Pate is a paste made of meat, liver, and fats. The most popular one is probably the one made of foie gras, but duck liver is quite expensive and very hard to find here, so I usually use chicken liver instead. Chicken liver can be found at any super market with a decent butchery; in the Bay Area PW Supermarkets is probably your best option, while here in Davis you can find it at the co-op or Nuggets.

Apparently, not everybody agrees on the merits of pate. According to wikipedia:

in a blind taste test conducted by the American Association of Wine Economists, 15 of 18 subjects misidentified the sample foods - some of which are pâté - as dog food

I’d certainly be surprised if dog food was that good… but this shows however, that pate is a fairly unknown product in the US. While in Spain cheeses and pates share more or less the same shelve space, in the US pate is hard to come by.

In any case, home made pate is actually much better than what you can find on the stores, and it’s super-easy to do it yourself, so you are not really missing anything.

The practice of measuring recipe ingredients exactly is not very popular in Spain, most of the recipes that I’ve inherited contain vague measures like “scant”, “pinch” or “handful”, tablespoons and cups never have the same size, and when the ingredients are measured exactly, only their weight is provided. Almost nobody has a scale in their kitchen, so you generally have to take those measures with a grain of salt and use your common sense instead.

I got this recipe from my mother, all the ingredients are measured in weight, and I’ve confirmed they actually work well, but in practice most of the time I do not measure them exactly, so just take them as a guideline:

• 250 gr of chicken livers
• 150 gr of smoked ham
• 150 gr of bacon
• 50 gr green onions or shallots
• 1 tbsp butter
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 200 gr heavy cream
• cured manchego or parmesan cheese
• 1/4 nutmeg, peper and salt

First, remove the hearts and macerate the livers in brandy for at least 4 hours. If you don’t have brandy you can also use white wine and leave them a little longer.

Fry the onions in the oil and butter in a medium saucepan until softened, then add the bacon and continue frying without letting it brown. Mix in the rest of the meat with the spices, and cook 8 to 10 minutes until the livers are well done.

Add the cream, it should fill the interstices, but not cover the meat entirely. Then add as much grinded cheese as you see fit. In Spain I always used one-year-cured Manchego cheese, but here that’s very rare, typically you can only find the semi-cured variety, and it’s quite pricey. Instead, I think that cured parmesan also works well. In addition to that, I also add a little bit of blue cheese, but not too much to avoid overriding the other flavors.

Finally, bring it to boil so that the cheese fully dissolves, and blend in a food processor until you have a smooth mixture. Alternatively, you can add other herbs, spices, or nuts, it’s hard to go wrong.

I love the feeling of being able to go almost anywhere just by the sheer strength of my legs. I’ve even been thinking about commuting to San Francisco by bike. I could easily go to Vallejo and take the Ferry to San Francisco, but a more ambitious route would be to go through the north bay, of course, I would do that on a Sunday, spend the night in the city and return by train.

Outdoor Adventures is a university outdoor program run by students. They organize backpacking trips and other activities, and also rent equipment at very low prices. I signed up for an “introduction to backpacking” trip for $52 and rented a backpack and a sleep bag for just $10.

It turned out that all the guides and participants were girls, except me and another guy who in the end did not show up. Initially I was indifferent about it, but I have to admit the situation made me feel a bit more awkward than I usually do, and of course, Mariana wasn’t too happy about it.

The pre-trip meeting was pretty useful, the guides were experienced and knowledgeable. They informed us about the trip plans, provided recommendations, made everybody feel comfortable, and gave us a check-list of items that we ought to bring with us.

We started the hike around 10:30 AM at the southernmost point of Loon Lake. The temperatures were fairly mild, slightly above 40º F. After 30 minutes we stopped for lunch on top of a huge granite slab with great views of the lake and the surrounding mountains. We continued the trail that follows the south shore of the lake until we arrived our destination: an established campground by the irregular shores of Pleasant Lake, under the shadows of an impressive granite ridge.

In the afternoon, after setting up our tents, and while the other participants relaxed and explored the area, I did a quick solo hike to cover a short section of the Rubicon trail and climb one of the smaller peaks nearby.

I didn’t know how quickly the sun would set, so I did a good portion of it almost running; I could feel the lack of oxygen when climbing the granite slabs. The views from the 7000 feet peak were amazing. I could see a good portion of the Rubicon Valley and, in the horizon, the mountains of the Tahoe rim covered in snow.

The trail to the peak was only marked with piles of stones over the granite surface and running on the way down I lost the track and ended up doing a quick detour around one of the mud lakes. I arrived to the camp right in time to watch the sunset from the shores of the lake.

At my arrival, one of the guides explained that one of the participants was suffering altitude sickness and had spent good part of the afternoon vomiting. So, we planned to wake up early and head back first thing in the morning.

Before the sunset we scouted out a tree for a bear hang. Embarrassingly, the guides could not hang it in any of the nearby trees and ended up hiding the food under a pile of stones. They argued that bear hangs are not very useful anyway, since bears are very good climbers, and that in practice we should have brought canisters.

I tried to scavenge some dry wood for a campfire, but it was hard to find enough pieces nearby and most of the ones I found were too wet to start a fire. Instead, I helped the girls refill our bottles with filtered water.

The dinner was probably the worst I’ve had in months, but everyone else seemed very pleased, I wonder if that’s the way American students generally eat. In any case I’m not sure I would have been able to do any better given the circumstances, and it actually felt pretty good to eat something warm while the temperatures started to go down. Heck, I even drank the warm water from boiling the pasta.

As the night closed in, the temperatures dropped very quickly and the cold settled down upon us reaching nearly 25º F.

The sky was clear, so when the moon set the sky exploded with stars, so bright as I hadn’t seen in a long time. It’s beautiful to watch the stars in the back country, away from all light sources polluting the atmosphere. However, it was getting extremely cold, so we retired to the comfort of our sleeping bags around 7 PM.

I didn’t sleep very well and woke up multiple times during the night. First, I was too hot; I removed some layers of clothes, but then woke up again feeling cold. My face was freezing and I could barely feel my nose. I also felt some discomfort in my bad shoulder. I finally woke up in the morning and waited for the sunrise.

At 6 AM the sky started to brighten and I decided to adventure out of the tent. I wandered around to warm myself up and to enjoy the silence and the solitude of the morning. The grass was covered in frost, water streams and small puddles over the granite surface were frozen, I looked around thinking that in a few weeks all this will be covered in snow.

I came back after and hour while the rest of the group started to wake up. We broke down the camp, and traced our steps back to the parking lot. We arrived to our cars at 10 AM. On the way down we stopped at Apple Hill to have some warm breakfast, although I got a portion of apple pie with vanilla ice cream and a cold glass of milk. We made it back to Davis by 1:00 PM.

While this wasn’t the most exciting of my trips, it was nevertheless an interesting experience. Outdoor Adventures makes it very easy to head out into the wild, and I think I’ll probably repeat before doing it by myself. This winter I’ll definitely try some of the cross county skiing and snowshoe tours.

Even though I generally prefer hiking alone, it’s good to meet other people sometimes. On the other side, I walk pretty fast and have very good resistance. Having to stay with the pace of the group was sometimes annoying. Ideally, I’d like to find a hiking partner that keeps up with me.

In any case, I had a great time working at NVIDIA during the last 4+ years; I especially enjoyed the time I spent working on tessellation. I’ll definitely miss the great people that I had the chance to work with. Some of them are in the following picture of my last day at work:

In clockwise order: Aravind, James, Tianyun, Eric, Sarah, Ignacio (not me), Cem, Lars, Timothy, Philippe, Matthieu, Paulius and Tristan.

The paper provides a solution to a problem that I’ve talked before, that multi-chart parameterizations introduce seams over meshes, and that these seams can produce severe artifacts in some use cases such as displacement mapping. While the solution that I propose removes the cracks in the mesh, it does not eliminate the seams entirely, in only eliminates the holes, so for that reason I still suggested that the use of seamless parameterization remains valuable.

The most interesting thing about the Continuity Mapping solution is that it does not require a re-parameterization of the mesh, allowing you to preserve the uv-map created by the modeler, which is sometimes useful. It’s cool that they reference my presentation at Siggraph 2008, although I first proposed that solution a few months before at Gamefest, and more detailed descriptions of the technique are available in my blog.

In general, I agree with Naty’s assessment that the technique is likely to be inefficient due to divergent branching. Although it may make sense for some applications, it’s unlikely it will be adopted for use in games. Naty describes some other issues, but one that I think is important as well is that it’s unclear how their sewing technique can handle tangent space normal maps. None of the examples in the paper appear to use normal maps, so I suspect the authors may be aware of the problem.

With tangent space normal maps each chart has a different tangent space. Tangent frames are defined at the vertices and interpolated over the triangles, and the tangent spaces do not agree along the seams of the charts.

Per texel normals are then stored with respect to the chart’s tangent space. You cannot interpolate normals that belong to different charts directly. Instead, you have to first transform them to the same space and do the interpolation afterward. That’s generally done in the pixel shader (although it would be more correct to do it before texture filtering). However, their sewing technique introduces new triangles over which the tangent space is simply not well defined since tangent frames at opposite sides of the seam could have completely arbitrary directions and their interpolation would likely result in degenerate frames.

I think that’s been helping me a lot. I’ve gained more than 12 lb and I feel in better shape than ever. I’ve been hiking again lately and I’ve started playing soccer with Nachito in the evenings. So far I haven’t noticed any signs of back pain, which means that the herniated disk is probably healing.

Swimming during the summer was very pleasant; Davis is super hot and jumping into the water at noon was very refreshing. I also have a great tan from swimming under the sun. However, it’s getting a bit chili now (~80º F). I wonder how hard it will be to swim during the winter; hopefully they will adjust the water temperature. In any case, swimming with others is very encouraging, it’s much easier to share the workout with regular lane-mates and a coach to urge you on.

Today we had a physiotherapy assessment test and just learned that my right shoulder is fucked up. It has a much more limited range of motions than the left shoulder and it makes cracking noises when rotating on certain angles. This summer I had a minor injury while swimming at the beach that kept me away from the pool for about one week, but it slowly recovered and after two weeks the pain was gone entirely. However, it’s very likely that I’ll have more problems if I don’t get that fixed. I should be able to change medical plans pretty soon, so hopefully I’ll be able to chose a decent physiotherapist.

We stayed at the Mill Creek campground in Del Norte Park. All the campsites are surrounded by lush vegetation and covered by the canopy of giant redwoods. The weather outside was nice, but the Mill Creek valley was always humid, it rained during the nights, and in the mornings the mist rose and shafts of light came through the trees. We got a secluded site and after setting up the tent it quickly felt like home.

On the first day we went to Prairie Creek and did a section of the James Irvine and Miner’s ridge trail. We started the trail in Fern Canyon and took the Clintonia trail shortcut to reduce the length down to 7 miles. Fern Canyon was pretty nice, but too crowded to my taste. On the other side Nachito had a great time hiking along the other kids, looking for fishes and snakes, and throwing rocks to the water.

The rest of the trail was nice redwood forest, although I think we missed the best part, which is at the beginning of the James Irving trail. After leaving the Fern Canyon the crowds dispersed. We met a few groups during the first few miles, but after entering the Clintonia trail we were left alone during the rest of the day.

Sometimes the vegetation was so lush and so high that the trail became a narrow tunnel under it, sometimes it opened up and we could see the beauty of the redwood forest in all directions.

Nachito behaved like a champ hiking 6 out the 7 miles. In order to achieve that we had to make frequent stops, or take him in our arms, back and shoulders from time to time. We had to constantly find games to keep him excited. Sometimes there were snakes pursuing us, or swiper the fox was waylaying us. He loves crossing bridges, so we would constantly look forward to the next one, and we counted the number of steps steps in all the stairs along the trail. Every once in a while I would give him a peanut to keep him walking, and on every important milestone he would get a piece of chocolate.

At the end of the day he was so exhausted that when we arrived to the beach Mariana and Nachito decided to stay there waiting for me to finish the trail and get the car. The day was gorgeous and outside the cover of the forest, the sun shined brightly. We were hoping we could take a quick bath, Nachito didn’t wait much to get naked, but unfortunately the water was too cold and the sea too rough.

The next day we were planning to do The Boy Scout Tree Trail at the Jedediah State Park before heading back home, but Nachito was too tired for that, and instead we simply wandered around the magnificent redwoods trees at the ancient looking Stout Grove that, despite its small size, is probably one of the most beautiful redwood forests that I’ve ever seen.

We then spent the rest of the day laying under the sun on the quiet shores of the Mill Creek unaware that the Grove of Titans was just a few steps away from us.

Anyhow, today it’s time for some more food blogging, and now that we are in midst of the summer there’s nothing better than Salmorejo. As soon as the tomato season starts, this is something that I have for lunch or dinner almost every day. It’s easy to cook, it’s fast, it’s refreshing, and it’s filling.

Salmorejo is actually a different food depending on the region of Spain, but in Andalusia it’s a cold soup made of tomatoes, garlic, and bread; seasoned with salt, vinegar, and oil.

Good tomatoes are by far the most important ingredient and here in California these are not hard to find (ie. at farmer markets or at the local coop). I usually use a combination of regular and heirloom tomatoes, which I think give a nice twist to the flavor.

I was hoping to grow tomatoes in my backyard this summer, but my back problems prevented me from working on my vegetable garden, which grew out of control during the spring and now almost dried during the summer. I’m tidying it up now, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to harvest something by the end of the summer.

For the bread I recommend a hard bread that is a few days old. Ciabatta or a crusty sourdough baguette work best.

Preparation is as follows:

• Take the piece of bread and submerge it in water for about 20 minutes until completely soft.
• In the meantime dice the tomatoes and liquefy in a food processor or a blender. You should get about 6 cups. Then pass the tomatoes through a food mill to remove the skin and the seeds, and place aside. After that you should have about 5 cups of a fairly homogeneous tomato juice.
• Now take some of the bread, squeeze it to remove some of the water, and add one cup to the food processor with two or three cloves of garlic.
• Season the bread and garlic mixture with salt, vinegar and oil, and combine with the tomato juice. Pulse in the food processor a few times until well mixed together.

The Salmorejo can be eaten right away, but it tastes better after 24 hours. It’s typically served with Iberian Ham and boiled eggs. If I don’t have good ham available I usually substitute it with tuna.

Or you can also spread it over a slice of fresh bread and combine it with smoked salmon or pomfret.