I have finally uploaded pictures from our hiking and camping trip to Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous 48 states at 14,505 feet/4,421 meters. Arguably one of the harder things I’ve ever done. Our schedule:

• Drive the ~6 hours from the Bay area to Lone Pine, CA Friday morning
• Spend Friday in town, camp at night. Go for a short practice hike Saturday during the day, nap and wait.
• Start hiking towards the Summit at 9PM Saturday with our headlamps
• Arrive at the summit at around 9-10AM
• Head back down, arrive at the car at 6PM to round out 20 straight hours of hiking (our group ended up taking between 15 and 24 hours to make the round trip)
• Wait for everyone to regroup, start driving back at 11PM, arrive home around 5AM.
• Nap for about 2 hours, get ready for work. Sit and stare at monitor at work in coma-like state

Enjoy the pictures, my suffering is your gain (:


Mount Whitney Conquer

Every year I post the same comic on my birthday. A little black humor. It’s one of my favorites (:

Today’s my birthday!

Over a month after returning from China, I am finally ready to put up the pics. It was a combination of being busy at work and laziness. Lots of pictures! Enjoy!

No pictures from China yet, I just downloaded them from my cameras today and have over 1,000 to go through. For now, you can enjoy some pictures from our vodka tasting at Hangar One Vodka yesterday. Pretty much just like a wine tasting except in smaller quantities (which is a good idea). I’d have to say probably some of the best vodka I’ve ever had, especially their fruit infused vodka. I ended up going home with two bottles of vodka.

On another note, finally did a 5 mile run yesterday after an entire month of not exercising (plus eating for 20 days straight in China). It was slow and exhausting but not as bad as I thought it’d be. After the half marathon in April, I was in as good a shape as I’d probably ever been in terms of running. Now, it’s time to start over again in preparation for the full marathon in October. Yikes.

I’m back from China after a grueling 24 hour travel day. From Hong Kong, I had a layover in Tokyo and then Los Angeles. In the short 2.5 weeks we were there, we toured the Potala Palace in Tibet, ate nonstop spicy foods in Sichuan, and attended the June 4th memorial in Hong Kong with anywhere between 50k-100k people. And now I’m probably taking a month-long break from Chinese food (I lie, I’ll probably be eating it by tomorrow). As for uploading pictures, I have over 1,000 to go through so please bear with me.

In other news, the last thing I did before heading to China was leave my position at Informatica in search of other opportunities. First thing tomorrow morning, I start working for Apple in Cupertino (jetlag and all). I wonder at what point they’ll realize all I own are two iPods.