This photo is special for 2 reasons. For one, I couldn't be happier
for Lilian, who got married to a very devoted and dedicated man,
Jeffrey Lee. It was a wonderful ceremony at her family farm in
Pescadero, with an even better reception at the La Costanera
restaurant in Montara. Now, the second part is what I consider a
major milestone; our group picture order was called by the wedding
coordinator, and specifically we were ranked #7. The ones in the top
5 were the bridal party, bride's nuclear family, bride's extended
family, groom's nuclear family, groom's extended family, etc. We
managed to upset the likes of Lilian's college friends, Jeff's MBA
school friends, etc. That is a big thing for us considering how small
of a program we were to begin with (we don't come from an automatic
qualifier conference like some other groups), and we were also missing
our star player (currently in Michigan). For us to achieve this
ranking is phenomenal, and to achieve it in such a national spotlight
for the world to see, I hope will allow us to contend for that coveted
national championship.

I hope for the next game we can all be there, as the last time we were
able to do so was at Shuyi's wedding in 2006. This is one of my favorite
pictures of all time. And the other one, when we all met in early
2003 at Roche Biosciences Palo Alto.

Last weekend I went to my friends wedding, Matt and Robin, who I met
many years ago while playing ultimate frisbee. The wedding was held
at the illustrious Holly Farm down in Carmel. It was a most serene
location, but when you insert many, many white people and a lone china
man it makes for some serious entertainment.

The second photo takes place during the wedding reception, where
Michael and Linnea had crafted this game for them to play. The
objective was for Matt had to wear a spiked cone on his head and
attempt to burst the balloons filled with Sacajawea coins into Robin's
apron. It was pretty funny but I had to hold one of the bitter ends
steady and that was heavy as shit.

For the late night festivities we downed two shots of vodka as a toast
and I somehow managed to figure out a song for everyone to sing to,
which to Dean's delight, who hollered from the stairs, was Oasis. A
lot of Aerosmith and Queen requests if I remember correctly except I
couldn't think of anything else but some Bon Jovi and my usual staple
of the Journey repertoire.

A lot of credit goes to the photographer, www.kylehepp.com, for her
dexterity and creativity. These are some wonderful shots she took,
and of course congratulations and much thanks to Matt and Robin for
having me there to celebrate with them.

http://www.kylehepp.com/2011/09/holly-farm-wedding-robin-matt/

http://www.kylehepp.com/2011/09/holy-farm-wedding-robin-matt-part-ii/

I found one of these emails received from a customer to be pretty funny

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Leonard Snellman
Date: Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 6:32 PM
Subject: Mac compatibility
To: support@jaiosports.com

I just bought a Beacon T500. I am very disappointed to find out there
is no Mac support for the product. I will be returning it to my
retailer. I have a work lap top at home that runs Windows software,
but figure that any product not compatible with my Mac will not be of
the quality I would expect.
Lenny Snellman

My Dad and I seem to have the same penchant for stopping on the way of
a road trip to visit random college stadiums. and Oliver People's
glasses. I at least went to Div 1.

 

Bronco Stadium

Williams Brice

Bobby Dodd

Ben Hill Griffin

Aggie Stadium

4 months ago, Mahesh and I jointly purchased a turtlecall for $2, with
the advice of Raman, for our friend Tony. The whole purchase was
perhaps the most stressful endeavor I have ever encountered.

I filled out the necessary information and proceeded to wait for a
good 6 weeks until I decided to write off the investment. However
with Mahesh's equivalent share percentage we looked to press on. We
were early adopters of the service and willing to wait for the service
to work out its kinks. And then I received this piece of
communication while at Dhara's wedding:

From: heather from turtlecalls
Date: Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 10:44 AM
Subject: your turtlecall to Tony in California

Hi Jonathan,

When we were going thru our growing pains back in March and April, we
were bombarded with a large volume of calls & one spreadsheet got lost
in the shuffle. It had about 30 calls on it, one of which was yours.
The system is perfected now and we apologize. Can you please re-enter
your call and it will be made in a timely fashion. Use your original
paypal receipt number. If you don’t have it, insert the words “per
heather” instead. www.turtlecalls.com/form2

So sorry for the inconvenience...

Heather :)

So again, I called up Raman and had him give me the information we
used to fill the original form out. This is the end result of the
hassle:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: heather from turtlecalls
Date: Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 9:34 AM
Subject: your turtlecall to Tony in California

we were unable to reach your person and left them a nice voicemail in
our turtle voice - thank you for using turtlecalls - we hope you will
use our service again in the future

Mahesh suggested that I request a free Don Cheadle upgrade but by then
I was just going to be relieved if the call was even successful.

So that's our experience, I hope it works out for all you others out there.  I can't say I'm not pissed cause I am. 

Mahesh and I went to the WonderCon show in early April to check out
some of the new developments. We sat through the Thundercats revival
and saw the voice of the original Lion-O. I came to this epiphany
that I may be too old for cartoons. We found this row of exhibits
that were staffed with aging stars and actors of yester-years past.
In theory, I thought it would bring back a lot of nostalgia, but the
exact feelings one got were akin to those evoked from watching The
Wrestler.

Later on we spotted and took a picture with E-Honda, then I took a
picture with the proprietor of the Slave Leia Costume Company. What
you see in the picture is basically what they sell, plus some
variants. Apparently there is a niche within a niche when it comes to
Star Wars costumes.

I also met the founder, and editor in chief of Girls and Corpses
magazine and was duly impressed.

Yesterday 大姊 and her ball-and-chain, Raymond stopped by my neck of the
woods to see how I was doing and also do some shopping at the outlets.
Before leaving, Sharon pulled up all the requests she had from her
friends in Taiwan to doublecheck and make sure she had them right.
But when I saw the one for the boxer briefs, I was completely floored.
Behold the following product requirements document, its a gas:

After 3 years, my friends Ben and Jud (I hesitate to say 'finally' for
anything because anything worthwhile is never easy), with their sweat,
blood and probably mostly tears, have opened the doors to their
brewery down in Austin, TX. I received a tour and was thoroughly
proud of their efforts in putting everything together. It really is a
magnificent sight. As an original paltry investor I was able to
redeem some of my dividends in the form of brews, both the Blur Texas
Hefe and the Envy Amber.

I'm not going to go in here and describe the palette as if I'm some
pretentious beer critic, I have virtually no credibility seeing as how
I drank an expired Coors Light earlier, but all I can attest to the
quality is that I've known Ben since graduate school for 6+ years and
he is one crazy bastard. And if you know that old children's rhyme
from the sea I'm referring to, then the full embodiment of his
personality is what is necessary to make Circle Brew great. Ben and
Jud are truly men of their craft. If you ever find yourself in Austin
and you did not drink this beer, you would be doing yourself a grand
disservice. You would be shooting yourself in the foot-- literally,
not figuratively.

http://circlebrewing.com/about.html

These are a set of pictures captured by my sister. In one of these
photos, my dad drew a false start penalty by farting prior to the snap.

It does not take much guessing to determine which one that was.

These are my father's verbatim comments in an earlier email when he
viewed the series of pictures: "This is how man reacts so calmly when
something horribly happens- Pictures draw the conclusion : Reaction is
always dramatic on the other side."

Merry Christmas to all my readers.

Today, Dhara, my personal psycho the-rapist, forwarded me this article
on the Wall Street Journal about the chinese mom.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html

After reading it, it made my mom look like a saint because in no way
was she anywhere near this bad. My mom would never withheld food from
me but she did talk about a locking mechanism for the refrigerator. I
knew that was an empty threat from the beginning because my mom has a
food science degree, and there was no way she could source the
mechanical components nor engineer herself a working contraption. We
had enough money to get by as a family so the solution to outsource
that system to a contractor was not going to happen anyway either.

While I am definitely against this method of Gestapo parenting, I can
understand some of the finer points of building discipline and
encouraging a hard work ethic. There's a line in the article about
how Chua's kids are not encouraged to be in the school play or any
extracurriculars that fell outside of the standard asian regime.
What's scary about this is that, when my sister and I grew up, we were
never encouraged nor discouraged to be Villager No. 6; but at the
time, we never even considered being in the school play or
participating in dramatic arts because all of our parents friends and
kids didn't do that, so naturally we felt it wasn't the right thing to
do, so my sister and I learned Q-BASIC programming instead. My sister
hates computer science. Looking back, I think I didn't try a lot of
things because of this strange influence.

It's not to say I regret where I am today, I certainly don't. I know
my loyal readers here (catherine, david, brian, lilian, yu-hung) know
that I love what I do and who I am but it does make me wonder what
would've been if I had at least tried my hand at something else
worthwhile at age 16, instead of, say studying SAT vocabulary.

Who knows, maybe the school play could have worked out for me in high
school. I could have been a huge, successful lesbian on Broadway
today.