Occasionally Interesting, often not

World of Goo: A++ Quantum of Solace: A Mantra restaurant, Palo Alto: B+ Skyline Chestnuts: A+ Fort Point, San Francisco: A- Flower Drum Song (2002 version): A Kahoo, Cupertino: A-

Haven't been whitewater rafting in quite some time, so took the opportunity to take a newbie to experience it. Late summer flow on the South Fork of the American River. I went with Whitewater Voyages, through which I went on the Middle Fork for my 1st trip). We had a cool guide, Sam, and 3 other strong guys to make a boat of 5 + Sam. Apparantly, we got lucky, in that the day before, they had run 20 boats, whereas this day, there was only us, and another boat being run by another guide for her family. This was especially lucky because they're not allowed to run a single boat. With the rapids fairly mellow, we ran all of them through the gnarliest parts of them, getting stuck a couple of times, and wet lots of times. I actually got bumped out on the 1st set of rapids and had to swim back to the boat. It was a bit cold until I dried off. Later in the run, after lunch, it was warmer without the wind of the 1st part. We did some tricks that I hadn't seen done before, for example...

Finally tracked down some statistics on homicides in the SF Bay area as a whole. As previously stated, Hong Kong, a city of 8m, has roughly the same population as the Bay area, and a homicide total of about 50 murders per year. In 2007, the 11 cities in the aqrea with populations over 100k, had approx 350 people murdered. In comparison to NYC, which had approx 500 murders in 2007 (out of 19.7m population) So in terms of population, the murder rate in the Bay Area (1/23k) is higher than in NYC (1/40k) by almost twice! And of course, much more dangerous (7x) than HK (1/160k) Yikes.

I was at the 4th/Harrison Whole Foods yesterday. At the checkout line, I was following a guy with a cart of San Pelligrino water (3 or 4 cases: $77!). The checkout person asked him "Do you want some help with that?", probably expecting, given that this dude is maybe 40, 6'3, looks quite in shape, for him to say "no", but instead, he says "yes", and we get the spectacle of a 5'2" woman pushing the cart for what seems to be a perfectly healthy guy. Perhaps he had some hidden incapacity, but if he had the strength to put the cases in his cart in the 1st place, he needs help pushing the cart into the elevator and unloading it into his car? Lazy, dude!

My recent trip to Beijing passed through HK. While there, I read the South China Morning Post. On one day, they posted the crime statistics for the 1st half of the year. For a city of 8 million, they had a grand total of 23 murders. For comparison, San Francisco, with 1/10th the population, the toll was 57 for the period ending June 30. The Bay Area as a whole is perhaps 8 million. I have no idea what the homicide statistics are for the whole area. I mean, there are much safer towns, but then there's Oakland, San Leandro. I hope that it's not 100 times!

My father was invited to the graduation ceremony of the BUPT and QMUL Joint Program, to receive an honorary fellowship from QMUL. My mother, who up until now has been the only one to accompany my father on these sorts of trips, thought it would be nice to have a holiday from my father, and suggested that I chaparone him. We flew to HKG to pick up a visa for my father, and then onto Beijing. It was very hot, and very hazy. We were picked up by a driver and whisked to the hotel, on the northern outskirts of the city (beyond the 6th ring road). The hotel is relatively near the BUPT campus, and was the site of the graduation ceremony. That night, we had our first banquet, and there were many more fine meals through the course of the stay. These meals were the highlight of my trip -- exquisite taste, excellent preparation and presentation, and top quality ingredients. The meals were primarily at the hotel itself, which obviously has a great kitchen, with one outing to a neighborhood restaur...

Hot, hot, hot. Travelled to NYC on the 1st hot weekend of the year. It was a fun packed long weekend. Arrived on the red-eye at 7am, arrived at the hotel at 9am hoping that they could get us a room early. They did! So we slept until 2pm. This wasn't a big deal because we were going to stay on California time for the trip, so this was equivalent to sleeping until 11am. Took the subway down to Washington Square and had lunch at Otto, then walked south to Soho, sitting for a while in Washington Square park to listen to some jazz, and then to the outskirts of Chinatown to buy a keyring (found one marked 6 for $10, tried to get one for $1.50; he said 2 for $3, but otherwise wouldn't move, so moved on. Several stores later, found not quite what I was looking for, but getting tired of looking by this time, so got one for $1.25. Then on the way to the subway station, saw exactly what I wanted (which was the same style as the 1st place): $1. So bought that too. After that, took the subw...

Might as well put this up because I had a bit of a time finding info on this. The question is, how do you make a large ramdisk on linux (specifically for me, Red Hat Enterprise 4). Took a combination of other people's posts to put it together. The basics are: 1. Edit /etc/grub.conf to add ramdisk_size = xxx (in kb) at the end of the 'kernal' line. I wanted to get a 1G ramdisk, so: ramdisk_size = 1000000 2. Reboot. 3. Double check things are ok: dmesg | grep RAMDISK 4. Then format the disk. I want the whole 1G in one disk. And here's the little tidbit. Apparantly, the default behavior for mke2fs is to create block sizes of 1024 for ramdisk sizes "wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1, or too many mounted file systems" when you try to mount your ramdisk. So you need to do this: mke2fs -b 1024 -m 0 /dev/ram0 (-m is optional; use if you don't want space reserved for root user) 5. Now you can mount the ramdisk: mount /dev/ram0 /var/mountpoint 6...

In Dec 2004, I went on a liveaboard cruise to the Similans, off the coast of western Thailand. You may immediately be thinking about the tidal wave, and in fact, I left Phuket 36 hrs before the event. Didn't bring a camera, so no pictures... I booked a last minute berth on the Rhapsody though Siam Dive 'n Sail , who were very helpful and quickly responded to emails. I was also somewhat interested in the Le Mahe, since it was quite a bit cheaper, and was told there was a space available. Then I was told that I would have to share with a female, and they'd have to write to her to get her ok. Then they told me that actually, sharing would involve sharing the bed! They didn't think that she'd be agreeable to that... So I ended up on the Rhapsody, which was actually my first choice because it had fewer passengers (8 vs the 12 of Le Mahe), and as it turned out, I still shared a cabin with a woman, but it was a bunk-bed cabin. I arrived in Phuket in the early afternoon and...

I'm going to try and consolidate trip reports that are on a different site to here, so following are a few posts of trips gone by. First up, a scuba diving trip to the Similans, in Thailand.

Having a gps unit is useful on this hike ... the permit comes with a set of photos showing what you see from 6 waypoints, and serve well to direct you, but coming back is another story. Part of the way, there's a definite landmark, but the route to the 1st saddle is not that clear at all, and in fact, going by feel, we went off course and had to correct with the gps. Not helping much, if you were going by feel was a cairn that was in the wrong place! (i.e. we were on track to the proper point, and could see cairns marking that point, but there was a cairn way to our right). Anyway, except for this caveat, it was an uneventful trek back to the car. The reverse stream crossing was easier, though still a bit anxiety provoking. We were originally planning to go back to Las Vegas via Zion National Park the next day, but because of all the mud on the car (caked inside the wheelwells), we decided that because time would be tight, and it wouldn't be a great idea to take the car back wi...

This past weekend (1st weekend in March), went to hike the famous Wave in Arizona, by way of Las Vegas. It was a very interesting trip, and the formation must be seen in person, if you can get a permit. For myself, I actually didn't know about the Wave until I read an article about it in the latimes.com travel section. They mentioned that one can apply for the permit lottery online, 4 months in advance. So I applied for some dates, and got March 1. The drive from Vegas to Kanab, UT, which is the closest accomodations, is quite an interesting drive. The drive to Kanab was done at night though, so we only saw the magnificent scenery on the return trip. For instance, where I15 goes through the Virgin River Gorge, and the red bluffs on the way from Hurricane to Kanab (and the peeks of Zion on the horizon). There isn't too much to say about Kanab, except that it serves as a decent base for travelling in the area. We stayed at the Quail Park Lodge, which from the outside is a very no...

It's been a while ... funny, but blogging hasn't been a very high priority; or perhaps that I haven't got into the habit of it yet. Well, no time like the present to start again, but I'm thinking that this blog is going to be more episodic than stream of conciousness. For instance, the next post.