Phil’s blog

It has been a great weekend. My friend Clement, whom I haven’t seen in over a year, came to visit. We went to UVA and worked on a couple of projects together, and he recruited me to intern at Microsoft in 2005. He’s now working at the MS office in Beijing, but has been in Redmond for the past couple of months, so it was a good time for him to make a trip down to Cali.

Highlights from the weekend:

• Dinner at Hyderabad House in Palo Alto with Clement’s friend Robbie whom I met while he was interning at Google this past summer
• Lunch at Brothers Korean Restaurant in SF with Clement’s friend Helen, who stayed and hung out with us the rest of the weekend. The food was amazing; they used wood charcoal in the table grill and brought more little side dishes than I’ve ever seen at a Korean meal. They also gave us a free dish of chap chae, perhaps because we ordered so much.
• Walking around Fisherman’s Wharf, checking out Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and getting clam chowder in a sourdough bowl.
  
• Seeing Blood Diamond at the Metreon. Great movie, and very cool that it is doing some social good in educating the public about conflict diamonds.
• Lunch at King of Krung Siam in Mountain View with Clement’s friend Shan and his girlfriend. We ordered several dishes but the only standouts were the seafood salad and the calamari.
• Hanging out and shopping at Santana Row. We went to the lounge at Sino which has nice decor but the lychee sangria isn’t so good.
  
• Dinner at Maruichi, my favorite noodle place outside of Japan. I learned that they have ramen in a spicy miso broth that isn’t on the menu. It was delicious!
  
• A great discussion with Clement, Robbie, and Helen about a startup idea Clement is trying to recruit me on. It brought back memories of the old days at UVA when Clement and I worked on a couple of ideas together. Fun times!
• Geocaching with friends from Google. We attempted and found: Google Falls, Octal Fair, Element #2, and Lone Pine Overlook. 4/4 is pretty amazing, but we did have seven people. Great times were had.
  
  

Am finally getting around to writing about this, but the details are getting hazy : / Must stop procrastinating. Anyway, two weeks ago Justine and I went out to look for a cache called Swimming Hole. There was a ton of brush and we didn’t end up finding it, but it was nice to get outside and we passed a giant spider walking down the trail in the opposite direction. Actually we stopped to stare at it for a bit and made it climb onto a stick. The thing was completely unphased. We must have spent at least 30 minutes walking around the supposed location of the cache. It didn’t help that my GPS never seems to get a good fix. At one point we got excited after seeing what looked like a plastic container. Upon closer inspection it definitely wasn’t a cache of any sort. We’re still not sure what it was, perhaps a bong? More photos here.

Justine visited for two glorious weeks and we did a bunch of stuff. I was thinking of writing individual entries for various things but I don’t think people would bother looking back a few entries to where I left off (but really I’m just too lazy to write that much). So here it is, condensed to a single post.

Delicious food
We went out to eat almost every day. Here are the restaurants (that I can remember) in no particular order:

• Momoya Sushi (pictured left): As I said in a previous entry, fantastic. Probably the best sushi in Mountain View. Found out they supply the sushi at Cafe Pacifica at the Googleplex.
• Pho Hoa (pictured right): Pronounced fuh huh-ah. I’ve probably eaten there 10+ times since moving out here. Cheap, fast, delicious, close, reasonably healthy - what more could you ask? We actually tried a non-pho entre one night: some kind of grilled chicken plate with a sweet/vinegary sauce - delightful.
• Betelnut: Asian fusion restaurant in SF. We got counter seats and watched the prep cooks work the woks. Had some delicious Korean noodle soup and firecracker chicken.
• Amarin: Thai in downtown MV. Great beef salad, so-so pad thai.
• Maru-ichi: Best Japanese noodles in MV. My favorites: bukkake udon (cold), nabeyaki udon, maruichi ramen w/shoyu broth.
• Pasta Pomodoro: Cheap, passable, chain pasta store. Nothing special.
• Totoro: Good, cheap Korean food in downtown MV.
• Sue’s Indian Cuisine: Pretty good, great portions. Downtown MV.
• Dakao: Pretty good banh mi (Vietnamese baguette sandwiches) in San Jose.
• La Rioja: Latin American/Carribean fusion. They try to pass themselves off as a legit restaurant, but it’s more like a club that happens to serve food. I ordered a rare ribeye and it came back anything but, so I politely sent it back and received a thicker steak that was still cold on the inside. I ate a few bites to be polite, then boxed it.
• Seoul Garden: Great Korean food in SF Japantown, very nice staff too.
• Crepe place on Pier 39: Too much cheese. Will never eat another non-dessert crepe as long as I live.

Japantown Festival
Like Chinatown, but cleaner! Seriously though, Japantown was awesome, and there was some kind of annual festival going on. There was singing, dancing, playing of games, taiko drumming, and a virgorous mochi ritual pictured left. We had a delicious lunch form Seoul Garden, a parfait from a nicely decorated tea house (pictured right), and a sno-cone. It seem food is always a major part of our activities. Anyway, good times were had. More photos here.

Exploratorium
Probably intended for children, but we saw plenty of adults having a good time. It’s basically a bunch of science lessons in the form of (mostly) hands-on exhibits. Memorable ones included:

• a game where you listen to ambient noise and try to determine the location (laundromat, supermarket, etc)
• an aquarium of mutant goldfish
• a giant display showing the transformation of one scene to another, one small piece at a time, and flickering with each change (I almost wrote flickring, haha), showing that it’s hard to perceive changes when your whole field of view is disrupted
• a heat sensitive video camera (output pictured left)

We walked around SF afterwards (right photo) and dined at Betelnut. More photos here.

Alcatraz
We went on Labor Day, huge crowd. The history was interesting but I appreciated the scenery most. It probably didn’t help that my audio guide device was malfunctioning and the line was too long to go back and exchange it, forcing me to have Justine tell me the interesting parts while she listened to the narration, or to put my ear next to hers to try to listen myself. Weather was beautiful as it has been this whole summer. Parking was crazy expensive. More photos here .

Geocaching
Spent an afternoon geocaching in MV. First went after Middlefield Field. The readings on my Magellan eXplorist 200 GPS kept drifting so we had to cover a wide area. I don’t know whether it was due to conditions or lousy hardware. Justine ended up spotting it in a tree as you can see in the photo. Then we went for Stevenson Surprise near an elementary school. We’re pretty sure we were in the right area, but came away empty handed. I suspect it was buried in some bushes, which we weren’t willing to go too far into. Good times though :] More photos here.

Movies

• Ghostbusters: You know these guys. One of my favorite movies as a kid, and still is. Teeny fell asleep though
• Porco Rosso: About a bounty hunter pilot who happens to be a pig (in a normal human world). Charming!
• Zatoichi: About a blind swordsman who takes on Japanese gangs. Hilarious and fierce.

PS: I posted this from writely!