Jun 27 2012
Got a nice shot of my mom with one of her prized rose bushes. All of a sudden it started to grow by leaps and bounds with rosebuds sprouting from almost every new stalk, and this made her very happy.
Wouldn’t be surprised if she turns this into a rose tree.
Jun 24 2012
Our fifth staff/volunteer meeting was held for the first time at the location of where Comic Fest is actually going to take place, the Town and Country Resort and Convention Center in Mission Valley.
The meeting started at 2:00 and was held in the upper floor Garden Salon Two above the Garden Ballroom. Each meeting so far has brought more volunteers than the last and this was no exception. This time there was an impressive twenty-three of us. The meeting lasted about an hour and a half, after which we kind of stood/sat around and talked for another half hour or so, waiting for our Fest rooms to become available for a walk-through.
We headed over to the Regency Ballroom which is separated into the Windsor, the Hampton and the Sheffield. This will be the Exhibitors’ Hall. To me it appeared to be a fairly impressive sized room, but I’m sure it will seem quite a bit smaller when it’s filled with dealers’ tables and wandering attendees of various sizes.
Next we walked across the way and checked out the Eaton room, one of the five satellite rooms that will be used for panels. This room seemed really small to me. But then I’m having a hard time trying not to compare it to Comic-Con.
From there we walked a ways, passed one of the pools, to the Regency Tower. This houses actual guest rooms but the very top floor has three function rooms that we will be using to create Café Frankenstein, an onsite coffee-house and hangout joint, as well as a room for an art exhibit/auction. The largest of the three rooms, Le Chanticleer, will house the café. The other side of the top floor, the Windsor Rose room, will have the art exhibit. Not sure what the central room will be used for yet. We learned that apparently this floor is haunted by a little girl in a blue dress who fell over the outside railing. Most of our people thought this might make an added good draw to the Fest.
With the Fest four months away (with Comic-Con looming in between) it’s finally starting to feel like it will be a professionally run event.
Jun 20 2012
Stunning new time-lapse video with some really cool ways of displaying segments and detail information.
T-RECS – Night Skies from T-Recs (Timelapse Recordings) on Vimeo.
Jun 19 2012
So today I was notified that I became a Silver Expert in Mexican Food and Tacos, as well as a Bronze Expert in Barbecue on Foodspotting. I am appreciative of the recognition but find this a bit puzzling since I haven’t posted anything on Foodspotting since the middle of May, and that was a shrimp burrito, with sea bass before that. I do have a few foods still to post but like Tinkerbell’s rear end was once heard to say, “I’m just a little behind.” (I just made that up. That’s funny right there.)
I’m starting to get a sneaking suspicion that they might be using my Facebook masticating album entries or Twitter posts as a reference, although the last meal I posted about on Facebook was meatloaf, then tuna before that, fish tacos before that, and barbecue before that.
So basically I have no idea how they are keeping score any more, but I’ll keep taking the points.
Jun 18 2012
Today is my younger brother, Tommy’s, birthday. He was born in 1960. That makes him 52 years old. He is now a very successful pediatrician in New Mexico. Through a bizarre series of quantum causality time-shift events he was teleported back in time to Banning, California in the early 60s and is now a patient of himself.
When he gives his child self a shot no longer can he say, “This will hurt me more than it hurts you.”
M' Bro
Jun 17 2012
Had a chunk of the family over for dinner tonight, including my older brother, his daughter and my sister. My mom made delicious Hungarian gulyás (goulash) but with rice added for some extra thickness. First time I’ve had it this way but I liked it.
Another first: my sister brought over three tiny watermelon looking things. They were Mexican sour gherkins and I had never even heard of them before tonight. They looked like toy watermelons on the outside and tiny green tomatoes with relatively giant cucumber seeds on the inside. They tasted like slightly bitter cucumbers, but not unpleasant.
And that’s how I spent my Father’s Day evening.
Jun 16 2012
Other than the regular alien abduction and prerequisite probing, day three of house/pet-sitting for Heather brought no surprises. No cats disappeared, no birds flew away, no FBI agent knocked on the door, no two-foot wide tarantula crawled out from the fireplace, and no neighbor came over to “borrow a cup of sugar” from this virile and available young man. (Insert vomit here.) None of that happened this time.
For the short time that Gordon and Theo were actually at the house, they did what cats do best.
Jun 16 2012
I was at the Tapias’ house when they harvested some vegetables from their amazingly fast-growing garden. The bounty included three Cherokee Purple tomatoes and four pickling cucumbers.
Even Lilo, who showed amazing self-control since she absolutely loves tomatoes, joined in on the home-grown excitement.
Jun 15 2012
Started my second away-from-home day with getting some shots of both Gordon and Theo before they disappeared into the Chula Vista wilderness, a.k.a. the neighbors’ yards. Ended my day by partaking of some fantastic trifle that Heather had made for me to enjoy. I shared it with the Tapias when I visited with them. And being makers of great desserts themselves, they enjoyed it at least as much as I did.
Thanks, Heather.
Jun 15 2012
Finally, after many frustrating attempts to complete some graphically intense projects, Sylvia got her new 13 inch MacBook Pro. Her old, refurbished iMac crashed and rebooted one too many times, usually just before she saved her work. And today it came to a head.
Rodrigo and I visited a local Apple Store to pick up the new computer as well as a couple of other minor items. While he purchased her device I had time to play with the brand new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. What a thing of beauty. My webpage and this blog never looked so good.
Since the 13 inch screen is a bit smaller than what Sylvia is used to, we drove over to a nearby Best Buy to also pick up an external, secondary monitor for her. After carefully scrutinizing the colors and sharpness of many screens we both decided and agreed that specific a 24 inch made by Dell looked the best and had the best specs for the price.
Once back at their house Rodrigo set up her computer and monitor while I helped her with one of her graphic projects. Unfortunately the Dell monitor may be going back because it just did not look as good at their house as it did displaying visuals at the store.
Jun 15 2012
As I was doing my daily watering while house-sitting at Heather’s house, I came across this Fall webworm larva (Hyphantria cunea) casually munching away on a large zucchini leaf. Since it is neither my plant, nor my problem (and partly because its such a cool looking insect), I left the caterpillar to keep eating away.
Fall webworm larva (Hyphantria cunea)
Jun 14 2012
Began my cat/house-sitting stint in Chula Vista for the Vander Schurrs. Since I didn’t really have much time for taking pictures of either Theo or Gordon, I decided to try something different: one anonymous hiding behind my camera shot showing way too many fingers, the other of me being a silly, emotive model.
At least the house is nice.
Jun 12 2012
After finishing going through “The Horse” exhibit at the Natural History Museum my mom and I decided to walk across the way to sit and have a nice al fresco sandwich lunch at The Village Grill. I had tried their tuna melt before and liked it quite a bit. Unfortunately they didn’t have it any more but they did have a Tuna Salad Panini on the menu. Ordered that along with a side if fries. Turned out to be a really good sandwich but the bread slices were so huge that I ended up not being able to finish it. My mom ordered a simple grilled cheese sandwich that she really enjoyed.
A nice surprise was running into my friend Bethany and her two kids, Taylor and Cooper. We sat with them while my mom and I ate our sandwiches. Even shared our fries with Taylor.
As we were walking back to our car after lunch we had a fun encounter with the San Diego Zoo Train. Cute way to end our Balboa Park outing for the day.
Jun 11 2012
For today’s Apple keynote address at this year’s WWDC at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, I set up my computer with four browser windows, three in Firefox to watch live blogging from Engadget, The Verge and MacWorld, and one window in Safari to watch TWiT Live’s coverage of the event. Everything worked flawlessly. Just wish Apple would stream the event.
It was an incredibly feature-rich, two-hour presentation that focused mainly on three areas: updated MacBooks, demos of new features in the Mountain Lion operating system coming out next month, and a ton of new features in iOS 6 that runs all of Apple’s mobile devices.
The presentation kicked off with an upbeat and personal address by Apple CEO, Tim Cook. He basically warmed up the audience of developers for lots of cool stuff to be announced.
Phil Schiller followed Tim Cook to talk about the hardware updates to the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro lines. While nice that they were upgraded, it wasn’t very keynote worthy. At least until they surprised everyone with a brand new line of MacBook Pros with specs that would make any computer geek drool: 15 inch retina display, 2 Thunderbolt and 2 USB2/3 ports, Intel quad-core i7 processor, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA graphics processor, 256GB flash storage/no optical drive, HDMI output. That had everyone there digging out their credit cards.
This was followed by sneak peek demos of updates to OS X Mountain Lion coming out in July. These included new features for Notifications, a more robust and intelligent Siri (finally including application launching), a new Safari with better tab management and integrated Twitter, over the air game play with other devices through Airplay and for laptops the new Power Nap which still lets the computer update even while sleeping. 200 new upgrade features, all for less than $20.
Lastly came all the iOS 6 demos which included the more intelligent Siri which can be integrated into a number of vehicle manufacturers’ vehicles, better designed and more intuitive notifications, finally Facebook integration, and a new app called Passbook which keeps all your retail/rewards cards, movie tickets, airline boarding passes or train passes so you don’t need to keep an y of these loose items in a wallet or purse. And they get updated automatically. Plus you can make purchases, such as at Starbucks, directly from inside the app. They also demoed the more robust Guided Access abilities for handicapped people. They showed a video of a blind man listening to walking directions being given by Siri. And finally they introduced the new Maps app, integrated with Siri and which gives turn-by-turn directions as well as a cool new 3D, vector-based flyover view of major cities.
It finished with Tim Cook returning to the stage to again thank all the developers in the audience before closing out the keynote. It was a lot of information to digest in a wildly positive and flawless, two-hour presentation.
Jun 10 2012
Since finishing the ten-day Amoxicillin regimen for my tooth infections and after the resulting two weeks of…abby-normal…occasionally urgent…um, evacuating…and after discussing my oft-seated situation with my medically-trained brother, I cheek-clenched my way over to a nearby CVS to pick up some probiotic tablets to battle this unfortunate…Game of Thrones.
Here’s hoping that in a few days my newly arrived, microscopic tenants will help wipe away this condition and turn me back into a socially adept masticator with balanced intestinal flora.
