Saket Vora

After a lazy Saturday (Troy and I parked ourselves at the Valley Tavern for some March Madness action), I headed up with a group of friends to Cataract Falls, near Mt. Tamalpais by Muir Woods north of the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin. Suggested by John, the falls would be roaring with the weeks of rain we’ve been getting lately. Our merry caravan included Patrick, Tim, and John Stanley in my car; Kito, David, Will, and Nirav in John Shen’s car, and Rong. Good mix of new and old faces for me. I’d been enjoying Kito’s shares and comments in our Google Reader community, but this was first time meeting him in meatspace.

Trailhead details were pretty hazy for this hike, and my car got up to Fairfax before Rong signaled that the road to our intended trailhead was closed. Uh oh. The caravan gathered at a cafe downtown and decided to backtrack and make for the 2nd trailhead. We passed the turn offs to Stinson Beach and Muir Woods before getting to a small parking lot. Here, our road was closed too. Ruh roh. I struck up a conversation with a gentleman by the parked car next to ours, who said that Cataract Falls is great and that we could just hike in from a small trailhead from the end of the parking lot. What good fortune! Many thanks, kind sir.

The forest was lush, energized by the very recent rains and the greens nearly glowed despite the cloudy skies. We made way our past a meadow before entering the forest proper, quickly joining Cataract Creek and following it deeper inside. The trip would be fairly well documented — Shen rented a 10-16mm wide angle lens, Tim was packing a tripod for the waterfalls, and Nirav and I were both sporting Rebels. This was also the first trip that I got to really use my new 24-105mm f/4L lens.

The trail runs along Cataract Creek as the creek makes it way from the mountains to the Bay. The steep valley makes for a series of cascades and waterfalls that were roaring on Sunday. We finally approached our first one as it tumbled down a sharp drop. Kito, I discovered, is training to be a volunteer search-and-rescue (SAR) team volunteer and has taken classes ranging from search tactics, high angle rescues, survival skills, rope work, etc. Not a bad person to have on a hike! He got out 150ft of rope and started anchoring it to a tree, seeking to rappel down the side of the waterfall.

We spent a good 15 minutes at the first falls, and there were many more to come. Along the way we saw these trees that had small leaves growing all the way around their trunks, almost like a coat of feathers. Very cool.

I took this next shot handheld, 0.8″ shutter speed. Image stabilization for the win!

Another series of cascades ends in a shimmering pool.

Here you go Mom, a photo of me! Thanks Patrick, nice shot.

The forest looking ominous…like Mirkwood?

By around 2:30pm, we saw the trailhead diverging away from the creek and decided to head back out. Five minutes later, the rain started up and didn’t let up. Grrrrr. This hike was actually postponed due to the reported “100% chance of rain” for Saturday and projection that the storm would break on Saturday night. Mind you, this was a projection from Friday afternoon. Instead, it didn’t rain on Saturday and rained on Sunday. I talked about Kito’s SAR stuff on the way back. He got into it because he’s been hiking and backpacking since he was little, and wanted to find an activity that combined that and community service. What a great fit. Some general advice I learned too if you’re lost: don’t move, try to stay warm and dry, use a whistle because its sound carries farther and you don’t wear yourself out shouting; signal mirrors are a lot easier to spot and don’t run out of batteries; and flashing headlamps are very useful too.

We dried off as best we could back at the car, bid adieu to our comrades and headed back to the City. We stopped by a nice cafe in the Marina-ish area for a warmup, which was amusing if you know the typical Marina crowd and then picture us (largely wet from hiking in the woods) yakking it up in their cozy cafe.

Altogether, I’d call this a success — now I’ve got a nice rainy-season hike close to the City in my backpocket.

The story of Abigail Washburn is a fascinating gem. I first learned about her last week, when Joseph had me listen to her latest album, City of Refuge.

She grew up moving around quite a bit — born in Evanston, IL, childhood in D.C., high school in Minnesota, and college in Colorado. While in undergrad, she started learning Mandarin and spent half a year living in China. She decided she wanted to become a lawyer, and completed exams to begin law school at Beijing University. Before Washburnl left, she wanted to take something distinctively American with her. Inspired by a recording from a bluegrass legend, she decided to pick up the banjo and embarked on a months long road trip to learn the instrument and songs. Her journey took her through West Virginia, North Carolina, and finally to Kentucky where she went to an international bluegrass festival. She found a group of women in a hallway, sat down and started playing the few songs she knew.

And was offered a record deal right then.

So much for becoming a lawyer in China. Washburn spent years touring as part of an ensemble and playing festivals, settling down in Nashville and, believe it or not, catching Béla Fleck’s fancy (they’re married now). Fleck, as some of you might know, is considered one of the most prolific and greatest banjo players in the world (he has been Grammy nominated in more categories than any other musician). Washburn has been able to keep her ties close to China too — she lead the Sparrow Quartet which melded Americana folk with heavy Chinese influences. They toured China and played at the World Expo in Shanghai.

City of Refuge is her latest album, released this past January. I don’t typically listen to bluegrass or folk — my exposure to that has been through some of Sufjan’s material — but this album is wonderful, so warm.

Please, please, listen to these two songs. Get our your pair of headphones, close your eyes, let the sound fill your ears. Let your mind focus on that voice, while the gentle banjo plucking and lush accompaniment fills the space between your ears. Hear the marvelous violin flourishes, the earthy substance of the upright bass, the lightness of the piano.

Abigail Washburn – Bring Me My Queen

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Abigail Washburn – Corner Girl

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Such beautiful music….

Raleigh folks, she’s playing at the Lincoln Theater on May 2. Get tickets before it’s too late!
San Francisco folks, catch her tomorrow at Yoshi’s! I wish I could go.

Last Sunday I finally resurrected the Sunday night dinner tradition and planned on making the most of the dismal weather we were having to make some of Bittman’s soup recipes. Sunday turned out to be a pretty nice day. I spent the morning watching more basketball, catching up on blog posts (have you noticed), and went for a short run.

The goal of the dinner was to brainstorm ideas for an upcoming Iron Chef night. Mia, one of Wendy’s friends, was charmed by the idea when they dropped by for a visit a few months back. Tonight, my guests included Mia and Wendy (who brought monster asparagus stalks), Mary and Matt made the trek from Menlo Park (along with delicious phyllo fig tarts), and Joey brought some homebrew imperial extra stout.

I made two of Bittman’s recipes — a hearty mushroom minestrone and a creamy curried cauliflower soup. The mushroom one needed more salt, but otherwise I’m glad how they turned out. I also made some butternut squash macaroni and cheese, then with Mia, Mary, and Wendy’s help got a large batch of popovers in the oven too.

The brainstorming went really well — in directions I never imagined it’d go. The way I’ve seen Iron Chef done before is that at the beginning of the week an ingredient or flavor (like sesame, or lime) is announced. People then gather that weekend potluck style, with dishes that incorporate the ingredient/flavor. In the end, I think we have a really cool idea – one that is challenging and a little out of the box. But should be fun — I won’t reveal it  yet though!

Last Saturday the wind and the rain descended upon the City for the whole day. It’s funny how a few years out here really spoils you. But anyway, I started the day off with college basketball (what else during March Madness?) and in the early afternoon Ben (Park c/o 2002) came over. He and I were going to participate remotely to a Park Engineering Alumni Mixer event organized and hosted back in North Carolina by Mark Voelker (fellow c/o 2002). This was an event that would help current Parks meet alumni who were in engineering careers and pick their brains about the industry, grad school, preparing for jobs, and general advice.

Mark setup a Webex video stream and students cycled through, asking a wide array of questions from the culture out in Silicon Valley, big company vs startup experience, grad school, interviewing, etc. I should point out that Ben is very well suited for many of these questions — he joined Google right out of school in the early days, worked there for 7 years before leaving to join some friends at Friendfeed, but that was acquired by Facebook two weeks after he joined. He left Facebook (just another mothership) for the seven person startup Brizzly, but that was acquired by AOL after nine months. So he left AOL pretty quickly, and just recently joined Dropbox (a certain super angel named Ron took a personally active role in suggesting startups to Ben). So yeah — he’s kind of a big deal. I handled some questions about graduate school and of engineering on the hardware versus software side of things. It was rather interesting — the alumni presence was dominated by electrical/computer engineering and computer science grads, but these majors were the minority in the students who attended. These majors have seen a decline amongst the Park students since when I was in school. Oh yeah — a huge plus of the event was seeing my close friends Greg, Jordan, and Win there too!

That evening I headed over to Tim’s place for a dinner party. He had around three dozen oysters on ice because one of the friends he invited over loves oysters. But…the friend didn’t end up showing so there was a lot to go around! Tim also had fish for the main course, and for veggiesaurus like me had portabella mushroom caps that were perfectly marinated — better than I’ve ever done.

After dinner he and his girlfriend Cat melted some chocolate into fondue and served with a variety of fresh fruit. Mmmmm.

Jen, one of Cat’s childhood friends, reaches for some fondue.

John evaluates a variety of fruit / chocolate combinations.

It was also Sean’s birthday, and no celebration would be complete without a candle-lit cake.

Afterward we played two games, first up being Mafia. Then we played a game that Patrick (new friend! fellow NC State alum, works at Google) suggested to us called Celebrity. It was pretty fun — get lots of slips of paper and everyone write a couple of names of celebrities. Split into teams (A/B/A/B) and then each person has 30 seconds to describe the celebrities on the slips of paper they’ve drawn one-at-a-time from the hat while their team guesses who it is. The first round you can say anything to describe the person, the second round you’re limited to just one word, and in the final round it reverts to charades.

Big hat tip to Tim for a fun night and good food!

Last Friday we had an office shuffle at work. For some folks, it was the first time in over five years that they were moving offices. As with any move, there are good and bad aspects. One nice thing is that the whole team will now be on the same side of the building, the one with the hardware lab. Previously a bunch of us were on the opposite side. I also really like the small hallway wing my new office is in — it has three great layout engineers that we often work with, our lead component engineer, an EPM that works on our projects, and four of the five members of Joseph’s team (Rishabh didn’t have to move and is just down the hall). The bad part is that several key firmware, NAND guys, and EPMs are scattered across the second and third floors, so it’s harder to just go over and pop our heads in their offices if we have a question. I’m already scheming about setting up a monitor in our hallway with a persistent FaceTime connection to the other floors. :)

Moving was the priority on Friday, and to mark the end of the era we did a group trip to a go-karting track (of course, right?). We had been here before back at the end of my internship for the launch of the Nano and Touch from three years ago.

Feeling pretty beat from moving and go-karting, I postponed a long-due dinner catchup with my friend Mike and headed back up to the City. John invited me to a house party of a friend of his from SF Energy Discuss club, so I popped over to the Mission for a couple of hours. The pair of buildings that the party was situated in turned out to be where the popular Couchsurfing service began — ground zero. Pretty cool.

Last Thursday — St. Patrick’s Day! — I wore my green sweater and green belt and enjoyed some Guinness Chocolate Cheesecake courtesy of Chrissy (hat tip to Sapana for the recipe share). Just as I was leaving work, I got a text from Melih: a colleague of his is fronts an Irish rock band and was putting on a show that night at the Great American Music Hall. What a cool way to celebrate St. Paddy’s day! I got a quick bite to eat at home and Micky greeted me at my door as they picked me up. Her mother was in town too — last night — so I got to see her again (last time was at the wedding). They also posed another “hypothetical scenario” question in which I had to invariably picks sides between Melih and Micky (they love making me squirm with questions like this!). I think I successfully threaded this one down the middle though, lol.

Melih and I got to the GAMH as his colleague’s band, Culann’s Hounds, was setting up on stage. I got a Guinness of my own in my hand before their set started.

I’ve got a thing for Irish music — the melodious violin, the foot-stomping beats, the earnest guitar strumming. The band played a good mix of what sounded like traditional Irish songs, some originals, and instruments. It was a lot of fun!

Big thanks to Melih for a memorable way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day this year.

A few months ago I wrote about Warpaint, the all-girl downtempo rock band that Jono (Dan’s brother) told me about during Thanksgiving. Last Wednesday I saw them live at the Independent with John, his friends David and Alex, and Alex’s roommate Timon. It turned out to be the leadoff show of their new tour. Before the show we got some pizza at the surprisingly excellent Little Star Pizza, less than two blocks up from the venue on Divisadero.

Timon actually works at Topspin, a company that develops web and marketing tools for artists, and so it was really interesting to hear more about the industry. He had seen Warpaint recently down in LA, where they are based, and raved about the new drummer they brought on board. He was right on — the drummer really shone through and was definitely the glue that kept things together as the band worked through the set. The vocal harmonies were also a nice touch.

It was an interesting show — really solid when the band were playing songs but surprisingly uneven in between songs. Maybe it was just first-show-of-the-tour jitters, or the fact that apparently one of their dad’s was in the audience, but the girls would make these really random comments or actions between the songs. Warpaint and Set Your Arms Down from their new album The Fool was good, as was was Elephants off their older EP. One surprise was 12+ minute jam on the last song of the encore — didn’t see that one coming but it was pretty cool to see them just cut loose and play. Though halfway through, the bassist and one of the guitarists sat down on the stage and remained down there until almost the very end. No one except for the first two rows could see them. Ok….but at least it sounded good.

Here’s something to get your foot tapping — Pretty Lights is electronic music with hip-hop beats, with a dashes of of glitchy dubstep, funk, and soul for good measure. Heard about them from Jess, and all their albums are available for free download off their website (one of the most vivid artist websites you’ll ever see, too).

Spin some of these albums up at your next house party. At least check out these two tracks:

Pretty Lights – Gold Coast Hustle

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Pretty Lights – Understand Me Now

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Raleigh folks — Pretty Lights is performing at the Raleigh Amphitheater on April 19th.

I typically don’t use this channel to complain about every day things, but this one irritates me so much that I can’t ignore it. While as a student and in my current job, I spend a lot of time using office productivity software. Excel for mathematical sketching and modeling, PowerPoint for slide decks, Word for long-form documents. In many ways, particularly with Excel, the Microsoft Office suite continues to be the best overall software for this. Now at Apple, I find myself using the iWork suite — Numbers and Keynote — almost exclusively now.

Having never owned a Mac before starting at Apple, I was taken aback by the difference in the Microsoft Office suite’s maturity between the Windows and OS X version. Office 2007 for the PC saw the introduction of the new ‘ribbon’ interface that, after a short time, proved largely superior to the old interface that originated over a decade ago. I used this version extensively at the end of undergraduate school and all through grad school. In the Mac OS X world, the Office 2008 for Mac did not include any of the interface changes that came out the previous year for PC. And due to several stability problems with Office 2008, many colleagues resorted to continued use of Office 2004 for Mac. What a shame too, because the Office 2007 for PC version has several great features they could have been using.

This past winter, Office 2011 for Mac was finally released and brought the ribbon-interface overhaul to Mac — something I was eagerly waiting for. Sadly though, two of my most favorite UI improvements failed to be incorporated. First is the Quick Access Toolbar. In Office 2007 for PC, you could right click on practically any option in the interface and add that function to a toolbar that would stay visible with the thick ribbon collapsed. I customized my toolbar with all my most used commands, extremely handy. This is nowhere to be found in Office 2011 for Mac.

Second, the quick zoom bar, which is the focus of this post. One of the best features in Office 2007 for PC was a zoom bar that provided smooth zooming in any document. You no longer had to select between 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, 150%, etc. from a clumsy drop-down menu (or be locked into those zoom steps via keyboard shortcuts then fiddle with the window size). You could click on a slider and zoom in fine-grained steps to your desired level. Furthermore, this feature was implemented consistently into all three workhorse tools — Word, PowerPoint, and Excel (respectively, shown below).

Inexplicably, despite the 4 year gap between the PC and Mac products, the Office 2011 for Mac completely fails at implementing the zoom controls. Here is the same UI view, shown for Office 2011 for Mac:

• First, the zoom bar is missing entirely from Excel (the software I use the most) —  the only software in the suite which has in essence an ‘infinite’ page size. One would think that the ability of easily zooming is most critical when you could have a spreadsheet spanning dozens of rows and columns, rather a fairly standard page or slide size.
• Second, the + and – buttons are missing from both Word and PowerPoint. If you wanted to easily step up or down the zoom, you can’t.
• Third, the tick mark in Office 2007 for PC marking the 100% level is missing. Good luck easily resetting your zoom level to default.
• Fourth, inconsistency in presentation. You can’t see this from a static screenshot, but in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac, the zoom bar remains visible even though the window is inactive. In Word 2011 for Mac, the zoom bar appears when it’s the active window, but strangely disappears when it’s inactive.

It drives me crazy that this utterly glaring user experience failure and inconsistency was ever allowed to ship to customers. I don’t believe for one minute that zooming is a relatively obscure action. In many work environments today, people move between small laptop screens, larger external monitors, and lower resolution projectors. Zooming is an essential action for both working with and presenting content.

Productivity software aids thousands of businesses and is a vital part of millions of students and employees. This is an extraordinary amount of responsibility entrusted to a UX designer. It is incredibly sad and frustrating to see that responsibility shirked in the case of zoom controls.

</rant>

Last week I learned of the first new song in nearly four years by Austin-based instrumental rock band Explosions in the Sky. How exciting! I’ve recommended the band to friends seeking music to listen to while studying or working that wouldn’t be distracting with words. Grounded in the rock music, their pieces are often long, orchestral, with sweeping flourishes and emotion. More accessible than Sigur Rós’s earlier albums, for instance. They also gained attention when they did the score for the film Friday Night Lights, and their musical influence continues on in the TV-series of the same name. Unconvinced? Just listen to their tracks such as First Breath After Coma, Catastrophe and the Cure, or Yasmin the Light.

This new track is more taut — at three and a half minutes it’s their shortest song to date by far — but it is energetic and clearly retains the signature sound that is Explosions in the Sky. I wonder how much it telegraphs what’s to come next.

Their new album – Take Care, Take Care, Take Care – is due out in April and they are touring also — I’m finally going to see them live at the Fox Theater on May 1st! Can’t wait. I hear their live shows are just epic.

Explosions in the Sky – Trembling Hands

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Last Friday about a dozen colleagues and I went paintballing after work. It was my first time, and it was a lot of fun! The “map” wasn’t a forest or open field — the facility had different maps setup with varying scenarios. The first was long and narrow, setup like the one-block town of the Wild Wild West. The next two were wider, more open, with lots of obstacles and barricades for cover. Erturk came prepped in full combat fatigues (Turkish Special Forces!) and even had his own paintball gun.

The rest of us rented gear, which thankfully came with a facemask and neckguard. I got a pair of gloves too, because I heard getting shot in the fingers hurts. We ended up doing 10-12 people on a team, so the Apple team got to play as a unit much of the night. The matches would last between 8 and 12 minutes, and we had a chance of refilling our guns with paintballs and air between matches.

It’s definitely exhilarating, an adrenaline rush. One thing is that for 95% of the match, you don’t see the enemy. You’ll snag a glance of them in the beginning, and you’re sprinting towards a forward barricade to seize its position. You’ll sneak a glance of a head or an arm popping up over an obstacle, usually followed by the thud-thud-whiz of paintballs hitting around you and flying past. The ground was mostly hard packed dirt, with scattered pebbles and debris, splotches of mud and puddles. Once in the firefight though, none of that matters. You’re diving for cover, rolling around, constantly crouched and contorting your body to try to see the enemy without getting hit. All this resulted in me feeling unbelievable sore the following two days. It wasn’t the actual paintball hits that hurt, (I don’t even remember where I got hit now), but the whole body rough-and-tumble that I wasn’t expecting.

Some other highlights:
- how easy it was for all the battle jargon to come out that we’ve heard and used in countless hours of video games like Counter-Strike or Battlefield 1942. Throughout the match, teammates would yell “Contact right!” or “3 on the left flank!” Working in a three man squad with Nader and Shyam, I’d yell “Covering fire!!” twist around the corner and let us a barrage of paintballs while Nader dashed forward, diving for cover behind a barricade 10 yards up. Then he’d pop up, yell the same while I moved up to join him.
- during the last match of the night, we were all running low of paintballs. Instead of starting with the 100 or 120 in our hoppers, we were all down to maybe a dozen. I’m with Nevin at the center obstacle, with JLo on the left flank. Nevin gets hit, and empties the few paintballs he had into my hopper before he leaves the field. “Make’em count!”. JLo spots an enemy and starts firing, but the gun soon starts firing blanks — he’s out. I tell him I’ll give him some rounds but he waves me off. He takes a deep breath, then turns the corner and charges forward furiously firing blanks — sprinting nearly 30 yards totally exposed — but makes it to the enemy barricade and forces a surrender at point-blank. But alas, he’s shot soon after.

Nader came along for the ride too and took this snapshot of a video during the Castle map. He made a courageous charge that drew the enemy’s fire but allowed three of them to be picked off.

Two weekends ago the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program made their annual spring break trip to Silicon Valley. As readers might recall, I participated in the program for my senior design project, and the Silicon Valley trip was a major factor in me deciding to come out to the Bay Area. It was also on that trip that Jordan and I met Joseph, now my manager and mentor, and started the chain of events that led Jordan to land a co-op with the iPod Hardware team, then getting me in the door with the team, and then me coming on board full-time.

On Saturday I met up with this year’s class of students down in Palo Alto (Mike and Nader tagged along too) and gave them a leisurely tour of Stanford. The group is no longer mostly electrical and computer engineers — now computer engineering, textiles, mechanical, chemical, business, and even natural resources were represented. Good group of students though — talkative, excited to be here, asked a lot of good questions.

On Sunday they had dinner up in San Francisco where John Cohen and I joined them, and then Monday they visited Apple where they heard from Joseph and got to see Patrick (one of our current interns) too. I think it was interesting for them to hear how innovation and product development happens at Apple vs other companies, particular the consumer web companies that are all the rage now. The ‘lean startup’ model or Steve Blank’s customer development cycle isn’t at play…when you build hardware you don’t built a “minimum viable product” and then do massive amounts of iteration driven by customer feedback. You design it the way you think results in the best experience for the customer.

This past weekend I made my first trip of the season up to Tahoe, part of a ski trip that Chrissy organized. She’s pretty good at these things, and this time didn’t disappoint – we had a nice big lodge in Tahoe City, on the northern part of Lake Tahoe near the Alpine, Squaw Valley, and Northstar resorts. Two cars left from Apple on Friday in the early afternoon; Chrissy’s car had me, Jared, and Dustin while Jon’s car had him, Dev, and Tom. Also heading up to our cabin was Nader’s crew with him, his former labmate Morris, friend Tim, and colleague Jeff. A fourth car with John and his friends Lionel, Jian-Wei, and Nirav were going to head up Saturday morning. Also up in Tahoe that weekend was Sam, Rishabh, and Sheila, and all were planning on Northstar for Saturday too.

Things were looking dicey early Friday; winter storm advisories were in effect and I-80E was briefly closed due to zero visibility. We decided to push on with the plan, and made great time leaving the Bay Area and pushed right on through dinner. We hit the chain control traffic just after 6pm…and were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic for nearly 3 hours. How bad was it? In just under three hours, we went about six miles. Chain control is implemented by the California transportation officials (Caltrans) when the road conditions are too dangerous. Your car must have snow or all-weather tires and must be 4-wheel drive to avoid putting chains on. All other vehicles must stop and put chains on, and there is a checkpoint in the road to prevent them from continuing. The weather reduced our speed to 30mph by this point, but Chrissy was a pro and we were the first ones to the cabin.

The cabin was nice – two floors with bedrooms downstairs and a big open space family room and kitchen upstairs. There was even a hot tub.

Dustin and Jared begin Battle: Icicle.

Nader’s car arrives after midnight, I meet them briefly then head to bed. We all get an early start and cook breakfast. Dustin got the coffee on and scrambled eggs, Chrissy brought these giant muffins, and Jared cooked some hash browns. We were going to spend the day at Northstar, a resort that I really liked last year for its number of nice blue runs.

Our caravan arrived at Northstar and suited up. Dustin and I rented our gear locally at 25% of the cost of renting up in Tahoe – Jon came up big for us and was able to find a bigger rack to take our skis with him on his car. We suited up and made our way to the mountain. The lines were a lot longer than the last time I was here. But the snow on the slopes was great. A lot of fresh powder everywhere, and the groomed trails were still very nice. I tried a powder run….and promptly sank waist deep into it. Tweaked my knee trying to roll over, and spent the next ten minutes just trying to find the other ski. The way down was full of the same…so I hiked thirty feet back up the main run, and stuck to the groomed trails after that. Dustin picked things up quick and went off trying blacks, while Nader’s crew spent time in the backside too.

Bumped into Sam coming out of lunch at the summit, and randomly ended up behind John on a cat-trail in the afternoon. Did some more fun blues with John, Chrissy, and Jared, then for the last run of the day took the East ridge trail from the mountain summit all the way down to the village. Our whole group met up at a pub in the village for drinks and food before leaving. Sam and his crew were there, Chrissy’s whole cabin showed up, and Rishabh and Lily also dropped by too! They had tried snowboarding for the first time. What a great way to cap off a day on the slopes. Hat tip to Sam for that suggestion!

We hit up Safeway on the way home and got ingredients for dinner. I made a hearty vegetable ragu pasta sauce (pro tip: use some wine to bring out the only alcohol-soluble flavors of the tomatos), Morris & Co manned a giant pot of lamb stew, Jared made a pan pull of meatballs, and Jon brought out some Canadian dessert similar to a multilayer fudge bar, but with a layer of custard and a hint of coconut (he’s from Saskatchewan). I borrowed Troy’s Jambox for the weekend and kept the tunes streaming all night from the iPad, so the cabin had to suffer my taste in music. A lot of photogeeks there too — I showed them the new lens that just came in and there were cameras going off a lot. My 50mm f/1.8 got the most action though — need the wide aperture in such low light conditions. Really keen on getting the 35 f/2 now! I also met Nirav, another one of John’s friends. He’s also Gujarati, works in materials science at Western Digital. Kinda surreal to hear him mention all these towns back in the state of Gujarat that I’ve heard my parents talk about…most Indians I meet out here aren’t Gujarati. Jian-Wei had a guitar and we got him to play some Dave, and reminisced how we all listened to Dave back in undergrad.

Nader’s crew was keen on a day at Heavenly so they departed early in the morning. The rest of us were rather indifferent about a second day, and enough folks were interested in beating the traffic back home. So we took an easy morning, got the cabin cleaned up and headed back. Instead of eight hours, this time with clear roads and no traffic is took barely over three.

A big tip of the hat to Chrissy for organizing another great trip. Looking forward to the next one this season….maybe I’ll try a black then!