March 11th, 2010
After putting up a video of Jax, I couldn’t help myself and went and found a video of Rupert when he was a puppy. Sadly, the video is out of focus for some reason, but the content outweighs the problems in this case, so I’m uploading it anyway.
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I got married. Congratulations to me and my lovely wife.
We chose to have a simple thing at the JP here in San Francisco (just like Jessica Alba, our role model). The real story behind this date involves Karen’s Mom. About a month before, Karen tells me that her Mom says that this day (March 25) was the only “lucky” day to get married this year for the two of us. This is based on me being a pig ear and Karen being a Lion’s butt, or something like that — Chinese superstition stuff. Since this was only a month away, and on a Tuesday, we joked about just going ahead and doing a JP-wedding for about a week, and then decided “what-the-heck, let’s do it.” Neither of us were enjoying the process of trying to figure out a cool wedding plan anyway. We never quite figured out anything we completely loved, but knew we didn’t want anything traditional; from there, a night of planning ended up being a night on the Wii. We flew Mom and Dad out and they served as our witnesses at the courthouse, and Srijesh dropped in as well and took some great pictures too. It was actually a beautiful setting — San Francisco City Hall provides a great backdrop.
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This is probably an example of counting my chickens before they have hatched, but we believe we have a new puppy. I say that because the site indicates the puppy as “adoption pending,” but we have yet to receive the confirmation that we are the “pending” home they are referring to. Still, from the talk with her yesterday, and the home visit we had yesterday, I think we are in.
We had been looking at the SF SPCA and the Animal Care and Control, which have been helpful, but then our impatience threw us out to craigslist, and then to this Pet Finder, a great site with animals from all over the country, and the ability to search near your area. We found out about Spike (who will be renamed to… um…) and Furry Friends Rescue.
This is a “home fostered” puppy, which means that he has never been in a shelter. There is a sweet related side story: The mom was going to be put down, but a volunteer offerred to take her. A vet had said it was early enough to abort the pups, but they ended up arriving only a day before the abortion (nice job, vet). So she ended up taking the mom and the complete, adorable litter.
We should be able to take him home this Friday. We’re very excited.
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When reading my December issue of Wired Magazine, I found out about a contest that Casio was putting on for the best “high-tech crib.” You needed to submit a 2-minute video of your crib. Considering how much of a geek I have been with all my gadgets, I thought I had a pretty reasonable chance of winning. Once I found out that you could win a $3,000 gift certificate to Best Buy, I got quite interested. After a frenzy of taking and retaking the video on New Year’s Eve (the last day of submission), I got the video into them at the last moment.
Watch the other videos that were submitted: http://www.youtube.com/casiousa (Click on the “Vote” tab 
to see the videos)I won due to a number of factors. Yes, I have a cool crib with a lot of gadgets… sure. In addition, the rules state that you can’t state any trademarks or brand names. Most people didn’t read that. So you could say I won on a technicality. If you watch the other videos that were submitted, you’ll see just how many people said “iPod” instead of “portable music player.” Also, there were four categories - fortunately for me, I submitted mine in the one with a little less competition. Finally, way less people than I am sure Casio expected even entered into the competition at all. You could page through the submitted videos on their site, and maybe only about 100 videos were even entered!
So anyway, I won “first prize,” which is truly “second place,” under the “grand prize.” This ends up being a $500 Best Buy gift certificate, Casio camera and a 2 gig card. I’m pretty excited. In all, I think the contest was meant to make a point: uploading to YouTube is a pain with regular point and shoot cameras. I got the point - it was a pain.
Quick Rant
On the other hand, I am disappointed in the advancement of video technology on these little devices. Over three years ago I bought a Canon SD300 which records at 640×480 and 30fps. During that time, we have seen the average resolution of still pictures increase from around 3Mp to 10Mp. Why then have we not seen a similar increase in video resolution, or even much of an increase at all? My theory: So companies can sell their new HD camcorders. Why would you put down $1000 on an HD camera if you can buy a compact camera that gives you most of what you would actually use in a much smaller package? You wouldn’t. That said, this Canon sounds cool.
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