Welcome 2012

One of the goals I have for the year that didn't make the top 3, or maybe not even the top 5 is to blog more.

Here are my top resolutions and goals for the year-

1. Lose 25 lbs
2. Ride my motorcycle over 5000 miles this year
3. Visit 2 or more countries
4. Cook more
5. Ride my mountain bike at least 2x a month

What are your goals for 2012?

I'm not dead

It's been a while since I posted on here last. Being married keeps me busy!

Page and I are planning on launching a blog together, stay tuned for details.

May need to blog more

I just realized it's been over a month since I posted again. Shame on me.

 Since my last post the following has occurred:

• USCM - a big Mazda meet w/ a cruise of 50+ cars then bbq/tailgate and Great America.
• Bachelor Party - me and the boys went to San Clemente State Beach for a weekend. Good times were had by all. No one died and we didn't lose anything important. I think we burned all the digital camera memory cards so no evidence could be found :)
• My brother turned 20 and I couldn't be there. I wish I could be around more. I still feel bad for missing his high school graduation.
• My sister returned from FL and will be visiting for a few weeks then back to FL.
• Took amazing engagement pics - Our photographer Anne from One Fine Day Photography came to San Fran and Page and I had a great time shooting for 2 afternoons. I'm sure most of you have seen the pictures.
• 2 Mazda Install days - worked on the car at Kyle's house to get belts changed, fluids flushed, and HID lighting installed. It's always enjoyable to work on cars with friends.
• I started riding my motorcycle to work more frequently. It saves me $4 a day from Muni fares, is faster and more convenient. Last time I rode the Muni the doors flew open at full speed, how dangerous is that!?

I will be spending a few days in Riverside coming up for my cousin Kevin's wedding and then for Page's cousin's wedding the following weekend.

Spring time

Easter, Spring break and April have arrived and I realized its been 2 months since I blogged last... sorry about that!

Work has been extremely challenging, but it is still fun and exciting. I look forward to going into the office everyday and solving problems and making progress. Long hours and busy weeks fly by as we're preparing for lots of great things. We brought on new people, and lost some too. All part of building the right team.

With the start of the year came a new season of autocross. I decided at the end of last season to sit out this year to save money and save the car from getting too beat up. I miss it. The fun, the adrenaline, a place to test your driving talents. In the end it's all worth it, as the money I am saving is going towards the wedding and honeymoon. I'm getting my automotive fix with the Speed Channel, car magazines, and doing some maintenance on the car.

Wedding plans are coming along. We ordered the invitations from one of my clients (TinyPrints.com) and they came out great. Looking forward to getting our engagement photos done here in SF in 2 weeks. Figuring out details for rehearsal dinner, honeymoon and day after brunch.

I found a church here in the city that I really like. I saw poster for it in the subway going to work one day and it made me go check it out. It's similar to Sandals for all you 951'ers. In fact, I made a friend who went to UCR and Sandals so he knows all about it and was great to find him. It feels good to find a place to go were people know your name (sort of like Cheers) and you feel a part of something when you help.

Thriving and thankful

With some of the recent events going on I've been thinking about how thankful I am to have everything I do right now in life. A fiancée, an exciting and fulfilling job, a really nice place to live, a car to get around and more. Friends who have been laid off from their work, with families and house payments. San Francisco seems like a better place to be than Riverside even though it has a higher cost of living. So much more opportunity here, and the economy has been hurt less.

Wedding Registry Reviews - Bed Bath & Beyond & Macy's

So with the wedding just under 6 months away, my fiancée and I set out this past week to create a wedding registry and 2 stores, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Macy's. We weren't too interested in registering at places like Crate and Barrel, Target, Amazon, or anywhere else. They didn't have good return policies, were only online, didn't have convenient locations, or the type/style of products we would like in our home.

Bed Bath & Beyond - This was our first stop. Not having created a wedding registry before this was an excellent first experience. We walked to the Customer Service desk and asked for help creating a registry. A manager jumped out of no where to welcome us, shake our hands and welcome us to the store. We were immediately offered a chair to sit in and bottles of water. They paged employees on the store PA system to get someone over to help us and we were met by a nice young girl who got us started. After filling out a couple pages of paperwork we we're offered a guided tour through the store, or the option of going it alone. We had a checklist for common items, and I was handed a scanner! This is the stuff the guys live for. Every 10-15 minutes an employee or the manager would walk up and check on us, see if we had any questions or needed help. It was especially easy to find the code to scan for products, every item's price on the shelf had a bar code, sets of products had barcodes for each item in the set as well. Adding a product to our registry was only one click and a "beep" away.  When we were finished, we received all of the catalogs, info, policies, and a print out of our list in a nice gift box with a bow.  Online has more options and a wider product offering than the store location we went to, but it is a little frustrating to shop on their website. It would be really helpful if they had better search and filtering options, as well as product reviews. BB&B has a really good return program and offers a nice completion program of 10% off  any items on the list you did not receive. Managing the registry online is pretty easy to do. We spent about 2.5 hours here then grabbed some dinner.

Macy's -  We were able to goto the 2nd largest Macy's here in downtown San Francisco. The store is 8 stories tall, has a separate multi-story building for menswear. We headed up to the 6th floor to get a registry started. We were helped by an older lady, who struck us as a "cat lady" if you know what I mean. The store was nice and had plenty of choices. Macy's tries to push one of their Macy's credit cards on you to get $100 free, but that wasn't worth it in our opinion. We found most everything we wanted there since we had done some reconnaissance online beforehand.  It was crazy we went from the 6th floor to the 7th, to the basement, to the 6th again. Pretty fun experience because it's such a HUGE store. We left with a print out of our items and a business card with the email of the lady who helped us. No fancy box or extra materials to take home. Their online registry manager is undergoing some changes this weekend so we can't access it, and she couldn't show us how to manage it, but I'm sure we can figure it out. One pain about adding items with the scanner at Macy's is that you had to scan the upc barcode which was on the bottom of every box on the shelf. Try holding a big heavy box of fine china, and a scanner and scan the item without dropping it, not that easy.

iPhone Apps

So there are 10's of thousands of iPhone apps out there but I just wanted to list a few of my faves that I'm using.

1. Facebook - keep in touch with friends and family on this social media network
2. Tweetdeck - always gotta find out whats happening in the Twitter'sphere
3. SportsCenter - you can watch gamecasts of live events if you aren't infront of a tv
4. TheWeatherChannel - I need to know should I wear the Columbia jacket or not.
5. TRAFFIC! - I rarely use this one in SF, but it's handy in so-cal for seeing live traffic
6. Yelp - this has been one of the most helpful apps/sites for me to find new food joints!
7. Pandora - stream some great music
8. Southwest - buy tickets and check-in online. I'm flying about once a month so this handy

Vote to support suicide prevention - To Write Love on Her Arms

Chances are you or someone you know has been directly affected by depression, addiction, self-injury or suicide. What if there was something you could to to help those people?

To Write Love on Her Arms (TWLOHA) is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide.  TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery. My sister is currently interning in Florida for 5 months at TWLOHA setting up events, promoting, creating street teams, and most importantly, listening and couseling with those who are struggling to find hope in this world. TWLOHA is trying to win Chase's Community Giving contest to use $1,000,000 to create IMAlive, an online chat tool to let people, young and old contact TWLOHA staff and other qualified individuals to find ways to escape the pain they are living in. Since 2006, TWLOHA hasresponded to more than 100,000 messages from people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide. This tool will save lives and give people hope.

No one is asking you to give any money, they are just asking for a vote. It takes less than a minute. Voting today means saving lives tomorrow.

http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/charities/1299927

http://www.facebook.com/towriteloveonherarms

She Said Yes

I figure I haven't updated things here in a while. Not sure how many folks miss me and my blog, but for the few (all 3 of you) here's an update.

The last few weeks have been a blur. They have been amazing and full of so much excitement. One day a while ago I met a girl. She was beautiful and had curly hair. I got the guts and I asked her out, she said yes. Well fast forward through 5 and a half years of lots of really good times to November 21. I got the guys and I asked her to marry me, she said yes. It was perfect. A wonderful surprise. I got on one knee. She stopped breathing and started crying. All the right people were there. I planned it to the T. I knew she would say yes, so I wasn't nervous. I'm so happy to have met this girl.

We don't have a date set yet. Busy making plans. Busy. It's a lot to take on. Get engaged. Have a birthday. Page will graduate school. All in less than 30 days. Wow.

More to come.

I've been keeping my eyes wide open

To what's around me. To a growing business to learn from. To mentors
who show me the ropes. To examples of great marriages. To friends in
need. To those in pain and suffering. To my family as broken as we all
may be.

To what's around me. I am thankful for those who serve our great
country and to those we have lost. I pray to have an ounce of the
bravery and courage of the men and women who daily sacrifice themselves.

To what's around me. He is everywhere and always around me. I just
have to keep my eyes wide open. Then I can see just what He wants me
to see.

One year away

It's been a year since I left everything in Riverside, my home for 20+ years, and moved to San Francisco. Leaving my friends, family, job of 3+ years and the city I knew inside and out, I packed my belongings (with the help of my friends) and drove 400 some miles to my new home in an unfamiliar city. With a new place comes new favorite food places, after trying many of them out of course! Finding your way around town, learning to use public transportation (there are many posts to write about this alone), making friends and adjusting to the weather. My house, is perfect for me and my belongings. My job, is awesome and full of challenges and new things everyday. My friends and family are supportive and encouraging. It feels really good to do everything on your own, meet your goals and succeed. Plenty more awesome plans in the works, new friends and adventures. Here's to another year!

Technology Rules

  So earlier this week my existing television set took a dump and stopped showing the right half of the screen. Alas, it was time to retire my old plasma screen. I was on a budget, I didn't want to spend over $700 out the door on a new tv. I ended up going economical with a new Vizio LCD. It's amazing the quality and features in this tv that cost about 30% of what my plasma retailed for. After a quick jaunt to Wal-Mart in the East Bay (since there are none in the city) I returned home with my new, slightly smaller, high definition tv. I set it up in about 15 minutes and haven't turned it off since. What better way to christen a new tv by watching amazing college football all day! In fact I also relocated my pc and have it connected to the screen, and I am writing this blog post from my couch with a wireless keyboard. Talk about being a geek.

I am amazed at how much technology can improve in such a short time. I have plans to try and start using the PC connected to the tv more frequently to stream other shows, play music and do some web surfing on. In fact, I may even drop the cable tv service and try to survive a la Boxee, Hulu, and other video sites. The biggest drawback is not having local news and sports. I've been watching so much sports it would be hard to give up.

What's on my DVR this Fall

So the popular Fall TV show season has begun and I cleared out my DVR of old shows, movies, and anything else of little value to make room for all the show's I'm recording on tv.

Current show's I'm recording (don't judge me!):
One Tree Hill
Grey's Anatomy
Flash Forward
Defying Gravity (ABC just pulled the plug, lame)
Trauma
House
The Office
The Big Bang Theory

What are your current favorite shows?

Picking seats is a science not an art

I am not talking about the seat picking involving uncomfortable
britches here. I'm talking about the seat you sit in. Whether it's in
a classroom, at the movies, on the bus or in a plane; you are
practicing the science of seat picking. Art is subjective and
requires emotion and feelings. Science is methodical and rational.
When picking your seating you are actually performing several
evaluations quickly in your mind before you settle down.

1) The seat environment
First you must determine the seating environment for you situation.
Are you in a classroom? If yes, you don't want to sit next to any
crazy looking people, not in a location that is too hot or too cold,
not too close to the front or too far back. If you are on a bus or
transit, you want to be close enough to the door relative to how close
or far your stop is. You definitlely want to avoid any dirty or sticky
looking seats. Watch out for transients, gangsters or crazy people.
If you are on a plane you have two options- some airlines have
assigned seating in which I suggest www.seatguru.com. If you fly
Southwest then you should check in online early and print your
boarding pass the day before. Note that as you board open seating
planes it's obvoius that you want a window or aisle, near or in a exit
row (leg room) and in the front (more comfortable and less noisy. Note
that drunk people can be removed from the flight during boarding if a
flight attendant is notified (ask me about my recent experience).

2) The type of seat
Next part of the process involves an evaluation of the seat itself.
What is the material and design of the chair. Is it a plain wood one?
Does it have armrests? Is it vinyl, fabric, leather or plastic?
Folding chairs, no matter how much padding, are rarely comfortable. In
a classroom setting, look out for left or right hand specific chairs.
Chances are there are only one or two seats for lefties so if you are
not left handed don't use it (we lefties hate that).

What are your tips and methods for picking seats? Any crazy stories?

My iPhone, a revolution in the history of cell phones

So as some of you know, I recently purchased an iPhone on September 8th. The actual purchase was simple and took no more than 15 minutes from the time I walked into the store to when I was out the door using the newly activated phone. The Apple employee who was helping me was also named Ryan, so I knew it was a sign that this was the phone for me. I wanted to give a review of the phone, my past phones compared and any disappointments I've had so far.

You're probably saying "get on to the good stuff, talk about the phone already". First I want to explain my particular "picky-ness" about cell phones, and all electronics for that matter. Fit and function are on the top of my list, so is the design and "fashion". It better look great and work great. Since getting my first phone (a Nextel flip phone) I've had quite a few. I've been on AT&T since about 2000 or 2001. First phone of my own was a Sony Ericsson T610. It was a sturdy candybar style phone that played music as well. I really liked that phone a lot. Sony Ericsson makes really great products. The phone had it's own operating system which was pretty easy to use. It also had a proprietary headphone/handsfree plug which was a negative. The next phone I grabbed was a Sony Ericsson W810i. This phone was also pretty awesome in the fact that it had a dedicated "walkman" mode to play music from an expandable memory card in the phone. At the time having 512mb of music on your phone was unheard of. This phone too had a proprietary headphone/handsfree plug which was a negative. I ended up trying out an unlocked Samsung SGH-T509. The phone was super light weight, thin and easy to carry in your pocket. It had some poor sound issues, but I think it was mostly due to poor signal in my house at the time (AT&T later added a tower just 100 yds away). It was a shame this phone didn't work well because I really liked the size/profile. I went back to the W810i for a while.  In February 2007 I got a Samsung Blackjack II. My brother had the Blackjack I and this seemed like a nice upgrade over the 1 since it had more memory, better screen and Windows Mobile 6 (instead of 5). This phone had a proprietary headphone/handsfree plug, but I bought some better aftermarket headphones for it since the OEM ones weren't very comfy. There was an expandable memory slot that took up to 2GB memory card which I loaded up with a few pictures and tons of music that played in Windows Media player. Making ringtones was simple to do with sound editing software. The internet sucked since it used Internet Explorer. I canceled my data plan after a couple months since the web experience was so bad. I used this phone for 2 years and it worked well. Windows Mobile allows for some cool stuff, but it too has it's own problems, its Windows.

First, I wanted to make sure I took care of the phone so it didn't get scratched or beat up so I put on a free ZAGG invisible shield that I won at a conference. The ZAGG invisible shield is nice, I like the screen protection, but I didn't like the part that covered the back of the phone. It didn't want to stick on the corners so I pulled that off. I picked up an Incase slider case in black (although mine didn't come w/ the stand) to help protect the rest of the phone. I already had some Skullcandy Inkd earphones in black/gray. I don't like the feel of the iPod/iPhone headphones. I have a Jawbone bluetooth headset so ear buds not having a microphone was okay with me. I really like the fit and comfort, and the sound quality as well. In-ear buds help also block out the sound, which is important since I take the subway to work and its pretty noisy.

So now the moment you've been waiting for. Life with an iPhone. It is life changing. I can be connected to whomever via whatever, whenever I want. Everything is in the palm of my hand. Internet, check, Email for personal and work, check. texting and chat, double true. I'm still getting new apps everyday. The phone is pretty easy to use, but I'm learning more shortcuts everyday. I wasn't a big fan of iTunes but I'm learning to live with it. It's also nice to have more than 2gb of music, as I was using a 1st generation iPod nano. I don't use Outlook (or a Mac) so some of the common ways to sync data like contacts and calendars required some workarounds/less common methods. I wanted to make some ringtones (other than the standard ones) which I had to find a work around for too. The biggest problem I have is getting all my old numbers from my old phone to the new one. In the past I've just swapped in my old SIM card chip and import the numbers then put the other SIM card back in. Apparently I haven't found a way to do this. I want to add a couple new sounds too for alarms or text alerts but haven't found a way to do this either. Currently we get bad service in our office downtown, but it's not just an "iPhone" problem as non iPhone users can't make or receive calls even though they have full bars too. I have to say I really like the phone. I don't want to put it down. This phone is history changing in my opinion. You see them everywhere, millions sold. Lots of apps and accessories. It has more computer power than what was in the lunar lander, all in the palm of your hand.

I will keep you updated on the things I find for the phone.

Slowly making the switch

To Google Chrome! What did you think I was going to say? I really am starting to like this web browser more and more. It's so lightweight when its running. I can have 10+ tabs open and it is using less than half the memory that Firefox would be using. Don't get me wrong, I still use FireFox regularly, especially for some of the great plugins/extensions that are available, but for daily web surfing, Chrome is my browser of choice.

Next you'll probably hear that I'm starting to use iTunes now, oh wait I am.

New iPhone

I am posting via email from my new iPhone.

My current "favorites things" list

Just thought I'd share some of my current favorite things in no particular order.

- Winter wonderland sushi roll
- Nightlife at academy of sciences
- Semi-sweet chocolate chip cookies and gourmet cupcakes
- Sneaky little post it notes
- More computer memory
- Cheap southwest flights
- The new saosin "in search of solid ground" album


What are your current favorite things?

I like food.

Who doesn't like food? Living here in the city has definitely encouraged me to try some new food, and be a little adventurous when going out. I just want everyone to know that I'm not eating take out everynight, or mac n cheese or top ramen. My mom taught me a few things in the kitchen and I always observed her cooking. My mom recently said "my little boy is all grown up" when she saw what I've been fixing to eat.

Here's a few Twitpics from the phone of what I've been eating lately. You can also checkout my Yelp profile to see where I've been eating at.

Home is where...

As you all know, I moved away from Southern California last October and up to the Bay Area. I took all my belongings and memories along with me. I recall reading a post by Pastor Dan Lance that pretty much sums up the whole transitional period of feelings, thoughts, language, and completely resetting your internal compass to call a new place "home". There are many nights where I long to visit Riverside. Nights when all I need is a hug from someone special, a belly shaking laugh fest with a sibling around the dinner table, or a deep conversation over coffee with a longtime childhood friend. But home is where the heart longs to be, where you wish to lay your head down to sleep, where you don't feel out of place or lost. When I visit Riverside now, I don't feel like it's my home. It's where I grew up. It's where my family is. It's where many of my friends still reside. It's just not my home anymore. I still have a key to the front door of the house even thought I don't have a room to sleep in anymore. I know how to get around Riverside just fine, although I'm still learning some new routes in the city. I come down to see friends and family frequently enough that I'm able to keep up on the newest bar, restaurant or attraction. Home shouldn't instill a sense of pressure or force any unneccessary responsibility on one's self. Home should welcome you with big wide open arms regardless of where you've been or how long you've been gone. Home is where you have your mail sent, where your favorite shows are recorded on your DVR, and where your bed is. That's where home is.