Random Brain Dump

There are some folks that claim iPhone makes up as much as 40% of Apple’s revenue. How many companies can claim that type of success with their 1st or 2nd generation product in a brand new industry? The company is on a tear. In fact, it’s already supplanting older and more established products like Macs & iPods as the bread-winner.

The company’s recent string of hit products is just amazing if you remember the old days of Gil Amelio. Whatever happened to him?

This incredible piano performance is from a 14 year old Jennifer Lin who demonstrated her composition talents by improvising a song on the spot after asking a guest to randomly chose 5 notes for her. Wow…

Ran across some funny campaign posters inspired by the original posters by Shepard Fairey…

At 9:47AM this morning, Allison turns exactly 5 years old. She’s such a happy and lovely child. She makes up for her petite in size with her stubbornness. She loves to color, draw and dress up as princesses. She knows how to melt your heart and has her daddy wrapped around her tiny fingers.

Happy birthday kiddo, I love you…

This past Saturday, I had a rare afternoon which I didn’t have to tend to the girls. I took advantage of it, grabbed my camera bag and headed out for a hike at Rancho San Antonio. The rain the night before cooled the afternoon but not enough, fortunately, to leave mud on the trails. The highlight was the view at vista point at “High Meadow” and my encounter with a pack of deers on my way back.

It was a nice way for some quality time alone and decompress…

We were looking at the photo books we made recently in bed last night, when I casually (honest!) mentioned to Suzanne about Canon releasing a new full-frame camera. I’ve been wanting to upgrade to a full-frame awhile, but these babies cost an arm & a leg. So, I was describing the camera to her (with no ulterior motives, of course! ;), when Suzanne said

I don’t care how much it costs, just buy whatever it takes to get good pictures. These photo books are worth it!

Alright, I’m blogging this as proof. Got a license to kill… our budget, baby!

As employees here at Shutterfly, we get to make some of the company photo-related products as freebies. These past two weeks, Suzanne & I have been busy making photo books.

We got the first two this week. Oh my… they are simply amazing products. Suzanne & I are thrilled with them. The printing is National Geographic quality. The background is simply gorgeous (the icons on our web site don’t do them justice at all). The book binding is great. Quality is top-notch (I’m not claiming this just because I’m an employee). These are coffee-table quality books!

It’s a great way to breath new life to photos that normally sit on your hard drive as idle bits. It’s such a more fun and liberating way to organize and make prints. A photo book like these instantly elevate the sentimental values in your photographs. I believe we found the best method for presentation. No more stuffing 4×6’s into a shoe box or a clunky photo album. I highly recommend you checking out Shutterfly’s photo books.

Most of all, the photo books really give me great satisfaction because it really showcases the photos that I took myself!

One thing I like about Chrome is that it’s fast and light. It starts up fast and performs zippier than Firefox. The memory footprint is about 1/3 to half of that uses by Firefox as the screen shot below shows. Both where running with a single tab opened. Not surprising since I have a few of Firefox plugins installed. Firefox started out as a light version of Mozilla, but has gotten fattened up a bit over the years. I’d like to think the bloat is for richer features and extensible plugins. It’s still my browser of choice, but I am finding that I’m firing up Chrome more & more when I want some quick surfing.

I found out this morning that Ensemble Studios is closing down after 12 years. They make the RTS series that I played for years: Age of Empires. I knew it wouldn’t bode well when I found that Microsoft bought them over… What a shame!