Every weekend at BroHaus (the house I live at with other TAMSters and friends) is packed with activities. Last weekend, we spend Saturday and Sunday at Berkeley.

On Saturday morning, we all packed into Jason’s car and made the one hour trip up to Berkeley. We met up with other 2007 TAMSters and Katherine (one of John and Paul’s classmates from Berkeley) at La Note for brunch.

I had ratatouille with a poached egg and cheese on top.

It was delicious. ^^

We then headed over to a board game store called Games of Berkeley, where Katherine purchased Bananagrams.

Afterwards, we drove to another section of Berkeley and browsed various shops.

We then walked to the East Bay Vivarium. A few weeks ago, my father’s student mentioned that he used to come to Berkeley to visit the reptiles at a pet store. I assumed that he just had an unusual interest in reptiles. I only realized what he was talking about when we arrived at the vivarium. It is a a pet store dedicated to selling reptiles. The place was almost a small zoo.

I guess this is the new “As Seen on TV”.

Some random shots from around Berkeley:

Paul wore Katherine’s leather jacket for a while. lol

We then headed to Paul’s apartment to hang out. It was on top of a hill, but the steep walk back and forth must be worth it because the view is amazing.

Paul, Jeffrey, Amelia and I had some fun with Paul’s huge beanbag chair.

Did I mention that the view from Paul’s apartment is amazing?

For dinner, we went to Anh Hong for do-it-yourself vietnamese spring rolls. The food was fun to make and delicious. From left to right: Me, Jason, Chuan, Amelia, Katherine, Paul, John, Dustin, Jeffrey.

Then we were off to Triple Rock Brewery and Ale House for some craft beers.

We then went back to Paul’s place to play Bananagrams. A little after midnight, we enjoying freshly made donuts at King Pin Donuts. I never appreciated how heavenly warm, soft donuts can be. After finishing off our donuts, most of BroHaus (except Jeffrey and me) returned to Palo Alto. The rest of us spent the night at Paul’s place.

In the morning, we woke up and drove to Wat Mongkolratanaram (aka Thai Temple)for Sunday lunch. Apparantly, the temple volunteers aren’t allowed to handle money. So, we had to trade dollars in for tokens, which we exchanged for food. The food was so delicious that I forgot to take pictures >.

The whole weekend Katherine talked about how she liked my storm trooper hoodie. It’s a pity there aren’t any girl sizes available.

At the end of lunch, I did manage to take a picture of the sticky rice with mango dessert.

The next stop was Indian Rock Park. The star feature of this park is a set of huge boulders that can be climbed. The top offers breathtaking views of the bay and San Francisco.

Can you see anyone hiding in the picture?

Paul did what he does best and climbed to the top of an almost vertical boulder.

I tested out the closeup “macro” of the EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6.

The last food stop of the adventure was Ici, an ice cream parlor known for its unique flavors.

I forgot to photograph the ice cream we ate, but it was amazing!! ^^. We bought one scoop each of tangerine creamsicle sorbet, raspberry plum sorbet, coconut curry candied peanut ice cream, tiramisu ice cream, and butter pistachio ice cream. My absolute favorite was the tangerine creamsicle. Before we all parted ways, we made a visit to the Goorin Brothers hat store. I think that this blue hat looks great on Amelia.

See the complete slide show:

I finally in California! Actually, I’ve been in CA for a while now. I just got around to setting up my room and getting comfortable. Here are a few pictures that I took before we set off and on the road (during the road trip to CA from TX).

A cute cardinal outside my window in Plano.

One of the amazing views we saw on along the drive.

Along the way, we stopped at a peculiar landmark, The London Bridge. As funny as it may seem, it is actually the real London Bridge. In the late 1960s, when London was going to demolish the bridge, an American bought it and had it rebuilt on Lake Havasu in Arizon. Read about it here.

The only way to cool off from the sweltering Arizona heat is to enjoy a delicious snow cone. Mine had guava and pineapple syrup with vanilla ice cream inside.

Wow this post is late. Life has been way too busy.

For about a week, I was craving corn ramen. On Monday, I couldn’t take it anymore and made some. I think it turned out pretty well. Hopefully I can try it again and use fresh noodles and homemade broth.

This is a game that a bunch of friends are writing for their game design class. They call it “Pong Revolution”

On Thursday, Chithra and I made pizza for Thanksgiving dinner. Here are all the ingredients we used.

We roasted poblano peppers on the stove. They are so tasty^^.

Here is what they looked like after roasting, peeling, and cutting.

Here is the first of many pizzas we made. It has tomatoes, basil and mozzarella.

My favorite was pizza with chipotle chilies, poblano peppers, asiago and mozzarella. Unfortunately, I only remembered to take a photo after I finished eating it -_-.

On Friday, Sean and did some exploring under Columbia.

Below are tracks that used to have coal carts transporting coal to the power house in University Hall back in the day. University Hall actually still exists, but it is now surrounded on all sides by buildings.

Some interesting graffiti:

Some really old batteries that had long ago leaked and rusted.

Does anyone know who drew these mice all over the tunnels?

An eyewash and shower station. After trying to test it, we realized that it isn’t connected. Sounds safe to me.

The famous signature wall. The first time I saw this I was pretty disappointed. I had only read about it and expected signatures from a century ago. Turns out the oldest signatures are probably from the 80s or 90s.

A lot of University Hall still has its beautiful details that builders never seem to put into buildings anymore. This brick was found in one of the deepest parts of the old power house.

Me with a huge valve of some sort.

There is a lot of unused space in university hall. I think it would make an awesome party space.

Finally the Triga Mark II, a nuclear reactor for educational purposes. It was built in the late 60s during the height of the Cold War. Unfortunately, it was never used because of financial problems and community outcry. Now it just sits dormant under the engineering building. You can read about it here, here, and here.

On Wednesday this week, everyone lined up to try the Korilla Korean taco truck. I think that it is meant to be similar to the famous LA Kogi trucks. The food wasn’t exceptional. Based, on what I read about it, Kogi seems much better.

The view out of my window at night was amazing. It was the most fog I had seen in a while.

Wednesday was also the night of EC/Wien Halloween events. In EC, suites were invited to turn their suites into a haunted house to try to win a $200 prize. Here are some highlights from them.

Friday was the Halloween potluck! All of us crowded into suite 1202 for dinner, games, and a few movies. Here is what everyone made/brought.

Me: Spinach Enchiladas
Caroline: Pumpkin Porridge
Cindy: Eggplant Parmesan
Geoffrey: Fried Rice
Vinny: Mashed Potatoes
Chris: Baked Ziti
Ryan: Chicken Pot Pie & Salmon
Sean: Pies
Jason: Drinks

Here is the food before:

Everyone circling the food like hawks:

Food afterwards:

On Saturday, Caroline and I went shopping for the last bits of our costumes. Our first stop was Macy’s. All the employees dressed up!

Along the way, we decided to stop at 2 Bros Pizza. I was amazed. The pizza was one slice for $1 or two slices and a Snapple for $2.75. They always had a line of about twenty people. To keep up with demand, they were constantly making pizzas assembly line style.

We got hungry again ^^ and stopped at K!Pizzacone. Apparently, pizza in a cone is a popular concept in Italy, Portugal, and Brazil. A pizzacone is basically a cone shaped crust with sauce and pizza toppings in it. It was delicious.

Caroline with the broccoli and mushroom pizzacone.

Along our walk around fashion district and 5th avenue, we had the chance to soak in some of New York’s architecture.

For example, the Empire State Building.

A small church nestled in between two apartment high rises.

The Flatiron building!

On Sunday, Caroline and I made Kimchi Quesadillas for brunch. The recipe is inspired by LA’s Kogi truck. Hopefully, I’ll write a post about it later.

Sunday was my first time spending Halloween in NYC! I had a blast. The night started with a sunset that I had to capture.

Phil and Helena were PB&J. Unfortunately, the pictures of them didn’t come out ):. Caroline was Coraline! She spent hours on making the key and other accessories for her Costume.

I was a Nerd Herder from the TV show Chuck.

My Nerd Herd pocket protector:

We saw some great costumes on the way to the Village Halloween Parade, including this Mad Hatter and a pack of bees. There was even a puppy dressed as a bee!

The parade was almost impossible to photograph, not only was I far away due to the huge crowd, but the lighting was horrible (it was night), and the people were moving too quickly. I am surprised that I even got any shots. The parade had many floating, glowing creatures like these snakes.

Many people were dressed as huge skeletons.

Some of them were more funny than scary.

There was even a group of people unicycles!

Even though I could barely see anything from my decent spot in the crowd, there were tons of people behind us that probably couldn’t see anything.

Phil, Helena, Caroline and I ended the night with $2 meals at Chipotle! mmmm Tacos.

Wow what a tiring week. Now for some rest and studying…

Caroline and I took an impromptu trip downtown for dinner.  I tried finding Two Boots, but somehow walked the wrong way. We decided to choose between mexican at Caliente Cab Co and vegetarian pan-asian at Soy and Sake.

We weren’t really in the mood for mexican. So, we walked into Soy and Sake. The place has pretty good ambiance. One side of the restaurant is lined with floor to ceiling windows and partial glass roof, that allow for a pretty good view of the street. The other side has a huge fish tank. The one catch is that every ten twenty minutes or so, the whole place would vibrate due to being right on top of the subway.

We ordered Roti Canai with mock chicken curry, summer roll, and Thai grilled mock chicken. The food was really good. My mouth is watering just from thinking about it.

A funny thing happened while we were eating. A chinese guy in his late 20s was sitting at a table, waiting for someone. Then, an older man, who I presume is his father, walks in. He looks at the menu. This is the dialogue (that I translated from chinese) that happens between him and the waiter:

Old guy: Vegetarian?! This is a vegetarian restaurant? Do you have meat?

Waiter: Sorry. We only have vegetarian food.

Old guy: [sounding agitated] I can’t eat at a vegetarian restaurant. Sorry. We have to go. Are there any chinese restaurants with meat around here?

It was so hard to not laugh out loud.

After dinner we went to Fat Cat, which is only a short walk away. Fat Cat is a place with a bar, live jazz, and games like ping pong, shuffle board, foosball, pool and chess. While Caroline and I were playing shuffle board, Ian, a classmate of ours walked in. We asked him what he was doing there, and he said he came to play foosball. Apparently, really good foosball players go to play every Tuesday and Friday. We ended up watching foosball for an hour or so and meeting an asian girl who is the amateur world champion. The amateur world champion! I didn’t even know that there is competitive foosball.

Wednesday was awesome. Classes were cancelled for most of us. So, we went sledding, built a fort and played all day in Riverside Park. I tried taking a lot of photos, but my camera was getting wet from the snow. Here are the few I did take.

Caroline, Sean, and Meixin trekking through the snow.

Some of the sledding slopes.

Yesterday, Sean and I made a short excursion downtown. We left around noon and got lunch at Teriyaki Boy near Times Square. The place has some decent curry and always plays J-Pop. The weather was surprisingly good yesterday. The skies were clear and my down coat was almost making me sweat. I snapped the following picture sometime after lunch. A hotdog cart was producing a lot of smoke that caught the light quite well.

Sean and I walked over to the New York Times building to check on the line for tickets to the taping of the Engadget Show, the main thing we were downtown for. It didn’t seem bad. Since we already had reserved tickets, we decided to spend the 3 hourse we had before the show to take a walk around midtown. We headed southeast. Along the way, I snapped quite a few shots of famous midtown buildings. Here is the Empire State Building:

The Chrysler Building:

The GE Building AKA 30 Rock:

The Pan Am Building. Now called the MetLife Building:

The Empire State Building again:

One First Avenue I saw a new Audi A4 and commented how the headlights look just like the ones on the R8 supercar. Right at that moment guess what Sean notices a few cars behind the Audi A4. An Audi R8.

On 1st Ave and 35th St. there was an interesting dive bar called the Pine Tree Lodge. I haven’t been there, but it has great reviews on Yelp. Maybe I’ll check it out sometime this year.

The Williamsburg Bridge from the north.

Interesting advice scribbled on a barrier in front of the construction site of the new buildings in the UN complex.

Protestors in front of the UN calling for democracy in Belarus.

An statue in front of the new UN building. Does anyone know what it is supposed to represent?

There was a huge flock of pigeons and seagulls above a parking lot on 1st ave. Weird.

A white bicycle marking where a cyclist died. It is pretty sad. Cyclists have to fight to survive in New York even though bicycles are the most practical transportation.

There is another Pinnacle in midtown! It seemed a little more run-down than the one near campus. A sad fact considering that our Pinnacle isn’t that great.

We even passed by the Harvard Club and Penn Club. They are places for alumni to hang out and stay when they are in New York. We went to see the Columbia Club, but sadly Columbia shares Princeton’s crappy club. Columbia actually used to have its own club, but sold it in the 70s for financial reasons.

Then finally we arrived back at the New York Times building around 4:00pm for the show. It turned out that there were still many tickets left. So, our guaranteed tickets didn’t matter.

Sean and I got free Engadget CES shirts while waiting in line. I don’t think Vinny got one because he came later and was further back in line.

We sat at the absolute front of the show. Here is the editor in chief of Engadget, Joshua Topolsky interviewing Erick Tseng from Google about Android.

This is from later in the show, when Nilay Patel and Paul Miller came to demo some of the gadgets from CES.

They showed the Plastic Logic QUE ebook reader. I really wanted this ebook reader for a while, but after hearing that it cost more than three times as much as my Kindle, I was no longer interested.

The best part of the show was the demo of the AR Drone quadricopter. It is controlled by tilting an iPhone and has onboard cameras so you can see where it is going. The cool thing is that it looks at the ground below it to sense the terrain and is able to hover by itself and balance on its own.

I took a video of the first part of the demo.

Here is another video from later in the demo that Vinny took. Skip to the 50 second mark if you want to see me almost get killed by the Drone.

At the end of the show the guys from Engadget gave away two Nexus Ones and a bunch of official CES bags full of free stuff they picked up. Sean and I didn’t win anything, but Vinny did. Too bad the bag was full of iPhone accessories since Vinny doesn’t have an iPhone.

Finally, at the end of the day, we headed over to Shake Shack in Madison Square Park for dinner.

For those of you who don’t know, some people think that Shake Shack is the best burger place in New York or even in all of America. I’m not too sure if it is the best, but the food is definitely delicious. I had cheese fries and a “Shroom Burger” which they describe as

crisp-fried portobello filled with melted cheese and onions, topped with lettuce, tomato and shack sauce

Sounds delicious right?

A little over a month ago, I set off on a two week trip to visit family in India and do sightseeing. In this post, I’ll talk about the things I did during the first week, while I was still in South India (where my parents are from). The next post will be about our time in North India during the second week.

Here is the view from my window on our way to our connection in Frankfurt. It was a great start to the trip. ^^

Every newsstand I saw was full of news about Michael Jackson. I think it was literally a day after he died. This particular newspaper is obviously from Frankfurt. It was a decent airport as always, but $8 for a McMuffin and cereal? Really?

The first international airport that I’ve seen charging people to go to the bathroom, albeit it’s only a couple cents.

A beautiful dragonfly at my great-grandmother’s house. It stood still just long enough for me to snap this picture.

Indian drivers always have to look out for animals on the roads. That usually means a stray dog or water buffalo standing in the middle of the road, but every once in a while a whole herd stops traffic. This was a herd of around 400 almost identical goats.

I was lucky to get a shot of rays of light peeking through clouds. I get reminded of The Lord of the Rings whenever I see a sight like this.

This is the entrance to Brihadishwara Temple, built in the 11th century AD by Rajaraja Chola 1. It is one of the most beautiful examples of dravidian architecture in all of India.

Here is the main building in the temple complex. It is made completely of granite.

The temple is covered in ancient writing describing the kings actions and the building of the temple. The language is an ancient form of Tamil, whose modern form is the predominant language used in Tamil Nadu.

The main reason I was in South India for the first week is my cousin’s wedding. Here are his and his wife’s hands in a scene from one of the many wedding ceremonies. Indian weddings are long and complicated. The whole wedding takes almost a week and hundreds of people attend it. Since so many people attend it, future weddings end up getting arranged and planned.

The next few photos are from Mahabalipuram, a 7th century port city of the Pallava Dynasty. The first three are from the temple complex known as the Five Rathas. They were all carved from one single rock.

This is a temple complex known as the Shore Temple. It was built in the 8th century

There was also this huge boulder balancing on the side of a hill.

In this picture you see the two types of carving that Mahabalipuram is famous for. On the left is one of the many cave temples and on the right is a massive bas relief carving.

If you ever get a chance to visit India, make sure to spend some time in Mahabalipuram. It may not be as famous as the Taj Mahal, but it is older and its influence on modern India is arguably much deeper.

Finally, here is a slideshow of all the photos from the trip. Make sure to look out for the next posts about my trip and subscribe to my feed if you haven’t already.

This post is going to be just a mishmash of random stuff. Hopefully I can get back to normal posting later this week.

First off, Allkpop.com has an internet radio station now. You can check it our here. They haven’t yet played a good song that isn’t already in my iTunes library. So we’ll have to see if it is worth bookmarking, but it is good music nevertheless.

Ever since it was released back in January, The Race for a New Game Machine has been on my queue of books to read. I finally bought it on my Kindle to beat the boredom while driving down to Austin with my family.  I think it might be the first DRMed media that I have purchased and if you ask me, it is well worth it. The book is a first hand account of an IBM engineer that managed a team producing the Cell Processor for the PS3 and also the processor for the XBox 360. I didn’t realize the amount of politics and drama that goes on behind closed doors at big chip design firms like IBM. This book is well worth reading if you are into technology or management.

I picked up Options in the bargain bin at a bookstore in Austin. It was a steal at $5 new. The book was written by Daniel Lyons AKA Fake Steve Jobs. Lyons used to write a blog called the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs from 2006 to 2008. If you aren’t familiar, here is the wikipedia article. The book is basically a parody of Steve Jobs in 1st person view. I don’t know how it is since I haven’t read it yet. So, I won’t recommend it to anyone yet. But even if it does suck, at least it has a cool shiny cover!

Now here is the cool part of the post. I said earlier that I went to Austin with my family. Well, before coming back to Plano last night, we sat under the Congress bridge to watch the famous bridge bats come out to feed. If you haven’t heard of them you can read about them here, here and here. Basically, millions of bats from mexico live under the congress bridge in Austin for the summer. Every night at sundown, all the bats come out as a group to feed on all the pesky bugs and critters outside. It is a truly spectacular sight. Naturally, I brought my 30D along to take some pictures.

Here is my family (with my sister pretending that she is some celebrity that can’t be photographed or something).

The crowd wasn’t too bad while there was still light. Down on the path in front of the grass, there were some jugglers and people selling I <bat>  Austin shirts.

This dog stood like this for a good 10 minutes. He didn’t seem to concerned that there was a 4 foot drop to his right and a 3 story drop to his left.

By the time it was getting dark, the grass and the bridge were filling up with spectators.

Here you can see the bats as blurs across the sky. The were really fast and for some reason seemed to only come as a steady stream from one small section of the bridge.

Here are two pictures I took from on the bridge. I really wish I had my 430EX external flash with me. The built-in flash only lets me sync to 1/250th of a second and those bats were a little too fast for that.

Last week I had my last final exam on Wednesday (actually the first time that I was done before Thursday). This along with the fact that I was leaving for home on Saturday meant that I had 2 solid days to spend exploring the city and packing. Sean, Vinny and I were originally going to walk all the way down Manhattan and photograph the whole experience, but the weather wasn’t favorable and I ended up waking up too late. So, we decided to head to the Intrepid Museum instead.

For those of you who don’t know, the Intrepid is a decommissioned U.S. aircraft carrier that has been converted into a museum. A few months back, they completed a complete new pier and dragged the carrier back from Staten Island where they were renovating it. They were still finishing much of the museum and as a result many parts weren’t open yet.

One of those exhibits waiting completion was the cruise missile launching submarine below. It has two dome shaped doors and contained massive cruise missiles that could be launched right off the deck of the submarine.

Next we went to see one of only a few surviving Concordes, the only commercial supersonic airliners. It sat on the pier with its landing gear extended and nose heat shield up. From afar, the plane looked quite big, but when we got near it turned out to be pretty small. It was nonetheless a majestic machine.

The underbelly was completely smooth and covered in instructions and numbers. I was able to capture a pretty good picture. Maybe I’ll turn it into a wallpaper sometime.

The doors into the aircraft were surprisingly small. We all had to duck to get in. I can’t imagine how basketball players would have liked this.

Here is another picture I took that may be wallpaper material:

Here is a tangle of conduits and pipes from inside the carrier. So complicated yet so orderly.

This airplane is a beast: the World War II era Avenger bomber. It had a crew of three and was equipped to launch torpedoes to sink enemy ships.

Here is an airplane with its wings folded up as is standard with planes designed to be launched from carriers. The intake looks like it could swallow a man whole.

The many decks have a few holes here and there that you can see the water below. It reminded me that a carrier is pretty much a normal ship with a huge table put on top.

The view through one of the many anti-aircraft guns that riddle the edge of the ship:

Here is sean next to what are pretty much ammunition dispensers. Men on the other side of the wall would have ammunition for the side guns brought up chutes from below and would deliver them through those doors in the wall.

Here is a more modern aircraft sporting the tiger motif from the famous Flying Tigers. They were a volunteer group independent of the U.S. Military that fought the Japanese up until the U.S. entry into World War II. There is also a John Wayne film called Flying Tigers I think is well worth watching.

Here we have two aircraft with the New York skyline in the background. The plane in the foreground is an A-6 Intruder and one behind is an F-14 Tomcat.

This is the engine and side of what is been my favorite airplane ever since I was 9 years old, the Blackbird. This one is an A-12, the predecessor to the famous SR-71.

I forgot which helicopter this is, but doesn’t it just look silly? I think the yellow paint adds to the comical look.

Below is the infamous Mig-15 with its odd split intake.

And finally the front of the Intrepid as we leave.

The visit was fun and tiring. Since admission is free to Columbia students, maybe I’ll go again and see the submarine and whatever else I missed.

Check out the complete set of pictures in the slideshow below: