We returned to Maui this summer after our wedding there 8 years ago. It was mainly a family vacation but we scheduled it so we got to celebrate our anniversary on the island. It was a quiet celebration at Roy’s, one of our favorite Hawaiian fusion restaurants.

The girls are bigger now, so traveling with them is so much easier & less hassle. Also helps that we traveled a little lighter this time. Airlines these days charge hefty fees for additional or over-weight baggage.

The girls had blast, spending most of their time in the pools & beaches. We pretty much stayed put at the hotel most of the time. We didn’t even make it to Kea Lani (hotel where we stayed when we got married) as planned. Katelyn got around the pool by herself this time, good to see those swimming lessons paying off. In fact, she’s pretty much like a fish. Allison too enjoyed it more since she’s much more comfortable in water.

We hooked up with a few friends. My buddy Vince flew over from Oahu; hanging out with him and his friend Vijack made us feel less touristy. We also hooked up with our friends, the Truongs, for a few days. Our hotels were close by, so the girls got to swim with the Truong boys. It was a shame our stays only overlap for a few days. One highlight of the trip is a sailing trip with Alex & Nicholas. The kids were super excited we spotted dolphins & turtles. It was a first snorkeling experience for our girls. It was a kick for them to see the fish & corals in the water.

Another highlight was a trip to Haleakala summit with Vince. Haleakala is a dormant volcano in Maui. We started out around 2AM up the windy road and made it to the 10,000 feet summit while it was still dark. Dozens of other tourists crowding at the the little shelter– it was very cold and windy. Dawn broke and we saw a glorious sunrise (my last memorable sunrise was at Bryce Canyon in Utah). Wow– sunrise above the cloud! Vince & I spent the next 4 hours snapping pictures, including some with us jumping up & down at the top of the world. That was great fun.

We also took the girls to a luau at the Sheraton, it was way overrated for me. But it was the first for the girls and they enjoyed it. They even went up the stage with Suzanne to do the hula.

As with other family trips, I found I was so busy having fun with the girls and I barely have time to shoot some real photos. In fact, I had all but one opportunity to shoot sunsets. So the night before we left, I spent 2 hours in the middle of the night shooting some night photography. It was cool to walk the emptied beach at night under the moon light. Plus I don’t have too many chances for night shooting.

Below is a few shots, check out more here @ Flickr or here @ Shutterfly.

Earlier this year, I resurrected the girls’ fish tank. Took the girls to the local pet store, Allison chose an orange guppy and Katelyn chose a gold fish.

Katelyn named hers Fred; Allison named her fish Rose.

I set up the fish tank in their bedroom and made it a ritual for the girls to feed the fish before going to bed each night. While I still have to remind them, Allison is always happily feed the fish. Katelyn on the other hand isn’t always keen about it. And it shows…

Rose is doing well. On the other hand, we’ve gone through Fred I & Fred II already. I promised Katelyn we’re going to take her to get Fred III later today.

Let’s hope we can fool Rose with Fred III. Perhaps she’s wised up about the situation already…

Just installed the new iPhone app from WordPress. Sweet…
Blogging this post from my iPhone!

Sometimes instead of running several sessions of SSH’s or putty’s, I run Emacs with multiple shells– this cuts down on the number of windows I have to deal with.

To run a shell in Emacs, you invoke the Lisp function “shell” via meta-x shell. This creates a buffer called *shell*. Running it the second time though doesn’t create a 2nd shell buffer as you might expect, instead it brings you back to the original shell buffer. The trick is to rename the original buffer to avoid name collision. The quickest way to do this is via “rename-uniquely" function via meta-x rename-uniquely. It renames the buffer to a similar but unique name like "*shell*<2>“. Now if you start another shell.

The better behavior is for Emacs to automatically create new buffer with unique name. Perhaps there’s a hook to configure this that somebody can point me to.

I was lining up at the AT&T store last night to pick up my iPhone. This one guy at the front of the line picked up his phone a few minutes earlier and came up to the employee:

Guy: “Where’s the wand to my iPhone?”

Employee: “What wand?”

G: “You know the thing you write on the screen with.”

E: “Oh, iPhone doesn’t have one, you don’t need it!”

G: “Then how am I going to write it?”

E: “You use your finger, it’s a touch screen.”

G: “But I need a wand”

E: “You really don’t need it, let me show you…”

E: showed the guy how to use it

G: “I want my wand, where’s my wand?”

The episode cracks me & all the folks at the store up. And it goes to show some people are buying into this iPhone craze without really understanding the product they’re buying.

Ah, the omnipotence of Steve Jobs…

Where’s that bandwagon that is iPhone? After skipping out on the 1st generation, I decided that I too will join the iPhone generation. I was one of those dorks that lined up when iPhone 3G was launched. They ran out of the model I wanted, so I placed an order rather than settle with the available models.

Anyway, my unit finally came & I picked it up last night. It’s a beautiful device and I can’t wait to put it through the paces! If only I can pry them from my girls’ hands… The fact that even my 4 year old can operate with easy the first time is a tribute to its design. They’re all over it.

Funny… but it says it all, doesn’t it?

Last week was the big launch of Firefox. This week, Eclipse Ganymede will be launched tomorrow.

Eclipse is a popular open source IDE. Each year, the Eclipse Foundation ships annual releases, so far around the summer. It’s a release vehicle where all major Eclipse projects release & synchronize their code. The Ganymede (all releases are named after Jupiter’s moons) release this year represents a simultaneous release of 24 eclipse projects– an incredible scheduling feat if you ask me.

I’ve been using several release candidates and so far so good. For an overview of the new features, check out this article. Coolest feature is probably muti-core CPU support.

So, go get the bits here.

Been having issues with my computer at home recently…

First the video card died inexplicably a few weeks ago so I upgraded to an Nvidia 9600; now I’ve got DirectX v10. But it still sucks considering it was only 18 months old. Then last week’s heat wave finally fried my CPU. I had trouble installing the heatsink on the CPU when I built my current machine last year. My guess is that there’s always been heat dissipation issues and the heat last week was the last straw.

So I spent some bucks getting a quad-core CPU and a spanking new Asus motherboard as well as some additional RAM and a terabyte hard drive which by the way is an engineering marvel: cramming 1 terabytes in a few 3.5″ platters. 6 hours of working late into the sweltering night and I finally got a pretty beefy Windows Vista system running. Other than the computer case and some RAM modules, it’s pretty much a brand new system.

Been testing it past few days and it’s rock solid and very zippy. Despite careful research, I did spent $700; for a few hundreds more I could’ve gone and get a Mac. I did contemplated it but decided to take the plunge later when I upgrade my notebook.

Last week, the girls helped their mom making me an omelet on the morning of Father’s Day. We then head out to the backyard to snap some pictures before heading out to Suzanne’s sister’s for lunch and then a movie. Caught Indiana Jones finally…

Here’s a snapshot of me & my 2 girls on Father’s day.

We were driving yesterday and explained to the girls that we were going to look to buy a house.

Suzanne: We are going to look at a house because we’re looking to buy a house.
Allison: We’re going to buy a house?
Suzanne: Yeah…
Allison: Are you kidding?
Suzanne: No.
Allison ponders then said: But how are we going to bring it home, Mommy?

Ouch! Lakers choked & gave up a 24 point lead and lost a home game to the Celtics. Their championship run is doomed as they are now down 3-1. What an unbelievable meltdown.

They don’t deserve to be champions with a historical collapse like this, especially when Boston held off the Lakers after they stormed back from being down 22 points in Boston. Celtics are the clearly the better team.

With the recent final-four loss by UCLA, this has been all too-depressing!

I was so disgusted by the months long fight over the name “Little Saigon” in San Jose city council. If you’re not a Silicon Valley local, you may not be familiar with the “controversy” over naming a business district “Little Saigon” that took months to resolve and involved world class drama that included disruptive protests, recalling an elected official and even a hunger strike by a well-known fanatic. As far as I know the city hadn’t solved the issues of crimes, corruption, homelessness etc… So, it made you stop and go WTF?

Now there are signs of political backlash against Vietnamese candidates. Gee, that’s a surprise… It’s funny now that everybody is blaming everyone else for their dismal showing in recent election. A recent Vietnamese candidate who gathered a mere 760 votes, blamed the council woman for her humiliating showing, how dignified! The ridiculous drama wasn’t just embarrassing to witness but also undid years of political advances of the local Asian communities.

I know I’ll never vote for these folks in the future, let alone folks outside of the Asian community. What idiots!

As if the world needs yet another iPhone blog post, but I must say that I am super-excited. I’m definitely gonna get one and retire my old sucky razr. It’s timely since our AT&T contract is up this summer.

It’s always wise to skip 1st generation of a new product, and I’m glad I did. That’s not to say I was tempted. The 2nd generation adds 3G network and GPS. I’ve been putting off getting a GPS device for my new car. I can’t wait to see the many location-based applications that will be coming out. In fact, I might consider writing a few apps myself!

Most of all, I’m looking forward to lugging one single device. Oh yeah…

I canceled our subscription to Netflix and is going back to Blockbuster. The main reason is the rediculously long wait for popular new movies. Almost every popular release has a status of “long wait” or “very long wait”. Case in point, I’m still waiting for “There will be blood” which was released months ago. With blockbuster, I used to get new movies when they’re released.

I like Netflix video streaming service, I would’ve stayed with them just for that. Unfortunately, the available libraries are pretty slim and the video is highly compressed (not surprising). Plus, our daughters like going into the store to pick their own kiddie movies. And since the summer is here, it makes sense for the switch.

I was helping Allison finishing up her bathroom “duties”, when Allison stepped on the stool in front of the sink and looked at herself. Then she grinned and said:

“Hello gorgeous!”
Then she bursts out laughing…

That girl is too much!!!

I received news that my last-surviving grandparent passed away yesterday. She was 95.

I haven’t seen her in the last 30 years. My last memory of her was when she took my sister & I out to the market to sell a basket of fruits that she harvested from her orchard one day; my parents had sent us to stay with my grandparents on their farm during the final days of the war. It was dangerous and chaotic time when the communists were launching the offensives that eventually overtook southern Vietnam.

When I was little, our family usually celebrated the new year by visiting my grandparents for a few days. It was always a treat to visit a small village and stay on a farm for a city boy like me. My grandparents’ place is by a river and has all sorts of fruit trees and farm animals. The best thing was eating all the home-grown fruits. Jack fruits being my favorite. I loved wandering among the trees and sometime I’d work up the guts and go all the way to end of their orchard and check out the people working in the adjacent rice paddies. I never stayed there too long for fear of getting lost– the place seemed huge to me.

Each new year, my grandmother would bake up all sorts of bake goods for the celebration. I do remember fondly of her ginger cookies. She was constantly busy. I’d jump at the opportunity of helping her feeding the chickens and the pigs. I remember one time, she chopped down this young banana tree and sliced up the entire tree and cook it as part of porridge for the pigs. She’d sometimes reward me with a fresh egg. She’d drop it into a glass of hot water and voila, hard-boiled egg.

My grandmother was a small and skinny woman. She was surprisingly resilient though– remaining strong even in her later years, my Dad told me. She stayed all her life in the same village: born and died there. The hard life she lived showed through on her rough hands and hardened face.

I regret that my daughters never got a chance to meet any of their great-grandparents when they were alive. I guess they’ll have to learn about their great-grandmother through the stories I will be telling them.

Goodbye Grandma…

I use Flickr for sharing my photographs. While I like the social aspects of it a lot, I always find the page rendering to be too minimal for sharing (after all these are pictures not search results).

Shutterfly is a “personal expression” site and is one of few sites that store photos in full resolution, with no storage limits. Your photos are guaranteed never to be deleted. All free of course. Check out the photo books, they’re pretty awesome!

This isn’t meant to be a shameless plug. But Shutterfly is beta-testing a new photo share service. It’s very cool and super easy to design pages and render photos. Since I started to upload pictures on a monthly basis mainly for online storage, now I can effortlessly share them and make prints all in one place. I’ll use Shutterfly for family photographs but I’ll definitely continue to use Flickr for my other type of photography.

Anyway, check out Our Lives In Pixels of regular updates of our family pictures…

Allison is known to be the drama princess in the house. Here’s proof from yesterday when the sisters got into a small arguments:

Katelyn: “Stop that …”
Allison: “You stop it, Je Je (big sis)”
Katelyn: “I said stop it, Allison!”
Allison: “No…”
Katelyn: “Keep your balloon over your side…”
silence… then Allison: “Je Je… you broke my heart!”