New Year's

January 1, 2011 / Tags: Bailey, Calvin, Jon, Justine, Kathy, New Year's, Philip, Wii

We spent New Year's at Calvin's new house. Thanks for hosting, Calvin!

The original plan was to get up and go see the Rose Parade, since Calvin lives within walking distance of the route, but we got up late and just went to breakfast.

Maybe next year.


Beach Trip

August 28, 2010 / Tags: Bailey, Beach, Huntington Beach, Jon, Kathy, Michael

Michael didn't lose his keys this time, but a wedding ring did go missing for a little while.


Settling Catan

July 25, 2010 / Tags: Bailey, Calvin, Jon, Kathy, Michael, Philip

Philip was back in town for a bit. We went over to his (parents') place to play The Settlers of Catan. Even with all of us ganging up on him, Philip still won.

Despite what the pictures might imply, the goal of the game is not to stack your pieces into little towers.


I've been thinking about getting a small (in size and weight) lens like my 50mm f/1.4 USM, except a little wider. After reading a bunch of reviews (The-Digital-Picture.com is awesome!) I decided on the 24mm f/2.

It's certainly not as fancy as the L version, but I don't have the budget for another L lens right now. And besides, the L version is a lot bigger and heavier, defeating the purpose of getting a small lens. Fortunately, my birthday's coming up, and my mom was very nice — she got it for me early so that I can take it to Amanda's wedding today.

On a very tangentially related topic, Bailey's been working on building a turntable at my place. He needs a photo dataset of 360° views of cars for his image recognition research, and the quickest/cheapest way to get the dataset he wants is to create it himself. We had a couple of different ideas, like rigging a microcontroller to a motor to stop the turntable at various positions, but the cheap motor we're using doesn't stop precisely enough. So our next idea was to use my 5D and capture video at 30fps, then just run the turntable continuously (and slowly).

As part of the project, we built a lightbox, which is what I used to take the photo of my new lens, above. Unfortunately, the lightbox we built is meant for the turntable (and it's a little too short), so the photo didn't turn out that great.


Despite being Pete's Best Man at his wedding, with Kathy's help I was able to play unofficial photographer, too.

The day before the wedding, we had the rehearsal. Pi'i was supposed to blow the conch shell, but because it was cold, it came out sounding like someone who can't play the trombone. Everyone laughed (except Becky, apparently).

After the rehearsal was the rehearsal dinner. Our table got kind of... erm... loud. Let's just say that the red wine was really good. And I don't normally drink wine.

On the morning of big day, there was still a lot of stuff to do. But first things first — Pete needed coffee, so we went to Pannikin and got breakfast.

We also bought a few extra muffins for later. Then we went home, finished preparing things for the ceremony, and headed off to the wedding site. We didn't want to risk Pete seeing Heather before the ceremony, so we put a bag over his head ("It's for your own good, Pete") while he called to confirm that the coast was clear (i.e., Heather was safely in the bride's dressing room).

Meanwhile, Kathy had been following the girls around and got some nice getting-ready pictures of Heather.

While getting dressed myself, I took a couple pictures too. We convinced Pete to let us wear colorful socks instead of boring brown ones that would match our tuxes. And Pete gave us monogrammed cufflinks made out of old typewriter keys!

Right before leaving the dressing rooms, Pete and Heather reached out and held hands. Even though it may not look like it in the picture, they weren't able to see each other when they did this.

One last picture and we're off!

We didn't take too many pictures during the ceremony — actually, I didn't take any, since I was in the ceremony — Kathy took these. I really like this one of Brad and Pi'i coming in:

And this one of the crowd when Heather made her entrance:

After the ceremony, the groomsmen had to get our cameras for a photo. Brad, César and I are all into photography, so we had our picture taken with Heather as if we were photographing her. How meta. (The picture of us was taken on the photograper's camera, so it's not on this site.) While I had my camera anyway, I took a few photos.

Remember those extra muffins we bought at Pannikin? They came in handy; Heather was starving! (And the couple doesn't get to eat at dinner anyway, right?)

Kathy took some photos of the tables at the reception before I got there. They were really nicely decorated.

Here's the newlyweds acting oh-so-mature at dinner.

The rest of the evening consisted of the customary cake cutting, cake eating (mmm... red velvet cake...), photos, dancing, car decorating, and Pete carrying Heather over the threshold.

Needless to say, I was exhausted after the weekend marathon, but it was a lot of fun.