You have got to be kidding me...

How can this not be a lip sync? If this 12-year old Korean girl is really singing Jennifer Hudson's signature song from Dreamgirls, that is just unreal. If she's not really singing, it's still an impressive performance. Turn up your speakers for this one.

Family bowling night

Here are our Wii bowling scores from yesterday. You can also see (most of) our Mii's, which are the avatars you create to represent yourself on the Wii system.

From left to right, that's:

• Colin (green) -- master bowler
• Mommy (orange) -- impressive bowler
• Katie (blue) -- setting new records
• Daddy (red) -- clearly unclear on the concept
  

We broke down and got a Wii -- our first gaming console since the original Playstation, which makes it our first since we had kids!

Here are the kids bowling their first official Wii game.

Katie was the first in the family to get a strike, Colin racked up a handful of spares, Cameron insisted on trying to control things himself, and mommy turned out to be the best bowler in the family. We can only hope dad improves.

Colin's poses in front of his top 2 wish list items. But he knows he can't get them because he's not old enough yet -- at least according to the age guidelines on the box. As our Very Serious firstborn, he is very observant about things like that.

Farewell, good and faithful friend

We sadly sold Fedora's Accord after 15 years of faithful service.

It still ran great, but after it failed its latest smog check, we decided to move it along to a new home. We sold it in less than 8 hours to someone from the East Bay who was buying a car for his college-bound sister. Gotta love Craigslist!

What a terbayte looks like...

...on a Tivo Series3 DVR. After the Tivo overzealously deleted one of my hi-def NFL games, I broke down and added a 750GB external drive.

You don't have to crack open the case or solder anything; the hack mostly involves knowing which drives and external enclosures will work wtih the ESATA interface and pressing a magic sequence of keystrokes via the remote when the Tivo boots. I've read external drive support comes out of the box with the latest software upgrade.

I think we're up to several hundred Tivo suggestions. :-)

Happy birthday, ah gong!

Colin celebrates with his grandfather at a recent birthday celebration. Mmm, sushi!

What me, worry?

Why actually, yes.

Crisp blue sky

Our old Casio digital camera was giving us all manner of metering and focus problems, so we're back with a Canon Powershot (the SD800 IS for those of you keeping score at home). In general, we think it takes better pictures. The detail you can capture with a point-and-shoot these days is astounding.

On the down side, the Canon creates enormous large movie files compared to the Casio. The culprit according to the spec sheet: Motion JPEG rather than MPEG-4 compression.

The new Prius -- and an unfortunate milestone

So first, the happy number: while driving into work today, I got 73.6 mpg in the Prius. Of course, I'm helped by rolling down a hill on the way to the freeway. Then I got into a bit of slow traffic on 101 which is when the Prius switches to mostly-battery mode. For comparison, my all-time high in the Passat was about 41 mpg (all green lights and no traffic on the freeway).

For the round trip commute today, I got 63 mpg, which means that the Prius burned less than 2/3 of a gallon of gas during my 40-mile round trip commute through stop-and-go traffic. (On a stop-and-go-traffic day like today, the Passat would probably burn more than that going one way -- and the Passat is one of the most fuel stingy sedans out there.)

Now for the unfortunate milestone: Autoblog Green reported today that crude hit an all time dollar high of $88.20 a barrel today.

Note 1: that's not inflation adjusted -- oil hit $90 a barrel in 1979.
Note 2: Crude futures actually closed at $87.61 today.

Cameron's vocabulary

Cameron's vocabulary is growing leaps and bounds now, but there was a time not long ago when I swear half the words he knew were actually Star Wars characters. Here he is practicing outside a Lego store with an assist from his eager-beaver sister at the end.

Cameron and R2-D2

Cameron poses here with his 2nd favorite Star Wars character. His favorite is Darth Vadar for reasons we don't understand. Both Fedora and I remember beng pretty terrified of the Sith Lord as youngsters. Maybe it's a post-modern phenomenon given that Darth is on everything from backpacks to an animated series.