How Great Is Our God Concert

Last night, a few of us went to watch Chris Tomlin and Matt Redman performed at SJSU Event Center. The concert was amazing. I have been looking forward to this concert since a month back and had tickets for just as long. So when Sunday night came along, I was pretty excited for the concert. As it turned out, Sunday was also a pretty long day starting with teaching KidZone at church, then the service, moving onto set breakdown, then going to Barnes & Noble to get Freakonomics (thnx Alison for the Teacher's discount), drove back home to meet friends to carpool to the concert, grabbed dinner at La Vic in San Jose, then onto the concert, drove the carpoolers home, read emails, and went to bed.

Despite the long long day, last night was really worth it. It was awesome worshipping God in such a large environment, singing with Chris Tomlin/Matt Redman, and hearing Louis Giglio speak. How beautiful is our God!

Check out pictures here: How Great Is Our God Concert.

Lunch at Adobe

I met up with Bruce today at the Adobe building in San Jose for lunch. I was a bit disappointed that they didn't offer their employees or visitors FREE lunch. Haha. Well, we talked about what he does at Adobe (some pretty cool stuff—programming and designing—really really cool stuff), some more about business, etc., and got a tour of Adobe. Finally! Danke dabruceski!

Last night I went to a SIG BayCHI event where two speakers talked about "Designing for Ajax". The first guy was Bill Scott (Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo!) and he offered tremendous insights about the 7 principles of designing for Ajax. There are tons of good stuff I took tons of notes and I will definitely try to process that. Good stuff.

Then this young kid named Matt Mullenweg showed up and really impressed me with his 12 rules of launching your start-up. Anyway as far as I can remember (I didn't take any notes you see) here they are:

Matt Mullenweg's 12 Rules: (in no particular order)

1. Be your most passionate user
2. Be anal
3. Support (you are your own...)
4. Get off the computer
5. 1.0
6. Have a tagline
7. Know what to do if you are successful
8. Simplify
9. Don't do as they say do as they do
10. Be a painkiller, not a vitamin
11. Measure your success
12. Start strong end strong

BTW Matt started programming 3 years ago and is one of the founder of the open source WordPress blogging software. The guy's like 22.

In any case let me know if you want to talk about his 12 rules in depth and I'll gladly fill in any gaping holes from my recall of it. Oh also if you haven't written a blog yet it's so easy now to set one up. So yeah I totally encourage you guys who are reading this and have not try blogging yet, to go for it. Let me know if you need help!

Google Lunch

No, it's not a new Google product. Although if the bright folks there could figure out a way to solve world hunger using codes, and make money while "do[ing] no evil", then I wouldn't be suprised if we see a Google Lunch beta™...coming to a Whole Foods near you.

Probably everyone who's cool would have already visited Google by now, but yesterday I got a glimpse of the campus, its cafeteria, as well as some strange corporate culture. (Not necessarily in that order as "I'm feeling lucky" today.)

First off, at the parking lot.

PARKING LOT: Here I was greeted by a security guard who promptly asked me for my host name. As in who's hosting you today, who's responsible for YOUR priviledged visit at Google? Parking was horrible as most people have mentioned here and there. "The parking is horrible there!" I was advised by my host friend to park up on a hill and walk 5 mins to the "quad"—four buildings which are very organically designed (thanks to former SGI).

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Peking Acrobats Blues

VP (Vietpower, ie Alin, ie MD) came through for us, scoring us primo seatings to a grand night out at the San Jose Performance Arts Center last night. Why were we (Sandy+me) there? Oh to watch the Peking Acrobats, of course.

Before checking in to the Peking Acrobats, we made a dinner stop at E&O Trading Company in downtown San Jose. A few weeks ago on our way to the Melting Pot we noticed this quaint restaurant with a name more like an investment company than a 4+ star restaurant (according to Citysearch.)

E&O Trading Co. is basically an asian fusion place. Their menu you can download and view for yourself off of the website I provided above. I read through it and came up with these choices with the priority of getting the most varied foods out there without spending a lot of money. This is what we got in order:

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Take Me Out to the Ballgame

It's always pretty neat to watch the Giants play at SBC (or AT&T or Pacbell) Park. Even better is taking off from work at 4pm to catch the game on the few days it did not rain here. The last time I went to watch the Giants Barry Bonds blasted his 44th homer of the season against the SD Padres.

Last night the Giants lost pretty badly against Houston Astros behind the nearly perfect pitching of Roy Oswalt. I should qualify that by saying the Giants had to play doubleheader games, making up for a rained out and cancelled game last Tuesday. In any case they split the games.

If you do make it out to SBC Park one of the best deal is the spicy Sheboygan sausages. (I was lucky enough to get this advice from Nick and Petey who were with us at the game.) The Sheboygan is basically a huge wurst sausage with grilled onion and sauerkrauts, extraordinarily huge, and extremely tasty—all for $6.50. That usually follows pretty well with the Gordon Biersch garlic fries. Otherwise everything else at SBC can get pretty pricey.

Next game? Giants vs. Dodgers in May (schedule.) Next eats? The Cha-Cha-Bowl.

On another note Barry Bonds was in the news although not in a good way. I think it would be ironic if he was 1 run from Hank Aaron's home run record (755) and he gets thrown in jail. Ouch!

Happy Good Friday and I hope all of you will have a great Easter celebration. And remember to always give thanks to our Lord Jesus.

Eden Interrupted

While I would like to say that the video night/open discussion on gender communication last Sat. night went relatively smoothly, the ending of it didn't. What happened was that at around midnight, after walking some friends to their cars, a caravan of police cars rushed into the corner street where I live in Sunnyvale. Something was happening. What turned out to be a night of watching that 70's show-style video flashback were now becoming an episode in "Cops", or a scene from Crash. All happening in front of my house.

So the cops rushed out of their police cars, about seven of them. One guy pulled his standard issued maglite™, proceeded to locate the suspect's house. He then led the charge with the rest of the officers following behind him, in a single file line. Somewhere in the middle was another officer with his canine dog in tow. Something was definitely happening.

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SV Marathon By The Numbers

4:38:53.2

+ 3000 est number of runners + 354 bib # + 336 overall male placement + 213.1 total training mileage + 10:40 pace + 70 entry fee cost + 46 age group placement + 22 miles—you could walk faster than I was running + 20 miles—hitting the "wall"—physically out of energy + 18 miles—mental doubt of finishing + 12 weeks in training + 4 PowerBar energy gels drank + 3 doused water on my head/back + 3 races leading up to SVMara: 2x10Ks and 1x5K + 2 Ben-Gay patches on calves + 1 restroom break + 1 ice pack for right knee + 1 FINISHER's medal. WOOT WOOT!!! Continue reading

Note to SF Athletic Director

When I was in college, I used to walk to my classes down what was appropriately called "Bruin Walk." Mass and mass of students throughtout the day would file through this path on the way to their respective classes.

On the way down Bruin Walk from Dysktra Hall (a dorm) you would pass the tennis court, the Cosby Track & Field, the gym, the Athletic Director's building — among various other buildings, notably Ackerman Hall. I remembered wondering as I strolled by what is the Athletic Director Building. The building is non-descript with dark windows. However once inside you have entered a mini Hall of Fame building, what with all the John Wooden quotes as well as quotes of pass fabled-athletes.

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Thoughts On A Marathon

I've been encountering runners left and right recently, whether these encounters are at church or through various other activities. The nice part about living in the South Bay is that there are tons of these opportunities to "run" into groups of active people.

Lately a lot of friends I know are gearing up to do a half marathon or a marathon. There is the Nike Women's Half Marathon that is coming up that a few of my friends are running, curiously mostly girls. Then someone mentioned the other night the Silicon Valley Marathon to me.

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