Hiking

A day in Marin county and the Palomarin trail

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Had one of my regular visits to California for work, and managed to spend a weekend with my daughter and her boyfriend. Friday night we went to a nearby bar in San Francisco (Paragon, a great place), to watch the Red Sox in the NLCS. We were planning on taking a trip to Marin County for some hiking, but weren’t really sure where we were going.

Paragon proved to be a source of many co-incidences. Waiting outside the bar (which didn’t open til 5:30), happened to be someone living in SF but who grew up the a few towns away from where I live in Massachusetts. Shortly they were followed by a horde of red sox fans. Game on! Sitting at the bar, some Detroit fans joined, sitting next to us. We had some friendly conversations – they were actually from Marin County, and recommended we hike the Palomarin trail. I’d been thinking about that as one of many choices but their recommendation confirmed that as the plan. As the game went on the Detroit fans were replaced with a different couple. Turns out, one of them worked in tech, and both my daughter and I had a number of number of mutual acquaintances. Weird. Last but not least, the Sox came through in the end with grand slam by Shane Victorino to win the game and head to the world series!

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Next day we headed out to Marin. We drove to the Palomarin trail, about an hour and half from downtown San Francisco. After heading around the Bolinas Lagoon, you’ll drive down a dirt road (passing the Point Reyes Bird Observatory along the way), continuing 10 minutes or so after that to the trailhead.

IMG 2773The trailhead has restrooms (as does the bird observatory). When we were there the trail was well used but not over-crowded (there was what looked like a teen venturing group headed out to camp on the beach as well as many hikers and trail runners).

The trail is about 9 miles total (4 1/2 miles each way). It’s relatively flat, about 600 feet elevation gain over all. We hit the trail around 11am or so. The trail starts in a grove of fragrant eucalyptus trees, then opens onto a mesa with wonderful views of the ocean.
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The trail continues to follow the ocean for awhile, then turns inland. You’ll briefly go through a variety of ecosystems including an almost rain-forest like section, pines, another foggy mesa, a rocky pass that would have felt at home on a greek isle, and finally a few mountain lakes (there were some folks swimming the day we went).
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After about 4 miles there’ll be a spur trail to the left (there’s a sign) that will take you down to Alamere Falls. The spur is about 0.4 miles long. Other blogs have mentioned poison oak, but we didn’t have any trouble with that.

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At the end are a wonderful series of small waterfalls and pools. Then there’s a mildly tricky rock scramble down onto the beach. Then, your prize from your labors. A neat, moss covered waterfall, 40 or 50 feet high. And waves crashing on the beach, seals and birds in the water. A great place for lunch! Then we’re back on the trail and back in the parking lot by about 2:30. On the way back you’ll get gorgeous views of the coastline, you didn’t notice on the way out because it was behind you 8).

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From there we headed up through Point Reyes and on to the Tomales Bay Oyster Company. IMG 2843It’s kinda out in the middle of nowhere, but well worth the drive. You buy your (raw) oysters from them. Everything else is up to you. There’s picnic tables and grills, you can each your oysters raw, grill them, or both. You’ll want to bring picnic supplies (we brought Brie, crackers, fresh avocados for guacamole, and other goodies. It’s kind of a motley crew there – we bought extra orders from the Sacramento Assassins, a friendly bunch of motorcycle riders down from the day. The staff is friendly and helpful and with a location right on the bay in the sunshine, it couldn’t be more beautiful.
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We stopped on the way back in Point Reyes for some book shopping, my addiction, at Point Reyes Books, while sipping on some great coffee from next-door, the Bovine Bakery.

All in all a classic Marin County late summer day.

(more photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/viking2917/sets/72157636783287194/)

Books

The Dark Labyrinth, by Lawrence Durrell

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Lawrence Durrell is best known for his Alexandria Quartet, and his writings about travel in the Greek isles. As a long time resident of the islands and a diplomat in war-time Greece during World War II, he came to know and love the islands. I’m a huge fan of his Greece travel books, in particular The Greek Islands.

Some time ago I learned of The Dark Labyrinth, a novel set on the island of Crete (originally published under the title Cefalu). I bought a copy a long time ago and finally got a chance to read it, it’s been out of print for a long time. A group of travelers head to Crete to explore the Labyrinth and find the rumored Minotaur.

The early part of the novel has the travelers on an ocean liner headed to the Mediterranean, each for their own reasons. Durrell gradually exposes us to the travelers, their lives and reasons for heading to the Mediterranean. Durrell absolutely skewers the pretensions of the passengers. The first half of the book almost feels like a comedy of manners or an A. S. Byatt novel fifty years early. I found myself laughing out loud, which doesn’t happen to me very often.

As the ship stops at Crete and the passengers sign up for a tour of the Labyrinth and to search for the legendary Minotaur, we enter Durrell’s Greece. The thyme-scented mountains, the stories of the Greek resistance’s mountain hideaways, abbots and monks and peasants, and the natural beauty of Greece come to the fore. The passengers encounter a disaster while in the labyrinth, and each finds their own fate while trying to escape. A bit of Greek legend, and bit of “Lost Horizons” bring the novel to an interesting philosophical close.

The Dark Labyrinth doesn’t rise to the level of the Alexandria Quartet, but it’s good read, particularly for those who are interested in Durrell or the Greek islands.

Vikings

And in Viking news…

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Apparently, at least one American Indian was brought back to Iceland by the Vikings.

Via: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/11/101123-native-american-indian-vikings-iceland-genetic-dna-science-europe/

Five hundred years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, a Native American woman may have voyaged to Europe with Vikings, according to a provocative new DNA study.

I assume some novelist will get ahold of this soon and write the book!

Music

A quick look at Twitter Music

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Twitter recently launched a social music discovery site, music.twitter.com. It’s pretty interesting. There have been a variety of music discovery music sites launched recently, including sites like Spotify, Shuffler.fm, ex.fm, Turntable.fm, and a host of others. Only a few of them have an explicit social angle. Spotify and Turntable are probably the most social of the lot. I’ve long since abandoned Turntable like everybody else (talk about yesterday’s darling!), whereas Spotify is one of my primary music consumption environments – although, the social piece isn’t really why I use it.

Twitter music, unsurprisingly, draws its inspiration from your twitter stream, and the larger activity happening on twitter. As a result, it’s naturally personalized, but also leverages all the activity happening in the twitter-verse. And draws on a broader crowd than Spotify (because it uses Twitter, where I have a large social graph, vs Facebook, which is more tightly controlled).

I think they’ve done something simple and elegant, and I’ve gravitated to it faster than many of the other music discovery services.

Basically, they present a vaguely pinterest-style view into songs, and the songs are selected according to one of a few primary criteria, and then ordered by recency. In particular, they show songs that are:

• Popular (new music trending on Twitter – essentially, a time-bounded popularity metric)
• Emerging (hidden talent found in the tweets – I am not 100% sure how they are doing this, but I expect they are looking for songs with a high-velocity recent tweet stream)
• Suggested (Artists you may like – presumably artists that are similar to artists I follow, see below)
• Now Playing (music recently tweeted by people you follow)
• Me (music from artists I follow on twitter)

All of these options could readily apply to other forms of content discovery – e.g., a books or reading discovery engine. But whereas Twitter music naturally generates a “stream” of music to listen to, all the books recommendations engines produce more of a static “if you like x you’ll like y” recommendation. For example, see Bookish, recently launched with much fanfare, but with a lukewarm response from the books community. It’s a lot of work to get recommendations out of Bookish – I have to come up with a book I like and get recommendations against – vs. a much stronger “push” user experience.

I found the “Suggested” music of Twitter Music interesting, but had a hard time figuring out why the particular songs were recommended. I expect it’s because they were from artists similar to artists I liked, but it wasn’t clear. Twitter Music could use a “why was this recommended” button. The “Me” music, music from artists I followed, I found really fun. But, it seems quite static. In the 3 days I’ve been playing with it, the music hasn’t changed. Not sure why that is.

A downside of Twitter Music is it designed to use with a companion music player, in particular Spotify or Rdio. With Spotify, you need a Premium account to stream the songs – I found twitter music sufficiently interesting I sprung for a Premium upgrade to Spotify – an extra $5/month over my Unlimited membership. Interesting. I wonder if Twitter gets a spiff on that?

Here’s a couple of screenshots:

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Overall, I found Twitter Music to be a surprisingly strong offering – simple, elegant, and “right” surprisingly often. I hope that they don’t build Twitter Books, because I want to!

Books, Startups, Travel, Search, Music