Category: 2005
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Things To Remember from this December
I wanted to jot down a few things to remember this month, besides the wedding. Most of these events happened in Hawaii, so I guess it still involves the wedding in some way.
Remember…
- the lady on crutches at //Sam Choy Breakfast, Lunch & Crab who offered to take our photo during breakfast? She took Farrah's camera, took a step back, and raised the camera over her head, then quickly fell to the ground. She, the camera, and her crutches came tumbling down. Ouch!
- hearing the song, "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper)" for the first time early one morning? //These lyrics are something to hear.
- when everyone got sick? Farrah, Alex, Yen, Fina, Dad, Roger, Jane, Tiana (when we got here), and Dad's friend. Roger had a sinus infection, Farrah was on antibiotics, and Yen was on a couple of different things.
- getting the car towed from Jane and Roger's place? I woke up at 6:00AM to go to Starbucks only to find the car had been towed. I know the sign said don't park there from 2:00 AM to 7:00 AM, but from what I understood that hadn't been enforced often. Guess the Christmas season keeps everyone on their toes.
- Khalil ordering shaved ice for everyone? He was a little worried on how to order, but did a good job. Only problem was that we asked for ice cream and beans, only to find out that there were no beans at the bottom of the cone. Disappointment for all.
- seeing stores open in Waikiki on Christmas night? We drove back to the hotel at around 10:30 PM, passing by people coming out of different shops on the strip. I guess Waikiki stores never close.
Our Wedding Mix
Below is the list of songs we had on our wedding compact disc:
- Songbird Eva Cassidy
- Pualena Vika
- You’ve Got a Way Shania Twain
- Sunday Morning Maroon 5
- Every Breath You Take UB40
- Banana Pancakes Jack Johnson
- Is This Love? Bob Marley and the Wailers
- In A Little While U2
- Turn Me On Norah Jones
- The Way You Look Tonight Frank Sinatra
- You Are So Beautiful Nohelani Cypriano
Merry Christmas To All!!!
We just wanted to say Merry Chirstmas to everyone!!! Hope you have a great Christmas day!!!
Friday Afternoon
I’m sitting in //Starbucks again as Farrah finishes some Christmas shopping. Last night my mom left back to California, arriving safely home early this morning. We head out on Monday, spending Christmas with those remaining behind. Doug headed out to Japan yesterday. I didn’t have a chance to talk to him before leaving.
Today Ann treated everyone to //Sam Choy’s Breakfast, Lunch & Crab off the Nimitz. Farrah had the French Toast Platter while I had the Papa’s Beef Stew Omelet. Hmmmm….good!!! Two different people actually told me to try the Beef Stew Omelet, and the recommendations were sound. I couldn’t finish the omelet portion, but I did finish the stew.
I’ve taken quite a bit of photos, so it will take a bit of time to process and post the photos. This is what I plan to do when I get home. Check my //Flickr account for any updates.
We're Married!!!
It is official! Farrah and I our now husband and wife!
We took our wedding vows on the lagoon lawn at the //JW Marriot Ihilani yesterday afternoon. The weather was very nice, except for the gusting wind - which blew at about 15-20 mph - but that didn’t really make a dent in the day’s events. It’s only worth noting because today is such a calm day at Ihilani. But like I was telling Farrah, “That day was our day”.
Pre-ceremony photos ran a little behind, but it didn’t push our wedding start time back. We actually started on time at 4:30 PM. The wedding started with me walking my mother down the aisle to her seat. I then made my way back to the groomsmen where we walked in order behind the Pastor. We took our positions and waited for the bridal party.
//Cory Oliveros, the acoustic guitarist/singer we hired, started to sing “The Road that Never Ends”. I must admit when I heard this song and saw the bridesmaids line up in the distance, I started to tear up. The bridesmaids started about 30 yards away from the ceremony spot, walking on the lawn through the palm trees. I first saw Kayla, who made me smile so much. Then Kay, Kristel, Fina, Michelle and Yen.
Then off in the distance, from the starting point 30 yards away I saw Farrah and her parents. Cory then started to sing “The Hawaiian Wedding Song”. This really got me going. I couldn’t believe the amount of emotion I was trying to contain, not wanting to breakout in a full cry. I was very very happy.
The whole ceremony went off as planned. Pastor Curtis Fong conducted a wonderful ceremony. The only hiccup was the lei ceremony we wanted to be done. We conducted after the ceremony, at the wedding certificate signing table. So it wasn’t a big deal it didn’t take place in the main ceremony.
Farrah and I took more photos with the bridal party, and by ourselves, after the ceremony. Derek Wong was very meticulous in directing us during the photo shoot. I really liked the fact he was paying attention the everything in the shot - from items or people in the background to lighting. There were times where I wish shots could be taken quicker, but if you really want the photos to come out right you need to take some time. I really appreciate the pressure a wedding photographer must endure. I have faith that all the photos will be great!
The reception started almost on time in the Ocean Ballroom. Rodney Villanueva, our emcee, really had the crowd going. Rodney really had our guests laughing and the reception moved along smoothly with his guidance.
Wonderful dancing was provided by //Iwalani’s School of Dance and The Philippine Dance Group during dinner. Heartfelt toasts were given by Yen and Doug, and Lotte’s words about Farrah and I meeting were very touching.
After the professional looking slideshow was done by //Aloha Friday Productions was completed, we started the cake cutting and dancing. Farrah and her dad danced to “Butterfly Kisses” and Farrah and I danced to “Songbird”. I wanted to dance with my mother for a song, but time seemed to be slipping away.
The evening ended with everyone on the dance floor. We stayed for a while longer, but the full day had taken it’s toll on our energy. But it was a full and lovely day. Everyone who helped make this day happen cannot fully know how thankful we are for their support. I will post photos when I can. I just wanted to write this out while I had the chance.
I don’t think Farrah and I could have imagined a more perfect day.
Meetings
The morning found us having Kim Chee Fried Rice with two eggs over easy for breakfast. We knew today we had two important meetings, so it required a special breakfast.
The first meeting was at Ihiliani with Terri at Ihilani to work out some final details. This went by without any major concerns. We then had a lunchtime meeting with (Pastor) Curtis Fong, who will be performing the wedding ceremony. He was very informative and brought along years of experience to share with us on how we should conduct ourselves before, during and after the ceremony.
I also had a chance to post more photos from yesterday when we went to go get our Marriage License.
There were a couple of photos of us taken by the lady who took our application, but they didn’t turn out. It seems I didn’t have the Nikon on full automatic, so the photos turned out blurry. Oh well.
It Begins This Way...
When I post this blog entry, I will be in a Starbucks in Aiea, Hawaii. Farrah and I arrived in Oahu last night, earlier than we thought, since the tradewinds were kind.
Farrah is still under the weather. She wasn’t feeling well last Friday night when we went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Saturday morning she had full blown flu symptoms. I couldn’t go to YEP (Yahoo!’s Year End Party) without her, so I chose not to go that night. Of course, I subsequently got sick on Monday, by my symptoms mimic a cold and not the flu.
We rested most of the week since we were flying off on Wednesday to Hawaii. Fina was kind enough to take us to SFO. We left the house around 3:00 PM with our flight scheduled for 6:00 PM. We hung out at “Just Desserts” talking about what still needs to be done.
We were almost going to go to the gate when we were surprised by Lotte!!! She had come to see us off. It was a very nice surprise seeing Lotte, who is responsible for introducing Farrah and I. We really wish should have come to Hawaii for the wedding.
The flight to Hawaii was pretty quick. We arrived forty minutes ahead of schedule! There was slight turbulence here and there, interrupting “Cinderella Man” , the in-flight movie. The weather was nice and cool when we arrived, a change from cold rainy climate currently plaguing the Bay Area.
We got the Auntie Horton’s house pretty quick. We unpacked, ate a quick dinner which included homemade chicken soup, and took our medicine before crashing for the night.
Morning time was rough for me, but Farrah was up light a bolt of lighting. We took off to Starbucks in search for a WiFi connection. The first one at Pearlridge was not working. It had me a little frustrated because I was able to connect in SFO easily. I could see the signal but wasn’t getting a login screen or full Internet connection. We went to the new Border’s about a block away in Uptown Pearlridge, I found a connection (this connection) very easily. This place is new and gets very very sunny in the morning (no shades), so I’ll probably only go there early in the morning or later in the day.
Ah, email and Internet access is so hard to do without.
Well, that catches us up to the present. What have we done so far? Well, we got our marriage license from downtown. The process was quick and easy. Farrah and I took a couple of photos, but when the clerk tried to use the camera to take our picture together it didn’t work out. Oh well, it’s ok. Not much else is planned today. There are several meeting we have tomorrow, and a few small things we need to do today. The big day is only ten days away. TEN DAYS!!!
Ah well, more later.
Thanksgiving Dinner and Surviving the Shopping Weekend
Thanksgiving was the usual affair at my sister’s house. This year was a little different with it being the first year without Bill. It reminded me of the first holiday season without my father. But life goes on. We drank a toast to Bill, had a good meal and good conversation about anything and everything.
I was so stuffed that I almost couldn’t do dessert! But I did manage to partake in the chocolate cake and pumpkin pie (yes, both for dessert). You can see the photos from Thanksgiving in the //photos section. All photos are not visible. To access all photos please log into your //Flickr account, and be on my Friends and Family list. I didn’t take too many photos, but just enough to capture the day.
The following day, Black Friday, I dropped off Farrah at Valley Fair. I did not dare enter the mall on that day. I did however go into Fry’s in San Jose. I managed to find street parking close by, only having to deal with the slight drizzle that filled the day. I didn’t buy anything, but managed to kill an hour before heading home.
Saturday we found ourselves up in the City with hundreds of other people. Union Square was packed!!! I wanted to take pictures of people around me, but I forgot the memory card for my camera. I took it out of the camera to download photos from Thanksgiving dinner and forgot to place it back in the camera. Doh!
Before starting off on our - or actually Farrah’s - shopping quest, we ate a nice lunch at the Nordstrom’s Bistro. After getting the all needed fuel to make the rounds, we headed to Forever 21 - which is one of my favorite stores (he says sarcastically). Next was //H & M which is new to the City.
I initially stepped into H & M with Farrah, after we waited in a 50-person line outside the store. Crowd control was necessary for the store - I guess - so as to not create a fire hazard. I stepped out of the store after ten minutes of waiting. I wandered around Union Square, passing by //Macy’s which had an SPCA display in one of their windows. The display had live cats and dogs playing around cartoonish cutouts. This created a small crowd along the windows. Damn, I wish I had my camera to take photos!
I made my way back to H & M where I stood outside waiting for Farrah to come out. I found it very amusing to look and listen to the crowds of people walking by H & M commenting on the store and the people waiting in line. I heard repeated remarks like: “What store is this?” “Oh, this is like the East Coast one.” “What’s the line for?” and my favorite - “I’m not standing in line just to go into a store.”
The day ended with a few more stores to stop by (Old Navy, the Apple Store) then we headed home. All in all I don’t think I bought much. I was just disappointed in forgetting my memory card to capture any moments of the day.
Black Friday is Coming
Just wanted to post a quick to find some deals on Black Friday. What is Black Friday? The first day of holiday shopping (the Friday after Thanksgiving) where retailers are in the black from all the sales they make.
So if you plan on hitting the stores, go see
for the scoop on not only deals but what might actually be in-stock!
Updating the Photos Page
Well, I’ve been updating a few things on the website. The biggest update is the use of a //Flickr plug-in called //FAlbum To see it in action click on the Photos link above. Cool, huh?
This just adds another reason to love Flickr, which allows the use of their API’s to interact with the data stored on their website. I don’t fully understand API’s, but hey someone does and made this plug-in. Now it looks like I have the photo albums on my website. You can still access the photos on Flickr as well.
So, this is another reason to sign up for a Flickr account if you wish to see more albums on //Janella.com Of course you need to be someone I know. After all, the photos that I have private on my Flickr account are those of family and friends. Nothing too embarrassing, but things I don’t wish to share with the general public. As always if I have a photo posted in the public space (of yourself) that you wish for me to take down, please write to me and let me know.
Too Many Photo Sites to Choose From
I have been trying to find an online solution to display my photos that isn’t reliant on hosting the software myself. If you go to //http://www.janella.com/photography you will see the photo gallery that is hosted on my site.
The software is provided by //Gallery and is a great piece of open source work. My problem? For one thing, I am getting a little time crunched on doing any patches that is required from time to time. The second thing is I can’t upload the original image (due to lack of disk space). This requires me to spend time resizing images for the web. It becomes a pain in the butt after a while.
Looking for a Solution
There are many photo sites to choose from. Most offer a way to make prints, such as //Ofoto, //Shutterfly, and //Snapfish. These are very good sites, but they lack the customization I’m seeking.
I took at look at four solutions. Here is how I rank them and their pros and cons - IMHO.
1. //Flickr
The lowdown:
A free account gives you 20MB upload limit per month with no limit on storage space, but only 200 most recent photos will appear. Older photos are not deleted they just don’t appear.
For a paid account it’s $24.95 per year. This gives you 2GB bandwidth a month for uploading and all your photos appear. This works out to be about $2.08 for unlimited storage!
My view:
The best of the bunch. You can’t beat the price for a paid service. The community, if you are seeking comments on photos you have taken or want to make comments on what you see, is very active. It can get brutal at times, but overall it’s nice to see people interacting online. I also like the ability to control permissions on a photo level. The current knock against Flickr is the incredibly awkward way it handles organizing of sets. The drag and drop UI for this needs to change and subsets need to be implemented.
- // Zoto
The lowdown:
New kid on the block getting attention. Free account gives you 2GB of storage with currently no upload limit. Paid accounts are a little pricey at $44.95 per year, so about $4 a month. At this price it only gives you currently 5GB of storage.
My view:
The big positive for this service is the ability to create photo galleries easily. Organization of photos is done by keyword (tags) as Flickr, with the mass tagging of photos a little easier than Flickr. The big knock against this service, besides the price for a paid account, is site outages in the last several weeks. Not sure about leaving my photos there for the long run.
The lowdown:
Community photo site with easy to use tools for organization. Photos can be organized by albums and subalbums as well as by date. For a paid account at $50 per year you receive unlimited storage, FTP access to upload photos, and customization to suit your needs.
My view:
FTP was a very nice feature to have. I found the password protection scheme awkward though.
- //Smugmug
My view:
No free accounts here, but free to try for 7 days. All paid accounts (starting at $29.95 to $99.95 a year) offer unlimited space for photos. You can even order prints of photos from your gallery, as well as allowing friends and family do the same.
My view:
Easy to use interface for anyone. The albums I created were very attractive. The big point I didn’t not like was that photo albums that I had password protected or private was searchable through Google for some reason. I’ve read on Smugmug’s message boards that this is a known issue and they are working to remedy this problem. If they solved this issue, this would rank as my #2 out of the four services I’ve looked at.
So for now it seems //Flickr, in my opinion, is the place to be.
Sideshows Come to Sunnyvale?
I pull out of the house this morning around 7:00am. I get to the corner of Ahwahnee and Fair Oaks, the first major intersection I hit as I head into work. I stop at the red light and watch a guy in a black side-dented Chevy truck make a U-turn to go to south-bound 101, even though no u-turn is allow. The guy in the black Chevy truck proceeds to go around in circle, burning rubber in the intersection, as people wait to cross. He does this for about 4 or 5 circles, enough for the smoke and smell of burnt rubber to fill the air. Then he takes off, satisfied that he has made a spectacle of himself.
It’s nice to start the day with a nice dose of idiocy. I wonder what is going to happen the rest of the day.
October Rant
Ok, here’s my end of month rant for October. The only times I do rants is when I haven’t written much or I have so much to write about. So here goes.
I was in Hillsboro, Oregon for about a week and a half, helping to train those who will be doing my job in the future. Nice place, nice people. Overall it was a good trip. I was there for the first three days with two co workers, Rich and Bert. We went to a couple of places to eat during those days.
On the recommend list:
- Reo's Ribs - A good rib joint run by Snoop Dogg's Uncle. Get the combo plate (pork and beef ribs).
- Syun Izakaya - A Japanese restaurant where the Unagi is tender. Service was fare, only because they get really busy at lunch time.
- //Huber's - I had the Five spice pork tenderloin which went well with a pint of Guinness
I came back for the weekend, then went back to join Rich for more training and food. Other places we hit were:
- //Imbrie Hall - I liked the stuffed burger I had. I think Rich liked the Jambalaya. They actually had to ask him if he had it before, because it is very spicy.
- Hale's Restaurant - Total diner type place. Reasonable price for reasonable food. But yeah, a total diner place. It even has a waitress that says, "Be with you in a minute, hun."
- //Russell Street Bar-B-Que - The last place we ate in Oregon before Rich and I took our flights out of PDX. Very good ribs and meats cooked differently than at Reo's Ribs. They also had a nice Iced Cinnamon Coffee (similar to a Hobee's Iced Tea), and Rich also got a Fried Chocolate Pies. Good food worth going back for.
For photos from Oregon, see my Flickr album for //Oregon - Hillsboro and Portland
In-between my trips to Oregon we celebrated Susana’s birthday at the house. We celebrated with a bar-b-que dinner - ribs, kabobs - and of course cake! Susana’s got a digital camera for her birthday, so Farrah and I gave her a larger memory card to hold all the photos she’ll be taking. Now all she needs is a computer to download all the photos!
For photos from Susana’s birthday, see my Flickr album for //Susana’s Birthday Celebration
When I finally came back from Oregon the bridal/wedding shower was the next day. A lot of people worked very had cooking food, putting up decorations, cleaning up, and doing everything and anything to make the shower go off without a hitch. We appreciate all the help people gave. We also were happy to see so many people at the party! Thank you for all the gifts!
For photos from the bridal shower, please see //Wedding shower and //Farrah’s Bridal Shower - Photos by Susana
Both albums are on my Flickr account. Please note: not all photos are visible to the public. If you would like to see all the photos, please sign up for a Flickr account. It’s really easy.
Simply click on the ‘Sign up now’ button on the home page for //Flickr After signing up, add me as a Friend or Family member and I’ll add you as one to my list as well. You may have to introduce yourself if I cannot recognize your username. Also Flickr just recently added the ability to get prints of online photos developed. But you need to be on my Friends and Family list to see the option above the photos. Photos can be mailed to you or you can pick it up at your local Target store. Cool, huh?
I am working on a way to better share photos. Flickr is a great service and I like most of the features, so for now photos will be primarily shared through that service.
It's Been A Long Two Weeks
A lot has happened in the last two weeks. I’ll write more on the End of Month Rant which is coming up shortly. In the meantime check out the new Flickr albums for:
I’ll comment more when I get a chance.