The Shailesh-tival

Two months ago, I hiked the Tour du Mont Blanc over two weeks. Since then, I’ve been eager to share pictures and my story about the trek, hitting massive amounts of writer’s block along the way. Finally, I decided to just post my raw notes from every day of my hike so I can share them with you, along with my favorite ~100 of the 2,000 or so pictures I took on that trip. Here they are below. I’ve added a few notes along the way to set some context, or add additional memories to my recollection of each day. Enjoy!

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In my line of work, I get to see and deal with a lot of clients trying to do something new, or trying to do something differently. Often times, despite the best of intentions, these companies fail miserably. They know where they are, they know where they want to be, and they even know what they need to do to get there, but they all forget about the dreaded bubble.

What’s the bubble? It’s basically the way you’ll operate while you’re midway between your starting point and your endpoint. When you’re at the starting point, you know how to function in your current state and you’re comfortable, and when you get to your endpoint, you’re enjoying the benefits of getting to the endpoint. But what do you do in the middle, when you have to behave differently but you’re still not seeing the benefits? Read the rest of this entry →

Running a marathon has always been on my bucket list, but I always figured it would be one of those things I’d do when I was older. The amount of training involved means that you pretty much have to focus on running and nothing else, and I didn’t want to give up lifting weights, Tae Kwon Do and the many other things I’ve picked up over the years.

For some reason I wasn’t thinking about this on the morning of January 1, 2011 and at 9 am that morning, I took advantage of the early-bird discount and signed up for the Detroit Marathon. Read the rest of this entry →

I’m spending a couple of days in Detroit on my way home to DC. (It’s a nice way to catch up with old friends while splitting up a mind-numbing 750 mile drive.)

One of my biggest regrets about my time in Detroit is that I didn’t get to learn the city very well until it was almost time to leave. I’m fairly certain that in my first year here, I made a grand total of 3 trips into the city. I caught up fairly quickly though, and by the end I honestly feel like I knew things about Detroit that friends who’d spent their lives here didn’t know. I learned my lesson from that, though, and I made it a point to embrace Chicago and city life (despite living in Evanston) when I moved last summer. Read the rest of this entry →

esktop Refresh St. Louis kicked off on 6/6/05, the first Monday in June, 2005. That was exactly 364 days ago.

For those that don’t know, desktop refresh basically amounted to me living on the seventh floor of the Bevo building (the giant Budweiser building in St. Louis). I think I even spent a night there once because I was there so late and I had to meet up with Andrea the next day.

Anyways, one day as I Andrea and I were sitting up there we were just talking in general and she asked me what my dream job was. I told her I’d love to have a job working with audio equipment.

Lo and behold, a year later, look at what I’m doing.

I have a lot of great memories from St. Louis. Very few of them occured in June or August of 2005.