Backpacking south olympic coast

Here is the Video account of the backpacking trip Maris, Myself and Jessica (Maris' ex-housemate) did this Memorial day weekend.



Pictures of the trip are shared here.

The three day trip was a fabulous excursion in the Pacific Northwest's flora & fauna, tide charts and yep the longest wilderness coastline!! All of these were unparalleled to my any relevant experiences before! I can go on and on about how i loved the coast but i think i'll leave you guys to enjoy the video for now!

Visible

Recently my team did the following presentation for our business development methods class:


The project was to find ways to propose a new business for a local company Treemo. We collaborated with the COO - Jeff Yee. Jeff was really a pleasure to work with, he almost instantaneously replied to our emails.

Anyhoo the presentation as you see here is proposing a company to help folks focus and improve the visibility of their amateur sports! The presentation and the related financial analysis and marketing research was very well received. We got comments like - "best presentation", "can I go check this out? Is this real?" , "I would love to have something like this, especially since I'm a soccer mom".

We also got very consturctive feedback like focussing more on a niche - may be niche of high school students wanted to get university scholarships via sports or may be a family oriented hub niche!!

The entire excercise was very frutiful for me, Mark & Cam. But we dont have customers or funding yet... any one out there???

Salsa 2A - Class one!

In an effort to link all my online sites, I'm importing posts from some other places. I took Salsa 2 a year ago.

So finally i'm writing my salsa steps one more time. Yesterday i attended Salsa 2A class at Century and it was amazing! I figured out the mistake i was doing in cross body lead, basically i was trying to cross over my left foot, move right foot towards the follower and then move left foot. This would get me in an akward position so actually the steps were to cross left foot , shift weight in it(1) , shift weight on right foot in place (2) and then uncross the left foot and shift weight on it(3)!

We learned quite a few interesting moves.

Move 1: Cross-body lead (1-3), make sure you hold her hand and move her ahead , one-and-half-inside-turn (5-7)

Move 2: Spin the left arm anti-clockwise, change hands (1-3), do an outside turn (5-7)

Move 3: You are right-to-right, take a back step on left foot pull her towards you and be in go-to-movies-pose (1-3), take a back step and send her out (5-7)

Move 4: You are in cross hands situation, with left hand over right, do a cross body lead and at the same time ask her right hand on top and leave her left hand (1-3), send out and do an inside turn (5-7)!

I have a full 30 second salsa clip with move 1-4 now!!!!

Naked Ape!

In an effort to link all my online sites, I'm importing posts from some other places. Naked Ape is a book i read a couple of years.

The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris gives a perpective of an ape to human. We are not these super-species just an ape!! It touches the raw emotions and its at times very controversial but non the less a good read. It borrow it and read this as a recommendation by Ruchi.

The Art Of Start

The Art Of Start - the classical Guy Kawasaki work outline the five basic Entrepreneurial principals - Make meaning, Make Mantra, Get going , Define your business model and Weave a MAT (Milestones, Assumption and Tasks). That a very expressive list of getting going but above all i love his statement that Entrepreneurship is all about doing!

I have put that as my litmus test for picking up partners - if you want to do lets get going !! :), What else should one look in a partner? Ofcourse few things which come to my mind are - complementary skill sets, tenacity ....

How To Start Climbing 5.12...

There are a lot of people aspiring to climb 5.12, well for me 5.12 is the ceiling ! Last year i could lead 5.8, atmost 5.9 trad and 5.9 (consistently) and atmost 5.10 sports. Well thats all numbers and very geeky rock rat talk! What i really aim to achieve is getting more comfortable on the rock. When i first started rock climbing two years ago I feared heights :), well the reason i climbed was just to get over my fear! Now i have come along long ways :).

Last season I started leading trad, I learned a lot of composure and mind tricks! Almost everyone can climb 5.8/5.9 but when it comes to leading it all in the mind! While doing a leading harder stuff i learnt from a friend and colleague (Damon) a very cool trick of extending your arms and using your legs. Damon is an awesome climber and when he climbs it almost looks out of a video, also note that most rock climbing books and websites stress on the fact of using your legs and not relying on hands. It was sort of 'AHA' moment when Damon showed me how to hang on hands and move your legs up and then stand on a good hold, and keep repeating the same tactic. I wish i had a picture or a video to illustrate. This has helped me a lot, many time i'm just able to cruise up on the juggy 5.10's without any problem using this technique. Well, no only if I had a cool technigue to negiotiate the tiny handholds i would be a 5.10 champ :).

Anyways, to the point this season i'm planning to use this book to first get the 5.10's and then move on the oh well.. lets see :). But from what my friends (Wayne) have told me about the book, it seems to lay out a great process of trying to make training pyramid of grades you can climb to grade you want to achieve, end of the day its all about miles and constant tiny improvements with 'AHA' moments inter-spread.. sounds familiar ??

Salsa fun!!

Back to Salsa! Its great to realize that almost after a six month break i havent lost that much of touch, but really i would love to be able to do the spins and flaps like the video above - Maris agrees too :) I should step it up !