A Week at Alpine

Ski Buddies
[click on any photo for a larger version]
President’s Day marked the first day of Karsyn’s winter break from school (not to be confused with Christmas or spring break), so we rented a cabin up in Tahoe City with our friend’s Steve and Tracy. It was a great week of skiing, lounging and playing with the kids.

Karsyn continues to become a better skier every time we hit the slopes. We rented skis for her down in the Bay Area for this trip, so she was able to get in a couple of solid days of skiing. We hit Alpine Meadows and their tow bar lift to start day one. It took Karsyn a couple of tries to get the hang of the tow bar.

For those that are unfamiliar, the tow bar is an aluminum pole that’s attached to a cable that tows beginner skiers up the hill. The pole has a plastic disk attached to the end of it, so the skier slips the pole between their legs and uses the disk as a make shift seat.


Conquering the Ski Lift
Karsyn didn’t quite get the concept of letting go of the pole after falling on her first attempt to tow up the hill. I give her a lot of credit for holding onto that thing for as long as she did! I’m just glad I caught the pole behind her, because the pole itself is attached to the main cable with an elastic band. Once she finally did let go of the pole, the elastic was stretched to the max, so it rocketed forward.

She finally made it up the hill, but I figured that the whole tow bar thing was more trouble than it was worth. Besides, she would have to learn to get on and off a regular ski lift sooner or later. This was as good a time as any!

The funny thing is that it was actually easier for her to use the ski lift. She boarded the thing as if she’d been doing it her whole life. No problem at all.

Sonya and I traded off skiing the two days that we got to spend at Alpine, half the time skiing with Karsyn and the other half free to enjoy the more advanced runs by ourselves.


Too Cool!
Tahoe City is quaint little town nestled off highway 89, right on the shores of the lake. There are a few nice little restaurants along the main strip of town. We were trying to figure out where to have dinner on the third night, and were standing on the sidewalk when along came a short bearded man in a green velvet fedora and a camouflaged hunting sweater. I recognized that it was Robin Williams, who we had heard spends part of the Winter skiing at Alpine.

I excused myself and asked him if he knew of any good Mexican restaurants in town. We really were looking for a Mexican joint, and was going to ask the next bystander that walked by anyway, this one just happened to be an Academy Award winner (1997 Best Supporting Actor – Good Will Hunting).

He was very cordial and suggested a place down the street. I didn’t let on that I knew who he was, trying to respect his privacy to some degree. I suppose he has to deal with annoying people all the time. After assisting me with my query, he scampered across the street, jumped in an SUV and drove off.


Ski Bunnies
The restaurant turned out to be the Blue Agave, a cantina that we thought was affiliated with the restaurant of the same name in Pleasanton that we dined at a few months ago with our friends Scott and Christine (I later found out that it wasn't). We decided to skip the Agave thinking it was a higher end restaurant (not conducive to children) and ate at Rosie’s Café.

On our final day of the vacation, we took the kids to a sledding hill so they could blow off some steam before the 4 hour drive back to the Bay Area. I started to trek down to the bottom of the hill where I could video tape some of the action, but before I could make it all the way, Karsyn and Matthew came screaming by me in a plastic sled. Problem is, they couldn’t stop the sled. They did however get to experience Newton’s first law firsthand

“… an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

The unbalanced force in this case, was a rock hard snow man at the bottom of the hill. “Abrupt” would be a good word to describe the fashion in which the sled came to rest. “Spontaneous” would be a good adjective to slap onto the description of the crying that ensued.


After "kissing" the snowman
Aside from a couple of bumps, both kids were fine. It’s reminiscent of the old Wide World of Sports show’s “agony of defeat” intro. Ouch.

For more photos of our trip, [click here]

Mini Reasons to Get an iPod

I was given a brand spanking new Apple iPod mini last week, so I decided to spend the weekend playing with the gadget that is all the rage amongst technophiles. My silver “mini” (it also comes in gold, blue, pink and green) packs a lot of punch for something that measures 2 inches by 3.6 inches and is a half an inch thick. Apple claims the 4GB of storage is enough to hold 1000 songs, but I uploaded almost 300 and my mini is almost half full.

No, I’m not storing operas, just plain old music. 2.5 to 5 minutes bursts of my kind of music. This 3.6 ounce device is also pretty easy to setup and use, even though the documentation was horrible. I wonder how much of a headache my mom or dad might have getting this device to operate.



The sound quality is a good as the files you load onto the device. Sampling songs at lower bit rates will return poorer quality files than those sampled at much higher rates. Considering that you’re listening through ear phones, a 380 bps digital file is really all you need. I suspect that pumping the music from the mini and into a receiver probably isn’t going to degrade the sound too much either, but I’ll get back to you on that one.

I was able to pull about 300 songs off of CDs in about four hours. It takes the iTunes software that is required to run on your PC (or heaven forbid your Mac) about two minutes to pull 8 to 10 songs off a CD. Swapping disks and picking the songs you want to pull off those CDs is where you spend most of your time.

Now comes my biggest complaint about the iPod. Seeing that I’m not 16 anymore and I don’t have countless hours of downtime to do absolutely nothing, I’m having a hard time trying to figure out when I’m going to actually use my new toy. A lot of the engineers at my work have them, and it makes much more sense for them, since they spend the majority of their time in front of a keyboard and monitor pumping out code.

I don’t have that luxury, so I’ll be lucky if I get to use it once or twice a week. I suppose I could use it when I work out, but that would require me to start working out again. Notice I said “again 

Anyway, we’re going skiing during President’s Day week, so maybe I’ll get a chance to enjoy my new pocket sized CD collection then.

If you’re thinking of venturing into iPod land, the mini only runs $250. Apple just released a cheaper, smaller version call the Shuffle, which runs $99. The regular 40GB iPod runs around $400, but you get ten times the storage of the mini.

The Battle Rages On

So if you want a glimpse into the battle raging between Yahoo, Google, Microshaft and the pool of wannabes out there, be sure to check out sites like WebProNews. You'll get nice snippets of the back and forth product wrangling that these companies are tussling over. It's really an intriguing time in the evolution of the internet.

Self expression is evolving into the great unabashed voice that everyone thought the internet was going to be all about, just five years after the fact. Paid inclusion is turning over revenues in the billions. Amazing stuff, but the best is yet to come. Convergence, accessibility and breadth of information will evolve in ways that nobody could have imagined just two or three years ago. This is simply the dawn of the information age, so embrace it, because you're immersed in it.

Another cool resource for info (especially on Yahoo related news) is Jeremy Zawodny's blog. Jeremy is one of the engineering geniuses at Yahoo, who is also gifted enough to convey his views on technology in a comprehensive and interesting style.

If you're interested in reading about some of the happenings in the world of search, Yahoo also publishes a product blog on the topic.

The 8 Year Itch

Sonya I celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary today. It’s really hard to believe that it’s been eight years since we tied the knot. Seems like yesterday. We actually got a head start on the event by going out to dinner last Saturday night, sans children. We dined at Manresa in Los Gatos.

“Manresa is the showcase for the inventive cuisine of Executive Chef David Kinch. Influenced by French and modern Spanish Catalan cooking…”, or so says their website.

The food was inventive. A couple of the dishes certainly dazzled my palate. Manresa offers three to five course meal selections from a prix fixe menu. We opted to have wines paired with our food, hoping to have select vintages to compliment our meal. This was a mistake, which was partly my fault. My food selections leaned toward milder wines, which is exactly what I didn’t want.

Bold food, calls for bold wine. I wanted fireworks going off in my mouth, but instead, I was forced to endure a Spanish white that didn’t have the effect I was shooting for. Our friend of ours (who will remain anonymous in order to protect his well being) recently told me that "white was was made to keep the women happy, until the good stuff arrived."

If you choose to give Manresa a shot, do try the Roast Sea Scallops and the Smoked Salmon. Skip the wine pairings.

Party Down - Super Bowl Style

Super Bowl Sunday was a little more special this year, because I got to watch the game with Ryan for the first time. He’s turning out to be a huge football fan, so we pulled out all the stops for the game. Sonya whipped up a fantastic spread for all of us to enjoy, complete with plenty of beer. I decided to document the event with my camera, so here are a few picks of the game…

In honor of New England’s Teddy Bruschi (pronounced “brew-ski”), Ryan decided to hit the brew-ski’s early. Here he is pounding a Corona during pre-game introductions.


Hittin the beers early
By the start of the game, he was slurring and pinching the waitresses. Here he is falling over as Adam Venitieri starts the game with the opening kickoff.


Whoopsee
At halftime, things started to get out of control. He turned into a wild man, dancing with all the skirts. Here is cutting a rug with his mom, while Paul McCartney performs. Uh little dude, it’s bad enough you’re dancing with your mom, but doing it to Paul McCartney is just downright wrong! You may as well have been doing the robot to a Milli Vanilli tune.


The Dancing Machine
At the start of the 3rd quarter, Ryan really started to demonstrate that he can’t hold his liquor. He was practically passed out standing up. Granted, that pretty boy Tom Brady would put anyone to sleep, but come on!


Can someone grab his keys?
Well, the Patriots ended up winning the game 24-21 (almost causing me to toss my cookies), but it was just too much for Ryno. Hard partying, dancing and a Patriots win just don’t mix. He spent the rest of the evening in, well, let’s just say it wasn’t pretty.


Too much partying = Porcelin Pushups

Standing Tall

Now comes the hard part
[Click on any image to see a larger version]
It’s time to batten down the hatches and get locks back on all the bottom cabinets throughout the house because Ryan is a crawling machine and started standing (with the help of something to hold on to) this week. The little guy will be scaling things before long, which is not necessarily a good thing. Lots of new things to get into and explore, which translates to much more to worry about for mom and dad.

Sonya took him for his first spin around the block on the back of her bike (in a kid’s seat mounted to the back of her mountain bike). Karsyn has been riding her bike to school for months now, so Sonya decided to bike with her, and took Ryan along for the ride.

Karsyn was extremely proud of herself, because she got to ride her bike on the street. Grandparents, please refrain from picking up the phone to yell at us for allowing Karsyn to ride her bike on the street! Sonya rode right along side her, they took side streets, and walked their bikes across all major crossings (or so I’m told).


The Xbox Queen
Karsyn also recently received a gift from her friend Ayla, a Barbie Horse riding game for Xbox. We spent an evening this week trying to figure out how to help Barbie round up a bunch of missing horses from the riding stable she frequents. Not quite Halo2 or Ghost Recon, but Karsyn seems to like it. There are no aliens to blast or rouge mercenaries to kill, so this is one of the many Xbox titles that Karsyn can actually play.


Helping Barbi round up ponies
Note to self: Need to make sure the Barbi game is clearly marked as Karsyn’s so it’s obvious that this isn’t a part of my library of shooters and sports games.

And yes, that is a tatoo on Karsyn's arm. Our little Courtney Love got a three pack of tatoos from Grandma, and guess what, they next to permanent. Nothing like having a little Angelina Jolie scampering around the house. Maybe Uncle Gary can loan her a pack of smokes to make the new makeover complete.