After a full year of desire to go to Yosemite, I finally made it out with Hourann, Shaon, and (partially) Zack last weekend.
The scoop:
This video probably says it all:
In 2009, I put up a tutorial on youtube on how to stitch a gigapixel image. Aside from the fact that the tutorial was really cheesy and that I never actually finished it, the image in the tutorial was of the beautiful lake Tahoe.
Now, almost three years later, I finally made it out to Tahoe with Tim McKague, Sally Lee, and Sean Dy. Stanley Chan, whom I worked with at TellApart last Summer, also managed to join us for about half the trip. We all went to Squaw Valley to ski and snowboard for the entire weekend.
My track in Winter sports isn’t really the best. I have only went skiing twice before then and performed so poorly that strangers were yelling at me telling me that I “completely suck”. Nevertheless, I decided the “bite the bullet” and see how things go.
On Saturday, the first day of skiing, I think I fell ~50 times. Everyone helped in instructing me, especially Stan. I think Stan was bored enough that he decided to document my struggle. Like this one:
And this one:
On the second day though, I felt a lot of improvement and I didn’t fall nearly as often. I managed to join Tim and Sean on their skiing/snowboarding adventures. Sally decided to snowboard for her first time that day and was left to struggle for the rest of the day on the green hills. I guess Winter sports aren’t that bad after all.
So the past few weeks have been quite hectic, having to relocate from the far East (Singapore) to the far West (California) along with starting my internship at TellApart.
Within a span of eight days, I surfed through six cities in five flights over four continents. Here’s the timeline:
My one week visit to Egypt marks my first visit after the January 25th revolution. Traces of the revolution are certainly visible everywhere you go – stickers on street carts saying “January 25″, spray painting on walls and bridges denouncing Mubarak and his regime and barbed wires around the Maspiro Television building. There was also a protest to express solidarity with Palestine in Tahrir square on Friday, May 13th. Hopefully political and economical improvement would be as visible in the near future.
For the first ten days in California I stayed at USA Hostels near the Civic Center in San Francisco. The commute time to work was around 75 minutes. One of the weekends the hostel was fully booked and didn’t have room to accommodate me. Thankfully, Stan Chen, my workmate, let me stay over at his place then. I have now settled in a house a few blocks away from work.
I am really enjoying my work at TellApart so far. In many ways it was exactly what I was aiming for this work term. It’s a great mixture of really smart people to work with, a startup environment, and serious scalability issues to deal with.
Aside from that, I really don’t know what else to say. In fact, I have no idea why I am writing this post right now. Off to bed.