I probably won’t blog about the whole thing right now, but I’ll cover a few highlights and revisit. It took Sam and I roughly 14 hours to get to Seattle due to flights getting delayed/canceled, etc. The one nice thing about that is that I got upgraded to first class flying to Seattle from Houston. I’ve got a ton of pics here, but I’ll directly include a few…

One of our first stops as a complete group was to Nielsen’s Authentic Danish Pastries. The danish I got was, in fact, very tasty. Recommended.

Prior to Sam, TC and I’s arrival, the group went to Serious Pie, but decided to go back again for first lunch. I had been there previously on a business trip and it did not disappoint the second time around. Recommended.

We walked around Pike Place Market, met up with Victoria, and then walked a mile and some to Pike Street Fish Fry and had some tasty “fish and chips” for second lunch. Recommended.

Off to Portland we go, and after checking in to our hotel, we hit up Aviary. It was really good. Highly recommended.

For a late night snack, we hit up Biwa. For some reason we thought they closed really late, but we got there right as they were closing up but they sat us anyways. Though the food was good, can’t say it stood out any IMO. If I lived in the area, I could see myself going back, but I probably wouldn’t make a point of visiting again.

In the morning, we waited a long time to eat at Tasty N Sons. It was worth the wait. Very recommended.

For lunch, we hit up Pok Pok, which was great. Highly recommended. Get the chicken wings. They were amazing. Afterwards, we got more dessert at Scoop.

After that, we make the long drive to San Francisco…

…and make a quick stop at Voodoo. It was alright.

We arrive in SF really early in the morning, but wake up in order to get some Chinese baked goods at Napoleon Super Bakery, accompanied by Tiff, Alex, and Kelsey who were wonderful guides. The dan tats (all I cared about) were good!

Our planned lunch, Swan Oyster Depot, was unfortunately closed for Labor Day, so we hit up Shalimar instead where I got some brains to eat. It was tasty.

A few of us then went to get ice cream at Smitten which also was tasty.

Off to French Laundry we go, all dressed up!

Unfortunately, I can’t say I’d recommend French Laundry. While I don’t regret going, I wouldn’t go again. The food was good, but not good enough to justify the price (I’d much prefer Alinea), and the service was so formal, it was awkward. I guess some people may like that type of service, but I found it a bit stifling. We had a good time regardless though, and there were definitely a few dishes that were pretty tasty, I just can’t say I’d highly recommend it to anyone.

The next day, we go kind of crazy and book two lunches and two dinners. For first lunch, we go back to Swan Oyster Depot. I’m super glad we did. This place was awesome, especially the smoked salmon. Highly recommended.

For second lunch, we went to a Burmese place, Burma Superstar. It was really good. Highly recommended. Nancy really liked the tofu.

After that, we hit up the Golden Gate Bridge and the Steinhart Aquarium.

I’ll stop here for now. I’ll continue with first dinner tomorrow!

Doh, I’ve fallen behind on blogging again. Well, here are some pics from last month when Olivia and Garrick came down to visit with their doggies:

Dark Knight Rises was good, but unfortunately not as good as Dark Knight. Not surprising, but I had my hopes up. I went to the marathon showing with Chad and Mikey and I guess Dark Knight is a pretty tough act to follow. I plan on seeing it again in IMAX and potentially enjoying it more the second time now that I know what to expect. My initial reaction - I wish they dropped the whole Bane backstory and instead spent that time on the Batman sidekicks. I felt like they spread themselves a bit too thin and spent time on inconsequential stuff while not enough time on parts that could have been really awesome. Anyways, it certainly was no Spiderman 3 or X-Men 3, so can’t complain that much I suppose. =) But darn it, I really wanted to be bawling at the end of this movie!

I’ve gotten an interesting spike of recruiters from the west coast contacting me via LinkedIn recently. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but it’s nice to know my profile is appealing I guess. ;)

At the end of the month, it’s WEST COAST ROAD TRIP TIME!

Rather uneventful July 4th, I suppose. Hung out at the Oches with a few others. The dogs tired themselves out good. =) Here are some photos, and some from previous play dates.

Little Miles:

Mozilla on the hunt:

Almost ready to pounce:

“Oh noes! I’ve been spotted!”

Here’s Sam checking out Weishan:

Here’s Chad feeding Nancy my new MacBook Pro:

Speaking of my new MacBook Pro, the retina screen is pretty awesome. Recommended++.

Oh, and…

https://twitter.com/owiber/status/220224933224132608

I’m moving over the blogs slowly to the RAX cloud, thanks to Chad. If you see this, it worked!

I went to see Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter with Oriana and Kevin. It was ridiculous… I guess worth seeing once. =p The guy who played Abraham reminds me of a young Liam Neeson. This happened while planning to see the movie…

=D

Ok, as promised, here are some of those puppy pics:

Also, these earrings that I ordered a while ago came in:

They’re NOT for me, but they were too awesome for me not to get. I’m guessing they’ll go to some lucky nerd girl at some point, haha.

This past week, I gave a demo to the entire company, which is quite a lot of people now. It thankfully went well, which was awesome because the demo crashed and burned at the dry-run we had, but I guess that’s why you have dry-runs. =) I’m generally not nervous when presenting on topics I’m knowledgeable about, but now that we’re a couple hundred people and presentations like this are more of a production, I was really feeling the pressure. Like I said, it went well though, so I’ve got nothing to complain about. =)

Rapid fire news!

• I ordered a new MacBook Pro (retina, of course).


• Sam decided to introduce me to new people. ;)


• Mozilla’s been farting a lot today. Think I’m going to switch to another brand of food.


• Viraj ditched us this weekend for his cousins, who I guess he’s contracted Sam’s issue because according to Andrew, he’s really flirty with them. =)


• BV All-Hands and TXJS

Oh, and I guess I’ll steal this from Oriana:

Argh, I’m starting to fall behind on blogging again.

I’ve been pretty busy recently. The new team I’m on at BV has me pumped up. I’m having the most fun I’ve had in a while. Great team and exciting work. I spent most of this past weekend working on various coding projects (not necessarily BV related). It’s been a goal of mine to write more open-source code and this past week I managed to send some code to a project and I wrote my own simple JS validation library (still rather immature). I called it TooLegit, haha. ;) Looking forward to writing more.

Last weekend, I also participated in RHoK Austin, which was fun.

Chad and Nancy got a new golden puppy, which has yet to be named. Here’s a video of Mozilla playing with it:

I’ve got some pics… they’re on Facebook right now. I’ll send them to Flickr and post them here later.

Okay, I finally went through a few photos. Here’re some of Mozilla from the new food trailer park where the Buffet Palace burned down:

Here’s the Mother’s Day gift I made my mom:

BV treated me to a fancy dinner, so I took Oriana to Uchi this past weekend. Here are some of my favorite dishes:

Here’s Oriana:

Tata!

A few months ago, I moved to a new team at work. I have no idea if I’m violating any insider trading rules by talking about it in detail, so I won’t. =) That said, I’m having a lot of fun on it now and I’m writing a whole heck of a lot of JavaScript which I’ve grown fond of. JS used to have kind of a “kiddie” language stigma to it back in the day, but I’ve learned it’s actually quite powerful and works pretty well for a lot of asynchronous tasks (which, in the world of the web, happen all the time). I’m itching to get some more open source projects (small ones, even) on my github account. Hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to soon.

I’ve got a few photos stuck in the camera that I haven’t processed yet from these past few weekends. I’ll get to them eventually.

Tomorrow night, Chad, Sam, Beika and I are going to see BATTLESHIP at midnight because it’s AWESOME. Honestly, I’m pretty sure it’s quite terrible, but I’m hoping in an awesome way. If someone yells “YOU SUNK MY BATTLESHIP!” I’ll call the whole adventure a success. I’ll give you all an update on how this goes. Stay tuned.

I had planned on doing some work this past weekend (yeah, I know, I’m lame sometimes :-)), but after about an hour or two of coding, I took Mozilla to Tacodeli for lunch:

Then, I went to the park near my house and got some shaved ice. When I was parking, I saw a guy in something that looked like a robe, which I thought was a bit weird cause it was fairly warm outside. I should have known something was up at this point, but I continued to get my shaved ice when I noticed that the dude in question and his group of friends had started LARPing. =(

I left, then, but decided that the day was too nice to waste inside, so I gathered up Ally, Sydney, and their respective owners and headed to a dog park in Pflugerville, which sounds farther away than it was I think. Anyways, here are some pics:

Aww, dog buddies:

Jonney got Mozilla a huge rawhide bone a while back, here’s a pic of that:

BYE!

Ally is probably Mozilla’s best dog friend. They play all the time and play for forever. Here are pics I mentioned a while back but just got around to uploading to flickr.

Two nights ago, Mozilla must have eaten something bad cause he kept on throwing up. I had thought he was over it, so I let him on my bed but shortly after, he threw up on my pillow/bed, so I had to remove the sheets and switch to my backup:

I think I may be in the market for another house near the end of the year. Started to browse available ones just to get a feel for things again. A little excited about it (but not looking forward to the moving or the paperwork =/).