Last night, I went to see the Oakland Athletics take on the Seattle Mariners at the Oakland Coliseum with Edna, Erik, and Rae. It was the first time that I went to a sporting event at the famed Coliseum. Rae and I drove to Union City and took the Bart over to the stadium. This was way more convenient than braving the traffic up 880 and paying $12 for parking.

Earlier in the day, I prepared dinner for the evening: chicken/tuna salad, hand-picked plums from our backyard plum tree, hummus and bread. The bag that I put all the food stuff in wasn’t allowed the first time we tried to enter the stadium — the lady said that it was too big. Poppycock! It wasn’t over the upper limite of 16×16x8! She wouldn’t listen to my explanation so we left, turned the corner, and rearranged a few things. Then, we went to the other stadium entrance and were let in by the nice man manning the entrance. Take that!

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Cynthia’s parents are in town, and on Monday night, they took Edna, Erik, Cynthia, Christopher, and I out to dinner at Farallon Restaurant in San Francisco (450 Post Street). Mark Franz is the owner and Executive Chef at Farallon, which specializes in coastal cuisine. Farallon opened its doors in June, 1997, the same time that I graduated from college. It quickly earned a reputation as a must visit restaurant in San Francisco. The moment I walked under the jellyfish lamps and the ocean-inspired curvy walls, I knew that we were in for a culinary treat.

In lieu of writing about how good the dinner was, I’ll show you some of the dishes that we had.

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The June 2003 meeting of the Camera Owners of the Bay Area featured a printing shootout. Earlier in the week, I sent an email out to members to print out a few sample images using their printer of choice. A number of people brought their images in, printed using a Fuji Frontier (CostCo), an Epson 1200, an Epson 1280, an Epson 875, and a Canon 950i. It was interesting to compare the differences in color between the prints. The results from the Epsons were all very similar, but the results from the Canon were a bit off. I suspect that it had to do with the printing software and color management as opposed to the printer itself.

There was an extended show and tell session during this meeting. I demonstrated a Photoflex Litedisc and my Rotatrim paper cutter. Chuong showed off his new Lumiquest Big Bounce flash diffuser while Dave demoed his dual lens can widget. Roger from Pixlabs took us through a demonstration of his new product, PhotoFramer an excellent program for easily creating frames around your images. I can see myself using this product from time to time, but unfortunately, it’s a Windows only product.

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Cupertino’s quickly becoming quite the ghetto. A few days ago, a car alongside our house was hit by an errant five pound rock right through the rear windshield. A couple of days later, eggs were tossed late in the evening, hitting four cars along our block. Eggs can easily be dealt with, but a broken rear window is going to cost money and time. Sigh. The officer who took my report said that at least three other cars’ windows were broken the same night. Sigh.

Today, my Apple Pro Mouse decided to stop working. It’s been acting erratically lately, refusing to send its signals back to the computer. Using the power of Google, I found out that the cable at the cable/mouse junction sometimes get frayed, leaving you with a useless mouse (unless you opt for mouse surgery).

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Last night, I drove up to the City with Susan and Rae to the Hyphen Magazine Release Party at Club Bas in North Beach. Hyphen Magazine: Asian America Unabridged, is a “news and culture magazine that illuminates Asian America through hard-hitting investigative features on the cultural and political trends shaping the fastest growing ethnic population in America.”

As a sidenote to all Blair Hornstine’s out there, don’t forget to cite your references!

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For those of you who are not familiar with Blair Hornstine, here is a quick summary. For additional information on the subject, please visit the links section at the end of this entry. Skip to here you want to see the Blair H. Project trailer.

Blair Hornstine, 18, is a senior at Moorestown High School (MHS) in New Jersey. In May, 2003, she sued her school district to be named the sole valedictorian of her graduating class. Blair has been diagnosed with a condition similar to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). She is thus classified as a disabled student, which by law, affords her certain accomodations from her school district. For instance, she is able to go to school for a few hours a day, has private, at-home tutors, and does not have to take the state-required gym class. In place of gym class, she can take additional Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Furthermore, her classes are not graded by the normal curriculum teachers, but by her private tutors, who were chosen for and approved by the school district.

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I’m glad that John is up in the Bay Area for work several days out of the week, as it gives us the opportunity to hang out and wax philosophic about life over dinner. Tonight we ventured to Aquis, a Mexican restaurant in the Willow Glen area of San Jose. One thing that struck me while sitting in the outdoor eating area — aside from the bird that crapped into our hummus salsa dip — was everyone was white. Aside from one older Asian women sitting a few tables across from us, we were the only other Asians around. I read an article recently that put the Asian population at 11 million, or 4% of the U.S. population. That couldn’t be, I thought to myself. It is, however, and it’s the fact that we live in the ethnically diverse Bay Area that skews my thinking on the subject.

I don’t recall noticing this fact when Vienna and I were travelling along the East Coast and the South during her tour in April. Maybe I just wasn’t looking or observing enough. Dunno.

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The team for the Voices In Your Hand project got together today for a BBQ at Stanford University. Paul Rankin, the head of the project, is a Fellow in the Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship Program. He’s assembled quite the team from the Stanford community and beyond, and it was nice to meet several of them, including Grace, with whom I graduated from Stanford in 1997. I seem to keep running into people that I knew from school!

Also in the crowd was Tom, an ardent Vienna Teng fan. John fired up some great BBQ for the crowd, everyone of which had a great old time in the sun. It’s certainly been hot the past few days; after I got back from the BBQ, Randy and I went to play some baseball at the local diamond. Those soft baseballs we have certainly take the sting out of getting hit by the pitch or by an errant flyball or groundball.

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