"I Surf So You Don't Have To" #5

Above pic is from http://havefun.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=21

If you're new here, enjoy your stay, and here's the original post on why I started this. Let the fun begin.

1. Apparently, bigger is better. iPod earbud speakers exactly 500X the size of real ones.
   
   
   
   
2. Bay Area homeowners with mortgages, listen up. We're all familiar with the "non-conforming/jumbo loan" around here since Santa Clara's medium home price is still around $750K. The recent economic stimulus package includes a major relief for Bay Area residents. The jumbo loan limit has been increased from $417,000 and $729,000. SJ Mercury has an article on the details.
   
   
3. Speaking of stimulus package, we totally need more of those packages. If you watch the stock at all, you would've seen the meltdown this week. Folks here in Cupertino are especially taking a hit after Apple's FY2008 Q1 earning announcement on Tue. Even though we had a record breaking Q1, the cautious warnings about Q2 slow down triggered the black diamond like slope of our stock. AAPL went from high of $200 to $130 in just a week!
   
   
   
4. On a brighter note, Google Reader added a few new features. I first read about it here on Google Operating Systems blog.
   
   
   • New favicon (the little icon that shows up on your browser's tab and address bar)
     
     
     
   • Hover your mouse over the date on right upper hand corner and GR will show you the publish date and the date Google indexed it.
     
     
     
   • GR added a few new keyboard shortcuts. a to add subscriptions, g+d to open the feed directory, e to email the current item.
     
     Just like in Gmail, you can use "?" to pull up this cheat sheet.
     
     
   
   
   
5. I seem to be leaving you a video at the last item every time, so here we go again. Bob from Apple.com's guided iPhone tours is at it again.
   
   "Hit Me On My iPhone"
   
   

I'll be back soon.

iPhone tips

WARNING: iPhone related post. If you don't have an iPhone or don't care about Apple products, close the browser and step away from the computer :-)

Below is a small list of iPhone tips and tricks I've picked up that others might find useful.

1. Two finger tap to zoom out in Google map. Most people know of the 1 finger tap to zoom in on the Google map. Try it with 2 fingers and it'll reverse that process. Any two fingers would do, but I highly recommend index + middle fingers, it just works better, trust me.
   
   
2. Jump to top of a web page in Safari browser. When you get to the bottom of a long web page in the browser, you can tap the top of the screen, right under the time and it'll bring you back to top of the page. I'm not aware of a way to jump to bottom of the page yet. If you do, share with moi :-)
   
   
3. Don't need to type .com in Safari browser. When you're typing an URL, no need to type http://www or the .com portion. Simply enter the doman (e.g. apple) and click "Go". Of course, this only applies to .com URLs.
   
   
4. Quick hover for numbers in keyboard. How do you type a number today? Click on "@123" to change to number keyboard, type a number, then click on "ABC" to change back? Say you just want to enter a number in between your alphabets? Try this trick.
   
   Hover on "@123" and the keyboard will switch to number keyboard, don't let go of your finger, hover over to the number or symbol you want, then let go. It'll insert the number or symbol and switch you back to the alphabet keyboard.
   
   
5. Caps-lock on keyboard. Double click the "up-arrow" will change the icon to blue and turn caps-lock on. Click on the "up-arrow" again to return to normal keyboard.
   
   Update on Jan 26 2008: Thanks to @sassytazcas below. You have to go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Enable Caps Lock (turn on). Then after you have it turn on, you can then double click on "up-arrow" to do cap-lock.
   
   
6. Two finger zoom in Safari browser. We all know the 2 finger pinch gesture on the iPhone to zoom in/out. If you're holding the iPhone with 2 hands, you can accomplish the same gesture by holding your left thumb on the lower left corner of the screen and use your right index finger to zoom in/out easily.
   
   
7. Redeem iTunes gift cards on the iPhone. With the latest v1.1.3 update, you can now redeem your iTunes gift cards right on the iPhone. Go to the iTunes music store -> "Downloads", 4th button -> "Redeem" on top left corner.
   
   BTW, in case I've never mentioned it, that's what I do at Apple. We're your bank, holding all your iTunes gift cards and your balances :-)
   
   
8. Hold the camera button and let go when you are ready to take the photo. When taking a photo with your iPhone, you can actually hold onto the camera button, move the iPhone around until you're ready. Then when you let go of the button, that's when it'll take the picture. Much easier than trying to hold the iPhone and then click the button mid-air.
   
   
9. Added on Feb 07 2008.
   Toggle between "Numbers" and "%" in stock application. I accidentally found this one. In the Stock application, you can tap on the "i" to configure the stock delta in "Numbers" or in "%". But instead of going there, if you simply tap on any of the existing stock's green/red area to the right of the quote, and that will toggle all between numbers and percentage. Neat, huh?
   
   

That's all I can think of for now. Let me know if you have other tricks 'n tips that you use on the iPhone.

"I Surf So You Don't Have To" #4

Above pic is from http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2005/oz/surfing.html

If you're new here, enjoy your stay, and here's the original post on why I started this. A quick recap.

I'll do the surfing. You're welcome.
I'll go through my massive amount of feeds on my Google Reader.
I'll bring you news along the tech ally.
I'll bring you news either you care about them or not, muhahha....
I'll bring you tibbits about me, my wife and Charlie.
I'll do all these from Cupertino where I live and work, so maybe there will be somethings about Apple too. But only once in a while, you know how we roll here, Moshe is watching.

Let's do it...

1. Remember how I told you few posts back that I use to work at NASA Ames? Well, I use to work at BEA Systems as well, the company that bought WebLogic. Oracle has decided to acquire BEA for $8.5B, and this time is for real! Good for me as I'm still a BEAS stock holder, so maybe these will offset the AAPL that has been taking a dive.
   
   
2. While we're on the topic of merger. Sun also announced on the same day that they'll buy MySQL AB for $1 BILLION. If you're interested in the details, head on over to Sun's CEO Jonny's blog.
   
   
3. Gmail added a new keyboard shortcut, "e" to archive from any view. If you don't already use Gmail's keyboard shortcuts, you should definitely enabled it via Settings -> General -> Keyboard shortcuts. Some of the ones I use daily are j, k, [, ], r, a, !. You can see the list of shortcuts list on Gmail's help page.
   
   And if you just do a ? in Gmail, it'll pop-up with this handy cheatsheet.
   
   
   
4. If you're interested what I did at Macworld, see my 8 pics on Flickr. My Twitter friend @leese and I got to hang with FSJ for a while and here's her blog post of the day. @iJustine (remember that 300 page AT&T bill girl?) and I exchanged few SMS and voicemails trying to coordinate her doing an interview with FSJ, but she never made it to find us. Oh well, next time.
   
   I also got to meet @verso in person and we walked around the floor and chatted while she showed me where all the cool swags are. Nameste "hello cylon"!
   
   
5. You on Facebook? You play Scrabulous? Hasbro, the maker of Scrabble, is suing Scrabulous and trying to shut it down.
   
   Below is what a game looks like in FB. This one is with a Twitter friend from Sweden, she is a teacher there, so she's gonna kick my behind!
   
   I can understand why Hasbro is not happy to see their board game being played widely on Facebook for free. But they should be happy to hear that as a direct result of playing the game on FB, we got a real Scrabble board game over Christmas from friends. Now, that should made Habro think twice about that move.
   
   
   
   
6. Purdue University's Mackey Arena is listed on USA Today as 1 of the 10 great places to watch college basketball. Quote from the site.
   

   "Forty-year-old Mackey is one of the last of the old Big Ten arenas," Feinstein says. "The team benches are actually situated below the court -- the coaches have to jump up to give their players instructions."
   
   The arena's domed aluminum roof makes the crowd noise reverberate to mega-decibel level. "When the Boilermakers are on a run, you literally can't hear the guy next to you talking."

   Click on picture below to see all ten schools, Purdue is #8.
   
   
   
7. Finally, I leave you with yet another Apple iPod Nano commercial. Parody on the "1234".
   
   

We'll meet again soon...

"I Surf So You Don't Have To" #3

Above pic from http://www.northshoresurfcamps.com

In case you missed why I'm doing this, here's the original post on why I started this.

Let's jump right in.

1. CES (Consumer Electronics Show) just finished last week, nothing too exciting came out of it. But there was one thing really stupid that Gizmodo pulled. They had this TV-B-Gone gadget which they took around and randomly shut off TV screens on the show floor and even during some demos.
   
   Now, I'm all for funny and pranks. But this one went a bit too far! They essentially sabotaged companies doing demos and possibly caused $$ impacts to some of these companies. Geez! Gizmodo, you've gone too far this time. Normally, I would link to the video, but I'm not even going to bother this time. Grrrr...
   
   Apparently, now CES has officially banned Brian, the blogger from Gizmodo from CES for life!
   
   
2. On a lighter note. Two interesting iPod related posters came out of Sydney Australia's Police Department. These are not not made by Apple, note the "watch for cars when wearing headphones" on top of the post. Click on each below to see larger version on AdsOfTheWorld.com
   
   
3. Facebook is making some changes to the profile page. Ever find it annoy when you visit someone's profile who has gazillion apps installed and it takes 3 minutes just to load?
   
   The changes they're making will allow you to move some of those less frequently accessed apps into a extended portion of your profile which others can then click on to “Show Extended Profile” if they're really bored. Read more about it here on FB's developer blog.
   
   
4. Unless you're in the high tech service industry, you probably have not heard of Infosys (Infy), TCS, Wipro, etc. These are some of the biggest consulting firms from India.
   
   Ratan Tata, chairman of TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) launched a $2,500 Tata Nano under his Tata Motor arm. Many have dubbed it as the modern Ford Model-T and if this is well received, it'll bring more mobility to the 1B+ population in India and maybe other parts of the world. Read more about it on CNN Money.
   
   
   
5. It kinda sucks when your wife works at Cisco and you shop at Costco. Why? cuz you get the two mixed up all the time! I keep asking Jean, "how's your day at Costco today?"
   
   
6. Apple released another "Get a Mac" commercial related to the Time Machine feature of Leopard.
   
   
   
7. I went to the Ars/Gizmodo pre-Macworld party with @gody and was fortunate enough to chat for quite a while with FSJ and Brian Lam of Gizmodo (yeah, that Brian from #1 above). Of course @ejacqui and @clint were there as hosts, they took a pic of me talking to FSJ, photo #6 on this Ars article.
   
   
   
8. And.... the biggest thing from the Macworld Keynote 2008? MacBook Air. Watch the new ad here.
   
   
   
   

We'll meet again soon...

Fun weekend!

What a fun weekend!

We started the weekend early on Friday night with dinner at Gochi in Cupertino, thanks to B & N! Bumped into some other friends afterwards at Fantasia boba drink place. Maybe we're all getting old or something, but high decibel in enclosed structures aren't our things anymore.

On Saturday, a group of us headed out to Hog Island Oyster in Pt. Reyes for some fresh oysters. Point Reyes is about 1.5 hr drive northwest of the Golden Gate Bridge. The weather was super nice to our surprise. Jean and I aren't big fresh oysters fan, but we learned to appreciate it more that day. We learned the art of shucking and the difference between regular and fancy schmancy Kumamotos oysters from Japan. Few of us agreed that we've never had this much oyster in one sitting. We ended up consuming 200 for eight people, so average of 15/each.

Somewhere in between all those oysters and the drive home, the guys decided on a day trip up to Squaw Valley in Tahoe for some skiing, gotta love the Bay Area! So 8 hours after we wrapped up the oyster day...

On Sunday at 4:30AM, while Jean was still sound asleep, Timmy and I hit the road at the crack of dawn. We met up with the guys from SF halfway for some hearty McD breakfast. By 9AM we were all geared up and ready to hit the slopes. We had two beginners in the group, so they took lessons, while the 3 of us hit some the more color ones. I have not skied in several years, so I wasn't sure if I could even stay up on the slopes. But I guess it's like what they say about biking. To my own surprise, I held up pretty well on the black diamonds, not pretty, but I came down with few falls. We all made through the day without injuries! At this age, that's a lot to be thankful for :-)

Links to 20 pics of oyster day and 9 pics of ski day on Flickr. If you're new to Flickr, you can click on the "View as slideshow" on upper-right hand corner and use left/right keys to navigate.

"I Surf So You Don't Have To" #2

(pic from http://www.sgolubev.com)

In case you missed why I'm doing this, here's the previous post on why I started this.

Several people have asked me after my last post, so I better clarify it here. No, that's not me surfing. I don't know how to surf. I just use my super power skill (heard of Google?) to find these surfing images.

Alright, we now return to our regularly scheduled program.

1. This one is a bit of old news. Read DownloadSquad.com? Never heard of them? It's the same company who does Engadgets, TUAW, etc. Still never heard of them? Then never mind, skip to #2.
   
   But if you have. One of my Twitter friends @harrisja now writes for them. Congrats to Jason! One of his articles, he had me in the same screenshot as Scoble, weird, huh? It took me a few weeks to realize it.
   
   
   
2. Apple Inc. got a new board member. Chairman and CEO of woman's beauty firm Avon Products, Andrea Jung, has joined the Apple's board, bringing its total number of directors to eight. Never heard of her? Check her out on Forbes.
   
   
   And in case you are wondering who the other board members are at Apple:
   - Bill Campbell (Chairman and former CEO of Intuit)
   - Millard Drexler (Chairman and CEO of J. Crew)
   - Albert Gore (Former Vice President of the United States)
   - Steve Jobs (CEO, Apple)
   - Arthur D. Levinson Ph.D (Chairman and CEO of Genentech)
   - Dr. Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google)
   - Jerry York (Chairman, President, and CEO of Harwinton Capital)
   
   
3. Learned a new term, albeit geeky one. A friend wrote on my Facebok wall "looks like you got joe-jobbed", after I twittered that someone unleashed the spam monster on my personal email server. I had no idea what that meant at first. But when we met up later, he explained it to me.
   
   According to Wikipedia: a joe job is a spam attack using spoofed sender data and aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender and/or induce the recipients to take action against him. The name "joe job" originated from such a spam attack on Joe Doll, webmaster of Joe's Cyberpost.
   
   
4. Excited that we're going back to Taiwan on vacation for 2 weeks in March. Just in time for Taiwan's 2008 presidential election. See, I warned you in the first post that there would be tibbits in here that you might not care about. Moving on...
   
   
5. Oh wait. Speaking of Taiwan, here's a YouTube video which ~50,000 have watched, titled "Best Taiwanese Parliament Fights Of All Time!". Kinda embarrasing as a Taiwanese, but you konw what they say? It's democrazy at work. Oh, did I type "z", I meant democracy.
   
   
   
6. You might have heard recently (or not) of more high-profile Googlers leaving. One of them being Kevin Fox, the Gmail UI designer. It's now public on FriendFeed's blog that he has joined his ex-colleague Paul Buchheit who is described as the creator and lead developer of Gmail on Wikipedia.
   
   If you happen to have FriendFeed too, you can find me here. I haven't fully understand its power yet. So currently it's just an aggregation of my Twitter, blog, Flickr, shared Google Reader article, etc.
   
   
7. The big Bay Area storm is pretty much over now. Not too many bad news on our end and we never lost power for too long, lucky us! However, we do have good news. If you've been to our house, you'll know that since the heat wave few years back in CA, our front entrance's door frame has been giving our arms a workout every time we open or close it. The strong winds during the storm must've knocked the house around so much that the door frame shifted and we now have our easy-to-open normal door back. Zillow, please take note of that.
   
   
8. Even before Macworld starts next week, Apple announced a new Mac® Pro with eight processor cores and stole the spotlight right from CES. If you like geeky stats and want to spend loads of cash, head on over to the Apple.com and easily spend $3,000+ with a few clicks.
   
   According to the official press release “The new Mac Pro is the fastest Mac we’ve ever made,” said Philip Schiller. O Rly? Good thing he cleared that up for all of us, @ejacqui of Ars Technica (also a fellow Boilermaker) appreciates those insights.
   
   
9. Anyone else going to this parteeeee on Monday night, I'll be there. The word is that FSJ is going to be there too.
   
   
   
10. Finally, I leave you with a comical video of "Bill Gates's Last Day at MS" as part of the CES keynote. IMHO, it's a pretty funny and got some big faces, Bono, Jay-Z, Clooney, Spielberg, Clinton, Obama, etc. If you've got 7 minutes, worth watching.
    

Until next time...

I Surf So You Don't Have To

(pic from http://digital-photography-school.com)

So I'm thinking of starting a regular post (maybe weekly) of what I call "I surf so you don't have to". What the heck is that you ask? Well, it's exactly how it sounds.

I'll do the surfing. You're welcome.
I'll go through my 272 feeds on my Google Reader (at the time of this writing).
I'll bring you news along the tech ally.
I'll bring you news either you care about them or not, muhahha....
I'll bring you tibbits about me, my wife and Charlie.
I'll do all these from Cupertino where I live and work, so maybe there will be somethings about Apple too. But only once in a while, you know how we roll here, I'm afraid of Moshe.

So here's how it will work. I start a draft on my blogger.com account. As I find interesting news or interesting things in my life, I'll add a bullet. When there are enough bullets, I'll publish it and start the process all over again. As a co-worker who I got on Twitter 6 months ago said: "Let's see how it goes."

1. Bay Area had a big storm. The biggest in years. Apparently about 1M residents lost power. Fortunately, we got lucky. Like my wife said, even the California trees are wimps and can't take the wind. This is our orange tree in the backyard.
   
   
   
2. Jean and I recorded a 3 minute video of me opening the OLPC's XO green laptop back in Dec. I went back to the video and found that it has been viewed 1,100 times on YouTube. Who is heck is watching me in high pitch?!?! If you still haven't seen it and has 3 minutes to waste, here you go.
   
   
3. Thanks to my friend, Steven (who also just started twittering @skywalkerchi, follow him and say hi). We both learned a Mac tip while chatting on IM. Mac laptop has the "delete" key, which deletes from right to left (like the backspace on PC keyboard). But where's the key to delete to the right of the cursor? Fn + delete will do the trick. And as a bonus! option + delete would delete left to the beginning of the word.
   
   
4. Famed blogger Robert Scoble got himself kicked out of Facebook recently. Oh yeah, kicked out! Account locked out, all his data erased. It turned out because Plaxo got him to test some beta-screen-scraping technology to get all his contact's information out of what some call the walled-garden of Facebook. Apparently this is a violation of FB's TOS. Facebook later reinstated his account, but it caused quite a stir all over the blogsphere and twitterverse.
   
   
5. In response to the above news, Loren Feldman and his gf Michelle Oschen of 1938 Media put out this video. If you don't get it, then you must not have seen this video on YouTube, 15 million people have.
   
   
6. Before I joined Apple, I had a job offer from a small startup here in Cupertino called SugarCRM. Just found out they got $14.5M series D funding. Congrats to them!
   
   
7. Speaking of jobs. I once briefly worked at NASA Ames on a mission called Kepler (bet you didn't know I worked for NASA, huh?). It is currently scheduled to launch in 2009 to look for habitable planets. In laymen's term, looking for ET's home. The new Space Science Division Director, Dr. S. Alan Stern is now holding projects to their budgets and Kepler is prominently singled out in a NYT article as an example, not a good way to get publicity. Hope my ex-colleagues there are OK.
   
   
8. I've decided that this is now my new favorite ICHC caption.
   "is mah brutha... from anotha motha"
   
   
   
9. Through Twitter, we had coffee with a new friend. @gody just moved to the Bay Area this weekend and will start AAPL on Monday. Follow him and say hi too. Welcome to the Bay Area!
   
   
10. Apple's "Get a Mac" campaign release a new "Referee" ad just in time for the Super Bowl.
    
    
    
11. In case you're not in tech. Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is going on at Las Vegas this coming week of Jan 7th. Then Macworld will follow during the week of Jan 14th. Lots of geek toys will come out in the next two weeks! As I nagged/blogged few posts back and drilled into my Lunch 2.0 friend Lisa's head. Don't let me catch you using the big Dub-yah!!! it's Macworld, not MacWold!
    

Reporting live to you from Cupertino. Out.

Review of 3 Twitter clients on the Mac

There are probably dozens of Twitter client reviews out there. But this review is unique. It talks about clients for Mac (mostly). It is written WAY late in the game. And most importantly, it's just moi writing it. So enjoy :-)

I would consider myself a pretty advanced Twitter user, or some would call it addicted. I mostly interact with Twitter via twitter.com (or m.twitter.com), instant messenger (Google Talk) and SMS when on my iPhone. But occasionally I fire up a client. There are dozens of clients out there. Below are the 3 which I've given somewhat of a good test drive.

1. Twitterrifc http://twitter.com/twitterrific Download @ http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific

Things I like.

• Keyboard shortcuts. When a tweet is highlighted. I can use Apple-2 to @ the user. Apple-d to direct message the user. Left arrow to open the user's profile on twitter.com (e.g. http://twitter.com/thomashan/with_friends). Right arrow to open a link if that tweet has an URL.
  
• It shows all unread tweet by making them bold. You can use keyboard shortcut Apple-k to mark them all read.
  
• I liked that it shows me unread count on the Mac Dock, like this.
  

Things I don't like or were confused about.

• This only works on Mac. So if you have other OSes at home like me, you'll have to pick another client when on those machines.
  
• They started out with no ads at the very beginning. But the latest v3.0.1 has ads. You can pay $14.95 to not see ads.

2. Twhirl http://twitter.com/twhirl Download @ http://www.twhirl.org/

Things I like.

• It runs on Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which means I can have the same look and feel on both my Mac and Windows. No need to relearn another UI, for an old dog like me, that's important.
  
• I like how it has a trash bin icon to "clear timeline" for readibility.
• This one is not useful for me, but if you have multiple accounts, you'll like this one.
  
  
• I recently read about terraminds.com's search feature and have already subscribed to certain keywords via their RSS feed. I was pleasantly surprised (so was @bbluesman) to find that Twhirl has build-in search to leverage terraminds to search against all tweets including people you don't follow.
  
  

Things I don't like or were confused about.

• I can never spell the name "twhirl" correctly.
  
• This is probably related to AIR, not sure. But unlike Twitterrific, if I miss the notification pop-up (which is configurable, default 6 sec), it does not show me unread count on the Dock when I return to my computer.
  
• When it opens a link on the browser, it always opens a new window. Why can't it open in a new tab of my already opened FF? Twitterrfic does.

3. Spaz http://twitter.com/spaz Download @ http://www.funkatron.com/spaz

Things I like.

• Spaz is developed by Ed (a.k.a. Funkatron), a fellow Boilermaker!
  
• Again, it is on AIR, same reason as above under Twhirl.
• It won the “Best HTML Community Application” in the AIR Develper Derby award.
  
• Has a tab for public timeline, like on Twitter.com. Not sure if I'd ever use that, but if I get really bored one day, nice to know I can just keyboard-shortcut-5 it.
• Keyboard shortcut. Nicely documented when you click on the "?" icon on top.
  
  

Things I don't like or were confused about.

• It froze quite a few times on me on the Mac. I had to force-quit it.
• I can't find a way to mark a tweet read. In Twitterrifc, when you click on a tweet to mark it unread, it'll unbold it. In Twhirl, it's got the trash bin. Can't find this feature on Spaz yet.
  
• Same as Twhirl above, when I open a link, it opens a new window (on the Mac). However, I did notice that on Windows, it opens a new tab in my existing FF, which is what I want.

I guess the bottom line is that I'm going to stick with Twitterrific as I've been using it since the beginning and it seems like the most mature one to me, at least on the Mac. Any other cool features you've found out about any of these above? What client are you using?

Macworld or MacWorld?

The first few weeks of every new year is like a continuation of Christmas for geeks and all technologist alike. First there's the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas during week of Jan 7th 2008, then there's the Macworld in San Francisco the week after on Jan 14th.

You'll be reading TONs of news, RSS feeds, blogs, Twitters about these 2 events. The only thing I ask of you is....

Officially it's "Macworld Conference and Expo" I know that's long, but just don't type MacWorld.

Update on Jan 5: Just to be clear, I'm not asking you to type the whole phrase. I'm just pointing out the MacWorld (big "W"). Just "Macworld" (small w) would make me a happy boy.

When @clint told Twitterers about the new @arsMacWorld last night, I just couldn't stand to see even Ars spelling it incorrectly and so prominently. Ah... halp my eyes...

I had to contact @clint privately and he, as any nice Boilermaker would, kindly replied to me to let me know he'll do his best. Like I told him, I'm probably the only one who is anal enough to even care.
< / rant >

OK, now onto caring about more important things. Like Charlie (the dog), not getting blown away in this Bay Area storm!

My first vocabularies in the U.S.

Reading Terry Chay's blog reminded me of the impact AD&D had on my own life.

I moved to the U.S. at age 13 from Taiwan without knowing ABCs, let alone any English words. My cousins, who we grew up with in Taipei and continued to be very close, had also moved to California right before us. For some reason, they had picked up AD&D.

Along with falling in love with some of my favorite 80s musicas, Walk Like An Egyptian, We Build the City, we also got to watch A Team and Knight Rider in English for the first time. Back in Taiwan and in the 80s, they were big hits, but only once a week on Saturday nights.

Sorry, I digressed. Back to AD&D... So cousins and I have not played it since the late 80s. But before I learned to construct proper sentences and learn my pronouns, these were some of my first words in the US: magicians, chain mails, swords, monsters, thieves, dice, dungeon-master, hit points.

Not sure if this is an improvement 20 years later, "korrect grammars, I haz dem"

Scavenger Hunt & NYE

This last week was wife's birthday. We're both very low key when it comes to our birthdays, so I thought Jean would prefer a fun game at home. No, not that kind of game, this blog is PG-13!

We pretty much have everything we need or want, so I had to think hard to find something she would like. After doing some research, I went for knitting related gifts given that this is currently her favorite hobby.

Once I got the gifts, I had to come up with a way to give her the gifts. Scavenger hunt seemed like a fun idea.

Started out with card #1, this card was for Christmas
Threw her off a bit with the red envelope. Those are for weddings or from elders, not from a husband to wife for birthday :-) She literally jumped up and down when she found out "it's a game?!??!!!!" and started running around the house.
Several clues later, it led her to the frig.Second card found under the dining table.
This one is for her birthday day. Cute, huh? hee heeThe hint in card #2 led her to the first gift: knitter's bag.Few hints later, she was led outside to my car's trunk where the 2nd gift was found: yarn basket.
See all 12 pictures here on Flickr.

What other good ideas have you had or have tried before for your significant other? Share! Share! So I can try to steal it for next year.

Oh yeah, this is also the first post of 2008 so Happy New Year! What did you do last night? Here's where we were. Thanks Brian and Nancy!