Monthly Archives: September 2006

Catching up…Trip to the Bay Area

It’s been a while since I blogged… Mostly since I’ve been busy at work getting Beta 2 Tech Refresh out the door. Over the long weekend, we did a short, but fun trip the Bay area and Napa Valley.

We spent Day 1 in San Francisco, hanging around and Fisherman’s Wharf and did a cruise to Alcatraz that evening. Key memories include a lunch of Dim Sum at the busy  Gold Mountain restaurant:

Gold Mountain

Funky street performers at Fisherman’s Wharf:

Street Performer

and the beautiful sunset-time cruise to Alcatraz Island:

Sunset at Alcatraz

 Day 2, we drove to Napa Valley – up and down Highway 29, visiting about half a dozen wineries from the small and quaint Cosentino

Entrance to cosentino

to the mega vineyards, wineshop and picnic spot of V Sattui:

V Sattui's wine shop

As expected, we were exhausted at the end of the day and couldn’t stand to see another bottle of wine!

Later that night, we met up with Karthik, AP & Ishwar at Berkeley before heading back to our hotel downtown.

We spent day 3 finishing up the other must-see spots in SF including the Golden Gate bridge and Twin peaks:

Us at the Golden Gate

 

As always, photos are at Flickr:

San Francisco: http://www.flickr.com/photos/umeshunni/sets/72157594271385261/

Napa Valley: http://www.flickr.com/photos/umeshunni/sets/72157594271416195/

and my favorite photo from this trip:

Vineyard

User generated ads

Kiss 106.1, the radio station we usually listen on our way to work everyday recently ran a contest for the best commercial that user’s could come up with. Now, I had heard of contests for the best slogan or the best punch-line before, but this is the first time I’ve heard of anyone holding a user-submitted-commercial contest.

What makes this contest really unique is the fact that you submit entries by uploading your entry to YouTube and tagging it with “kiss 1061 commercial contest“.

So, has Web 2.0 finally hit mainstream?

Is user-generated-content really the future? Or is this just a result of Kiss 106.1 cutting their ad budget by an order of magnitude.

Philosophical questions aside, here’s the winning entry:

 

 

All other entries are at http://www.jackieandbender.com/KISSTV3.htm. Most are pretty lame!