market day

Another trip to the farmer's market. Find of the day: Fatted Calf Basque Sausages.

I also discovered that Zoe likes to fly:

fancy table

We bought a nice Cherry table from Traditions on 4th street

Las Trampas

A few weeks ago while walking in Redwood Regional Park, I saw what looked like cliff bands off in the distance to the East. I did some google maps surveillance and discovered that they were most likely in Las Trampas Regional Park. Today was the day we planned to check them out, and although we got a late start, I was excited to see if they were climb worthy, or useless rubble piles. Unfortunately, in my excitement, I didn't look at a topo map of the trail that I had planned on taking, and it turned out to be a bit of an uphill slog with Zoe. It was made worse by the fact that when we finally got to the ridge line the wind picked up. This wasn't a problem for mom and dad, but Zoe strongly objected to it, and I had to start jogging down the other side to get out of the wind. Here I am before the run, and already bushed

And here we are on the other side:


We got out of the wind under some BOULDERS (yaaaaay!) which turned out to be sandstone, but coated in lichen. Some of them look climbable though.
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After feeding Zoe, we took stock of where we were. We still were not where google maps showed the cliff band, so we went down the other side and found this:

which looked a bit low angle and also covered with lichen, but potentially interesting. This particular rock wasn't even visible on Google Maps, actually.

It was at this point that things got a little unpleasant. The cliff band was supposed to be off to the North, but there was no discernible trail. Worse yet, we were running out of time: the park service locks the gate to the parking lot at 7 pm and it was now close to 6:00. We bushwhacked a little through the tall grass and wild sage, but quickly abandoned hope and began heading back up to the ridge via established trails. Once at the ridge trail, we took the Cuesta trail back down towards the lot. Both the wind and Zoe were now howling, and we had to hand carry her for most of the way back down to the car. I think the 7 pm gate locking might be a bit flexible, as there were still plenty of cars in the lot at 6:45 and people were casually grilling in the picnic area. Here is our approximate route, and here is a 1.6 Mb PDF map of the park. From the map, it looks like ~1300 ft of gain total, and nothing like even the approach to Ceuse, but MAN was it tiring!

It's a beautiful park, but next time we'll leave a lot more time for walking the trails.

another market trip

The blog has been a little uneventful lately: too much weekend programming sessions and not enough road trips to the desert I guess! Eventually I'm sure I will get tired of writing about our trips to the farmer's market, but it's still novel enough to me to merit the occasional (ok, frequent) posting.

It was Earth Day at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park, and we unfortunately discovered that this makes parking for the farmers market a little difficult. It does make for some amusing pictures though:

There's something a little troubling about the words "Spinal Exam" hanging from a tent. I guess it's better than a liver transplant.

I just love how this lady (maybe the artist?) feels like it's necessary to tell the four burly dudes where to go while they are struggling just trying to get the damn borg-cube off of the truck without field-amputating any of their limbs.

Not too much exciting stuff was acquired this time, except for the delicious Tan Oak honey, and the usual Himalayan lunch, which Zoe coveted



Next was a trip down to fourth street for a crepe pan from Sur la Table, a dining room table from Traditions, and an ice cream from Sketch: All we needed was a trip to Weatherford BMW and we would have had the Perfect Yuppie Day. By this time, little ZZN was worn out, and it was time to go home

Farmers market, LHOS

We went to the Farmer's market again today and met up with one of the grandmothers

followed by the usual overspending on fruits and veggies

I bought a pretzel from the German guy with the lederhosen (hey, if you're gonna buy a pretzel -- that's the guy you want to buy it from right?) and then we started heading back to the car. Chloe and I got separated by a funeral procession for a Fireman


who had died of cancer. I'm not usually very affected by the designated occasions when you are expected to display your joy or sorrow, but there was something unexpectedly profound about this that took me by surprise emotionally. After watching all of his fellow firemen and women and his family pass by, (much to my embarrassment) I found myself trying to hide my red eyes from random passersby.

Next, we headed back to Oakland to feed and change the baby, and then headed up to the Lawrence Hall of Science. The LHOS is a science museum with sweeping views of the bay area which also happens to be where I spent many blissful childhood days learning obscure computer languages like PILOT, natural history and basic electronics. I even went to their summer camp in the Santa Cruz mountains, where I got the worst case of poison oak of my life. We met Katie, Taras and Lucy in the courtyard

and checked out the Speed exhibit, followed by relaxing on the new (to me) back patio.


(photos by Taras)
where we were joined by Caleb: an old Swan Systems buddy.

Farmers Market

We took a family trip to the Berkeley Farmers Market, where I again spent way too much money on food. The highlights were sugary baby carrots, ultra sweet japanese sweet potatoes, beautiful Swiss chard, perfect yukon gold potatoes, wild boar sausages, strawberries, purple asparagus, delicious oranges, and eggs from carefree and unionized chickens. Oh yeah, and really good himalayan food for lunch!



Later on, we headed up to the little farm in Tilden to show little ZZN the animals

megalamp, the return

Using the lessons I learned from Megalamp I, I designed and built MaxiLume Turbo Type R this weekend. The design is pretty similar to the original instructables design, but with a few key differences.

1)Log pot (http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail?name=P3H8502-ND), Panasonic EVU-F2MFL3D53
2)Cree XR-E, Q5 bin from DealExtreme. These took *forever* to arrive. Next time, I will try ordering from Cutter in Oz.
3)Flashlight clicky switch from DealExtreme
4)Running LEDs at 1000mA instead of 500mA, since the spec says they can handle that kind of current
5)Only 3 LEDs used, wired in series, not series parallel
6)Buckpuck, pot and switch are all cleverly mounted on the headlamp harness.
7)Used fancy Arctic Silver thermal epoxy, and I actually bought a heat sink (which still ended up being a bit small)


The instructables design outputs an anemic ~200 lumens without the squishy 2.5X blue correction factor at 8 watts. MaxiLume Turbo Type R however outputs a testosterone laden ~660 lumens at 11 watts, (~500 lumens at 8 watts), so better than 2x the efficiency... and you can run it super hot if you want too!

I'm using the same 10 cell battery pack with Tenergy cells, so 12 Volts, 2600 mA. The three Crees drop the voltage 11.1 volts at 1000 mA, so 12 V is just about perfect for a buck driver. Using LED pro, I should get these ball park run times:

Current (mA)    Battery life (hours)     Lumens
1000                             2.3                    660 
800                               3.0                   540
600                               4.1                   450
400                               6.5                   330

lenses (l2 optics) at left, 1000mA buckpuck at the upper left, fancy epoxy lower left, old Petzl headlamp harness at right, heatsink (http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail?name=345-1062-ND wakefield 628-65AB) middle top.

mounted LEDs


more or less finished: wide angle sub lenses on


Let there be light! Now all I need is one of those "Let there be light" T-shirts with Maxwell's equations, and I could give up all hope of escaping nerddom


Heres a closup of the head piece.


And here we are in a dark room. I have found that one of each of the three sub lenses make a nice compromise of wideness and spot. Note that there is no trickery here. ISO 200, f 4.5, 1/30 second exposure.... BRIGHT!

kick butt brownies

I bought a hand cranked pasta maker a while ago at Sur La Table, and it came with a free subscription to Gourmet Magazine. My impression of Gourmet had previously been that it was kind of old school (I was expecting "Grandmas Beef Brisket" type recipes), but we've been pleasantly surprised by the content. Last week we also received a free issue of Cooks Illustrated, which had a GREAT brownie recipe. It's done serious damage to my new weight loss scheme, but what the hell.

I have to admit that I didn't like Cooks Illustrated at all at first, because I avoid Molecular Gastronomy like the plague. I get enough science at work, thank you very much. On reading it more closely, I really like it. It has good recipes and lots of practical information.

A walk with Zoe

I took a walk up in Redwood Regional park with Zoe after picking her up from day care. Here's my reward for lugging the little sack o' bricks up and down the hills