what's going on?

designs

2012-02-05T18:51:00.000-08:00

The design and style of cars, and particularly sports cars, has been on my mind a lot lately. Let's take a visual look at some of the beautiful design ideas that have been swimming through my head lately. I would love to own any one of these cars someday:

Acura NSX

Alfa Romeo 8C

Aston Martin Vantage

Audi A5

BMW 507

Bugatti Type 57 Atlantic

Chevy Corvette Stingray

Ferrari 458

Ferrari 250 GTO

Ford Mustang

Lotus Esprit

Lotus Evora

Porsche 918

Toyota 2000GT

And if I were to design my own sports car, I would probably borrow heavily from the shapes and lines you see above.

advertising

2012-02-02T10:45:00.000-08:00

The Super Bowl, America's ultimate celebration of NFL football championship is coming this weekend. To tell you the truth since it's New England vs. New York we West-Coasters don't really give a rat's ass who wins this year. Since I'm not really a huge football fan I tend to watch just as much for the Super Bowl ads as for the game. Usually there is a lot of hubbub about the incredibly expensive and often creative television ads that major companies will debut at this hugely-watched event. No doubt Doritos and Budweiser will have some spots that will be the water-cooler talk-of-the-town for days after the game, but right now I'm seeing a lot of sneak previews on the automotive websites, showing both some pretty cool and pretty lame ads for various auto makes that are hoping to kick start their 2012 sales and become part of the post-Super Bowl buzz.

Kia's new ad for the Optima sedan is one such ad that to me seems to hit the right spot: it's creative, it's funny, it targets their ideal demographic, and it features Adriana Lima, Motley Crue, and UFC fighting. Need I say more?

Oh, I do? Well how about a supplemental 5-hour video of Adriana Lima waving a flag in slow motion, compliments of Kia? Ok, you're welcome. Hit the link below to see both the ad and the 5-hour slo-mo Limafest. I envision lots of people just putting that up on their big screen TVs and using it as a backdrop... not just because Ms. Lima is there, but because the happy little bossa nova beat is just fantastic as background music.

http://www.autoblog.com/2012/02/02/kia-debuts-adriana-lima-infused-super-bowl-ad/#continued

endurance

2012-01-13T16:19:00.000-08:00

About 12 years ago, I bought my first sports car--my 2000 MR2 Spyder. At the same time, I also joined some online communities devoted to the Spyder specifically as well as the MR2 family in general. These were online forums devoted to all aspects of owning, caring for, and driving these great little sports cars, but you could say that these were in essence car clubs. And although there is a ton of information available to any visitor to these communities online, in the end it is a social experience. The members of these communities plan many local and regional gatherings where you can meet up and not only check out each others' cars in person, but also meet the people involved -- typically people who share the same passion and enthusiasm for cars that you do. And that is how I met Bryan Heitkotter.

In the MR2 community, there tend to be two basic kinds of gatherings. There's the meet up in a parking lot and check out everyone else's car type of meeting, where the focus is usually on who has the latest mods, the fattest rims, the newest body kit on their ride. Maybe hang out and have coffee, or get something to eat together, and just chill. Then there's the other kind -- meet up and drive as a group somewhere, whether purely for the fun of driving, or cruising somewhere scenic like along the coast or up to wine country. I've done my fair share of both types of meets, and they are both fun, but my preference has been to do more of the latter. These MR2s are sports cars, not museum pieces. They were meant to be driven, not just looked at! So I prefer to spend my time driving them. So it happened that a group of MR2 owners suggested a gathering at the local SCCA autocross one weekend, and I went to check it out. Several of us ended up entering in the event, which is basically a timed competitive event driving around a course laid out in traffic cones. It's a great safe way to learn your car's dynamics and work on your performance driving skills. From that I got hooked, got my own racing helmet, and started doing autocross events on a regular basis.

And I started seeing a familiar face, at both the MR2 meetings and at the autocross events: this young kid, he must have been 19 or so, who went by the name of BryanH on the MR2 forums. He owned a first generation 1987 MR2, and drove it like he stole it out on the autocross course. I was a little stunned when I saw that he consistently drove his underpowered, 13 year old car around the course faster than I could drive my brand-spanking new Spyder. And he was modest and humble as could be, showing plenty of admiration for our new MR2s. I kind of compared him to the protagonist of the Inital D anime series, Takumi. Well I just had one thought -- if this kid is this fast in that beat-up old thing, how much faster could he be in my MR2? So I asked him to drive my car at one of the events -- with one caveat, that I get to ride along with him to see how he was driving so fast. What was he doing that I wasn't to be so quick? So we went out there, and ... just wow. I don't really know what just happened there. It was so dramatically different than what I was doing. He was going flat out in areas where I hesitated. Where I braked hard and slowed down for a corner, he tapped the brakes and trusted the car to find its way around the bend at significantly greater speed. And where I fought to keep the car pointed in the right direction, he quickly and intuitively steered and countersteered to maximize forward motion and minimize the skidding around that slowed me down. After seeing him do this on several occasions and seeing him compete at local and national levels, I remember saying to him, "you should really do this for a living. You have a natural skill, a knack for driving that I with all my practice cannot match." At the time he hemmed and hawwed modestly, because realistically who gets the chance to become a real race car driver? Don't you have to basically be bred from birth to be a F1 driver and spend your 2nd birthday tooting around in a shifter kart to qualify? Not to mention find a sponsor. Over the next few years Bryan started coming out to the meets and events in the Bay Area less because he lived all the way out in Fresno and as you all know the price of gas has been steadily increasing. And I got busy with work so I had to stop doing the autocross events. So we sort of lost touch...

Well fast forward to 2011. I believe I've blogged in the past about my favorite driving game/sim for the PS3, Gran Turismo. They're up to Gran Turismo 5 now which is a fantastic game. In addition to being able to race online with other players, they periodically hold competitive events not terribly different in concept from the autocrosses we used to do. Get the fastest time around the track that you can, competing online against all the other contestants. The competition was called GT Academy, with the final prizes being a trip to Silverstone racing circuit in England to compete as one of the final 16 finalists. And the grand prize being a job with Nissan's racing team as a real life race car driver! I participated in the first round (everyone who owned the game in North America was eligible to enter), but the competition was fierce and my skill was lacking - I think I ranked somewhere around about 67000. So I put it aside and went back to playing the game as a regular joe.

A few months ago, when they started publicizing the GT Academy again, on TV and within the game itself. They filmed the whole final round of GT Academy and it became a reality series that aired on Speed TV. And lo and behold, the name of the man they crowned as GT Academy USA champion sounded awfully familiar. The one and only Bryan Heitkotter! Imagine my surprise and pleasure to hear that this highly skilled and modest guy had managed to take it all the way to the top and had won a contract as racing driver for Nissan's racing team and was living the dream. If you watch the interview video I've linked above, you'll see what a great and humble guy he is, and hear a little about his story. I'm a little disappointed that he didn't mention his early MR2 driving roots, although he does talk about autocrossing of course. Winning GT Academy is no doubt a turning point in his life, because basically he had been living a fairly banal existence, unemployed in Fresno when he entered the competition. Now that's all changed as he travels the world, testing and racing cars and earning his international competition license under the aegis of Nissan's racing efforts.

Who knows how far Bryan's star will continue to rise, but right now he is doing something pretty amazing: this weekend he is in Dubai, along with 3 other GT Academy champions from past competitions in the U.S. and Europe. They are campaigning a Nissan 370Z race car in the Dubai 24 Hours endurance race which has already started, and ends in about 10 hours. Best of luck to you, Bryan, and the RJN racing team -- kick ass and take names!

More info about the race and where to find info about the Dubai race, on GT Planet:
http://www.gtplanet.net/2012-dubai-24-hours/

resurgence

2011-12-23T11:09:00.000-08:00

It has been a while since Toyota came out with a car that generates any kind of excitement for a car enthusiast like myself. It seems like they have been content with selling boring appliance-cars like Camrys and Corrollas, and also leading the hybrid revolution with the equally yawn-worthy Prius. I'm not excited at all by the prospect of driving any of these cars. I've been a Toyota loyalist for many years though, and so I tried to stay in the family, buying my last two cars from Scion and Lexus. But I've held on to my last real sports car from the year 2000, my Toyota MR2 Spyder (known as the MR-S in the home Japanese market). To me, that was the last time Toyota made anything truly sporty. Sadly, US sales of the MR-S ended in 2005.

Fortunately, Akio Toyoda, the current president of Toyota, felt the same way. He is a true car guy and even takes the time to be involved in motorsports. Now that's leadership by example. He wants to bring back sporty and fun driving to the Toyota family of vehicles and that started with the Lexus LFA, which he helped push into production. However the LFA costs a cool $375,000 -- er, how about something for the regular folks Akio?

Fear not, 99%-ers, Akio has your back too. Toyota and Subaru started work on a joint collaborative project that would create a new Front-engined, Rear-wheel-drive platform. Inspired by Toyota's past sports cars like the 2000GT (another one of my dream collectible cars), and the wildly beloved RWD AE86, it will be powered by a Subaru-developed boxer 4-cylinder engine and make 200hp. It will reach dealerships as the Subaru BRZ, and in various forms around the world as the Toyota 86 (Japan), GT 86 (Europe), and Scion FR-S (US).

Early press reviews are quite positive, describing the car as fun to drive and easy to push hard to the limit, making it a very attractive car to enthusiasts and drifters in particular. Toyota/Subaru even go so far as to say that they set the Porsche Cayman as their handling benchmark while developing the 86/BRZ/FR-S. If that is indeed what they are trying to go for, I will definitely want a test drive when these little rockets come out. The styling is pretty sweet and dare I say it, from some angles it even looks like a baby LFA:

Scion FR-S

Lexus LFA

Unfortunately my old MR-S is starting to show its age, and it might be time soon to start thinking about a replacement. Could be that an FR-S is the answer. Coming to dealerships, your local twisty roads, and the racetrack, in May 2012.

demolition

2011-12-22T18:57:00.000-08:00

December is here once again. Two trials, and a whole year in our new place now behind me. I've decided to take the rest of the year off (sounds so much more grand than saying I'm taking 2 weeks off, right?) and started telling people at work, I'll see you in 2012. Some of them seem a little put off by that. Most satisfying.

And just as I return from Washington DC and settle into my comfortable routine of staying up late watching movies and playing video games, and sleeping in ... what is this cacophony outside? Oh that's right, I have an army of workers outside digging, hammering, pouring cement, building walls, and bringing my backyard designs into fruition. Can't believe it's finally happening. We got our city permits, HOA approval and everything. Months of talking about design ideas and choosing stone materials for pavers and tiles and moldings, actually turned into something really being constructed! It's very exciting for us, not to mention costing us most of the remaining savings we had left after purchasing the home, so we are of course monitoring things very closely and taking pics of everything that goes on. Oh, Mauro is going to move a pile of dirt from one side of the lot to the other with the Bobcat? Hold up, let me go get my Nikon...

Can't wait to see it all when it's done. Firstly, because it's going to be awesome. Secondly, I can start sleeping in again.

architectural

2011-11-19T11:45:00.000-08:00

It's been a year since we moved into our new place at Stonebrae. And we still haven't started landscaping in our back yard. Not to worry though, I have been hard at work designing and visualizing what our back yard will look like, and we've selected our contractors for the project. So we'll be getting that started soon and we're very excited about how it will turn out.

2D drawing, my layout overlaid on top of plan drawing of our lot.

I started out sketching designs and ideas on the iPad using Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro, which is a great 2D sketching tool. But when I started to use photos and try to visualize the outdoor kitchen and pergola in 3D, it wasn't cutting it.

Top view of the lot in Sketchup.

So I found out about Google's free 3D drawing tool, Sketchup, and started playing around with it. It's pretty easy to learn by watching the various tutorial videos they make available, and you can't beat FREE! So I started out by sketching the kitchen area, and next thing you know I had added the pergola, and then the whole backyard design. And then to take it to the next step, I started drawing the outline of the entire house, and before you know it I had a complete 360 view of the property. So I went ahead and did some redesign in the front yard too. This stuff is addicting! One of its primary purposes is for architectural and landscaping design, so it was very easy to take the real world measurements I had and input them to make my drawing to-scale and as realistic as possible.

Kitchen and pergola area, with measurements using Sketchup.

In addition, Sketchup can pull in real world imagery from Google Maps and Google Earth, so you can actually render stuff and see what it looks like in real locations. And you can build and share objects (called components or models) with everyone else in the Sketchup community, so you don't even have to draw/create everything yourself. If you need a pre-rendered palm tree or a chair, chances are someone has already done it for you, and you can just drop it into your project and move/rotate/scale it around to your taste, or even tweak it further. Data just wants to be free...

Plants, furniture and pergola from the 3D Warehouse. House, walls and fountain design by me.

We're still in the process of getting approval through the HOA but our contractor is on board and we are ready to make this jump from virtual to reality very soon. Stay tuned for real photos of the finished project and we'll see how true to the design it turns out!

wondrous

2011-10-15T17:25:00.000-07:00

Check out this awesome time-lapse photography video. Watch it fullscreen, on a big monitor or TV if you can. It's just breathtaking sometimes, when you see how beautiful nature can be.

Landscapes: Volume Two from Dustin Farrell on Vimeo.

Got a few minutes or a few hours to kill, and trying to attain a childlike state of amazement and wonder? Search for "time lapse nature" on vimeo. You're welcome.

classic

2011-10-09T09:29:00.000-07:00

It's October again, and we all know what that means! Well it means a lot of things of course... changing of the seasons, Octoberfest (good beer), and SF Fleet Week. The Blue Angels are performing in town like they do every year! And thinking about that made me recall this classic Van Halen video from the 80's or 90's showing the Blue Angels using the older A-4 fighter jets. Watching it brings back memories of watching airshows as a kid, and falling in love with jets and aviation. And of course, Van Halen rocks.

Here's a modern updated version featuring the F-18s they fly today but showcasing the same awe-
inspiring cinematography and precision flying ... love the USN Blue Angels!

improvisation

2011-07-01T19:29:00.000-07:00

Although they say "necessity breeds invention", I guess this doesn't really count as a true invention, because the idea is not original or novel. But I'm so dang pleased with myself that I just have to tell this story.

I've been playing around with my iPad for a while now and naturally I've tried some drawing apps to see how well they work with the iPad. To make a long story short, they're pretty neat programs and it's fun to do a little painting/drawing with your finger, but ultimately the finger painting technique lacks the kind of precision you want when doing anything other than, well, finger doodles and very rough sketches. Specifically, we've started trying to plan and sketch out what our back yard is going to look like when we are meeting with landscaping contractors and I've used the iPad a few times to show some thoughts and basic ideas. One of the cool things the app I use (a free app called DrawCast) can do, is use an existing image as a background and then you can draw on top of it (I'm sure lots of the popular drawing apps can do this). So I've taken a clean drawing of our backyard lot and imported it into the iPad, so I can use it as a background and draw sketches of our landscaping ideas over it. Sure beats using a bunch of paper to draw and redraw as we try to form our often-changing ideas about what the backyard should look like. The accuracy of my finger drawing was pretty rough though and in one of these collaborative sessions V. asked why didn't I get a stylus for the iPad? That got me thinking about it and I started shopping online for one. Turns out these things are like $15-$40!! What the frak?! They're just pieces of capacitive foam or rubber at the tip of a pen-like tube right? Well I kept reading about how great they are and how much people like them so I went ahead and ordered one through Amazon -- for $15.

Well I was hoping to get it today (Friday) just before the long weekend, so I could play with it all weekend long but to my dismay the Amazon Prime has let me down -- it's Friday evening and no stylus. So in my despair I went back online and thought, man it's such a simple design, there has to be a way to do it yourself and make one on the cheap right? Google to the rescue! I found a few links and apparently there are quite a few different ways to make one. But the one I ended up following, was incredibly simple and requires only 3 parts. A pen or stick (easy), some tape (easy), and a piece of capacitance-conducting material (erm... wha?). Turns out it was easier than I thought when the DIY instructions mentioned using the shiny anti-static packaging that internal hard drives come packed in. Every true geek (and maybe even the average experienced computer user) has some of this stuff laying around. I was at work and just looked around in my office and found some in like 2 minutes. 5 minutes later, with some scissors to cut a small quarter-inch wide by 3 inch long strip of the material, I was in business. Wrapped the shiny material around the tip, leaving a little bit of play between the material and the tip of the pen (I used a click-type pen so that the ball point was retracted for this). The idea is to let it compress or squish (yeah, highly technical term) a little when it is pressed down on the screen, so that it kind of emulates the touch profile of your finger when you touch or tap the screen. Taped it down, then wrapped the rest in a spiral up the pen, and taped down that end to the pen. Done. How does it work? Pretty dman well if I say so myself (and yeah, I think I just did). I tested it against the iPad screen to unlock, and it worked fine. Flipped through some pages to find my drawing app, perfect. Launched the DrawCast app and started writing, drawing, whatever. Worked like a charm. So much better than using a finger. And no greasy screen smudges from my fat oily hands! I'm so dang pleased with myself. I had to run around the office and tell some of my coworkers.

What makes it work? The touch screen is a capacitive screen, so it reads an electrical impulse from your finger. Using a plain old stick or pen won't work because they won't conduct electricity from your finger to the screen. The capacitive material at the tip of the stylus (yes, by my magical craftsmanship it has been transformed from a pen to a stylus, doesn't that sound fancy and worthy of $15?) does the trick, and by spiraling it up the length of the pen, it contacts your fingers where you hold the pen. I suppose the same thing could be accomplished if you have a pen with a metallic conductive tube, but I improvised with what I had in front of me, with all of 5 minutes effort. Like I said, magical craftsmanship.

So now I'm going to play with this over the weekend and see how it works for me. Who knows, maybe when my "real" stylus finally arrives in the mail next week, I might just return it and keep using my DIY stylus instead.

opulence

2011-03-26T14:52:00.000-07:00

Every time I think buying a 5-bedroom house up in the hills and owning 3 cars for the two of us is a bit extravagant, I remind myself there are people out there who are far more extravagant. This series of Direct TV ads is a great jab at that opulence that exists with the upper crust of society, or those who definitely have more money than taste... and it's great fun. Besides, who wouldn't want some of the cool stuff he has, if you could afford it?

Opulence, I has it.

I am Epic Win

hahaha I love the little giraffe.

mansion

2011-01-12T00:39:00.001-08:00

I've created a pictorial history of our dream home, that tracks how things progressed from a mere plot of dirt to the palatial domicile that we now inhabit. We're getting it printed as a coffee table book which we will have out on display when we have visitors! Hope you enjoy the story.

Click here to view this photo book larger

whirlwind

2010-12-31T21:49:00.000-08:00

Well here we are at the end of the year, and I find myself with very little time and a lot to say. It's been a very hectic and incredible last few months with so much going on... moving into our new house just before Thanksgiving, then heading off to Delaware for a trial almost immediately afterwards. Then before we knew it Christmas had arrived and we hosted our first big Christmas party at our new home with the family and it was a big success. And now, all of a sudden we're at the end of 2010, and it seemed like I didn't have enough time to take it all in. I will of course have many photos and stories to share, and when time permits I will try to add them in. For now, I will keep it short and say a belated Happy Holidays to everyone, and wish you all a very successful and joyous 2011. Now I have to go and enjoy a fine steak dinner and some wine, and ring in the new year with my honey... peace out.

importation

2010-11-13T16:56:00.000-08:00

We're about to move to our new place up in the hills but we have a few more days to go. My vacation has begun though so that means ... Time to update the blog!

I know at least some of you have been wondering whether an iPad would make sense for their needs instead of a laptop. So I plan to have several posts about using the iPad for different tasks that I've been doing, and how it has been better or worse than what I was using before, which was a laptop docked to a monitor, keyboard and mouse (essentially your typical PC). For this update I will focus on one of the functions for the iPad that I mentioned before: managing and working with photos. I have to say, that so far the abilities of the iPad are a little disappointing for me for this function.

Before I get into the details let me talk about what my typical photo workflow is in the context of the previous setup, using my laptop. I take photos with my Nikon D5000, and I want to offload them from my memory card. I use a USB card reader, and plugging in the SD card kicks open Google's Picasa image management software (which is free). From there I can copy the images over to the laptop's drive, and back them up to an external drive. Then Picasa lets me review my images, delete the ones I don't like, and tag (star) the ones I like. I can also adjust basic things like brightness, contrast, white balance, as well as rotate and crop the photos all within Picasa.

Typically that's all I need to do with my photos, but if I need to, I'll open the photo up in PhotoShop if I want to do anything more advanced like touching up the photo, removing items from the picture, stuff like that. If I want to use multiple photos together (for instance in my San Francisco series) to build a panorama I use Autostitch, another free app. Save the file, and then it's back to Picasa.

From Picasa I can organize the photos into folders, and upload them to Picasa online so that I can share the photos with everyone. I also have accounts with Photobucket and Flickr, but for those I just upload through the web browser. And then I may publish the photos or links to them on this Blog or on Facebook. That's about it, 99% of the time. I very rarely print my photos but if I do I will pick them out using the Picasa viewer and export them to send to the printer.

Ok, so let's move over to the iPad workflow. I pop the SD card out of the camera just like before, and use the Apple Camera Connection Kit for the iPad. Plugging it in automatically launches the iPad's Photos app, and it lets you select which photos to copy over from the card. Like Picasa the app tells you if your images are duplicates of what's already on the iPad. You can select everything with one button or tap individually on each photo to select it, and then start the copy process. However in Photos you can't import the photos into a folder or name the folder. They just all go into the Photos area.

Once they're imported you view them in Photos as well. But you only have a few limited ways to sort or view them. You can't actually move them into another folder or album on the iPad. There are three views.

1. Photos view shows you everything you've got stored on the iPad, unsorted or grouped. If you have 500+ photos loaded on your iPad, that's a lot of scrolling around through the thumbnails to find the photo you want.
2. The Albums view is misleading for me, because you can't actually organize your photos in this view or create any new Albums on the iPad. It shows you any albums that you've created on your PC or Mac and then copied over to your iPad using the synch feature in iTunes. In this view all your photos that you've imported through the Camera Connection Kit are all lumped into an "all imported" album, and there's a separate album called "last imported" for the most recent set you imported. Then there's a separate album called "saved photos" which contains all other non-imported photos, such as ones you save from the web while browsing, or images that are saved from other apps, whether they are drawings from a 3rd party doodle app or edited photos from a 3rd party editing app.
3. The last view is Events which basically as far as I can tell, groups the photos you've imported based on what date you imported them. Even photos taken on the same date, if imported to the iPad on different days, will go into separate Events in this view.

What else can you do in the Photos app? Not a whole lot. You can view and delete a photo, and you can email it, or copy it to the iPad clipboard. You can upload a photo to your MobileMe gallery if you have an account. No renaming files, no sorting into albums and no tagging. And to back up the photos to another drive, you have to connect the iPad to your PC or Mac and do a backup through iTunes. You can't connect the iPad to an external drive to back up the photos directly.

Did you catch all of that? To me it doesn't make much sense. The organizational function of the Photos app is very weak and I find it frustrating to work with. It seems like the answer is to sort and organize on your PC or Mac and then synch over to the iPad but that kind of defeats the purpose of having the Camera Connection kit. I guess if a good 3rd party app was out there that could take the place of the Photos app and add better functionality, that could solve this. Or I hope that Apple improves the app with future updates.

Well, let's take a look at the rest of the tasks I wanted to do. I've been using Adobe's PS Express and Zagg Photo Pad for my photo editing needs. Both are very good for free apps. The touch interface is kind of neat for adjustment sliders and for cropping photos, but sometimes lacks the precision of a mouse. I also bought the IOS version of Autostitch ($2.99) for making panoramas. These are all very cool but I do feel they fall a bit short of their PC counterparts.

I can't believe there isn't Picasa for iPad yet but I got the 3rd party app Web Albums which is ok for uploading pics. There's also a Photobucket app which is pretty good for both viewing and uploading on the Photobucket site. The closed nature of the iPad's file system prevents you from simply uploading a file through the web browser to sites like Picasa, Photobucket or Flickr. You need to either have an app that supports uploading to the site or use tricks like emailing in a file if the site has that option. Once you've got the images up there, linking to them in Blogger or Facebook is a little trickier on the iPad than on PC due to the wonky copy and paste functions, but it can be done.

So most of the same abilities are there on the iPad, but there is that one glaring issue for me. What I really want is a way to manage the photo albums on the iPad without going back to the PC. Maybe this limitation is there by Apple's design, because the storage on the iPad is very finite and they may be trying to make the case for more cloud-based storage and sharing. That's where the apps like Web Albums and Photobucket come in. But coming from the PC world I can't help but think that so far, in this particular arena, the iPad falls short of the PC's power.

clarity

2010-11-13T12:41:00.000-08:00

Probably my last SF shots for a while... As we will be moving soon and no more Bay Bridge commute for me. Yay! Maybe I will return when the holiday lights are up around the City.

iterative

2010-10-29T14:55:00.000-07:00

From City by the Bay

Quick posting for today -- one of my most recent panoramas of the SF Skyline. It's a stitch of 4 images taken with my kit lens, at 55mm, shot from Treasure Island. I think aside from the one with the crescent moon and the GG Bridge with the blue sky gradient, this is the best one I've taken so far. Although I think the sky isn't as pretty here, this one is much sharper than the previous one. This might be the one I send to the printers to make a nice framed print for decorating our house! Which by the way, we will be getting the keys to the new place in two weeks! Woot! Exciting times ...

formation

2010-10-20T17:28:00.000-07:00

From 2010-10-09 Fleet Week Airshow

October is my favorite month of the year, for several reasons. It has the perfect fall weather that I like, not too hot and not to cold. It also happens that my birthday is in October. This year it was a particularly unique date: 10/10/10. I don't know if it has any astrological significance, but see my previous posting about the power of the number 10.

Anyways V. took me out to the city and we had a wonderful day of seeing the sights... We parked at Fishermen's Wharf and had lunch at Hooters. Afterwards we went to the pier and watched the Fleet Week airshow including a performance by the Blue Angels. That's the other reason I like October, it's always when Fleet Week comes to San Francisco. I had my camera with me and got some nice shots -- click on the photo above to see the rest of the photos. And then for dinner we went to one of my favorite dining destinations in SF -- Espetus, the Brazilian churrascuria. If you love eating meat like I do, you are doing yourself a disservice if you have never had dinner at a churrascuria! We ate so much we had to roll each other out the front door.

If you know my wife V., you know she always tries to get me the latest in fancy technological gadgets for my birthdays and Christmas. Well I wasn't expecting anything grand this year because we are trying to save up for the new house that we'll be moving into next month. So imagine my dismay and outrage when I unwrapped her latest example of utter defiance. An Apple iPad 3G.

I have to admit I wasn't that impressed by the iPad when it was introduced by Apple. What is it, really, beyond a jumbo iPod Touch? And why would I want it when for the same cost I could have a full-fledged laptop?

Several people I know got one, and they all tend to say the same thing. "You have to try it, and then you'll get it." And now I have, and I think I get it. There's a few things remarkable about using it. It's about the touchscreen interface, and how intuitive it is to use and navigate through the Web, flip through photos, and other objects. Humans respond favorably to the sensation of touch, and when tightly coupled with a strong visual presentation, this is a significant break from how we traditionally have used computers and technology. It's not just moving a mouse with your hand, and seeing a cursor move on the screen. It's reaching out and touching an icon that you see in front of you, and seeing it expand or react to your touch, instantly. It's also about how small and thin it is, small enough to hold in one hand and walk around with it, or sit on your couch and lounge around while swiping your way through the news or playing a game. And it turns on instantly and is ready for you to leap onto the internet or into an app, with little or no start-up time. I don't know if it's as "magical" as Steve Jobs would have you believe, but it is, like the iPhone before it, a game-changer in the technology world.

Now that I have one, and I'm told that the return policy is, well, not an option, the next question is, what to do with it? One thing I suppose is to flaunt my technological superiority and hipness among my peers by dangling the lightweight tablet around my neck as a medallion, like the supa-fly funky fresh young man on the left. Couple that with some kind of huge clock app (I'm SURE there's an app for that), and I'm Flavor Flav for the 21st century! Yeah, boyeeee!

Here are some of the options I can think of, and will be exploring in the coming days:

Web and Reading. Obviously a major function of the iPad is for surfing the web and reading articles, books, and email. I haven't bought any books from iBooks yet but I probably will dabble in that, and maybe sign up for some online magazines. So far reading the web and social networking has been great, especially with this app Flipbook that helps make checking up on your friends' activities and goings-on much more interactive and visually slick. In the mornings I can roll out of bed, turn it on and immediately check traffic, weather, or the news without having to turn on a PC, and wait for the device to start up, load the operating system, etc.

Work. I've already got my work email flowing in on the iPad, which lets me switch between multiple accounts on Outlook, Yahoo! and Gmail pretty easily. The built-in viewers seem to open most PDFs, Word docs, and other typical business documents with no problem. If I want to edit docs I'll have to splurge on some real business productivity apps like Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

Play. Obviously there are plenty of games available for the iPhone and iPad. There are plenty that are free to try out and they range from the simple like air hockey to more complex like Scrabble, and even to the highly complex like the turn-based strategy classic Civilization. There are some racing games for the iPad that I will probably check out. I just bought my first game which is a Real Time Strategy game called Land Sea Air Warfare. I always thought a touch-screen tablet like the iPad would be perfect for playing a RTS and now I'll get to test that theory as I learn a new addictive game. Oh, how many hours have I wasted playing RTS games? A lot.

Photos. Along with the iPad my family also got me the camera connect kit, which makes importing photos into the iPad a cinch. So I am looking at the various apps available that will help me view, organize, edit, and share my photos more easily. The view and edit parts are covered with a few free apps including a decent one from Adobe Photoshop, but I need to look for better ways to organize and then share my pictures online. I've got the Photobucket app, but am considering buying another app that supports uploading to Picasa. I'm a little suprised the built-in Photos viewer has no ability to really organize your photos on the iPad -- you basically need a Mac and iPhoto to do anything with them. I guess it's Apple's not so subtle way of saying, "hey, you like the iPad? Then you should buy a Mac to go with it."

Writing. The touch keyboard is fairly easy to use especially in the landscape mode, but I might want to consider getting the wireless keyboard if I plan to do a lot of typing. I am going to try doing more of my blog posting from the iPad to see how that goes. A portion of this post was written on the iPad, but when it came time to add in photos and do some more writing I went back to my PC and keyboard. For short posts it should be a lot more convenient.

Music. Many have said or joked that the iPad is just a iPod touch enlarged. So obviously it plays music. The iPod functionality is nothing special, it just plays music like an iPod or iTunes. It actually feels like something in between, it doesn't have all the same control features of iTunes like DJ mode or ability to edit ID3 tags, song titles etc. But I'd rather just use my iPod Classic for playing music than have to plug in the iPad to speakers or use headphones with it. I guess having iTunes and being able to shop for music is better, but maybe where it comes in handy is being able to run music apps like Pandora or Shazam. But this functionality comes secondary to all the other functions in my mind.

That's it for this update. Drop me a comment if you have ideas of other ways I could use my iPad that I haven't thought of yet. After I have had a chance to use it some more I will give further impressions.

ephemeral

2010-09-15T22:05:00.000-07:00

My mother-in-law's got this plant that blooms only once a year and the flowers only last one night before dying and falling off. I was there and took a few shots of one of the flowers in bloom.

From Flowers

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may;
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
~Robert Herrick

celebrity

2010-08-05T18:11:00.000-07:00

My fellow racing and track-day cohort turned car builder Hong Quan has finally made it big time, getting some national exposure by having famed comedian, Tonight-show-host and car guy extraordinaire Jay Leno feature his custom-built 3-wheeler (some call them trikes) on his automotive website, Jay Leno's Garage! Congratulations to Hong and hope the build orders start flowing in.

Link to Jay Leno's Garage for more info and photos.

Looks like Autoblog has finally seen the light and posted up an article about the Prong 3 there as well... mainly riding on Leno's coattails.

Hong also made the local news on NBC... hope you remember the little people when you're rich and famous pal!

fame

2010-08-03T23:24:00.000-07:00

If you haven't already, check out the latest overnight internet sensation that is sweeping Youtube and Facebook - meet Antoine Dodson. Some quick background: a young woman in Alabama wakes up to find an intruder in her bed, trying to rape her - she screams and her brother Antoine comes in and helps her fight off the would-be rapist; he manages to flee out the window he climbed into the room from. Police come, tv news crew comes, and it's all a very normal if unfortunate story for the six o'clock news... until they interview an angry and emotional Antoine, who has some things to say to his sister's attacker. After the story aired on tv, the video on the local news stations' website became their number one watched video, and Antoine becomes an unsuspecting internet star. As often happens these days, some creative types took the video and remixed it into what could become the next big internet viral meme -- and so I give you, the Bed Intruder Song!

The song and Antoine's diatribe are both incredibly funny, although the subject matter and his sister's ordeal are a serious matter. But the song is just so damn catchy, I can't stop listening to it over and over. I think it can be viewed as a powerfully sincere and angry anthem for Antoine and his sister Kelly, who want nothing more than safety and justice, and express their frustration at the environment and circumstances that they found themselves in.

You dont have to come and confess, we lookin for you, we gon' find you!
So you can run and tell that, homeboy!

Update: here are a few more covers that i found that I enjoyed.
http://youtu.be/HKraf32VU6M

http://youtu.be/Wid6V_f09rA

http://youtu.be/7wucEzYqTXk

http://youtu.be/Aud_wgLdrQI

visions

2010-07-18T20:38:00.000-07:00

This post will just be a quick photo update...

Some fireworks photos from July 4th:

Also because I've been taking the Bay Bridge home after work now, I have had a few opportunities to stop by Treasure Island and take some nighttime skyline shots of San Francisco:

From City by the Bay

this one's kind of massive, and features a 3-image stitch I made with Autostitch, Photoshop and Picasa (click to enlarge):

the vista point on Treasure Island is super windy and cold at night so it's a bit of a challenge to capture some of these images; they're still not as sharp as I would like even with a tripod and various photog tricks people have suggested to me. I'll keep trying though, hopefully I will come up with some really nice shots that I would be proud to hang on a wall in our new place.

relocation

2010-07-04T10:11:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday, America! Happy Fourth of July! A lot has happened in the past few months... but in short we've sold our home, paid off our debts, put our stuff into storage and moved to Richmond! We found a buyer and after some negotiations with him signed a purchase agreement. We finished packing up our things and moved out last weekend, putting most of our stuff into a storage unit that's near our future home. We closed escrow last week and have moved up to Richmond to stay with family until our new house is complete. We had looked at renting an apartment but it seemed like a hassle and for the short term (four months) that we needed it, it wouldn't have been so cheap. So now we have a bit of a lengthy commute for the next few months but we're saving a lot more money by not renting. It's kind of a weird feeling not having a mortgage or any substantial debt to our names. Though that will certainly change again very soon when we move into the new house.

In the meantime, work continues as busy as ever... I had one trial that was scheduled to take place in Boston right about now but it was dismissed just before we were set to leave. I was a little disappointed we didn't get to go to Boston again but I guess I'd probably be working right now (on July 4th) if it had gone forward. But now my other case has been extremely busy and we're gearing up for the next trial in DC that starts in September.

I took some photos recently of an airshow - I didn't actually go to the airshow but it was going on outside of my office building one Saturday while I was working. It's kind of hard to keep focused when there's Harrier jets flying around outside your window. So I took a break and with the power of my 70-300mm lens was able to capture some of the cool aircraft flying around.

riparian

2010-05-19T11:16:00.000-07:00

We've just come back from a 2-day trip to Yosemite Valley. The landscapes and scenery were pretty awe-inspiring. Here are some of the photos. I probably took over 700 photos in all but many of them didn't turn out the way I wanted them to. That's the great thing about a DSLR like the Nikon D5000, you can just keep clicking away and not worry about wasting film, and then go back and pick the best shots. Anyways we had a good time enjoying the natural beauty of Yosemite, and I had fun trying to capture some of that beauty with my camera. Oh and by the way the wide angle shots were done with a Nikkor 10-24mm lens I rented from http://www.borrowlenses.com/. It's a great way to get access to otherwise expensive equipment like this lens, which retails for like $1000.

spartan

2010-05-02T14:37:00.000-07:00

Construction has started on our new home and our current place is still up for sale -- no decent offers have turned up yet. In the meantime we are kind of resuming our normal life although with a bit more economy and restraint. I've hooked the PS3 back up to the TV so we can at least watch some Blu-Ray movies.

Recently I watched John Woo's epic historical drama Red Cliff which runs a staggering 4+ hours across 2 discs. The film depicts the historical Battle at Red Cliff from 208 AD. Although it's a long film, I thought it was a triumphant return to form for John Woo -- the only disappointment for me was that long-time Woo collaborator Chow Yun-Fat withdrew from the film early in its filming.
But his fellow Hard-Boiled alumni Tony Leung does a reasonably good job playing the charismatic and wily commander Zhou Yu. Some of the memorable battle scenes feature the fearsome general Guan Yu, who to this day is deified by Chinese around the world, as the god of loyalty and righteousness.

Now I'm wondering if I should pull the XBox360 out of the closet as well -- next week the free multiplayer beta of Halo Reach comes out for Halo3: ODST owners... that would include me! But that would mean I need to renew my XBox Live Gold membership which I let expire, so I'll have to think about it. Not sure I'll have time to play games as work picks up again this summer...

In the meantime, I did take more photos recently - check out the collection below. And we have a weekend trip up to Yosemite coming later this month, I am looking forward to seeing (and photographing) some spectacular scenery out there.

-p.

presentation

2010-04-19T15:35:00.000-07:00

We've spent the last few weeks packing, throwing away old stuff, and lightly renovating the house -- mostly cleaning up and touching up the paint. We've been very low-impact on our home so very little needed fixing. Then came "staging" -- dressing up the place to make it look desirable to the maximum number of buyers. After a whirlwind tour of stores like Bed Bath and Beyond, Ross, Wal-Mart and Pier 1 Imports, we have decked the place out with all manner of new paintings, mirrors, lamps and bedsheets. Last weekend our place officially went out on the market and we held our first open house. Check out the photos, the place looks absolutely stunning if I may say so!

And if you're looking to buy a place and ours looks tempting, act quick! We've already got our first offer to buy over the weekend... we are still considering it.

Official Listing on our Agent's site

liquidation

2010-03-21T12:43:00.000-07:00

As we get ready to sell our home and move to our new place we've started clearing out the extra stuff we've had lying around over the years that we don't really need. Less stuff to move = less trouble. It's not hard to imagine that I have quite a few auto parts stored away in the garage. So I've put up my original Lexus wheels from the IS350 for sale on craigslist. There's probably other parts I've kept around for no reason that will go to the dump or up for sale on craigslist, like extra exhausts, lug nuts etc.

Wouldn't you know it, the first three emails I've received about the wheels are all likely scammers. They either want me to click on some probably malicious link or spam that they sent me, or want to send me a cashier's check for the wheels, sight unseen. I just need to send them all my personal information so they can proceed swiftly with the transaction. The transaction of stealing my money, you mean? Yeah right sucker.

Check out this video at the Federal Trade Commission about filing a complaint online. I think it's unintentionally funny because everyone's all squinty-eyed until they get scammed, and suddenly their eyes pop open.

migration

2010-03-09T23:20:00.000-08:00

Maybe I'm an optimist but I do believe that 2010 is the year that things turn around for us... and now I've put my wallet (and life savings) on the line to prove it. Last week V and I decided to buy a new house up in the Hayward Highlands. Right now it's still just a dirt lot on a hill, but in about 6 to 8 months our new home will be built and it's going to be very exciting to move into a bigger house. It's so big, the builder Toll Brothers doesn't just refer to them as homes, they are "estate" homes.

This is by far the biggest purchase we've ever made (eclipsing our current home by more than double the price) so it's really going to be a test of our financial strength. But it's all about risk vs. reward and we think it's worth the stretch. We've lived in our current home for 7 years, and this will be our home for probably the next 7 or more... and there's plenty of room so I doubt we'll outgrow this one. So here's hoping that in 7 years we are sitting on a big fat pile of equity.

Anyways we are pretty excited about moving to our new home, but some changes are in order before that happy day... we need to keep saving money to make our dream a reality and we plan to try and sell our current home very soon and move temporarily into an apartment to save even more as our home is built. It's certainly a real shakeup and turn of events for me, but I hope in the end it is worth it.

calibration

2010-02-21T00:50:00.000-08:00

With time, misfortune can become comedy. You've probably heard someone say (or maybe said it yourself), "someday we'll look back on this and laugh". Usually it's said in the midst of an unfortunate or difficult situation. A few years ago I had that thought, as I stood in an open dirt lot, hands raised in the air as several policemen pointed their guns at me. Well actually, the thought was more like, "if I live to look back on this, someday I'll look back on this and laugh."

I suppose some background is in order. Somewhere back about 15 years ago or so, a friend and I decided it would be awesome to take up target shooting. Neither of us had any real firearms experience, so we decided to start our sharpshooting adventures with CO2-powered pellet guns. For some reason I think we were spending a lot of time hanging out at K-Mart and they had a selection of pistols to choose from, modeled after real guns. My buddy chose a Dirty Harry-style .44 Magnum revolver replica with the long barrel and 6 shots. My weapon of choice ended up being the Colt .45 semiautomatic replica. They were both made of black plastic, but from a distance they certainly looked like the real thing. Both guns fired .177 caliber pellets and used CO2 gas cartridges to propel the ammo with satisfying velocity, enough to let us blast small holes in soda cans and whatever else we happened to have around as a target.

After a ricochet from a more solid food can zinged right back past my head I figured that we should stick to thinner and softer targets. And maybe shoot from a farther distance than our backyards might allow. We were young(er) and (more) foolish, and one weekend it occurred to us that we should go find an open area to do our plinking in. I knew of some new housing developments nearby where the homes hadn't been built yet and there was plenty of space, so my friend, my brother and I hopped in the car and headed out there with our pistols and some cans for targets.

So we found an empty lot where we set up and started shooting. At one point I saw a pickup truck driving along through the development heading our way. Whoever it was spotted us and almost violently came to a stop. As I watched, it quickly backed up and sped away. I should have known right then and there that it was time to split. Instead we shrugged and kept firing away.

Maybe ten minutes later, the other shoe dropped. A black-and-white police car came along but stopped well short of where we were. Uh-oh. I motioned to my friend to cease fire and started to unload my pistol, tossing it to the dirt. Maybe a minute or so later, about two or three more police cars arrived. Backup now on the scene, the po-po charged up to where we were, lights flashing and all. One of them was a K-9 unit with a police dog in the back. Almost immediately the cops were out of the cars, guns drawn and pointing right at us. "Hands in the air!" one of them gruffly shouted. I'm pretty sure I put mine up immediately. Apparently either my brother or my friend wasn't quick enough, because the next command was "Hands out of your pocket, right now!"

Wind blowing in my face as I faced the five-oh, in my mind I was already expecting to see the flashing muzzles as they took us down. Maybe I had seen too many bad-cop movies but I totally saw the scene going down like this: One of the cops sees something they don't like and puts one of us down. The others open up on the rest of us either out of panic, or to cover their tracks and write up whatever story they want. Dead men tell no tales. "Yeah, the perps saw us come up and didn't cooperate, one of them drew for a weapon and we had to rock 'n roll on they ass!" We'd be face down in the dirt and they could drop a few planted weapons on us to justify the takedown. One of them came towards me and told me to turn around, away from him. Oh, shit.

But the shots didn't come. Instead I felt a hand patting me down, feeling what I had in my pockets. OK, maybe I'll survive this encounter after all. They had us standing there at gunpoint for several minutes, reaching for the sky while one of them checked out what we had dropped to the ground. It didn’t take long for them to figure out what we were up to, and that we weren’t hardened criminals in the middle of some high-stakes drug or arms deal. Just a couple of kids with pellet guns plinking around. Then they rounded us up and led us back to our car. They were surprisingly cool about the whole thing. Perhaps just relieved that it hadn’t turned into a shootout at the OK Corral. They returned our pistols and basically told us to get lost. Subdued and feeling lucky we had gotten off so easy, we got back in our car and got out of Dodge as quick as we could. Our interest in target-shooting diminished pretty rapidly after that. I think we took up bowling for a while instead. Nobody gets shot while bowling.

Years later, yeah I think I can look back on that incident and laugh a little. We were dumb kids but we managed to avoid Darwinian selection. And you know what, I still enjoy trying to hit a bulls-eye with a well-placed shot. A few months ago some coworkers and I got together, and some of them had rifles and pistols so we went down to the gun range and spent an enjoyable morning blasting targets. One of them had a powerful scoped AR-15 rifle that could nail a bulls-eye at 100 yards with ease. But when the time came to switch to pistols and do some closer-range targets, that was when the spark lit up inside me again. Like driving fast on a twisty road or at a race track, I really enjoy the focus and precision involved in target shooting. For that fleeting moment in time, you clear your head of all other distractions, and for me, the singular purity of purpose is where I can find inner peace. Am I a pro race driver or an expert marksman? Not at all, but as they say, life is about the journey not the destination. As long as you have fun, who cares if you don’t win the race or shoot a perfect target every time?

I hate to say it but in this crazy world sometimes you also need to be ready to protect yourself and those you care about, not just rely on the protection of others. So my pursuit of skill and precision has a practical aspect as well. After a lot of deliberation and consulting with some knowledgeable friends, I decided to purchase my own semiautomatic pistol. I went to the range a few more times, to test out some of the pistols I was considering. Ultimately I decided on the Sig-Sauer P226 .40SW, which is weapon of choice for many elite military and law enforcement units around the world, including the US Navy Seals, British SAS, and the NYPD. If it’s rugged, reliable, and accurate enough for these guys, surely it’s good enough for me. The .40 caliber round is also ideal for a home defense weapon due to its stopping power and accuracy. The Sig is a popular and sometimes hard to get pistol, so I put in an order at the local shop for one and can’t wait until it comes in!

renovation

2010-01-14T18:36:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed a new look to this blog, I figured it was time for some change and hopefully it's for the better. I tweaked the layout to allow for a little more width in the main body column (that's the column you're reading this text in), and removed some redundant ads and links. I still have links to Amazon to the side and at the bottom if you want to keep helping me out whenever you purchase anything from them.

I enjoy buying stuff on Amazon myself... recently I've bought and thoroughly enjoyed watching The Clone Wars: The Complete Season One (TV Series) on Blu-Ray. The full length movie (Star Wars: The Clone Wars) that preceeded the TV series is not nearly as good (pretty lame plot-wise), but it is the starting point that introduces some new characters and reinterprets some of the old ones from the Star Wars double-trilogy. I got them both just to have a complete set.

I've also decided to try and get back into reading again... by which I mean something other than magazines and internet sites. I used to be really into the Tom Clancy novels like The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising. One of my favorite books of all time was Without Remorse.
Now I've tried to pick up where I left off in the Jack Ryan series, with a book that's 10 years old at this point, The Bear and the Dragon. It's been years since I read books on a regular basis, so wish me luck.

decade(nce)

2010-01-01T14:43:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year and welcome to the new decade! Wow, I can’t believe it’s 2010. It’s one of those futuristic numbers that I thought when I was younger, it would be so far off. So I have managed to cheat death and apocalypse for another 10 years.

It’s pretty customary to take a look at the end of a year, at the past year and try to remember the major events. I suppose it helps you to know where you’ve been, before you plan where you want to go next. So bear with me as I recap the highlights of 2009, even though I am a little late.

I think the biggest personal development for me in 2009 was taking one of my interests and moving it up to the next level – if you have been following along on this blog you probably already know what I am speaking of – Photography. It had always been an interest of mine ever since childhood, but this spring I really went into advanced mode by buying a Nikon digital SLR camera and a couple of lenses. I am fortunate to have a supportive wife who always encourages me to go out and get the best equipment, not just the best deal. And as I ended up traveling quite a bit in 2009, I got plenty of opportunities to get out there and just shoot, learning as I went. Some of the shots even turned out decent, if I may say so myself. Of course due to the nature of my work most of my free time to shoot was at night, which made it even more challenging. But I have much to learn still. I have found I favor static shots like landscapes and architecture, and shooting portraits and action definitely are not my strong points.

Professionally, it was almost certainly the busiest year of my career. Almost immediately following the trial I had in September 2008, I jumped onboard another pair of trial-bound cases and worked virtually non-stop. We had two trials in Washington DC in the fall, which meant lots of travel and ultimately I spent over a month in the capital. I haven’t run the numbers yet but I think I have 2700 hours logged for the year. I also hit my 10-year anniversary with the firm which is both amazing and depressing at the same time.

Thankfully, I was able to take a refreshing 3-week vacation with my honey V. once the trials were over. It was also our belated celebration of our 5th year anniversary, since I missed it while I was away at trial. We traveled to Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia to soak up the sun and devour the cuisine. And to take lots of photos, of course. It was just what I needed to scrape off the battle scars and regain my sanity.

In the electronic gadgets world, I’ve continued to collect nifty toys to keep me occupied in the rare free moments I have. V. somehow always manages to find me the greatest gifts! I have a Sony PSP to play games on the go, and a new pocket-sized projector to bring giant-sized movies with me wherever I go. Gran Turismo and Grand Theft Auto IV (with their multiple iterations of great add-on content) continue to provide me hours of entertainment.

On the automotive front, not a whole lot has changed with my rides. The biggest thing to happen was I ordered, and after 4 months of waiting, put on some new rims and tires on my Lexus. I’m very happy with how they turned out, and doing everything I can to drive and park carefully to keep them in their brand new condition.

So what’s next for 2010? Well it is the start of a new decade and therefore a great chance to make big plans and aspirations. Personally, I hope to keep taking more photos and learn to take better shots. Learn to be a better husband. And if the economy starts to pick itself up, move to a bigger house. With a bigger garage or driveway. And drive bigger and faster cars. Take more vacations. Lose weight and get in shape. Eat healthy. Improve my quality of life. You know, live the American dream, writ large.

Professionally, I am kind of at a crossroads. What I see ahead of me where I am, is the same thing over and over. I’ve already been put on another new case that is headed for trial later this year. I might make more money each year but the same challenges and tasks await. Arguably, I am near the top of my game here, so perhaps it’s time for a change? But with the economy in the tank right now changing jobs or professions doesn’t seem like such a brilliant path.

Executive summary: it’s a new dawn, a new day, a new life. Time to get out there and start living it. I suggest you do the same.

seasonal

2009-12-27T13:58:00.001-08:00

Season's Greetings to everyone! Yeah I know it's a little late for the Christmas/Hannukah/Festivus holidays, but better late than never. And I can get a head start on the Happy New Year wishes.

Lest you think it was 100% laziness that prevented me from posting recently, 'tis not true... well maybe 50% laziness. The other 50% can be attributed to some last minute craziness at work, that resulted in my spending a week, with very little notice, in NY and Boston for a hearing. Let me just say, it's pretty dman cold out on the East Coast. At least it didn't snow while I was out there. On the upside, I got to take some photos of mid-town Manhattan just before Christmas -- enjoy the photos here:

I also haven't had the time to post up the photos from our SE Asia trip. I took probably over 6000 photos in all, but here are some of the best shots I rounded up in my first pass through them. Hopefullly more to come at some point (and a little more story to go with it), but this should give you a taste of our trip -- and maybe spread a little more warmth than most of us are experiencing this winter:

Thailand:

Singapore:

Malaysia:

portable

2009-11-03T23:49:00.000-08:00

Coming back from two back-to-back trials, the return to normalcy is almost a bizarre and unsettling experience. After being accustomed after over a month away from home, to working 100+ hours a week and sleeping for a few hours during the daytime, returning to a regular work week and sleeping at night is somewhat difficult. My sleep pattern is still a little out of whack, but I am historically a fairly nocturnal person. I think I almost kind of thrived on staying up all night and going to bed in the morning. It's certainly nice to be back home but I almost don't know what to do with all the extra free time I now find myself with; it's like I suddenly gained back 40-50 hours a week that I didn't have. Well, sleep is certainly high on the priority list. But when I returned home my honey V. had also bought me a few toys and games to help kill some time with. Specifically she bought me both the PSPgo and the PSP 3000
"Slim" so I could try them both and see which one I liked better. She also picked me up a copy of the newly released Halo 3: ODST game for the X360.

The PSPgo is a real neat little device--all the abilities of the previous PSPs but in a smaller package. The slide-down controls allow most of the frontal area to be a screen, and it's about the same footprint as an iPhone when closed. Because it doesn't include a UMD drive it's ultra light and quiet. And with its launch in early October the online Playstation Network Store saw a barrage of new digital downloads added to the roster.

The thing is, the older PSP 3000 does everything the PSPgo does, plus it has a UMD drive to play the older sold-in-stores PSP games. They both have wifi to connect to the internet and a basic web browser. They both use bluetooth to connect with other players. And they both have large, bright displays which look great with games and videos. The downside is the 3000 is larger, bulkier, and doesn't come with onboard memory -- you have to buy a Memory Stick card in order to download and store games on the PSP 3000 whereas the PSPgo comes with 16GB onboard. Although when you add up the cost of a PSP-3000 and a Sony 16 GB Memory Stick card it still comes out to less than the list price of a PSPgo. And when you compare the 3000 with its predecessors (the original 1000 and the "slim" 2000, the 3000 is significantly thinner and lighter.

I downloaded several demos on both PSPs such as the addictive Patapon 2, the speedy reflex-testing Wipeout Pulse, and the slash-tastic blood-splattering God of War: Chains of Olympus. I played the same games on both so I could really compare and contrast the two, get a sense of their strengths and weaknesses. And then to really put them through their pace, I bought a digital copy of the newly released Gran Turismo for PSP, which the Playstation network gratifyingly allowed me to install and play on both handhelds at the same time. Sweeet. Some of my coworkers also had GT on their PSPs so we got together several times after work and had some hilariously fun racing parties. Plus with the game's ability to share cars we were able to give each other the cool rides we had been accumulating on our own. I highly recommend this game for any racing fans, it's like having the old GT4 game from the PS2 in your hand wherever you go. Good times.

So what's the verdict? Which version of the PSP did I choose? It was not an easy decision, but ultimately I chose the PSP 3000. Mostly for the way the controls just felt better in my hands, on the PSP-go my fingers felt a little cramped when playing for anything more than a few minutes. I will have some disadvantage from the fact that the 3000 won't fit easily into the pocket like the go does, but when you factor in the UMD drive, the lower cost, and better controls I felt the 3000 had the best combination of features.

That's not all in the gadgets department... in anticipation of our upcoming vacation trip to SE Asia (Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia) we also decided to also pick up a netbook for convenient portable internet access, and an HD camcorder. V. really wanted a pink laptop so I ordered her a ASUS Eee PC 1005HA 10.1-Inch Pink Netbook. And then we got a Sony HDR-XR200V 120GB HDD High Definition Camcorder to document our travels. So you can look forward to plenty of photos and video clips from our adventures in Asia! We're getting pretty amped up about it, we leave for Bangkok in just three days!

resurgence

2009-10-24T23:54:00.000-07:00

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions." - Old English proverb

It's me, back from the dead! At long last I've returned from my two back-to-back trials in Washington, DC. I barely had any time to take photos on this last trip. I was pretty much working around the clock, no time for monkey business. I previously would use the expression, "I'm busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest." Reviewing some of my time records, I managed to work 116.55 hours one week. It was also a long time away from home, 33 days in total this time. The funny thing is I hear that you can qualify for residency in DC if you've lived there for 30 days, so I could in theory apply for it. I don't think you'd want to though, after all, the city motto that's stamped on every auto license plate says, "Taxation without representation".

While I was gone I missed a few major events -- our 5th wedding anniversary on Sept. 26, and then my mother's birthday on Oct. 4, and my own b-day on Oct. 10. Like that Adam Sandler movie Click, it does feel sometimes like some part of life has passed me by. Fortunately my family has been waiting patiently for my return and welcomed me back with open arms.

Loyal readers may remember that I ordered a new set of wheels for my Lexus way back in March... well they did finally arrive in July but I just realized that I hadn't found the time to post up photos of them on the car yet. Here's a link to some photos I took:

new rims

Anyways now that I'm back with some free time and some overtime paychecks to spend things may pick up around here again... as always stay tuned. And hey, just a quick reminder, if you happen to like shopping on Amazon.com, just help me out by clicking through on the links to the right or at the very bottom. Thanks.

provider

2009-09-11T23:18:00.000-07:00

Time to sign off for a while -- I'm heading back to DC for two trials back-to-back, so I'll be gone for 5 weeks.

Goodbye beloved one.

See you in October.

DC

2009-08-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

Last month I made two business trips to Washington DC and fortunately found the time to take some photos and see the sights.

I got to visit the National Air & Space Museum, and the National Gallery of Art as well as walk around the Washington Mall. A lot of my walks were at night after work so I was able to practice lots of night photography and try out my new 35mm f/1.8 prime lens.

View my DC photo album here

View my Air and Space Museum photo album here

View my National Gallery of Art photo album here

beef

2009-07-16T20:31:00.001-07:00

This is the first volume of "Beef", an 8-part documentary series about battle MCs, feuds and rivalries within the early days of hip-hop and rap. Great stuff if you are a hip-hop fan, a must-see!

lunchtime

2009-07-10T13:21:00.001-07:00

Miniburgers @ matchbox
(with onion straws)

iconography

2009-06-27T00:09:00.000-07:00

By now the entire free world has heard the news -- King of Pop Michael Jackson has died. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that he was probably one of the most significant individuals of the 20th century... who else can you name besides religious figures, world leaders and tyrants who are recognized worldwide and had such a huge impact on society, culture, and of course music? For those of you who grew up the same time as I did, who doesn't remember listening to Billie Jean or Beat It, and trying to moonwalk like MJ?

For sure MJ was a controversial figure, ever since he grew up and stopped being the cute kid singer from the Jackson 5. His clothes were wild, his songs filled with shrieks and grunts, and his videos broke the mold of what music videos were expected to be. And of course there's countless things that could be said of his oddly changing appearance and the scandals involving him and children. However, society tends to try to focus on the positive aspects of an individual after they have passed on, and in my mind there is clearly a wealth of phenomenal music, pop culture influence, and humanitarianism that MJ left behind for us to remember him by. MJ we'll miss you, but because you were so prolific you left so much for us to enjoy and so in a sense, you live on in our hearts and minds.

Here are a few of my favorite MJ videos for you to enjoy.

Rock With You

Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough

Never Can Say Goodbye

Beat It

Billie Jean

longshot

2009-06-11T00:39:00.001-07:00

Long exposure shot, taken one night after work.

flashback

2009-06-01T23:16:00.000-07:00

My dad's Nikon 35mm camera, taken with Nikon D60.

Over 30 years ago, my dad bought a Nikon SLR 35mm film camera and started carrying it around to take photos of our family and our travels. It was pretty big and heavy, and I remember one time as a kid we were in Las Vegas and somehow I got smacked in the face with the camera hanging from my dad's shoulder, giving me a bloody nose. After I got over the initial pain and commotion, my dad had me pick out numbers for Keno, saying that my bloody nose was "lucky". Ah, such a wonderful childhood...

Fast forward to present day, and I find myself retracing my father's footsteps. I started getting more into photography as of late, partly due to some work that involved digital camera technology, and decided to get an dSLR. After much research and deliberation, I decided on a Nikon D60... ordered it on Amazon and started clicking away. As far as entry-level dSLRs go the D60 is not the top of the line model (that honor goes to the Nikon D90), but I thought it would be plenty enough for me to learn with. When my dad found out I bought a new Nikon, he offered to give me the old Nikon body and lens. I probably won't use the body to shoot film, but the 50mm prime lens he had is in reasonably good condition (for being 30+ years old) and can be used with modern Nikon SLRs in manual mode.

Well, after nearly 30 days of shooting with it I decided to return the D60... and get a Nikon D5000 instead. In the last month I've tried to rationalize not getting the D90... after all it's over double the price of the D60. But Nikon just came out with the D5000 which has nearly all the features of the D90 crammed into a D60 sized body. Upgrading from the D60 to the D5000 gets me better auto-focusing abilities (11 vs. 3 AF points), slightly more megapixels (12 vs. 10 MP), a LiveView function, the ability to record HD 720p video clips, and a swiveling LCD display. I don't think I need the few additional features that the D90 offers (support for much older autofocus lenses and a better high-res LCD display) for several hundred dollars more, hopefully that money would be better spent on getting better lenses and other accessories.

My dad's 50mm f/1.4 prime lens should work fine with the D5000 in manual mode as well but as it totally predates autofocus technology, it has to be manually focused. I'm going to keep trying to use it and hopefully the LiveView with magnification will make manually focusing it on distant objects easier. Here is a photo I took with the D60 and my dad's 50mm lens, stay tuned for more when I get the D5000 in. I've also got some extra batteries and a tripod on the way, and eventually I'll start shopping for more lenses... at the moment I'm considering either the Nikon 35mm f/1.8G AF-S DX Lens or the Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S VR Zoom Nikkor Lens ... wow isn't that a mouthful.

portfolio

2009-05-03T00:21:00.000-07:00

Photography has been an interest of mine for quite some time, though until fairly recently I have not been that seriously into it. I bought my first digital camera ( the Largan LMini 350 Digital Camera) back in 2001, and it had a barely adequate 640x480 resolution. A few years later V. took pity on me and bought my first Sony DSCP9 Cyber-shot digital camera, and that had 4 megapixels. I took lots of pics when we traveled and some of them were even decent. Continuing our love affair with Sony, she bought me another camera, the 7.2MP Sony Cybershot DSC-P200. For her birthday this year I bought her, you guessed it, another Sony camera, this one is a pink Sony Cybershot DSC-T700. Even though the T700 is a fantastic 10 MP camera that's super compact, I just can't take it seriously because it's pink (though it does come in other colors such as Grey), so I continued to carry and use the P200. The nice thing about the P200, is it has a larger than average sensor compared to the ultra compact point-and-shoot cameras out there, including the T700. So even though it loses in the megapixel wars, I tend to think the image quality on it is slightly better than V's new camera.

But no little P&S camera can hold a candle to the superior sensor of an SLR camera. The much larger sensor means far better image quality and low-light sensitivity. The downside of course is the much-larger camera body and significantly more expensive hardware. I tried to hold out for a while, learning as much as I could while sticking with the P200. Some basic stuff about composition, shutter and exposure settings, aperture, etc. And so I think I started taking better pictures. Well some of them are still stinkers but maybe more of them turn out ok now.

So how do you know when it's time to move on to a digital SLR camera? For me it's the need or desire for better equipment to do the same job. Will my photos look that much better? Probably not in a huge way--sure, in some low light situations it will be easier to get non-blurry shots with a SLR. But I think more of it has to do with being able to quickly and accurately control the settings and take the shot you want instead of fiddling around with a clunkier device. So I've decided to make the move to a dSLR. More on that soon... but this might be a surprise, it's not a Sony.

While I wait for my new camera to arrive, I thought I would go back and take a look at the shots I took with all these P&S cameras -- somehow some of them actually turned out decent. So I'll share with you what I think are the "greatest hits" of my pre-SLR photography. Enjoy this best of the mediocre collection, and maybe some day this post will be followed by a part 2, from my SLR era.

http://s78.photobucket.com/albums/j118/pmok_mr2/?start=all&mediafilter=all&action=tags&current=best

for some of the really old Lmini shots: http://s78.photobucket.com/albums/j118/pmok_mr2/photography/lmini/?albumview=grid

loanshark

2009-04-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

I dropped off my IS350 at the local Lexus dealership on Friday morning for some warranty repairs and several service campaigns. They said it would take several days so they sent me on my way with a loaner car ... they gave me a 2003 ES330, wait it gets better, it came in white with chrome wheels and gold badging. Talk about NOT my style... I feel like an old man driving in it, this car seems to be perfect for someone 60 or 70 years old. Which is to say my dad would probably love it. Not me. It's like driving a boat, instead of reacting to my inputs like a well-tuned road-carving instrument, it kind of takes them as suggestions and grudgingly moves in the general direction you want. The power steering is super boosted and has no feedback at all. The brake pedal mushes like you're stepping on tofu. The power coming out of corners is... almost nonexistent. It can barely move out of its own way. Is this what most consumers find comforting or normal?

There are a few interesting perks in this car though. It's kind of fun switching the shock absorbers back and forth between Sport and Comfort while driving over a bridge... I doubt it helps the handling much but you can definitely feel a difference in the ride. The other thing is, I now kind of understand why others drive so badly in this car. With such sensory deprivation from the realities of the road, how can you avoid it? It forces me to do the same things they do ... drive slowly (to avoid upcoming hazards, as the time-to-react to everything becomes painfully higher with the weak responsiveness), constantly tap the brakes (because the pedal gives you no resistance or reassurance whatsoever), and I even have to back up and readjust the steering angle when turning into a parking spot (because it has the turning radius of a 747). I didn't even feel bad when I had to cut off someone to change lanes, the person behind me probably said, whatever, this guy can't help it, he's probably 70 years old and has the mental acuity of a chimpanzee. I've heard people say, it's not the car, it's the driver. Well I'm telling you right now, the car makes a helluva difference.

I can't wait to get my IS350 back.

tesla

2009-04-17T17:11:00.001-07:00

This electric-powered Tesla Roadster has been showing up in my parking lot at work a few times now... wonder whose it is? Tesla is getting a lot of attention these days, some of it not so positive as the company struggles to make a profit and alienates some of its prospective buyers with contract-breaking pricing increases. Enjoy this funny video someone made as social commentary about the situation: Hitler vs Tesla

homemade

2009-04-11T20:34:00.001-07:00

Mmmmm ... tonight V. made my favorite noodle soup, and the namesake for this blog, cha siu tong mein. Sure, eating out is nice, but sometimes you just wanna sit at home and attack a sumptuous meal with no regard for manners or decency, knowing no one will see you...

aromatic

2009-04-01T15:08:00.000-07:00

My coworker just came back from China and brought me this. Mmmm this might be the only non-vegetarian potato chip I've ever seen.

rotation

2009-02-26T13:31:00.000-08:00

We recently finished paying off V's Scion ... so the natural inclination of an automobile junkie is to start thinking about buying a new car. But with the economy taking a huge nosedive and so much uncertainty I think the wise choice is to stick with what we have, especially if there's no real need to go out and buy a new car. Our cars are running just fine and a new ride would just be, well, extravagant in these times. Unless we went out and bought a hybrid or some kind of small commute car. But the Scion and Spyder are perfectly suitable cars when we feel like going into fuel economy mode.

To stave off the burning desire to blow off a large chunk of my dough on some very tempting glistening example of modern automotive design and engineering, I've decided to uh, blow a smaller chunk of my dough on some very tempting glistening example of modern automotive design and engineering. So I've been shopping around for a new set of wheels for my IS350. I still haven't really rewarded myself for working so hard last year and I have a pretty nice tax refund coming to me soon, AND I will need a new set of tires soon anyways. So the timing seems right, and giving a new look to the Lexus will hopefully tide me over until we see better economic times.

I started out by looking at the mesh-style wheels, like the Volk SF-Winning and MRR GT-1. German wheel maker BBS is pretty well known for making wheels in this style. I think these have a nice classy look to them and look good with the style of the IS, but mesh-style wheels have lots of spokes and are kind of hard to keep clean. Cost is also a huge factor. Forged wheels like the Volks cost a pretty penny but are stronger and light weight; the more common mass-produced cast wheels like the MRRs are cheaper but more prone to bending or damage if you hit a hard bump or pothole, or require more material (and thus more weight) to get the same strength.

Five spoke wheels are the classic style for a sports car, but for a sedan like the IS I am not sure the standard 5-spoke looks right. For a coupe or sports car they look great. However a split-5 spoke design works pretty well, and that's what the standard 18" wheels on the IS are. I decided that I want a set of wheels that don't stray too far from that aesthetic, yet are bigger and lighter. And of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I wanted them to look better than the stock ones which look a little too curvy and flowery to me. They are still very good looking wheels though, which makes choosing a better wheel very difficult.

I've finally decided on a wheel that I really like, the AME Tracer FS-01 made by Enkei in Japan. Enkei is like the Toyota of wheels, they are the giant wheel maker in Japan and they have a high tech manufacturing method called M.A.T. that supposedly bridges the gap between cast and forged wheels, giving wheels almost as much strength as forged wheels but at lower manufacturing cost similar to cast. A high-tech wheel for a high-tech car. Because they are a full-face rim (the spokes extend all the way to the outside rim of the wheel) there is no fat lip like some of the real ballers like to sport on their cars, but I'm going for a classy, sort of understated look. I've liked this wheel ever since I first saw it and after looking at all the other options I keep coming back to this one. So I've pulled the trigger and ordered a set -- they're individually imported as a special order from Japan so I will have to wait about 4-6 weeks for it.

Here are a few other photos of IS's with the same wheels and I think they look pretty nice. They are also about 6 pounds lighter for each wheel than my stock wheels so I am going to get some mild improvement in acceleration, cornering and braking. I'll also go for slightly wider tires than stock and that will help as well.

Thanks to fellow ClubLexus member eddiec for the pic of his dark gray IS350 with the FS-01s.

Stay tuned for more pics when the wheels come in and I get them mounted on my car.

defection

2008-12-19T19:42:00.000-08:00

What's the holidays without a little technological gadgetry upgrade? Well it would still be the holidays, but also getting some new gadgets is certainly more fun! My honey V. couldn't wait until Christmas to give me my Christmas present, so I got it super early this year... she got me an Xbox 360 Elite! It's super cool looking in all black and even has its own distinctive black controller. The Elite has everything the regular X360 has, plus a 120GB drive, HDMI cable connector, and black headset. It also came with two free games, LEGO Indiana Jones and Kung-Foo Panda. I'm not too sure about those two games, but I will probably get to playing them eventually.
V. knows me so well... she knew they probably wouldn't cut it so she got me a copy of Halo 3 to get my violence rampage on. (Hey, killing ugly bad things in the virtual world, just might make you a better person in the real world.) So I stopped (momentarily) playing through GTA4 for the third time, to get into the world of Master Chief. So far it's been a real challenge, playing the game at "Heroic" difficulty I have to try most levels many many times before I can get through it. But the gameplay and storyline is fairly similar to Resistance 2
for the PS3, which I finished in an unbelievably short period of time. I haven't ventured online to play against other people yet but I will, I hear it is a lot of fun and some people never even play the solo campaign, opting to spend all their time online instead.
So now I'm a little conflicted, having been so long a Sony PS3 fanboy and now I have an X360 as well. What games to buy, which system to spend more money and time on? The PS3 has the home theater setup going for it, with Blu-Ray support and a decent web browser. On the other hand the X360 also interfaces nicely with our PC as a Windows Media Center extender. Well, we'll see how it goes as I play around with the X360 and learn more about what it can do.

retrorockets

2008-12-05T17:36:00.000-08:00

My friend and fellow car junkie H. recently posted up his automotive resume of sorts, listing all the cars he's owned over the years. That of course led me to think about my own rides and... (start shimmering dream sequence effect) it's time to take a spirited drive down Memory Lane...

1) 1991 Toyota Tercel (a.k.a. Rice Rocket I) (1991-2002)
For a car guy, you could say that their first car is like their first love. It may not be the best or the one you stay with, but it will always have a special place in your heart. So it is with the original Rice Rocket. It was painted white, had kind of rounded edges, and being Japanese the name wasn't hard to come up with. The 4-speed long-throw stick shift helped make the most of the mind-numbing 82hp of the 4 cyl engine up front. Armed with 2-door coupe design, a sweet-looking black vinyl interior that one chick even thought was leather, and a "RELAX" bumper sticker on the back, it was the epitome of cool in 1991 for a high school senior. So what if it didn't come with a stereo? That's what a passenger is for, to flip the tape on the boombox when side A is done. It even had a dealer-installed sunroof. Unfortunately RR1 met its untimely demise when it smashed into a freeway offramp divider. Miraculously my sister-in-law who I had lent it to for her college commute escaped with only minor injuries despite RR1 not being equipped with an airbag. By then I had already acquired my next two rides so it didn't mean so much to me, but I will always remember it fondly.

2) 2000 Toyota MR2 Spyder (a.k.a. Stealth Fighter) (2000-)
Growing up my family was very fond of Toyotas ... we had some bad experiences with various American and European makes, but when we started buying Toyotas we found they were economical and reliable. Even when I was in school I became enamored of Toyota's first and second generation MR2s -- they combined sporty performance with rock-solid reliability. No wonder that when I started working and making a little money, I lusted after the new concept MR2 that Toyota displayed in 1997. By the time it went into production in 2000, I had met V. and she encouraged me to pursue my dream. Driving a mid-engine 2-seat roadster opened up my interest in cars and motorsports -- I tried my hand at autocross and then open track days, and got into the import tuning craze. The Stealth Fighter remains in my garage today, and although I no longer drive it every day it makes a great pick-me-up on the weekend drives and the occasional track day.

3) 1992 Toyota MR2 Turbo (a.k.a RedShark) (2002-2005)
As far back as high school I had already fallen in love with the 2nd-generation MR2 which had according to some auto magazines, Ferrari-style looks and Toyota-style price and reliability. And a standard-setting 200-hp 2.0 liter turbocharged engine providing the oomph. Unfortunately Toyota discontinued this model in the U.S. in 1995 and I never had a chance to buy one new. Well with a little extra cash available I was able to finally pick one up used. It was a fantastic ride with plenty of power, stylish looks, and superb mid-engine handling. It held its own at the racetrack, but it was also a practical car that I could drive every day. Unfortunately I eventually sold it because we didn't have the space for so many cars. I still miss it, and maybe someday I will own one again.

4) 2005 Scion tC (a.k.a. Rice Rocket II) (2005-)
When we got married I decided we needed a more "practical car" that we could take everywhere and haul a little more than a few small bags of groceries. But being who I am, of course it still had to be somewhat sporty yet comfy. The sporty ride of the MR2s was getting a little too harsh for the daily grind of my commute. At first I was thinking about an Infiniti G35 but I kind of recoiled from being so extravagant, and decided to look at something more economical. The new Scion tC fit the bill perfectly with its sporty 2-door coupe/hatchback profile and a surprisingly ample set of luxury, convenience and comfort features. And to a certain extent, I felt it was a spiritual successor of sorts to my first Tercel. Eventually V's Mercedes started to fall apart and it just wasn't worth fixing it, so we sold it and V took over the Scion as I started searching for another ride.

5) 2006 Lexus IS350 Sport (a.k.a. Silver Lexstasy) (2006-)
When we got rid of the Mercedes C280 it seemed logical to buy another car to fill the same purpose: another 4-door sedan. But V was happy to take the Scion off my hands, so I was free to shop for another car for me! Woo-hoo! Performance and style were my key criteria. Oh, and made by Toyota of course. At this point though, Toyota itself had gotten a little boring in their offerings. The Japanese equivalent of GM, some call them, but without the Corvette. They had discontinued sporty cars like the Celica or MR2, and a Camry or Avalon wasn't going to cut it. The real exciting or interesting cars were to be found in the Scion and Lexus brands. Well I certainly wasn't going to be rolling in a Scion xB so I went to look at Lexus. The IS350 was the standout performance sedan with a fresh new look and an impressive 306-hp V6 motor driving the rear wheels. It makes the daily drive to and from work just a little more bearable, maybe even entertaining.

Looking back at all these rides, it seems kind of modest and actually a pretty short list considering I'm supposed to be a "car guy". Aren't I supposed to have like 5 cars at once, at least two up on stands or cinder blocks in the front or back yard? And surely at least one truck to haul or tow them, and something with a V8. No muscle cars? Obviously my automotive resume needs some beefing up. I guess I'm coming to the realization that I am more of a driver than a mechanic -- I have tinkered with my rides to a fair degree, but I get much more enjoyment out of just taking them out on the open road or on a closed track.

So what's next in P's garage? I'm not sure yet -- maybe it's time to stray from the Toyota fold and see what else is out there. I'm definitely feeling the mid-engine magic might take hold of me again. I'm running out of affordable options there though. The Audi R8 seems like a solid choice but the Porsche Cayman is a bit more affordable. Then again, there's that new Lexus LF-A that will be coming in 2010. Maybe I should just start saving up for that. But reports say it might be priced over $300K. That's a pretty huge chunk of change for a Toyota!

adaptation

2008-10-25T12:22:00.001-07:00

It used to be called Cluck University and then University Chicken, and now it's changed names once again. I pulled up today on my way back from a business trip to Monterey to pick up some spicy buffalo wings from my favorite wing place in Santa Clara and now the place is called Smoke Eaters?

Personally I think it's a horrible name but I had to go in and see if the wings were still the same. I asked the server when they changed and she said about a month ago. The menu looks different but has essentially the same offerings as before. The wings are still called wingers and there are still different levels of hotness for the sauce, but the highest level of hot is now "Inferno" instead of "Global Thermonuclear". Maybe the change makes sense; probably only the older customers will remember the classic reference to the old Matthew Broderick film WarGames.

Anyways I took a box of 10 "Nuclear" wingers home and dug in. Still the same sweet and tangy hot sauce, with a good dose of spicy heat. Too bad the name stinks. The weird thing is, the Chicken University website is still up and lists the Santa Clara location, so I'm not sure if they changed all of them or if just this one changed. Seems like they still serve the same good ol' wings though so I guess I'll still drop by from time to time.

cutbacks

2008-10-18T18:46:00.000-07:00

So, 6 months have passed since I hatched the grandiose scheme of investing my money and having the dream of someday driving a V10-powered auto. And unless you've been living under a rock (which I sort of was for a while, but even I've managed to notice), you know now that the financial and investment world has seriously gone down the drain and, almost to add insult to injury, the price of gas has shot up to $4 and even $5 a gallon for a while, making both investment in stocks and the purchase of any kind of gas-guzzler appear to be very foolish ideas. But who would have known? I'm sure there's someone out there that could say "I told you so", but I'm no genius and surely did not see this coming. Needless to say, I haven't made it big and bought my retirement mansion in the Bahamas yet. Nor am I driving a Bugatti Veyron or even a humble V10-equipped M5. Instead I'm lamenting the demise of my WaMu shares and dusting off my trusty 4-cylinder powered MR2 to try and save some scratch at the pump.

And while I'm not necessarily packing my things and moving into a cardboard box just yet, surely this is a great time to be rich. With all the economy in a tizzy and gas prices shooting up it's crazy but you can find some really sweet deals on some automotive hardware. It's all about supply and demand, and right now it's a buyer's market like nobody's seen in quite a while. If you're in the market for a Mercedes S-Class or a Ford F-150 truck, it's on like Donkey Kong. For everybody else, though I think we're going to be finding ways to cut some of the excess fat from our monthly bills. All of sudden my $95/month cable bill has moved from simply silly to outrageously ridiculous. I think I can do without 200+ channels that I don't really have the time to watch anyways.

Last night I was having dinner with J.T. and we tried out a new restaurant, San Mateo Prime. Which, as you might surmise, is in San Mateo. The prime rib there was decent and certainly enjoyable but not quite up to the standard of House of Prime Rib up in San Francisco. I'd say that in terms of ranking, HOPR > Broadway Prime > San Mateo Prime. But it was pretty sobering to see that even at prime time dinner hour on a Friday night, the restaurant's tables weren't full. The waiter commented that business has been slow and they were even lowering the prices of wine offerings in an attempt to drum up more business. Food for thought indeed.

contrast

2008-10-04T18:42:00.000-07:00

It took all night, but I was actually able to finish this 24oz. can of Amp!

pequeno

2008-09-21T14:19:00.000-07:00

Tabasco in an 1/8 oz. size! Ain't it cute?

spinning

2008-08-23T21:17:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last post ... things have been busy at work but what else is new? At least I got a little time off back in July to take a roadtrip with my dad and visit my bro in San Diego and then we made the trek up to Las Vegas to take a little money off the casinos. In case you didn't know roulette is my game, and although I won't go so far as to say I have a winning system, I usually do pretty well and have fun while doing so -- what else could you want?

But then it's been back to work and although two of my cases thankfully settled before trial I still have 3 more on the calendar for this year, and that's still a ridiculous amount of work. I head to Washington DC next week for a trial at the ITC that will run about a week and a half; when I get back I think I have another hotel room waiting for me in San Jose to prepare for the next trial that may last several weeks. So this may well be my last post for another long stretch; as you might imagine I've been spending my days and nights at the office getting ready for all this action. Oh yeah, and then another trial coming in November. Maybe I will actually get a day or two off sometime in October.

Life's no fun without new gadgets, but my latest new toy is probably something a lot of people are starting to take for granted these days -- a new iPod! My first real iPod actually, my only other one being an iPod Shuffle. Due to a mishap involving the washing machine and her Shuffle, I gave my Shuffle to V. and picked up a new iPod Classic 160GB. I decided to go for the black finish because, well, it only comes in black or silver and I think white or silver iPods are just a little too common. Oddly though the black iPod still comes with white headphones -- guess that's the Apple branding at work ... but I guess I could just get any run-of-the-mill black set of earplugs to go with it. I've spent the last few days putting as much music and video as I can find the time to collect onto the iPod, but I've hardly made a dent on the 160GB hard drive... I just don't have that much music I guess. To be honest the 80GB version would probably have been fine, but V. got me the 160GB and I guess it'll be more than enough storage for a long time to come. Anyways it will be great to have along with me as I travel to and from the east coast in the coming months.

furley (2007-2008)

2008-06-22T14:46:00.000-07:00

It's good to be home, but unfortunately when my honey V. picked me up at the airport she had some sad news... my little fishy friend Furley apparently missed me too much and kicked the bucket on Friday. I didn't get as teary eyed as I did when his predecessor Spencer went to the fish bowl in the sky, but it wasn't really the kind of news I wanted to hear upon my arrival. Anyways we gave him the royal flush ceremonial sendoff this morning and I think we are going to hold off on getting any new fish friends for a while.

Poor Mr. Furley.

NYC5

2008-06-21T23:30:00.000-07:00

On my last day in NYC, I decided to take a scenic walk through Manhattan. I started from the GM building on 5th Avenue where our office is, and headed south through all the ritzy hotels and luxury shopping destinations. I walked past the iconic St. Patrick's Cathedral, Trump Tower, the NY Public Library, and the Empire State Building. Then I headed up Broadway towards Times Square, walked amongst the throngs of people there, saw a parade under way on 6th Ave., and walked past Radio City Music Hall back to the office to catch my ride to JFK airport by 1PM. So I covered about 50+ city blocks in 2.5 hours on foot, Niko Bellic eat your heart out.

Unfortunately the tight time frame meant I didn't have time to stop anywhere to grab some NY style pizza, but I didn't think the pizza around Times Square was going to be that great anyways. I was hoping to hit up Brooklyn on the way to the airport but my driver was not too cooperative and said we were going through Queens to get to JFK so it wasn't on the way.

Anyways I ended up at the airport early and the security checkpoint was nowhere near as busy I had been led to believe, so went into the gates and I hit up the pizzeria for a pair of strombolis, which are kind of like calzones. Good stuff for airport fare. Anyways the flight home was pretty uneventful and I got some work done in between sips of vodka and Coke and snacking on some Terra Blue chips. That's how I roll, baby.

For the rest of my phone camera pics from NYC, click here to my Photobucket album.

NYC4

2008-06-20T21:24:00.001-07:00

Yum!!!

- CBS has its studios in the same building as my firm, and they use the plaza outside for live concerts and such. Apparently they were setting up the stage this morning as I was walking in, and I missed a live performance by Rihanna. I heard she was asking for me afterwards but I was busy in a lunch meeting with the patent litigation counselors group.

- Another burger place caught my eye, right across the street from the office. It's called Pop Burger and it seemed pretty hip and trendy. Like a White Castle meets Andy Warhol. Got a pair of mini cheeseburgers for $6 and you know what, it wasn't that much different from the bigger one I had at the Burger Joint last night. Pretty dang good and a lot easier to find.

- Well, tomorrow is my last day and I fly home to see my honey. I hope she's been feeding my fish Furley. She never remembers to feed him. Anyways, one last chance in the morning to do some exploring of NYC before I leave.

NYC3

2008-06-19T22:43:00.000-07:00

-it's cramped in the conference room we're in. We set up a projector to show some of the work we're discussing and I have to say it's one of the most ghetto-style configurations I've seen in a while. the projector is a table-top model that is designed to project upwards from the table but we found there isn't room for it with us all sitting there so we put it on a chair, propped up on the far counter and because it shoots at an upward angle we had to tilt it with a binder and a stack of notepads. G-h-e-t-t-o.

-Some coworkers told me about this secret burger place that some regard as one of the best burgers in NYC. And it was within walking distance. So naturally I had to go check it out. It really is hidden, in a little alcove within a swanky hotel lobby of all places. You walk past a tall velvety curtain, spy a simple neon burger sign, and hang a right. Suddenly you're in the Burger Joint and it's all good. In keeping with its secret nature I couldn't take a picture of the burger that does it justice. But it was good. And I have a shot of the neon sign which also seems to evade clear depiction. You'll just have to ask someone that knows how to get there.

NYC2

2008-06-18T22:26:00.001-07:00

More random thoughts from New York.

-being right across the street from the office is pretty convenient. A 5 min walk is a nice contrast to the usual 35min commute.

-went out for lunch with a coworker and he took me to a place called Beacon. I ordered a $19 hamburger with fries and "custom" ketchup. Not bad, but for $19 you'd expect something pretty awesome which it wasn't.

-lots of European tourists walking around 5th Ave during the day. Strong Euro and weak dollar means great shopping deals for the Euros.

-My coworker pointed out the Abercrombie & Fitch store on 5th Ave doubles as a trendy nightclub at night. There's even a velvet rope outside the door during the day and when it gets busy, you sometimes have to wait outside to get in ... just to shop. How incredibly pretentious.

-the office is in the GM building which has been decked out in the ground floor lobby to look like the inside of an iPod or something. Everything's white with silver accents and there's these pointless flashing red lights in the elevator that don't tell you what floor you're on or anything useful.

NYC1

2008-06-17T05:21:00.000-07:00

NYC is nice. highlights so far:

-my flight on sunday was cancelled. flew redeye into JFK instead Sun night/Mon morning.
-checked in at 6AM, showered and then went to work all day Mon.
-hotel is pretty nice, best part is it's directly across the street from the NY office. towels are nice and soft.
-sudden rain and thunderstorm hit NYC last night. I got drenched in the one block run back to the hotel
-had a street stand hotdog at 2AM after the rainstorm, then visited the 24hr Apple Store right outside the office.

flex

2008-06-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

Chris Bangle, the Director of Design at BMW has been both praised and villified by the automotive press for his accomplishments. Love it or hate it, the "Bangle-Butt" you see on cars like the BMW 7 Series has made an impression on the world of auto design and it has now manifested itself in cars as mundane or mainstream as the Toyota Camry.

I can't say I cared too much for the Bangle-Butt but now with the newest concept design from BMW I have some new-found respect for Bangle and his team. They've taken the "flame-surfacing" ideas they showcased on the BMW Z4 roadster and coupe, and moved into a new organic direction... with a flexible fabric-based skin and motorized moving structure that can resculpt itself and even blink its headlights, this really is the kind of car that one could imagine as a 21st century car of the future. Check out the promotional video from BMW featuring Bangle and showing some of the cool effects you get from a flexible skin and adjustable structure. The look of the folded skin when the doors open is very unconventional for sure, but I think it's pretty breath-taking to behold. I hope to see this car or an evolution of it in person someday.

See more photos of the BMW GINA at Autoblog

duality

2008-06-01T15:17:00.000-07:00

Now I'm not a particularly big fan of football, but when one of the partners that I work for invites me to play in the office's newly formed flag football league, I found myself having a hard time saying no. To be honest, I haven't played flag football since high school, and I didn't fare particularly well then either. But you know what, it's moments like this that slap you in the face and make you sit up and pay more attention to your own health and well-being. But when we took to the field for the first time on Friday, the slap in the face was more harsh than even I imagined. Out of shape and with no athletic skills or conditioning, I found myself gasping for air after only a few plays and eagerly self-benching myself so that others could get a chance to play. Oh, man am I out of shape. My elliptical machine has really built up a fine patina of dust over the last few months from disuse. The guilt is starting to take its toll on me, so I think I'll be popping some fresh D-cell batteries into it (yeah, seems kinda silly that an exercise machine couldn't be self-powered, right?) and putting it through its paces soon. Maybe next week's game I can actually stay on my feet and not collapse from exhaustion.

But as they say for every force, there is a corresponding opposite force to keep things in balance. And so with this renewed pledge to exercise and get into shape, comes a desire to stuff myself silly in the most extravagant way possible. And so I have reconvened the Carnivore Club, a ragtag collection of similarly meat-centric folks who take no shame in eating as much food as they can, to return to the fantastic Brazilian steakhouse Espetus Churrascaria in San Francisco. If you're a meat lover and haven't been to a Brazilian steakhouse, you have to try it. You know how you go to a normal steakhouse, order a steak, and while it tastes great when you first dig into it, by the time you're finishing it the meat has cooled off and it's not so tasty anymore? Well at a churrascaria, you get smaller slices of beef off a large skewer fresh out of the kitchen and brought right to your plate, so every bite is a nice hot and tasty experience. I can't say enough about it and I can't wait to go back there next week. But I leave you with a few Carnivore Club Rules, or in the spirit of Pirates of the Carribean, they're more like guidelines.

Rules of Carnivore Club

#1. You do not talk about Carnivore Club.
#2. OK, you can talk about it a little but only when recruiting others.
#3. If someone says “stop” or turns over the red card, the food stops coming.
#4. One man (or woman), one plate. Nobody shares from their plate.
#5. You finish what’s on your plate. Unless it’s nasty.
#6. No soup, no salad. Unless it’s got meat in it.
#7. Dinner will go on as long as it has to.
#8. If this is your first night in Carnivore Club, you have to eat.

furious

2008-04-29T21:54:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty angry right now. I just have to get it out of my system and move on. I've gone on and on in multiple posts about the coming of the new Rockstar game, Grand Theft Auto IV onto the PS3. I mean, this is basically one of the 2 games that I have been waiting all along to play on the PS3. Needless to say I'm pretty excited about it and I couldn't wait to play it when it was finally released in stores. I even pre-ordered it from Best Buy so I could be assured of getting it on Day Zero. That day is today.

And yet, here I am at home after work and am I firing up the game, assuming the role of Nico Bellic and terrorizing the streets of Liberty City? Negative. Instead I sit fuming in front of the computer, just plain angry. Did I get the game? I did. I worked until about 8pm, got the hell out of the office as soon as I could, and went down to the Best Buy to pick up my order just before closing time. The chick behind the counter gave me a blank stare as if she'd never done this before. "Is it the special edition?" she asked me. Not wanting to lie, I said I don't think so, but she seemed almost bent on trying to hand me the special collector's edition which costs about $30 more and comes with all kinds of extra stuff like a metal box and a book of artwork. If she was going to give that to me I sure wasn't going to say no. But eventually she actually checked the order and realized that it was just the regular game. She put it in a bag and handed it to me, and I was outta there.

It wasn't until I was nearly home, half an hour later, that it occurred to me that the package she handed me in the bag was unusually large. The PS3 games come in a Blu-Ray disk case which are slightly smaller than a DVD case. But something felt wrong somehow as I sat at a red light, caressing the package in my passenger seat. The case felt... unusually large. Ohoh. Surely the dimwitted cashier had not given me the wrong game? Or for the wrong platform (GTA IV is also available for the X360)? As I sat there in the car I held up the package in the pale yellowish illumination of the streetlights and made the horrible discovery -- the silly b!tch had forgotten to take the game out of its security packaging! Unbelievable!

So the game sits on my table, sealed in its tamper-resistant packaging and I'm halfway tempted to just go at it with my rotary cutting power tool to get it open. But I think it has one of those exploding ink cartridges that wouldn't be too fun to see splattered all over the room or my shirt. So yeah, I'm pretty damn angry. I'm going to go back tomorrow to get it opened, and I'm gonna let somebody have it. I guess in meantime, I'll go play some more Gran Turismo 5: Prologue instead.

alternative

2008-04-26T14:56:00.000-07:00

I might have been too quick to judge, too swift to declare my allegiance to the V10. Because in this world of rising gas prices and global warming, it might be foolish to not at least consider buying an alternative fuel or hybrid vehicle. With that in mind, I submit, um, Plan B.

The Audi R8 TDI LeMans V12. It runs on diesel fuel and makes 500hp. According to Audi, the production version would be capable of reaching 200mph top speed, 0-60mph in less than 4 seconds, and it gets 25mpg. Dude, right now my Lexus IS350 doesn't even get 25mph. Sign me up!

gran(d)

2008-04-17T00:21:00.000-07:00

Today is a big day for racing sim fans and PS3 fans -- it's launch day for Gran Turismo: 5 Prologue.

It actually hit the PlayStation Network last night as a downloadable game but will also be available in stores for purchase on Blu-Ray media today. I've already placed my order on Amazon and took advantage of a $5 off online coupon but the downside is, I won't get the game until sometime next week most likely. Things at work will probably keep me busy over the weekend anyways but you can bet I will be eagerly awaiting the arrival of what undoubtedly is one of the most hotly anticipated and wildly popular PS3 games that will come out this year.

The other huge release of the year comes out April 29th but is a multi-platform game -- Grand Theft Auto IV. I'm definitely going to be picking that up at the end of this month, and then I may well disappear off the grid for a while as I explore and fight to conquer the virtual world of Liberty City.

Speaking of grids, GT5P may see some intense competition later this summer from game developer Codemasters -- from a game called GRID. Check out the preview trailer below from IGN. I will probably be picking this one up as well when it comes out, it should really give GT5P a run for the money:

These are exciting times... I mean, GT5P and GTA IV are the games that I essentially bought my PS3 for. At long last, they are here. Both games also feature new online multiplayer functionality that should give them tons of replay value long after I finish the single-player modes.

fracture

2008-04-16T20:20:00.001-07:00

Well the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I'm not really sure that applies 100% to the story I'm about to tell, but you can be the judge of that. I just couldn't think of anything more pithy to pair up with the tale on a moment's notice.

I've been told and have read somewhere (don't ask me for the source now) that eating almonds, especially raw and unsalted almonds, is good for your health. In fact it says right here on the can that eating them may reduce the risk of heart disease. So since I have mildly high blood pressure and am one of those "at risk", I thought it would be a nice healthy habit to pick up, plus I really like almonds anyways. It's just that I was used to eating roasted and salted ones, but raw almonds are not that far off in taste and texture so it's a relatively easy switch. So last weekend since we're on a health craze V. and I went to Trader Joe's and I picked up a big bag of raw almonds for me to snack on.

So I'm snacking away at work yesterday, munching on these healthy and heart-friendly almonds while my coworkers are scarfing down the Twix and Reeses Pieces in my candy jar. But late in the afternoon, something goes awry -- I find myself chomping down on something distinctly non-almondlike. Before you think of something horrific (animal part) or something really awesome (10-carat diamond), suffice to say that it was in fact, a fragment of my tooth. Apparently the corner of one of my molars had broken loose and presto, there it is on my desk. Fortunately, the aforementioned coworkers had since departed from my office, perhaps fearing that the look of consternation on my face was going to presage some new dreadful assignment I was about to lay down on them. But no, it was just a molar malfunction.

So I took the morning off today and went to see my dentist, who proclaimed "nice fracture!" and proceeded to saw the top of my tooth off after various needles and Novocaine were bandied about in front of my face. I'm sporting a temporary cap on the injured tooth and they made a casting from my teeth to make me a permanent cap that will be ready in two weeks. I was sorely tempted to inquire as to the price for a full platinum or gold grille but I had a hunch my insurance wasn't going to cover it. It could have been a pivotal point in my life, where my career as a hip-hop star would have taken off, but alas it seems it was not to be. So now I'm back in the office staring at this can of almonds and wondering what's next... am I going to cut the roof of my mouth trying to eat some of my multigrain flake cereal? Or choke on one of the vitamin pills I'm taking? Is there a moral to this story? I am not sure but I guess I'm going to be chewing more carefully for the next few weeks.

ten

2008-04-10T19:59:00.000-07:00

Sometimes amazing things happen based on a simple idea or concept. Take the number 10 for instance. It has amazing significance. We have 10 fingers and 10 toes, and therefore our whole system of counting is based on factors of 10. It has a 1 and an 0, the two basic elements of the binary code language that man-made machines speak. Everywhere you look around, the number 10 plays a huge role in our lives.

I should know. My birthday is on October 10, the 10th day of the 10th month of the year.

Ok, don't get too creeped out. I'm trying to get somewhere with this, and it's really quite simple. A thought that just occurred to me today. It's not that politically correct to say something like this, and certainly not the "green" way to live, but I feel it in my heart just the same. Here it is:

I WILL own a V10 someday.

OK, maybe it wasn't the ground-breaking bombshell discovery or revelation you were looking for. But it caused ripples of cause and effect which could have amazing consequences further down the road. Walk with me a little further.

In case it's not clear, what I mean is I intend to own a V10-powered car someday. Why? Because we have 10 fingers on our hands and 10 toes on our feet. Because being born on 10/10 gives me the right, nay, the obligation to fulfill my automotive manifest destiny. Is it the most eco-friendly thing to want or have, given our bleak future of depleted oil resources, expensive gas prices, and global warming? Most definitely not. But you cannot deny my logic. 10 is the number that must be dominant, 10 is the number of cylinders that must power the vehicle of my dreams and make my life complete.

So let's take a look at what we're talking about here. What cars are available with a V10 engine? Not too many, really. The now discontinued Porsche Carrera GT would have been a great candidate. The Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 is a serious contender. The Dodge Viper SRT-10 is another option. If I wanted to be practical I could even consider the BMW M5 Touring or the Audi RS6 Avant, which are German-speak for really really ridiculously fast station wagon. I have to admit, I may be doing myself a disservice by categorically excluding all the fine vehicles out there that are driven by a V8 motor, or a V12. But I must be true to my calling.

That's all well and good you say, but what is so ground-breaking about saying I want a V10? Nothing much, in and of itself. But when one realizes that these V10 machines are not cheap, but one still has the aspirations or dare I say, mandate! of owning one, then one has to get down to brass tacks and git 'er done, as the good ol' boys in the South would say. So it's time to get cracking on the revenue generation, bringing home the bacon, making the dough. That's the ripple -- it changes everything we do, in cause and effect.

You might have noticed a few subtle changes on this blog site. I've slyly added some advertising for Amazon in the sidebar, and a link at the bottom of the page where you can search and shop the whole Amazon site. If you're already shopping at Amazon to buy your favorite books, DVDs, music or other cool stuff, help me out and click through from here to make your purchases! Gift certificates also make great gifts! No additional cost to you, and it's a few pennies more to my V10 fund! I'll change the sidebar links from time to time to recommend some cool movies or books or whatever that I would recommend based on my own enjoyment of these items.

V is also on a newfound entrepreunerial charge, working to become a health and beauty consultant and teaming with Market America to sell products like vitamins, nutraceuticals and makeup. Her new business is called Princess Health and Beauty. If you're into that stuff then take a look at her new blog, and also her homepage linked in the sidebar.

Not to be outdone, I'm going to be playing mini-venture capitalist, throwing around some of my hard-earned bucks in various investments. I've taken a few risks and gambles by choosing to invest in what is viewed by many as a very shaky time economically but it may well pay off (literally I hope!). I've got some money in banking and commercial transaction institutions, some money in some aggressive mutual funds, and even some foreign investment funds. Wish me luck.

So today is 4/10/08. And in 6 months, it will be 10/10/08. Check back in to see how we're doing, maybe in 6 months we'll be coming up perfect 10s... and riding in style in a V10-powered car.

rumble

2008-04-04T18:21:00.000-07:00

A few years back Sony lost a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Immersion Corp. and in the end they had to pay some $150 million for the fact that they used vibration or "rumble" in their PlayStation and Playstation 2 controllers. Gamers everywhere were pretty skeptical when Sony announced that the PlayStation 3 was going to come out without rumble in their controllers. Instead they introduced the SIXAXIS controller that featured motion sensing instead and tried to spin all kinds of lame PR to suggest that gamers really didn't think that vibration was that important for gaming. Well au contraire, mon ami! How would you explain the fact that companies like Microsoft and Nintendo went ahead and licensed the technology from Immersion and incorporated the vibration feature into the controllers for their next-gen game consoles, the X360 and Wii? That was a pretty big load of b.s. as far as I'm concerned. Especially for the games that I like to play, driving simulators like Gran Turismo and first person or 3rd person action shooters, vibration is a big part of the game experience. It gives you tactile feedback when you hit an obstacle or get shot or something explodes near you. Once you've experienced it you don't want to play without it.

Sony finally came around and saw the light -- they signed a license deal with Immersion and in Asia they debuted the new DUALSHOCK 3 controller for PS3 sometime in November last year. No love for North America in 2007 though, the word was that sometime in Spring 2008 the U.S. gamers would get it. Some devoted U.S. gamers bought or ordered DS3s through companies that would import the DS3s from Asia.

My coworker was going on a trip to China, and he asked me what I wanted... you know where this is going. Two weeks later he's back from his trip and in my hands is the ultra-rare, made for the Chinese market, bona-fide DUALSHOCK 3. Pretty sweet, it actually doesn't weigh that much more than the SIXAXIS and has all the features of the SIXAXIS plus the vibration. And many of the popular games already support it. Rumble is back, baby!

And so I reveled in the glory that is mine, having one of the very few DS3s in the hands of a consumer in the U.S. ... until next week, it seems. There are reports that Sony is shipping DS3s all over the country to retailers and that they are about to break cover in the next week or so. Well, that's the thing about being on the cutting edge... it's thin and sometimes you fall right off. But at least I got mine for cheaper than everyone else will.

dominance

2008-02-15T20:19:00.000-08:00

I was not a super early adopter of HDTV but over the last few years of HDTV ownership I've definitely become a big fan and proponent of it. You just have to see the difference in picture quality between standard definition 480i resolution and the high definition resolutions of 720p, 1080i, or 1080p and it'll make you a believer too. Until the last year or so it was still a pretty hefty purchase, but nowadays you can get your feet wet in the HDTV world for less than $1000. I've become a bit of a resolution and picture quality snob ever since I switched to HDTV -- I rarely watch any television programs unless it's available in HD, with maybe Formula 1 racing on Speed TV being the main exception. (It still boggles the mind that NASCAR is available in HD but the world's premier racing series is not.)

Cable or over-the-air HDTV was just the beginning, though. Of course true movie and gaming buffs would want to take full advantage of the high definition resolutions, and sure enough the consumer electronics industry brought the digital goodness to market. The problem was, there was disagreement between the major manufacturers on what high-definition format should be the one to replace the 480i DVD. And so two formats came to the stores to wage battle for the hearts and pocketbooks of the people: Toshiba brought HD-DVD, and Sony had Blu-Ray. In terms of gaming, Microsoft's XBOX360 offered HD-DVD capability as an add-on, and Sony's PlayStation3 came with Blu-Ray playback right out of the box. Well in retrospect, it certainly looks like Sony made the right choice to include that functionality as standard, because it meant that for every gamer who bought a PS3 they also got a Blu-Ray player which leads logically to more Blu-Ray sales. HD-DVD (and the X360) came to market first and took the initial lead, but now, some 2 years later, it appears inevitable that Blu-ray is the outright winner of this battle.

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray were neck-and-neck in the race in 2007 with roughly equal numbers of movie studios supporting each format, and many studios committed to supporting both. But the tide suddenly turned earlier this year, when in January the Warner Bros. studio announced it was dropping HD-DVD in favor of Blu-Ray. Last week two more bombshells rocked the HD-DVD camp, when Best Buy announced that they would promote Blu-Ray as their format of choice (although they would still sell HD-DVD players) and Netflix decided to drop HD-DVD and offer Blu-Ray discs exclusively as the preferred high-def format of choice. Both organizations cited the apparent preferences of their customers and the need to eliminate confusion amongst new HDTV buyers as reasons for taking Blu-Ray's side. The names backing Blu-Ray at this point are impressive: Warner, Sony, Fox, Lionsgate, Disney/Pixar, Blockbuster, Netflix, Best Buy, Samsung.

And now, this really has to be the final nail in the coffin for HD-DVD -- national retail giant Wal-Mart has announced they are backing Blu-Ray as well. I think it's game over for Toshiba's HD-DVD at this point. There are already rumors that Toshiba will officially declare the format dead soon.

As a PS3 owner, I'm glad I backed the winning side. Now, I'm waiting to see if Universal and Paramount will finally change their minds and release films like Transformers on Blu-Ray!

From MSN: Wal-Mart dumps HD-DVD in favor of Blu-Ray

challenger

2008-02-13T15:31:00.000-08:00

If you follow automotive news and new car designs like I do, then you know that it's really a great time to be a muscle car or pony car fan right now -- it's like a rebirth of the classic American iron block era. Vintage muscle cars are fetching some amazing prices at the auto collector auction houses, and American auto manufacturers have taken notice and quickly moved to introduce new but highly-retro designs. Credit has to go to Ford, who with their 1960s-era inspired 5th generation Mustang redesign in 2005 launched a movement they refer to as "retro-futurism." Classic car style but with modern technology, safety, and reliability. Chevy soon followed suit in a move that echoes the pony car wars of the '60s and '70s, developing their Camaro concept in 2006. But despite appearing in the Transformers movie and showing up at various auto shows in different guises, it has yet to enter production. Chrysler/Dodge came to the party with the Charger, resurrecting an old muscle-car name and some styling cues from the classic car, but ultimately bringing to market a kind of frumpy looking car. Don't get me wrong, it looked positively badass as an evil police cruiser/Decepticon in Transformers, but it's not the kind of car that resonates with me.

Well maybe lots of other car guys and the product design teams at Dodge agreed with me, because they went back to the drawing board, and the old muscle car archives, and came back with the new Challenger which was recently unveiled at this year's Chicago Auto Show. And this time, I feel they really got it right. For their performance SRT8 model, which is the only trim the Charger is available in at launch, they even eschewed the homely Dodge "crosshairs" grille that adorns the rest of the Dodge family right now, including the Charger and the Ram line of trucks. The styling harkens straight back to 1970.

Maybe it's because I spent way too many hours as a kid watching The Dukes of Hazzard on TV, but the sight of that bright orange show car just spoke to me. Die hard Dukes fans will point out that the Duke boys drove a Charger, not a Challenger, but apparently I'm not the only one who would dismiss that discrepancy -- right there on the Dodge site you'll see plenty of photos of this gorgeous car in bright orange, and there's even a few shots of the car flying high in an obvious throwback to the ridiculous jumps and stunts of the '70s and '80s TV shows that we so loved.

In the early '90s my family soured on all American cars as a result of some bad experiences with a Chrysler New Yorker we had. "Never buy an American car again", was the sentiment we all seemed to share. Well there was a time that I didn't think I would ever even consider it, but the Challenger just might be the American car to um, challenge and overcome that prejudice for me. I'll take mine in black, please!

rats

2008-02-11T20:10:00.000-08:00

First of all I have to say Gong Hay Fat Choy, that is, Happy Chinese New Year to everyone! It is now the Year of the Rat, which doesn't sound very glorious but rest assured it is a very good time in the Chinese Zodiac calendar.

Speaking of rats, there was a recent study conducted that shows that drinking diet sodas with artificial sweeteners may not help you lose weight; in fact, according to the study you may actually gain weight by drinking one or more diet sodas a day. Diet soda proponents will of course argue that it's still better than drinking a full-on sugar-laden soda instead, but watch this video and give it some thought -- the possible theory for the weight gain in rats (and I guess it somehow correlates to humans) who drank diet sodas is that somehow your mind thinks you're drinking something sweet but you don't actually get the sugar so your body adjusts in a way that leads to weight gain. Well to be fair all this study really means is that if you're a rat (and most of us reading this probably aren't), then the artificial sweetener may mess with your body and mind in ways you might not have expected. The one tidbit of truth that you can take away from all this? You should drink less soda, whether diet or not, and drink more water.

chocoholics

2008-02-05T00:06:00.000-08:00

I got a new cell phone this weekend -- the LG Chocolate in Blue Mint. Very slick, and a major improvement over my previous phone which got lousy reception -- I may never buy a Samsung product again. The guy at Circuit City/Verizon was very nice and combined a few offers together so I was able to get the phone for the low low price of $FREE.99! But wait, there's more... he also threw in an BOGO offer, so we got a second Chocolate in Black Cherry for V. and we only had to pay the sales tax on it. So now we have matching his and her's phones, very dorky! Guess you could think of it as an early Valentine's Day gift.

The Chocolate is a slider not a flip phone, but its simplistic design calls to mind the beloved Motorola StarTAC that I gave up for the Samsung. It also doesn't hurt that this new phone is probably 70% thinner than my old phone, and maybe 50% smaller than V's feature-laden but brick-sized LG VX9800. Yes, the Chocolate does has a camera and MP3 music player incorporated into that slim little case but they haven't missed the mark on the most important aspect of a phone -- namely, to be able to make clear phone calls and maintain a good signal. Well let's not unconditionally praise the new phones just yet -- we'll have to play around with them for a bit and see if they live up to their initial positive impressions in the long-term.

bratty

2008-01-28T14:19:00.001-08:00

Happy Birthday to my sweet-cheeked honey V! Today she turns ... um.... sweet 16. Yup. Here is her latest portrait, courtesy of her Nintendo Wii and her new TV. I'd say it's pretty accurate, even down to her new haircut.

We celebrated last night by going out to Ray's Sushi in Hayward and attacking a record amount of sushi, sashimi, and some fried tempura green tea ice cream. Ok, now back to our regularly scheduled starvation and fasting. I am so close to my goal of losing 10 lbs. in January ... 3 lbs to go.

technologic

2008-01-20T22:14:00.000-08:00

In my last post I mentioned acquiring some new gadgetry -- in our modern life of conspicuous consumption, we just can't get through another year without picking up some new electronic gizmos. Well I certainly can't seem to do so, at least.

The biggest new toy is truly a sight to behold -- it's 40" of 1080p goodness. While I was living large downstairs with my 50" Panasonic HDTV, my poor little V. had to make do upstairs with a sturdy but somewhat diminutive 20" Sony Trinitron. Well I just had to do something about that. So as an early birthday gift I found a pretty good deal online and had the TV delivered, set up and ready to go all while she was still sleeping one Saturday morning. It's a Sony Bravia KDL40V2500 LCD flat panel and it looks mighty nice -- and actually it looks pretty darn big in the smaller living room. Needless to say V. was quite impressed and very happy with her new TV.

During the holiday season I also picked up a little toy for myself too. My home theater setup was distinctly lacking in the bass department, due to my old unpowered subwoofer not being compatible with the new Denon receiver. Not to worry, the old receiver and subwoofer continue to see use up in the bedroom. I had some gift cards for Best Buy left from my birthday presents, so after several trips to listen and consider, I finally decided on the Klipsch Synergy SUB-10. It's actually a pretty big enclosure -- about the size of one of our ottomans. And when I plugged it in and fired it up, the difference was, to use an old cliche, like night and day. Even watching ordinary commercials on TV revealed all kinds of fantastic bass notes and beats that you would never hear if you just rely on the measly speakers that come with most TV sets. And when I watch some of my favorite action movies, the ground shakes and you can really feel the rumble. I watched Ratatouille for the first time after I got the sub set up, and at one point when a lightning strike fries our hero Remy, I nearly jumped out of my sofa. Good times!

I also got a pair of very nice Acoustic Research 308HO speakers from my dad that he didn't want -- he's convinced his vintage pair of Dynaco's and a set of Polk Audio surrounds are better. His setup is mostly for music though, so I gladly took the ARs off his hands and I have to say they sound pretty good ... though probably anything would sound better than the tiny surrounds that came with my old Koss receiver. They're pretty big speakers but they really need to be raised up on stands to sound their best. So I guess the next thing to shop for is some new speaker stands. Boy, this home theater hobby is getting expensive, even with the recycled hardware and the hand-me-downs.

Is there no end to this techno-odyssey? Well there's just one more gizmo to mention. My honey V. had wanted a Nintendo Wii for Christmas, but somehow Santa got his lists all crossed up and put her on the 'naughty' list. So all she got was a lump of coal in her stocking on the 25th. Being the smooth talker that I am, I appealed on her behalf and got her vindicated, so she got her Christmas gift a little late. Right now all we have is the Wii Sports game that comes with the system, but it's a lot of fun -- I'm getting a sore arm from the frenetic swinging and pitching in the baseball game.

Well that's it for now... too much fun without ever leaving the house. But seeing as I have tomorrow off from work for the MLK Jr. holiday, I just might go out for a drive if the weather's nice.

hotness

2008-01-16T21:41:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year everyone! I've been relatively busy at work and there's lots of new gadgety goodness for me to talk about, but right now I wanted to focus on some new automotive hotness coming out of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, where many of the world's carmakers show off their new models and concepts.

The first car that caught my eye was the ultra-sleek and very green Fisker Karma, which is a premium luxury hybrid sports sedan. If you've never heard of Fisker before, it's because they're a fairly small coachbuilder which is a fancy way of saying they take other manufacturer's cars like the BMW 6-series or the Mercedes SL-class and completely restyle them, with new bodies and new interiors but the same mechanical underpinnings. But this is a bold new step for them, partnering with a high tech company to develop this all-new hybrid design. The car has an electric motor that can run in "Stealth Drive" mode, or lay some smack down when paired up with a 4-cylinder engine for more oomph. Me likey! And it will arrive on our roadways in late 2009 at a price of $80,000, which doesn't really sound too bad when you consider the very compact and all-electric 2-seater Tesla Roadster will go on sale for around $100,000. And with the limited production of the Karma, you will be sure to have a very unique ride -- after all isn't exclusivity a big part of the idea of premium luxury?

Fisker Karma website

Fisker's Karma Hybrid unveiled at Detroit show

Autoblog's Final Wrap-Up of the Detroit Auto Show

aplomb

2007-12-30T20:57:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone had a great holiday, and got some quality time with the family, loved ones, and friends. I had a good time hanging out with family and of course it's almost 100% predictable -- ate a ton of good food, thereby ensuring that I remain "festively plump". At my father-in-law's house we had a massive helping of roasted prime rib plus some crab -- it was with some amazement that I survived the night without a massive coronary. I also went up to my dad's place to visit and we had some ribeye steak with a bottle of Cab. Good times.

At my dad's place one of the spots I always gravitate to is his big 55-gallon aquarium populated with a lively school of goldfish. I remember helping him take care of the various fish we had and cleaning the tank when I was younger. After all this time he still has it, and he has taken good care of it through the years. The fish he's got in there now are nothing fancy, just some cheap feeder fish that he bought a year or two ago, but they have grown big and provide endless entertainment to those easily amused (I count myself among them). One of the fish in his tank has a special place in my heart though, because he is "special". Fans of the Disney Pixar film Finding Nemo will recall that little Nemo has a "lucky fin". Well this fish has it even worse, because he's completely missing his tail fin. The poor little guy has to work twice as hard as the other fish to swim around and fight for his share of the food. But he seems to do it quite well with a certain sense of aplomb that earns my admiration.

Here's a short video I took of him for you to see the everyday hero in action.

Awww... don't it just melt your heart? Happy Holidays to everyone!

framework

2007-12-20T13:28:00.000-08:00

What would you do with two weeks off from work if you didn't have anywhere to go? My plans to either visit my bro in San Diego or take a roadtrip to Las Vegas have fallen through, so I'm just hanging out in the Bay Area. Truth be told, it's been 4 days off so far and I haven't even left Fremont. I've hardly left the house. I made a run to Blockbuster and picked up some new movies to watch. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End on Blu-Ray, and Transformers (sadly, not available on Blu-Ray). Other recent Blu-Ray viewings include Live Free or Die Hard and Layer Cake. And I just bought The Departed and Happy Feet in a buy 1 get one free deal from Amazon.com.

Lest you think I'm a complete couch potato (though that isn't too far from the truth), I've also been decorating around the house. Too many blank walls to stare at, something needed to be done. But no overpriced or boring store-bought art for me. I rounded up my best digital photos that I've taken over the years and sent them to print at Ritz Photo -- enlargements and prints are available for me to pickup at the local store in an hour. Then a few trips to Aaron Brothers for some picture frames. They've got a sweet 40% off coupon you can print from their website. After spending about $50 in prints and about $100 in frames, and some fun with laser levels and an electric stud finder, I have some very cool looking art hanging on the walls -- and I know I won't see it anywhere else because they're truly unique. To fully appreciate them, you'll just have to drop by and see them in person.

caribbean

2007-12-19T20:21:00.000-08:00

Wow, how the time flies--it's already December and our trip to Miami and the Caribbean was two months ago. Things have been busy at work but now with the holidays approaching things have settled down some, and I'm on two weeks vacation. Time to wrap up the writeup of that previous trip, eh?

So after a week in swanky Miami we headed to the port and boarded the Liberty of the Seas, Royal Caribbean's newest cruise ship.
For the moment it holds the honor of being the largest cruise ship in the world, along with its sister ship Freedom of the Seas. The Liberty has everything you'd wish for on a cruise ship: a shopping mall promenade, nightclubs, a casino, a skating rink, even a surfing pool. And multiple restaurants to dine at including a Johnny Rockets. But we spent most of our time in the breakfast and lunch buffet, and typically had dinner in the luxurious main dining room.

Our first port of call was San Juan, Puerto Rico. Old San Juan is just that--an old quaint colonial town with cobble-stone streets and plenty of shops to check out. Our time in San Juan was brief; we only had a few hours to walk around before sunset. But we did get to have dinner at the restaurant that was the birthplace of the Pina Colada.

Then it was a few more days at sea to reach our next destination, the island of St. Martin. St. Martin is a 21-square mile island shared by the Dutch and the French. The ship docked at Philipsburg on the Dutch side, but we signed up for an Excursion that took us across the island to Marigot on the French side for some shopping, and then had lunch and a few hours of beach time at Orient Beach, which was one of the nicest beaches I've ever been to. The sand was fine and soft under my feet, and the water was many incredible shades of blue. The only thing that put a damper on things was losing my sunglasses when I got pounded by a rogue wave.

A few more days at sea gave us ample time to explore the many things the ship had to offer. Eventually I had to succumb to temptation and try my hand at roulette in the Casino Royale. My strategy is to stick to mostly even bets like red and black, or occasionally doing one of the 1/3 bets. It seemed to work well for me, after a few hours I walked away with about $300 and my ego intact.

Last port of call on our Caribbean cruise was Labadee, a beach resort area on the island of Haiti. Note the welcome sign that seems clearly inspired by the recent success of the Pirates of the Caribbean films--that Labadee Luc guy sure looks a lot like Capt. Jack Sparrow. I'm not too convinced that Haiti is politically stable enough to be a recommended vacation spot, but Labadee is a resort in a remote region privately owned by the Royal Caribbean cruise line. Not much in the way of things to see or do beyond the beach, but that suited me just fine. A floating beach mat, some sunscreen, and I am set.

After that it was time to head back to Miami. A couple more days and nights at sea, which gave us ample opportunity to hit the buffet and order extra deserts after dinner. Oh man, a cruise is really not a good way to lose weight. Sure, they have healthy options on the menu, and a full gym and fitness center, but who's going to stick that regimen while on vacation? Someone with more willpower and commitment to fitness than me, that's for sure. I wish I could say I have come back home and diligently hit the elliptical machine every day, but that would be a big fat lie. As we head into the Christmas holiday the heavy and hearty meals just won't end, but at least I'm going to try to make some use of the elliptical every so often, if only to avoid a massive coronary at the dinner table when my father-in-law serves prime rib next week. I'm definitely planning to have seconds!

excellence

2007-11-24T12:24:00.000-08:00

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving -- I certainly did (burp). I like turkey and every once in a while will have a turkey sandwich or something like that, but really it's this one time of the year that you really go all out and gorge yourself with plate after plate of the big bird. My father-in-law roasted a nice big turkey this year and there was plenty to go around, not to mention plenty to fill my refrigerator with afterwards.

Yesterday was Black Friday, the "first official day of the holiday shopping season" and as always the sales and doorbuster deals were the talk of the town... the news couldn't stop talking about it. I decided that I wasn't going to wait in line outside any stores this year, for a couple of reasons. The biggest one was that it was pretty dang cold outside at night, probably dropped below 50 degrees. And even on our way home from Thanksgiving dinner, we could see lines forming in front of places like Best Buy and Circuit City. I was thinking, if I was gonna try and get some good deals I wouldn't stay up all night waiting in line out front of one of these popular places. I'd just show up at a less popular place like Home Depot, where I could probably just show up maybe 15 minutes before opening and be like bam! when the doors opened I'd be among the first to get a really good deal on a riding tractor lawnmower, or some power tools. Maybe even score a free garden hose or something. I sure didn't see any news coverage from the local channels showing lines wrapped around the local Home Depot, so maybe that's the plan next year.

So instead I stayed home all day and didn't go out. Don't get me wrong, I don't boycott Black Friday. I just did all my shopping online. Well actually I just browsed online since I didn't actually buy anything. But I was pretty fervently combing the Best Buy and Amazon websites for deals though. Mostly trying to decide what Blu-Ray movies I should buy. I've been renting a lot of movies on Blockbuster and their selection of Blu-Ray movies is pretty good. So I'm setting a pretty high bar for movies that I would actually want to own. Quite simply, it has to be a movie or film that clearly demonstrates the awesomeness of the HD picture and audio. So far the only Blu-Ray films in my collection that really do that is the Planet Earth series from BBC, now available from Discovery Channel Store. This series is phenomenal, and I totally recommend it. But the visuals from PE far outshine the audio on this series, so I am in search of something that hits a home run on both counts.

I've found this site to be pretty helpful in evaluating what Blu-Rays are going to be contenders -- High Def Digest. Their reviews of Blu-Ray discs rates the movie itself, the video quality, and audio quality separately and you can sort the reviews based on these ratings. Not too many movies get the overall grade of five stars, but I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that one of them is Pixar's Ratatouille, which of course is completely digitally sourced. So I'll probably be adding that to my collection soon.

miami 2

2007-10-29T21:12:00.000-07:00

Time to pick up where I left off with our trip to Miami. After two nights at the very stylish and luxurious Mandarin Oriental, we headed to South Beach to stay at the Angler's Resort, a newly restored Art Deco style boutique resort located in the heart of South Beach and only 2 blocks away from the beach. The location was ideal as our base of operations as we set out to explore all that South Beach has to offer: swanky nightclubs and bars, colorful art galleries, fine dining. Not to mention a jaw-dropping combination of fabulous beaches and beautiful people -- people watching is a major pastime in this town. There are scores of cafes along Ocean Ave where you can just sit for hours and watch the playas and hotties pass by, whether on foot or rolling in a Maserati.

I'd be lying if I said we didn't eat well in South Beach. We went to some pretty fantastic spots and ate some pretty expensive food. I'll just try to hit some of the highlights. The Blue Door in the Delano Hotel was very cool; it's a sophisticated and classy place owned by Madonna. I had the Kobe Beef Sliders with White Truffle Fries, and V. had the Cobb Salad. The food was so good, we went back there at the end of our trip and ordered the same meal again.

We also made reservations at Prime 112, one of the popular steakhouses in South Beach. V. had a large glass of ceviche and grilled sea bass, while I had a belly-busting 22-oz. ribeye steak and some massive stalks of asparagus. I swear the asparagus in Florida is HUGE. One thing's for sure though, fabulous eats don't come cheap -- even the sauces for the steak came separately at $2 - $5 each. But I guess you don't order a $48 steak and then skimp on the sauce, do you? No way man, I'm all in!

But perhaps the real highlight of our dining experiences in Miami had to be our visit to Joe's Stonecrabs. Joe's is one of the oldest restaurants in South Beach, and all the locals will say, you gotta try the stone crabs at Joe's. And so we did, and oh was it good. So sweet, so tender. V. also ordered a seafood cioppino that she couldn't stop talking about. And we topped it all off with some tasty Key Lime Pie that just hit the spot.

Good times, good grub. After two days in South Beach it was time to pack our bags and head for the Port of Miami to rendevous with the largest cruise ship in the world, the Liberty of the Seas. Stay tuned for the next installment, where we set sail for the Eastern Caribbean!

disconsolate

2007-10-24T12:16:00.000-07:00

I am saddened by the passing of my dear friend and faithful fish Spencer. He was not doing well when we returned from our trip and continued to decline. I came home last night and he swam up to greet me for the last time but didn't seem to be eating at all. A few hours later he was belly up at the bottom of the bowl. I said farewell to him this morning and hope he is in a happy place. I miss you little guy and the house already seems a little emptier without you.

miami

2007-10-21T22:48:00.000-07:00

Did you miss me? I've just returned from our two-week vacation to Miami and the Eastern Caribbean. We flew back into SFO last night and boy are my arms tired! (drumroll) It really was a long flight and I thought it would never end, but now I am glad to be back home. We of course took lots of pics and some of them even look ok. So in this installment I'll sum up our first week in Miami.

The first two days in Miami were spent in the northern area of Sunny Isles, and we stayed at the Trump International Sonesta Beach Resort. Yep, owned by Donald Trump. I had to resist a strong urge to walk up to random staff and give them my best "You're fired!". Our first dinner in Miami was at the Noemi's Grill within the resort but it wasn't anything special, just a quiet dinner. We did get a nice suite upgrade to our room because V. told them it was our honeymoon, that usually gets us some nice perks. Our room was way up on the 25th floor and had a great view of the ocean and beach but it was pretty scary looking straight down.

There isn't really much going on in Sunny Isles but they have their own nicely groomed patch of beach and first class service from the pool and beach staff. I managed to botch the sunscreen application and got sunburned the first day on the beach. Nice going. We spent some time shopping at Aventura and Bal Harbor to pass the time. It was remarkable how hot and humid it was, I couldn't spend more than a few minutes outside without breaking into a sweat. But maybe that's just an indication of how out of shape I am. We did discover one gem of a restaurant near Bal Harbor, an Italian restaurant called Cafe Ragazzi. V. raved about the paella she had, and I was content with a glass of Peroni and a plate of spaghetti.

On day 3 we said so long to Trump's resort and moved to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Downtown Miami. The MOH is actually on its own little island called Key Brickell, situated in Biscayne Bay between Downtown and South Beach. Once again, our "honeymoon" gambit scored us a nice room overlooking the water and Downtown. On the suggestion of some coworkers we decided we would drive down to the Floria Keys to enjoy some seafood and take in the sights, so we asked the concierge to book us a rental car. I decided to splurge a little since my birthday was coming up so we rented a Cadillac SRX which was pretty pimp, not as gangsta as the Escalade but very comfy and entertaining to drive.

Our initial plan was to drive only midway through the Keys, have dinner somewhere and turn back, but our early progress was encouraging and I suggested that we make the drive all the way down to Key West -- the southernmost part of the United States. Might as well, right? A quick stop for lunch at a Wendy's of all places, and then it was a race to beat the clock -- trying to make it to Key West in time to see the sunset from its world-famous vista point. We made it, and I have the photos and souvenirs to prove it. After a fantastic sunset we had dinner at the A&B Lobster House and the requisite Key Lime Pie.

Then V. took the wheel of the Caddy for the long, dark drive back up to Miami. We thought we'd never make it but we did get back to the hotel around 1AM. Dead tired and ready to collapse into bed, we came back to our room and found the staff had decorated our honeymoon suite and bed with rose petals. Very nice!

The following day was my birthday, and we spent it at the Mandarin Oriental as a lazy day. We had lunch at the hotel's Cafe Sambal which served Asian fusion which of course V. enjoyed. We passed the afternoon just hanging around the pool, and got dandied up for dinner at Azul, the hotel's premier dinner spot. But first we hit up the M-Bar, which featured several hundred different martinis. Since we were at the Mandarin I ordered the Absolute Mandarin Martini, and V. had a Lychee Martini. Dinner at Azul was pretty nice, V. had a massive chilled seafood platter and I had some great clam chowder and a study in lamb.

After dinner I tried my hand at taking some night shots with my mini tripod. They didn't come out too well but this one looks ok in an impressionist sort of way.

Well that only covers the first 4 days, and I haven't even gotten to South Beach! I will have to cover that in the next installment.

upscale

2007-10-04T18:36:00.000-07:00

Loyal readers may recall the saga involving my Koss home theater system. So I finally got tired of dealing with the finicky stereo unit and ordered a new Denon receiver. But as luck would have it, the launch date got pushed back by a few months (it was supposed to be available as of August 2007). But the wait is now over, my long-anticipated Denon AVR-2808 came in yesterday. Woot!

I of course spent a good chunk of the late evening and early morning setting it up and plugging stuff into it, which involved a fair amount of crawling behind the TV and the use of my super handy LED flashlight. Fortunately I had a few spare HDMI and optical cables ready to go, purchased from MonoPrice.com a few months ago in preparation for this glorious day. Thanks to the 2808's HDMI switching and scaling functions I was able to reduce the number of cables running around behind the TV. Now my cable box and my Playstations (2 and 3) can go to the receiver and from there one HDMI cable to the TV.

So the old Koss HTiB is out and the Denon is in, but the old Koss speakers are still in place. These are some pretty small 4 ohm speakers and I'm now convinced they're not going to cut it. In fact my very first impression after I powered up the system is that I need better speakers. I found that I had to crank the master volume pretty far up in order to get any decent sound from the speakers. The system is really designed for 6-8 ohm speakers. But the worst part is, the unpowered subwoofer that I have from the Koss system is not compatible with the 2808. It's set up for a self-powered subwoofer, so it only has a pre-amp output. So for the moment I have very little bass response, and my next upgrade is probably going to be a new powered subwoofer. But maybe a whole new set of speakers soon after that. Oh yeah, just what I needed, another expensive hobby. Stay tuned as I continue to pimp my home theater.

chronological

2007-10-02T19:45:00.000-07:00

V. threw me a surprise birthday party over the weekend, a little early due to our Miami trip coming up. It was nice to see friends and family but I was a little shocked to see so many little kids running around the house. I'm sure V. had to practice unprecedented levels of self-control, as the place was practically a zoo for a while there. The birthday cake theme was -- predictably -- Cars! Ka-chow!

As an early birthday gift V. surprised me with a new watch. It's a Tag Heuer Carrera Automatic Chronograph Tachymetre which is quite the mouthful. Basically the wristwatch equivalent of a Subaru Impreza WRX STI, or a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX MR -- the more words the better, you get the picture. Pretty sweet.

I also got a boatload of gift cards for Best Buy and some spending cash. I'm very tempted to go out and buy a X360 and Halo3 right now. But I'll probably refrain and think about it some more during my 2 week vacation in Miami and the Carribbean. I've already made a few other purchases lately, a NordicTrack elliptical workout machine and a Logitech GT Driving Force Pro steering wheel for the PS3. Maybe by the time I come back my new Denon receiver will have arrived and I can start thinking about speakers or other home theater upgrades.

If it seems like I have been doing a lot of conspicuous consuming lately, it's probably because I'm trying to forget how old I'm getting.

meatballs

2007-09-28T17:06:00.000-07:00

Some of the work I do involves techy topics like open source and music players and DRM, so I sometimes come across some entertaining or interesting stuff. I started to read this but didn't finish, but want to go back to it at some point and read the rest. Pretty funny in some parts, especially the part where he says:

Sony is the oafish guy at the party who is parked in front of the meatballs tray eating directly from the dish.

mmm, meatballs sounds good right now.
http://wilshipley.com/blog/2007/09/iphone-ipod-contain-or-disengage.html

trinity

2007-09-26T16:24:00.000-07:00

Wow, another year goes by and it's time to celebrate the third anniversary of our wedding. Where's that coupon for Black Angus that came in the mail? :D
Just kidding. This year V. and I are going to be enjoying a quiet dinner at home since it's a weekday. We've got dinners and lunches with the family this coming weekend and we have our much-anticipated vacation trip to Miami and the Caribbean coming up in 2 weeks (more on that soon) so we'll no doubt have plenty of nights out on the town.

Happy Anniversary Honey! Where's my gift this year?

impact

2007-09-16T15:06:00.000-07:00

Colin McRae dies in helicopter crash

Colin's 2006 crowd-pleaser

Motorsports is an inherently dangerous activity, but it's always sad when a racer loses their life participating in that sport. It's somewhat ironic, however, when a racer meets their fate off the racetrack. Former World Rally Champion, and highly successful racer Colin McRae apparently crashed his helicopter not far from his home. Making it even more tragic is that his 5-year old son Johnny and 2 other passengers were also aboard and were also killed. No doubt a good portion of the motorsports community is saddened and affected by this loss, and my thoughts go out to McRae's family.

Colin's most memorable recent high-profile appearance was in the X-Games rally event. In the 2006 event he wowed the stadium crowd with an amazing flip and roll 2nd place finish that made news all over the world and pumped up viewer interest in the sport of rallying like no one else could. RIP, Colin.

See Colin's full run at the 2006 X-Games on YouTube

catapult

2007-08-14T19:48:00.000-07:00

If you're at all into cars you no doubt recall the 2001 movie The Fast and the Furious, perhaps better known for catapulting Vin Diesel's popularity as an actor than for its technical accuracy. Hey, it's Hollywood, so we can overlook a few glaring inaccuracies as long as there's flashy eye candy and some cool stunts. But one thing that they keep bringing up in the movie, is the idea of a "ten-second car", a car with the ability to run the quarter-mile from a standing start in ten seconds or less. Well in the real world, such a car is pretty damn rare, and almost never an actual car that you would be able to drive on the street. We're talking specially prepared race cars, made of flimsy ultralight materials that would probably never even make it out of your driveway without scraping a piece of bodywork off, let alone something you'd consider driving to the grocery store.

But if you were indeed looking for such a ten-second car, and you were hoping to drive it down to the local Quick-Mart so you could impress the gaggle of 14-year old boys who hang out there, look no further. Witness the SSC Ultimate Aero TT, a 1183-horsepower car that rips the 0-60 run in 2.8 seconds and goes on to tag the quarter-mile in 9.9 seconds. And no, you don't even have to drop the $1.2M in coin that you had saved away for the Bugatti Veyron, which by the way takes 10.8 seconds to complete the quarter-mile. Oh, no, you can be the real-world Dom Toretto for $550,000.

I personally don't feel the need to travel the 1320 feet in ten seconds. If I'm looking for a stylish way to impress the 14-year olds, I would actually save about $450,000 and get a Porsche Cayman S Design Edition 1 instead. It's black, it's sexy, and it comes with a matching briefcase, watch and pocket knife. Sign me up.

Ok, for those of you who, like me, don't have the dough for a ten-second car yet, try the ten-second burger challenge instead. "I live my life one Quarter-Pounder(TM) at a time ... for those ten seconds or less, I'm free." - Ronald McDonald.

jukebox

2007-08-04T00:10:00.001-07:00

I was spending some time on Yahoo! Music Videos, and came away from it pretty impressed at the great collection of music videos that you can pull up on there. Especially the availability of some of the older ones, some which I haven't seen in years. So I decided to make a list of some of my favorite music videos.

Michael Jackson, Beat It. This is probably on everyone's favorite video list. Well it should be. Only MJ has the massive pop appeal that can separate two rival gangs in a knife fight and make them break out in synchronized dance routines.

Kool & The Gang, Fresh. Wow this one is ancient, you can really tell it comes from the early days of music videos before a lot of money went into the production. But I loved the song, and was glad to find the video for it on here.

Sade, Smooth Operator. An oldie but goodie. Not really much of a plot but I really enjoyed the jazz club ambiance and Sade is still the bomb after all these years.

Wham!, Careless Whisper. Another old one, I remember watching this video over and over again on MTV. It was #1 for weeks on end. Classic love story about trust, betrayal, and regret. Where the heck is George Michael going in that big circular building at the end? Is he going to jump off? Or just mope around and look sad for a few more hours?

R.Kelly, Down Low. One of the finest R&B videos ever made if you ask me. Epic story line with gangster underpinnings, a hottie temptress who leads our man R. down the wrong path to betray his boss (none other than old-school R&B legend Ron Isley), and a heart-breaking tragic finale.

Maroon 5, She Will Be Loved. When this came out, I thought, wow, what a great story. A confused man torn between the girlfriend his own age, or the tragically neglected hottie mother. For some reason the part where Adam Levine sits in the old American car wearing the 70's era shades really speaks to me.

Kanye West, All Falls Down. I really enjoyed this video, I thought it was a neat concept, almost all of it from Kanye's point-of-view. When he climbs into the x-ray machine and rolls through I just bust out laughing.

Chemical Brothers, Get Yourself High. Oh man, this is one of the best videos ever. I couldn't stop watching this one and the tune was stuck in my head for days. Not to mention the kung-fu DJ FX are hilarious. When the guy busts out the big boombox under his shirt it's like, whoa! It doesn't get any better than this.

fodder

2007-07-29T14:59:00.000-07:00

I had to take my Lexus IS350 back to the dealership for some more repairs covered under the warranty, and as it would take several days for them to finish the work they gave me another loaner. This time it's an RX350, their smaller SUV. It's pretty nice but not really my kind of ride, the high stance of the car makes me think the thing is going to tip over when I make a turn. The vertically challenged Miss V. seems to enjoy it however -- I know short people like to feel tall sometimes. I have the car until Monday night but I can't wait to get my IS back.

That's not really very blog-worthy in and of itself, so let's switch gears for a moment and talk about food. I love food, and it shows, har har. But sometimes food is more than just nourishment, sometimes it's entertainment! Here are various food photos I took with my phone camera.

I don't know what all the fuss was about when the movie and book for Jurassic Park came out, Asians have been growing dinosaur eggs for a long time now. And I'm not talking about the thousand-year-old eggs either, you can get them fresh.

I had one of these brownies while I was at trial. I don't know what's in them but all of sudden I felt a lot better. :)

Yeah! Let's get Crunky! Rapper Lil' Jon and his homies must like this candy bar.

apparatus

2007-07-18T21:08:00.001-07:00

We've got a new gadget to play with -- an HP laptop with 17" screen. I bought it through the HP store online, as I get a discount there. The relevant specs:
- Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz/4MB L2Cache)
- 17.0" WXGA+ Ultra BrightView Widescreen (1440x900)
- 2GB DDR2 System Memory (2 Dimm)
- 511MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS
- Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 4965AGN Network Connection
- 200GB 7200RPM SATA Dual Hard Drive (100GB x 2) running Windows Vista Home Premium.

It's pretty slick but I am still getting used to the new features that come with Vista. All in all though it's pretty similar to Windows XP with some enhancements.

It took me a few hours to get it set up and to uninstall some lame trial software that comes on it, and generally get it configured the way we like it. Still need to install some other applications but we're connected and got the basics running. Hooray for Firefox, woo woo! Stay tuned cuz with this much computer processing firepower we can probably create some pretty cool stuff -- I will probably use it do some video editing and multimedia stuff.

I feel kind of sorry for my old desktop PC which is starting to show its age and pales in comparison to the newcomer. Still it's no slouch, it's a P4 1.7GHz running WinXP. I am thinking of picking up a KVM switch from monoprice.com and being able to switch between the two PCs with one keyboard/monitor/mouse. And it can still serve as a media server, streaming music and videos wirelessly to my PS3 downstairs. So I'm not ready to retire the old machine just yet.

ersatz

2007-07-13T18:11:00.000-07:00

So the time came for another oil change for the Lexus, and I made an appointment to drop it off in the morning. I also had a few issues with the driver's seat making creaking noises and with the brake pads making too much dust causing the front wheels to look constantly dirty, and there are actually documented TSBs (Technical Service Bulletins) from the manufacturer on these. You can look them up for your car on a site like Alldata or search the forums on a car enthusiast site like ClubLexus.com. Anyways I dropped it off and because it would take several hours to check those issues out as well as do the oil change, they gave me a loaner car.

I was hoping they'd give me a nice Lexus ES350 or an RX350 (the wifey has been wanting one of those) to play around with, but you can imagine my dismay when they said they were out of Lexus loaners that morning. Instead I found myself behind the wheel of ... a base-model Toyota Camry. A dark red one, to boot. Oh joy. And there was an added bonus: firing up the ignition, the most fantastic music blared out of the MP3 stereo system. Some kind of Pakistani pop-techno mix CD, left behind by the previous occupant. Spectacular. So I set off on my way to work, floating my way onto the highway and putting the pedal to the floor, listening to the 4-cylinder engine's wail as the automatic transmission vaguely hunted around between 3rd, 4th and 5th gear. The beats were bumping, sitars playing, vocalists moaning and chanting to the beat, it was good times. But it got even better, because whoever made the CD just couldn't make up their mind -- it went from Pakistani techno to Chris Daughtry to some hard core rap and hip hop all in the blink of an eye.

In some kind of morbid curiousity I had to keep listening, to see what was going to play next. At lunchtime my coworkers commended me on my music choice, to which I had to respond, I had no idea who it even was. It certainly wasn't music representative of the typical Lexus driver demographic, that's for sure. I got one of the Lexus music CDs they give out, it was all jazz and easy listening. No hip hop or techno there.

At the end of the day I took the Camry back to the dealer and traded it for my beloved IS350, freshly washed and gleaming in the dealer lot. But not before ejecting that crazy MP3 CD -- I'm not gonna miss that Camry at all, but I'm taking the beats with me.

racial

2007-07-06T17:53:00.000-07:00

I saw this in the Asian supermarket while I was shopping and it kind of put me off ... for the uninitiated the word "gook" is a derogatory racial slur for Asians used in the Vietnam War and here it is, in some kind of Japanese cracker snack! Unbelievable!

And I'm also not sure how it is characterized as Salad, seeing as it looks a lot like Pocky which is cracker stick coated with chocolate. Maybe the orange flavor makes it a salad??? Anyways, that's messed up, man.

flavors

2007-06-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

As I have professed in the past, I am a lover of chicken wings, and certainly am willing to go out of my way to find a good chicken wing. They actually opened up a Hooters near my house, but no I haven't been over there yet. However I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there are several Wingstop restaurants in the Fremont area -- another option for wings, and not just buffalo-style wings either. If you're not into the bright orange wings they offer various wing flavors such as hickory smoked BBQ, teriyaki, lemon-pepper.

If you go to the website, football Hall-of-Famer Troy Aikman proudly proclaims, "they're the best wings I've ever tasted!" Well I'm not sure I agree with Troy who may have been tackled a few too many times to have any credible sense of taste left. I kind of think he must have part ownership of the chain or something? Anyways the wings are good, but not the best I've had. I recommend the Original Hot and the Garlic Parmesan flavors, but their seasoned french fries are also very good. They're a lot closer to me than University Chicken but UC has bigger wings and tastier sauce. That's too bad because WS is on my way home from work and I can see myself going there a lot more often. To add to the convenience they even accept online orders at the once closest to me, and I can place my order at work with a few clicks and pick it up on the way home! Pretty cool. And when you sign up for the online account they sent me a coupon for a free order of fries for the next order, very nice.

In summary I don't think Wingstop provides as memorable a dining experience as a place like University Chicken or House of Chicken and Waffles, but as a convenient place to stop and get some wings when you've got that hankering, it's a good choice.

Also really quick I went and checked out another local burger joint, Mission Burger near Ohlone College. Very good charbroiled burger, a little better than Bob's Burgers and nearly as close to my place. I think I'm going to start hitting them up more often when I feel like a burger.

rehabilitation

2007-06-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

I've had a week off from work and plenty of time to think about updating this blog, but of course I've been lazy and decided to spend that time doing other things, like recovering from the madness of trial, eating and playing video games. Spending a lot of time in virtual Miami as Tony Montana in Scarface: The World Is Yours. It's bloody, violent, chock-full of vulgarity, and it's great fun. What other game lets you zoom in and target the left or right testicle of your target before you blast him with your rifle? "Say hello to my lil' friend!"

Also spent time catching up on all the television I missed while I was away at trial. Watched recorded episodes of The Apprentice, Lost, and American Idol. Caught a few Formula 1 races as well. Young F1 rookie Lewis Hamilton is really making a name for himself, finishing in the top 3 in every race he's run so far -- setting a new record in Formula 1 racing. Poor Robert Kubica at BMW, who was a rookie last year and my pick as one to watch this season, has been overshadowed by this young British talent who is racing alongside reigning champion Fernando Alonso at McLaren and wowing everyone with his skill.

I decided as my gift to myself after the trial I would get a new exhaust for my Lexus IS350 -- after having performance exhausts on my other two cars the Lexus was really too quiet for me. I decided on the Tanabe Touring Medallion dual exhaust after hearing it in person on another car -- gives it a nice deep tone and growl without being too loud and obnoxious. It also saves some weight and adds some power over the stock exhaust system so I have some performance benefits as well.

I was going to record some video clips of the new and improved sound, but through the power of the internet, conveniently here is a video someone recorded of the exact same car with the exact same exhaust -- it's even the same color so this looks just like my car. Good stuff.

So now I'm back at work, back in the office -- and suddenly I have time to update my blog. Funny how things work out huh? Happy Friday.

crepuscular

2007-05-11T21:06:00.000-07:00

It's finally over. But not really. After 3 long weeks of sleepless nights and a tense 8 days in court fueled primarily by coffee and Amp, the work is done and the jury rendered a verdict. To our surprise the jury ruled in plaintiff's favor -- suprising because we felt we had outgunned them in every way. But where we kind of won the battle was in damages -- instead of the $75 million the plaintiff was seeking, the jury awarded them only $6.5 million. The client was happy about that, considering they had a potential exposure of much more, but in the end as lawyers I think we have to consider this a loss. The real kicker is, there's another related litigation coming up in June, this time at the ITC in DC. Most likely I will be involved.

Cisco owes $6.5M

After the initial repeat visits to the Ale House, our opportunities to go out and enjoy a good meal dwindled to virtually nil as we worked day and night, but at least the catering we had brought in was not too bad at all. On the occasional night of "suboptimal" dining experience, there was always the late-night pizza call. Grotto's pizza was the midnight savior for us in our time of need.
My team and I are fairly bitter about the loss. Perhaps we were cocky enough to assume victory when it was not assured, but we really thought we were going to win this one. It was like repeated slaps to the face as the clerk read the jury's verdict. Infringement. Slap! Willful infringement. Slappity slap! Invalidity defenses denied. Boot to the head! Equitable defenses denied. Kick in the ass!

We went out to dinner with the client afterwards and although the mood was somewhat dejected, the client was still very appreciative. We sampled various tastes and treats at 821, an upscale downtown restaurant with a French-style tasting menu. The spinach and gnocchi salad was fantastic, and so was the lamb plate and the braised rib. My butt was sore after sitting and eating and drinking for over 3 hours however... it felt like I had just gone through a 5 hour flight in a cramped economy seat.

So today we finished packing up the warroom and sending off the truck with all our documents and supplies back to California. The bigwigs flew the coop almost immediately after verdict and left us holding the bags as usual. Tonight, our last night in Wilmington, I decided to take the team still in town out for a real treat, by taking a car to Philly and having dinner at the Saloon, an upscale Italian-American steakhouse. I know this place from going there about 2 years ago when I was last in Philly on business. The food there is fantastic and so was the waitress. She handed us a two-page menu and then rattled off specials of the day for a good 5 minutes. There were probably more items on the specials than the menu. You really have to pay attention as she talks about them, because they are truly the better choices and there's so much to choose from. I don't know why they don't just print out the daily menu instead but it does give an entertaining experience. Repeating my experience of 2 years ago, I ordered a Blue Hawaii only to be told that they didn't have Blue Curacao, and as a substitute was given a pink drink. My coworkers loved it and were promptly stunned when I ordered and devoured an entire porterhouse steak plus dessert, a sumptuous banana custard tart. Good stuff. But I think we all dozed off on the ride back from Philly to the hotel.

Tomorrow morning we rise at 5:30am and head to the airport for the trip home. It's been a long time coming, and all of us can't wait to get back. I haven't seen my honey V for nearly a month, and it's going to be good to be home.

installation

2007-04-26T23:50:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Wilmington, Delaware. I flew into Philadelphia 7 days ago. Unfortunately I did not have time to stop in Philly for a cheesesteak, but that is still a goal of mine. I caught a cab from the airport straight to my hotel in Wilmington. The Hotel DuPont is probably the nicest hotel in Wilmington, and it's in the heart of the downtown area. Unfortunately there's not much else around, it is mostly office buildings and at night and weekends the place is totally dead. Working until about 1-2AM each night, walking the block and a half back to the hotel is eerily quiet and uneventful. I had expected it to be colder, but it has actually warmed up nicely since I arrived. Temps are in the 60s and even got into the 80s for a day or two. But now it is raining again.

I gotta talk about the food situation here. The first few nights we went to this place within walking distance from the hotel, and it was great. So good we kept coming back -- it's probably the best bar and grill type place in the area. It's called Washington St. Ale House, and they have some good grub. I recommend the Build Your Own Burger, their buffalo wings, and the crab cakes. My coworkers introduced me to a new beer, called Yuengling Ale. Mmmm good stuff. We also tried a fancy seafood restaurant called Deep Blue that's right across the street from the hotel. Very niiice. But once the whole team arrived it was time to get to work. We set up our warroom on the 16th floor of our local counsel's building, which is the Chase building. Home away from home. My hotel room is just where I sleep. All of our meals are being catered by a company called Movable Feasts, and it's actually pretty darn good. They keep the variety going and we've had everything from salads to steak to crab cakes.

But the real show stopper is the trial snack setup that we have here just outside our warroom -- a complete table covered with snacks and candy. Believe it or not, this is pretty much what we have at every trial we do. Some of my coworkers are super health conscious but this kind of spread is hard to resist. Mmmm gummi worms. You know what, when you work 16 hour days every day of the week for this long, you gotta spoil yourself a little bit.

The view outside our office is fairly bland, but we do get to watch the sunset each evening when the weather is clear and take in the beauty of it all for a brief moment before we turn back to our work. Tomorrow we begin jury selection and on Monday the trial begins. It's going to be a long weekend I know, a lot of work between now and verdict. That's it for now, stay tuned for another update when I can. Most nights I just walk back to my room and fall into bed almost immediately.

revelation

2007-03-30T10:12:00.000-07:00

Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto IV is one of the most hotly anticipated video games coming out this year. Imagine an immersive city environment where you're free to roam and do as you please, now with ultra-realistic next-generation graphics. GTA IV will be released for both X360 and PS3 in October 2007. I'm a big GTA fan, and I can't wait to play this latest one on my PS3.

Yesterday Rockstar continued to build up the hype around this game, by giving the gaming world a glimpse of things to come, in the form of a short teaser trailer. The speculation is over, the next GTA is coming back home to Liberty City, which is a thinly veiled version of New York City. The trailer shows some cool digital renditions of various NYC landmarks, like the Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square, the Chrysler building, and Grand Central Terminal.

To be honest, I'm a little disappointed that it's Liberty City again. I've already roamed the streets and dominated the crime underworld twice in LC, with GTA III and GTA: Liberty City Stories. I was kind of hoping they'd take the franchise to another new and exciting city, perhaps somewhere international like Hong Kong or Germany.

What's interesting though, is that based on the trailer, you will be playing the role of a thickly accented immigrant -- everyone seems to think it's a Russian accent. This is a new take on the GTA plotlines, but Rockstar has always had a reputation for doing unconventional things and making them into a success. I'm sure I'm going to enjoy playing this one when it comes out.

View the GTA IV Trailer at Rockstar's site

folding

2007-03-25T17:46:00.000-07:00

I used to fold paper airplanes and throw them from the 2nd story of my house to see how far they'd go, but this is way cooler. This weekend I'm using my PS3 to help find a cure for cancer.

Stanford University [ok as a Cal alumnus I feel somewhat obligated to call them Stanfurd, rhymes with turd huhuh] has been using home PCs and now PS3s in a distributed computing network called the Folding@Home Project. People who want to let their computers/PS3s help the Project simply download the Project application, and then let the program run in the background, effectively donating their idle computer processor time. The Project tackles the massive task of analyzing folding proteins -- due to the huge amount of calculations required it typically would require a supercomputer, but by dividing up the task into smaller work units and handing out assignments to individual machines -- homework, if you will -- the power of everyone's computers is combined in one of the largest distributed computing networks in the world. Good stuff.

But it gets even better. The PS3's Cell processor has been touted as one of the most advanced CPUs you can buy today, and Sony has teamed with Stanford University to take advantage of that. The CPU crunches away at its homework, and the RSX graphics chip displays the actual protein folding and geometry in realtime for you to see. And in the background, a world map slowly rotates and shows you, world-wide, all the other PS3s that are crunching away as well as little points of light. That rates a 10.0 on the geek scale for me.

It's nice to know that I can do something for medical research so easily, and it requires so little effort -- just leave the PS3 on and let it put the smack down on some misbehaving proteins. I almost feel guilty when I interrupt it to actually play a game -- almost. I still gotta play my games, sucka!

Folding@Home on the PS3

Gizmodo: PS3 Triples Folding At Home's Computing Power to Over 500 TFLOPS..PFLOPS in Spitting Range

idle

2007-03-15T17:47:00.000-07:00

A soon to be ex-coworker (he's leaving my firm and therefore not highly productive in his final days anyways) introduced me to one of those websites that is bound to tie up many of your hours during the workday and make you completely unproductive. Click on it at your own risk, I wouldn't want you to get fired because you've been playing video games all day instead of work! http://www.everyvideogame.com

This site has some of my favorite classic NES games such as Tetris, Bionic Commando, and Karateka.

This coming Saturday is a big one for racing -- the season opener for the Formula 1 Championship Series in Australia, and the first major endurance race of the year in American Le Mans Series, the 12 Hours of Sebring. In F1 everyone's excited about the beginning of a new era--one without Michael Schumacher on the racing grid. The battle is on between reigning F1 Champion Fernando Alonso at McLaren Mercedes, and the hopeful successor to Schumacher's throne at Ferrari, Kimi Raikkonen.

In ALMS, the focus last year was on the debut of Audi's diesel prototype in LMP1 and the Corvette vs. Aston Martin battle in GT1. But this year the big show looks to be in LMP2, where a multitude of cars will debut at the season opening 12 Hours of Sebring in Florida. Acura and Mazda make their entry into the ALMS with LMP2 entries, and hope to give Porsche's newly updated RS Spyders a run for their money. Porsche returns with its Team Penske RS Spyders but also welcomes new customers Dyson Racing to the fold with RS Spyders of their own. I'm still bummed that Lexus didn't end up fielding their GT2 class IS350 race car in ALMS, but who knows, maybe that will return someday.

motivation

2007-03-09T17:56:00.000-08:00

It's that time of the year in Europe for the Geneva Motor show, and there are lots of cool new cars on display this year. Of course I don't have the coin nor the time right now to be jetting off to Geneva to see them in person, but thank goodness we have the Internet and legions of car fans all over the world who can share the love.

Previously I mentioned the unveiling of Lexus's IS-F at the Detroit Motor Show -- well, now here comes the latest iteration of the competition -- well actually the benchmark against which all other performance sport sedans are measured. BMW brought its M3 Concept to the Geneva show and most of the automotive press have pointed out that it pretty much is what we're going to see in dealerships later this year when the M3 goes on sale. The pertinent specs: based on the new 3-Series coupe chassis, 2 doors, 420+ HP V8 motor. Carbon-fiber roof, slightly sportier-looking body styling. The "Powerdome" bulge on the hood is supposed to be a subtle hint that the car is packing some formidable V8 muscle under the hood, but it just comes across as tacky or plain ugly in my book. Otherwise overall I think the M3 is a pretty good looking car, but is it going to be worth the hefty premium over the standard 335i coupe? I don't know. I was just reading that there are some ECU upgrades available from the likes of Vishnu or Alpina that turn up the boost on the 335i to power levels of around 360-380HP, for a lot less dough.

Another cool vehicle rolled out at the Geneva show is the Artega GT, which looks a bit like a cross between a Carrera GT, Lotus Elise, and Ferrari F430 -- all very beautiful cars. Powered by a 300HP V6 motor from VW, the Artega GT will be offered in limited numbers for around $100K.

deflation

2007-03-06T20:15:00.000-08:00

I had another lesson last week in the "you gotta pay to play" category ... got a flat on my IS350 while driving into work. The low tire warning light came on just as I pulled into the parking lot. Sure enough, a tire was leaking badly. Just like that, I needed a new rear 255/40-18 tire. Went to the local tire shop, they said that tire is toast, couldn't be repaired. That one tire would set me back $345 and take a week to order. Yowza! I called around and fortunately my Lexus dealer had one in stock, for $296. Woohoo. I could saved some bucks buying it on Tirerack.com, but I can't be driving around on my donut spare tire all week long (what an attractive pale yellow hue the steel wheel has!) so I bit the bullet and got the new tire installed. I guess that's the price we pay for performance.