Travel, Read, Conserve

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses  by Eric Ries I will admit, this was a difficult book to stay focused on.  The subject is interesting but the presentation is a little dry. Agile being the word of the decade, all of us in the tech world are familiar with the basic concepts of the book - minimum viable product, constant iteration, and capturing the right metrics are critical for any successful product. In the first few chapters of the book , Eric Ries walks us through many examples of failed startups, and the principal reason for the failures were not understanding the customer's needs, attempting to solve a problem that does not exist or releasing a final product without iterative development to incorporate the customer's feedback.  All the anecdotes emphasize on the Build-Measure-Feedback loop to deliver a sustainable product. To persevere in the same direction or pivot to a new path ba...

Being from the Pacific Northwest , we are not new to whale-watching. We have done trips around the San Juan islands to see pods of Orca whales at a reasonable distance, even seen a gray whale resting on a shore on the Central Oregon coast. So we went in with a certain level of excitement to see the migratory humpback whales all the way down at Baja California but not with the expectation to be blown away. Boy, were we wrong about that! First things first - our captain and the two ladies-  marine biologist Barbara and photographer/guide Tania were absolutely awesome. They kept us safe, all the while regaling us with whale anecdotes and facts about the region and its geographical features. The close up views of the famous El Arco , Lovers beach and Land’s End with the colony of sea lions resting on the rocks were an added bonus.  The boat ride on the the beautiful turquoise Sea of Cortez was more or less smooth but as soon as we got onto Pacific waters, it w...

After a few months of training on charcoal and pastel drawing at the Seattle Visual Arts Studio , we started on our acrylics and watercolor journey. The prospect of being able to play with paint was exciting and daunting at the same time. I remember being all charged and ready to go paint colorful landscapes the first day, but I was really jumping ahead :) The first few lessons were spent on learning and really getting familiar with the color wheel, which sounds deceptively simple but in practice, is far from so. In our acrylic sessions, we used a limited color palette, and it was amazing to be able to create a very wide range of colors from just the three primary colors, and white, using a palette knife to control the portions of each color. For creating acrylic or watercolor paintings the basic techniques remain the same. We still started with creating several thumbnails to decide which composition we are most comfortable with to translate on to the canvas. The principal...

While painting a still life may be an organic, seamless, free flowing form of expression for the experienced artist; to an aspiring art student, it is the culmination of a sequence of steps for laying the foundation and building on top of it. I am trying to break down the process of creating a still life  painting into a few smaller steps, that have helped me immensely as a beginner. Setting the still life   This is done for us by Shruti Ghatak, our mentor and teacher, at the Seattle Visual Arts Studio . The thought that goes behind the setup and the meticulous arrangement makes it a pleasure and challenge at the same time to paint it. It determines the complexity of the painting by the number of objects used, the spatial relationship between those objects, the exact lighting on the setup that creates a very dramatic light & shade effect , folds added on a tablecloth so it creates the desired fluidity. Last but not the least, since we often use perishable objects s...

Tapas, flamenco, fútbol, sangria. All of these have one common factor, and that is they are all overwhelmingly and characteristically Spanish. Having recently visited Spain, I saw why the country draws in millions of tourists from all over the world every year. The magnificent architecture on just about every corner, a Mediterranean coastline that spans more than 1000 miles, mountain ranges scattered throughout the country, and the extravagant, inexpensive cuisine made it very difficult for me to leave. While all of this is draw in crowds and should be on every tourist’s bucket list, I would like to focus on another, more subtle aspect of the country I slowly but surely picked up on during my travels: sustainability. It is no secret that I am obsessed with nature and am constantly looking for innovative strategies and methods that have been implemented to help regain the balance between humanity and nature. Although subtle, Spain is just chalk full of these intr...