Half moon bay day trip

Devil's slide is the must see. I love Devil’s slide trail. It is a short coastal hiking trail with great view of pacific ocean. In spring, there are a lot of wild flowers that makes the trail much prettier.

If you are a strenuous hiker, you can visit trails at McNee Ranch State park. It has gorgeous view of pacific ocean too. If the timing is right, one can see the whale migration that usually happens around January.

Overview from McNee Ranch State Park

Monster chef is a great place for Japanese food. I like the sashimi and sushi rolls there. It is a pity that it is not open for lunch on weekdays.

Monster Chef
The alternative is Gerkin’s Sandwitch close by or restaurants at the pier. The pier is across street of monster chef. Don't forget to buy live crabs and live fish at the pier.

Gerkin's Sandwich place

If you has more time, you can drive down to pigeon point light house. It is a scenic route. The pigeon point hostel is a cheap and fun place to stay overnight. Don’t miss watching the sunset.

The alternative plan could be:

visit pigeon point lighthouse first.

have lunch/picnic  at norms market: the artichoke bread is really good. Usually we will bring home some too.

drive down to visit devil’s slide

visit pier and have dinner at monster chef. 

Best to avoid crowd to visit Devil’s slide in earlier mornings or on 
weekdays.

Pros and cons between options and RSUs.

Living at Sillicon Valley a lot of people work for startups. From time to time, I run into people who are confused by the differences between RSUs and options and don't understand the conditions in which  one is better than the other.

For RSUs, one needs to pay income tax on it according to the share price on the date they are granted, For example if one is granted 100 shares on Jan 1, 2015 and the share price is $10, one needs to pay income tax for 100*10. The 1000 is considered as income. From now on, it just works as any individual stock. The cost basis is 1000, depending when one sells, one pays long term or short term capital gains or has losses if the price drops lower than $10 per share.

For options, one can choose to exercise it or not on the granted day. One only pays income taxes when one exercises it. Note that Incentive Stock Options (ISOs), and Non-qualified Stock Options (NSOs) have different tax treatment under the alternative minimum tax (AMT) regime. Discussion of the differing treatments under AMT are beyond the scope of this blog post.

Pros for RSU: it is guaranteed money if one sells right away when granted. In this way, it just works as a bonus.
Cons for RSU: one may lose money on it if one doesn't sell it right away and the value drops to lower than the taxes one has paid.

Pros for stock options: one never really loses money on it in most cases, but may not be worth any penny either if the stock price doesn't increase.

At the first glance one always pay the income taxes on both RSU and options, but why do people working for startups prefer to have options than RSU?

One can do earlier exercise for options and end to paying long term capital gains instead of income taxes upon selling appreciated stock. Most startups offer the earlier exercise policy for options for earlier employees. Earlier exercise means the employee can buy the options at the strike price when he starts to work. In this way, as long as one holds the stocks over a year, one ends up to pay long term capital gains instead of income taxes.

For most highly paid engineers, the income tax rate for the part over $411k is around 35%, but the long term capital gains tax rate is around 25%.  The after tax value of $4M in RSUs is  $2.4M (with a maximum tax rate of 39%), with earlier exercised options one ends up with 3M. The difference is substantial here. Note that in California state income taxes applies as well.


Acknowledged the information to An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups. A great book for people who likes to work for Startups!

Visiting Cancun

It was kind of last minute booking. As Piaw used to tell me it is cheap in Cancun, so I got the cheap flight first. However the hotel stay was very hard to get around Christmas and New Year time and the rate of the hotel is almost doubled comparing to other time. After trying to call a few hotels, I gave up. I just used bookit.com and made a reservation at Regina Vacation Club for the first 4 days including the new year eve. I bought a  JW Marriott package from Costco for another 4 days.  The website information at bookit.com is quite confusing. I thought I had bought the all-inclusive package. But when I checked in at the hotel, people there told me the package I bought was just for room no meals. Such a disappointment as I paid almost the doubled rate as JW Marriott to stay at Regina. Luckily I didn't book the whole stay there and saved some money.   

Raintrees Regina Vacation Club

It is a great place for diving, especially to get diving certified. The wind is strong, so we didn't do much swimming in the sea as Bowen still doesn't know how to swim. We swam in the swimming pool most of the time. 

Beaches around Hotel Zone

Beach at JW Marriott

At JW Marriott

Swimming pool overlook the beach at Hardrock Hotel

We went to Xcaret park for a day. It was a great trip for small kids. The underground river swimming was fun. Bowen enjoyed it a lot and I loved it too.  

Big Turtle at Xcaret Park

Character in the night show at Xcaret Park

Character in the night show at Xcaret Park

 My mom and I went to Chichen Iza for a day. It was a long day as it is a long drive from the hotel zone to there. When we got there, it was around noon. It is one of the great monuments for Maya culture. It is really sad that no any books or written materials  are left that record the history of the Maya culture. We can just get little information about Maya culture. 
  

Another unique thing one can do here is diving/swimming in Cenote. The water is a little cool in Cenote, but it is really fresh and clean. Try it when you get there. The spa at JW Marriot is really great. Usually one can get one free spa for two day stay, use it.  

Underground water swimming at Xcaret

I don't have plans to come back again though it is a nice place to relax and explore the beach. Maybe one day I was so into diving, I may consider to come back to do those exotic diving.  

Some tips and highlights: 
Prepare some Mexican pesos and one dollar bills in advance to pay tours and food. Dollar bills are easy to pay bus tickets and tips. Some hotels like JW Marriot give a reasonable exchange rate, but most of places don't. Or bring a credit card with good rate and low transaction fees. 

Book direct flight if it is feasible as it saves time and the hassle to do custom at the transition.

If you plan to visit those theme parks or visit Cozumel, stay 2 or 3 days around Playa Del Carmen, as it is closer to both theme parks and the island of Cozumel.  The downtown of Playa Del Carmen is a very nice place to dine or walk around too. It is worthwhile spending a few days at the Hotel zone area. It has the specular beaches. The location around JW Marriot and Hardrock is great.  One can easily take bus to other places around here.  It is easy to visit Isla Mujeres Island too.  

The View from the room of JW Marriott

Overlook the beach and the resort at JW Marriott

The tour to Chichen Iza can cost from $50 to $100, I don't see the big differences between them. Talk to a few agencies to get a better rate. Usually the agencies at downtown or shopping mall can give better rate for most of tours, like at La Isla shopping mall at hotel zone area or downtown of  Playa Del Carmen. To visit Xcaret it is better to reserve taxi or take private tour instead of going with a big crowd as the pickup may take much longer time and one doesn't have enough time to play at the park. 

To save money and avoid crowd, visit in Nov or Feb. Book the hotels in advance as good deals are gone fast. Imperior has very reasonable price and convenient too as it has branches both at Hotel zone and Playa Del Carmen. If you want to go to a more luxury resort, Hard rock is a good choice. You can drop me an email, I can give you the member access rate. Most hotels give credits or free spa for the stay, it is nice to use those credits to get diving certified.  

Sleeping bed at Mextreme Restaurant

Decoration hats at Mextreme Restaurant

Coconut, pine apple virgin drink at Mextreme

Delicious Tacos

Try the local authentic Mexican food, tacos are really good there.  We went to Mextreme and Pericos, both of them are great! The people are so nice and warm there. At Mextreme, my son fell asleep, they even provide a bed for my son to sleep.  

Decipher the Ancient Myth

While playing with my App, Nutrition Tracker, I gradually understand some old Chinese sayings, like "the more fish one has, the bigger one's brain is". Omega 3 is the required nutrition to have a healthy brain. The critical part in Omega 3 is DHA that is hard to be synthesized by human body. The natural food that contains high DHA is mostly fish. Although Salmon has been more popular than cod. According to the USAD food nutirion database and the calculation from Nutrition Tracker, for an adult, if one has 8 ounces of cooked salmon weekly, one doesn't need to take any supplement for Omega 3 at all. In another words, if one has two or three big meals with fish weekly, one will have enough Omega 3 to have a healthy brain. This amazingly explains the old Chinese myth I didn't understand before. This is a great book about how to cook fish: Fish: Fish: Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking. 

New Release for Nutrition Tracker

Features in 0.7 release uploaded on Jun 15, 2014:

1. Export data. The diary can be exported to an comma separated values (csv) file for a physician/dietitian to review or analyze. The file is easily opened with Excel or other spreadsheet.

2. Log caloric intake and match to your activity level. This enables you to set goals for weight change.

3. Easy input of food. Foods that you’ve already entered are now on the top of search results. Saves time entering data.

Features in 0.6 release:

1. Add the lookup feature. You can now lookup nutrition facts for a specific food.

2. Missing nutrients are listed at the top of the nutrition report in order of decreasing priority. It’s now easy to figure out which nutrients you’re missing.

3. At the report output, click on the nutrition name, you can see the list of food with high value for that particular nutrient.

4. Add DHA/EPA information in the report.

Check it out at:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.tigerparents.nut

The Alternative for Vitamin C Supplement.

Vitamin C is a critical nutrition to our health. Few people know that a medium size of orange has enough Vitamin C as one daily vitamin C supplement pill has. Vitamin C can be used to alleviate the cold syndromes and shortens the cold period though it can not prevent to get cold. Vitamin C also can help recover the damaged skins by Sun exposure.

One day, one orange is enough for daily intake of Vitamin C calculated by Nutrition Tracker according the data provided by USDA.

If one gets cold, one can have two or more oranges to ease the cold syndromes.

To get more information about the Vitamin C, one can read the long article here:
http://health.cvs.com/GetContent.aspx?token=f75979d3-9c7c-4b16-af56-3e122a3f19e3&chunkiid=21522

Pick points from Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing.

When I started to read the book, Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing   I could not stop. Thanks for my friend, Xi's recommendation. Every chapter shows a new aspect that we should watch over for our health and the current medical field have totally ignored. It not only tells the experiments and theories from farms or labs, but also gives us advice how to apply the principles into our daily life. 

The most valuable and intriguing point I got from this book is the new way of analyzing our health issues. Current medical field is using an isolation model to cure the diseases. But our body is a very complex system. Is the isolation method really sound? For people having the same disease, like diabetes, they get there due to different reasons, such as less exercises, poor diet, or poor gene. They should be treated differently. Being healthy is quite an individual thing and is highly correlated to how people live, the life style. This is fascinating to me. As I haven't seen any model to simulate human's living environment or life style with AI to diagnose the root cause of the diseases. Is it possible to build a model to cure some disease or all diseases with an AI model? It is an open problem for me. 

The book also gives some practical advice that are very helpful to apply in our daily life. In chapter 3, it gives toolbox for the stress reduction: 
1. Join the flock that could be a club that shares your passions, a sports team, a spiritual group, volunteering. 
2. Enhance your behavioral freedom and increase your sense of purpose. Take time to care for and pamper yourself, and exercise daily. 
3. Play a tag and dust-bathes often. Doing exercises in a voluntary and enjoyable way. 
4. Get a good night's roost. 
5. Put the right foods in your gizzard. Having cage freed chickens and eggs, more leafy greens, spices and herbs. This agrees with my experiments with my Nutrition Tracker project. As the more I play with it, I realizes that we can get most nutrition from natural food and leafy greens is the best.  

To the end of the book, it talks about aging and cosmetics. Most of time we are not aware that the cream we apply to our face or body contains chemicals leading to cancers. So examine your skin care products and stay away from hydroquinone, mercury, steroid, retinoid, alpha-hydroxy acids, mineral oils, parabens, phthalates, sls (sodium lauryl sulfate), vitamin E, and artificial fragrances. Try to use hydrosols, like roman chamomile (anthemis nobilis), neroli (citrus aurantium), rock rose (cistus ladaniferus), lavender (lavandula angustifolia), rose (rosa damascena), rose geranium ( pelargonium graveolens).