The Salmon Fish and Chips, Yellowtail Tuna Wasabi Rice Bowl, and three kinds of Fish Tacos at the Pacific Catch in the Marina. My favorite was the delicately flavored rice bowl–especially the tender yet crisp seaweed salad.

Just a few shots around the city. I’ve been a little back logged lately–hoping to straighten things out on the site. I’m experimenting with larger images on my pages. Also, I will soon be shifting my domain to http://www.jamesyu.org. You’ll know when it happens.

Supporters of the Falungong practioners in China involved in an awareness protest in SF Chinatown. I’ve seen these before, and always find it a bit creepy–everyone is so silent and sullen as they enact the torture and persecution of the practioners that are in China.

I enjoyed some salmon and Thai fried rice at Osha Thai. We tried the salmon twice. The first time it was great, but the second time was lacking.

Some interesting views in the SF transport system.

The first week of my new job has gone by. My team took me out every day of the week–quite a gastronomic tradition. I’m very excited about Dolby in general: there’s going to be lots to learn and play with.

I’ve been going into work at around 6am, and leaving at 4:30pm. I’m on the 9/80 schedule, which is quite common here in the Bay Area. Basically, you work 9 hour days, and you take off every other Friday. The payback is that I get a 3 day weekend every other weekend, which is quite nice. However, waking up at 5:15am everyday is quite an adjustment. After the first week of hellish blood-shot eyes, I think I’m actually getting used to it.

My job is going well. Dolby has been really organized about giving me the proper training and background information. This is definitely not the usual haphazard training that I had at many other companies. It just makes things much nicer when you actually understand your job function before diving in.

The photoblog has been backed up; I’ve really had zero time to do anything with my digital life at home recently. Things should be getting back to normal in about a week or two, so check your RSS feeds when the time comes.

Life is a bit hectic nowadays. I started my career at Dolby this past Monday. More to come soon (when everything settles down).

I don’t have a TV in my home in San Francisco, so the only time when I get any time with the tube is at my parents’ home in Colorado. Usually, I get all my news from blogs and other independent media sources (I rarely surf CNN.com) Needless to say, it’s always a very surreal experience actually watching CNN on TV.

What I find most amusing is that there are actually Blog Reporters on the CNN team. I saw this for the first time this morning when they did their blog segment, which gives an overview of notable blogs (in this case, ones that are relevant to the London bombings). They surfed to many of the sites I was looking at yesterday when the tragedy occured. I almost felt like the mainstream media were intruding into my space–it’s very weird to see familiar webpages on the TV. Also, they were shooting computer screens directly, and not screen capturing it. This is awkward at best–providing a low quality view of the webpages. They even had to pan around to see the whole webpage! It’s absolutely an awful way to convey the wealth of information in the blogosphere.

This morning, four explosions occurred in London’s mass transit system in what seems to be a concerted attack by terrorists. Bloggers are quick to report from the scene, and Flickr has a photo pool. I still don’t understand how killing innocent people aims to prove anything about someone’s personal beliefs. The only thing it promotes is hatred, confusion, and total disbelief.

Across the pond here in the US, we have yet again raised the terror level in mass transit systems–whatever that means. Haven’t the terror levels already been raised before? How is this going to be different? I find such frivolous threat announcements to be useless for the general public. We all have some sort of common sense–if we see a mysterious package with wires hanging out, we’ll report it.

In NYC, they are doing random police spot checks on buses, which includes a short lecture on what a suicide bomber looks like. I’m no expert on suicide bombers, but couldn’t they easily take on any appearance? There’s nothing wrong with a little briefing on what is suspicious, but there definitely is something wrong with ignoring elements of a suspicious scene just because it wasn’t on the list of suicide bomber attributes handed out by the police. I’m also hoping they’re not making any broad racial suggestions about the bombers.

I have concluded that Americans are generally obsessed with the beach. Every advertisement and graphic that tries to give an impression of relaxation has a person sitting on a sandy beach sipping some beverage next to the ocean. This image has bombarded us so much that when we think of our next vacation, we usually think about hitting the surf–even when we’re not!

I have nothing against beaches, but I also don’t see anything that particularly special about them. It’s true, a nice walk on the sand can provide a landscape to let your mind drift. But this doesn’t come without work. It always seems like going to the beach is a delicate balance between comfortability and nature.

For one thing, the sand gets everywhere. It finds its way into our clothes, feet, awkward orifices, electronics, food and picnic baskets. We defend against this by toting beach blankets and exercising a degree of caution. But I find this annoying! This act of sand defense ruins any relaxing mood I had.

Even though we all know about the sand dilemma, we highly value the beaches that have sand. I find this sand-loving attitude quite amusing, since we seem to do everything possible to contain the sand once we set foot on the beach–and yet, it is the thing we crave.

Okay, so maybe I’ve exaggerating the sand problem a little bit, but I’m sure every single one of you has had the same feelings at one time or another. So next time when you decide to relax, maybe you should choose a rocky beach. That way, you’ll final defeat the cliche sandy beach loving attitude.