Road Trip to California: Day 1

avelWe are back from the road trip. Now that the road trip is over, we must publish a travelogue on our blog. So in the next few posts we shall cover each and every day of the trip.

Day 1 was Friday, Aug 14th. Nandana picked me up at work around 4:30PM. For our camping trip we needed the headlamp which I had loaned to Ajit ---so we drove around to his office to pick it up. Ajit's comment when he saw Nandana driving: "You are doing a great service by keeping dangerous drivers like him away from the road". He never did care much for my driving skills.

The drive was monotonous: we switched drivers every couple of hours. It got dark around Portland and after that there was just a succession of signs, exits and towns: Wilsonville, Salem, Eugene, Roseburg.... Driving in night one is hardly aware of progress ---the landcsape around is a mass of darkness with the highway two rivers of lights: one red and slow, the other white and fast. We were planning to push on to Medford to spend the night, but after Roseburg tiredness took over. We decided to stop at Grants Pass ---we saw a sign for Motel6, took the exit and called it a night after a quick check-in.

Chiranjeeb

Road trip to California

We are starting our trip to California today. I have just finished loading the car and am totally amazed at the amount of things we are carrying !! Of course, I am being quite liberal with packing as we are taking the car. But our plan to camp & climb in Yosemite has added a huge load to the luggage. Till yesterday we could not find a single campsite in Yosemite.. all of them were booked. But then Chiranjeeb got this bright idea from one of his more enterprising friends that, the trick lies in refreshing the park website again and again..! at some point you are going to get a campsite ... people keep canceling their booking for various reasons. And that actually happened ! ( you can try that, it works). So, now we have all these extra things to carry..the tent, sleeping bags, cooking equipments, climbing equipments ..! No wonder we have our car full.
Now, I just hope that I don't leave behind something crucial..like the GPS. This reminds me of my old habit of leaving behind my wrist watch everywhere I go. Then finally my brother gave me a seemingly ordinary but very useful tip..'always keep it next to something without which you just can't move, like your car key'. that actually helped... I have not lost a single watch after that.
Anyway, we plan to hit four places San Francisco , Santa Barbara, LA and Yosemite. Planning to take it slow this time. But then, I have my own must-dos..like shopping at the North Face outlet store in Berkeley ! :)

Nandana

Picnic today.... and reflections on Microsoft and other meanderings

The Assamese community of Seattle held its annual picnic in Perrigo park (Redmond) today. Everybody was invited at 9AM, but predictably we were all late: people started showing up at 11AM. A nice park: picnic shelters, soccer fields, volley ball and tennis courts, children's play area and everything else you need.


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Overall a nice cool day for the picnic: perfect weather for children to run around and the adults to play volley ball. I tried my hand at volley ball ---had never played before. Overall a pretty dismal effort: never could hit the ball across the net, but I guess there is a first time for everything.

Most of the Assamese folks are employed by Microsoft: so work at Microsoft is a pretty common discussion topic. Over the last couple of years, I am struck by the fact that in Microsoft large projects may get started and worked on for a while and then nothing comes of it. The project gets scuppered or the product is a dismal failure. And this is not specific to Microsoft at all: any large company goes through it. Google has definitely done it, inside my company (Amazon.com) we have launched products which have gone nowhere ---of course not as large projects as Microsoft. I guess when you launch any risky project, it has a chance of failure. To minimize the problems caused by failures, you can one of two things:

1. Launch projects which are low-risk. This means that the company will stagnate.
2. Launch lots of projects which are high risk, but low cost and can be killed early with not too much loss. This is the approach taken by venture capital firms for start-ups.
   

Approach 2 is also very useful in doing research, whether in computer science or physics. I forget who it was exactly, but somebody once said that the secret to having good research ideas is to have a lot of them. The only problem is to decide when to kill the bad ideas. If you kill an idea too early, you might have killed something that could have succeeded, if you kill too late you have wasted resources. In the end, killing early is probably better. My professor JK Bhattacharjee had once said that Alexander Polyakov's success as a physicist was due to the fact that he was so good technically, that he could kill his bad ideas much faster than anybody else and so had a lot of time left to pursue the good ones. I wonder if this can be quantified: you can measure in any large division how many products were launched and what was the failure rate. High rate of failure with good revenue is a sign of creativity. Killing projects early is also a good sign. When projects are killed too late, it signifies inertia.

Chiranjeeb

Floating Lanterns at Green Lake

Yesterday evening we went to see the lantern floating ceremony for "From Hiroshima To Hope". It is organized every year in remembrance of the victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all victims of war and violence, on NW Shore of Green Lake.
Everybody can make his/her own lantern with the materials which are provided. We reached at around 9 p.m. By then the prayer ceremony was almost over and people were getting ready to float the lanterns. Within half an hour hundreds of beautifully decorated lanterns were floating serenely in the lake. It made a truly amazing sight.If you live in Seattle area do make it a point to attend this beautiful and peaceful event next time. These are some of the pictures we took of the event.

(The crowd near the bathhouse theater getting ready to lower the lanterns down onto the lake.)

(A few kids went into the water and helped everybody float their lanterns on the lake.)

(Floating lanterns on Green Lake.)

(The wind blew the lanterns onto the shore where they gathered under trees.)