Visiting Philip in St. Louis
October 26, 2009 / Tags: Beer, Calvin, David, Food, Jon, Kathy, Philip, Photo Outing, St. Louis
Since Kathy and I didn't take a summer vacation, we decided to go visit Philip in St. Louis with Calvin and David.
We flew in early Friday afternoon. Philip picked us up and took us to eat St. Louis style pizza. I forgot the name of the restaurant already, but it had these cool red booths that I couldn't resist taking a picture of:
The cheese is a mix of provolone and mozzarella. It tasted very different, but I liked it.
After lunch, Philip dropped us off at the Saint Louis Zoo and went back to work. Calvin was teasing Philip because Philip's mom said "oh, he loves the zoo." But after visiting, we can see why — the Saint Louis Zoo is the 3rd-largest in the US, ranked #1 by Zagat, and admission is free. (A recurring theme in St. Louis, it seems...) We didn't have time to hit all of the exhibits, but we did see some cool ones. I liked how a lot of the exhibits allowed you to get very close to the animals.
After Philip picked us up, he showed us around his alma mater, Washington University.
In the parking lot, Philip was looking for a building or something and didn't see a woman trying to back out of a parking space, so he just kept driving. (This would be another theme throughout the trip...) Fortunately, she saw him and didn't hit him, but we laughed that she was probably cursing at us. We coined the term "pulling a Philip" to mean "purposely blocking someone from backing out of a parking spot." Philip wasn't amused.
We had dinner and some excellent root beer floats at Fitz's. They make all their root beers and sodas on the premises — you can see all the equipment behind a big glass wall. (I didn't take a picture, though.)
The next morning, we woke up early and went to see the Gateway Arch. (Well, Kathy, Philip and I work up early — we had to drag Calvin and David out of bed.)
After the arch, we had lunch at St. Louis Bread Co., what we Californians call "Panera". They had the same design, same logo, etc. — it was just called St. Louis Bread Co. Even the web site on their cups pointed to panerabread.com, but we were joking that Panera is better because this particular location badly burned our paninis. (We took it back and they fixed it.)
After lunch, we toured the Anheuser-Busch brewery. Anheuser-Busch is probably best known for making Budweiser, but they apparently do a bunch of other stuff too, like owning Sea World in San Diego and selling baker's yeast during Prohibition. You learn something new every day. The (free) tour started off with a visit to their Clydesdale stables and ended with two free beers. :)
More than anything else, I was impressed by the sheer amount of beer they produce. During the tour, we visited their secondary fermentation tanks. The tour guide said that if you drank a beer per hour, it would take you 137 years to drink all the beer in one tank. These things were huge, and they had several hundred of them on the premises. (You can't see it in the photo, but the tanks are pretty deep, and there are another set of tanks stacked on top of the ground-level tanks.) And they have several breweries across the country. That's a lot of beer.
That night we had dinner at Rigazzi's on The Hill (St. Louis' Little Italy), then dessert at Bailey's Chocolate Bar. I loved how the place was decorated, and the chocolate brownie was probably the best brownie I've ever tasted. It was a little bit crunchy on the outside and soft and gooey on the inside. Mmm...
Sunday morning we got up a little later, checked out of our hotel, and went to have brunch at Wild Flower. The food was really good. They had this one wall next to where we were sitting that was decorated with masks. The masks were for sale, too. We didn't buy any, but I took a few pictures.
After brunch, we visited the Cathedral Basilica Saint Louis. The pictures don't do it justice. There's a sense of awe that you feel when you're inside that pictures just can't convey.
Other stuff we did that afternoon...
We checked out a condo that was for sale. (We were curious about property values there.) The model unit on the 5th floor (which was recently sold) was nice. Two bedrooms, corner unit, with floor-to-ceiling windows for the entire corner (living room and kitchen) that had a view of the Gateway Arch. The bedroom window on the other side overlooked the 4th-floor pool.
We took some pictures with the pretty fall trees as a background.
We wanted to visit The Cupcakery, but they were closed on Sundays. So we got boba instead. The tea was good, but the boba was pretty tasteless and hard. :( I'm thinking about starting a boba critic web site. ;)
We visited the Saint Louis Science Center. Admission was free.
Calvin and I made David and Kathy solve the Tower of Hanoi puzzle. It took them a while, but they managed to figure it out.
When we left the Science Center, it started to rain. We hung out at Philip's place for a little bit, then he took us to the airport.
It was a fun weekend. :)
LA Photo Outing
September 26, 2009 / Tags: César, Chinatown, Kathy, Photo Outing
Steven (whom we met at Carol's wedding) invited us to a casual photo outing in LA. It was a good opportunity to get more familiar with the 5D, practice my photography, and meet new friends. Thanks Steven!
After shooting a wedding where speed is critical to get the shot, it was nice to be able to take my time and really think about the picture before I shoot. Or if it didn't come out the way I intended, try again. I took this photo about four or five times before I finally got it to look the way I had pictured it in my head.
I really like this one, but it was all luck. We passed these skateboarders as we were walking down the street. They were sitting down, not really skateboarding, so I looked up at the building and started to frame the shot. As I was doing it, I saw out of the corner of my eye that the skateboarders were getting back up, and that one was going to pass through my frame. So I finished framing, then waited a second or two, and when he passed, I snapped the picture.
New Camera, New Homepage
September 11, 2009 / Tags: 5D Mark II, Jon, Kathy, OCPAC, Photo Outing, The District
Unlike some people, I'm not much of a writer, at least when it comes to personal blogging. For some time now, I have wanted to change my homepage to more of a photo blog, but I never could find the time to write the software. I tried evaluating Wordpress and other open source projects, but nothing was exactly what I wanted (duh). I did find some inspiration though, and with the arrival of my 5D Mark II, I figured now was the time to make it the switch. So a sleepless week later, I present to you ::drumroll:: my new home page.
The main features are a cleaner layout with nicer inline display of images
and better large image display. Instead of going to a separate page, large image display is done using a lightbox. (Click on the image above to test it out.) I wrote all the lightbox code myself -- it's based on the lightbox code I wrote for Arcadia Music, except instead of fixed display sizes, it sends the size of your window to the server and the server determines the optimal size image to send back. Oh, and it's written in JQuery instead of Prototype. I still like Prototype better, but JQuery appears to run faster, and it downloads a lot faster than Prototype + script.aculo.us. The HTML is also super-clean because so much of the heavy lifting is done by the javascript. The new software also supports pretty permalinks and tags. RSS support is planned, as is an open source release.
I'll leave you with a few test shots from the new Mark II. Some of these were taken at the park near my condo, some were taken at The District, and rest were taken at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.
This one is my favorite from the group.
P.S. I'll try to find time to back-fill the galleries from my old homepage.
August Birthdays
August 29, 2009 / Tags: Amanda, Bailey, Beer, Birthday, Brad, Bryan, César, Cuban Bistro, Food, Heather, Jon, Kathy, Michael, Moles la Tía, Pete
For my birthday, Kathy arranged for a bunch of us to have dinner at Cuban Bistro in Alhambra. At first, I was thinking: Alhambra isn't really known for lively nightlife, is it? I hadn't been there in years, but I was pleasantly surprised. And the food was really good -- we need to go back soon.
They're apparently known for their mojitos, so of course we had to try them. ;-)
For Pete's birthday, we went to the Stone Brewery Beer Festival. And bonus -- Brad was in town!
Despite beer not really being my thing, I had a great time. Even Kathy had fun, and she really doesn't like beer! ;-)
For Bailey's birthday, Ambassador César took Bailey, his friend Isako, Kathy, and me to his favorite Mole restaurant in LA, Moles la Tía. And if César likes the food, it would be an exercise in redundancy for me to try and describe how good it was.
Jon's Birthday
Pete's Birthday
Bailey's Birthday
Observation Balloon at the Great Park
July 3, 2009 / Tags: Birthday, Great Park, Jon, Kathy
For Kathy's birthday we drove down to Irvine to ride the big orange balloon in the Great Park. Only a few people can go up at a time, and the conditions were kind of windy (further limiting the number of people who can ride at once), so we were lucky to get a spot. We had to wait a while, but as you can see, we found ways to amuse ourselves.
The view from the air was worth the wait.
