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:

Caroline and I were taking a walk on Saturday when we walk out to Broadway and saw this.

They rerouted a whole 4 block section of the northbound side so that some big crane could hoist some I-beams onto the new Interdisciplinary Science Building. I wanted to try to make the above picture a little better since the orange is pretty interesting, but it didn’t really work out. Any suggestions on improvements to composition?

So, I decided, “Why not walk around the north side of campus and get a better look and see a side of Columbia that we rarely visit?” Here is a shot of the outlet where the 1 train comes above ground at 121st St.

Here is a another shot.

The next picture is the most interesting though. Since all of 120th street above Columbia was closed, we were able to just walk down the middle of the street. While walking down, I noticed something peculiar about one of the potholes. It was deep enough that you could see the old brick road that got paved over a little after World War II. It is just so delightful to find pieces of history in the most surprising places. (:

And on an unrelated note, here is a slideshow of pictures I took of Tamasha 2009, the South Asian culture show. My sister performed as part of the Dhoom fusion/Bollywood dance troupe!

This Thursday my parents decided surprise us by taking us to a basketball game. It was totally not expecting it. This is pretty much the first sporting event that we’ve been to together, and my first Mavs game (if you don’t count the scrimmage they had when they spent a week practicing at UNT during senior year). Even though my dad got the best seats he could get with his discount from work, we still had pretty bad seats (3rd tier). But, with my trusty 10-22mm and 28-135mm, I was able to run with it and get some pretty good shots.

We came super early, and there weren’t too many people in yet. Here is what it looked like.

While we were waiting, this big blimp shaped like a chile started floating around dropping gift cards and other goodies. I guess Chili’s is sponsor of the Mavs.

The game didn’t start off too well. The Mavericks trailed the Knicks 3-6 points the whole first half. I was kinda confused on who to cheer for though. Even though everyone obviously loved the Mavericks and I had always been a Mavs fan, I now live in New York and have great respect for the Knickerbockers. I ended up cheering for the Mavs anyway.

One thing I love about the game was the constantly changing defense animation on the jumbotron. My particular favorite was this gorilla animation:

Since we were so far away, I wasn’t able to get close enough with my telephoto. I did get this decent action shot though.

At the end of the first half, the Knicks were leading 59 to 54. Here is a shot of the stadium. It wasn’t too crowded as you see. Must be the downturn ):

Here is a photo of the drumline. They led some of the cheers and had their own acts during timeouts and other down time.

At the end the Mavericks ended up winning 99 to 94. It wasn’t the most thrilling game, but there were a few great moments. Also, I wasn’t too sure about Jason Kidd. The Mavericks had to give up a kidney and a lung to get him and I didn’t think that it would be worth it. Surprisingly he did really well with the rest of the team. He had quite a few steals, rebounds and assists and the team definitely couldn’t have won without him.

That game was a lot of fun. I can’t believe I never went to any before. It didn’t have all the glamor that I thought it would, but it was relaxing to be able to just sit down and watch a few guys fight it out. I hope I’ll get more chances to go to sporting events this year… maybe a football game in NY?

Well, I have only a few minutes left of 2008. Tomorrow is going to be a new year. To make sure that I top my accomplishments of 2008, I decided to list out 16 notable things I did this year.

1. Became a certified open water SCUBA diver

2. Went to the rainforest in Ecuador and almost got landed on by a toucan

3. Toured the Galapagos on a yacht for 3 days

4. Cooked for myself for a whole summer

5. Made some money at my summer internship

6. Finished a subway track safety course

7. Learned how to juggle

8. Made a blog

9. Started writing for CrunchGear

10. Met some weird girl name Caroline

11. Learned to solder well

12. Swam with sea lions and sea turtles

13. Balanced an egg on the end of a nail

14. Visited the southern hemisphere for the first time

15. Learned ruby

16. Went to Six Flags Great Adventure with Sylvia

Have fun everyone. See you next year!

Ok. If you don’t really care for computers or electronics, you can skip this post. So since the middle of this semester, Caroline and I have been visiting the “Computer Graveyard” where Columbia dumps all their old computers. Since then, I have accumulated a modest collection of old computer components. They pretty much take up all of the space on top of my desk in my dorm:

Here are some really old RAM sticks. If you know anything about computer components, you’ll notice that the contacts are plated with aluminum. I guess it was before gold became the standard.

Here is a stack of AMD Athlons that we pulled out from a bunch of dual processor servers:

This is an old Pentium II. Yeah it used to come in this weird daughterboard that fit into a slot in the motherboard.

Here is the cool stuff. It is an incomplete history of (kinda) Modern Intel chips.

First row from left to right: Intel i486 DX, Intel Pentium, Intel Pentium II “Klamath”, Pentium II “Deschutes”
Second row from left to right: Pentium III “Katmai”, Pentium III “Coppermine”, Pentium III “Coppermine-T”, Celeron “Willamette”, Pentium 4 “Prescott”

Here is a table comparing some of these chips:

It is pretty cool to see how much computers have changed since we were all born. It is most likely that the microprocessor that powers your cell phone is more powerful than the chips on the top row. Look at the prices too. I bought my MacBook Pro for less than the i486 cost in 2008 dollars.

Here is a comparison of undersides of some processors. The large one on the left is a Socket 4 Pentium. The one in the foreground to the right is a Socket 478 Celeron and the one in the background to the right is a Socket LGA775 Pentium 4. Notice that the Pentium 4 doesn’t have pins on it. It is a LGA (Land Grid Array) package that has pins on the motherboard that contact pads on the processor.

And last is a cool desk ornament. It is a CD cover from an old Apple eMac.

I know. I am a real big nerd but visiting the graveyard is like hunting for treasure. You never know what to expect.