blue angels rock!

It's Fleet Week in San Francisco and the Navy put on one awesome airshow!

The US Navy Blue Angels and the Candian Snowbirds were the two highlights of the show. I brought the Canon EOS-1Ds with me and took some awesome photos.


The Blue Angels flying over the Golden Gate Bridge


Upside-down


Flying in Diamond Formation


The Canadian Snowbirds flying over Alcatraz

moonlight run

Today's mileage: 6.3 mi. (10 km)
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 129.2 mi. (SL: 22.9 mi.)
Course: Palo Alto Moonlight Run 10k

Talk about an impulse race: I found out about the Palo Alto Moonlight 10K Run in the morning and signed up for it that evening. And I actually ran the full 10 km.

The run was great. The only light on the course was from the full moon, and it's quite satisfying to run with 500 other people who are equally as crazy as you are to run on a dark course on the side of the San Francisco Bay in the middle of the night.

run log

Today's mileage: 2.0 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 122.9 mi. (SL: 16.6 mi.)
Course: Bootcamp Run up Vista Hill

cooking craze

One thing I learned tonight: the key to peparing a good multi-course meal is to have everything at the right place at the right time.

I went to a cooking school with 30 other colleagues from work at Emiles where chef Emile Mooser taught us how to prepare a delicious dinner (which took 4 hours to make!).


Chef Emile Mooser demonstrating how to despoon an orange

Cooking is all about organization and making sure that you have each dish prepared at the right time. It's all about making sure that the sauce is hot and fresh right as the gnocchi comes out of the boiling water, and that the shrimp are pealed and ready to for baking as the risotto cakes begin to cool.

Being the master chef is like conducting a orchestra: every muscian has to be in sync and play at the right time or else you get a disaster.

yosemite memories

We made it to the top of Half Dome and back. Some great memories:



5am wake up call, 6am departure, 7am eager and excited start at the trailhead. Making it up the mountain and admiring scenery that you can't find anywhere else.



Reaching the base and looking at the cables, wondering how we could make it to the top.



Getting to the summit and realizing you're at the edge of the world.



And collasping shortly afterwards from exhaustion.



But best of all, having great friends who are crazy enough to hike up with you, and who share the soreness and pain with you the day afterwards.


(L to R: Wesley, Mike, Brian & Josh at the summit)

half dome adventure

I'm off to Yosemite to summit Half Dome. We'll be waking up at 5am tomorrow to start a 17 mile hike (4800 ft. elevation gain) that will take us to the top of Half Dome and back.

I tried to summit Half Dome last year but was thwarted by a thunderstorm that hit right as I was on the cables. After two hours, when the storm wouldn't relent, we headed back without ever making it the last 200 feet to the top of the dome. (I was really pissed.)

The weather forecast predicts sunny weather with highs in the mid 70s, so tomorrow should be a blast.

photo printer

I just purchased a Canon i9100 photo printer. It's Canon's most expensive inkjet photo printer, and the prints I've made are absoultely stunning. I compared two 8x10 prints--one from the inkjet and the other printed on silver-halide photo paper--and couldn't tell the difference.

I finally have something I can use to print out some of the over 6GB of photos I have taken over the past couple of years. Now if only I had some frames...

run log

Today's mileage: 2.5 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 120.9 mi. (SL: 14.6 mi.)
Course: Bootcamp Workout Course
Calories Burned: 841

World Cup

My good friend Stan Hu moonlights as photojournalist at night and on weekends. (By day, he's a crack software engineer writing code that any MIT-educated developer would be jealous of).

He just got accredited to take photos of the 2003 World Cup and his pictures are simply amazing. I predict that it's a matter of months before he decides to change careers and take on photojournalism as his main gig.


Victoria Svensson celebrates as Brazil's goalkeeper Andreia can't make this save on a shot by Malin Andersson
Photo courtesy of Stan Hu of accelphoto.com