With a paddle - Kayaking in Monterey Bay

North California Seal taking a sun bath

Before man starts hunting seals, Grizzly bear was its biggest predator. That explains why we see its rocky camoflage, and why they tend to stay from shore when it is resting. Millions of years of instinct is at work.

City of Monterey from the sea




After three hour straight paddling

It wasn't as bad as I thought, thanks partly to the perfect weather we had that day. Still we looked very tired.



A home made basket shop and its owner




A band called Gypsy is singing

Graceful voice, perfect for a relax afternoon, not so perfect for a busy bazar...

Napa, my sideways trip

I haven't been to Napa, until yesterday. It's strange, consider I have been living in bay area for over 5 years now, and Napa is just 2 hours away from my home, consider I enjoy drinking so much and can drink a lot that sometimes I am called "alcoholic". Similar to that I almost never visited Tiananmen square when I was living in Beijing, one don't treasure something that is too easy to get.

I put up my mind to do it after I watched "Sideways", an Oscar winning movie depict two buddies of a quite difference personalities set off to a trip to Napa a week before his wedding. An excellent dark comedy, but I was more impressed by wines and the feeling of vineyard.

So we set off to wine country, on a perfect sunny Saturday morning. Beautiful beautiful day, we sat in the sun, drinking wines, chatting and relaxing through lunch. We followed wine tour guide, walking down deep into fermatation room and smell aging wines slowing evaporating from oak barrel. We witnessed a beautiful wedding about to take place in a small vineyard hight above the hill. We watched a full 15 minute firework show on our way back home.

A day packed with top class wines, food, joy and relax. Besides knowing many more on wines, I had another perfect day to remember now.

Vineyard in distance

Wine gallery

Wine storage room (Robert Mondavi Winery)

Money is evil

Money, poison to life, opposite to every lovely thing, turn good into ugly. Don't want to talk about it, though still need it, badly...

Unlimited music, Yahoo!

Yahoo starts offering unlimited online music to over a million songs via their music engine by a price of $4.99 a month. It's a quite decent deal giving other competitors are offering at a at least doubled rate (Rhapsody, Napster etc). I am tring out its service now and are very likely to go with it after 7 day trial period. Some pros and cons I found so far,

Pros
1. Price: Nothing beats being cheaper, even it means sacriface the quality of the service a little bit.
2. Yahoo! music offers wma (MS media player) format at a 192K bitrate, higer than 128K by Rhapsody in real format, and Napster in mp3 format.
3. User can access the service from up to 3 different computers at he same time. Making it easier for different family members to play his/her own music out of the same account.

Cons
1. Lesser music selections compared to Rhapsody, can't say much about Napster since I never used their service. Although claimed that it offering more than 1 million songs, I found out many of them are not for playing online but "buy" only. I am still hopeful that company as big as Yahoo! will grow its music collections fast once it sees its business flying.
2. Not user friendly software, doesn't support uPnP, which I desparately need for my media streamer at home. Not very intuitive to nagivate and search for artists or songs. Paticuarly slow on downloading music. Consider it is still in beta phase, I can live with it.
3. Can't find any Chinese songs on it, I still have to buy Chinese CDs or download it somewhere on the net.

I believe "renting" rather than "owning" is becoming more and more popular on digital online servies. Why spend more money buying and owning a song if we can access endless selections by less money. Consider I have my earphone on all the time while I am coding, it is a must have for me and I am more than happy to pay just $4.99 a month for it.

Drummer wannabe

Enjoyed playing my bongo on a party Saturday night. This morning, my figures are still hurting from playing it 3 hour straight last night. Had a great fun jamming with my musician friends. We had one guy plays chinese flute, one plays guitar and me with bongo, the rest 10-15 ppl singing along. It's a wonderful combination putting a chinese instrument, a guitar and a lartin drum together. We covered something like 50 songs, some are very old chinese pop song I don't even know why I am stilling remembering, but everyone had such a blast at last. I want to spend more time to perfect my bongo skill, it's such a fun and I just love it.