Wed, September 22nd – Local Natives @ the Fillmore

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

Tue, October 19th – Jónsi @ the Fox Theater

Tue, October 26th – Sufjan Stevens @ the Paramount

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

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

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

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

Animal Collective – Summertime Clothes

Injecting chocolate into the marshmallow

Applying the graham cracker crust

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

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

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

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

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

Gloria looks after some sweet potato fries

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

Gloria and Dustin

Pot o’ roasted corn

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

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

Dustin did a quite a nice job with the presentation!

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

Here are two songs for you to check out:

Delorean – Real Love

Delorean – Infinite Desert

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

Stars – Dead Hearts

Stars – Fixed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prepping the dessert

Delicious.

Vanessa and Andrea

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

Click here to watch in HD.

Well then.

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

Haha, nice one Matt.

^ Mary took this one!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julio

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

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

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

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

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

Terraced stair areas where people can hang out during lunch.

Feng and Doug

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

(click here to watch in HD!)

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

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

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

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

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

Sleigh Bells – Kids

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

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

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

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

photo by John Shen

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

photo by Wendy

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

Lost in the Trees brings the full arrangement to the stage, with violins, cellos, piano, horns, surging guitars and plucked banjos. There is baroque classical inspiration here (two of the tracks are sweeping classical arrangements that would fit right in with a Bach compilation) intersecting with folk. There is a dark and brooding manner about many of the songs, but the whole production is so aurally intriguing that I can’t help but be drawn in.

Note to my friends back home — Lost in the Trees will be playing at the Arts Center in Carrboro on Thursday, June 3rd it’s apparently a Planned Parenthood benefit, but if that’s weird for you then they will be at TRKfest in Pittsboro on June 26th).

Here’s the title track of their new album, All Alone in an Empty House:

Lost In The Trees – All Alone in an Empty House by antirecords

And here’s another, called Walk Around the Lake:

I wonder if they could open for the Decemberists on their next tour — would be rather fitting, right?

A few minutes out of town and we’re in a deep redwood forest, and did a short hike around the park.

Note you can see Nader, for size reference.

After the park, we headed west to Highway 1, planning on heading back down through Bodega Bay before angling back towards 101 through Petaluma. With the sun beginning to set, it will quite pretty out there by Russian River.

And who wouldn’t mind seeing the beautiful California coast again?

Two Door Cinema Club – What You Know

For now though, check out these two walk-through videos. It’ll give you a taste of the new place.

More to come later…

We had a big group. Most of them left Friday afternoon, but I went up through Palo Alto to have dinner with my cousin Shweta. Rong and I headed out early Saturday morning and ended up arriving at the campsite just in time for breakfast. Erturk had come out with them last night, but headed back after breakfast. We did a leisurely 8 mile stroll around the park. There was a lake with some boating and fishing opportunities too.

After the hike we lounged around, drinking some cold brews and basically waiting for dinner time.

I made this remark to Wendy during the camp trip, but it seems that the correlation of people I’m friends with and caring about good food is quite high. And this trip was no exception. Homemade hamburger patties, fire roasted (literally) corn, tofukey sausages, sliced avocado, even some camping-style pasta that Dustin brought. Plenty of Blue Moon (with orange slices, of course) and Budweiser to around, a bottle of cab, and followed up by classic S’mores for dessert. Sitting by the searing warmth of the fire, belly full, I felt so content.

Dustin brought Kona, his German Shepherd puppy. Gorgeous dog! Had a lot of fun being around him.

After missing it two straight years while at Stanford, I finally made it out to see the spectacle. I went with Dan and Wendy to the house of one of Wendy’s former roommates, who lives right along the race route near the halfway point. There was a brunch with plenty of food and drink. We watched the crowds roll through (even spotting Troy and Steve, plus some other friends in the crowd) and then later went down to the street ourselves. Here’s what the race looked like from that point at around 9am (about an hour after the race officially began):

As the more serious runners waned, the wackier the costumes got. Here was a group going as synchronized swimmers:

Tetris blocks:

This is the scene three hours after the race started:

Big floats being pushed along, many with DJs blasting tunes causing a huge moving dance party.

Some Tea Party mockers. “God Hates Fog”, hah.

A game of curling, why not?

And bringing up the rear was a line of street sweepers and power washers that did an amazing job at cleaning up after everyone. It was the cleanest anyone had ever seen Fell St.

Having seen glimpses of the Krispy Kreme Challenge and then the zany Stanford Marching Band for the past two years, I wasn’t that taken aback by crazy costumes. What was incredible was the sheer scale of the event — it went on for 5 hours straight with the roads just packed with people. Next year I’m gonna join in! Need to think of a cool theme though.

Living in the City and having a bus I need to catch is helping keep it more sane than similar stretches months ago. I’m focused on the whole bus ride to and from work. The China trip rattled my internal clock, so I’m waking up now at 6am and feeling sleepy at midnight.

But overall it’s not an unwanted feeling. Not at all. It evokes purposefulness. It reminds me that engineering is truly about solving problems in real world settings — what we do is not always the most elegant, or the most complete, but it keeps things moving on schedule. And it feels really good to be part of that. 

The Jin Mao tower and TV tower during the day (video from this view)

The Jin Mao tower and TV tower during night (video from this view):

The Shanghai Financial World tower is one really really tall building. It’s 2 blocks from the Jin Mao tower (more video from this view)

The TV tower is one of the most iconic buildings in Shanghai, for obvious reasons.

A traffic quirk (to US eyes, there are a lot of them). Notice how the outer lanes have green lights, but the middle lane has a red light. No idea why.

This is Hi Bao, the mascot for the World Expo. His name translates into ‘baby of the sea’. This guy is everywhere around Shanghai.

The Bund area is finally renovated and it looks great. Hopefully we’ll visit that more next trip and walk along the new river-side promenade.

Thanks for your patience!

And it’s practically the only thing I’ve listened to since then. It’s an incredible debut album — one in which all the songs are good. Other reviewers have name dropped these names, but it’s fair — the vocal harmonies are reminiscent of the Fleet Foxes, and the instrumentation reminds me a bit of the Arcade Fire or Grizzly Bear. And unlike some of the other artists I’ve highlighted here, these guys know how to rock — just listen to the end of Sun Hands or Shape Shifter.

I’ll spare you from having me list out all the tracks I like from this album (the first six tracks are strong, plus there is a cover of the Talking Heads’ Warning Sign), and instead highlight one in particular – Who Knows, Who Cares. There are some songs that I immediately connect with on a deeper level; songs that are so compelling to me for reasons I can’t always explain. 41 by Dave Matthews Band, There There by Radiohead, The Predatory Wasps of the Palisades by Sufjan Stevens, Sæglópur by Sigur Ros, The Trapeze Swinger by Iron & Wine, All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem, all come to mind. I have a feeling that Who Knows, Who Cares will join that list. Maybe it has to do with the feeling of when I first listened to it — cruising down 280-South with the sunroof open, the California sun streaming in, the green hills surrounding me. By the time the song entered its final moments, I could not help but join in at the top of my lungs.

Local Natives – Who Knows, Who Cares

With this album, summer has arrived.

(Hey NC friends — Local Natives is playing on May 4th at the Local 506 in Chapel Hill. Please check them out!

Last night Luke and Dora hosted an ‘Iron Chef’ style dinner party — they announced a special ingredient at the beginning of the week and all the attendees make a dish featuring the ingredient. I discovered that they are experimenting more with flavors rather than typical ingredients, and this week’s theme was sesame. Other dinners they have done pomegranate (a great success), lime, and a few others. I didn’t know what to cook, but I ran into Wendy’s roommate Noelle at work (they dropped Dan off on their way to Santa Cruz for a half-marathon race) who recalled a black sesame tofu recipe in this month’s Women’s Health.  Perfect! I’ve never cooked with black seasame before. I seared the tofu with the sesame seeds, then sauteed asparagus, shredded carrots, asian eggplant, and red bellpepper. The sauce was made from the juice of a fresh squeezed orange and some soy sauce (couldn’t find miso).  I haven’t seen Luke and his (now) fiance Dora for ages, which is embarrassing because I live so close to him now. Simon and Jess were there, as well as Amy and Patrick, two of Luke and Dora’s friends. Amy is a first year law student at Stanford, she met Patrick at Arizona while both were doing an MFA program. Really cool people! Great senses of humor, very bright, and fun. Great conversations over great food — one of those where you seamlessly transition from laughing at a YouTube video of two angry camels in a car to discussing the fundamental underpinnings of modern absurdist humor. After leaving Stanford, I find that I’m craving that kind of mental dynamic range.

The following day featured rain, rain, wind gusts up to 20mph, and rain. For lunch I tried a potato leek soup recipe that my friend Forrest made last weekend. I haven’t cooked with leeks before, but this recipe made for a nice hearty meal. Felt great to actually cook again, for real!

I think the Iron Chef idea is a cool idea for dinner parties. I’m looking forward to hosting a night in the new house!

Noe Valley has a leisurely feel, with 24th St. being a great avenue of restaurants, cafes, stores, and bars. I also happen to already know several people in the neighborhood, so it’ll feel more like a real community — something that was missing after moving off-campus in the suburbia that is Menlo Park. There is an Apple shuttle stop a couple blocks away, and because Noe Valley is in the south part of the City, the commute to my building at work is ~50 minutes. Noe Valley is also one of the sunnier neighborhoods in San Francisco, because the Twin Peaks shields it from much of the wind and fog that rolls in from the Pacific Ocean.

The place we’re renting is actually a full home (really well maintained by its owners), with a backyard and small deck. It has a nice kitchen with a six-burner range and Sub-Zero fridge, which Dan and I are excited about because we both enjoy cooking. A bonus feature is a partially finished attic space too. Can you spot another cool feature of the house from the picture above? It has solar panels! There’s a web interface too apparently, so it’ll be cool to see how effective it really is, not mention it will help mitigate some (if not all) of the electricity bill. The only downside is that there is no dedicated parking, but fortunately street parking in this part of town is pretty easy.

We’re scheduled to move in near the end of April, and I’ll sure to post some more pictures once we’re settled in. I’m looking forward to all of you coming to visit!

The view from outside the house towards the Bay.

I usually give the students a tour of Stanford (they stay at the nearby Stanford Terrace Inn), and this year I was able to join them for a couple of Apple-related events and dinner at the Dutch Goose, where Amit and I learned the story of Danger first hand from its co-founder, also an NC State alum.

The group this year was terrific — passionate and motivated, and more diverse — more and more majors and expertises are being represented in the program. I really enjoyed talking with them and hope to see more of them out here soon!

Side note: I re-read what I wrote during the 2007 trip, and it’s pretty amusing: I not only called Joseph ‘Joe’, but I also misspelled his last name. To be fair, I didn’t know it until later. :)

We did the usual Craigslist browsing and headed on a Saturday morning with a slew of places to check out. Wendy came and joined us — she was moving to a place at 24th & Castro but was nice to keep us company as we started our search. Karla also came along, as did my buddy Mike who was in town for the Game Developers Conference that upcoming week. He was a great sport to come along looking at houses with us. My search box was largely confined to a neighborhood called Noe Valley, located south of Market St. near the middle of the peninsula. It’s demographic ages older (its nickname is often ‘Stroller Valley’), but it has an easy-going feel to it; has a lot of great restaurants and cafes; I have friends nearby; and (this is important): there is an Apple shuttle stop about 5 min away. I wouldn’t consider moving to the City if I was faced with doing the 60 minute commute every day.

We saw several apartments, but on opposite sides of the spectrums. Some places were super nice, but expensive (exceeding $1700/person/mo), and others were on the lower end (less than $1300/person/mo) but weren’t at the quality level we were looking for. It did give us an idea of what was available.

We meandered over to 24th St at lunchtime or savory crepes at Savor. It was a stunningly beautiful day, though likely brought more into relief after the spate of clouds and rain we’d been seeing recently.

After finishing our list of houses, Karla and Michael split off to meet up with some people, while Wendy, Troy, Mike and I headed up to Nob Hill to meet up with Wendy’s roommate for drinks. We went to this tapas/wine bar on Polk St. Later that evening, my friend Simon (Stanford roommate and hacker extraordinaire) and his fiance Jess met up with us. I hadn’t seem Simon and Jess in ages, and it was wonderful to catch up with them. We headed over to a Thai restaurant for a late dinner, and was amused by the masses of people in snuggies doing a bar crawl. You’re guaranteed to see something weird everytime you visit San Francisco.

The next weekend, we lined up some more places to see. Mike and I were accompanied again by Wendy, but this time Dan came along too. This time we looked at places more in the middle of our range. For lunch we walked to the Castro and met up with Chrissy for sandwiches at Ike’s Place, one of the coolest places I’ve been to in San Francisco. It has an awesome menu, great sense of humor and identity, and the food was delicious. Again, the day was simply gorgeous, and I just felt like sitting there in the sun. Later we went over to Wendy’s apartment to hang out for a bit, and took a lazy afternoon stroll through Golden Gate Park before heading back home.

Update: Oh yeah! I forgot that en route to Wendy’s house, we swung by the Sutro and took in the amazing views of the whole City from there.

Freelance Whales – Generator ^ First Floor

We get up early just to start cranking the generator
Our limbs have been asleep we need to get the blood back in them
We’re finding every day several ways that we could be friends

We keep on churning and the lights inside the house turn on
And in our native language we are chanting ancient songs
And when we quiet down the house chants on without us

“Hannah” is bubbling with energy, and “Starring”, and “Location” are also nice.

The xx – Intro

Another tracks to check out are Islands, Crystalised, and Heart Skipped a Beat.

Bonus track for Greg – gotta give credit to Troy for finding this. here’s a sweet remix of DMX and the XX. I never thought I’d read those two artists in the same sentence! Caution: NSFW.

We later hit the first chain control and the highway parking lot around it. When there is snow on the ground, the California transportation department requires that you put chains on your car for better traction. They inspect cars through a waystation, and you have to pull over to the side of the road to install your chains. But if you’ve got a car like Stephanie’s, you breeze right through it. The maddeningly part was that we ended up stuck for over an hour (maybe moving 1/4 mile) and there was no snow on the ground. It was just wet. Only at the second chain control did we actually hit any snow.

The result of all this was that despite leaving at 7pm from Cupertino, we finally pulled into the cabin at 4am. No joke. The three of us took a shot of whiskey in triumph of having made it finally (nightcap also), then went to get a few hours of sleep before heading to the mountain.

The street outside our cabin, a common view in Tahoe

The group (numbering nine people) didn’t end up at the Northstar ski resort until almost 11:30pm, so we were just going to do a halfday. Dan, Mike, Stephanie and the others were going snowboarding and had their gear, so Wendy and I went and rented skis. By noon thirty, we had taken the gondola up to base camp and were finally on the mountain. I did a green run two times to get my ’snow legs’ back, and then met up with the group at the lodge for lunch. Anthony, a friend and colleague of ours from Apple in Product Design, came up from Heavenly with a few friends to snowboard with us.

Anthony, Jason, and Stephanie

I was the beginner in the group so spent most of the day by myself, improving my skiing. After lunch, I did only blue (intermediate) runs. I was digging Northstar — the jump between easy and medium wasn’t as severe as I felt it was at Squaw Valley. I was feeling really great on the last few runs, even though at the top of the mountain the fog was starting to set in. I finished with a 20-30 minute run from the top of the mountain to the lodge at the base. We were all feeling pretty good about the day.

End of a good day at Northstar

We hit up a Safeway en route to our cabin back home, where the outdoor hot tub was fired up and a batch of “summer beer” was prepared by Stephanie, Mike was busy making dinner with homemade pasta sauce, but the rest of us enjoyed the hot tub for a while.  The summer beer was a hit (despite drinking it with snow all around us) and it was easy to see why: three cans really cheap (too cheap?) beer, 12 oz frozen limeade concentrate, then 12 oz of vodka. You really end up tasting the sweet limeade.

Sam, another friend and colleague from work, has a cabin nearby and joined us for dinner. He has a season pass to Alpine, another ski resort in North Lake Tahoe. He had a good day on the slopes too, and he told us about the ‘full contact skiing’ mode he and his longtime ski buddy goes into when they deem a run is too easy for them. One time Sam almost derailed him into a tree!

The cabin’s main room

The next day we returned Anthony’s good deed and headed down to Heavenly to ski a half day there. I woke up at 7am, and laid in bed for a while until I had no more interesting things to read on my NYTimes iPhone app. I got down to the kitchen at 8am and started some coffee. Mike and his girlfriend Carrie later came down and started cooking up a storm — French toast, bacon, sausage, eggs, you name it. We ended up eating a big breakfast so we wouldn’t have to interrupt our time skiing.

Acorn, a friend of Mike’s who also came up this weekend, joined me, Dan, Wendy, and Stephanie to Heavenly. His van came in so handy in the trip, and it was apparently only one of eleven stick shift Toyota vans to make it to the US that mid-90s model year. Stephanie had a season pass here (came up like ten times last season) and had us avoid the crowds on the California side by going to the Stagecoach lodge on the Nevada side (the Heavenly ski resort straddles the CA/NV border). Wendy and I rented skis again and joined the rest of the group up the ski lift. We had to take two separate ones to make it ‘base camp’, where we met up with Anthony.

Wendy and Dan on the ski lift at Heavenly

He, Steph, and Acorn pointed their snowboards in the direction of Mott Canyon — a double black diamond section of the mountain while I eagerly tackled the wide selection of blue runs throughout the mountain. It was a good progression for me — the runs at Heavenly we not as well groomed as they were at Northstar, so frequently I’d run into moguls which were a bit difficult to get through. But there are just so many blue runs and I felt myself improve learning to go down them. A month ago, I’d look down a really steep hill and mentally lock up — now I just take a breath and head down it. I ran into Dan and Wendy but then lost them unexpectedly a few runs later.

On the lift at Heavenly

Heavenly is known for it’s views. On the Nevada side, you see the stark contrast between the white slopes beneath your feet and the desert of the valley below. On the California side (saving that for another trip), you see an gorgeous view of Lake Tahoe. I took the shot below on my last run of the day, from near the top of the mountain.

It was another great day on the slopes. Despite being sunny, the snow didn’t get slushy at all. By 5pm we were all off the mountain, and headed over to Anthony’s hotel room in South Lake Tahoe to shower and freshen up for the ride back. The last Olympic event was on — the 50km cross country race — so we watched that. For the drive home, I hopped in Anthony and his friend’s Jason’s truck while Stephanie took Dan and Wendy. Jammed to an eclectic mix of late 90s pop and mid-decade hip-hop. Our caravan stopped for dinner at a sweet burrito place near UC-Davis (outside Sacromento), not far where Anthony and Jason lived while at UC-Davis for grad school. From there, it was another straight shot to the Mariani parking lot, then finally home.

Would love to go back to Tahoe, but it might have to wait till next season….

photo by John Shen

It was great to see Fanfarlo live — especially to see how much (or how little) of the instrumentation you hear on the tracks translate to the live performance. The songs have a lot of great rhythm to them. The band played briskly through their set, pulling in a few songs from older EPs. They came back for a quick encore, which ended in a rousing edition of Fire Escape. We milled around after the show, taking in the music hall. It’s neat with these small bands — the bandmembers just came out after the show into the audience area and mingled with people.

The journey home took a few turns. I accidentally ended up on the Bay Bridge after dropping John’s friend off, and ended up doubling back via Treasure Island. We actually stopped and took in a great nighttime view of the San Francisco skyline, glowing in the darkness.

This was the first concert I had been to in a long time, and hopefully just the beginning of a good year of events.

Anyway, on to the wheels. It’s a 2006 Jetta GLI with Autobahn package (whatever that means) with 48,600 miles on it. Same engine as the Audi A4 (2.0L turbo), sunroof, etc. Certified pre-owned, with two year warranty. I’m having them install an iPod integration kit too.

One justification is that if I had bought a cheap car now, I would have probably upgraded in a few years. This is a car that I’d gladly drive until the engine creaks to a halt. Or maybe I’m just being self-indulgent and embarking on the destructive path of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. After all, now four of the five members of Joseph’s team drive Jetta. Either way, it’s done.

Now — who wants a drive?

This music makes me happy.

Go sing too loud
Make your voice break – Sing it out
Go scream do shout
Make an earthquake…

You wish fire would die and turn colder
You wish your love could see you grow older
We should always know that we can do anything

Go drum do go out
Make your hands ache – Play it out
Go march through crowds
Make your day break…

You wish silence released noise in tremors
You wish I know it surrender to summer
We should always know that we can do everything

Go do you´ll know how to
Just let yourself fall into landslide

Go do you´ll know how to
Just let yourself give into low tide

Go do!

Tie strings to clouds
Make your own lake – Let it flow
Throw seeds to sprout
Make your own break – Let them grow

Let them grow (Endless summers)
Let them grow (Endless summers)

(Go do endless summers)

You will survive we´ll never stop wonders
You and sunrise will never fall under

You will survive we´ll never stop wonders
You and sunrise will never fall under
We should always know that we can do anything

Go do!

What I love about this song is how the horn section surfaces towards the end — though it’s at first unexpected, it fits perfectly and really elevates the song.

In a recent interview with Matt Berninger, the lead singer for The National, he talks about how dramatically songs can change for good and bad in the mastering process, and says:

But the other side of the coin is the song “Fake Empire”. It wasn’t ’til the very end of the process that we added the whole fanfare, the horns at the end, which turned a sleepy little simple song into something more exciting. That whole moment at the end of “Fake Empire” makes that song in many ways. It’s an average song without that. We’re right in the place where those kinds of things happen.

Kinda neat to read that, because that’s just what I felt about it too.

With our honed just-in-time logistical skills, Nishu and I picked them up and made it just as the ferry was about to set off. It was a warm day out on the water with the sun shining. I didn’t realize that Alcatraz has became a national park, or much about it’s history after prison operations ended. In the 1960s a group of Native Americans occupied Alcatraz claiming it to be old Indian land, and stayed out there for some time.

We had a quick bite to eat in the dock area then started heading up hill towards the prison yard. The whole island is smaller than what the movies make it seem to be. There are some support buildings scattered around, more often in pieces than not. But still, the views around the Bay were just stunning. What a stark contrast it must have been to be imprisoned on this island with so much vibrant life all around you.

There was a whole audio tour about the history of the prison and famous escape attempts, but we wanted to get outside. There is also a lot of natural life on the island — it’s a Bay rookery for water fowl, and flowers too.

And with that, it was back on the ferry towards the pier.

We got back to the somewhat shady parking lot we snagged near the pier, and I got them over Van Ness where they picked up a rental car. It was Super Bowl time! I realized I was near Nob Hill, where my friend Nevin has an apartment and gave him a ring. I even found a parking spot less than a block away. The party was in full swing 20 minutes before kickoff, and even Chrissy and Dave were there. Nevin and his roommates were terrific hosts with great food throughout the evening.

It was a fun game to watch, even though I was rooting for the Colts. Personally felt the commercials were a total bust this year. But the atmosphere was great and a lot of new people and faces to meet. Not a bad way to spend Superbowl Sunday.

Here’s a track called Love Me Girl.

Other standouts for me include I Remember, Rome (for a funky swing feel), and Madder Red.

I don’t really remember what we talked about on the drive up, but it was nice.

For lunch we sat outside in the patio area of a cafe, enjoying the warm sunlight and treating ourselves to some local brews.

Of course, as many of my friends know one can never really truly get away from one’s research, leading to amusing moments like this:

But this is why I love my friends. :)  We enjoyed an impeccably fresh butternut squash ginger soup, followed by pizzas with just-picked mushrooms in a real wood fired oven (like the one Mary’s family has!). The menu even called out the exact kind of flour they were using.

After our immensely enjoyable lunch, we headed towards the seashore. The creeping of gray clouds did not deter us from taking a hike to the beach.

The fog drifting in softened the horizon and the corners of the cliff faces, giving my photos the feel of landscape art. At least to me, anyway.

A nice day all in all. Looking forward to going back later in the spring. There is just so much the Bay Area has to offer like this…must stay vigilant to enjoy it all!

]]> http://www.saketvora.com/2010/02/08/point-reyes-national-seashore/feed/ 1 http://www.saketvora.com/2010/02/07/blogroll-addition-backspace-prologue/ http://www.saketvora.com/2010/02/07/blogroll-addition-backspace-prologue/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:20:26 +0000 Saket http://www.saketvora.com/?p=1343 I’d like to announce a new addition to the blogroll today — Backspace Prologue by my friend, roommate, and “professional coffee shop hopper” Troy Brant. He will use Backspace Prologue to share his experiences in developing and writing iPhone and iPad apps, but also about general issues and key trends in programming in this new paradigm as well. As some of you might know, Troy will be having a book released later this year and an extremely polished and functional iPhone app in the days (weeks? months? nudge nudge)  to come. Check out Backspace Prologue — I’ve already warned Troy that you can’t start off a blog with such epic posts, because people will just keep expecting even more from you. Present company excluded, of course. :)

Bonus fun fact — one of the most visited parts of Troy’s website is http://troybrant.net/reg/, a student course scheduler and planner that Troy wrote for a Georgia Tech class project while a student there. Thousands of Tech students go there every year to help them plan their semesters. I wish someone had done this for our school!

The bar at the top floor was pretty swank, with an outdoor hot tub. Was a little too cold outside though.

There was a lot of construction in preparation for the World Expo. All the sidewalks were being torn up.

Not much to show this trip. More later though, for sure.

Early Monday Morning, Saket packed up the aforementioned ESFoC and began his arduous commute from Menlo Park to Cupertino, by way of Interstate 280.  What he did not expect was that danger lurked behind every Jersey Barrier – and that fate had it out for him that day.

At approximatley 0800 (I think – I’m actually just making this time up completely), a dark and sinister SUV began to skulk northbound on I-280, seeking unsuspecting victims.  Little did Saket know… that HE would be that victim.

At approximately 0830, the dark SUV leapt over a Jersey Barrier, defying the laws of gravity and common sense, and began a furious nose-dive toward Saket’s vehicle.  This is specifically counter to the purported design objective of the Jersey Barrier – which should deflect such SUVs back into their own lanes.  But these barriers were never designed to stop *predators*.

Over the concrete, with total disregard for human life and $125, the SUV spun out and landed on Saket’s hood, wrenching solid steel and bending aluminum and fibreglass sheeting (it’s a Mazda).  The SUV’s massive jaws tore into the soft, supple underbelly of Saket’s front passenger differential couple, mangled the engine block, and snapped his axle in half.  Saket’s Mazda responded with the fury of a dying animal, forcefully chomping back at the SUV, and staggering forward in its death throes, lunged for the heart.  The Mazda scoured the underside of the assailant. The rain poured down torrentially.

Amazingly, the passenger compartment of the Mazda did not flinch.  Through the windshield, Saket’s coldforged eyes pierced the very soul of his attacker.

The SUV had expected an easy feast, not a fierce battle against a determined opponent.  Rebuffed, it staggered off to the right shoulder of the northbound interstate to graze in the grass.  It would taste no more steel that day.

Sirens blared.  The rain continued to fall.  (I assume.  I wasn’t there. But this makes it sound better).

The firetrucks arrived and shut down the interstate, delaying and infuriating thousands of southbound commuters.  And the emergency crews approached the tattered remains of Saket’s Mazda.  They prepared for the worst -

- but lo, Saket stepped out in to the roadway, unscathed, and clutching the Envelope Stuffed Full of Cash.  He had been saved.  By Japanese automotive engineering.

“Damn you, destiny!”  he bellowed into the mists.  ”This money must get to Chrissy!”  Destiny would hear none of it.  Saket shook the ESFoC toward the sky in futile rage.  But Destiny was dead-set on preventing the ESFoC from reaching her.  And so, the Firemen and the Ambulances arrived, and the Trucks removed the carcass of the Mazda from Interstate 280, and interned it in a Camp for Broken Automobiles, saying that it was a Danger to Itself and Society and could not be allowed back on the public roadways…

And to preclude any chance that the money would make it to its rightful recipient, Apple corporation decided to send Saket overseas. But before he was shipped out, Saket managed to make one critical telephone call.  To me.  ”The money…” he gasped.  ”It … must… be… delivered…”

And so, I trekked to Menlo Park, in the cold and the wet and the rain, and I found Saket doubled over at the foot of his bed.  The Envelope Stuffed Full of Cash was at his side.  ”Nader…” he said, “There is pasta on the stove… somebody must eat it.”

You have to give the man credit for determination.  There was no time to eat the pasta – the men from Apple were coming to take him away…

But he would not be dissuaded.  He stuffed at least 15 raviolis full of boiling cheese in his mouth, desperately eating what might be his last meal for weeks.

The phone rang.  Saket could barely answer, for his scalded tongue.

On the line was the Man from the corporation.  He had come to take Saket away.  I knew that the ESFoC would never survive an international flight.  I have tried this before, and it always gets confiscated by the D.E.A….

Improvising a solution, I stuffed the envelope into my jacket pocket and snuck out the side door; I hobbled my way towards my Toyota.  I heard a trunk slam and as I lumbered off into the foggy night, I looked back to see the silhouette of the black limo car.  The man from Apple drove away with Saket.  I fear I may never see him again.

Thanks Nader :)

I’ll be catching up with a few posts that will trickle in over these next few days then we’ll be back on track. Thanks.

I slammed on the brakes and swerved to the left, trying to avoid the SUV. Next thing I know, I find myself stopped next to the concrete barrier dividing north and southbound traffic.

The airbag had deployed, I reached down and picked up my glasses. I grabbed my laptop bag and darted outside into the rain. Behind me I saw the SUV stopped. The man in the Mercedes had stopped and came up to me, asking if I was ok. I was. No sharp pains, no cuts. He said “the SUV came out of nowhere!” I thought the SUV probably spun out in front of us. The car looked pretty bad.

The wheel had completely separated from the axle. 911 was on its way, and soon the cops came and got my info. A tow truck arrived later and I waited inside of it. The couple in the SUV were walking around and didn’t appear hurt, but they were on the opposite side of the highway. I wanted to talk to them, but didn’t seem like a good time. The cops came up to me later with the more bizarre part of this all:

The SUV hadn’t spun out in front of us. It was going northbound on I-280, then apparently lost control, went up the embankment, hurdled the central concrete barrier, and into the southbound traffic. No wonder the Mercedes guy said the SUV came out of nowhere. Jeez.

Joseph came to pick me up at the tow truck’s place and took me to an urgent care center near work. I had been feeling some shakes, but Sachi said that was probably the adrenaline wearing off. Still, I didn’t have a scratch. The urgent care center wouldn’t see us because it was a vehicle collision, and my health insurance company’s offices were closed for MLK holiday. Go figure. In the parking lot back at work I ran into my colleagues and went straight to lunch with them, showing them pictures of my car. Even though I’m on a diet, I had a chocolate chip cookie. It was good.

I got a ride back home from a colleague at work who lives near me in Menlo Park. I made phone calls to my sisters and later in the evening told my parents, who are in India. My mind started to drift back to the accident. I started to feel pretty lucky, all things considering. I even had my rear brakes replaced last week, but now the car was likely totaled. But maybe those new brakes helped me walk away from this one. A few meters here or there, and it could have been a lot worse. I ran though some what-ifs….what if I had just left home a few minutes earlier, or if I hadn’t pushed to make a traffic light. But I quelled those pretty quick — we all make hundreds of decisions each day like those, and it’s just not worth the energy to ponder all the problematic outcomes that could arise from them. I guess I’ll be thinking about this when I start driving again too. We just need to control what we can control. The other thought that crossed my mind before going to bed? I’d like to find a girlfriend.

]]> http://www.saketvora.com/2010/01/19/a-bad-case-of-the-mondays/feed/ 5 http://www.saketvora.com/2010/01/13/skiing-at-squaw-valley/ http://www.saketvora.com/2010/01/13/skiing-at-squaw-valley/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:18:16 +0000 Saket http://www.saketvora.com/?p=1319 Last weekend, I went with a group of friends up to Tahoe for skiing at Squaw Valley, the site of the 1960 Winter Olympic Games. It was my first time skiing in over five years, but still I had a great time. Our group consisted mostly of Apple colleagues, and Chrissy did an awesome job of finding a great lodging in nearby Truckee. We drove up after work on Friday (Nader drove me, Dan, and Wendy in his new Rav4) and got in after 11pm that night.

We killed some time that night exploring the cabin. It was huge, with a sauna and hot tub. It had a big kitchen (with a pasta faucet over the six burner stove) and just about every kitchen gadget you could want. Nader got the fireplace going and jammed out on the guitar a bit. John brought his Nikon D200 with a 35mm f/1.8 lens and I had a blast using it (the photos are from it)

John and Rong are regaled by Nader.

Dan shows Brook and Georgina his snowboard

The next day we drove ~30 minutes to Squaw Valley. What a different setup than the Wintergreen ski resort I’ve been to in West Virginia! A group of us went to rent our skis then took the funiculare up to a point 2/3rds up the mountain. Several lifts were available from here, including a handful of green circles. I stayed on those for the morning, getting my ’snow legs’ back. Turning gracefully while keeping my skis parallel is still pretty hard, but I didn’t fall on the slopes or coming off the lift.

It’s so beautiful to just be up on the mountain in Tahoe. The lake was shrouded in a blanket of fog, while all the peaks of the surrounding mountains was covered in snow. It wasn’t that cold, and the sun shone through a thin layer of clouds. Feeling adventurous, Rong and I took a lift up to the top ridge to try a blue square. The lack of snowfall during the past week hurt this one, because the very beginning offered just a narrow path of good snow, with the edges being rocks and dirt. Not too good for a newbie like me! But we made it down, eventually. The group had split up to check out different runs, but we all met up around 1pm for lunch. We packed bagel sandwiches, and I kept a few Clif bars in my ski pants.

After lunch the newbies (John and I) went on another blue square, with Chrissy and J.Lo being great sports in staying with us. There’s a mental block for us — I’ll be feeling fine on blues but then comes this one hill which scares the heck out of me. I just have to man up and barrel down it. Falling a few times was good for me, cause it’s not that bad. Getting back up is harder than actually skiing.

We ended the day by taking a mile long “mountain run” to the very bottom of the mountain. This was the highlight of the day, because it was right at my skill level, long, and our group of five serendipitously started running into all the other members of our group on the way down. About 2/3rds of the way down, it started to rain a bit, and I could feel the snow start to get a little slushy. It wasn’t too much longer though until I was finally down.

We returned our gear and headed back to the cabin. We made some pizzas, broke out the drinks, and chilled for the rest of the evening. We also played ‘the Game’, a cross between Pictionary and Telephone. Everyone has a sheet of people, and you write a sentence or phrase at the top. Pass the paper to the right. That person has to draw something that represents that phrase. They then fold the first sentence over and pass it along, such that the next person just sees the drawing. That person has to write a sentence of what they think the drawing means. You keep going round with people translating between drawings and sentences, and in the end nearly always hilarity ensues as someone’s original intent gets completely transformed into something entirely different.

We all cleared out of the cabin by 11am and Nader’s car stopped in Berkeley for lunch. We went to an authentic ‘Berkeley experience’ organic co-op cafe on Telegraph Avenue. No Hare Krishnas today. Nader saw some hippies with signs saying “No to Dedicated Bus Lanes”, which made Nader say “A hippie who is against dedicated bus lanes? Just whose side are you on?!” Hah.

All in all, it was a great tip and I’m already looking forward to another trip sometime in mid to late February.

]]> http://www.saketvora.com/2010/01/13/skiing-at-squaw-valley/feed/ 2 http://www.saketvora.com/2010/01/08/weekend-in-tahoe/ http://www.saketvora.com/2010/01/08/weekend-in-tahoe/#comments Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:55:28 +0000 Saket http://www.saketvora.com/2010/01/08/weekend-in-tahoe/ Posts have been light lately, but I’ll catch up after the weekend — heading up to Tahoe for some skiing. It’s my first winter visit to Tahoe and my first time skiing in maybe 5 years. Hopefully I won’t break any limbs :)

A remarkable difference, to be sure. Raleigh — the “City of Oaks” — and the Research Triangle area in general seems to have begun a noticeable revival in the recent years. The change is most recognizable in downtown Raleigh, where there seems to be new bars, restaurants, and cafes popping up every few weeks.  I’ve heard my friends in Raleigh talk about new places they are finding, and I initially thought it was a function of transitioning to off-campus life, but it’s much more than that. The changes are even surprising to those who have grown up in Raleigh. Over winter break, I was downtown bar crawling for the birthday, then again to see Avatar in IMAX 3D, and again to a cafe one afternoon with friends.

This is really exciting to me. It seems that many of the re-development efforts undertaken by the local governments in the past 5 to 10 years are finally bearing fruit. Even though the recent recession has hit some of the stalwart Research Triangle Park companies (i.e., Nortel and SonyEricsson), new entrants like Fidelity and Credit Suisse are coming in. And as a whole, the Triangle area wasn’t hit as badly as other parts of the country. Consistently Raleigh and the Triangle are ranked top in the best places to live, best places to start a business, best places to start a family.

If this keeps up, I see no reason why Raleigh and the Triangle can’t be elevated further into the national discussion as great/unique metropolitan areas. One example I give is Portland, Oregon — a city smaller than the other landmark cities of New York, LA, Chicago, Austin, etc — yet has a well known character of being very progressive, green and yuppie friendly, and with its own unique music scene.

Keep it up Raleigh, keep it up.

Upon returning from winter break, the realization that my time at Stanford was just six months away truly hit. At this point, I was completely immersed in energy and greentech courses and market trends. Apart from fleshing out new venture ideas of my own, organizing the Social Entrepreneurship Business Plan competition was also kicking into high gear. I was also working part-time back at Apple, helping to get the new interns up to speed. In February — in the depths of the stumbling economy — I decided to turn down a job offer from Cypress Semiconductor, boldly stating “I didn’t come to Silicon Valley to take the safe way out,” (only to join Apple 7 months later…). That was a hard decision, but one that I’m glad I made. February also marked the end of my father’s 40 year working career; he visited India for the next couple of months. School was becoming a blur — all my energy related classes were projects based, I pushed and helped execute a really ambitious film project for Hindi class, I was attending more events off-campus like the ThinkGreen forum trying to figure out what to do after graduation, the Social E-Challenge eating up more time as we got closer to the competition date.

Visits by my friends helped kept me sane and recharged — in those last two quarters at Stanford, I saw Mike, Donny, Mark and Jennie, Greg and Kelly, my corridor-mate Eddy from Sweden, Jordan, and Laura! (Bonus points to Greg and Kelly for making a trip just to see me! hehe) I also got to see Melih, Brent, and Tim more often. On campus, I enjoyed getting to know a whole new group of people who were interested in energy issues that were in all my civil and environmental engineering courses.I also grew closer to the people I already knew on campus. The tick-tock-tick feeling that looms over an impending graduation can be dreadful.

Graduation came, with a piece of paper stating I (miraculously) had a diploma from the Leland Stanford Junior University, and my family came to the Farm. A little bittersweet though, for a last minute scare back in India saw my dad depart for India before the graduation ceremony. The four of us also went to Tahoe for some hiking — so pretty.

So what to do now? Brent and Abhi back at RTI were kind and let me do some part-time working on a project, so I worked on that while continuing the job search. For the past few months I (and tens of thousands of other soon-to-be-graduates) had been looking for job opportunities; startups, companies, or even new ventures. I eagerly sought out greentech companies, but the recurring line I got was “we think you’d be a good fit, but we want to wait 6/8/12 months before hiring because we’re not sure how our project load is going to be with the current recession.” Not very encouraging. The world was gray…I was between worlds. Still living in my on-campus apartment through the summer, but no longer a student. Not sure what or where I’d be in the next few months. In my heart I wanted to stay out in the Bay Area, but what if this application for a position at the renown National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the Boulder region of Colorado goes through?

Then, Joseph called me up and wanted to meet for dinner. Well, this was interesting. Over the next few weeks, I sought advice and perspective from everyone I spoke to. The advice that resonated with me the most: don’t undervalue the fact that you love working with the people there. That is actually a rare thing and appreciate it when you can.

A room for rent opened up in a Stanford friend’s house in Menlo Park, so I transitioned there for the fall while starting at Apple. I got consumed by work, and loved living with Troy, Michael, and (effectively) Karla. Troy was busy working on his iPhone app and writing his book, Mike converted to full-time as Box’s lead mobile developer, and our evenings routinely featured new recipes on the stove and hours of ping-pong. Talked hours of college football with Troy, Melih, and Matt. I got to see some of golf’s great players at the President’s Cup tournament with Melih and Matt too. My grandmother visited America and I visited home for Diwali. I decided that I would move up to the City, and started spending more weekends in the City. I was delighted by a day spent up in San Francisco with Peyton. In mid December, Dad got the call from India and was on a plane the next day for his hometown of Akola. A few days later, my grandmother passed away.

Finally, spent winter break back at home. Went out on the town with friends and had a terrific time for the 25th birthday, and got to see them more before the eventual return to California. It’s hard for me to describe the feeling of seeing and being with my friends back here; it’s like slipping on a favorite pair of well worn shoes after a long absence. They’ve been with you for countless miles, places, and situations, and will never let you down. It makes me feel like the luckiest person in the world.

So what’s next for 2010? I now feel good and confident about a few aspects of my life — I graduated from college (for real) and have a great job that I love. Now, while I love living with Mike and Troy, I’d like to find a place to live that I can feel more settled in. And finally, at the top of my goals for 2010, I want to finally start paying attention to my personal life. Although I’ve just hit the quarter-century milestone,  I know there is so much more I have yet to experience in life.

Now, let’s get to it.

Happy New Year and best wishes to everyone! Thanks for reading.

I admit, I’ve got a soft spot for epics. The grandeur, the archetypal narratives, and the scale of emotion. And with a film, the vision and sheer force of will needed to convey an epic story through the screen is deeply intriguing to me. Avatar was not a film whose production I actively followed; I only learned what James Cameron was cooking up when I saw the first teaser trailer. My expectation were low. The consensus of most people I’ve talked about Avatar with is that a) the story is cliched to just ‘alright’ and b) the visual experience is stunning. On part b, I wholly agree but I’ll play defense to part a. I’ll argue that the underlying narrative of Avatar is a recurring, archetypal one that we have seen played out many times before, both in cinematic and literary history. I can look back at many films and stories and find elements that match particular beats and sequences in Avatar. The spectre of Joseph Campbell’s famous hero’s journey is present here, I think. Each viewer will likely think back to different sources when comparing Avatar; Fern Gully for it’s environmental theme, Dances with Wolves or The Last Samurai for the “gone-native” theme, and (for me) Dune for the growth and maturation of Jake Sully’s avatar character within the Na’vi society. For these reasons, I don’t go as far as to dock points from Avatar due to its story.

The visual experience is truly stunning. I saw the film twice in IMAX 3D, and I give major credit to Cameron’s immersive use of the 3D effect, rather than just ‘gotcha’ moments. This isn’t a 3D film as much as the visuals hover in front of your face, but that there is greater depth and substance to the visuals on the screen. Beyond the technical effect, there is Cameron’s world of Pandora. Lush, grand, detailed, with sweeping vistas and wonders. And of course, the Na’vi — the ten foot tall, blue-skinned, at-peace-with-nature inhabitants of Pandora. Cameron developed critical advances in motion-capture technology, both in the capture process and rendering process such that Avatar presents to me the first time an alien ecosystem is fully realized. Peter Jackson’s Gollum was the first, followed by the tentacle-faced pirate captain Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean. But Avatar showcases a whole array of immediately believable creatures. The picture of Neytiri at the top of this post shows a moment that I insisted was either a prothestic-wearing actor or a sophisticated animatronic. It simply looked too good in the film to be entirely computer generated. But no…none of the actors ever put on blue makeup and all the Na’vi are entirely CG.

One of the things I marveled at while sitting through the credits was the sheer force of will it took to make this picture. I’m the kind of film geek who has watched all the dozens hours of behind-the-scenes material of The Lord of the Rings…twice. The credits for Avatar read likes a who’s who: Joe Letteri and Weta Digital, John Knoll and Industrial Light & Magic, Richard Taylor and Weta Workshop, Stan Winston Studios, Skywalker Sound, plus a half dozen other smaller visual f/x houses (though no DigitalDomain? hmm). I joked to Dan that it was as if Cameron had opened his rolodex and just started asking who had free computer clusters to render some scenes for him. Regardless, the outcome is simply staggering. The 3D effect aside, there so much visually going on in just the background of some scenes, let alone the technical mastery of creatures, vehicles, and the main characters. I am eagerly looking forward to the behind-the-scenes story of how Cameron and his team accomplished this extraordinary feat.

The one real criticism I have of Avatar is that its musical score does not rise to the occasion. I think back to some classic ‘big’ films — Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, The Lion King, Jaws — and they all share incredibly memorable scores and musical motifs. Play five seconds of the main melody from any of these films and recognition is instant. For a cinematic feat such as Avatar, this absence is a bit disappointing. Was I too focused on the visual spectacle? My friend Dale observed that the fairly rudimentary score was perhaps a reflection of the Na’vi culture and place within nature. This could be plausible; Howard Shore’s monumental score to The Lord of the Rings builds its motifs around races and cultures that have developed for thousands of years. We just don’t know enough of the Na’vi’s background and context in the Pandoran world. I’d love to see this explored in future films.

I enjoyed Avatar and I’m excited to see the effect it’s had on cinema. I think it breaks new ground on what filmmakers can satisfyingly convey to an audience, and just wait until these techniques are employed in telling more original, daring, and challenging stories.

thank you all for everything

At times it feels like a less extravagant Arcade Fire (but not in a bad way), but also notes of Eisley or The National (ok, maybe a stretch there). Lyrically the songs have a lot of depth as well.

Fanfarlo – The Walls Are Coming Down

The Walls Are Coming Down

They swallowed it whole, they went for the gold for the gold
We fall for the same lies, we all have the same shoes to fit
The preachers and books of your empire will fight here alone
Some day they will be forgotten and die one by one

The walls the walls are coming down, the here and now is coming round
It will some day let you down
The ships the ships are coming in, the great ideas are wearing thin
There is nothing left to do

For atoms have gone as far as atoms will go
Your books write themselves, they line up in row after row

The walls the walls are coming down, the here and now is coming round
It will some day let you down
The ships the ships are coming in, the great ideas are wearing thin
There is nothing left to do

Despite arriving to Dulles on time, we spent 45 minutes on the tarmac waiting for a gate to open up. This was a bit problematic, because some of us had connections with under 20 minutes to make them. The good news for me was that there was 25 of us on-board intending to continue on to Raleigh, so they called ahead and held the plane. On that flight, I ended up sitting next to a Brit who was  a screenwriter. We ended talking about scripts and film for the entire flight, even all the way to the baggage claim. It was great.

Enjoying the time back so far, especially seeing Mom and the sisters. Did some light shopping yesterday (got some new kicks) and watched Pitt beat UNC in football (haha). Looking forward to catching up on things (like movies), seeing my friends, and eating more of Mom’s delicious delicious food.

Dirty Projectors – No Intention

Bon Iver – Blood Bank

Now, I can just see Jordan’s eyes roll at my very mention of Dirty Projectors — a band he’s been namedropping for months now — but I listened to the rest of Bitte Orca and didn’t find the others as memorable. Bon Iver is a band that I’ve been wanting to explore, and this seems like a good entry point.

No Intention

The renegade feeling satisfied
You blinked and closed your eyes
You like the feeling of Saturday
You love the danger in the night
The restless corpse is collapsed wind
The breath is daffodil
What not become what is lapsing
Into the universal fill
Or maybe just

No intention
Or maybe just
No intention

When I am full with endeavor
Nothing can stop gestalt
The freshness of my reality
Makes me feel tingly and hot
When you wake up shouting “Idea!”
Is that a punishment?
You represent saying, “I’m real,”
But is that what you meant
Maybe you meant

No intention
Maybe you meant
No intention

Blood Bank

Well I met you at the blood bank
We were looking at the bags
Wondering if any of the colors
Matched any of the names we knew on the tags
You said “see look, that’s yours!
Stacked on top with your brother’s
See how the resemble one another
Even in their plastic little covers”

And I said I know it well

That secret that you know
But don’t know how to tell
It f$@!s with your honor
And it teases your head
But you know that it’s good girl
’cause it’s running you with red

Then the snow started falling
We were stuck out in your car
You were rubbing both of my hands
Chewing on a candy bar

You said “ain’t this just like the present
To be showing up like this”
As the moon waned to crescent
We started to kiss

And I said I know it well

That secret that we know
That we don’t know how to tell
I’m in love with your honor
I’m in love with your cheeks
What’s that noise up the stairs, babe?
Is that Christmas morning creaks?

And I said I know it well
I know it well …

On Wednesday I caught up with Brent over drinks at the Wine Bar in downtown Palo Alto, and Amit joined us later after attending  a conference in Mountain View earlier that evening. On Thursday, Lux sent out a note saying that to celebrate his last final of the quarter he was headed to the Nuthouse. I ended up getting there at 11:30pm (looong day at the office, yeah) and had a good time with him and some classmates, plus Saumya from Econetix with whom Lux is working on some cool stuff. On Friday, Dan invited me to his “Hanukkah” party, which I put in air quotes because in addition to latkes and dreidals there was also plenty of bacon, pork ribs, and shrimp to go around. Dan was wearing this giant dreidal on a chain, a watermelon yarmulka, and a bathrobe with a menora stitched on the back. Hehe.

So I was getting home after 1am the last three nights, which is a little late (even for us) for ping pong. Taking it easy today, then will go up for brunch and maybe apartment hunting up in the City tomorrow. It finally started raining over here, so we’ll see how long I end up staying up. Heisman Trophy ceremony tonight, hoping for a Toby Gerhart win but will be fine if Ingram gets it (he’s in the championship game after all) and it’d be a just world if Suh gets it instead.

We then headed over to the Old Pro, my go-to sports bar in Palo Alto. It’s the same place that Amit and I went to for March Madness when Donny and Mike were both in town. Nader and I were also there last weekend to watch the NCSU vs Carolina game….at 9am. Yes, they had coffee. The place wasn’t too crowded, and we found a table in front of the soon-to-start Florida vs Alabama game. I love watching football with Melih and Matt — these guys know so much about it and are really passionate about the sport. Matt is from Oklahoma and is an OU alum, and so I was very excited when we later found out that Stanford would be playing Oklahoma in the Sun Bowl on New Year’s Eve.

After eating way too much junk food at the Old Pro, I headed back to the apartment and caught the the tantalizing end of the Texas-Nebraska game. It was madness; 1:44 min away from BCS chaos, and Nebraska then completely self-destructs.

On Sunday, I headed back up to SF (I know, been visiting a lot lately) to drop off an application for an apartment in Noe Valley. I picked up a sandwich at Whole Foods and strolled over to Dolores Park where I hoped to get some sun and reading done. But alas, the weather didn’t cooperate; the sun never broke out from the clouds, and the wind picked up. I killed some time in coffee shops and looked at some DSLR cameras in stores along Market Street. Melih was free so I dropped by their apartment where he and Micky were babysitting little Ben, whom I saw in an adorable monkey outfit at Melih’s halloween party. Later that night, his friend David came over and the four of us had dinner at Kezar’s Pub in Cole Valley (not too far from Zazie, the incredible brunch place that Terrell, Tim, and I went to during the weekend of Outside Lands back in 2008). By this time it was cold and raining, but Melih was kind enough to drop me off near by car down by Dolores Park. Though the weather wasn’t stellar, when you got great friends to laugh and chat with, everything turns out ok.

Shaimus rocks out at Stanford University

And boy am I glad I went! The graduate student council brought the (free) beer, and Shaimus brought the rock. The music was great and the band performed admirably playing to a bunch of grad students in a hall where yoga lessons are usually held. During the mid-show break, we spoke to the guitarist and he said that some of the band members knew Harmonix, the makers of Guitar Hero, back when they were in Boston and heard about the call for local indie acts to include in the game. They submitted a song they had recently finished, and it was included in the game. Shaimus isn’t signed to a record label yet, but they have a publisher to get their stuff featured in various medium. Genre is indie alt rock, and I’m not sure if it was just the result of seeing them perform up close in a small room, but honestly they sounded better and more polished than more semi-famous acts I’ve seen featured on late night shows.

They played up the crowd too, with the guitarist shouting “#@% the Bears!” and “Toby for Heisman!”, and then some of the students even started a mosh pit (not sure it was really warranted though…) near the end. They came back for one more song, doing a cover of the Beatles’ “Something” by George Harrison that got the whole room singing along to.

I picked up their two CDs to show my support, and a big tip of the hat to Chrissy for the heads up on this fun show.

The recipe is simple, but does need some attention. Chop a small onion and some fresh garlic, saute in a large skillet with sliced mushrooms (I just used a whole carton) over medium heat in some oil. After mushrooms start to brown in ~10 minutes, add in 1/2 pound of dry penne pasta and stir to coat evenly. Cook for 2-3 minutes, then add a bit of salt and pepper and 1/2 cup of white wine. Let the liquid bubble away. Then, add in 1/2 cup of vegetable (or chicken) stock and stir. Let the pasta cook over medium heat until the stock has been incorporated, then add 1/2 cup more stock. Repeat for about 10 to 15 minutes, and taste the pasta after the second 1/2 cup to test if done. You want to keep the mixture wet, but never soupy. I ended up using just over one can of stock before I thought the pasta was done. Season to your liking, and serve. Freshly grated parmesan goes really well.

I felt like the pasta retained more of its starch and overall flavor, and the whole dish felt moist without ever appearing dressed in a lot of sauce. Give it a try!

Gotta run, I think the banana bread with walnuts and chocolate chips is getting a little toasty inside the oven….

What’s great about the ToneMatrix is that you can copy and paste your tone patterns to share with others. To see the following samples live, open up ToneMatrix in a new window, copy the numeric codes in the post below, then paste (crtl+v) them into the ToneMatrix square. It’s a nice visualization.

Mike showed me some base templates, and I experimented in adding new melodies to them. When I was showing it to Karla and Mike, I just doodled in the following blocks to see what it would do:

0,0,0,0,0,2048,0,512,0,512,131070,0,0,0,0,17476

Starting from this, I broke up the vertical bar and spaced out some tones.

0,0,0,0,0,2080,0,512,0,512,6690,0,0,32,512,50244

Then added some rhythm to it, in the bottom left.

8192,49152,16384,33152,0,18464,16384,512,0,512,6690,0,0,32,512,50244

I then added just a couple of squares in the upper left side to change the tempo of the melody.

8192,49154,16386,33152,0,18464,16384,512,0,512,6690,0,0,32,512,50244

Building upon that, I add several more squares in that area to further define the melody.

8192,49154,16390,33156,8,18480,16392,512,32,560,6658,0,0,32,512,50244

And then just a few more tweaks to the melody and I was happy with it.

8192,49156,16386,33154,4,18480,16392,544,16,520,6690,0,2,4,544,50248

I listened to this loop for 3 minutes straight and what I found is that my brain would switch between focusing on the melody (the top half of the square) and the underlying beat (the bottom half of the square).

Seeing my excitement with the ToneMatrix, Troy showed me a project that a student in the iPhone development class had done (Troy was a TA for it) where a ToneMatrix was made for the iPhone. Troy then played for us a song he had made in GarageBand over last winter break, and it was really good! Karla and Mike got interested, so I envision some GarageBand experiment evenings in the near future.

The concert was part of the San Francisco Lively Arts nonprofit group, and they rent out space at the Noe Valley Ministry, a Presbyterian Church. We had dinner some blocks away in southern Noe Valley beforehand.

The opening act was actually an instrumental trio of piano, flute, and electric bass guitar. The bass guitar used an interesting effect like a sustain with reverb, reminding me actually of some sounds I’ve heard in Sigur Ros songs. The pianist had some interest “fusion” pieces, such as “ragtime and science fiction” or “bebop and dinosaurs”….yeah. Kinda neat though overall. Something different.

The Books show was an audio/visual presentation. They’ve put together these strange and varied video and picture montages and then play in front of it. One has a guitar, the other has an e-cello. I had never seen an e-cello before, so that was pretty neat.

Peyton and I were apartment mates during our senior year of college at NC State. He’s halfway through his 3rd year of medical school at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Justin, a fellow NC State alum as well, is a graduate student at Stanford in applied physics, but his advisor works at IBM Almaden research center here in the Bay Area, so Justin doesn’t really go near campus now. He’s working on vanadium oxide substrates for new forms of semiconductors (sorry Justin if I butchered that). Cool guy.

They picked me up en route to the City, and we walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, drove down Lombard Street, and enjoyed sourdough bread bowls at Fisherman’s Wharf, had a sundae at Ghiradelli square, and saw the seals during sunset at Pier 39. The weather stayed a bit dreary during the morning, but the sun broke in the afternoon and it turned into a great day.

It was so great to catch up with Peyton!

‘Hysteric’ is one of my favorite songs off It’s Blitz.

What have people been watching on the TV? There has been a several good shows lately, heavy on comedy in particular. There are the stalwarts The Daily Show and Colbert Report, 30 Rock, South Park. I still like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But some other shows that I’m following now: Lie to Me (gotta hand it to Tim Roth, plus great casting), Castle (Nathan Fillon!), Glee (though the last two episodes have almost been unwatchable), and just recently Modern Family (witty writing). Any good ones that I’ve been missing?

What world-aware, engaged, and interesting dinner company! What a wonderful evening.

I have a lot to be thankful for this year, but most meaningful to me are my family and friends — both back home and out here in my new home-away-from-home. You all enrich my life more than any job, place, gadget, or gift could.

Thank you.

My housemate Mike graciously invited Troy and I to the  Thanksgiving dinner that his family and their neighborhoods hold. I’m bringing along an apple pie — I spent last night getting a pie crust made from scratch, and this afternoon got the apple filling made; reducing down the natural juices of the apples to create a glaze. I experimented with a lattice like top for the pie, and here’s how it came out:

The glaze came out a bit splotchy, but overall I’m pretty pleased. The lattice top looks a lot better post-baking than pre-baking. Just need some vanilla ice cream and it’s heaven.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

This past Saturday was the Big Game — Stanford vs Cal. It’s the one game of the year that the entire Stanford campus actually gears up for — ready for blood. And I mean it. A conversation from earlier that week:

nimur2008: well
nimur2008: the band just ritually killed the cal bear
nimur2008: so much gore
nimur2008: so much blood
Saket Vora: YES>
Saket Vora: is it on youtube?
nimur2008: not yet
nimur2008: give it a few minutes
nimur2008: it literally just happened minutes ago
Saket Vora: where
nimur2008: white plaza
Saket Vora: is the fountain red?
nimur2008: not yet
nimur2008: when the bear’s blood reaches it
nimur2008: it will be
nimur2008: he’s still gushing
Saket Vora: ….
Saket Vora: what do you mean
nimur2008: they took a bear
nimur2008: slammed it onto the claw
nimur2008: blood spurt
nimur2008: blood everywhere
nimur2008: tree and dollies dancing all over
nimur2008: it was anarchy
Saket Vora: so they got like a stuffed teddy bear and sewed a blood bag into t?
nimur2008: no a real bear
nimur2008: real blood
Saket Vora: hah right
nimur2008: I WAS THERE

Nader is referring of course, to when the Band impales a teddy bear onto the claw fountain in White Plaza, turning it into this:

There will be blood.

This was a resurrection year for Stanford football. We just defeated the #1 and #2 teams in the Pac-10 (and #8 and #9 nationally), including a record breaking demolition of USC away in LA. The 55 points we put on USC is the most they have ever allowed at home, and was their worst loss since 1966. Stanford went from having zero Top 25 votes to 14th in just two weeks. For the first time in nearly 8 years, we were the favored team going into the Big Game.

I got on campus early for some tailgating with friends from Apple. What a gorgeous day for football — perfect fall weather.

AT&T’s data plan promptly failed once. And everyone had iPhones at our tailgate, except Nader. Who refused to check scores for us.

Got into the stadium half an hour early and was surprised to see the Red Zone already full with students. Our group was up on the 2nd level, but none of us sat in our ticketed seats; we moved around as the real ticket holders arrived. But whatever. Everyone does it.

The Red Zone student section.

The Cal Band took the field first and was boring, but the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band took the field and all was right again. The entire drum section was decked out in full body stormtrooper attire. Awesome.

The game got underway and on the 2nd play from scrimmage, Heisman-worthy and the nation’s best running back Toby Gerhart broke free for a TD. It was soon 14-0 by Toby Gerhart again.

Then the breakdowns started coming. Our defense because extremely porous, with the Cal running backs picking up first downs from the line of scrimmage per carry. Cal quickly took the lead soon after halftime, and we were down by 10. Oh yeah, Tiger Woods was on hand to be inducted into the Stanford Hall of Fame, and was an honorary captain for the football team. Even the Cal fans were booing him. Come on!

The last 8 minutes of the game was pure agony. We got within a touchdown. Our play calling became totally passwhacky. On the next possession, we tried three passes (two of them long 40+ yard bombs) that all dropped incomplete. Then proceeded to go for it on 4th and 8 on our own 20-something yard line. Another incomplete pass. Cal got the ball, but our defense miraculously held. We would get the ball back with just under two minutes to play. Again, passwhacky. Toby Gerhart then gets a dump off from the QB and runs 40 yards up the sideline, through traffic, to the Cal 13. Whoa. 1:30 left in the, 1st and 10 on the Cal 13, down by a touchdown. First play, a pass in the flat outside, incomplete. And then it happens.

The pass over the middle. In heavy traffic. The interception. And Cal just knees the ball until 0:00, when the Cal fans rushed our field.

Sigh. Shellshocked. Speechless. The burning question: why on earth, when you have the best running back in the country on your team — who has already rushed for 136 yards and 4 touchdowns — do you not give him a chance to punch it in? In the Big Game? Game on the line? In his senior year?

I absolutely love what Coach Harbaugh has done for Stanford — he’s a terrific coach and I’m fully behind him. But boy do I wish we had some different playcalls on that last game.

Chrissy and Dave were kind enough to get me back home, but I headed back out with Troy to downtown PA for some dinner with Mike, Karla, Lauren (who went to USC), and Gregg (Mike’s friend from HS). After dinner Lauren invited us to her house to try some WAFFLE COOKIES. I write them in all caps because they are deserving of it.

This was shared on Google Reader just days ago by Kelly,  and now I got to try them! Absolutely delicious. At least it was a good night.

]]> http://www.saketvora.com/2009/11/25/shellshocked-at-the-big-game/feed/ 0 http://www.saketvora.com/2009/11/25/apartment-hunting/ http://www.saketvora.com/2009/11/25/apartment-hunting/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:04:48 +0000 Saket http://www.saketvora.com/?p=1206 The past few weekends I’ve taken the hunt for an apartment up in the City more seriously. One Saturday I went up and just walked around the neighborhoods south of Market. As all major cities, SF has a lot of neighborhoods with unique personalities. Because the areas south of Market St (a main avenue cutting across the City) make the most sense for me commuting via the Apple shuttle (free Wi-Fi enabled coach service to and from Cupertino), I focused my attention there. You have the denser Mission District, with a panoply of good Mexican food, bars, and nightlife. As you walk west, you enter Mission Dolores by the pretty Dolores Park, and the vibe swings a little more upward, if not a little hipstery. Nice restaurants here. Continuing west of Dolores Park is the Castro District, and then the large neighborhood south of Castro is Noe Valley. After my initial scouting weekend, I felt most comfortable in Noe Valley, but Mission Dolores was nice too. What can I say? I’ve lived in the suburbs all my life.

This past Sunday, I scoured the Craigslist posting and lined up a dozen apartments to see. On the drive up 280-N, a good sign appeared:

The luck continued. The first apartment was owned by a Stanford alum. The second one of the day was a friendly fellow who works at Google (and later I discovered was on the Google PowerMeter team) who had a beautiful apartment. Then, I got a call from someone who said I could come by right now if I was free — turns out I was just two blocks away. Score! I had a free timeslot at 3pm and called up another place to schedule a viewing, and they said “Can you come at 3pm?” before I even said anything. I even had half an hour to enjoy the sun at Dolores Park. After a morning of drizzle, the sun finally broke and lit up the SF skyline.

Note: this is from an earlier visit but captures the same view. The iPhone’s camera doesn’t dynamic range well at all.

After killing some time in a coffee shop (otherwise quite nice but ruined by allowing that horrible Miley Cyrus song to be played), I saw the last place up on a hill on Noe St…an enormous three bedroom house that looked like a mansion compared to the other apartments I saw that day. Stunning though — huge entertaining friendly kitchen large deck, a real yard, big rooms. Too bad it’d come out to ~$2000 per month. Per person. Oh, and street parking if you can find it nearby. Another observation: I think it’s a requirement to own a dog if you live in Noe Valley. I must have seen over a hundred dogs being walked. Crazy.

I was dead tired by then, so I bailed on dinner and headed home. Michael and Karla arrived home with full shopping bags, and so for the next few hours while they made a butternut squash lasagna with fresh creamy pesto sauce, we enjoyed a long and meandering conversation that touched upon healthcare reform, the limits of capitalism, the psychology of difficult decisions, literature, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Michael’s trip overseas to Israel then India, the glorious thunderstorms Karla and I remember from Texas, Mike’s account of seeing a car get struck by lightning on a road trip with his dad, then onto an REU he did researching sprites (upper atmospheric lightning phenomenon only very recently discovered and pretty freaky) which actually tied back to my two weeks up in Alaska for the PARS summer school. There were other detours in there somewhere, but I’ve forgotten them already.

None of the apartments will work (the wonderful apartment of the Google guy was already taken that very night), but I have a better idea of what to expect now.

The reason she told Jad and Robert about this was that in order to keep him still to treat his scrapes, she put on an episode of Radiolab on her iPod, the one about parasites. And he lay there…completely transfixed. And he understood everything he heard. Her little boy seems to listen well to these podcasts but doesn’t understand it when his mother tries to lecture him about consequences. So Jad and Robert record a lesson with her explaining how one should always think things through to the end. And then they put their wonderful Radiolab spin on it and elevate it to something entirely new.

There was a smile on my face for the whole segment. Jad says:

..there is something about this story that just gets to the whole point of why we do this. Here you’ve got this kid who is obviously in a lot of pain, and he just sits still and listens to a story on parasites?

What we’re trying to do here is to tell stories that move you, or keep you still in this case, but stories that draw you in, and make you think differently about the world, even if just a little bit.

I’m so happy this exists. It makes me feel like a kid again with a whole world waiting to be explored.

This was going to be a huge game for Stanford, coming off a huge upset win over #8 Oregon. Winning this game would not only knock out #9 USC’s BCS hopes, but would put the rest of the football world on notice: Stanford is real and you better watch out! And what a game! Our whole team clicking — Heisman-deserving running back Toby Gerhart dropped 175+ yards and 3 touchdowns on USC, while our defense came up with 3 interceptions, all which ended up in touchdowns. Redshirt freshman quarterback Andrew Luck outplayed the freshman USC quarterback. The result, a 55-21 demolition,  was the most points ever allowed by USC at home. The last time anyone had gotten close to do this to USC was Notre Dame putting up 51 points…in 1966. In the last 49 games at home, USC has lost twice. Both to Stanford. And this was USC’s homecoming game.With 91,000 fans in attendance. Glorious. Hail, Stanford, Hail.

Chrissy broke out her Stanford cupcakes and immediately after our cornerback Richard Sherman picked off USC’s QB in the 4th quarter for a touchdown. Go Cardinal!

After savoring the victory, I dropped off my friends back at Stanford, perused the shopping mall a bit, then headed back home to watching some more football with Troy. Saturdays = college football!

At night, I had my experience of Settlers of Catan, a game I heard a lot about from friends back home. The Nicks were hosting a game night, and for the next several hours Bill, Sarah, Alex, Cindy, and I were engrossed in our game while the Nicks and others played other board games.

While some delicious homemade chocolate bourbon pecan pie (heavy on the bourbon…) was enjoyed, a lack of isopropyl alcohol stymied the wielding of Alex’s flaming throwing knives, but that’ll be for another night (some months ago, the Nicks and Alex launched some flaming projectiles with their trebuchet, captured to great effect with long-exposure photography). It also looks like the group will be headed up to see the Books play in San Francisco over Thanksgiving weekend.

And to top it off, I got an email late at night saying that my $25 Kiva loan has been fully repaid, so I lent it out again to another worthy entrepreneur; this time in the Philippines. Nice!

In an attempt to get healthier and fitter — and being inspired by Melih’s public-personal challenges — I’m going to set some goals for myself over these winter months and provide monthly updates here on my progress. While losing some more pounds would be well received (my aggressive target would be 168lbs, down from my current 180lbs), I’m really trying to aim for overall improved fitness. I’m also cognizant of the plateauing of my ultimate frisbee performance, especially after this summer. While I think my ultimate “I.Q.” has improved, I put my team at a disadvantage because I’m not able to execute what I know needs to be done. I need to become faster to jump on potential interceptions or blocked passes, and I need more endurance so I can stick with my man for the whole play.

I’m as far from a fitness expert as you can get, but I’m looking at these four metrics:

1. “40 yard” dash — or rather, the time to complete a sprint down an ultimate field, or to chase a runner going deep.
2. 2km erg session — inspired by my rowing friends (Greg, Donny, and Ben), this is the time it takes to complete 2km on an ergometer, which is used to train for rowing. It’s a drill that requires constant focus because of the sequence of events you must do to execute a proper stroke, and works your arms, traps, and legs.
3. 5km run — pretty standard fare, 3.1 miles. The only related benchmark I can offer: in my senior year of undergrad, we had to do a 3 mile run and the best time I clocked in was 24.5 minutes.
4. # of Pushups in 1 minute — figure I should work in an upper body strength metric somewhere. not entirely sure about this one, but I’ll keep it for now.

The idea is to get a starting datapoint for each of these metrics now then re-do them every 30 days until next summer rolls around. The Apple gym is just across the parking lot from my building, so I’ll start using it and work out three times a week before heading home. This is going to get harder if I really do end up moving up to San Francisco in January, but it’ll just mean I’ll have to be more diligent with my time — squeeze in workouts by taking an earlier shuttle in the morning or during lunch. Let’s see how this goes for now…updates to come.

Thanks to Greg and Ben for the rowing info.

Learned another lesson in the importance of peer review. With Joseph tending to more important things on paternity leave, Brian has re-emphasized frequent peer-review among our team. Me and a colleague were working all this week on something, and we thought we had it wrapped up. But before sealing it up, we did a peer review and the perspectives of the other team members revealed a more optimal solution. It wasn’t so much that our theory was flawed, but that previous experiences had shifted the risk assessments of our peers to different levels. Peer review early and often!

The other thing that I’m appreciating now is a new lens on analog circuits that I’m learning more about, especially from the analog team. In school, you first start off learning simple things like circuit networks with resistors, capacitors, inductors (RLC circuits) which leads to some linear systems stuff. Then you throw in operational amplifiers, and typically analyze them in their steady state. Even in more focused analog circuits courses with multiple transistors, you have two “lens” onto a circuit: large signal and small signal. In the large signal view, you focus on making sure the circuit is “biased” in the right mode of operation. After this condition is set, you then dive into the small signal view and assume the amplification properties are practically linear.

However, while this can be useful for integrated circuit design, but it doesn’t tell the whole story; especially at the level that we use components. I’m learning a new way of looking at these components, in which you observe the state of all the components at incremental time steps with respect to specific inputs. It’s this kind of approach that best helps me understand why a particular component is placed at a particular point….something that isn’t always intuitively obvious on a first look.

It’s just one of the many ways that “real-world engineering” can differ quite a bit from what we learn in the classroom.

I’m fuzzy on the dates, but I think Larry started at Apple very early, in the early 1980s. He was part of the first Mac team and I think he worked on a wide variety of projects. He was part of the iPod team when it first started, bringing expertise in audio electronics in particular. To celebrate, Dan organized a group outing to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It was my first time visiting, and I couldn’t think of a better visit. The other young members of our group just followed Larry, Doug, and Wendell around and listened to their stories. It’s amazing, they still knew the designs of the artifacts in the museum, knew the people who made them, and heck — even built some of the computers on display.

Larry points to the original Mac laptop he worked on.

Before we left, we got to see Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2. Babbage built the first mechanical computers, and the Computer History Museum is fortunate to have one of two working replicas ever built in the world. It’s a stunning work. The scale is hard to see, but this is as tall as I am.

Back in Cupertino, we had a small party at BJ’s to toast Larry. There, Doug unveiled one of the most stunning plaques I’ve ever seen. We were all wondering what Doug was up to — getting our pictures and signatures the past week, and mysteriously going around rounding up old iPods. Everyone in the room was amazed by it…

Larry worked on every single iPod the team put out.

That’s how the iPod Hardware Engineering Team sends off one of its own. Be well and enjoy your retirement, Larry!

After catching some morning college football games, I headed over to Castro St. in downtown Mountain View to have lunch with Melih and Matt, my two friends who went to the President’s Cup golf tournament a few weekends ago. We munched on sandwiches in a sports tavern (or rather, what passes as a sports tavern in Mountain View, jeez) while watching the Penn State vs Michigan game (yawn) and having a free ranging discussion about college football (of course!), technology, monetary policy, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury department, state of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the visible impact of America’s huge trade deficit with China. Matt described seeing the trains go by while growing up in Oklahoma, and how two decades what used to be grain and wheat was slowly replaced by finished goods from Chinese, with all the trains being full going east and all empty coming back west.

We then headed to a nearby Turkish cafe (where, when I asked if it was kosher to add cream to Turkish coffee Melih responded with “why don’t you just desecrate my culture and steal my property?”) to brainstorm ideas for our submission to the NYC Big Apps contest. Melih told me about this contest, in which the New York City is encouraging people to aid its transparency and openness by building apps using its public data archives. It’s a fun outlet for us to try something new and get the creative juices flowing. This should keep us occupied over the next few weeks.

On the way home, I picked up an immersion blender that has a mini-food processor attachment. It’s a nice multi-tasker in the kitchen, and it’s handy having a chopper around. A brief stop at the Milk Pail, a European style open-air market got me a fill of fresh fruits and vegetables. I was planning on cooking something for dinner, but Mike arrived and we walked a few blocks down to the nearby Dutch Goose, where over burgers and drinks we enjoyed the Stanford football game against Arizona State. It was homecoming weekend, so spirits were high and Stanford played great! We’ve got a terrific football team this year. Mike’s high school friend Greg also dropped by.

Sunday was quieter — spent most of the day finishing up some volunteer work for the California Clean Tech Open, taking care of some errands, and cooking. I made some salsa with my new blender, but put in one too many habanero peppers. Boy it can burn! Dinner was some Japanese eggplant, red bell pepper, and garlic with sauteed baked tofu. Mike and Karla prepared some excellent pasta with butternut squash sauce, also giving the blender for a spin. Butternut squash is rather amazing…it has such a dominating nice taste that you’re often not sure what else you should add to make it taste good. I want to start using it more.

And finally, some really great news! Joseph and Heidi’s baby — Henry Isaac Fisher — was born early Saturday morning. The whole family is doing great. Congratulations Joseph and Heidi!

For me, this is especially true with photos. While photo managers like Picasa, iPhoto, Lightroom, and Aperture all have nice methods for organizing photos into albums, I find it important to keep order with original files and folders. This is especially useful when you want to select some photos to put online. Having left my Thinkpad in California, I thought I’d just use my MacBook to transfer my recent Diwali photos online.

In Windows, I use Windows Live Photo Gallery to import my photos, which allows me to quickly enter desired destination folder and filenames for different batches of photos (separated by time taken), all in one dialog box. That way my photos are automatically given a human-readable filename like “diwali 002″ instead of “IMG_9982.” To my dismay, I discovered that iPhoto doesn’t support the ability to rename the photo filenames upon import. Neither does Picasa for Mac. Nor does the built-in Image Capture utility in Mac OS X. So I found a freeware batch file re-namer and fixed the files after importing.

This makes me wonder: Am I just weird for refusing to simply accept photo filenames like IMG_5429.JPG? How come these hugely popular programs lack what I consider to be a necessary feature? I mean heck, the simple baked-in image importer utility in Windows XP had the functionality I desire, and yet Windows Vista decided to cripple it by not letting you rename the files on import. Fortunately the free Windows Live Photo Gallery not only restored it, but improved it. I think I must just be weird.

“What’s your most radical belief?”

My friends know that I can be rather loquacious, but it’s been a day since seeing this question and I still don’t know my answer.

My mind finds itself wandering between many lobes. Platitudes or statement of beliefs grounded in political or moral theory? A pithy quote from a favorite thinker, author, or figure? A number of “quasi-conspiracy” theories that I have varying degrees of stock in? A vision of a new product/system/solution that will change the world?

Beliefs are deemed “radical” in the context of the society they emerge from. In some parts of the world, the belief that everyone should be given the opportunity to receive an education would be “radical” enough to warrant violence. In another part of the world, the belief that a wealthy prosperous nation should have the moral decency to provide universal access to essential healthcare is deemed “radical”.

What would be “radical” for me – a product of a two-parent financially stable upper-middle class family with an entirely absent period of adolescent rebellion that has enjoyed the opportunity of a world class graduate education with international experience, surrounded by a widely selfless, encouraging, and loyal network of friends and mentors, and now enjoying a professional career in an affluent liberal city while stereotypically drinking my french-pressed coffee, listening to NPR, reading high brow periodicals, while having the luxury to think and blog about big thoughts like the one I’m writing about right now?

Throughout my life, I have continually self-selected myself to be around like minded peers — whether in school, in my social life, or in my professional life. In such a context…

Am I even capable of having a radical belief?

Smarter power. Smarter cities. Smarter traffic. Smart computing. Smarter healthcare.

I find them dynamic. Unabashedly diverse and global. These ads deeply resonate with me. I think “hey, that’s what I want to do!” It makes me excited at the promise the future holds, especially because my experiences over the last couple of years – immersed in a community of entrepreneurs and scholars who are keenly aware of the intersection of technology and society – makes me aware that this indeed is the future. At least, it’s the future we must strive towards if we are to achieve a better planet for ourselves and for our children.

Once again, the push emphasizes again the role that IBM seeks in this new, meta-knowledge economy. A decade of intense development of information technology infrastructure has put elements of our world into play for advances in innovation that was merely a dream 20 years ago. The realization of Moore’s Law, the ubiquity of connectivity, and the software to manage and harness vast amounts of information have made a smarter planet possible, but not a guarantee. It’s up to business, communities, governments, and ultimately ourselves to deliver on its promise.

I don’t have the skills yet to play the role I desire. But I’m learning them. When the opportunity comes, I aim to be ready for it.

The visit was wonderful, as expected. I took Friday and Monday off work to make the most of the moment. Mom had all the best food lined up waiting to go, we spent time together as a family, and I got to see some of my closest friends again.

On Saturday the family dressed up in our “Sunday best” and took some family photos. They came out rather nice!

Mother and daughter.

I also took iLife’s PhotoBooth application for a spin with Ba and the family. I must say…I don’t think I’ve ever seen them so excited and happy using a piece of software as PhotoBooth. Tip of the hat to Apple. Check out the goofy pictures here. Some are quite funny, others reveal the true horrors within.

I also took a moment to get Sapana up and running on her actual domain (www.sapanavora.com), after chiding her for not sharing more of her adventures and experiences in Chicago. She showed a photo of her with Jesse Jackson, gorgeous night-time photos of the Chicago skyline, visits to shows and baseball games, and amusing anecdotes about her lab and school. She promises now to be more active in blogging.

I was hoping to visit the State Fair, but weather wasn’t cooperating on Sunday so deep-fried Snickers bar will have to wait at least another year (sorry Eli in Spain). Scary fact: The Economist wrote about deep fried butter at a (Texas) state fair in a recent issue. An ominous sign to be sure, regardless whether it’s about America’s health or The Economist’s editorial oversight.

A quick sports update too: Panthers (surprise) actually won. NC State (no surprise) lost.  It’s been such a futile, spirit-crushing effort to watch this Wolfpack team this year. I blame it squarely on the defense and the receiving corps. Russell Wilson looks to be the only one on offense playing like he wants to win, but he can’t do it alone. He was given great protection by the o-line. The receiving corps were dropping open passes in the season opener, and they are still dropping open passes now. And don’t even get me started on the obscene mediocrity of the defense. It’s an utter disgrace. What’s more maddening about the situation is that Russell Wilson is a baseball player, and he’s the only one on the football team that seems to care! As my friend Mike said: “at the end of each game, the whole team should apologize to Russell Wilson for sucking so much.” Put RW on the bench so we don’t ruin his baseball career with a freak injury. Let’s get Mike Glennon a lot of snaps and start re-building for next year – right now. My roommate Troy must be happy though; his Georgia Tech team persevered over #4 Virginia Tech, and then his Falcons destroyed the 49ers. Chargers are playing the Broncos for Monday Night Football as I type this (on the airplane), and I really hope Philip Rivers can spoil Denver’s perfect season so I can poke fun at my buddy Birschbach. You know how we NC people like to jaw, right Chris?

Update: The Broncos beat the Chargers. Good game, Chris. :)

A live band called M88 from LA was playing in the amphitheater, and we all enjoyed a fine autumn evening on the lawn.

Dan seeks enlightenment at the Infinite Loop….

Sara is cameraphobic, and violently so!

This song, from an NPR concert in 2007, prompted these thoughts and feelings.

Iron & Wine – Upward Over the Mountain

Mother don’t worry, I killed the last snake that lived in the creek bed
Mother don’t worry, I’ve got some money I saved for the weekend
Mother remember being so stern with that girl who was with me
Mother remember the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons are like birds flying upwards over the mountain

Mother I made it up from the bruise on the floor of this prison
Mother I lost it all of the fear of the Lord I was given
Mother forget me now that the creek drank the cradle you sang to
Mother forgive me I sold your car for the shoes that I gave you

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons can be birds taken broken up to the mountain

Mother don’t worry I’ve got a coat and some friends on the corner
Mother don’t worry she’s got a garden we’re planting together
Mother remember the night that the dog had her pups in the pantry
Blood on the floor and the fleas in their paws
And you cried ’til the morning

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons are like birds flying always over the mountain

I just can’t comprehend how mothers do it.

It’s astonishing.

I’ve never attended a golf tournament before, but this sounds like an exciting one to see!

Me: “What’s that master alarm there?”
Dan: “Well, it’s not a main bus B undervolt.”

I love my colleagues here.

I heard  two older songs I hadn’t heard much before — Upward Over the Mountain (around the 53:10 minute mark with an amazing jam at around 57:30) and Jezebel (around the 59:50  minute mark). Excited, I found them on albums and felt that the versions I had heard in the concert sounded better (I learned later that these were deliberate reimaginations). I later listened to an NPR concert of Passion Pit, to mixed results. Which of course leads to the question:

Q: Are there bands or musical artists you prefer hearing their studio sound over their live show? Vice versa?

One thing I’ve noticed is that a significant portion of my preferred music has been carefully produced and assembled in the studio in order to get the sound that I like. Others, like Nader especially, prefer the lo-fi taped-in-a-garage-on-a-single-track type sound. That being said, I almost universally prefer the sound of Dave Matthews Band in concert rather than the studio. And I vividly remember while attending a Decemberists concert in Raleigh three years ago, I felt like I was hearing some of the songs for the first time. And I know Sachi and Sapana rave about the live Nickel Creek shows. But even still, as exhilarating it was to see Sigur Rós live, if you talk about pure music quality their studio albums win out. What say you?

But you can actually change the page size, orientation, and margins from page to page inside a single Word file, like so:

click to enlarge

This doc has a letter landscape mode, letter portrait mode, followed by two tabloid sized (11″ x 17″) portrait pages with small margins for some large Excel charts, then a tabloid landscape mode for another wide chart. To do this, go to the Page Layout tab and insert a Next Page Section Break (this is different than a normal page break). Word lets you divide your doc into different sections that can be independently formatted. Modify your page size and layout, but be sure to close the section by inserting another Next Page Section Break and resume your normal formatting. Note — when using my CutePDF printer it prints the PDF in whatever page size that the doc shows, so it looks fine electronically. I don’t guarantee the same results if you try sending that to a normal paper printer.

I spotted a fall-themed potato salad recipe on Mark Bitten’s The Minimalist column in the NY Times. Instead of normal potatoes and lots of mayo, this recipe showcased roasted sweet potatoes, black beans, and a southwest style dressing of lime juice and minced jalapeno and a healthy helping of cilantro.

I’ve actually never cooked with sweet potatoes before, but they are quite nice. Bitten’s recipe showed them being orange-ish on the inside, but mine were more white. But I roasted the cubed sweet potatoes with chopped red onions on a cooking sheet drizzled with some oil, then made the dressing with some olive oil, juice of a few limes, minced jalapenos and garlic, salt + pepper, then mixed all together with chopped bell pepper and a can of black beans.

I combined this with some homemade guacamole (I’m such a sucker for guacamole), and spent the day watching college football with my housemate Troy, who is equally obsessed with college football.

We also had these freakishly large mutant seedless grapes.

These took on a new form of finger food. They’d take two bites to eat. Pretty cool. And red grapes are far superior to green grapes.

Back in late August, as I was preparing for the formal interviews at Apple, I chatted with my friend Melih, who also been thinking some big thoughts recently, as he is profoundly apt to do. He gave me an interview practice question:

“Where do you want to be in 5 years?”

We’ve all heard it before, and I started to take a step back to let the question roll around in my head. After all, this was a confusing time. Freshly minted graduate degree from one of the finest institutions in the world in my hand, an inner understanding that there is so much more to learn about, and torn between career paths and opportunities. So I parried.

“With the way that question is phrased, there is almost an implicit assumption of ‘progress’.”

What does ‘where’ refer to? A position on an org chart? Geographically in the world? Where along in a relationship? Where along in starting a family?  Perhaps its natural for us to figuratively map these factors onto the common progressions of the general order of life, and judge, like horses along a race track.

“It’s interesting — a form of that question is semantically intended to mean one thing, but the question is unintentionally tinted depending on what specific word is used. There’s the common “what do you want to be in 5 years?”, but consider the question “how do you want to be in 5 years?” How might one’s answer change? Or more intriguingly: “why do you want to be in 5 years?”

So I took a shot.

Where do you want to be in 5 years?

• Career — an influential person in a small-ish company, ideally in the greentech sector or similar.
• Location — not sure. Bay Area still? Too early to tell.
• Relationship — Ideally, married. Or at least engaged.
• Family — couple years away? Too early to tell.

What do you want to be in 5 years?

• An entrepreneur or professional engaged in the greentech/cleantech field, ideally.
• A person who gives back — to family, to friends, to the community, to society.

I don’t put words like ’successful’ or ‘respected’ or ‘rich’ here, because if I stay true to my core values, then these will come — and they’ll come from the people that matter to me.

How do you want to be in 5 years?

• Happy during the week, happy on the weekends. Excited at work, excited at home.
• Curious. Without curiosity, the world becomes a boring place.
• Motivated (or is ‘determined’ a better word?). As years go by, one can lose energy or start settling for compromises. Retaining the motivation and determination to continue to improve (at work, at home, at relationships, in society, in the world) is important. I don’t want to lose sight of that.

Why do you want to be in 5 years?

• So I can help the people I care about — hospitality, advice, career, a shoulder to lean on. If I’m gone, I can’t do that.
• To help move the ball forward in solving the problems the world is facing today. Whether it’s technological, political, or social problems; whether it’s in my backyard or halfway around the world. I believe I’m capable of playing a role in these endeavors, and I want to an opportunity to contribute.
• Because if I want to honor everything my family and friends have done for me, I’m going to need a lot more than 5 years!

So there’s my response. Let’s see how these change over the years. Thanks for reading.

Q: What song(s) do you purposefully not listen to? Why not?

For me it’s Radiohead’s Street Spirit (Fade Out) off their album The Bends. And this isn’t just because I don’t like that album compared to their later stuff, but I will go out of my way to avoid listening to that song. I’ll credit Donny and his friends Chris and Kris for this. It was the summer of 2006, and I was driving up to Philadelphia from my research stint at the University of Maryland to meet up with Donny and his New Jersey friends to attend my first Radiohead concert. On the drive up I listened to all the Radiohead albums, starting with the Bends.

The concert was great. The moments after it, not so much. See, during the show I happened to be standing next to a rather large-ish fellow who became belligerent after I told him we’d discuss how to share our photos/videos after the concert ends, rather than discuss the details during the songs. He started acting like a jerk after it ended, and to my admiration Donny’s friends immediately stuck up for me as if I were one of their own. The guy and his thuggish entourage caught the attention of some of the security guards, and we made it off into the pouring rain.

Soaking wet over greasy pizza and fine beer at a hole-in-the-wall joint near Donny’s apartment, the song Street Spirit (Fade Out) came up as a song of bad omen for Donny, Chris, and Kris. Each accounted their own stories of ill happenings. Finally,  I said: “You know, I listened to the Bends on my way up here. Including that song. And then this guy gets all in my face.” They looked me, nodding gravely.

So since the summer of 2006, I have never listened to that song again.

In other music news, I was tinkering around with the ‘Genius’ playlist generator in iTunes, which creates a playlist of songs from your music library that “sound great together.” I particularly enjoyed one of them which was seeded by Iron & Wine’s The Trapeze Swinger, and I invite you to listen to the playlist here. It’s mellow-ish, the ideal kind of music I prefer when studying or needing to focus on work. I hope you enjoy it.

I got the tickets off Craiglist and printed them out via an electronic ticket “relay” that is run by the Giants site, which looked pretty legit. When the gate agent scanned Krupali’s ticket, it flashed green but he didn’t see it, so he scanned it again and of course it showed it had already been tagged. We headed over to the ’special issues’ line and tried it again, same story. Krupali nudged me try my ticket, and it worked. We told that agent what happened, and he just told Krupali to duck under the turnstile. Score.

The seats were in the lower level by 3rd base, but kinda far under the overhang (I got the tickets that afternoon). It’s a nice ballpark.

We caught up with things, had a veggie hot dog (hey, it’s San Francisco), and I even got to see the Big Unit come out at the end to close for the Giants. The game was brisk too — the Giants had zero offense, and scored no runs.

After the game ended, we walked a few blocks north of the ball park to eat a great Thai restaurant recommended by Karthik, one of Krupali’s friends who is working at VMWare and living up in SF. I had met Karthik on Krupali’s last visit to SF, at the Wine Bar in SOMA. The three of us caught a late dinner (the food was excellent) and had a wide ranging conversation. iPhones were out for a lot of it, as Karthik was showing off a new camera app he got (he’s an excellent photographer). Krupali and I also tried out the ‘Bump’ app, where both users activate it then do a fist bump to wireless send their contact info over. Neato!

I was meaning to meet up finally with Melih, but I let the night get away from me. Another weekend Melih, another weekend. Now, I need to make a trip down south to visit Krupali in LA since she’s visited the Bay Area three times already.

Despite being a fun game, I felt like turning it off by halftime. Why? Because its not enjoyable to be bludgeoned to death by repetitive advertisements. I kept track of the online video advertisements shown to me during the 3 (three) hours that I had the video feed going:

Over 3 hours of primetime television to a user in the lucrative college educated, professional, 18-to-45 male demographic, I was shown 44 minutes of advertising and witnessed only 7 unique advertisements. Actually 5 if you don’t count NBC’s previews for the winter Olympics. I saw  the same Visa advertisement 30 times, often twice in the same commercial break. And I’ve now completely internalized the fact that Gillette can make me play like Tiger Woods, land the business deal, and score babes.

The problem? I’ve had a VISA credit card for nearly 6 years. I was a Sprint customer for 8 years before only recently switching to AT&T, for a good reason. I’m a vegetarian, so being told 15 times that Subway has a new chicken sandwich doesn’t do it for me. They had a lucrative demographic engaged to their site for 3 primetime viewing hours, and they utterly failed in providing their advertisers a return on investment.

What’s inexplicable to me is that we’re talking about the two of the biggest brands in America — the NFL and NBC. Using YouTube’s popularity as a benchmark, online video has been a ‘big deal’ for the past 3 years. The idea of online advertising has been around for over a decade. While TV represents ‘dumb’ advertising outlets that couldn’t tell advertisers who exactly they were reaching, the Internets can tell them a lot of information — even basic info like how long I’ve uniquely been watching your video feed. After all this, the concept of a “If User has seen Advertisement A more than N times, Show User Advertisement B”  seems to fail them? I often feel that I’m at  point where I’d rather just tell an advertising network what things I’m interested in, and suffer through somewhat interesting and relevant commercials rather than wanting to hammer thumbtacks into my eyes (although honestly, this year’s sports announcing crews are making that a more desirable experience anyway).

It’s no wonder then that there are a lot of online video advertising startups. It’s still amazing to me how these two huge brands can fail so spectacularly, especially since they were able to put together such a compelling online video product. Let’s see what happens next week.

Join in on the conversation on TokBox! Would love to hear your thoughts.

Came down feeling pretty ill yesterday, did some (involuntarily) fasting since then. Not sure what it is, but it sucks. Had to cancel plans. On the flip side, I came back to my office today to find a new MacBook Pro on my desk. Shiny! Really folks, it’s too much.

Q: Imagine being given the chance to direct a music video of your choosing. You have full creative direction, you can bring on any director you want and can work with any band. What song(s) would you want to make a music video for?

I ask because on the drive to work each morning, I think about how I’d shoot a video for Fold in Your Hands by Passion Pit. Can’t get enough of that song right now.

And at the risk of sounding like a broken record (see what i did there?), I’ll bring up one other thing I like about Passion Pit — the depth of their lyrics and how they’re able to wrap them in a candy coated indie pop veneer. Consider Eyes as My Candles.

Lyrics excerpt:

Some unguarded room:
a smoky figure fills me full,
makes my head swell in ruin.
My family kneels at the pew,
They nod, “We believe in what you’re doing!”
I feel it rise above me,
the western landscape’s towering,
and from my shell of a body
the flowers blossom for picking.

Why do I always need to need you when you’re fleeing?
Where do you go when I’m around?
What have I done, what have I got that’s so defeating?
And have the nerve to wear the crown?

Oh, na na na na na na, hey! hey! hey! (x4)

I’ve waited and waited for someone to take it.
Don’t fight it, don’t bother an inch for another.
Don’t listen, don’t hear them, they’re in this together.
I’ve learned well, now hear me, there’s much to be fearing.
I’m used to your absence, your faceless distraction.
I’ve painted your patterns but found them attractive.
Now I’ve been leaning towards a life far more candid,
though lead through the dark with your eyes as my candles,
and your life, and my life’s directions can render.
And all of a sudden you left me to handle
the reasons that never forbid me to step out.
And somehow or somewhere I found out the secret -
To say it alive without actually breathing.

Maybe I’m just thinking about it to hard, but I just find it so intriguing. The interweaving voices in the last stanza, the children’s voices in the background connotating the blissful ignorance of childhood, the challenging tone of the words itself. Makes me think that if you substitute the pop for folk, you’d have a Sufjan Stevens-esque song. Pretty great.

Don’t forget to answer the question at the top!

Shiny! All thanks to my parents, who tackled the Sprint folks to knock down the early termination fee…or else this would have come in March. Thanks Mom and Dad. One less thing my co-workers can make fun of me with…

As I stopped by his office this week, he offered an insightful re-framing of the idea of a ‘progress report’, an otherwise standard part of any team endeavor. Members of high performing teams typically have multiple on-going parallel projects and tasks. Prioritization of these tasks is crucial skill, but the awareness shift is that with high performing teams it is assumed that any given task will be completed, it’s simply a matter of when. So rather than provide extensive updates on the progress you’ve made on a given task, Joseph is more interested in what tasks are you’ve not made progress on.

It’s a good point, and it’s not intended to be critical either. There are only so many hours in a day, and it’s appropriate for some tasks to be delayed. Most team meetings begin by going ‘around the horn’, with people explaining what they’ve done since the last meeting. Positive news travels fast, bad news travels slow. It’s easier for us to talk about the things we’ve made progress on. But by immediately getting to the things not being addressed, a manager can more quickly begin to assess the prioritization of tasks and start to re-allocate resources.

• I’ve moved out of the wonderful Rains on-campus apartments over to a house about 1.5 miles away in Menlo Park. I’m living with two roommates, both who graduated with Master’s in computer science (focus in human computer interaction) from Stanford. Troy, who has been living in the house for a year, went to Georgia Tech undergrad. He was TAing the iPhone development class at Stanford, is working on his own iPhone app (which looks amazing, can’t wait until it’s out!), and is the one writing an iPhone development book too. Great guy. To other housemate is Michael, who lived across from me in Rains and interned in the iPod software team last summer. He’s interning at Box.net heading up their mobile applications suite — hopefully it’ll turn into a fulltime position soon. I’ve updated the contact info to reflect the new address.
• I’ve got a Google Voice number: (650) 453-VORA (VORA = 8672). It’s a Palo Alto area code. It’s just pointing to voicemail, but any voicemail gets speech-to-text processed then emailed to me. Just for fun right now.
• Since joining Apple, I’ll be using a Mac more and more as a full-time computer. Still got my 2 year old ThinkPad though, but need to get a new keyboard for it before it’s back in top form. It was neat, I was talking to Sara (one of Joseph’s interns this fall term) yesterday and she actually said that ThinkPads were her favorite computer.
• I’m trying to see the best route to getting an iPhone. My Sprint contract is due up at the end of March, but I’d really like to get one soon. There’s a termination fee involved that I’d rather want to avoid paying. It almost seems inevitable now.
• My grandmother is visiting soon from India, and there’s going to be a family reunion around mid-to-late October back in Cary to celebrate Diwali, the Indian end of the year/new year festivities.
• Currently begin seriously researching places to live in San Francisco. More on that later.

So then in July my manager from Apple, Joseph, opened up the possibility of coming back to Apple. I have a great relationship with him — he’s also an NC State grad, really interested in green building design and energy efficiency (currently designing his new home in Santa Cruz), and he understands that I have interests in startups and greentech. He and his manager liked the work I did last summer, and felt that I could add value to their team and that I can learn a lot from them. The more I thought about it, the more it started to make sense. And I sought advice and perspective from my network out here, and there was an overwhelming positive reaction to the offer. It is such an unusual group of people to work with — I spoke with people there who have worked at both big companies and startups and they saw their group as one with a spirit and mentality of a startup but with the resources of a big company. The teams are cross-functional, meaning I get to see all aspects of a product cycle and maybe even a trip over to China too.

But here’s the last thing: I loved coming to work everyday last summer to work with this team. And I’m realizing that finding a work environment that you truly enjoy isn’t as commonplace as it should be.

This is going to be a great experience, and an important one that continues to develop my skills and also build up some financial resources to set out of my own in the near future. I’m not sure now how long it’ll last…there is so much to learn. Don’t worry — I’m still keeping the networks going with energy stuff and all my other interests. I appreciate all the support.

After spending the previous day in Raleigh, I ended up heading back there for the college football home opener game, NC State vs. South Carolina. Mike and I headed to Chubby Tacos to meet up with Ben for dinner, where we watched the kickoff and the 1st quarter. Then we hopped over to Snookers where Jordan, Greg, and Kelly were playing as part of their pool league. Jordan and Greg had made it into a tournament, but it was amusing to see Jordan’s Red Hat books sprawled across a table and him tapping away at a terminal between turns, as he had a major exam the following day.

The game was — is it a surprise? — an embarrassment as NC State played lackluster offense for the game. It was uninspiring, not fitting for being host to ESPN’s College Gameday Kickoff on primetime TV. Oh well, our defense actually held up better than I had expected, so we’ll prep for next week.

Next couple of days were spent at home with the parents; I met up with Megha at Goodberry’s on Saturday night to catch up — she’s headed to South Korea on a English language teaching program. She was excited to learn that the Korean alphabet makes sense to someone who knows Gujarati and Megha has been a big fan of Korean TV for years now. Her accent is impeccable, and even struck up a brief conversation with a Korean family at Goodberry’s….in Korean.

On Sunday morning I headed into Chapel Hill to Naman’s house, where I met up with friends Derek and Pavak. Mike joined and we headed over a nearby middle school for a nice game of ultimate frisbee with a bunch of Naman’s friends and friends of friends from UNC med school and graduate school. Met a lot of people for the first time (like Kamal, Sapana’s friend who has a huge crush on Carl Kasell from Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me) and afterward we all gathered back at Naman’s house for Sunday brunch. What a bustling lively crowd — people moving about cooking over a dozen dishes, the kitchen table covered with goodies, etc. Really nice way to spend a Sunday morning; I’m jealous.

Last full day in Cary! The whole family made one last trip to Goodberry’s with Mike and Naman joining us, then I did some packing for my 7am flight back to the Bay. What a fulfilling a trip this was. Makes me truly appreciate what astonishingly great people I have the pleasure of calling friends.