One of our favorite pics from vacation

Fedora snapped this shot as Cameron decided he had enough of the cold water. 

New aquarium

There's a new aquarium with a few nicely down exhibits right next to the main park at Legoland. Probably not worth visiting on its own, but if you're going to Legoland, definitely worth checking out some of the innovative views of the sea creatures the designers have managed to create.

Water park

Colin and Ryan had a blast at the water park this summer. The water was pretty cold, but it was a hot day in Carlsbad. They eventually worked up to the nerve to stand underneath the big bucket of water.

If you've never seen it, it's an impressively large bucket of water that gets dumped on the kids every few minutes.

I love the reaction of the kid who turns around right after the water comes down. Also, go check out the stop-motion photos on Smugmug -- I finally got to use my little Canon's multiple-exposure feature, and it did all right for a point-and-shoot. :-)

New rides @ Legoland

There are a few new rides at the so-called Land of Adventure area inside Legoland. The kids enjoyed all of them, especially this one called the Beetle Bounce:

The Buzz Lightyear-like ride called the Lost Kingdom Adventure felt like it could have been made by ambitious camp directors (Anson?) for church summer camp -- that is, pretty good for amateurs, not that impressive for professionals. :-)

Legoland

Legoland wasn't quite as crowded (we went on a Wednesday), but they are still plagued by the slow-moving-line syndrome. Something about their rides and the way they pack people into them mean than even short-looking lines can go for 30-40 minutes.

On the plus side, this was the first year Cameron could actually ride some of the attractions, including the drive-your-own-cars which he treated more like bumper cars than a simulation of a city street.  :-)

Summer Vacation

We just got back from our last-week-of-summer-vacation jaunt to Disneyland and Legoland. You can see the pics on Smugmug. Here are a few teasers (along with the ones you can flip through on the right side now, thanks to Blogger's fancy-new-widgets -- go to Dashboard and click on "Make Blogger Draft my default homepage" to get yours).

Disneyland was crowded pretty much everyday this week, in case you were planning a trip of your own around this time. Without Fast Passes, I'm not sure we would have actually ridden that many attractions.

Back here in the real world, thankfully, lines move much faster (though there was a humdinger of a line trying to get out of the San Mateo Farmer's Market this morning at 10 am -- didn't see that one coming!).

Pastor Rick Warren

Set your Tivos!

Pastor Rick Warren of Purpose Driven Life fame will interview the presidential candidates one after the other at his church tomorrow.

CNN is carrying it at 5 pm Pacific time.

An article about the event:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/14/warren.forum/index.html

Program details:
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/saturday.html

Colin turns 8

Colin just turned and is headed into 3rd grade. And he just lost his first baby tooth, which seems later than typical. But still, I'm not sure how we ended up with a 3rd grader already.

This year, in lieu of a party, we're going to Disneyland just before the school year starts up. Hopefully the mild summer will continue as we head down south.

Speaking of flirting with other technologies...

...I've been doing some spelunking in the open source world of Linux. Mostly Ubuntu. More on my discoveries later. I've converted my old laptop into a dual boot, and wiped an even older laptop my mom uses sometime into an Ubuntu-only machine (it was getting too old to really run Windows XP).



My observations to date: the open source community is astounding in its productivity, and if they could spend less time implementing the same feature over and over again and more time focusing on Apple-quality design and simplicity, the vast majority of users shouldn't really have to upgrade to whatever slow, bloated, internally inconsistent OS Microsoft ships next.

Ubuntu really does seem a major release or two (ok, maybe 3) away from being consumable by most people who are sick of forking over $150 to Microsoft every 2 years for not all that much to show for it. And with so much happening on the Web these days, who cares about what your desktop is doing? Imagine a world in which iPhoto and iTunes were in the cloud -- do we really need another forklift upgrade of desktop OSes which breaks all your applications?

Weclome to our new look

Welcome to the new look. Leave a comment to let us know whether to stick with this one or go back to the old one. Or, for a more radical look, check our our flirtation with Wordpress. Ooooo, dark!

In addition to the new Blogger template, I added a few new items on the right side, including a list of all tags, a blogroll (list of blogs, for people who speak English and not Web-hipster-speak), and links to our outposts on LinkedIn and Facebook and a few other places.

After you visit the Wordpress page, vote for your favorite look (more than 1 vote is ok) on the top right.

(Yes, we are still flirting with moving our digital domicile to Wordpress. But after stumbling across the beta of Blogger, I'm not feeling the urgency. Still, Wordpress does do some pretty templates. How would this be for a tech marriage made in heaven: Google's innovative Web technologies married with Apple's design savvy? I mean, I love Blogger and Google Mail and Google Docs and Google Calendar and Google Reader -- but they sure are dowdy compared to to Apple Web properties.)

The verdict

The kids are getting better at bowling (they've been 3-4 times this summer as our local alley is sponsoring a "free game a day" for kids during the summer -- "say yes to bowling, no to drugs").

As for me, I'd probably better practice some more unless I plan on bowling in the Barack Obama league. On the up side, I did save a few good throws for Cameron after he got tired. :-)

Real bowling

After months of training with the Wii, we took the kids to an actual bowling alley to see what the real deal is like. Well, it's a lot harder for everyone. Spinning the Wii bowl is a cinch compared to trying to get a decent spin on an actual bowling ball. But of course nothing beats the satisfying crunch of real pins getting knocked down.

Here is Cameron as he drops the ball -- about a quarter of his weight -- into the lane. You'll see why I say "drops" instead of "rolls". :-)

Concentration

We ran the recycling up to school last Friday morning because the tireless recycling coordinator for the school is collecting over the summer.

The kids had a great time since they had the school playgrounds all to themselves. While Cameron did most of the riding, occasionally he wanted to get out and push. Katie obliges him here by serving as his passenger. I love his look of concentration as he pushes his big sister around. :-)