Azaria

We've been sampling a bunch of nearby restaurants during the holiday shutdown, courtesy of a dramatic discount at Restaurant.com (it's still going on until the end of the year -- get your 80% discount by entering the coupon code CELEBRATE when it's time to checkout).

Today, we visited the very yummy (though pricey) Astaria in San Mateo where the old Lark Creek Inn used to be (attached to the Ben Franklin Hotel on East 3rd). I think those were the best French fries I ever had. And certainly the most intruiging bread pudding. Go get a gift certificate and try it out for yourself.

Here's their very California take on fish and chips: a raw marinated tuna served with house-made yam (or some other exotic vegetable) chips. Tasty. Very friendly service and upscale ambiance as well: great for a special occassion.

Sorry about the photo quality: I didn't drag my Nikon DSLR in with me, so this is from the Canon point and shoot.

Time to go to church

 

Cameron is such the fun age now. He's also the family's class clown -- always laughing and with a mischievous gleam in his eye. We're not ready for all the children to grow up as fast as they are!  For some reason, I liked this shot of the tiny guy as he and mommy head up the hill to church.

Lawrence Hall of Science

Frank took the kids up to the Lawrence Hall of Science at Berkeley on Saturday. It was a beautiful crisp winter day, and we enjoyed a perfectly done thin-crust pizza at Zachary's (mmmm, tasty!) to fortify ourselves right before. Cameron polished off an enormous slice the same size his siblings had.

The pizza restaurant was employee owned and operated, and the servers were remarkably friendly and attentive. Don't know if there was a causal relationship, but it was refreshing to be served by friendly folk. An employee owned enterprise: very fitting for the Berkeley backdrop.

The museum was perfect for the kids: they enjoyed all of the exhibits, especially the interactive ones that were part of the traveling Engineer It! exhibit (see it now, as it's only in town until January 4). Though Katye declared her favorite exhibit was the gift shop where we saw a motley collection of dramatically enlarged stuffed germs called the GIANTmicrobes.

 

See the photo album on Smugmug.

Christmas kids

OK, we leave the 2008 Christmas season with a triptych, courtesy of SantaSnaps, a freebie Mac application that friendly folks at MacHeist are (were?) giving away.

Next time, we'll have to to pick a time when the light is streaming into the office just so, but the kids enjoyed posing nonetheless.

Ruby reds

Wow, they weren't kidding when they named these ruby red grapefruits. Here's Cameron reaching for some delicious grapefruit (from which mommy carefully peeled the bitter outer skin).

And here is Colin's reach:

Do you like one of these images more than the other? Leave a comment to share your thoughts.

The Nikon does not like my compact florescent lights. The auto white balance setting doesn't look right, and neither do any of the preset color balance settings: it's not quite tungsten, and it's definitely not fluorescent. So I'll have to figure out how to compensate properly (don't know how to use that feature of the camera yet).

Also, I shot these pics with my dad's old, old Nikon 50mm lens which doesn't autofocus or meter with my camera. Nikon calls these non-CPU lenses since they don't have embedded smarts to work with the camera's electronics. So I'm going old school playing with various metering settings until I get a half decently exposed shot.

But the lens does open wide, which creates the arty blurry backgrounds. I also learned that photographers have a fancy word for this blurry background: bokeh. Sounds like some Greek dessert, though I believe it's actually from a Japanese term.

(Yes, I'm just playing with my new toy now. This is what vacations are for!)  :-)

A fabulous brunch at La Boheme in Burlingame

We just had a fabulous brunch at La Boheme in Burlingame. It's just like being in Paris, except the waiters are friendly and speedy (sorry, couldn't resist -- but that has been my experience in France every time I've gone).

The flavors in each of our dishes just popped. The bread was yummy, the potatoes were yummy, everything was yummy. After each bite, I was just left thinking, "wow, so that's what jam (or chocolate or ham or butter or hazelnut) is supposed to taste like." As they say, it's the ordinary dishes which give chefs the opportunity to really show their stuff.

Read the Yelp review, then see the pictures, then drive over to La Boheme and enjoy!  Yum!

(Loving my Nikon DSLR, in case you are wondering. Smugmug is going to regret offering unlimited photo uploads.)

 

 

A lesson in humility

Faithful readers will remember that a few posts ago, I shared my goal to bowl a perfect game in Wii Sports bowling. I think my high game was 265, which is all strikes except for a 7 and 2 in the last frame -- not when you want to choke!

So for my lesson in humility: I was playing with the kids last night ("Wii family bowling", we call it). I was bowling all out -- no mercy bowling to let anyone win. You can see the results below. Let me provide the legend to our Miis. In order, that's:

• Cameron, age 3 (yes, age 3): winner with 192
• Daddy: age withheld: runner-up at 182
• Colin: age 8, bowling in at 180
• Katye: age 5, with a total of 153
  

Hats off to di di (Cameron), who earned more than 70 points on his way towards being a bowling pro.

Daddy is very proud that he got schooled by his three year old. (Yes, I know you want your kids to do better than you in all aspects of life, but I didn't know it was going to start quite so early.)

Sushi!

To celebrate Fedora's birthday, we ordered up the gigantic Joy Sushi Special. Would you believe this is their medium-sized sushi combination? Now I'm totally curious to see their large, which they call the Joy Sushi Cruise Ship. Maybe it features multiple decks?

Here are the hardworking sushi chefs assembling our boat. It took them about 45 minutes to finish, which seemed a little long. But we were in no hurry, so we enjoyed catching up with Tim and Sumin.



I hope this will be the first of many "shots I couldn't get with my point-and-shoot camera", as I was probably 30-40 feet away in a poorly lit environment when I snapped this shot from the 2nd floor balcony.

Yup, that means I finally broke down and got a DSLR (Christmas present to myself!). In retrospect, I think I paid roughly the same for my shiny new Nikon D90 (sans lens) as I paid for my first Olympus point-and-shoot years ago. Ah, the relentless march of progress!

I was on the fence between a Canon and a Nikon for the longest time, but finally decided I could get outstanding results with both cameras. Then I found a good deal on a twice-used 18-200mm Nikon zoom lens on Craigslist, so I concluded that God wanted me to get the Nikon. :-)

Virtual Box

If you've ever:

• Been curious about what a different operating system (say Ubuntu or Windows Vista) looks and feels like
• Need to run the odd Windows application (say Quicken) on your Mac
• Have a Vista machine but long for the simpler, nimbler days of Windows XP without blowing away your existing Windows installation
  
• Wanted to surf in a safe environment without worrying about Bad Things on the Internet (viruses, malware, etc.)
  

Then you should go get the free VirtualBox (the latest release, version 2.1, just dropped today). It helps you do all of those things, it's free, and it's pretty lightweight on system resources. (There are a few caveats, so talk to your resident geek to understand what this approach will protect you from -- and what it won't protect you from, such as phishing attacks.)

I just upgraded to the 2.1 release using my Mac as the host. I'm running Ubuntu, Vista and XP and guests. Now that VirtualBox supports the fancy technology in modern Intel chips (VT-x) to speed up virtualization, it's smoother, faster, and more responsive than ever.

It's not for resource hungry games (this is what I keep my old Dell around for), but for all the scenarios I mentioned above, it's amazing free software. I have no idea what Sun gets out of it, but don't let that bug you: just go get it.

Just as OpenOffice is not quite as powerful and full featured as Microsoft Office, VirtualBox is not quite as powerful or full featured as VMware Fusion or Parallels. For example, its implementation of "Seamless Mode" which mingles your guest OS windows with your host OS windows is a hack compared to Fusion's. But you can't beat the price. For the simple things I need out of a hypervisor (that's what nerds call this kind of software), it just works.

Aside from games, the only thing that doesn't work all that great is streaming video from Netflix. (streaming from Hulu and most of the major broadcast networks works just fine.) But now that the Netflix can do that directly to a Mac, I just watch on my Mac.

When 1 is not enough

This is when Cameron decides one popsicle is not enough and reaches out to take mom's.

Yum: popsicles

Colin and Katye enjoy popsicle time at Frank's parent's over the weekend. Well, Katye enjoys her fudgesicle while Colin is a little behind and hasn't opened his yet.

Christmas tree

We put the Christmas tree up right after Christmas. One of our light strands died, so we replaced it with a strand of almost too-bright LED lights.

That's the relentless march of technology for you: brighter lights using less power.

Here in the picture, we got this set of one-eared cats from a McDonalds in Taiwan a few years ago. I think they're from some comic series that's on TV in Asia.

In the useless skills department...

In the utterly useless skills department, I'm trying to bowl the perfect Wii bowling game by the end of the year.

I swear the Wii can sense when you are closing in on it and ratchets up the precision you must achieve to get a strike. No, really. :-)

Wow: 40 years!

We were privileged to celebrate a momentous milestone with Fedora's dad this weekend. He's celebrating -- count them -- forty years of ministry with the 29th Avenue Baptist Church in San Francisco.

In our twitchy, Twitter-y culture, people have a hard time doing anything for forty weeks continuously, much less forty years. Hats off to Reverend Chin for a lifetime of steadfast and sacrificial ministry on behalf of our God.

See more pictures on Smugmug.

BFAM Christmas Party

 

This year's BFAM Christmas party had a more modest turnout that most years, but that meant more food and fun for the people who did come.  :-)

The kids enjoyed making their own fragrant smelling Christmas tree ornaments and eating Smarties along the way.  If you brought one of your child's ornaments home, make sure it's baked enough. Speaking from horrifying personal experience, if you leave too much moisture in them, they get furry -- and not in a good way.

See the whole gallery of pics on Smugug.

Another HP Friends and Family offer

If you haven't bought your holiday cards, Snapfish is offering HP friends and family (yes, this means you) 20 free photo cards if you buy more than 20.

So go forth and claim your photo cards.  Use discount code HPFRIENDS during checkout.

Tivo day

I declare today Tivo day.

Earlier this afternoon, I dropped by Tivo HQ in Alviso to participate in usability testing for a new feature they're working on (improved searching, essentially). It's fun to see new features under development, and they reward test subjects well. :-)

Also ran across this offer for a free Tivo cookie cutter for signing up to be on their mailing list (it's possibly you can even opt out of actually getting spammed, but I didn't try that). Get yours here.

Under the chairs

We were warming up to take an extended family pictures for Thanksgiving, and the kids decided that under the chair was more fun than on the chairs.  :-)

 

You can see the more rest of the shoot on my dad's Picasa Web Album.