite fruits….slightly chill and perfectly ripe, they are simply divine. They are in season right now, so let them shine!

Back at the Yeasayer concert, I mentioned the opening band, Sleigh Bells. It raised our eyebrows, largely because it was unusual to see so much sound come from just two people on stage. Who triggered the air raid siren? There is a guitarist, and a singer, backed up by what’s likely a Mac laptop somewhere in the shadows. The hype machine on indie music blogs has been firing away on all cylinders with this duo, but I mention them here more as a curiosity because much of their debut album, Treats, makes my ears ring upon prolonged listening. It’s deafening, distortion heavy guitars meets dance-pop minded vocals, if that makes any sense at all. As the NY Times review said, “The tracks don’t just rock — they detonate.”

One song that managed to burrow its way into my head is Kids. It’s summertime, so let’s hit the beach. From the coy “did I forget my sunglasses? No…got ‘em” to the surging melody, the song begs for repeat listens. Or maybe that’s the mush-that-used-to-be-my-brain talking.

Sleigh Bells – Kids

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One thing is for sure — there certainly nothing else like this sound anywhere else right now.

The China trip was fairly uneventful, just doing the work. I came home earlier than the last trips, so I didn’t get a chance to check out the Expo or more of the City. Maybe next time. I took a different flight back home (leaves Hong Kong at 12:30am instead of 3:00pm), and arrived back at SFO at 10pm. Recovering from jet lag has progressed much better. Usually for a whole week I end up crashing into bed at 8pm and wake up at 4am (I know, technically doesn’t make sense, but that’s what happens). But I haven’t experienced any of that this time around.

I did a WFH (work-from-home) the next day, where I took delivery of my new queen mattress and ran some much needed errands (thanks Mom for the tip on good sheets). I woke up very early on Saturday and made a poor man’s huevos rancheros for the World Cup games. In the late afternoon I first swung by SOMA for my friend Kevin’s birthday party. We were in Hindi class together at Stanford, where he was doing grad school in Aero/Astro. Kevin was hosting people on the roof of his apartment building, and was jamming some tunes with friends from his undergrad days at Berkeley:

After that I headed to Cha Cha Cha’s in the Mission for Karla’s birthday dinner. Got to catch up with Jess and Justin, which is something I always look forward to. A few familiar faces from the Stanford Rains crowd were there, as well as some of Karla’s department friends. After dinner we headed over to Mighty, a dance club where Pink Mammoth was going to be spinning as part of their fundraiser for a tent at Burning Man. Pink Mammoth seems to be a group of people who like to party and they’re pretty active in the area’s events — they have a float at Lovefest, Bay to Breakers, a tent at Burning Man, etc. The music was alright (house, but very repetitive. even after 3 hours, the DJ seemed apprehensive of moving away from the beat he laid down initially), but it was fun to hang out with them.

All that was two weekends ago. Last Friday, Chrissy organized a bonfire at a beach just north of Santa Cruz. Dan and I headed down after work and caught up with another group of Chrissy’s friends just outside the beach. We made our way down through the bluffs to the little cove that featured a wide sandy beach. It was a fun night — John brought an honest to God vuvuzela much to the delight and horror of people there. We had some drinks, made s’mores, had our jackets drenched with smoke as the winds off the Pacific leapt off the ocean.

photo by John Shen

The next day (this past Saturday) was one of the most productive that Dan, Wendy, and I have had in a while. Wendy had a lead on a free sectional sofa in Menlo Park that was her manager’s, and let us keep it because there’s no need for it in her apartment. But we couldn’t fit it in any of our cars. Wendy was also moving out of her apartment that day. Here’s what we did: swapped out/returned cable boxes at Comcast in Potrero, took rental of a bigger truck than we reserved because the truck rental company screwed up, drove to Union Square to pick up the dining table I ordered on Memorial Day (and witnessed a bicyclist get hit by an SUV and go flying over the hood right in front of us), drove all the way down to Menlo Park to load up the sofa and a nice coffee table, drove back to Noe Valley and unloaded the (heavy) tables and sofa, then drove the six blocks to Wendy’s apartment and helped her move all her things down two flights of stairs into the truck, drive the 3 blocks to her new apartment and unload all of her stuff up 1 flight of stairs, then drive up to Pac Heights to get an entertainment center Dan spotted on Craigslist (having to take a major detour in the ridiculously large truck through more hills because Castro/Divisadero was shut due to the Pride Parade), then across town back to the truck rental place to drop it off, then back to Noe Valley. Dan and Wendy split off to go to a friend’s birthday party / concert, while I jetted down to Target to get some needed things, making it out just as it closed at 11pm.

photo by Wendy

Whew. Pictures of our more finished house to come soon….