For two weekends in a row we went for nice day hikes in Tilden regional park / Wildcat canyon. The area is very nice and the views of San Francisco and the bay area are awesome. We prepared both hikes by looking at the GeoCaching website and planning a couple of …
read moreTilden regional park: Vollmer peak
A quick and easy 7.2mi (12km) hike in Tilden park with awesome views of the bay area, including San Francisco, the golden gate bridge, Oakland, Emeryville, the bay bridge, silicon valley and much more.
We set off really late (at around 11:30am) and just drove up to Grizzly …
read moreRobots, wildlife and bioinspiration
Sangbae Kim, professor in mechanical engineering from MIT visited Berkeley today and gave a great inspiring talk on dynamic locomotion. The original title of the talk was "Toward Highly Dynamic Locomotion: Actuation, structure and control of the MIT cheetah robot".
An early model of the cheetah robot. Image (c) biomimetics …
read moreHiking and Geo Caching along the Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline / the Keller Beach Park
Today we went off for another short 'warm-up' hike before the big hiking seasons starts. We drove to Richmond, CA where we walked along the shoreline, explored some old railroad tracks, discovered some brick houses (and factories), enjoyed the view over almost the complete bay area, and strolled through Richmond's …
read moreAll paths lead to Rome: POPL and PPREW from a syssec perspective
read moreA week in Rome: what could be better than sitting all day in a conference room?
POPL (Principles Of Programming Languages) is one of these great conferences that have been around forever and sound very interesting to any systems person. The definition of POPL according to the SIGPLAN homepage is …
Golden Gate bridge, Point Bonita lighthouse and light hike around the Rodeo lagoon
On our first hike of the new year we set off for the Golden Gate bridge, Point Bonita lighthouse and beyond. We got up relatively late as we only planned a very light hike as the first hike of 2013. The weather was actually perfect and we set off with …
read moreRussian River Canoedeling
For a change this post is not about a hike but about a canoe trip that we did on the Russian river. We got up early in the morning to arrive at Burke's Canoe Trips around 11am. After a short safety message and shelving over 60$ per canoe (one canoe …
read moreMuir Woods hike
Muir Woods National Monument is a very special park as you see many redwood groves with huge trees. The park features two short loops down in the valley that pass along a couple of different redwood groves. These loops are like highways, almost paved, and well looked-after.
read moreLake Anza stroll
Today was a sunny late September lazy Sunday and we just wanted to get out to enjoy the sun and relax a little. We packed our bag with swimsuits, enough water, some carrots, sweets, and sun lotion and set off for Lake Anza in Tilden Regional Park. As a side …
read morePhD: expectations and reality
read moreIntroduction
Deciding to do a PhD is a huge commitment as you are just dedicating a couple of years of your life to a single cause. When I decided to do a PhD in 2006 I was not completely sure what would expect me. I just finished my master of …