We signed up for an elephant excursion Monday afternoon, and it was great! Yizhen had ridden elephants before, in China I think, but he and I both enjoyed this outing.
We went on an elephant riding tour near Ao Nang, Krabi, Thailand
Good morning! We woke up around 7 a.m. this fine Monday to go shooting a bit before breakfast. Here are some of my photos.
Coke!
We got to sit together on the plane
I’ve been busy catching up on personal stuff since returning from Burning Man.
First, I finally located a primary care doctor in San Francisco.
I’ve been putting it off because I didn’t want to deal with scheduling appointments and figuring out how much it would cost me …
Primarily the temple was a bridge to the hereafter, where many people paid tribute to their departed friends and family. From little messages to cards and photos and keepsakes to large sculpture tributes, burners have many creative ways to honor the dead.
There was more to this place, though. It also seemed to function as an outlet for emotions we no longer manage together as a society. This was apparent through reading just a small sample of the temple’s faces.
Some people released years of tension in their lives, apologizing for being a horrible father, forgiving a sibling for habitual abuse, or vowing to be a more sensitive friend. Some wrote inspiring messages and some asked questions, from personal to universal. “How do I be there for my son when he makes me so upset with his life choices?” “How can human kind achieve peace?” “Are we alone?” “Why me?”
Hundreds gathered in worship, remembrance and meditation all week at the Temple of Whollyness
Saturday night around 9:30 is the big burn of The Man, the giant structure in the middle of Black Rock City.
I’m going to let the photos do the talking for this entry… enjoy!
The UFO begins to fall apart
The nightlife at Burning Man is life entirely different than anything I knew before. If the day time is for wearing nothing, the night time is for wearing everything. The art pieces that are so strange, so epically large or so remote under the scorching sun come alive in the dark. It almost seems most of the people also come alive in the dark. Colored lights are everywhere, on everything.
Organizing how Burning Man provoked my mind is tough, and much of it doesn’t correspond with photos, as is usually the case with my life documenting. I’ll take a stab at providing a glimpse while narrating some photos that roughly fall into the categories of art structures, sound structures, art cars and art structure burns. Those are the things I was most able to document while immersed in my mental and physical explorations. As with most things at Burning Man, those categories aren’t even well defined. All the lines blur, sometimes disappear entirely, and you grow to appreciate fluidity.
Disco party at the sheep
Everyone carries water, a dust mask and goggles for protection from the elements. Single ply toilet paper, sunscreen and snacks are also a good idea. Radical self reliance is the key. The weather was hot, but not horribly so this year. Generally people wear little during the day. Just about anything goes on the playa, and people can dress as they please without fear of judgment. This is part of another Burning Man principle, radical self expression. Nudity is not as common as I expected, but there are definitely many nudists. More commonly, I saw scarves or shorts, but not much more, which was definitely practical in the heat!
Brad and Matt
In early February, I decided to buy some tickets for that impossible to fully describe event called Burning Man. Despite prevaling wisdom, I actually think I had a pretty good idea what I was in for. I knew it is a city that rises on an ancient lakebed within a week and then in even less time diseappears entirely. I knew it is about acceptance and free expression. I knew it is not for the feeble.
What I did not know was how being freer than I ever have been would change me. Realizations, new experiences, new friends. It was undoubtedly the most awesome adventure of my life, even though I know I barely scratched the surface my first year. You really do need to experience it, though hopefully writing about it can help me better live it every day.
It was a pain to get the bike rack mounted on this vehicle, since the back was mostly plastic lined and I had to work hard to find secure mount points.
I haven’t gone back to see what version of MT this starts with, but this particular setup is a Movable Type Pro 4.37 installation that was upgraded to 5.2.7. Upon publishing an entry, I observed this error screen:
An error occurred
Undefined subroutine &MT::Template::Tags::Entry::_hdlr_entries called
This past weekend I redeemed my United frequent flier miles for a $5 round trip flight to Seattle to visit Keith and go camping. It was a blast!
The actual flight was suboptimal, as I had to take a 6 a.m. flight Friday morning. It was the only option in the “Super Saver” category for which my miles qualified, though, so I had to make due. It ended up sort of working out because I had a lot of work to do the night before, and I stayed up all night doing it. At the airport. Because BART only runs till 1:30, and doesn’t start again till around 5 a.m.
The lower Tank Lake, and we are home!
I order a ton of stuff via Amazon’s "1-Click" ordering, and unfortunately Amazon does not give you the option to choose a specific courier for the shipment. If they did, I would ban USPS and FedEx from ever handling my shipments.
I never receive packages shipped via FedEx or USPS, and always receive UPS and Ontrac packages on the first attempt. How is it that the doorbell never works for two couriers? Or perhaps they don’t even bother ringing me.
Movable Type templates can be published in many ways, including "static" publishing upon each entry save, "manual" publishing only when an administrator triggers them, or in the background using the "Publishing Queue". This last option takes some additional setup, but is well worth it.
Yizhen and I decided to go camping this weekend Wednesday or Thursday, but we didn’t start looking for a destination till Friday. All of the desirable campgrounds in the area seemed to be booked, so we headed to the only place I knew we could for sure go: Mendocino National Forest.
Exploring near the Eel River in Mendocino Forest with Yizhen
Movable Type is an incredibly flexible publishing system that makes it trivial to create output files of any text file format. One common request is to create a Microsoft Excel compatible CSV (comma separated values) spreadsheet of various data from a content management system.
A basic CSV file might look like this:
Name, Birth Date, Death Date
Britney Spears, 1981-12-02,
Albert Einstein, 1879-03-14, 1955-04-18
Justin Bieber, 1994-03-01,
Betty White, 1922-01-17,
George Washington, 1732-02-22, 1799-12-14
On the off chance this might be useful to someone, here is a sample template to output a CSV formatted file with all the entries in a blog that have duplicate titles. In the first Entries block’s blog_ids modifier, replace the word “all” with a blog ID number, or remove the modifier altogether if you are publishing this template within the blog from which you are exporting entries.
I’ve watched this video twice now, and for some reason it made me decide to write little blogs about videos I watch that make me think. This is mostly so I can review the thoughts I took from the video, hopefully helping me internalize them.
I stumbled on this one while watching a TED series called “Lifehacks” on Netflix with Travis, and it turned out more interesting than I thought it would be at first.
Yesterday I returned from my first camping trip of the year, that shouldn’t have taken this long to happen. I went again to Mendocino, this time with Rich. We tried to find some other people to go, but failed. It was still a wonderful trip.
We played with the Arctic 1W blue laser from WickedLasers.com
Wednesday, we got up a bit earlier, skipping breakfast at the hotel and heading to the Tsukiji fish market instead. Nob said he likes to eat breakfast near the market because the fish is fresh and cheap, so we were going to try that out. And we also wanted to see the market, even if we didn’t get there early enough to see some fish auction action.
Well, getting there was easy enough. We only got a little bit lost, but we eventually found it, before 9 a.m. And things were eerily quiet. It didn’t take long to realize the market was closed, and we eventually found a sign that read, “Today is a fixed holiday.” Apparently some Wednesdays are off days.
We tried to go to the fish market the day it was closed
We began the day by setting out to find a shoe store that sells Keen for Dan, but the destination store didn’t have anything in Dan’s size. We later found out this was the case everywhere in Japan. The walk was nice, though! After a while, Aaron and I headed back to do some work while Dan continued to wander.
World champion yo yo artist BLACK returned to the Six Apart office to speak about the experience of being chosen to perform at the TED conference earlier this year.
Today was a big day; the first of three or four days in the Six Apart KK office, the reason for our trip to Tokyo. And I had no idea what to expect. After breakfast, we began the short walk to the office. We left at 9:40, needing to be there by 10. Google said 5 minutes. We got there only 10 minutes late.
Having lunch with some engineers from Six Apart, makers of Movable Type
This morning for breakfast I tried Nattō, which is fermented soy beans. It was pretty disgusting, and adding the soy sauce and spicy mustard it came with made it worse. Justin told me not to feel bad about not finishing it (I ate three beans), so I didn’t!
This is a not properly exposed panorama from Tokyo Tower... but it gives you an idea of just how huge this city is. Buildings as far as you can see in all directions! Larger version at http://votecharlie.com/blog/2013/CNG_9572.jpg
Saturday I woke up pretty early, so I decided to go for a run around one of the parks nearby. On the map it appeared to be a few miles around, so I hoped it would serve as a nice route. And it did.
I got slightly disoriented when I crossed a river I mistook for the water surrounding the park I aimed to run around, but I got to see some city streets and eventually got back on track. I ran about six miles total, though my fricken iPhone 4S GPS reported I ran almost 10 miles. I can’t wait to get rid of the iPhone.
All the crosswalks open at once!
I got back from my trip to Denver Tuesday night, leaving only Wednesday to squeeze in a four hour clinic appointment, a haircut, two hours of weight lifting, and a full day of work. Oh, and I had to pack for a week in Japan, but of course I didn’t do that till Thursday morning in the 30 minutes before I had to head to the airport.
A street near our hotel
Perhaps I will write more later, but for now, here are some photos of my last days in Spain.
143 megapixels
I’m running out of time, so the photo captions will have to suffice! Sorry!
Musée du Louvre
Monday morning we ventured to the Musée de l'Orangerie, which houses eight Water Lilies murals by Claude Monet.
Musée de l'Orangerie
Next we flew from Barcelona to Aéroport de Paris-Orly, which was not as nice or spacious as Barcelona or Madrid’s airports. But it received the plane just fine! Signs in the airport seemed to be in English for the most part, but I was looking forward to seeing how we got along with whatever amount of French my brother Tim knew.
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris
Saturday we went to Barcelona’s Park Güell, a popular forested park area overlooking the city.
CNG_8216.JPG
Friday night we dined at Cinc Sentits, a fairly new restaurant in Barcelona that is already acknowledged to be one of the best in Spain. The place only takes 10 table reservations a night, as it is a small space and the meal takes hours to complete since there are so many courses.
assorted Spanish treats, including orange garnished olive, tomato shaved cracker, cream skin
Today was a big day, so I'm going to split it into two posts. Part 2 is “Cinc Sentits, my fanciest dining experience to date”.
We got up and walked from our hotel apartment to the Sagrada Família, probably the most prominent church construction underway in the world. We stopped at La Vieja Tahona for coffee and L'Oreig for tea, and then went to the church.
We had 11 a.m. tickets for ascending one of the towers, so we started with that, and then did the self guided audio tour. It was really fascinating, and the building was incredible. The photos should speak for themselves.
The columns are different colors due to different stone being used according to the load the column has to bear.
Unfortunately I have not had time to write these captions, so here are just a few photos from Friday while we visited the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.
Charlie Gorichanaz at Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya
Thursday morning we went to the Madrid airport to catch a flight to Barcelona, where we checked into our hotel and headed straight to Casa Batlló, a famous building designed in 1904 by Antoni Gaudí.
Casa Batlló
Wednesday we walked along the Padeo del Prado en route to the Prado Museum, home to many works by Francisco de Goya, one of the most well known Spanish artists in history.
Tranquility outside the Prado
I decided May 6 to book a ticket to Madrid to join my mom and her friend Terry on a trip to visit my brother, Tim, who has been working on his master’s there for a year.
I was to leave Monday, May 20, but I had a ton of work to do before that. I ended up logging 116.25 hours in those two weeks, largely thanks to three projects that were behind schedule and high priority. But the overtime allowed me to largely not need to work during the trip!
The day came, and the flight was scheduled for 7 a.m. Monday. I was to land in Madrid Tuesday at 8 a.m. after a stopover at JFK.
Random shots from around Tim’s neighborhood
Last night Derek invited me to go out with him and some friends from LA. I wasn’t going to, but agreed around 11 p.m. to meet him out. I was more inclined to go because he was presently alone at the bar, so I could meet him first …
I don't remember exactly how I came up with this idea, but when I was looking at some D3.js powered charts, I decided to make something so I could play with them. Somehow I chose to try pulling my daily step counts through the Fitbit API and graphing it against temperature data. I found a neat weather data API, Forecast.io, and used my Foursquare history to determine which location to use for weather data each day. Once I got this working, I created a web page so others can create their own graphs. And I called it Weatherbit.
My Weatherbit chart
In certain cases, you cannot select all the Movable Type entries you might want to with a single Entries block.
You can get around this by employing a hash variable to gather all the entry IDs we are interested in, and then using a Loop block to sort them.
This is an example of how to time processing of a chunk of Movable Type template code
My mom needed arrange for 18 new employees to meet each other via a series of group sessions of four groups meeting at a time. In order to make each session as long as possible, she needed an efficient set of combinations to have each person meet each other person in as few sessions as possible.
She ended up manually grouping all the employees and came up with a solution that required nine sessions, which is pretty good. But I wrote a program that solves her problem using only eight sessions. And it only takes a few seconds, versus the much longer amount of time to do it manually.
Item Grouper source code
Charlie Gorichanaz's ancestry composition according to 23andMe's “speculative estimate”
Charlie Gorichanaz's ancestry composition according to 23andMe's “standard estimate”
Barely two days after I posted about my new gym lifestyle, the Fitness SF website got replaced Feb. 14 with a cutting open letter from the company's former designer, Frank Jonen.
"Fitness SF preferred to ignore our invoices instead of paying them. As a result this website is no longer operational," Jonen wrote.
Screen Shot 2013-02-15 at 11.53.24.jpg
Anyway, back to signing up for the gym... I had e-mailed with one of the recruiter people a few times about prices, and finally went in to start a membership after they made a reasonable offer on my desired plan: $36.95 per month with no money upfront and no contracts. Most of their other plans involved paying $100-200 up front for a monthly discount, but I decided not to try a plan that would save me money a year or two down the line when I'll possibly not live in this neighborhood and possibly be making way too much money to care. Well, hopefully. Hopefully.
My first time doing "skullcrushers" roughly following Derek's training program
I was setting up a search domain last night, and went to bed while the latest draft of my SDF file generated. This morning I tried to upload it on the "Create a New Search Domain" dialog, and got this new error.
Amazon CloudSearch's "Create New Search Domain" dialog. I didn't take a screen shot of the error, though. :-(
HIM: hey handsome!
ME: are we ever going to meet? :-(
HIM: UGH, YES! However, we better do it soon lol I’m dating someone now
ME: what the hell! lol
ME: well do u want to come over now?
HIM: I’m at work. FML
ME: how long have you …
I am me! I’m also a scientist minded software engineer who loves reading, running, listening to music, and recording photos and videos and data of all sorts. After earning a biochemistry degree, I lived in San Francisco and Tokyo, and now I find it difficult to stay put. Read more about me and my online life.
SF: 87% complete; Oakland: 27%
San Francisco Bay Area running progress
Charlie says: “What a wonderful region!”
30 November 2022
In-N-Out Burger (Fast Food Restaurant)
333 Jefferson St , San Francisco , CA
Charlie says: “It was super hot and we got a taste for salty fries, but by the time we walked there it dropped 35° and was cold. Still tasted good!”
28 September 2020 at 20:32
Taqueria Zorro (Mexican Restaurant)
308 Columbus Ave , San Francisco , CA
Charlie says: “Restaurants are hoppin’ around here, feels weird.”
26 September 2020 at 19:42
碼頭老火鍋 (Hotpot Restaurant)
仁愛路四段409-1號 , Da’an District , T’ai-pei Shih
Charlie says: “Delicious spicy hot pot with Harry. I am so full!!”
25 March 2020 at 08:40
桶好呷滷味 (Asian Restaurant)
, Taipei
Charlie says: “We pick a representative set of ingredients and they build out the rest into a braised soup like thing over noodles.”
23 March 2020 at 06:46
Addiction Aquatic Development (上引水產) (Fish Market)
民族東路410巷2弄18號 , Taipei
Charlie says: “Standing sushi bar at a fish market.”
21 March 2020 at 07:03
ACME Breakfast CLUB (Breakfast Spot)
3F., No. 10, Ln. 27, Chengdu Rd., , Taipei
Charlie says: “Brunch w/ Shawn! Was tempted to get the avocado toast kind of as a joke since I never get it in SF, but resisted, sourdough was good. :-)”
20 March 2020 at 22:27
三甲和風創意料理 (Japanese Restaurant)
Charlie says: “Late dinner with Shawn, at a lovely place!”
20 March 2020 at 09:28
中央藝文公園 Central Culture Park (Park)
北平東路與紹興北街口 , Taipei
Charlie says: “Social distance.”
20 March 2020 at 03:42
虎頭山環保公園 (Scenic Lookout)
Charlie says: “Exploring the hillside in Taoyuan City.”
14 March 2020 at 23:49
Abura-Ya (Japanese Restaurant)
362 17th St , Oakland , CA
Charlie says: “Dinner with Beam before Sarah McLachlan!”
24 February 2020 at 18:55
