Riding BART

MC Soleil and I are taking White Noise Lounge on the road—to France! So posting might be a bit irregular, depending on the good sounds we find along the way. To get in the spirit of travel, I took a…

S’installer dans le Vieux Nice

Sunday was jetlag recovery day. Left the apartment late in the morning for a leisurely stroll through the Vieux Nice. Made our way again to the coast where there was a big Italian cultural exposition going on. Sort of a…

“Tonton ’tin”

Uncle Justin with Luna, Stephanie’s niece

Randonnée dans l’Esterel

The last time we visited Nice I pretty much summed up the week-long trip in a single post, Une semaine à Nice, because that’s kind of how it felt—time just flew by. We kept comforting ourselves by saying it was…

On est allé à Fayence

On Wednesday we went to Stephanie’s one-time childhood hometown of Fayence to visit with her grandmother who wouldn’t be able to attend the wedding and her aunt who was staying there in order to attend the wedding. We were also…

D’Èze-sur-Mer à Èze-Village

The rain we saw in Fayence hung around the coast on Thursday, but that didn’t dissuade us from getting out for another hike. We drove east to Èze-sur-Mer (aka Èze-Bord-de-Mer), one of many small villages hugging the Azur coast, which…

Waves in Nice

This is a very familiar sound to me. The beach along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice was a soothing and invigorating place during my college years. The entire beach is made up of small polished stones, which are not…

Un Mariage Français

Last weekend was dedicated to wedding and baptism festivities (for Stephanie’s sister and niece, respectively). We cleared our schedule on Friday to help out however we could (and to recover from our Èze hike), but found that everything was under…

En route vers Cinque Terre

To get from Nice to Cinque Terre last Monday, we hugged the coast and headed east on the A8, which became the A10 in Italy, and then we took the A12 in Genova all the way to La Spezia. But…

Les grenouilles

The title of this post is in French because these are French frogs croaking—and because grenouille is such a fun word to say: gren-OO-ee. Unfortunately it’s a really hard sound to photograph without stumbling upon an actual frog in the…

Cinque Terre!

At some point last year we got an REI Adventures brochure in the mail and flipped through it, dreaming about all the crazy places in the world there are to explore. One in particular caught Stephanie’s eye, Cinque Terre, which…

Fleur de courgette, avant et après

I can’t say that I’ve ever seen the flower of a zucchini before. In France they’re sold with the flower in order to make beignets de fleurs de courgette, or fried zucchini flowers. It’s something of a specialty in Provence.…

Socca

I can’t believe I didn’t post anything about this on my first trip to France. Socca is sort of a chickpea crepe popular in and around Nice—particularly in the Vieux Nice.

Sandwich Américain

Stephanie told me that during college in Nice, when funds were low, she would occasionally treat herself to an “American Sandwich” because it was cheap and very filling. The funny thing is, the Sandwich Américain doesn’t really exist in the…

Tomates à la Provençale

On the way back from Italy we stopped off in Monaco, like you do, went to the castle, saw the exotic garden, stumbled upon the changing of the guard, and walked through the church. Panorama of Monaco’s harbor and waterfront…

Joyeux Anniversaire Luna

Luna, blow out the candle Maybe with some help from the Soleil family And the Palumbo family Happy Birthday

Car brands that you can’t buy in the US

Alfa Romeo Citroën Dacia Daihatsu Fiat Holden Lancia Microcar Opel Peugeot Renault Seat There are others of course, but these are the ones I saw (again and again) in the course of two weeks in France. I don’t know why…

Hills Bros. Coffee

Sometime in August I’m told this will become Federated Media’s new San Francisco Headquarters. Not the whole building, just the 6th floor—the set-back part you can see peeking out from beneath the giant Hills Bros. Coffee sign. The Hills Bros.…

Mt. Tamalpais grass

During the summer months, the North Bay turns golden which accentuates the contrast between the dry grass, the sky and the dispersed trees. Mount Tamalpais is a recurring example of this beauty, in addition to the spectacular elevated ocean views.…

Mt. Tam’s Panoramic Coastal Trail

On Sunday Stephanie and I escaped the fog of the city and headed for the golden hills of Mt. Tamalpais State Park. We were joined by Leona (recent Bay Area retransplant) and her lovely friends Rachel and David for a…

What a crappy time to have started investing in the stock market

I know, I know you’re not supposed to check on your long term investments, but where’s the fun in that? I started investing money in the stock market (outside of my Roth IRA) last October, primarily in an index fund…

Federated Media code_swarm

A neat visualization of the work that the Federated Media Tech team (including me) has done over the last 14 months: I put this together this afternoon using code_swarm. Andy uploaded it to Vimeo so the world can see: FM…

Barbecue grill at the airport

Only in Texas. Though technically speaking, this is a bbq pit (or a smoker).