I went over to Ed Levin State Park on the western edge of Milipitas, just north of San Jose where the mountains rise up to meet the city border. Located at the very end of the Bay’s inlet, this is a favorite spot for paragliders and hang-gliders.

I catch Klaus at the end of the lesson and we pile into his truck, picking up Chrissy and Jon as they folded up their gliders and then making our way slowly up to the top of the 1700 ft. hill that overlooks Ed Levin. It really did look a lot higher up than I was expecting. Jon helped me get my harness on and Klaus arranged the glider behind him. He strapped on to my harness loosely, but it wasn’t a snug fit.

Here’s how it was going to work: we were situated about 30 yards up a gradual incline from the edge of the mountain.  Klaus would start standing behind me, facing backwards towards the glider. I would stand at the ready, knees slightly bent. Klaus would then pull the glider into the air, wait until it moved directly above us, then turn around and yell “run, run, RUN!” I would take off running, pulling both of us and if all went well, he would be airborne and pull me up to him by the time we got to the edge of the cliff. I didn’t think much about that failing to happen.

And you know, it worked! What an incredible feeling it was to just soar, soar, soar above the hills. Klaus twisted and turned us around, seeking and catching thermals. We’d look for the birds, because they were naturals at doing this. We must have been up in the air for 10 or 12 minutes, until we coasted down for an easy running landing near the parking lot, where Chrissy and Jon were waiting. It really made me think to start taking classes! HIghly recommended to everyone if they get the chance.

Mary, Matt, Heather, and Brock were going there Saturday and I made the journey to catch the Broken Social Scene show with them. It took me forever to get there, as bus after bus after bus was packed with people. After seeing five buses go by, I caught a cab with some other festival goers. The ‘free’ aspect of the festival just makes it insanely packed….and it’s getting too much such that moving around is a huge pain. But once you find a spot with a blanket, it’s sublime.

The next day, I went for a longer stint with Chrissy. We braved our way through the crowds and caught some of the “Melody of Rhythm” group from the sidelines — this is a group consisting of Bela Fleck (one of the world’s best banjo players), Edgar Meyer (one of the world’s best upright bass players), and Zakir Hussain (one of the world’s best tabla — and indian drum — players). Pretty mellow sounding jam, but folks were digging it.

Next we fought our way through some crowds to say hi to Joseph and his family, and happened to also catch Bryson and his family just in time. They love this stuff. We made our way to the far left stage and listened to Fitz & the Tantrums, then followed by Gomez. It was warm, we had nice seats on the hill. Add in some surprisingly good festival fare food, and you have a nice day. We even got lucky on the way out of the park and snagged a bus that was already pretty full. Thank you, kind MUNI driver, thank you.

One cool thing was their friend Rachel Saunders, who started making homemade jam in her kitchen then started selling it at farmer’s markets (Brock and Heather would help man the booth). She soon turned it into a business — Blue Chair Fruit — and was able to move production into a commercial certified kitchen that helps small entrepreneurs get started selling their goods. Now, she is in over a hundred Williams-and-Sonoma stores, did a segment on jam making on the Martha Stewart show, and has released a couple of cookbooks. Pretty awesome.

We perused several food trucks, had bourbon popsicles, and tried some local brews. What a really pleasant way to spend a lazy weekend day!

Now here they were headlining a much bigger venue. Bonus points for Grouplove being the opening act – a fun super energetic electro-pop band I first heard a month ago at Outside Lands. They sounded great again, and I think the band is really about to get way more popular. We had balcony seats for the main show which gave us great views down to the stage, but the downside was that we’d get blinded everytime the stage strobe lights would fire — which happened a lot. Something was definitely up with the sound setup too…i noticed the band making gestures throughout the first two songs. My guess was that the on-stage monitors weren’t working properly. Finally, the band actually stopped the show for about five minutes so the stage crew could sort out of the issues. Once they were back, it went really smoothly.

Last night, Bon Iver played the Greek Theater in Berkeley. As a bonus, Other Lives was opening for them, a band I had seen earlier this year. However, we didn’t realize that the time printed on the ticket was the show time (not doors), so we ended up arriving three quarters of the way through their set. John drove up a car with Sean, Jason, and myself. Traffic was utterly horrendous near campus so we ditched the car and walked the last mile in. Heather was able to get there early, and a fellow NC State alum Erin also made it inside. With some tips from me, the two linked up and reserved a large patch in the same spot that we saw the Fleet Foxes a couple weeks earlier. Brock joined us, as did John’s friend Rosie too.

photo by Isabel Golinn

The band took a few songs to gel, but the show was a great experience. The songs took on a more raw edge to them as the large band played them live, and we were treated to an especially muscular version of one of my favorite Bon Iver songs, Blood Bank. As the main set ended, a lone stage hand came out to set a beaten, well worn acoustic guitar next to a single chair – completely (but not surprisingly) betraying the inevitable encore song of Skinny Love. For anyone that doesn’t know what I’m talking about, just watch this. Vernon could have sat there and played by himself and the sell-out crowd of 8,000 would have watched captivated. But the rest of the band came and song along, clapping and stomping to give the song a new air.

As Vernon said after the first couple of songs, as he and the band looked out onto the packed outdoor amphitheatre on a beautiful Bay Area fall evening — wow, just wow.

Fleet Foxes are known for their harmonies, and they sounded great live. We were treated to a nice mix of their new album and old album, and they hit all my favorite songs over the course of their ~1.5 hour set. The weather was perfect, and the company wonderful.

The hotel Sean got us was right in the heart of Tsim Sha Tsui, amidst the hustle and the bustle, below the Kowloon area. The city is divided into two parts, with a bay in the middle. Because of the British influence into Hong Kong, getting around is remarkably easy for someone who just knows English. Many of the major streets have retained their English names, and the Metro system is extensive and easy to navigate.

The first night we headed out to Lan Kwai Fong, the most happening place for bars and nightlife in the City. From there we explored the surrounding streets, following a series of escalators up and up and up into the hills. It’s just incredible, the charming small windy cobblestoned streets, interesting restaurants and bars and cafes of every possible cuisine tucked into every corner, all nestled into beautiful hills and buildings…like San Francisco on steroids.

The next day we took a long walk to the famous Ladies Market (cheap trinkets and knockoffs), swinging by a nice city park along the way that had an aviary with exotic birds. The other remarkable part of Hong Kong to me was how insanely clean the place was. Even side streets and alleys, the vast subway and Metro system, everything was scarily clean. Made me think of morlocks.

The next day, we took a bus down to the other end of the south island, to a resort town called Stanley. There is a ‘boardwalk’ there, and we had lunch at a German restaurant on the second floor of the former residence of some bigshot. Stunning views. We later walked (a lot of walking this trip) around part of the Island, making it to the beach on the other side before heading back.

That evening we took in the famous light show that the skyscrapers along the water take part in, and then headed out to one of the night markets for last minute souvenir shopping.

The next morning, it was just a short train ride over to the Hong Kong airport and we were off, homeward bound. What an incredible city. Can’t wait to go back!

Went to eat at a great Italian restaurant, and surprisingly decent Indian food too. Caught up with a colleague I hadn’t seen in half a year at the penthouse bar in the hotel one evening.

Anyway, moving on. It was Labor Day weekend coming up and instead of rushing back home, we decided to spend an extra day in Hong Kong…

First we went to Japan near Tokyo and spent two days there on business, followed by Saturday and most of Sunday in Tokyo waiting for our flight to China. The night we got in we headed to the trendy Shibuya neighborhood and spent hours wandering the windy, narrow roads dropping in on bars and pubs. There were lots and lots of people around, the scene buzzing with energy. I learned here that Japan, for a foreigner who doesn’t know any Japanese, is a place where you can get within 10 yards of where you want to go, but that last 10 yards is often insurmountable.

Often times the three of us would be standing outside a stretch of storefronts, looking at the location-aware maps on our phones showing us that we were in the right location, but having no idea which of the dozen storefronts or signs is the place you want. Due to population density, places go vertical. Often you’ll see signs for different restaurants or stores on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th+ floors of a building — it’s not just commercial on the ground floor and residential on the rest.

We discovered that Tokyo’s premier underground / indie music venue was in Shibuya, and finally found it after walking up and down the street a few times. The top level was a bar with hundreds of pamphlets new and old of various artists’ shows. There was a TV showing the stage on the floor below, but after seeing that the band tonight was a retro hair band from the ’80s, we just had our drink and moved on. The places we hit up were so varied — an English ex-pat pub, a wonderfully lit and vibey wine bar, a chain noodle joint, and finally an old style sake bar where we sat low to the ground on pillows. I was feeling super tired by the end of the night, so I hopped in a cab while Joseph and Sean walked the two or three miles home.

The next day, we visited the famous Akihabara electronics mart and the neighborhood around it. The famous Tokyo subway system was efficient and always on-time. Again, if you knew where to go. For the newcomer, entering a central hub station is overwhelming — at least twenty different platforms with all sorts of lines going through. We stared at the maps (some have English, some don’t) and remembered the kanji to make sure we boarded the right train. After the first couple of trips though, it becomes a lot easier.

In the afternoon, we took a long walk to the old Imperial Palace. It was a lot less grand and opulent than I expected, but then again I didn’t have time to do any real research on Tokyo before arriving.

I really should have done my research on the weather too — it was extremely hot and humid. After half an hour outside your clothes are just drenched with sweat. That evening, we made our way to Popeye’s, which is apparently the #1 beer lover’s bar in the city. We parked ourselves at a small table on the narrow patio, and literally just passed the next three hours there. They had a great thing going — excellent beer menu, and if you got a certain beer, you also got a small tapas-like plate with it. So it’s wonderful to go with a bunch of friends, order some drinks and nibble on some food. That evening was also a large firework show, to mark a cultural event. This event got delayed due to the tsunami. All along the subway cars and streets, men and women in traditional kimonos and attire were streaming towards the riverfront for the event. Pretty cool to see. At Popeyes, the waiter was taking a liking to us for being such good patrons. We spotted a sweet poster inside titled “Refermenting Japan” and asked about it — he went over, took it down, and rolled it up for us to take. And then as we we finally left, he handed us special Popeye club membership cards. What a trip.

On Sunday, we had a leisurely brunch and headed off back to Shibuya to a popular shopping street where I wanted to get some things for folks back home. The shopping was a total disappointment (a lot of crap and awful attire), the people watching so-so, but we stumbled onto the main promenade we discovered they were having a parade that day. And the timing of it was to work in our favor. We snagged a streetside spot amid the crowds and enjoyed the parade. It featured troupes of dancers in different garbs and styles, usually with a banner leading them. I’m still not entirely sure what the purpose was, but what an nice unexpected surprise!

Hit the hotel, took a shower, checked out, and pretty soon we were back in the Narita airport headed down to China….

Lots to like from all of us with the day’s lineup. Started off with Diego’s Umbrella, then moved to a small stage (apparently solar powered) rather awkwardly placed close to a row of merchandise and food booths. Grouplove was getting the crowd bumping early in the day with their impossibly energetic sound and stage presence. Giant (~5 diameter) balloons slightly weighted with water were bouncing all over the place, and two in rapid succession collided with the lead singer’s mic stand causing them them to pop and shower him. After Grouplove, Lord Huron took the stage (which readers of this blog have heard of), and played their short but good set. One of their new songs is rather good, first time I heard it. Jose Gonzalez’s new project, Junip, played a great set, with a perfectly set bass line and rhythmic groove. Chad and I were really digging it.

As the early evening set in, we wandered around to the main stages, taking in the hipsters (lots of them), the various food stalls (surprisingly decent, you can count on SF for that), and the gorgeous weather. One great thing that today’s festivals do is produce smartphone apps with the concert schedule, map, info, etc. Very very handy throughout. Randomly ran into Joey and Christophe too! They were going to see Beirut as their headliner, then catch the tailend of Deadmau5; Chad broke off to join them, but Chrissy and I stayed at the main stage for the double headliner of The Decemberists opening for Arcade Fire. Yeah, you heard that right. :) The Decemberists sounded great, playing a healthy mix of songs from The King is Dead, Hazard’s of Love, The Crane Wife, and even some oldies. The finished off with the crowd favorite Mariner’s Revenge. Things got packed for Arcade Fire. Their stage setup was a reduced version of the Suburbs theme I saw at their full concert at the Greek Theater back last year, but they really know how to put on a solid show. We were able to get closer to the front (one beef with Outside Lands: the sound tents for main stages are unnecessarily large both in area and height, resulting in a large amount of prime real estate having zero views of the stage or the jumbotrons). The chick in front of me kept her big backpack on the whole show and would thrash around, so that was kinda annoying. But still, terrific show and it’s always magic whenever you get to sing along to ‘Wake Up’ along with ten thousand other people.

We were able to meet up with Chad after the headliners ended and decided to take our chances north of the park. Getting home from Golden Gate Park festivals is always an enormous endeavor. Another concern: hunger. We ended up at a Mexican restaurant with a long wait (due other festival goers), but we stuck it out and had some grub. Apparently this place was known for its magaritas, so naturally we got a round for the table. Chrissy knew of a bar nearby with some neat drinks, so we hit that up before finally catching the bus home.

What a day!

I took a redeye flight Wednesday night and got in early Thursday. Got a couple more hours of sleep at Sapana’s apartment, then made my way via bus into Hyde Park. Sapana was giving a presentation to her lab, and I was going to crash it. I quickly realized, despite all the warnings, that I didn’t come dressed for the Chicago summertime. Boy was it warm. Her presentation was actually about her entire research project, and I jotted down notes and grilled her at the end, after getting the nod to do so by Ken, her PI. Afterward we casually made our way back to downtown Chicago, stopping for lunch at a nice sandwich and coffee place by campus and some window shopping on Michigan Avenue. Did a lot of talking and catching up, which would become a theme of the weekend. While we got that night’s enchiladas going, Puja arrived from Bloomington, Indiana where she’s doing her Ph.D in chemistry. Wow, crazy to think we are all so ‘grown-up’ now….last time I saw her I think we barely in high school?

Friday morning had my old friend Kevin meeting us at Sapana’s place then joining us for breakfast at Orange. Sapana said it was close enough to walk, but I think she got her locations mixed up because we walked for a good 2 miles before arriving. One of their specialities is fruit sushi, which is exactly what you think it is.

Kevin then took off to finish his moving to Pennsylvania, and Puja and I meandered around Michigan Avenue while Sapana did work. It was actually pretty fun going shopping with her, and I think she was surprised too. Hah. Got back to the apartment and freshened up, for tonight we had reservations at a fancy vegetarian restaurant, Green Zebra. It was one of those places where the portions are small, but the quality of the food is simply outstanding. Afterward we stopped at Hopleaf, a famous beer lovers bar, then over to the Bedford, a cool bar/pub built into the basement of an old bank where they kept the giant vault intact. Inside the swinging vault door is a lounge with quiet seating, and you can still go in and check out the deposit boxes that line the walls.

Our Lolla tickets were just for Saturday, so away we went. Sapana’s prime location allowed us to just walk to Grant Park, and we arrived just as the gates were open. The grounds were surprisingly spacious — did not get the crammed festival feel even later in the day when the real headliners were taking the stage. The acts were split into 8 stages of various sizes — there were 2-3 ‘main stages’, two small ones for the newcomers, and then the electro dance tent called Perry’s. Apparently this stage gets bigger each year. Bonus points for the free Camelbak water re-filling stations, but docking points for the complete and utter lack of enforcement of the ‘no-DSLR’ rule. I should have just learned my lesson and brought mine anyway.

My first real show of the day was Typhoon at the tiny BMI stage, a multi-instrument young band out of Oregon with a Lost in the Trees vibe. And when I say multi-instrument, I mean it…it was amusing to hear the soundcheck guy go “left drum kit, right drum kit, check check, trumpet 1, 2, 3, check, cello 1, cello 2, violin right, check check, bass check, guitar check, check, marimba check, etc.”. They were great, and I look forward to seeing a proper concert from them soon. We caught the second half of Phantogram, got a dose of Super Mash Bros. then had a late lunch while watching the Fitz & the Tantrums at the main stage. Festivals like this were also great for people watching…but wow so many hipsters. Jeez. While meandering our way back from the Black Lips, we heard an intriguing electro-pop sound coming from the BMI stage. We go over and discover the barely formed Chain Gang of 1974, with an energetic lead singer who had the crowd super into it. The guy was performing like this was the greatest gig of the festival, even though it was an early afternoon show at the smallest stage. We loved it, and so did the crowd, especially after he dove in headfirst for some crowdsurfing, much to chagrin of the security guards.

After this it was Local Natives, who put on a terrific show just as the sun was setting. Puja is also a fan (we share a lot of the same music interests!) and we got up close for it. Often the best shots projected on the jumboscreens were from behind the band, looking out onto the festival grounds with tens and tens of thousands of people. Pretty epic, and Local Natives said as they finished their set with their closer ‘Sun Hands’ that this was the largest gig they ever played. Lolla didn’t do a great job at matching up headliners, but we ending up opting for Pretty Lights at Perry’s electro tent. And wow I’m so glad I did. I don’t think Sapana or Puja knew what they were exactly getting into, but it was an amazing show. The Glitch Mob was the lead up, and then Pretty Lights hit the stage and the crowd went wild. We’re talking lots of wubs, glow sticks, and flashing lights. He even played some of my favorite tracks, check it out:

Afterward, the thousands of people streamed out of Grant Park and sucked into the avenues and broadways of downtown Chicago. The night was warm, and we were craving pizza. Found a rather upscale looking place and seated us with a smile (we weren’t the only smelly haggard looking festival folks hungry for food that night).

Sunday featured a lazy brunch in the morning, followed by a leisurely walk along the shore of Lake Michigan. The three of us walked and talked the entire time…about our our experiences in high school and undergrad, the challenges and joys of grad school, careers, life, etc. Really, really great.

The night we tried a Chicago-style pizza place that none of us had tried before, then capped off the weekend with drinks at the top of the Hancock Tower. The city shimmered in all directions below.

*ok, technically second cousin, once removed.

Chrissy really did the heavy lifting for this one! Before the presentation, we assembled a tray full of our ‘sliders’ and then arranged the pieces for people to make their own if desired. I think the results turned out rather nicely:

Sean and Paul fired up the grills for their sliders, and Stephanie did a modern take with salmon, a Greek style yogurt sauce, served on ciabatta. We had a great turnout, with the team enjoying the nice weather in the atrium outside. It was also a farewell of sorts for Thomas, one of our terrific PCB layout guys who was moving on the following the week. Super friendly, always ready to help, and an expert with the design tools — you’ll be missed!

Paul had a special treat up his sleeve too — carbonated fruit! He bought a giant block of dry ice, and put some of it with cut fruit in a sealed Nalgene container. What a delight, especially with orange slices and grapes.

Sean took home 1st place (again), with Steph coming in 2nd. Once again, I thought Paul was robbed!

I had to swing by a grocery store to pick up ingredients for tomorrow’s food battle, so I hustled to a nearby Whole Foods, making it there minutes before closing. Now I just had to get home, and I was out all the way by SOMA. Figuring my chances for a Muni or a taxi was better up by Market St., I jacked in my headphones and started making my way north. A few blocks away, I get a vibe from a guy I see out of the corner of my eye near me talking into a headset. A few seconds later, I realize it was my buddy Lei! He realized it at the same time too and laughed. I rarely find myself in this part of town on a weekday this late at night, and I know Lei lives down in San Jose; yet we happened to serendipitously run into each other on the street! Lei was up for a conference and crashing out a friend’s place up in the City.

It was another instance of the Bay Area not feeling so big anymore.

That night, we took our drinks out by the beach and relaxed in the cool summer night, gazing up at the band of the Milky Way that painted its way across the night sky.

One of the interns asked about breakfast the night before, and I chuckled: with cooks like Sean and Chrissy around, breakfast is of no concern. Sean prepared skillet potatoes, bacon, and eggs while Chrissy whipped up fruit pancakes. Dustin got the mimosas flowing and Patrick kept the coffee brewing. Outside on the second story porch, you could look out at a forest clearing and see horses trotting about.

We roughly sketched out the day and by ten headed down to the dock. Chris (what a champ) had made the trip to Tahoe the last two weekends to learn how to pilot the boat himself and he did an amazing job. And what a gorgeous boat too — sleek, comfortable, and spacious for the eight of us. The first session was wakeboarding, with Dustin and the interns (except Chris, who was in the captain’s chair the entire time) all taking stabs at it. The start proved notoriously difficult, with the handle ripping out of their hands just as they lifted out of the water. At this time of morning, the lake is already pretty choppy due to all the traffic.

Sean settled into the co-pilot’s chair and hoisted the orange flag with a bemused expression everytime a swimmer was in the water. I often had a camera in my hand. Chris’s generosity with the lodge and boat motivated me to spend some money instead on renting a set of lenses for the weekend. I picked up a long zoom lens (70-200mm f/4L IS), a fast wide prime lens (30mm f/1.4), and a wide angle zoom (10-22mm f/2.8). I also had my personal 24-105mm f/4L. Since Patrick and I shoot nearly identical cameras, we geeked out and would just swap cameras throughout the weekend, tag teaming with one person shooting a zoom lens while the other took the wide shots.

It proved invaluable for the tubing shots, and we’re really happy how they turned out. We later docked and swapped out the wakeboards for a giant inner tube. Tubing was a blast — we went out in pairs and Chris really cranked up the boat, crisscrossing to send the tube skittering across the boat’s wake and swinging it around on sharp turns. There’s a manuever he knows that is guaranteed to flip the tube and employed it rather judiciously, hehe (I didn’t get flipped!).

It’s hard to express now just how blissful it was out on the lake. The warm California sun beaming brightly, the coolness of the breeze, the deep blue water, the forested snow-capped mountains at all points on the horizon, and the thrill of a motorboat. What incredible fortune to experience it.

Around three we jetted across the lake to a crowded waterfront restaurant known for their rum runners. We anchored the boat in the harbor and took their dinghy to the dock. A live rock band jammed while we nursed our drinks, people watched, and ultimately eat our lunch. Boating and tubing during the morning certainly worked up an appetite.

After lunch we made a beeline back home and docked the boat. After freshening up, a few of us popped over to the nearby Safeway for dinner supplies. I was going to make pizza monkey bread, and ended up buying pizza dough from a pizza place (they were rather confused at our request, but complied anyway). Chrissy was going to make these white chocolate and mousse pyramids, and Sean whipped up some excellent guacamole. –My– Troy’s jambox got the tunes bumping, and even the air hockey table was getting some use. We took a break to watch the sunset from the beach.

We got an assembly line going for the monkey bread, with Dustin, Chrissy, and Chris all preparing the stuffed balls of dough while I assembled them into a bundt pan. I probably should have left it in ten minutes longer, but the finished result was still pretty cool:

Chrissy’s mousse pyramids came out of the fridge looking and tasting awesome:

Before calling it a night, Patrick and I headed out to the beach with Sean’s tripod, and we tried to capture the Milky Way. Nothing could beat seeing the granduer of it for real though. The next morning we had a deliberately lazy start, finished off the fruit pancakes, bacon (of course), and Sean used the extra eggs and leftovers and improvised two pans of delicious frittatas. Most of our group made it back on the boat, but Dustin and Shyam ended up too engrossed in their chess match that they ended up staying on the land.

After another unsuccessful stint wakeboarding, we took it easy and Chris piloted the boat across the lake to the scenic Emerald Bay. It’s an iconic view from above, and now we were going to see it from the water. Along the way, a guy with two chicks on his jetski enjoyed our wake. We made a leisurely pass around the Bay, seeing Kungsholm and the stony tea cottage on the small island in the middle of the Bay.

After reaching back to home base and freshening up, our group split for the afternoon. Chris, Sean, and Dustin decided to lounge around the house while Chrissy and I took the interns out for hiking by Eagle Falls near Emerald Bay. The hiking was a lot shorter than I remembered it, but the epic snowfall of the previous winter kept both the Upper and Lower Eagle Falls gushing. And it’s always a treat to see Emerald Bay from above. We made it back just in time for a leisurely sunset.

And with that, we bid Tahoe adieu. We left as darkness was settling in, making a good distance away before finally stopping for some food (hunger was kept at bay when Dustin heroically dived into the trunk via the backseat opening to retrieve snack food…no stopping the car for us!). The only thing opened was a Carl’s Jr., and I was jazzed to see a veggie guacamole burger. I pointed to the picture and ordered it, but when it came it was a normal burger. I returned it, asking again for it. This time, I got a lettuce wrap…with still a burger. Chrissy, Dustin, and Sean were enjoying this immensely as I went up again. Some teenagers were hanging up front, waiting for the food and watching this. I ask again, explaining what I want and the wait staff looked perplex. As I went back to the table to wait, apparently the cook asked increduously “wait, he doesn’t even want bacon?” to which one of the teenagers replied “nah man, he’s serious! no meat!” Considering the quality of food available to us at that point (we had struck out on a pretty sizable list before settling for Carl’s Jr.), the amusement experience was worth it.

The skyline of San Francisco became visible by midnight, and I dropped my friends off before finally calling it a night myself.

What a wonderful weekend, full of some real and much needed R&R. Huge hat tip to Chris for making it possible.

Other Lives is a such a treat to see live. They recently released their second album, Tamer Animals. The band’s layered instrumentation and harmonies reminds me at times of the Fleet Foxes, but vocally is sometimes closer to The National. On stage, they had a violinist/cellist, guitar and keyboard, another violin/guitar/marimba player, bassist and tympani player, and the drummer. Really cool, and they sounded terrific live. The cellist at one point brought out these cool looking claw like bells she held in each hand. David – the violinist from the Rosebuds, also came out and played with the band for nearly half their set.

The Rosebuds played a nice set too — one that got noticeably tighter in the second half. I hadn’t heard much of the band before, except their latest album Loud Planes Fly Low, but really enjoyed their show live. They did a good job engaging with the audience, showing their appreciation and leading us in some sing-a-longs too. They also get a special mention for having one of the coolest band shirts I’ve ever seen:

Another interesting tidbit — I’ll be seeing Other Lives again this fall when they open for Bon Iver, and the Rosebuds will be opening for Bon Iver too on the second half of their summer tour.

We made our way down the bluffs and over to a large rock, which provided shelter from the wind. Again, being NorCal we were dressed as if we heading out on an autumn hike. Except Chad, who was rocking a mighty fine blazer. Gotta class it up sometimes, you know? I got –my– Troy’s jambox out and nestled it on a rock ledge, providing some tunes. Those things are seriously cool.

The weather got noticeably better the later it got in the evening. After sunset we broke out the wood and got the bonfire going (using an *entire* container of lighter fluid, as boys tend to do), grilling up sausages and later s’mores. As always, it felt good being by the fire, in a circle of friends.

The last time we were here, we made it back up to our cars at 10:15pm and all got parking tickets. Weren’t going t make that mistake again…so we wrapped things up and hauled the gear back up the bluffs for the ride home. Check that experience off the summer todo list.

Homemade sushi (tuna & salmon), hanging from chopstick fishing poles, suspended over a pond of soy sauce, with wasabi lillies. Yep!

The night before I stopped by a nearby Asian grocery store and got all the sushi tools and ingredients, and practiced two rolls that evening. Cut my veggies and prepared my rice. But what about the fish? I honestly couldn’t execute this idea without having fish…I mean, think of the fishing poles! I had no idea what to ask for at a grocery store or how to cut the fish either. But Chrissy had the eureka moment and said I could get prepared fish from the sushi bar at work. After whittling the chopsticks into fishing poles on the bus ride to work, I pinged the head guy at Caffe Macs with the special request, and they were amazing — it bounced to three different people and confirmed in under 4 minutes. So responsive and helpful!

Before the time of the battle, I made several rolls of sushi and started ‘plating’. Chrissy was sitting this battle out, so kindly offered to help.

There’s always money in the banana stand, courtesy of Sean. Nice plating!

People really liked the presentation (got a bonus award for it), but real substance tok home the victory. This time from Craig, who won in a landslide with his steak lollipops. He marianted strips of steak overnight in a marinade made with Jack Daniels, grilled them, then coiled the strips before putting a stick through it to resemble a lollipop, served with a homemade creamy wasabi sauce. Well played, sir, well played.

I had to leave early though and head back home to quickly grab food and supplies for the day’s main event — a July 4th cookout on Crissy Field, by the Presidio and Golden Gate Bridge by the water. Sean and Joey were holding a cookout too at their house, but I protested — on a holiday like July 4th, let’s go outside! So I proposed a rival cookout, hehe. After loading up the car, I headed over to Chrissy’s place to pick her, Chad, and Gurpreet up. She cooked up a storm — making potato salad, cookies, basil/mozzarella/tomato stacks, and rounding up sausages and various cookout sundries. She even bought a portable grill that morning!

‘

Brock and Heather were on time, getting to Crissy Field right at 2pm. My car was running a bit late, but we finally made it there and scored a parking spot near the field. The others were actually unloading the trunk when I spotted a car pulling out of a spot ahead, and I just sped ahead and grabbed it. We hauled our bounty over to the spot Brock and Heather scored, nestled in between two small hills to give us protection from the wind. The weather could not have been better — warm, shining sun, blue skies.

Travis and Leane (from whitewater rafting) joined up with us, and later in the evening Jon and Chris came by too. With a bit of tinkering, we finally got the grill going. I later had the terrific idea of bringing the grill in the middle of our blanket spread (instead of off to the side) and it went about as well as you can imagine.

We all heard Crissy Field gets blanketed in the infamous summer fog, but as the evening waned on the weather kept holding up. So instead of packing up early, we just ended up staying for the fireworks. From Crissy Field, we saw the fireworks over in Sausalito, Berkeley, and then finally around 9:30pm the dual fireworks from Piers 1 and 39 in San Francisco. Nice show, especially with the running commentary.

I couldn’t have asked for better way to cap such an eventful, fun-filled holiday weekend. Big hat tip to Chrissy for doing such a great job helping to organize this!

Stern Grove concerts start at 2pm but are infamous for getting packed early. Having nothing else to do, I decided to trek over early in the morning with blankets, food, a book, and reserve spots for my group. Found a parking spot half a block away, and found an area on the wide granite terrace at the foot of the hill. Our view of the stage:

Friends started showing up around 12:30, and we broke open the food for a picnic. The spot was big enough to fit some friends who I realized were coming quite late, and soon we had a fun crew assembled. The sun broke out from behind the trees, and we soaked up the heat and the sunshine. Felt good, for being summertime in San Francisco! The concert was fun — though honestly for such a big venue they could have definitely turned the volume up a bit.

We rented an additional shotgun (and over/under, meaning there are two barrels that fire in succession and you can load two shells at a time) that Jon and I shared, with Chris and Chrissy sharing hers. This was the second time I’ve ever fired a real gun before. It was Chris’s first time, and Jon had been before. Chrissy gave us her thirty-second safety course and we headed off to the first station. Coyote Valley has around 18 or so different stations, each with two launchers that throw small orange clay discs into the air at various trajectories. There are buttons to control the two launchers. The person shooting sets up at the station, and then their partner will launch the first clay. As soon as the shooter fires, the second clay is launched. The goal is to hit both of the clays. Each of us got six shots per station, and we kept score for each station (6/6 being perfect).

The stations can vary quite a bit. Some look out over a clear expanse, with the clays coming across your view. Other stations are in the woods, looking out into a narrow clearing thus reducing the time you can get a clean shot at the clays. Some are at the foot of a hill, so the clays come either down or away from you at an angle. Others you look down angle at the clays, some have the clays fly almost vertically above you, and two actually were in the style of “rabbits” in which a clay bounces and rolls along the ground.

We took a break about halfway to get a cold beverage and it was good timing because Paul’s crew rolled up. Matt’s cousin just arrived from out of town, Lan, Ben and Lauren came along too. Our party of four stuck together and they followed one station behind.

Jon, Chrissy, and I were at first closely tied for the lead, but then after the short break Chrissy and I starting pulling ahead, closely matched for 1st. At this point though, my shoulder was definitely feeling the pain. At times I’d gingerly prop it up. But I prevailed, and won the group by a single point.

At the last station we did, none of us could get the first launcher’s clay. I wanted another shot, so I took shots and finally got it. Then, to mess around a bit, I wanted to see if I could hit the easier clay with my offhand — my right hand since I’m left handed. My left shoulder could use the break, anyway. I lined up, and boom got it on the first shot. Was Chrissy up to the task?

She’s such a good sport :)

Friends trickled in, and it was great to see people from a variety of different connections. Patrick and Rishabh from work, Simon and Jess (Simon and I were roommates at Stanford), Gurpreet (great photographer, interned with Chrissy), Eric (classmate of Lux’s at Columbia, fellow college football nut), and Veronica (John’s friend and former colleague). Of course, on such a nice day in San Francisco there all sorts of people out and about. Chrissy even came by briefly after a paragliding lesson in the morning.

The lineup for the symphony’s concert was fan friendly:  Rimsky-Korsakov’s Night on Bald Mountain (made famous from Fantasia), Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and Bethoveen’s Symphony No. 5. Patrick was particularly delighted to hear Night on Bald Mountain, for his two-year Disney Imagineering project revolved around Fantasia (his team from NC State placed 2nd nationwide from hundreds of entries, and he was apparently offered a job on the spot by a VP!).

The performance was great to listen to, especially Symphony No. 5 (though true, I was most familiar with that one). After the show, Veronica suggested we continue enjoying the fine day by getting ice cream at the famous Bi-Rite Creamery down in the Mission. Sure! We scattered out but re-grouped there, once again the parking gods smiling upon me as I took a spot just two blocks away. The grassy hills of Dolores Park were barely visible under the throngs of hipsters and yupsters enjoying a warm day in San Francisco. After enjoying our salted caramel, honey lavender, balsamic strawberry, creme fraiche, etc. ice creams, we finally headed home. I grabbed a pint of mint chocolate chip to go and headed to Chrissy’s place; she wasn’t able to make it out but I wasn’t about to deny anyone some Bi-rite. Ended up spending the evening hanging out with her and Chad. Talked music (Chad and I actually share a bunch of musical interests), and tried to convince Chrissy on the worthiness of Battlestar Galactica, while she waxed eloquent of Grey’s Anatomy. So we traded, watched an episode of both.

It wasn’t until almost 1am that I finally made it back home. And what a day! Up at 5am, my first road race, SF Symphony in the Park, ice cream with friends, and an evening of great conversation.

The race took us through some neighborhoods before weaving through a park and along a paved trail running by a lake and stream. There were a few steep, short hills — one at the very beginning, one around mile 4, then a gut-check at around the 5 mile point. I was able to stick with Steph for the first two miles or so, but then she started to break out. Overall I was still feeling pretty good — I had RunMonster going but with it clipped to my shorts I wasn’t aware of my pace. Right around mile 4 though, I started to feel the legs cramp a bit. There was a super high priority project the week leading up the race, and I wasn’t able to find time to do some light runs, so the day before the race I did a 4 miler in the park — felt great actually and was my best pace. But people said I probably shouldn’t have done a run like that less than 24 hours before the real race. I had to take a quick breather so did a 30 second walk, but gathered myself and finished the race running. I definitely felt I could do better in those last two miles.

I crossed the finish line with a chip-time of 53:47, which comes out to about a 8:40 minutes per mile pace — actually better than I had expected! Steph was there waiting, finishing 15th out of 470 women with a chip time of 50:16, finishing just a hair over an 8 min/mi pace. Wow! She crushed it.

We got some water, a snow cone, and took in the atmosphere for another half hour. After that, headed back up to Mountain View where I freshened up and headed back up to the City. Next up for the day: a free symphony in Golden Gate Park!

Chrissy’s brought a chocolate cream pie with a thick meringue topping, but the real kicker was a layer of peanut butter between the chocolate cream and the pie crust. You don’t expect it, but the flavor takes a delightful leap onto your taste buds when you take a bite.

Stephanie made hand pies, with three types of filling — apple, strawberry, and blueberry. Homemade pie dough and really well made. The apple filling had just the right hint of nutmeg and cinnamon. Yum!

In my opinion, Paul won the match. He brought in an exquisitely prepared chocolate cream pie (a riff of a Julia Child recipe) made with a dash of dark coffee, rum, and Cointreau, with an Oreo crumb crust, topped with a dusting of cocoa powder. It had the perfect combination of culinary expertise, excellence in technical execution, intelligent adaption of a recipe (with the Cointreau and Oreo crust), presentation, and it tasted spectacular. Way to go Paul, huge props. :)

Friday was a great day for another reason too — for lunch Chrissy and I made a run to Ike’s Place in Stanford and got sandwiches for the team. Some of them had never tried Ike’s before, but they became instant fans.

Chrissy was thinking the same thing too, so we drove up to the park, luckily found parking not too far south, and got some food for a light picnic. The meadow was packed. I had seen the preparations for this while on my run the previous day, but I had never seen so many people here before. We kept making our way back, and found a little alcove tucked behind some vendor tents. Couldn’t see the stage, but we were so far anyway that we wouldn’t have seen anything anyway. But we could still hear the music.  Weather was warm, sunny, and nice. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon!

There were stages setup around Civic Center with live music and dancing, food stalls, information booths, and a general party atmosphere. The following day would be the big Pride Parade. After kicking it around Civic Center, we decided to head down to Dolores Park where a march and bike parade was going to happen. I realized that we were going to pass near the famous Ike’s Place sandwich shop. I had barely eaten anything since my long run earlier that morning, so Chrissy and I made a detour for Ike’s, then found a spot in the park to eat. JLo (Jon) happened to be in the City that day for the launch of a friend’s new suit apparel company, so he dropped by looking all snazzy.

We took in the crowds at Dolores Park until the motorcycle march took place, then Chrissy and I ended up headed back home; we lost Dave and Jacqueline somewhere along the way. The bus lines were a huge mess, so we ended up walking all the back to Noe. There was a epic block party unfolding in the Castro district…obviously.

Last week saw the release of his self-titled second LP, and it’s an extraordinary album. We are no longer in a secluded cabin in the woods, left alone with our thoughts. Vernon has emerged, expanding the core of his sound (with that signature falsetto) with more lush instrumentation and textures. Some of the tracks themselves are named after places; some real like Calgary or Perth, and some not like Michicant, or Hinnom, TX.

My favorite song so far is Holocene, a devastatingly beautiful track.

…and at once I knew I was not magnificent
strayed above the highway aisle
(jagged vacance, thick with ice)
I could see for miles, miles, miles

As a fellow Bon Iver fan I recently met so perfectly described, “the line that ends with ‘magnificent’ makes my stomach turn every time, but in the best possible way.”

Bon Iver – Holocene
(song removed by request)

I’ve listened to this album dozens of times over the past few weeks, and still find it difficult to find a second song to showcase this album. You’ll undoubtedly hear Calgary, the first single, so I’ll offer another track:

Bon Iver – Minnesota, WI
(song removed by request)

The summer tour kicks off in late July, so check the schedule for dates. Chicago 7/24 (sold out), Atlanta 7/28, Raleigh 7/29, Berkeley 9/22.

Chrissy, Chad, Troy, and I grabbed a quick dinner of Indian food a few blocks from the venue, the Hotel Utah Saloon. This was my first show here, and it reminded me of the Hemlock Tavern — a bar with a small room attached with a stage. The Hotel Utah has a split level though and is only about nine strides deep, so there were only maybe 35 people in attendance. Our group took over half the balcony, overlooking the band. Also in attendance: Gregg and Sarah (they had been listening to the album all week), Christophe and his friend Paul (who I saw The Low Anthem with a few weeks back), Sean, John Shen, and then Sam, Praveen, and Justin from Karla’s birthday party (they swung by on their way to the Caltrain).

The band put on another terrific live show — loved the extra flourishes and jams they added to their album songs.

Everyone really enjoyed the show. After the show we went downstairs and practically everyone brought some merch. We ran into some of the bandmates outside (it’s hard not to, the venue is so small that Praveen ended up helping them get their drum out the door), and said we couldn’t wait for them to come back and play at a bigger venue. Their sound is so big.

Here is them playing the instrumental second half of On My Knees– watch for the short but sweet jam at 4:10 minute mark.

I can’t wait for this band to blow up. So good.

1 minute

5 minutes

9 minutes

Miles 6 and 7 are mostly on trails, and with a slight incline. Gotta work on the hills! That’s the hardest part of the run.

Pretty convenient route — I just take the 24 bus to Oak, walk two blocks to the Panhandle and start there. Run to the ocean and back.

(Michael can’t stand Bloody Marys)

By the time we left Elixir, our numbers had grown and so we made our way a few blocks over to Dolores Park. On a warm sunny day, Dolores Park is jam packed with people hipsters (and yupsters! hey, that’s us) spread out on blankets, enjoying picnics, drinks, and other — shall we say — recreational indulgences.

Van and Matt secured a spot near the hula hoopers and the soccer players, and we soon broke out the food.

Karla

Laura and Mihalia

Van

Sam

Mylon and Jeff

Some weird guy that just showed up recently.

Matt spotted the Frisbee I packed in my bag and we got up to throw the disc around. As is typical in Dolores Park, we were throwing it back and forth amidst some guys throwing a football 30 yards to one another, people playing catch with their dogs, the soccer players, people walking by, etc. Matt recently joined up a San Francisco based ultimate league. My flicks were super accurate (!) for once, so it was fun to make some really long pulls weaving through traffic. Some other folks jumped into the action later on and we soon had multiple discs flying around.

A long afternoon spent in the park just kicking it with friends in the warm sun with food, drink, and a frisbee. Summer, thank  you for being here.

Joey attempted to class up the event wearing a tux and serving fresh mozzarella, tomato, and basil hors d’oeuvre on a slate. He and Sean mounted the art people brought on the walls. I wanted to cut together a video of the whitewater rafting trip to music, but just didn’t have time to get it done before the event. So I juxtaposed two photos I’ve taken:

I could try to go meta with these photos…about how one is showing the beauty of electricity and energy at night, while the other shows the stark cost of providing this essence of modern life. I also liked how the angle of the Chicago sign and the tower matched up. Chrissy brought a canvas painting (note: the paint was still moist) of a stick figure, a bold artistic impression of Nevin. Joey and Sean had some great abstract art they had painted over the past few months. Rishabh put a photo mosaic together of shots around San Francisco into the shape of the City itself. Christophe showed two photos he had taken that were nice. Gregg demolished a old iMac he found junked, spray painted it, and chewed up all the innards. Dustin bought a painting for $5 at a thrift store of a mountain lake, then proceeded to paint a goofy octopus sticking out of the water. He also was rocking the accordion in the early evening, and switched to the Korg later in the evening for some beats. Rishabh strummed the guitar, while Sean goofed around on the ukelele.

What made the evening even better was that Brock and Heather were going to join us! They met us inside the pub, we got drinks, and had a great time. The opening solo act was a very strange concoction…I’m trying to think of how to describe it but I’ve got nothing now. Anyway:

Being an idiot, I brought my DSLR with the 50mm f/1.8, but forgot the memory card in my computer. D’oh, so all I’ve got is this iPhone photo. There was probably 35 people in attendance, very small and intimate. But Seryn just blew us away. They put on an incredible live show with a sound that can fill much bigger venues. We were amazed at the drummer, who at times also played the xylophone, accordion, and banjo. They aren’t afraid to experiment either — the lead singer at one point hunched over and started singing (yelling?) into the pickups of his ukelele, creating a haunting sound. It kinda looked like he was making out with the ukelele, hehe. At one time the bassist was using a cello bow on his bass guitar but also the xylophone, and at the finale song whipped out a trumpet!

They added to their album songs with flourishes and mini jam sessions that were a delight to hear. This band is going to be big, I just know it. Their sound is just too good!

It was nice to see folks from work in a casual setting — Carlos, Jose, Brian, Brian, Leland, Loren, Jackson, etc. Joseph brought little Henry, who was just adorable. I couldn’t stop taking pictures of him! Later in the afternoon, Jay led us on a short hike up the hills behind his house to the ridge, where you could see all the way to the Santa Cruz boardwalk. I couldn’t believe all the land was his.

We also had live music! Jay’s daughter’s friend plays sax and vocals in a reggae band, and they wanted to come play in the backyard. And then the friend’s dad is in a bluegrass band, and so they came and played too. It was pretty rad.

Pretty chill way to spend a Saturday afternoon. We headed back up to the City by around 5:30pm….for the day wasn’t over for me yet.

Also, maybe this is a good time to disclose the new look on this website — I recently ditched the glasses and the goatee (which I grew out the summer of junior year). Some of the NC folks might remember what I looked like without it, but I’ve lost a bit of weight since then too.

It’s been kinda amusing seeing folks out here doing double-takes, or sometimes not even recognizing me at all! Hehe.

Realizing that the house wasn’t prepared to handled the ballooning guest list, I went shopping on Saturday, made a big grocery trip Sunday morning, and then spent the rest of the day getting the house ready. After all, had to make my own dish too! By around 6:30pm, the contestants started to arrive. The turnout was great, the largest gathering I’ve had at the house: Mozzi, Alex, Jonathan and a friend, Mary and Matt, Joey, Sean, Stephanie, Luke and Dora (who hosted their own Iron Chef last year), Jess (sadly Simon couldn’t make it), Mia and her friend Dorothy, Paul and his friend Tess, Michael and Karla, and Dan and Wendy.

A quick rundown of the creative dishes people made:

- Mary and Matt did a ‘toe jam’ and a head cheese. The jam was made out of bacon and the head cheese was…a ball of cheese shaped like a head, hehe.

- Mia had a chicken fried rice dish with eggs, artfully plated so you couldn’t tell which came first, the chicken or the egg.

- Michael and Karla had two ambitious entries: they found a whole rabbit somewhere in the Mission (where else), served with Spanish style flatbread called tortas, so you had the tortas and the rabbit = the tortoise and the hare. Alongside they had chunky (wholly!) guacamole. They also had an amusing plating of cake pieces arranged on red solo cups…..cupcakes. Loved it.

- Paul and Tess also had a delightfully ambitious dish. They had an entire chicken stuffed, presented lying down face up. A small bowl of homemade soup was used to create a face, and scattered around were pan-fried zucchini rounds with $ signs branded into them (Paul used a shaped clothes hanger), and a syringe used for basting was left on the plate. So you had the message of what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

- Joey whipped out his ice cream maker and presented cool as a cucumber ice cream. It was delicious.

- Luke and Dora made cheese enchiladas, half the tray made with homemade mole sauce (looked practically black) and the other half with homemade guajillo suace (orange colored). The many small enchiladas added up to make one Giant dish, and those colors are that of the San Francisco Giants!

- Dan and Wendy made brownies with the Brown University logo in frosting on it (Dan’s brother Jono went to Brown).

- Sean made a tray of spicy meatballs that were a big hit (hey! it’s a spicy meatball! in your worst italian accent)

- I used Pillsbury breadsticks dough and made a lattice network, formed into a woven basket after slightly baking. I then prepared egg in a variety of ways — single serving spinach and mushroom fritattas made in a cupcake tin, scrambled eggs, soft boiled, hard boiled, fried, and poached. Much to the horror of the guests assembled, they learned that I had never fried or poached an egg before, so there was definitely a tutorial for me. I then served the scrambled eggs in the basket, and arranged the other dishes around it. Hence, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

I even had prepared some homemade pasta sauce for pasta and a big appetizer plate of fresh fruit (hat tip to Heather and Brock for the simple yet delightful presentation of sliced oranges with a sprinkling of cinnamon) in case there wasn’t enough food, but there was plenty. Mozzi and Alex brought special dumplings, Stephanie made a big bowl of salad, and Jess brought these jaw-dropping amazing homemade chocolate croissants. She’s in culinary school now and has been cranking out some pretty incredible edible delights lately.

What a fun night — I was very happy that so many of my different friends could make it! Now onto the next challenge….

The first thing I thought of when listening through Burst Apart is “wow, this sounds a lot like Radiohead back during Ok Computer and Kid A“. The composition, the shimmery slightly off-kilter effects that round out some of the sounds, the songs that verge into formless structure during the middle of the album, etc. One immediately thinks of the fantastically disquieting “Climbing Up the Walls” when listening to the Antler’s song Parentheses.

It’s definitely an album that deserves a few listens, and some songs in particular definitely start to stick in your ear. Two tracks that did this to me:

The Antlers – I Don’t Want Love

The Antlers – Putting the Dog to Sleep

Also worth checking out French Exit.

Here are two songs that I liked:

The Naked and Famous – Young Blood

The Naked and Famous – Punching in a Dream

The weather was perfect, and the grill going full on when I arrived. Matt was there, as was Melih’s brother Doruk who had flown in from North Carolina, and Micky’s sister Lisa who had flown in from England.

We brought the disc out and threw it around for a while too. I got to catch up with Heather, who I last saw at the wedding back in October, as well as Melih’s buddies Adam and Chris. What a lovely way to spend Memorial Day.

I broke out the new two-person tent I bought the previous weekend, but the tent already setup was a mammoth mansion of a tent, it could have slept a dozen people. So we decided to start dinner. Paul shares my keen eye for a good meal, so we raised eyebrows as we set to work getting fresh vegetables chopped and sauteed for fajitas, ears of corn on the firepit, avocados peeled and cut, tortillas warming on the grill. No MREs for us! The weather, unlike all my previous trips, was cold, cloudy, and moist. Raindrops started falling softly near the end, and Paul and I worked in the dark. But it was so worth it — the fajitas were delicious! As we got ready for bed, we discovered that the mansion wasn’t watertight…there were puddles all over the floor. The others went to their cars or other tent, but I looked at Paul and said — how about we setup my tent inside this tent? Inception tent! We got it setup and spent the night dry and warm.

The next morning, we geared up and headed to Yosemite Falls. We were going to do the same hike that Dustin, Dave and I had done last September, but now I’d actually see the waterfall. Back in September, there was zero water and it was hot. This time, it was cool (to very cold near the top) and wet with all the mist from the waterfall. The elevation change is so great at the top that there was snow on the ground too! I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:

Tendrils of clouds masked the tops of the granite cliff faces all throughout the day, making for stunning views of Half Dome and the Valley.

It’s impossible for me to convey the scale of the waterfall picture below:

We made it to the top and stopped for lunch. It was remarkable how cold everyone felt after stopping just for ten minutes! Here again Paul and I raised eyebrows when we brought out a brick of Tillamook extra sharp cheddar and Triscuit crackers. No string cheese, thanks!

The hike itself was fine. There was some portions where it felt like you hiking in the middle of a stream instead of a set of granite stairs hewn into the side of the mountain, there was so much precipitation. Regulating body temperature against the elements and energy expended while hiking was also a challenge, but overall I’m much more fit now than I was back in September and I could feel it. The plan was to head all the way along the ridge to North Dome then return along the backside, but the weather just wasn’t conducive to it.

We made it back to our campsite by around 4pm, and Teresa brewed up some hot chocolate for us (thanks Teresa!). We noshed one some more food, and Paul and I broke down our tent and packed up the car. We threw the frisbee around, and when the raindrops started we bid the crew adieu and started to head back to the Bay. We ended up stopping in Manteca for dinner, picking a local brewery-restaurant that had high ceilings, two levels, and lots of seating. It was pretty amusing — one of the waiters comes sprinting down the hall when we entered, and told us to sit anywhere. Later, he comes sprinting past, stops, wheels around and asks us what if we wanted something to drink. The poor guys were on a skeleton crew, then got slammed by local Little League teams. The amusing part was that only the one guy was operating in full sprint mode…everyone else was just normal. In the end, we just wanted to tip that guy.

Paul took a detour to SF and dropped me off before heading back down to Mountain View. What a great trip to Yosemite, and the whitewater rafting! Also enjoyed getting to spend some more time with Paul — he works just down the hall from me, but on a different iPod, so I haven’t gotten to interact with him as much I’d like.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to face the frigid snowmelt of the river in just our swim trunks. The rafting company had us done wetsuits, splash jackets, and helmets. Some of us wore sandals, water mocassins, old sneakers, or in my case, Sperry topsiders. This was amusing to many, who asked if I realized that a day on a yacht wasn’t exactly what I was in store for. :)

The mood was good as we suited up. Julian described some of the rafting he did down in Argentina, while the other Julien betrayed some of his anxiety. All of us playfully teased Chrissy on how she was going to definitely fall out of the boat, much to her (pretended?) dismay. I was just really eager to go!

Paul, me, Jared, Julien, Chrissy, and Rebecca formed one crew, anchored by our guide Bill — who had been in the States less than 22 days from Brazil. Dustin, Julian, Travis, Leane, and two other folks formed the other boat’s crew. Paul and I took the two front positions, using our opposite hand dominances to good effect.

The rafting was a blast. From the beginning we were in it, with a series of rapids followed by maybe 30s to 1 minute intervals of calm. It was technical, with our guide bill providing instructions (“left paddle!”, “forward paddle!”) constantly to get our boat in the proper position. The water was cold, but not freezing — refreshing and helped sharpening your senses.

We stopped by a rocky beach for lunch. The guides setup a table with fresh fruit and sandwich ingredients. We rose our faces to the sun, which sporadically decided to reveal itself to us throughout the day.

The highlight (lowlight?) of the trip came soon after lunch. We handled the morning terrifically — boat never got stuck, no one fell out. We were feeling pretty cocky, then it happened. Paul and I had switched to the middle, with Julien and Jared up front. We came over a roll in the rapids, and the boat got trapped in an eddy. The water from the roll started pouring into the side that Paul and Chrissy were on. Paul leapt to our side in an effort to free the boat, but by that time the water had wrapped its arms around Chrissy and pulled her in. Our freed boat moved a few yards away from the roll. I realized Chrissy had fallen overboard, but was looking for her to pop up so we could pull her back in. The trouble was that she was caught under the roll — the water crashing down was keeping her under the water. There was a period of time — about 3 seconds — where we all realized that the situation was bad. In the crystal clear water, we could see her face several inches below the water, a single hand reaching out. Out of the corner my eye, I saw our guide Bill about to jump into the water, and the boat behind us perched itself at top of the roll, seemingly about to come down right on top of Chrissy. But she popped out! We believe that the presence of the boat slowed the oncoming water enough for her to pop to the surface. We hauled her in, our eyes wide. She looked extremely alert, but all things considering she handled it extraordinarily well. It wasn’t until later when we told her what it looked like from the boat’s perspective that she changed her outlook on it….

We continued down the river for another or so, but it was much milder. The overcast sky let out some rain, and by the time we arrived at the end at around 2pm we were ready for it. The guys helped haul the boats up from the embankment, and we took a moment to get out of our wetsuits and dry off. What a trip!

Back at the parking lot, I moved my gear from Chrissy’s car to Paul’s, and bid the rest adieu. After a grocery store top-off, Paul and I began the drive toward Yosemite….

It’s smooth, warm, and feels like summer never wants to end. As for me, I just want our summer to really start!

Delorean – Grow Taragana Pyjarama remix by Mushroom Pillow

Enjoy.

Have a great holiday weekend everyone!

Lord Huron – Into the Sun (Teen Daze Remix)

The second is of Mighty, the great song I’ve written about before. Here, Painted Palms’ interpretation is heavy on the synth, but still retains the tribal sound of the original. I like how how the aaaahhhh backing vocal washes over the melody.

Lord Huron – Mighty (Painted Palms’ Remix)

This year Sam organized a big group of people for a Scrabble theme. We all wore cardboard letters and formed words as we walked along — often in response to the costumes we saw or by request from fellow paraders. Paul went wildcard and came as a ? mark. It was great — he’d go up to all the random costumes he saw and take a picture with a puzzled look on his face. And, he kept accessorizing his costume as the day went along from other costumes people had.

What friends are for:

The house parties all along the race route are pretty epic.

The weather forecasters were predicting rain, but instead it was beautiful.

The goal was to make it to Sam’s house along the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. This is usually when the parade starts to thin out too — most people are too um, gone to make it to the ocean. We ran into Nevin too, romping around with a giant gnome flag and with a huge group of fellow gnomes.

Sam got the grill out, the cornhole boards, and we spent the next few hours kickin’ it in the park.

A really great day.

The songs lean towards the long side, with the band showing patience and exploring shifts in key and temp in their songs — which makes sticking with songs the whole way through well worth it. Harmonized vocals, soft guitar and banjo pickings, and orchestral flourishes make this album a treat to listen to. If you’re a fan of Sufjan Stevens, Fleet Foxes, and Mumford & Sons, then I highly highly recommend you give this young new band a try!  Here are two songs to sample:

Seryn – We Will All Be Changed

Seryn – Our Love

Bay Area folks – Seryn will be playing a show at the Hotel Utah Saloon on Sunday, June 19th. Tickets are just ~$8, so why not? I’m going. There’s also a Berkeley show at the Starry Plough on Saturday, June 11th. Might go to that too.

I present for your consideration, a peanut butter cookie coated with chocolate with a Reese’s peanut butter cup inside :)

On Saturday they had the nursing school commencement and the Lamp Lighting ceremony, a special tradition in homage to Florence Nightingale, the “Lady with the Lamp”. It was great to meet Sachi’s classmates and her professors, whom she has gotten quite close to over the past two years. A few weeks back, she received a special award given to the outstanding nursing student of the whole class, and it was clear how much everyone liked her.

That evening we had dinner in downtown Charleston at Pies & Pints, a classy pizza place. We waited for our table at the lovely independent bookstore next door, where to my delight there was a live music show. A couple in their fifties played an assortment of acoustic guitars, mandolins, banjos, slide guitar, etc. with original songs.

On Sunday the overall graduation ceremony took place. Alas, the lovely weather we had on Saturday didn’t hold up so the ceremony was moved indoors. The commencement speaker was Dr. Charles Vest, a West Virginia native who served as President of MIT from 1990 to 2004. He actually met the woman who would become his wife while spending a summer in Charleston as an intern. It was a nice ceremony, and the weather cleared up afterward enough for everyone to stream out onto the lawn by the river alongside the campus, with the golden dome of the capitol building in the background.

Later that night, as we were getting ready for bed early (Sapana and I were to fly out at 6am the next morning), I got a text from Mike telling me I better turn on the TV. The news: President Obama to announce that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a US special operations raid. Whoa. We stayed up Obama’s address, and ended up getting little sleep. But after a weekend of spending time with the family and Sachi’s graduation, it was well worth it.

It was awesome. We talked about how he got involved with the band, what touring is like — how do you keep things fresh after dozens or hundreds of shows? — and fun moments that happen when you’re in a real bona-fide band. Here We Go Magic was Thom Yorke’s (of Radiohead) favorite band from last year’s Glastonbury Festival, and Peter described having a jam session one night in New York with Yorke himself. Like whoa. Peter is really well read — the conversation drifted deep into music theory, accessibility of music, the feel of music in different cultures and how people connect to it in a very fundamental way, etc.

The show was nice. I was going on just 3 hours of sleep from my flight back to the Bay Area that morning, but I enjoyed it. Many of the songs live get into a nice groove, and there is definitely a jam feel to them, especially near the end. Their music is often described as ‘electro-folk’, with some psychedelia mixed in a few songs. Whatever that means, heh. The band came back on for an encore, and Peter even gave us a shoutout: “Thanks to my cousin Patrick and his friends!” So cool of him!

Check out this song from their latest album, Pigeons.

Here We Go Magic – Collector

By the way — Here We Go Magic is playing at Schubas on May 9th for you Chicago peeps, and at the Local 506 on May 17th for you Triangle peeps.

The 11th annual race was held last Saturday in the Potrero neighborhood. They used to do it on the famous Lombard St., until the neighborhood complained. They’ve found a good home in Potrero. This year, some colleagues of mine were getting a group together for it, and they had an awesome group costume idea — Tetris blocks! They made the blocks the day before, each of them taking a different piece. Chrissy, of course, picks the one hardest to make. Haha.

The results were spectacular.

I headed over to the venue after having lunch at Catherine’s place, where I showed her how to use Final Cut Pro, and I arrived just as they finished their first run. They looked awesome. I heard a lot of people say they were most impressed with the Tetris blocks.

photo by Bhautik Joshi

Everyone was having a blast. I grabbed the green square and did a run myself — I looked ridiculous with my long legs, but it was fun. There people lined up all along the course and tons of cameras were clicking away. Paul snagged one of me, for proof that I actually did it :)

Here’s a shot Chrissy’s friend Gurpreet shot of Elmo!

photo by Gurpreet

The next picture is San Francisco. Older professorial guy with a Herringbone blazer over a snug black tee and jeans? Check. 20-something dude in a hot pink tracksuit with bunny ears right next to him? Check.

What a cool event, and something I can appreciate too. It all started by a guy (Jon Brumit) who wanted to do something fun, and just made it happen. No entry fees, no corporate sponsorships, just someone who wanted to have a good time and invite a bunch of people to join in.

After the race we headed down to the Mission for a snack at Philz (another well-known SF coffee house), and as we’re sitting outside  the cafe in the early evening sun, Jason from work walks by us. Jason doesn’t live anywhere near the Mission, and didn’t even know about BYOBW. So it’s quite something that we just happened to cross paths. And I randomly saw James at BYOBW, Sean’s friend that I recently met. Just a few more ways that this place doesn’t seem so big anymore.

Chrissy has a 12 gauge semi-automatic shotgun (doesn’t have a name yet!), which for trap she shoots one round at a time. There were five stations set in an arc, with the clay launcher shed in front. The first person will yell “pull!” and fire at a clay. Then the second person, then the third until everyone has fired a round. You get five rounds per station, before rotating to the next. That way the angles are a bit different. Chrissy went first, then me. Since I was a total newbie, Chrissy stood by me for the first round, giving me some tips. I hit 12 clays out of a possible 25. She shot again, and in my second round I did worse, hit 11. But, I’ve been told by experts (i.e., Jordan and Chrissy) that it is quite respectable for having never shot a gun before. So maybe there is hope for me in the zombie apocalypse.

I swung by Paul’s house to help out a bit in preparing for the following day’s festivities (more on that later), then headed up towards Oakland for Brock and Heather’s housewarming party. Yes — the one and only Brock Winstead. My Google Reader community knows what I mean, hehe. They moved into their very own house in Emeryville (border of Oakland and Berkeley), and like me moving to Noe Valley they also have friends in the neighborhood.

The house was just lovely — with respect to decorating they have done ten times more in 1 month than I have done in 1 year. It looked like they’d been living there for years. So tastefully done! Heather baked some terrific bread (the no-knead recipe!), served with dippables like a white bean puree and chive butter. An eye opening pro-tip that I’ve been allowed to steal: sliced oranges slightly dusted with cinnamon. Like whoa. Seriously do it. Brock was mixing drinks for people, and there was merry all around.

Some familiar faces were there — Tim and John — but it was fun to talk to many of Brock and Heather’s classmates and colleagues from their time in grad school at Berkeley (where they studied city planning) and the nonprofit world.

And, in homage to our heavily interwebs centric relationship, I give you a picture of a cat.

We ended up splitting up for dinner after work on Friday; Chrissy and I grabbed a burrito in the Mission before heading north to Polk St. We had about half an hour to kill before the show, and just as we got our drinks I ran into Ari Picker, the lead singer and artist behind the band. Wished him luck for the show, told him how we brought a whole lot of folks, and that I was from Raleigh.

The show’s opener was a singer-songwriter named Sean Rowe. His songs were quite good — nice percussive notes on the body of the guitar, and some songs in particular showed great guitar work. His voice reminded me a lot of Tom Berninger from The National, but Joey said it also reminded him of the Pixies.

Lost in the Trees played a set that drew from their album All Alone in an Empty House and their recent EP, Time Taunts Me. Somehow, they all fit on the small stage — guitar, drums, two cellists, a violinists, a french horn / accordion player, and an electric guitar / tuba / xylophone player. The venue is quite intimate, maybe only 80 to 100 people in a long, narrow room.

One thing that will strike you about their music is how much emotion there is. Many songs deal with sorrow, yearning, longing, and loss. Ari wears this emotion on his sleeve, at one point resting on knees with his eyes closed while the strings carried the melody forward.

The highlight of the night came at the end. The band was battling sound troubles throughout the set — monitor levels not high enough, reverb through the mics, etc. After hinting at it during the show, for the encore Ari stepped off the stage and headed to the center of the small room. The rest of the band followed, and we all made space for them and their instruments. There, in the darkness save for the backlight from a few phones, we were treated to an acoustic set right amongst us. It was amazing.

I could only muster this photo from my phone, but it was really dark in there. The guy in front me held up the xylophone for one song. They called Sean Rowe to join them for one of Sean’s songs that the band had been learning (never before played in public). And at the end, Ari led the crowd to do the backing vocals, telling us that we’re going to overpower the noise from the bar.

I was really pleased to hear that Chrissy, Rishabh, Patrick, and Chris all really enjoyed the show too, even though they hadn’t heard much (or none at all) of the band beforehand. It’s an interesting mix…folk, Americana, indie, with a heavy dose of baroque classical influence. We hung around afterward, and the band members came out to meet the crowd. Almost all of us ended up buying merch, and Ari signed out limited edition tour posters. This is what I love about seeing small, up and coming bands in venues like this.

Definitely looking forward to their next album and their next visit to San Francisco. Triangle folks — Lost in the Trees will be playing at Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro on Friday, May 13th!

credit bigsurhalfmarathon.org

So this is happening. And what’s ever better is that my close friends Win and Greg are gonna come out west to join me for it. They said they’d do it too if I signed up, and peer pressure is a powerful thing. Mary and Matt too! :)

So mark your calendars and lace up your shoes. It’s on!

The apartment, right on the border of Noe Valley and the Mission, was bright and airy, and the rooftop deck lent panoramic views of the entire City. And there was a hottub!

A really intriguing crowd — several Stanford MBA students who graduated in 2009 as well, a handful of other Apple folks, nonprofit and education policy people. It was nice to exercise a different part of my brain!

I learned from Lloyd an interesting new trick for the grill — cut a bellpepper in half so it makes a little cup, roast it on low heat for a bit to get it going, then crack an egg in it. The egg will poach right there as the pepper roasts. I’d rub the pepper in some flavored oil, then add some herbs and cheese (shredded gruyere perhaps?) to the egg before serving.

On Sunday morning, Patrick and I went for a run through Golden Gate Park, this time adding to the distance by running all the way to the ocean and then up the whole west edge of the park before cutting back in towards the middle. We did a solid 4.5mi run. This, of course, was to earn our treat for the rest of the day — a leisurely barbecuing, grilling, and brewing beer at Sean, Joey, Dino, and Christophe’s house (that’s a mouthful to say, so it’ll be ’4404x24th’ hereafter. hrm, that isn’t any better).

Sean’s table arrived a couple of days earlier, a long custom one made of reclaimed lumber with steel supports. The nicest part was that he got benches instead of chairs, so it’s cozy and very welcoming for large groups. Their apartment is filling out — got some living room furniture, deck furniture, and of course the grill.

Sean was brewing a kolsch style beer this afternoon; his friend James — who has been brewing his own beer for a long time — brought over a large pot for the boil. The two of them and Kyle (worked with Sean as an intern in iPod new tech, at Apple currently too) minded the various brewing steps throughout the afternoon.

At the end of the day, they had ready to cellar for a few weeks; the gravity was a bit high for a kolsch apparently but all signs so far are pointing to a stellar brew. I was enjoying one of their home brews, which was a Belgian-style dubbel (?), not really show. The beercap had a pitchfork on it. Sean and Joey also had a really nice imperial extra stout too.

There was plenty of food, all homemade. Dino had fajitas going, Patrick and I brought a greek salad, Christophe with fresh asparagus and French-style mayonnaise and mustard dipping sauce, Kyle and Krista with authentic Texas-style queso con carne, Chad with a great guacamole and sweet potato fries, Rishabh with paneer tikka skewers, Gregg with eastern Carolina style slaw, James with bacon mac ‘n’ cheese. I’m probably forgetting a few people too.

And of course, lots and lots of meat.

At the end Chrissy unveiled her homemade, unbelievably delicious, fruit/cake bars topped with sliced almonds.

More photos here. A huge tip of the hat to Sean, Christophe, Dino, and Joey for hosting such a great event. A slow-paced, relaxing afternoon with plenty of great food, great beer, great people, and great conversations. Can’t ask for much more than that.

First up was a performance of Henri Dutilleux’s cello concerto Tout un monde lointain, a piece which often had the the featured guest cello soloist pitted against the rest of the audience. It felt modern and a little abstract to me, but it was nice to see the cellist furiously play a riff, then to see all the instruments of the orchestra rise up in the ready position and fire back a response.

The second piece was more recognizable to our amateur classical enthusiast ears: Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Patrick played the bassoon in band and there is a famous bassoon solo part of the piece, especially in the famous 4th movement of March to the Scaffold. Chrissy has been playing the flute for many many years all the way through college and was very competitive — so good, in fact, that if it wasn’t for engineering she would have gone to music school instead.

The show was really great — I really must come to the symphony more. The night was still young when we left, so we headed to Range, a highly acclaimed cocktail bar in the Mission, and talked the night away.

I wasn’t the only crazy one, for John, Troy, and Joey jumped in on the idea too. Steve wanted to make it also, but he was stuck out of town on business. Chrissy joined in for Freelance Whales, but not Delorean (she saw them last fall with me and Jared). We grabbed dinner at a Thai restaurant around the corner from the GAMH, and timed our entrance perfectly.

photo by Human Fiction

photo by Natalye

I was impressed — they have a really tight live show. Their album Weathervanes can be pretty mellow at times, but they gave new life to the songs on-stage, adding new dimensions and textures to them. It would have been boring if they just replicated the sound off their album, but they didn’t disappoint. The whole band jumps in for the harmonies, and are switching instruments around throughout the show. The guitarist in particular was intriguing — he played electric guitar, bass, guitar with e-bow, electric mandolin, and xylophone.

After the set we bought some merch (Joey pulled a wildcard and bought a Foals t-shirt, even though we weren’t sticking around to hear them and I don’t think he’s even heard them either). We bid adieu to Chrissy and bounced. John had his car nearby, so we piled in; parking was pretty easy a couple blocks away. About 50 yards from the car, I freeze and ask John to unlock it before sprinting back to drop my jacket off in the car. I had been to Slim’s before to see Two Door Cinema Club (who, in fact, were also playing a show in San Francisco this night). Wasn’t too crowded, and I spotted Jess — slipped my mind she was coming. She had a few people along too, like Kimmie (sp?) who works with her at Arup. Delorean took the stage at eleven and we got up real close.

I had told our group in particular to watch the keyboardist Unai Lazcano — he’s one of my favorite live performers because he gets so into the moment — boogying around, bobbing his head eyes half closed, feet constantly moving, rocking the keyboard dangerously until it almost tips over. You can’t help but grin when you see it. The show was great, the band playing through several songs continuously before slowing it down and building the rhythm up again. Three songs in, Troy leans over and says “I suddenly realize why you had this panicked look on your face before sprinting back to the car to leave your jacket” — it gets really warm when everyone is dancing around.

What a fun night!

Bottom of the Hill has a penchant for cranking up the volume, even for bands that don’t really need it. This time I was sporting a pair of Etymotic ER-20 earplugs, which are designed to provide sound isolation while still preserving the clarity and full range of music. Joseph highly recommended these and wears them to all the shows he goes to. Sure enough, I saw the person next to me holding their ears two songs in.

The show was good, they asked the crowd to indulge them for a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska that they had been playing the night before. After the show I headed to the back merch table where I met Ben, the band’s front man. He actually recognized me from last time, which was kinda cool. They had run out of EPs on CD, but I did pick up a 12″ vinyl record of the Mighty EP for Joseph — he handed me some money earlier that day to spend at the show to support the artist too.

They’ll be back in San Francisco for the Outside Lands music festival in August.

I thought Dr. Woodson was pretty cool — very personable and had an ease about him while interacting with students that I never felt J.LO had. He worked the room, talking to everyone. We discussed the coaching search, the new basketball coach Gottfried, and how the construction on campus was progressing with Tally, the Atrium, the new Hunt Library, etc. I asked him what his top three goals were after he got to NC State from Purdue and assessed the situation. He said: a) grow the endowment, which is much lower than that of other comparable schools, b) slow enrollment and c) improve the state of NC State athletics. He also said again when he addressed the whole group assembled there, that while we need to work hard and getting the school’s name known, he needs to work at improving the value of our degree. Woodson knows the impact of a strong and winning athletic program. He likes our Athletic Director’s tenacity.

I left the event feeling pretty optimistic. It was a lot of fun to catch up with people too. I hadn’t eaten much before arriving and so Melih and I walked and talked our way to Union Square and found a late night yet surprisingly good Thai place. I love the conservations I have with him.

The group was large, with a few familiar faces with Tim, his girlfriend Cat, and our friend Catherine. It was great to see Catherine on the mend (her foot cast, which she named Guillermo, is coming off soon). We also found a time next weekend to finally make good on my promise to show her how to edit videos with Final Cut.

The food was incredible. Patrick and Catherine raved about the mushroom sauce, so I got a savory crepe with chanterelles and mozzarella cheese, made with buckwheat and salted butter. It was the best crepe I’ve had in years, certainly in America.

Our ringleader Patrick, with the longest bill he’s ever seen at one of his gatherings:

Afterward some of us went to the Monk’s Kettle for an afternoon drink, where I had an unusual Belgian style witbier made with some of the juice from a pinot noir — they called it a Red & White. Strolled around downtown a bit, tried to do some shopping but didn’t like anything. For dinner I ended up walking a few blocks from the house a Thai restaurant in Noe. Still looking for a solid option in the neighborhood.

The infamous and lovable Stanford band was even out in full force:

I was joined by Nader (who, despite coming up on 101 from Sunnyvale, somehow ended up clear on the other side of the park…) and John, who brought along his friends Alice and Melissa.

The game was actually one of the five spring scrimmages being televised on ESPN3, but it was amusing how the QBs were pretty much offlimits (a two-hand touch got you a ‘sack’). Yet the recap boasted how smooth QB Andrew Luck was in the scrimmage. Got some shots of the game, but Nader brought out his super zoom lens and binoculars. The field binoculars were a real surprise to me — its depth of field or something literally made the game look like it was in HD when you look through it. Hard to explain…

After the game we walked around the park a bit, enjoying the day. Stopped at Cha Cha Cha for some sangria and tapas too, where one of Nader’s former colleagues Mark joined us.

After making our way back to the stadiu , John gave Alice and Melissa a ride back; Nader, Mark and I walked through the park before hitting up an Irish pub right of Lincoln. As you can probably tell, it was a really lazy, relaxing day.

Music critics throw around adjectives like “orchestral” and “expansive” all the time these days. But here’s a band that actually deserves such labels. Portland’s Typhoon is an indie rock geek’s dream: a dynamic 12-piece with a seemingly unending reservoir of energy, emotive vocals, arpeggiated guitars, horns, multiple drum kits, strings—there are so many sonic details crammed into the five tracks on A New Kind of House, the band’s second official release, that you might need two pairs of headphones to properly connect the dots.

I was pretty impressed — several longform and thoughtful songwriting, varied song structures, and nice instrumentation. They’ll be playing at a few festivals in the coming months, and hopefully do a wider tour as well.

Here are two songs that I especially liked:

Typhoon – Summer Home from A New Kind of House

Typhoon – Belly of the Cavern from Hunger and Thirst

Lyrics to Belly of the Cavern:

I was lost out in the mountains
and I had run out of provisions
I had one drop left in my deer-skin
and I had come to my last decision.

Should I lie down
or should I be laid down
I had set out in the first place
from what I gathered from rumored hearsay
I heard of treasure in a high cave
on the northern slopes of the coast range
so I climbed up
but I didn’t know how to climb down

I wandered through the foliage
I came across my own tracks
and i became discouraged
until at long last i found a cavern
I crawled inside and I lit my lantern
and it was all there
just like they told me it would be there

I was lost out in the mountains
I had no water nor food to eat
so i drank the soil from a golden chalice
I gritted precious stones between my teeth
and I regretted my lonesome palace
should have never listened to others tales
all I had left was a priceless ballast
to hold me down from the howling gales.

In my mouth there burned a fire
I was dying of a long long draught
but then a voice whistled across the mouth of my cavern
and it said to me it said that without a doubt
you will settle by the water before this is over.

All my life I’ve spent wasting time,
wasting my time just to forget again
but I don’t mind
I’ll take my medicine and I will be fine.

The turnout was nice and diverse, in terms of networks, not race! Hehe. The cast of characters: Tim [Havoc/NC State/Park]; Sean, Rishabh, Dustin, Nishu [Apple]; and Mike, Karla, our friend Cynthia, and Cynthia’s labmate Andrew. Patrick was going to join us too because the lack of cell phone reception at the park totally borked our plans to sync up and we ended up missing each other. Sorry Patrick! My car from Noe gathered at the charming Noe Valley Bakery for a snack, picked up picnic stuff at the grocery store, then headed out. We started hiking in the late morning, and it was a beautiful day.

This was hill country, and our destination was the rocky outcropping on top of the hill. Meadows, cows in the distance, etc.

While we were at the top, Dustin spotted a deer blitzing across the meadow incredibly fast. Then it started to actually scale the really steep hill/cliff towards us! I can’t describe just how fast this deer was booking it. We made our way along the ridge, stopping for a picnic halfway through. The setting reminded me a bit of the music video for M83′s We Own the Sky. The thermals were supposed to be good for raptors, and I did manage to capture one as it flew by.

Finally we snaked our way down the hill and followed a thinly shaded creek back to the beginning of the trailhead. Overall a relaxing, sunny, hike.

One of Joey’s friends from undergrad, Chris, is a student at CCRMA and was performing a piece. The exhibition floor had sound/art installations by students. Some very interesting stuff, with new ways of thinking about how to interact with sound.

One installation had the user put on a EEG sensor headset by NeuroSky and then listen to different musical compositions. The headset would study how focuses vs relaxed you were, and how much you were in sync with the music. Based on that, a marker would move around on a whiteboard.

Then there three musical performances. One was an interactive one in which the audience would send out tweets with the #modulations hashtag, and their system would scan Twitter for those tweets and create a sound tree based on that. Some of my tweets got some good reactions from the crowd. The next two were long, 20 minute compositions of “found music”, in which the composers create music from just sounds they have recorded, but have modified/distorted them in a variety of ways. One of the artists, Trimpin, I learned later was very famous, but these words were just too unstructured and experimental for my taste.

After the break we were treated to a pre-made composition that had a very trippy accompanying video. It went on like this for maybe 10 or 15 minutes?

Chris took the stage for his piece, but it had some recognizable melodic notes and beats, and Chris even did some singing (reminiscent to me of Panda Bear, and indeed I learned later that’s a big influence of his). It was pretty cool. At one point he held two walkies around the mic to get some interesting echo / reverb effects.

Photo by DoNotLick

The show was at the Regency Ballroom up on Van Ness, first time I’ve seen a show here. Röyksopp puts on quite a show in contrast to some of the small up and coming bands that I’ve seen more recently. The lights were trippy and I wasn’t expecting the costumes either — the guitarists started off with burlap sacks on their heads, at one point one of the lead singers puts this giant robot eye helmet on, and the female vocalist had something different on all the time. Everytime a new one would appear, I’d turn around to Joey (who saw them last time in SF) and he’d nod knowingly.

Photo by John Shen

Girl & the Robot, video by sushisac

The duo did a nice job at talking to the crowd with their Norwegian accents They came back out for three encores, with the last one actually being a remixed version of a Kings of Leon song. I had no idea what song it was (I don’t listen to Kings of Leon), but it sounded decent. But really, what we really wanted was to hear Röyksopp Forever!

What Else is There – jskallerup

I picked up four tickets and within the next half hour all the tickets were gone. So glad that I check email as frequently as I do.

Mary and Matt swung by the house and we walked down for a quick dinner on 24th before catching the bus over to the Brava Theater Center in the Mission. On the stage there was a desk with two microphones; off to the side was Zoe Keating’s cello and music setup. Amongst NPR geeks (guilty), there is talk about how program hosts sound versus how they look. Jad Abumrad looks pretty much like I expected him too, and though Robert Krulwich is different, seeing him banter with Jad on the stage totally changes that. He’s like the college professor we all wished we had. The show was on the subject of Symmetry, and it was incredible to see how Jad and Robert translated their intricately produced podcast to a live setting.

Jad had a sound board in front of him with dozens of keys that he had pre-programmed with music, sound effects, and interview clips. As he and Robert would talk, Jad would trigger the appropriate sound on cue. Zoe Keating also provided live accompaniment to the show, loosely conducted by Jad. The end result was striking — if you closed your eyes it was like a real Radiolab broadcast. The witty yet probing banter between Jad and Robert, the chopped up interviews with imaginative explanations sprinkled throughout, the musical pauses that let your mind process what’s being said. The video projector behind them would also be used to show animations, art, pictures, and videos too. Twice, Zoe Keating took command of the stage and played two original compositions of hers. If you aren’t familiar with her work, Keating uses loop pedals to layer sound after sound from her cello, enabling her to create densely layered and intricate melodies all by herself.

After the show, we headed down to the stage and I got to shake Robert’s hand, thanking him for coming. We also briefly chatted about the powerful (and unfinished) story he recently wrote on Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komorov who died during re-entry on a mission he knew was botched, but chose to fly anyway to spare the life of his friend, Yuri Gagarin.

What a truly memorable night getting to see one of my favorite shows performed live. Coupled with the Cataract Falls hike we did earlier, I’d say that makes for quite a memorable day too.

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.

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

Abigail Washburn – Corner Girl

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

Pretty Lights – Gold Coast Hustle

Pretty Lights – Understand Me Now

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

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>

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

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.

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.

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!

It was also the first show I saw at the Independent. Pretty decent sized for a small venue, and the sound mix was better than Bottom of the Hill, which tends to just be too loud. Geographer also played a new song, so here’s to hoping there is a new album coming out soon.

On Sunday I went for a run in Golden Gate Park for the first time. Wendy had spoke of it many times, and now I’m kicking myself for not having done it earlier. Grassy meadows, tree groves, small ponds and lakes, even a pasture with real bison in it (!). The coolest part was that I actually ended up at the western edge of the park, at Ocean Beach. I turned up north, with Cliff House in the distance and the waves crashing to my left, before ducking back in the park. Running outside is much different than on the treadmill. My split isn’t as fast, but I ended up going more than 4 miles, which is the longest I’ve ever run before. Definitely looking forward to more of them.

Later that night I headed over to my friends Sean and Joey’s new place in Noe Valley for dinner. You remember them from previous Sunday night dinners and concerts. They just moved up to San Francisco, and are living with fellow colleagues Christoph from Apple and Dino from Tesla. Dinner was, of course, excellent. We’re talking about serious chefs here. Sean had been barbequing and smoking pork and ribs all day and made the best baked beans (smoked too) that I’ve ever had, Joey made buttermilk cornbread, I made falafel for the first time and served with pita and hummus, and Gregg brought over some vinegar based coleslaw. The beer was great too — all homemade. This is a house where you don’t ask “what beer do you have?”, you describe to the gracious hosts what kind of beer you like and they’ll pour you a homebrew. I had a Belgian tripel which was delicious — balanced, fragrant, smooth. Now that’s a good weekend.

On Thursday, Chrissy mentioned that Shaimus, the band whose show at Stanford she had us go to last year, was playing at Kimo’s in SF that night. I decided to tag along, and they kept up their reputation for being great live. They played new material, and in chatting with the band after the show we learned that they are recording new material in April and the new album will likely drop this summer. I asked the bassist and the lead singer what new album they were most excited about, and both said Radiohead’s latest. Heh. Another neat part — both of them sorta recognized us from the Stanford show. That’s the cool part of these up and coming bands. I hope Shaimus has a nice year — they are good guys and deserve to be bigger.

click to see it full-res at YouTube

I caught up on some reading and observed the pattern of the waves crashing against the shore.

There were still people out — wearing fleeces, naturally — and dogs were having a good time in the sand.

I stretched by legs by hiking up to the bluffs overlooking the beach and making my way closer to Golden Gate Bridge. There was an old concrete bunker complex up in the bluffs — which I thought could be a really cool place to throw a big party in the summer. Up on the gun parapet a DJ table would have gone nicely. And there was a leather sofa just chilling on the roof, enjoying the view. Why not?

The beach closer to the bridge — technically Marshall Beach — and slimmer and rockier. But from up on the bluffs, very picturesque. Near the end of the beach, a pile of rocks capped further progress on sand, so I started stepping my way over the boulders to get closer to the bridge.

I can’t wait go back for a picnic when summer rolls around!

Their name is Lord Huron, which started as the solo project of Michigan-native Ben Schneider that expanded to a full band for live shows. So far they’ve only self-released two EPs for a total of seven songs. Their sound brings acts like Fleet Foxes, Animal Collective, Local Natives, and Vampire Weekend to mind. I’ve been listening to the title track of their latest EP “Mighty” almost on repeat, a track that sonically reveals Schneider’s post-graduation travels that brought him to Bali, Indonesia. This is the joy of giving new things a shot. What an interesting find! From the evocative image on the band’s website — two men at dusk on a beach, with a briefcase and a guitar, running towards an elephant in the surf — to the lyrics. Give it a go, and let me know what you think.

You were a wild thing when you were younger,
stomping through the jungle.
You were mighty and you were stronger
but I bow no longer.
All your temples will lie in ruin
once I ravage through them.
All your rivals will not go near you
but I do not fear you.
Well, you howl and you roar,
but I am not afraid of you anymore.

You think you can have it?
Then come and get it.

Preheat an oven to 425F with an empty muffin pan or ramekins inside. Whisk 8 oz of milk and 2 large eggs until smooth, then whisk in 4 oz of flour (just shy of a cup) and a teaspoon of salt. After it’s integrated, let it sit for half an hour. After you’ve waited the half hour, melt some butter (recipe called for half a stick of butter, but I used maybe 1/4th….your call) and have it ready. Take the pan/ramekins out of the oven, pour in the melted butter equally. Then ladle in the battery equally into the cups. It’ll already be sizzling. Bake for 10 minutes @ 425F, then lower temp to 375F and finish it for another 20 to 30 minutes. I think if you’re using ramekins, the diameter of the popover is larger so it’ll need closer to 30 minutes to finish cooking all the way. If you have a muffin pan or a real popover pan, maybe it’s closer to 20 minutes. The best part is when you open the oven and see them bloom! Take them out of the oven and serve immediately, they’ll start to deflate.

They are delicious…airy, buttery, rich. Mmmmm.

Red peppers were on sale for 50 cents each, so I bought some then roasted them in the grill until the skins were blackened. Immediately seal them in a ziploc bag to let them steam, then after a while you can just rub off the charred skin. I put them in an omelette along with the fresh popovers for a Sunday morning brunch!

I wasn’t budgeting with this money at all, it came out of the blue. Of course, there is this expensive lens I’ve been eyeing recently but that didn’t seem right considering the spirit that the money was ‘earned’. So I decided to reinvest it back to organizations related to international health, as well as other efforts that I support.

• $300 to Nyaya Health, a health organizing in Nepal that incorporates radical transparency into their operations (thanks Naman for the recommendation)
• $200 to Doctors Without Borders
• $100 to Park Alumni Society
• $50 to the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program at NC State (just the beginning)
• $100 to the Stanford School of Engineering (fulfilling a longstanding pledge I made)
• $75 to WNYC’s Radiolab program
• $25 to WBEZ Chicago, the NPR station that produces Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! and This American Life

I’m really lucky and fortunate to be where I am, and this is just a tiny, tiny, bit of what I can do to give back and help others out.

Last Friday, Jordan came in town for a conference. Best of all, a fellow former intern — Ian, the original “super intern” — was here too. He and Jordan were co-ops in Apple iPod at the same time back in 2008, and Ian and I overlapped by a week. I actually was filling in his extremely large shoes, took over clickwheel validation for the Nano from him. Sean was also interning at Apple. Man, what an epic year. Ian is out here in the Bay Area for the next six months or so, he just has a class and a thesis to write at MIT and then he’s done with his Master’s in EE. Super smart, passionate guy. And really, really funny too. And when you put him and Jordan together, oh boy. I haven’t laughed this much in the past few months. On Friday night Sean, 4G Gregg and I met up with Jordan and Ian for a long dinner, then hit up this old bowling alley behind the Apple campus which was one of their old haunt three years ago.

On Saturday, I headed down to Menlo Park (where Ian is staying, not two miles from where I used to live in Menlo Park) and the three of us got dinner on University Avenue before picking Sean up and heading to HP Pavilion in San Jose. Three colleagues of mine — Sam, Julien, and Sheilah — play in an amateur ice hockey league. One game of their season actually takes place in the same arena that the San Jose Sharks play in. So we watched the Sharks play the Minnesota Wild, then the three of them took the ice after the game while the rest of us cheered (and heckled) them on.

The Sharks won their game, and Sam, Julien, and Sheilah also won their game. The three of them were on the same line too. Julien scored a goal late in the first, and then Sam got one in the 2nd. It reminded me of the time I used to go with Frieder to watch the Lund Giants amateur hockey team play at Ishallen in Lund. For like $5 you could be right up to the glass enjoying a game.

On Sunday we hosted Sunday night dinner. Ian came up and brought along these delicious stuffed mushrooms, and a few Flipfolks (i.e., colleagues of Troy’s at Flipboard. see what I did there?) came too. There was Tori and Tony (who, along with Troy, make for an amusing triplet of names), and Tori’s friend Vanessa. Tony was wrapping up his first week in the Bay Area — he just moved from Portland and started at Flipboard working on the front-end with Troy. It sounds like Tori is balancing back-end and front-end stuff, and Vanessa (hailing from Deutschland) is studying film & broadcast production at San Francisco State University. Quite an eclectic group of people, it was a lot of fun.

And finally, spring concert season is taking shape! So far I’ve picked up tickets to Geographer on February 23rd, Warpaint on March 16th, Freelance Whales on April 14th, and Delorean on April 14th. Yeah, both playing on the same day. Looks like Troy, Steve, and I are gonna shoot for the double header! Two Door Cinema Club is also playing on that day (it’s right around the Coachella dates). I’m also looking at Royksopp on March 28th, and possibly Cut Copy on April 16th. Any other shows I should catch?

I seriously encourage you to spend a few minutes over at his travel blog — Loaded Tour — to see some of the incredible photos of his journey. Check out this one in particular and just scroll down. Your jealously level will very likely start to rise dramatically.

Speaking of cooking….Sachi made some amazing French beignets (ala Cafe du Monde in New Orleans), and Mom made her homemade butternut squash ravioli with brown butter sauce, walnuts, and cranberries. Delicious!

This break, the family brought out dozens of boxes of old family photos stretching back 30+ years (that weren’t in albums already), and we set to work. We selected about three hundred photos from 3,000+, and I scanned them all into the computer. Still remaining: dozens of old VHS tapes that we need to digitize before it’s too late!

Woke up on the morning of the 26th to find 8 inches of snow on the ground! Definitely wasn’t expecting this! It was beautiful outside, and the main roads were paved so it didn’t impact much. Snow like this is rare for North Carolina, even at this time of year.

One evening we got a crew together — three of us, Pavak, Naman, Mike, Dale — and headed downtown and met up with Greg and Kelly for dinner at a new Asian restaurant near campus, followed by drinks at Foundation where Jordan joined us. On the 28th we were back in Raleigh at a sports bar for the NC State vs West Virginia football game. I even got Sapana to commit treason and wear an NC State hoodie. Great game and a nice crowd (we won!), then afterward we went to Big Boss Brewery. They have their own line of craft beers brewed locally, and they’ve got a World War II aircraft theme going on. I can see why my friends like this place a lot.

One afternoon Mom got us all in our Indian attire for some portrait shots outside. My cousin Anup is getting married this fall, and it’s apparently never too early to start preparing the wardrobe! I think they turned out rather well.

On New Year’s Eve, the family went to Market, a new locavore restaurant near downtown Raleigh, and were joined by Greg, Kelly, Greg’s brother Mark who was in town visiting, and Ben. Jordan O’Mara joined too, and even a surprise guest — Peyton! I lived with Peyton my senior year of undergrad, and he visits the Bay Area at least once a year to go climbing in Yosemite.

These are the best parts for me coming back to NC. I’ve known these guys for 7+ years now. We headed back home and as midnight approached friends came over too. Naman, Pavak, Mike, Dale, Nader (who I hadn’t seen in a long long time). Megha came, a classmate from high school is in Chicago with Sapana now, and Naman rescued his friend Anubha from a dinner party. Anubha is from Chapel Hill but is in med school at Stanford now.

Couldn’t ask for more. Friends, family, and a new year starting. Let’s make 2011 a special one.

I discovered it was embarrassingly easy to make. As in, why haven’t I been doing this for years? A big part of the reason it was so simple was because of the handy food processor attachment to my immersion blender.

• drain/rinse 1 can of garbanzo beans and put into the food processor. add:
• juice of one lemon
• spices to taste: I used cumin, garlic powder (I was lazy, didn’t have minced garlic), paprika, salt and pepper.
• a couple of spoonfuls of water for smoothening the texture
• a glug of olive oil (you can just forgo this too for a healthier choice)
• optional: a few dashes of your favorite hot sauce (I used Cholula)

Blend, stir, blend until the consistency is to your liking. If it looks too dry, add another spoonful of water. Adjust spices as necessary.

Boom. This is enough hummus for two people, easily. I thought I’d compensate for no tahini sauce by adding some sesame seed oil, but it’s just too strong, don’t bother. Tastes great without it. What’s awesome is the flexibility. Throw in some olives. Red peppers. Jalapenos. Dollop in a few spoonfuls of plain yogurt instead of water for a lighter blend. Or go more authentic with more olive oil.

If you keep it simple and have an easy-to-use food processor, you could seriously make fresh, healthy hummus for two in like 2 minutes and ~$1.20 worth of stuff. Amazing.

Enter 2010. Looking back, 2010 was the year of settling into this current chapter of my life. Professionally, I finally experienced a full product development cycle, made trips to China (a first for me), shipped a product, and learned a tremendous amount. Personally, I greatly strengthened my relationships with my friends in the Bay Area, moved to San Francisco into a nice house which feels like home now, increased my understanding of the Bay Area and Northern California via trips, and as more pragmatic things got resolved I finally felt truly ready to adjust my personal priorities. Largely for my own sake of reflecting, here are some of the memorable moments from 2010, in rough chronological order:

- First Tahoe ski trip to Squaw Valley. Hadn’t skied in nearly five years, but enjoyed it. Later did another ski trip to Northstar and Heavenly (endured a eight hour trip with Stephanie and Dan to make it there). I feel good on blues and skiing become something I did because friends were doing it to something I actually enjoyed.
- My car getting totaled when an SUV driving recklessly ended up in my lane on the highway. Walked away without a scratch, lost a bit in the insurance back-and-forth, but ended up with a fun used car to drive.
- Relieving cabin fever with trips to Point Reyes with Troy and Karla, a first trip to Alcatraz Island with Nishu and her cousins, Armstrong Redwoods park with Nader, Meetup hike in Big Sur, a beach bonfire in Santa Cruz
- Finding a place in San Francisco between trips to China, moving in, having to furnish an empty house (it’s expensive!).
- Camping trip to Angels Camp with a big group of folks (where the phrase Murder Bear was coined), an impromptu trips to Castle Crags up north with Tim, John, and Dustin, and a serendipitous weekend trip to Yosemite with Dustin and Dave.
- Work getting insanely busy as the project entered extreme crunch mode. Felt really good though. Had a terrific time working with the shuffle team.
- Finally getting a digital SLR camera. Quality of photos ticks upward, and it gives me a fun new hobby to be creative with.
- Bay Area visits by Mike, Ben, Caitlin & Dale, Ian, the EEP group, Jordan Price and our trip to Napa
- Products getting shipped: the new iPod shuffle by Dan and I, Troy and Steve’s RunMonster app, Michael’s box.net iPad app, Troy’s book on iPhone/iPad programming, Flipboard’s epic launch.
- Stanford and NC State football games and tailgates
- Visiting Asheville for Melih and Micky’s beautiful wedding
- The wonderful Google Reader community, so many great articles and comments
- Cooking! The Sunday Night Dinner tradition, finally making my deconstructed s’mores which were received very well, and creating the Sunday Night Dinner tradition. Cooking is one of my favorite creative outlets.
- Concerts and music — listened to a lot of new music this year, with a big tip of my hat to friends like John, Joey, Joseph, and Jono (ok, that’s a surprising alliteration…) who introduced me to new bands all year. I had the good fortune of going to eight concerts this year
- Catching up with all my friends back home in NC, and meeting someone who I can’t wait to see more of next year.

Thanks everyone for a great 2010. You all make me feel like the luckiest person in the world. Happy New Year!

A great example is Undertow. I like it when the guitars kick in at the ~2:44 mark to kick the energy up.

Warpaint – Undertow

Another highlight is Bees, in which shades of paranoia creep in, evoking the mood of Frou Frou’s Psychobabble.

Warpaint – Bees

It looks they will be touring overseas for the first part of 2011, but keep and eye on this intriguing band.

On Friday, he and Ben went around Stanford and they hit up Ike’s Place for lunch (mmmm). Mary and Mathew hosted us for dinner at their house in Menlo Park. She made some potato gnocchi and these cheddar and cranberry biscuit things — delicious as usual — and some pannacotta for dessert. On Saturday Ben and Amit came up to the City and we did brunch at Savor, a great brunch spot in Noe Valley. The rain was spotty, but we geared up and headed north across Golden Gate through a wall of fog to Muir Woods. It was great to see the journey for the first time through Ben’s eyes — to see the rugged hills, Bay harbors, and dark green valleys once again.

We did a 4.5 mile hike around Muir Woods, making it to the top of the Panorama Highway. I had never done this in the rain, but the woods took on a different character — the light was diffuse, the woods quiet.

It only started raining hard on the way back, then more as we made our way back to the City — the Marin Headlands would have to wait for another visit. We swung by the Palace of Fine Arts, then snaked our way down to Hayes Valley, to the Blue Bottle Coffee kiosk. For a coffee lover like Ben, a cup of Joe of the famous Blue Bottle Coffee was a must. And huzzah, it was confirmed good! We made a pit stop at the Whole Foods to get some ginger thins and a house red, and back at the house we warmed up with some authentically served glögg (Ben is half-Swedish). Glögg, a spiced mulled wine drink, is a staple of winter in Scandinavia. Served warm with raisins and sliced almonds, it evokes a lot of memories of the winter I spent in Sweden back in 2005.

We relaxed for a few hours, talking and taking the Apple TV for a spin with its YouTube feature. We cracked open several bottles of local San Francisco and northern California brews, including a magnum of Anchor Steam’s Christmas ale ($14  at Whole Foods here compared to $88 at a bar in Raleigh!).

At around 11p, we headed out to the Mission to one of my favorite burrito joint, El Farolito. Burritos in the Mission is a must-have for any San Francisco visitor. Being stuffed from earlier in the day, Ben opted for two tacos (for comparison with Dos Taquitos, a Raleigh favorite), and Amit and I got burritos. Later, we headed further north in the Mission for drinks, running into a classmate of Amit in the process.

Amit and Ben hit up SF MOMA in the morning, and I met up with them after dropping Troy off at SFO. We headed up to Fisherman’s Wharf, where Ben saw the seals and picked up some of the sourdough bread that the City is known for at Boudin’s. We made our way along the water to Ghirardelli’s Square, where we had the requisite ice cream sundae at the chocolatier’s cafe, then did a wine tasting at a wine store next door (a real trip to Napa would have to wait ’till next time). With the sun waning, I took them west to Golden Gate Bridge, and this time we got out and walked a bit onto it. Along the City side of the base, dozens of surfers were bobbing in the water seeking waves to catch.

Sutro Heights on the Pacific Ocean was the last stop before heading back down south. Darkness was falling as we walked out on the beach to meet the ocean. I had come to the same spot to shoot some pictures over Thanksgiving, but this time the waves were high and crashing, frothy white at the tips. Back in Noe, we acquired some fine cheese and enjoyed it while folks from Dan’s failed ski trip arrived for Sunday Night Dinner — John, Murder Bear, Dev, Wendy. Ben, Amit, and I left though — we had reservations at Dosa, one of the best restaurants in San Francisco. This place is always backed, and the south Indian go-to dish takes front and center. My friend Eric joined us. The food was simply outstanding — I got the chole batura, which is chana masala served with a gigantic puri. I can’t wait to go back! Ben was done though afterward….so stuffed.

He and Amit spent Monday down in Palo Alto — SRI International, Coupe Cafe, Fraiche yogurt — but came back up for dinner. I made reservations at another San Francisco favorite — Burma Superstar in the Richmond. Every person I’ve met in the City has heard of it (2,461 reviews on Yelp!). We got the famous tea leaf salad and three dishes — all were terrific. I never had Burmese food until I came here some months back, but it’s cool how the cuisine has found an individual voice, combining threads from Bengali and Indian cuisines to the west with the more Asian styles to its east and north. Who knew? We hit up one of my favorite bookstores — Green Apple – before leaving (snagged two copies of Dune this time). Before arriving home I took Ben up to Twin Peaks to see the view at night, but rain cut short the visit. Later that night, we popped out to the street every half hour to see the winter solstice lunar eclipse.

And with that, Ben’s whirlwind of a first visit to San Francisco was over. We stuffed him silly with many of the famous spots locals love, but there is still so much more out there. I think he’ll be back to visit soon. :) Thanks for coming out here, Ben! It was a great to spend time with you again.

A few interesting things caught my eye too — ‘Silian Rail’ is the name of the font used on Bates’ business card in the movie American Psycho. The duo liked the way it sounded. Also, they are both from Durham, NC — right nearby my home in North Carolina! From an interview they did with Signal and Noise:

The Raleigh-Durham tri­an­gle area where the two grew up has obvi­ously shaped them musi­cally and per­son­ally. A lush and fer­tile wilder­ness, a sup­port­ive arts com­mu­nity and a lot of all-ages shows make a strong cock­tail of early musi­cal prowess and enthu­si­asm. Not sur­pris­ingly though, Kuhn has a more glow­ing opin­ion of North Carolina and his time there.

“The area I grew up in is incred­i­bly warm, lov­ing, diverse, strange and rich with his­tory,” he says. “And I’ll also say hush pup­pies, fire­flies, thun­der­storms and brick. I cer­tainly miss it all the time.”

Landy misses cer­tain things (“The crick­ets, the moun­tains, the south­ern accents, etc.”) but is glad she got out when she did. “For me, it became way too small and claus­tro­pho­bic of a place and I needed to leave. It’s one of those places that if you let your­self, you could stay there for­ever, even if you are totally bored and uninspired.”

“Hush puppies, fireflies, thunderstorms, and brick.” Ah, home.

Silian Rail – Death Should Know Better

Silian Rail – I Is Somebody Else

They are playing tonight at the Hemlock Tavern, and also at Bottom of the Hill on January 7th.

I love when two different things I like intersect. Especially when they aren’t that well known!

Some newcomers this time too — my colleague and friend Rishabh (he was the lead system integrator for this year’s iPod Nano!), and my friend Nishu. So get this: she actually helped babysit me back in Charlotte after I was born, as our families were friends. Flash forward twenty years, and she’s living a quarter mile away from me and working at Apple. Small world! My friend Rob also came by — he’s the roommate (and another Apple person) of a undergrad friend (Eric, now at Google) of my friend Lux from Stanford.

I had left a few dough balls for people to make the pies fresh, and Rishabh and I did so to start off the night. As a quorum formed though, each person got a par-baked crust and went to town. Everyone brought various ingredients and we mixed and matched. Sliced giant portabella, green peppers, onion, artichoke hearts, fresh spinach, basil, pine nuts, and walnuts.

Sara also came by towards the end of dinner, in time for Dan’s showing of the original Tron movie. We had to prep for the new movie coming out, after all. She brought cacao and peppermint schnapps…a holiday drink for sure. I broke out our shaker and prepared a white Russian too.

I made another ‘white pizza’ which was a big hit — a sauce made of olive oil, minced garlic, and herbs, topped with artichoke hearts, pine nuts, and some of all types of cheese (mozzarella, fontina, goat, parmesan, asiago). And following Paula Dean’s principle of “I’m your chef, not your doctor”, give it a zigzag drizzle of some nice olive oil before sliding it into the oven. :)

Dan used his kettle corn machine to make some fresh popcorn, and we watched the film. It is rather impressive to see the effects, particular for a movie so old. The funniest part of the night was when the main character’s computer password is shown to be “reindoor flotilla” and I said “wow, now that sounds like a band’s name. Rishabh, you need a name for your band? There it is.” I pulled out the iPhone, and sure enough, Reindeer Flotilla IS a band’s name. Haha.

One of the bands new to me was the curiously named Buke and Gass — which describes the two instruments this Brooklyn-duo plays. The lead vocalist, Arone Dyer, plays a modified baritone ukelele (a ‘buke’) and Aron Sanchez plays a handmade guitar/bass hybrid (a ‘gass’). They feed both through custom homemade amps, and Arone works a tamborine attached to her shoe via a bicycle toe clip mount while Aron handles a kick drum. A really intriguing setup, but one that makes you do a double take when you hear the sound they generate.  They released an LP this year called Riposte. Here’s a wonderful Tiny Desk concert they did at the NPR Music offices.

I love the way Arone interacts with the audience and her easy laugh. Really cute. They are extremely proficient musicians, and their songs have a kind of improvisational air to them — full of clamoring energy, time signature shifts, little one-off twirls and riffs,  striving beats and melodic phrases. Dyer’s voice is acrobatic, rapidly jumping octaves, switching between a staccato stanza (with unconventional lyrics, at that) to sustained notes. I’ve been on a pretty serious Röyksopp lately, so this is such a wonderful contrast to that sound.

They also sound great live. This is the album version of the leadoff song from the NPR video above.

Buke and Gass – Your Face Left Before You

Just look at how this next song takes so many turns and directions. It’s cool to see a band exploring atypical song structures.

Buke and Gass – Medicina

I freestyled some enchiladas and Spanish rice (severely underestimated the enchilada size and ended up using four pans) and was about to start the guacamole (of course) when John arrived. Karthik was next, and I gave them the tour of the house. Pretty soon it was a full house! One fun part was that it was the first in-person meeting between Melih, Mary, and John — even though they’ve been conversing in our Google Reader community for the past several months (the thought on everyone’s minds: where is Brock Winstead?!). Melih finished off prepping the guacamole (it was delicious) and we sat to eat.

There was a good mix of experience around the table. Melih and John both shot for campus newspapers, and Gregg helped shoot weddings and had access to the impressive photo gear cage at RIT. I knew Karthik had been shooting for a while too for pleasure (doing wonders with the iPhone camera at that), and Mary even has a LensBaby! Sarah nearly stole the show with a retro Canon film camera SLR body from decades ago. Very cool.

After dinner, we gathered in the living room and took turns showing off a small portfolio of our photos on the TV. We talked about the background of the shot and why we liked it. Everyone was great about giving feedback, and it was terrific to see all the photos that were taken. It was really interesting to see the natural instincts and style of each person become evident — John has an amazing eye for color and patterns, Gregg can find the ‘shot’ even in the most typical of settings (and a penchant for grimy gears and old VW Bugs), and Karthik is really strong at capturing lighting and mood in his photos.

Mary brought this delicious chocolate cake with hazelnut ganache (if I remember correctly…) that met if not surpassed all the hype I was creating about Mary’s culinary mastery. Like there was any question. :) Oh yeah, and you know the tunnel view photo of Yosemite Valley that Mary took? I got it printed and framed with a custom matte, and I had Mary sign it! It now looks complete up on my wall.

Anyway, it was a super fun night, and it’s always such a pleasure to see so many new people meet for first time and yet get along really well. Minds were definitely inspired!

Here was my lineup:

From left to right: 24-105mm f/4L IS (MSRP: $1,250), 24-70mm f/2.8L (MSRP: $1,500), and 10-22mm f/3.5-5.6 USM (MSRP: $850). I’m contemplating buying one of the two L-lenses, so this would be a good trial period for them. On the day I picked them up, I was already near Palo Alto so I grabbed lunch with Troy (where he snapped a few shots with the 28-70mm f/2.8L) and visited the Flipboard offices. They have a nice airy space a few blocks off University Avenue, plus a whole wall adorned with tweets about the app. Pretty neat. Next stop was the Apple gym in Cupertino, then popped over to Google HQ for a snack and to say hi to Wendy. It was a slow day, so she left soon after and we headed back north to the City.

On Wednesday I had plans of going to Mt. Diablo, but that was thwarted by some car trouble. Instead, I headed to Chrissy Field to see the Golden Gate Bridge at the ‘golden hour’ and the Pacific Ocean at sunset.

Later that night, Gregg came over with two tripods in hand and we drove up to the top of Twin Peaks, the highest hills in the City. With our tripods setup and hands turning to white from the cold, we worked on capturing long-exposure night shots of the City. It was a beautiful clear night, made lighter with a bright moon hanging low in the sky. The road on the way down makes a hairpin turn, so we timed our shots to capture the car headlight streaks of light.

As we were leaving, we even setup our cameras on the crest of that turn looking back up the mountain. I can’t imagine what people thought as they drove out — two guys wearing dark clothes, crouching in the bushes outside the railing next to dark tripod-mounted pointed objects. But here’s what we got:

Seeking the exact opposite in terms of night scenery, we headed over to Union Square. I tried shooting with the wide angle lens here, but it’s a tough lens to use. Gregg was sporting a 24mm f/1.4L beauty which was smooth as butter.

Thanksgiving day feast preparation consumed much of Thursday. Dan’s family — Jack, Lois, and younger brother Jonathan (Jono) were in town. Here is American Gothic, Warren-family style:

Later that night, I went to see Micky, Melih, and Matt for a 2nd dinner (for the record, Micky makes putting together delectable and balanced servings of food look effortless) and Scrabble.

On Friday, rather than shopping, I met up with Melih and Matt to see the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit at SFMOMA. It served as great inspiration for our photowalk, as he is considered one of the fathers of photojournalism. Hat tip to Melih for spotting this relevant exhibit! Gregg joined us after lunch, and we walked to the Ferry Building, then back towards the hub of stores on Powell and Market, before Gregg and I headed up to Chinatown and Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. We covered a lot of ground that day!

Dinner that night was some Thanksgiving day leftovers, followed by Bananagrams with the Warren family (guest starring Wendy and myself), and later that night I went down to 24th St. to put the 24-105mm f/4L through it’s low light paces. One of the big differences between that lens and the 24-70mm f/2.8L is that its widest aperture is half of the 24-70mm’s widest aperture, which has big consequences in achieving blur free low-light photos. Sure, the 24-105mm has image stabilization, but that only helps with subjects that are standing still.

All good things eventually come to an end, and these lenses need to be returned Monday morning. I’ll be sad to see them go. :/

After brunch we headed down to the Nut House to watch the Big Game — Stanford vs Cal. We were seeking revenge this year, after Berkeley stole the game from us last year. We got a big table, pitchers, and of course the peanuts. This year, it was no contest. This Stanford squad is just too good, and it was fun to see them romp against Cal at Cal, bringing home the Axe.

We went our separate ways after the game. It was threatening to storm all day, and the rain bands were dumping rain in San Francisco. One of our windows (over the sink) started to leak bad (it doesn’t have a rain gutter), so I decided to swing by Home Depot for some weatherstripping. It was raining hard by the time I got there, and as I insert my key in the ignition upon leaving, the orange Home Depot signs blinks off. I look around — the entire shopping center had lost power. Rain is really coming down now, and trees are losing leaves in the wind. I have bad memories of driving in weather like this, so I camped out in the parking lot, waiting for the worst to pass.

But you know, it worked out — the timing was perfect for me to drop by the Intramuros to see my colleagues Orville and Rishabh play a short gig at the Intramuros, a cool Filipino restaurant and lounge. Orville plays the drums and was part of a popular Filipino band (they even got a music video on MTV Asia!), and Rishabh plays the electric guitar. They got a small group to jam together, and their friends at Cloud 9 — a local Filipino house band — let them play a few songs before their gig.

Not too bad actually! They only practiced for 3 hours before this gig, so they can only improve from here. We got a table and stayed for Cloud 9, and I’m glad I did. They were great. Their repertoire was easy listening, 90′s alt rock, and Filipino crowd favorites. The two lead male vocalists did a great job with the covers, and a real gem was the female vocalist – A.C., who I later learned was the wife of the guitarist/vocalist. She came up for a few songs, but wow could she sing. Here is the band covering Ironic by Alanis Morissette:

Another fascinating thing to see that night was Orville. Keep in mind apart from Rishabh, me, and a few of Rishabh’s Indian friends, everyone else was Filipino. Orville was completely in his element, and it seemed like he knew everyone. Such an interesting contrast to the Orville I know at work. I’m looking forward to their next gig and heck, even to see Cloud 9 play again.