Today, I went to Best Buy with Randy to check out their cheap laptops. What rebates dropping the price of some laptops to $599, I have to wonder if the manufacturers are making any money on these computers. We checked out Best Buys at Santana Row in San Jose and in Milpitas.

I must say that PC laptops are ugly compared to Apple PowerBooks. The only decent-looking laptop I’ve seen recently is the small Sony Vaio sub-notebooks, or as I’ve been telling Randy, “Sony Vaio with XBrite Technology!”

After our Best Buy browsing experience, I headed over to downtown Mountain View for lunch with Yuji. We ate over at this new tofu house on Villa Street. I don’t remember what was there before, but Yuji said that it was some generic Japanese restaurant. Another restaurant that has recently closed is the Global Village Cafe on Castro Street. It’s sad to see it go, since the owners were really cool. The Global Village Cafe is also where Virt Records first heard Vienna play live!

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The former Palm WISE group got together at Vive Sol restaurant in Mountain View for its annual White Elephant Gift Exchange party.

It was great to see the old gang together once again, including Vinay, Carey, Gary, Vijay, Carl, Charles, Fermin, Greg, Raja, Debbie, Tatyana, John, Trevor, Glenn, Vince, Fanny, Dave, Lisa, Thomas, Katherine, Brian, Jon, and Morgan. Out of the group, 9 of them are still at Palm, whereas the other 14 have moved on to new ventures.

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Bulletproof.

Only hours after we screened War Photographer at the final COBA meeting of 2003, I learned that James Nachtwey — the subject of the documentary — was injured by a grenade attack in Baghdad. A former editor of his from the 80’s mentioned in the film that older combat photographers tend to think of themselves as bulletproof — incapable of being killed on the job. Nachtwey was in danger of thinking of himself as being bulletproof.

War Photographer followed Nachtwey as he photographed global hotspots such as Kosova, Indonesia, Palestine, and Africa. The director Christian Friel outfitted Nachtwey with an ingenious video camera mounted to his Canon camera body. This approach allowed the viewer to see what Nachtwey saw as he photographed the violence and despair surrounding him. I’m not sure if I prepared the COBA crowd in advance of the subject material of the film. I had seen the film a month earlier in the basement of Green Library (their media center is now located there instead of the second floor of Meyer Library), and I was numb after watching it. I suspect the same was experienced by those in attendance.

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Best Buy would be one of the last places I could think of as a venue for Vienna Teng to perform. There she was last week, however, performing in front of fans and Christmas shoppers at the Best Buy in Santana Row in San Jose. Some of the usual fans were there, including Levi and Vanessa, and Michele and Eric. I also ran into Gordon Lai and his family; not only is he a Vienna Teng fan, but he also frequents tow.com and Eric Cheng’s! Hey, I can’t argue with that!

Actaully, Fry’s is one of the last places I could think of, but that might just become a reality one of these days!

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Po’k and Tom came by the house last week to knock out some scenes for his upcoming film, Pupil. In the drizzle, Po’k, Randy, and I filmed Tom exiting the house and driving away. It’s always fun to see the creative process in progress at Clubertino. We’ve had parties, documentary and now feature films created at our house!

Here are some behind-the-scenes photographs from the filming of Pupil.

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Rae’s friend from college is getting married! Christine and Ben had their wedding engagement party at Andy and Amy’s in Berkeley. Rae had a good time reconnecting with her college friends, Christine, Nicole, and Jen.

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Catching up on events the past few weeks… on the 5th, Rae, Levi, Vanessa, May, and Salim headed out to Hanamaru in Sunnyvale to celebrate Salim’s birthday with sushi. I don’t understand why people have an aversion to eating a nice nigiri or sashimi. Sushi is nice and yummy! Maybe people aren’t used to the texture and consistency of raw fish. No worries, cause that’ll mean more sushi for me!

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MoveOn.org is sponsoring the contest Bush in 30 Seconds, “a political TV ad contest to help us find the most creative, clear and memorable ideas for ads that tell the truth about George Bush’s policies.” At the time Rae and I decided to go ahead and submit an entry, the deadline for submissions was a week away (December 5). By Sunday, Rae had the script and storyboards worked out, and by Tuesday we had all of the props and backdrops created. Thanks to our friends and family, we were able to get all the filming done on Wednesday evening. Thursday was spent editing the sound and video footage. On Friday, we finalized the last few details before submitting it to MoveOn’s web site around 6:00 pm.

Thanks again to our actors and actresses in the short, Dardy, Thomas, Randy, Ginger, Javier, Raphael, Heather, Joon-Mo, May, Salim, Steve, Susan, Vanessa, and Levi. Thanks go out also to Po’k and Jim, who helped us with the sound and soundtrack! We couldn’t have done it without you!

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A couple of weeks ago, I went to an IDEO Unfocus Group in the City. Most of the people who attended the session were from the City and were all dressed rather city-like. Rae has been saying that a few of my new outfits resemble hip city-clothes, and she’s right!

The purpose of the unfocus group was to brainstorm ideas on products intersecting the areas of mobility, living, and communication. We weren’t told who the ideas were for, but you’d have to think that it’s some company trying to get a foothold in mobile communicator marketplace. It’s certainly not a big-named company like Apple, Palm, Yahoo!, or Microsoft…

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