The Blog of Kwan

Alessi started reading today!

From her teacher Rachel:

What an exciting day for Alessi!! Here’s a picture of her doing her reading work...she was so excited! We are so proud of her!

Rachel

We are so proud of her too!

100 miles with Nike +

I finally hit the 100 mile mark running with my iPod Nano and Nike+. Alex & the kids got me the nano for Father's Day. Its definitely been handy to track my casual running  over time.

There's probably better technologies out there, more techie with gps, etc. but this has been a pretty cool experience for me. I think Apple and Nike have done a pretty good job with the overall experience. Alex has been using hers as well and has been running longer average distances than me.

I think now that we have a treadmill to run in the winter, the next thing is to get a small tv down in the exercise room so we don't get bored running indoors... (I don't think the nano video will suffice).

Tonight, I hooked up the psp to the speakers built into the treadmill and watched Transformers. I ended up running 4 miles. A couple of nights ago, before refiguring out how to get videos onto the psp in the right way, I watched a video on the iPhone. While handy, both of these screens are a little small. I'm going to keep an eye out for an inexpensive 19" tv.... Hey, it's for our health, right?

I've got an iPhone

So I've had a blackberry for about a year and a half for work, the phone quality has sucked to the point I've avoided using it for calls. Today I got an iPhone! We waited in line  at the AT&T/Cingular store starting at 11:30 this morning. We walked out at 7 pm with our phones. (from left, that's me, Pashmina & Tyler)

These guys look like they have a blast

To my cousins in HK: this looks like a fun place to work, they do some cool stuff. Check it out.

Paola's first presentation

Alessi's logo and birthday merchandise

I'm a little behind on this...work and a couple of projects have been keeping me busy...well, and there's the procrastination thing. Anyway, here's Alessi's 1st birthday logo. Her birthday is coming up on the 24th.

Merchandise can be found here. Get 'em while they're hot! Help Alessi go to college!

Skype is cool

Seems like every year or so we get the itch to buy a webcam, thinkning that technology will finally fullfill it's promise of providing cheap and easy video communication with our family, enabling the kids and grandparents to see each other in full motion color. And, for whatever reason, hardware or driver or software issues, it never quite seemed to work effectively.

However, recently, we signed up for Skype, and it's pretty cool. Like MSN messenger, it's got instant messaging, voice and video capability. But since its functionality is more centered around voice calls, the voice and video calls work really well. I was able to talk with my brother while he was on his trip to China last week. Alex has been able to do a conference call with relatives in Guatemala, her sister in Atlanta and her parents in Little Rock, for free. Our tests with the video thus far have been easy and free as well.

I know the other messenger services also have these capabilities, but they haven't been as easy. Skype has definitly captured the mindshare for free internet voice and video calls.

Check it out! My dad's blogging!

I'm happy to see that my dad has started blogging now. We set the site up on October of last year, and it looks like after transferring over to his new computer which may have solved a picassa bug, he's been posting rather frequently.

It's amazing to me to see how easy it is and how it's an effective form of communication for many.