Thanksgiving

We made our annual pilgrimage down to Bakersfield for Thanksgiving again this year. We never learn and always think it'll be relaxing to be down there and do nothing. Wrong!

As soon as we got there, I was weeding in the backyard for hours since daddy is getting old and never gets time off from the busy restaurant hours. While Jean baby-sat in the house.As for dinner that night, we ate in at home with food we brought down from the Bay Area. It's our version of turkey.
For the last few years, we have gone out to Black Angus Steakhouse for dinner since that's the only place open on Turkey day. But since last year, we've learned and here's why...
Then on Friday, we were "recruited" to help setup Ben's (brother-in-law) new dental office. Hard to believe that he is about to open on Tuesday and there's not even curtain or wires yet. We helped from moving a refrigerator and washer/dryer (don't ask..) to opening boxes and boxes of expensive dental equipments.
On Saturday, we were up at 8AM to meet the contractors. While they worked on getting the wires in, we put up about 20 some Redi-Shade temporary curtains.

Yeah, that's pretty much our Thanksgiving... Oh, somewhere in between all that, I was able to play some Wii that we brought down and got myself up to Pro status in tennis, yay!
On the way back on Sunday, it was a bit scary when we got onto I-5. Below is what we saw for about 45 minutes at 0 mph before traffic mysteriously started to flow again.
Here's link to the rest of the 15 so pictures on Flickr.

Whew, can't wait to go back to the office next week...

One Laptop Per Child

Yay! We just bought a One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO laptop. So excited!

It's the brainchild of MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte to create a $100 laptop for kids all over the world. But the project wasn't able to manufacture it for less than $100, so what they've done is the "Give One, Get One" program. Until Nov 26, you can buy one for $399 and they'll donate one to a developing country.
It's no secret that this won't be a shiny, powerful MacBook Pro which I'm writing this blog on, but it is packed with lots of fun features and the color... it's so gonna match our "man bag"
Some cool things about this laptop.

• Rubberized keyboard meant to be used in harsh outdoor conditions. Maybe even Charlie can try it out.
• My favorite! A rechargeable battery that can be hand charged via a crank, pedal or pull-cord—or recharged by a directly connected solar panel. Yet another "green" thing we can do
• Build-in camera, mic, wifi.

And if you order in the next 15 minutes.... T-Mobile will give you free 1 year membership access to T-Mobile HotSpot, which they say is worth about $350 a year. This means that we'll be able to surf the net on both our iPhone and this new laptop at any Starbuck's.

Can't wait for it to ship, we'll post some pictures once we get it.

FSJ and @guykawasaki

Jean and I just came back from the FSJ event tonight at Mountain View's Computer History Museum. Yeah, I somehow convinced her to come with me!

Hilarious night!!!

Guy tried to get him to answer as FSJ a few tims, but I think Dan is just more comfortable writing the blog, which is fine by me. The crowd was dying laughing most of the night. I can't remember exactly when during the night, but he brought up his post which he introduced siooma over lunch with Fester. Man oh man, that was a funny post!!!

Picture with @guykawasakiPicture with @iJustine and @KuraFire, who also works at Apple.

weekend

We had a pretty relaxing and fun weekend, we love the sun!

On Sat afternoon, we walked to AMC Cupertino to watch a movie. I snapped this photo of my favorite tree in Cupertino on the way there.
We watched "The Kingdom". It's kinda neat to watch a matinee on a Sat afternoon, empty theater.

"The Kingdom" has been out for a while now, but since we're poor and only have the "silver" tickets, we can't watch new releases :-) We both liked the message the movie had, nobody is a winner when it comes to wars.

After the movie, we went to try a new Japanese restaurant and had a cream puff at the new Beard Papa's in Cupertino afterwards.
On Sunday, we met some new friends and went hiking at Portola Valley. I think the trail Dave picked was a bit longer than what everyone thought, but we all survived and everyone were good troopers. The 12 of us then went to have Thai in Mountain View and chowed down! We were so pooped that Jean was in bed and knocked out by 6PM!

There's gonna be lots of FB friends adding in coming days and new Scrabulous buddies, yay!