The actual video

Just figured out that while you can upload videos via Blogger's Web-based inteface, you can't blog directly from Picasa. I hope they fix that soon.

In the meantime:

Raspberries!

As you might recall, Cameron loves berries. There was a period when that could have been his exclusive diet. All the world revolved around blueberries (which he called "boo-booberries"), raspberries ("red boo-booberries") and grapes ("big boo-booberries").

Well, we found some raspberries and blackberries at our local Costco, and sure enough, he still loves them. Here you'll see the approved eating technique for raspberries. (Felt mildly guilty that they came all the way from Mexico and Florida in violation of our "eat local" preference, but oh well...)

Amusingly, you'll also see Katye and Cameron making sure they get their share of airtime.

Krispy Kreme

This was the first year we'd ever seen the totally hilarious Krispy Kreme snowmen donuts. Colin and Cameron were delighted to eat theirs. Katye wasn't that excited: not enough chocolate or sprinkles.

Ah...just the right ingredients

Before and...

Colin was super-pleased to start construction of his Lego B-Wing fighter. It's been downstairs in the basement since his birthday, and we figured this was the perfect week for him to put it together.

After...

A few hours later, here is the boy with his completed Lego B-Wing. He survived a few interruptions and a visit or two from his little Godzilla-like brother.

Like me, Colin can get very focused on completing a project: he skipped lunch to finish construction, and barely even looked up when I asked him whether he was hungry.

Christmas Day

Here are the kids on Christmas morning with their stockings.

Astoundingly, these stockings are handmade (the wife says "cross-stitched", to be precise) by the mom of one of Fed's former coworkers. Look at those details -- that can't have been easy! I promise: no Photoshop.

Hewlett and Packard on pricing

Over the Christmas break, I'm reading a couple of books. One of them is Michael Malone's Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World's Greatest Company.

I've always been a fan of company histories, and this is one shaping up to be a good one. It's done a particularly compelling job so far of capturing HP as the scrappy startup flying by the seat of its pants.

Here's a great example -- and an especially poignant one since we just went through the very long, tedious, and MBA'ish task of getting all the old Opsware products on the HP price list.

Here's how Bill and Dave named and priced their ever first product offering, an audio oscillator. First on naming (emphasis mine):

[Bill and Dave] designated the new instument as the "200A" because that number sounded like just the latest in a long line of products from a mature enterprise, not something from a pair of twenty-five-year-olds working out of a garage.

And now -- more surprisingly -- on pricing:

The price the two decided upon was even more arbitrary: the 200A audio osciallator was listed at $54.40, a number chosen entirely because it amusingly reminded Bill and Dave of the historic phrase "54'40" or Fight!" that was used in the 1844 campaign to set the U.S.-Canadian border in the Northwest.

The fact that makes this arbitrary price even more eye-raising:

Though the story of the pricing has become part of the HP myth, less remebered is how foolish this decision was: $54.40 was well below what it cost the pair to build the 200A, meaning that they would lose money on every sale. It was not a propitious start for two future titans of American business.

Thankfully, the company survived its lowball pricing scheme. Fast forward to this fiscal year, and HP becomes the first technology company ever to post more than $100 billion in revenue (I had thought IBM had done it before, but nope -- HP got there first.)

Jump rope rhymes -- and testing a new Blogger feature

I mostly wanted to try out Blogspot's new "Upload Video" button. Here are the cousins doing a jump rope rhyme. It's amusing, but not as funny as Colin's longsuffering "why me?" expression in the back there.

Presuming this upload video feature works, it'll be easier than posting in YouTube and then linking in here from the blog. Although everyone raved about how easy it is to use YouTube, I always found the uploading process somewhat tedious -- similar to listing an item in eBay. Find a category, find a subcategory, rinse lather repeat.

Men's Half-Yearly Sale

Here are the people in the family most excited about the Nordstrom Men's Half-Yearly Sale. Mmmm....donuts!

Katye in the tunnel

We stopped by a neighborhood park this morning. It's very exciting to be on vacation!

Christmas morning

The kids were thrilled to open their presents Christmas morning, not that you can tell from Katye's expression. :-)

Steamy!

I made fried rice yesterday and for some reason it was throwing off tons of steam.

I should get a digital SLR to get better pics. Who's upgrading and wants to sell me theirs? :-)

Blogging through the years

Some factoids as we reflect on our 3 years of blogging:

• First blog post: December 23, 2004
  
• Featuring a picture the monorail operator at Disneyland kindly took of our family
• Total posts: 582
  
• 2004: 15
• 2005: 257
• 2006: 179
• 2007: 131 (but the year's not over yet!)

The rest of this data comes courtesy of Google Analytics, which started tracking this blog in November 2005. Kinda freaky how much it knows.

• Unique visitors: 1,601
• No, we don't know half that many people -- but I presume it's counting IP addresses or machines that you're visiting from
• Average time on site: 1 minute, 11 seconds
  
• Page views: 9,623
• Browser breakdown
• Firefox: 59%
• IE (boo!): 34%
• Safari: 6% -- interesting (one day, we'll probably get a Mac)
• Connection speed
• Cable modem: 47%
• DSL: 28%
• Unknown: 18%
• T1: 6% (greetings, work surfers -- aren't you supposed to be working?)
• No idea how Google figures this out (IP address?)
  
• Peak traffic day: 1/21/2006 with 27 visitors
• Who knows why?
• Direct traffic: 36%
• i.e., visitors arriving via bookmarks or typing in the URL directly
• Top referrers
• my.yahoo.com
• Yahoo mail
• Rob and Jen's blog
• Wang family blog
• Top keywords when you come from a search engine:
• "frank and fedora"
• blog + "withfries"
• fedora blog
• Top viewed page (aside from the current page)
• YouTube video of the Back Dorm Boys
  
• Yeah, we like it too!
  

Mmmmm....cinammon buns

A new -- and quite popular -- item at the FBC Christmas Breakfast this year. For more pics, check out the complete album on Picasa.

FBC Choir in action

The church choir sang joyfully at the FBC Christmas service.

(Fedora --their usual pianist -- is much relieved they went with the music-from-a-CD approach this year. It was quite a lot of music and definitely more majestic with the full orchestra.)

Geek Squad delivery!

Yeah, there was no way the rack was going to fit in either of our cars, so I left it to the Geek Squad to bring the rack and navigate our stairs. :-)

New furniture

The kids were very excited by the arrival of our new audio rack. Not sure why -- maybe it had to do with the Geek Squad delivery van outside?

Gloria Dei Christmas program

Katye and classmates Nate and Ashley (not sure where Giselle was) had been diligently memorizing words and song for the annual Gloria Dei Christmas program. They did a great job, staying mostly together and loud enough to hear in the back. For some reason, Colin is not a big fan of Katye singing, so at home he would often shout, "no signing, Katye!"

Luckily, that didn't distract her from memorizing her lines. And he managed not to blurt it out during the actual performance.

We brought the kids to visit my grandparents in Richmond (CA) the other day. It's heartwarming how kids can make something fun out of anything -- in this case, it was the step leading down to the formal living room. They thought it was just hilarious to chase each other around the room jumping into and out of the living room.

(Sorry for the slightly blurry action shot but I thought the "I'm flying" effect was worth sharing.)

49ers game

One of my coworkers kindly gave us his tickets to the 49ers-Bengals game a few weeks ago, so I brought Colin (much to Katye's chagrin).

Surprisingly, the 49ers won. Maybe Colin is an actual lucky charm. Our home team won the only other paid sporting event we've been to (a Stanford-Harvard men's basketball game) as well.

All in all, I have to say Colin was probably more into the stadium experience--especially (1) viewing action through binoculars and (2) eating Gordon Biersch garlic fries--than the actual game. But we both had a good time despite a typically windy experience inside Monster Park. We even took the Samtrans up and back, which seemed like the way to go given the sea of cars in the parking lot.

(Are those people underneath the flag?)

Here is Katye's shot where you can see more of the glorious cake. Please excuse the kitchen light-as-Frank's-halo framing. :-)

Happy birthday mommy!

Colin and Katye each insisted on taking a picture to celebrate Fedora's birthday. Here is Colin's short of us with our fabulous burnt almond cake, our first ever and seriously yummy dessert from La Patisserie in Cupertino. Check out Frank's Yelp review.

Posing with the flowers

Katye is always ready to ham it up for the camera, but Cameron rarely so. Imagine mom's surprise when the boy relented to pose in his coordinated-with-the-flowers-in-the-background sweatshirt.

Merry Christmas!

I'm thankful for God's blessings on our family this year.

And for the 2-week vacation coming up. This will be my first contiguous 2-week time off since I started working. Well, factoring out time off for newborn babies. Get ready for a backlog of blog updates, beginning with the blog version of our Christmas updates for 2007.

Here's what we're thankful for in 2007

• Not sure how this happened, but Colin (7) is in second grade, where he is reading, ’riting, and ’rithmeticing. He can make change, tell you the capitals of most Central and South American countries, and his handwriting has improved dramatically—unclear how useful any of those skills are going to be in his adult world, but we’re grateful he’s growing up to be a polite and thoughtful if somewhat serious boy. Gee, wonder where he gets the serious from?

• Katye (4) is our free-spirited pre-kindergartener. She’s in a half-day program at a nearby Lutheran school. She chose the spelling of her own name; you might recall that last year, she was just Katie. Her class has just 4 students, her teacher is a first-time pre-K and K teacher, and Katye just adores the whole scene. She loves singing, craft time, memorizing Bible verses, playing on the computer, and surprising grown-ups with her savviness about the world.

• Cameron (2) is our family’s clown and is chatting up a storm. Even though he’s putting together short sentences now, complete with subjects and predicates (“I went to Jarrod’s house”), we think about half of his vocabulary is still Star Wars characters. Distressingly, Darth Maul is his favorite. Not sure what we did to encourage that outcome.

• Frank’s company Opsware got acquired by HP this year, ending his almost 7 year run at a single company—an all time record. This is the biggest company he has—and will ever —work for. It’s a bittersweet conclusion to the years of small camaraderie. But as usual, Frank’s looking for the silver lining. This is the first company he’s ever worked for with a 401k match. Also—anyone need the employee discount on laser printers or inkjet cartridges? (Note to new HP coworkers: just kidding -- I know this contravenes the Employee Purchase Program policy.)

• Fedora continues to work with All Things Creative creating custom printed goodies to help celebrate the joyful occasions in life. And the rest of the time is filled with the all-important mom-stuff!

We’d love to see you in person, so please call or e-mail (or break tradition and send us snail mail!) and come on by!

Pandas, courtesy of Digg

Thanks to the collective wisdom over at Digg for finding this astounding collection of pictures and YouTube videos. We love pandas. Who doesn't?

Go see them before they have fur, playing in the snow, riding down slides, and just plain being adorable.

Product of the year

There's no contest: the product of the year for our family is the Nintendo Wii. Everyone on the family loves it, even if Cameron has a hard time with the controls. (Yes, that includes Fedora!)

How do I know this? Cameron trotted over this afternoon, in his demanding-asking voice, "Wii bowling? Play Wii bowling!"

The Wii is riding some powerful trends into millions of living rooms around the globe:

• Simplicity over complexity: Wii graphics are cartoonish compared to the photo-realism of the PlayStation 3. But with simple, compelling gameplay and the breakthrough Wii-mote, people find the graphics good enough.
  
• Just like MP3s beat Super Audio CDs and the DVD-Audio.
• Anyone outside of Nerdville even remember those formats?
• Turns out people valued convenience and portability over fidelity.
• Breakthrough user experience: The Wii-mote is the iPod of video gaming. It demonstrates how a breakthrough user experience can create a huge market opportunity. (And I'm not just saying this as a user interface professional.)
  
• Social interactivity. The Wii brings people together, a phenomenon that the Wii ecosystem just groks. Watch any ad for a Wii product or Wii game and it'll show a group of playing having a blast -- as opposed to eye-popping gameplay.
• Even grandparents like it. I'm not sure how explicitly the Wii designers knew this was going to be true, but even my parents love the Wii -- perfect opportunity for Nintendo as the population grays.
• Physical engagement. I'm sure the Wii designers were all over this trend, but now moms around the globe don't need to nag kids to go outside to get some exercise. You can easily work up a sweat playing any of the Wii games, especially the boxing mini-game in Wii Sports!
  

Happy birthday, Wii! Cake courtesy of Henry S over at Engadget.

FBC Thanksgiving Banquet

Katie and friend Elena work hard on their cross-legged turkey crafts. It was quite impressive how many high-quality crafts they churned out during the official program. Of course, Aunt Jennie was in charge. :-)

Ryan turns 7

All 3 kids had a fabulous time celebrating Ryan's 7th birthday at the local Pump It Up. Here, the BFFs do their funny faces on the throne.

Ready for trick or treating!

Clonetrooper Colin, Princess Katie, and Mickey Mouse Cameron prepare to trick or treat on the night before Halloween.

We loved the Mickey Mouse ears, but Cameron didn't much care for it. He kept on trying to take his hat off, but the elastic was pretty snug and he had his big mouse gloves on -- so had a hard time actually getting the hood down off his head.

Katie had wings too, if you look closely. So technically I think she was a princess fairy.