During that time, I’ve taken some personal time off, but in all of those cases, I took time off to attend weddings in faraway lands such as France, Rhode Island, and Minnesota. I finally came to my senses on Thursday in deciding to take a well-needed break from work.

Weddings weren’t that far from my mind, however. On Thursday, I went to the wedding rehearsal at Ardenwood. Edna and Erik came by on Friday to use my printer for some wedding photos they wanted developed. If that wasn’t enough, tomorrow is the big wedding shoot day in Fremont. I guess days off from work and weddings go hand in hand these days when it comes to my life, no?

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Wedding rehearsals are key to any well run wedding. Practice what you’re going to do before you have officially. When the curtain goes up, however, you only have one shot at history. It’s the same with wedding photography — there is no second chance! Working in the technology industry, we’re used to delays upon delays with software and hardware projects. Introduce a bug? No problem! We’ll fix it tomorrow. Weddings and events aren’t like software projects; they have to be right the first time around.

At 6:00 pm, close friends and family convened at the Ardenwood Farm in Fremont. Joe and Cam, along with their wedding planner, Beverley, planned a quick run through of the wedding procession. Cam’s parents were there, along with the maid of honor and best man. Another person who’ll be shooting the event, Dan, rounded out the small group at Ardenwood.

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On the fourth Tuesday of every month now for the past several years, the Stanford Newton User Group convened at Printer’s Inc. Cafe in Palo Alto. The numbers were once strong, though in recent years the group’s numbers have dwindled to only a handful of people each meeting. With the “death” of the platform in 1998 at the hands of Apple executives, who would think that people would still be using it years later?

This past Tuesday, we had an all-time high of people, 8 Newton devotees. At this point, we might outlive the Printer’s Inc. Cafe! There weren’t that many people there that night, a far cry from the heyday of the dot-com industry, when the place was packed with would-be millionaires. Gregory, Flash, Peter, Kevin, Dave, Wayne, Eric, and I arrived at or around 8:00 to comment on the state of Newton and to catch up with old friends.

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Friday night, I drove up to Hearst Gym in Berkeley to see the Berkeley Wushu Team demonstrate their skills to wide-eyed freshman. There are some definite differences between Berkeley and my alma-mater, Stanford. While the Farm resembles more of a country club, Berkeley appears to the new student as an urban environment where everything goes (at least to my eyes). More diversity and more reality give Berkeley a harder-edge to it. I wonder what it would have been like had I went to Cal instead of Stanford. Would I have ended up the same person that I am today? I for one, doubt that. I would have been exposed to a more ethnically, socially, and politically diverse group of people, and I probably would have done more outside of the university given Berkeley’s proximity to San Francisco via BART. Stanford was isolated in the sense that you couldn’t really get anywhere without a car.

As expected, there were a lot of Asians in the Berkeley Wushu class. The people attending the demo was also skewed to Asians, but there were a number of non-Asian people there. With the recent popularity of martial arts movies from Jet Li and Jackie Chan, interest is growing. When I was a freshman, one of the first classes that I started taking was Tai-Chi at Roble Gym. I could see the same interest from many in the crowd Friday night. Many of the demonstrators were flying around doing flips and other impressive moves. Still, my own excitment and interest was tempered by my desire to see more internal martial arts demoed. We only briefly flirted with learning the internal aspects of Tai-Chi at Stanford. It certainly wasn’t the fault of the instructor; rather, it was the system of martial arts in America — a system that places more emphasis on what can be seen instead of that which cannot be seen — which I think is to blame.

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It’s been a tough week for everyone in the nation, and I must admit that after Tuesday, work become a distant concern of mine. I’m probably speaking for a lot of people when I say that I didn’t get much work done after Tuesday. One cool thing that the company did was assemble 200+ Palm VIIx wireless organizers for some FEMA teams being deployed in the New York area. I had an extra, unopened Palm VIIx box in my cube that I donated to the effort. I hope that the devices are useful for those working in “the pile” as ground zero at the World Trade Center is being called.

At any rate, this past weekend, I vowed to bring some semblance of normalcy to my life. I started it out by not watching television nor listening to the radio, as that would have probably depressed me to the point of being useless Saturday. Instead, I researched backpacking equipment for my upcoming trip in October. I’m not sure where we’re going to go, but it’ll probably be out of the immediate Bay Area.

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These are the days that you don’t think will ever happen in the United States. I’m in a state of stunned disbelief at the events that have transpired this morning. It makes no sense. I can only pray for the victims in this tragedy.

Terrorism has reached American soil at a level unprecedented in its short history. The bombing of Oklahoma City and the previous attack on the World Trade Center hold nothing against what happened this morning on the East Coast. Four planes headed for California were apparently hijacked, diverted, and crashed into prominent American landmarks, including the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

I received a call this morning on my cell phone, waking me up from my sleep this morning. I didn’t believe it when I first heard it. “The World Trade Center is gone.” The World Trade Center is gone. “What do you mean it’s gone?!?” Gone.

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Scout the location. In preparing for an upcoming wedding shoot, Randy and I drove across the Dumbarton Bridge to the Ardenwood Historic Farm. Ardenwood is a picturesque complex that accurately recreates what farm life was life a century ago. Tractors, farm animals, corn fields, and railroad cars populate Ardenwood, drawing visitors from all over the Bay Area.

I had never heard about Ardenwood until I signed on to shoot this wedding at the end of September. I’m beginning to understand and appreciate the importance of scouting a location before wedding shoots. It helps to know the area before shoot. That way, you can better visualize how to record this special moment in two people’s lives. Randy and I wandered around the farm for about an hour, taking shots and shooting video of the complex.

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I had lunch with Tom, Fanny, and Vijay at 3Com’s cafeteria. 3Com has seen some major cutbacks in recent months and the campus seems sooo dead these days. The cafeteria, once bustling with people from both 3Com and Palm, is not empty during the lunch house. I’d hate to be working at that company, always running under the uncertainty of tomorrow. In today’s marketplace, however, it’s like that for many companies in the Silicon Valley.

Tom’s a nice, laid-back guy from the Cambridge, MA, area, but he has the look of someone straight out of a James Bond movie! “007, your next opponent is the deadly PM Tom Lerra. Be wary of his quick smile and sharp wit.”

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We can do it.

The past two weekends, I’ve helped Rae film and photograph her documentary on Qiu Jin, a Chinese revolutionary and poet from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The week before, we did some scenes of Rae dressed up as Qiu Jin. This past Labor Day Weekend, we filmed three more scenes at Rae’s place in Saratoga with the D30 and the VX2000:

• Military Woman
• Marlene Dietrich: Her tuxedo outfit from Morocco.
• We Can Do It!: J. Howard Miller’s painting of Rosie the Riveter.

The footage that we got then wasn’t as good as the stuff we filmed a couple of days ago. I guess our powers are growing stronger with each passing moment, no?!? All that being said, I still feel a little wet behind the ears and ill equipped. Got to get a better tripod, I figure.

In the blaring heat of the spot light, Rae held in there quite fine, even when wearing all those heavy costumes and while under the makeup. She had the tough job; I just had to press record and pan and zoom the camera. Filming is difficult, Journal. But, the only way to get better is to keep on practicing! I’m finding that I have a lot to learn about backgrounds and lighting. It’s funny, but those are the two skills that I have always needed more practice with in my drawings. I could always draw the figure, but I could care less (or couldn’t do) the backgrounds as well.

In between video takes, we had some fun with the camera, getting me dressed up in the military costume (man, that belt was tight!) and shooting Rae as Odd Job from Goldfinger. The next day, we also made Rae into a little rebellious child by putting a new tattoo on her left ankle.

At any rate, it’s 21:49 right now. I feel exhausted after the past few days. Work was really, really tiring. Watching an ungodly classic duel between Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras tonight in the Quarterfinals of the U.S. Open just drained me. Sampras won 6-7, 7-6, 7-6, 7-6 in a four-set tiebreaker thriller. I wanted Agassi to win, but alas, it was not meant to be. Now, I’m rooting for Sampras to go all the way. It’s going to be tough, though, since he now faces the man who crushed him in last year’s final, Marat Safin. Sounds like a video game character!

We can do it!

We took Rae’s roommate Michael out to San Francisco to celebrate his 30th birthday this weekend. For dinner, we went to the busy Indian Oven restaurant, located in Lower Haight. We met up with some of their mutual friends, including Keith, Terri, and Lee, and Deb. At first, our table sat six people in six chairs. Lee came a little late, so we were stuck with a conundrum. Seven people, six seats. Hmmm… Rae, Michael, Deb, and I placed our seats next to each other and made one giant sofa for the four of us! Seven people and six seats? Nothing to it! Michael is left-handed, and I’m right-handed. It made eating a little difficult, but I’ve had it worse when my elbow was dislocated back in February of this year.

After dinner, we drove a short while to the Fillmore, where Reverend Horton Heat was playing. He plays a style of punkabilly rock. I’d never heard of this band before, but hundreds of Reverend fans lined up the insides of the Fillmore, dressed in very interesting garbs. There was even a guy dressed in a kilt! Lots of leather and old-school looks at this concert. The music itself was not bad… I’ve been listening to a lot of female performers lately, so it was a definite change of pace. There was a mosh pit that I jumped into at the end; I don’t think that I’ve done that since I was a junior in high school, dancing at the Locomotive nightclub in Paris, France! You have to be extra careful in a mosh pit, since there are some big, burly guys who can hurt you with their flying elbows or prodigious beer bellies!

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