My new bike.

We celebrated Christmas at home, having two family Christmas parties, you might have seen the pictures from my previous post.  For Christmas Kelly got me and awesome bag for me to use for work, along with some cooking books I really wanted, a circular saw, and some clothing.  It was a really awesome Christmas.  For my birthday I got a new bike.

Raised vegetable bed.

Kelly and I used my new saw and build two raised beds for our vegetable garden this year.  We’ve already planted some onions, and are waiting for March to add the tomatoes and peppers I get at the annual sale that Fullerton College has.  That just about wraps up most of the things we have done the past month.  So I guess it’s time for the Weekly Cool Links!  Just an FYI, there is a lot of stuff to share this week, so I’m going to do something different and break this up into a couple posts the new couple days.

Cool Stuff
Lifehacker put together a kick ass table of when is the Best Time to Buy Anything, from Homes in the winter (hey that’s what we did!) to Jeans in October, it’s a great list for those that are looking for when the best deals normally are.  You say you aren’t interested in buying anything, well how about these not so cool porn ideas (safe for work), don’t miss “The Making of You” staring Mommy and Daddy with special guest Uncle Bill…  I was going to post a bunch of “best of 2009″ links, but this guy did all the work for me, so I’ll just link to him.  I was hoping I would be on the 30 best blogs of 2009, but I guess I’ll have to wait for the 2010 list.  Continuing with the theme of lists, Gizmodo posted their list of the worst gadgets from the past decade, a lot fo great ideas but they just ended up sucking.

Cool Advertising
I have some American Apparel shirts (well they are shirts from places that print their shirts on AAs) and I’ve always been fascinated with their unique marketing strategy, from using porn stars to having androgynous looking models, they cover it all, which is why this collection of their hottest ads (possibly not safe for work, but nothing graphic) is included here.

Cool Food
One of the books Kelly got me (and my brother in law Dominic) was the 1st volume of the Good Eats books, by Alton Brown, I’ve loved reading the book and wanted to share this great Good Eats fan site (it’s poorly designed but still a great resource).  Talking about food, Lifehacker shared this article of Six Kitchen Skills You Can Pick Up This Weekend.

Cool TV
Chuck and 24 started up last week, Burn Notice starts tonight, and someone is selling a barely used late night show…  By the way even though I don’t watch much late night, I with Coco.

Cool Sports
The Hall of Very Good has some great stuff about good baseball players, that aren’t quite Hall of Famers, or shouldn’t be Hall of Famers.  I liked the guy, but Eric Karros should not have receive 2 votes for the Hall of Fame.

Cool Videos
I know he’s gone, but his trip to Seattle was delayed because of an annoying USC fan.  (I’ll miss you Pete!).

The Unaired 1994 Pilot of 24!

This reminds me of calls I get sometimes when Kelly is having an issue with the computer at home… ;)

All these guys are trying to do is be Helpful!

Stay tuned for Weekly Cool Links #21.2 tomorrow!

Actress Christina Hendricks

Oh yeah the Golden Globes were the past weekend, and according to the Internet these were the only globes being talked about…

By the way, GO TROJANS!  That was an awesome 28-7 beating of the Bruins!

MBA in 2 Minutes

1. Revenue – Costs = Profits
2. Businesses without customers are not in business
3. You must do everything you can to attract and retain customers

Besides work not much happened the last couple weeks, we had a couple various family gatherings, a relaxing 1 week vacation, and saw a couple movies.  Funny People (3 Stars) and 500 Days of Summer (3.5 Stars) you can check out my movie reviews here (more reviews to come as I catch up!).  Lastly I’m getting into golfing and bought some new irons last week, that should be arriving at my house today and I’m looking forward to playing 1-2 times a month if possible.

On to the Weekly Cool Links!!!!

Music
I have a bunch of music links this week, most of them about finding new music, something I struggle with because of my specific eclectic preference.  I’m always interested in finding more music I might like, iTunes DOES NOT CUT IT with their recommendations, even Genius is just sort of ok, but Lifehacker put together an article on articles and ways to help, with their Top 10 Tricks for Making Your Playlists Rock.  There is Project Playlist which can help you find music, generate playlists and create ringtones for you.  Lastly if you are looking into turning an old computer into a “media server” you might want to check out Amahi, doesn’t require much power or high priced tech to get running, and can stream to just about anything, in addition is has lots of features that compare to those of Windows Home Server!  And lastly, I thought I would share an artist I discovered yesterday, this girl can do wonders with just a ukulele and has a very pretty voice.  She is also playing in Long Beach in a week or so.

Movies
Not much on the movies front this week, but how could we all have missed the production of Lesbian Vampire Killers!  Most of the reviews say it’s pretty bad, but come on with a name like that it has to be at least entertaining.

Sports
I found this gallery archive of Iconic Dodgers Photos from Sports Illustrated.  My favorites include the picture of Sandy Koufax’s no hitter, if you look closely on the chalkboard someone wrote and then erased that he went 0 for 4 in the game.  Also love the picture of two of the best pitchers ever in baseball, Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax.  Glad that they included one of my favorite Dodger of all time, Orel Hershiser.

TV
If you happen to know anyone that is looking for a job, perhaps Veridian Dynamics might be just the place.  Well regardless if it is, I highly recommend that you check out the two episodes of Better off Ted that will be on this week (Tuesday 08/11/09 at 9:00 P.M.).  Or maybe you are like me and you just accidentally want to somehow download all the TV shows you are interested in so you can watch them later on your own time and without advertising… Well ShowRSS might be able to help you out…

Tech
If you don’t know by now, both myself and Kelly have iPhones, and one way I keep up with the release of free applications I might want to check out is by visiting FreeAppAlert, actually I have them on my Twitter, but I check out their website via their feed there.  Talking about the iPhone I’m really stoked to see that the FCC is interested in getting to the bottom of the application approval process at Apple after their denial of the Google Voice app.  I was really looking forward to getting to use my Google Voice number, hopefully these questions that the FCC has made will get Apple and AT&T to stop with the antics.

Neat Stuff (probably tech oriented)
Did you know that my relative and US President John Quincy Adams is tweeting?!!?  It’s all being done by the Massachusetts Historical Society, as this article explains.  J.Q.A. kept a 1 line a day journal 200 years ago while he traveled to Russia to be the first US Ambassador to Russia.  According to my calculations he’s currently just off the coast of Canada make his trek to Russia.
View Larger Map

On to present day, I really thought this graph by the New York Times showing how people spend their day was interesting.  I love the data that have put together and the ability to filter through it and see some specific groups.  For those of my friends that enjoy beer, and especially Miller Lite, they are soon to release some new draft technology to be used in the home.  This one should probably be in the tech section, or maybe I should just make an iPhone section, but someone has come out with software that allows one to track what is in their pantry and allow it to link with their iPhone to help create shopping lists and keep your pantry items up to date.  With the integrating of the pantry list on your computer you can have an automated shopping list that updates to your iPhone pantry list!

Local
That’s right I have a local section, but not much to report.  OC Register posted a list on Certified Farmers Markets throughout Orange County, although it doesn’t include the one in Stanton on Mondays (unsure if it’s a certified but I could have swore it was), also check the comment section for most lists.  Lastly, Gustavo Arellano at O.C. Weekly wrote about an article he read in a Jewish satire magazine, in which porn star Joanna Angel praises the sausages from Mattern Sausage in Orange for, “Its curved shape was good for hitting my G-spot and, because it was a smooth surface, it was also great in my ass.”  If that’s not a praise for their sausage then I don’t know what is!  What Gus didn’t mention is that there is actually an article and pictures of Jenna von Oy from Blossom fame!!!

Videos

Ladies, is this what it has come to?  What extracurricular activity does the Shake Weight resemble?

Are all the people in Santa Cruz like this, or is their something wrong with the water?

Don’t forget the Aspray next time you have issues with your body odor.

And lastly I had to include this awesome time-lapse video of Disneyland construction, it’s amazing how quickly they were able to do stuff back then, compared to the time it takes today.

Have a great week!

-Daniel

I have a little bit of a perdicament, a year ago I registered the domain LetsGoDodgers and at first I was going to make a Dodgers blog, but I’m not committed enough to continue something like that, since I really do have a life outside of the internet.  The problem now is that I have 19 days to decide if I want to continue owning the domain, I think it could be a nice site to own and develop someday so I don’t really want to let it go, I even registed LetsGoTrojans sometime after that, but did even less there.  So I’d love to hear comments from anyone that reads this as to what I should do with either of those sites.

First off probably the best site I’ve found this week, thanks to Bill over at Dubious Quality for Awkward Family Photos!  There are some real gems there.  For those of you in California, thougth I would pull a oldie from my own links I like to visit, California Highways, can pretty much tell you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the roads we travel on here in the CA.

Kelly and I both enjoy watching Talk Soup and now after watching this preview for Community and I’m really looking forward to seeing Joel McHale (and even Chevy Chase) in the fall.

Here are some links I found through LifeHacker this week.  TrueCar will help you find out if the price you are getting for that new car is actually a good deal compared to what others are getting.  I can tell you we got a great deal on our G35 looking at the price of the new G37.  If you are looking for a book review site, you might want to check out Book Army, which will make suggestions basted on users with similar tastes of yours, I’ve signed up and will work on adding books, since I’d like to start reading more.

DUKE NUKEM IS DEAD! One of the biggest computer game stories of the century and yet it took me nearly a week to actually find this out.  3D Realms has closed for business.  “Shake it baby…”.

My webhost Dreamhost is having a wonderful special going on right now.  If you signup for webhosting using the promotional code ” SAVETHEDEVIL” you will not only get $50 off your signup but they will also donate $50 to the Save the Tasmanian Devil program.  All you have to do is click on this link to check out my host and use the promotion code, they are a great host that does great things.

Who wouldn't want to save this cute guy?

I jailbroke my iPhone last night and it’s working flawlessly so far, made a couple little cosmetic tweaks to the interface but the good programs aren’t online yet.  I also found a CTU ringtone for my phone!

Day 1

I guess I can begin from the start and see if I can remember everything. We left for San Francisco at 4:15 AM; traffic was good most of the way up except for a 15 minute stop of traffic as the California Highway Patrol cleared an accident on Interstate 5 right at the exit for Magic Mountain. We arrived in San Francisco crossing the Bay Bridge at around 11:30. The weather was great, it was around 70-75 with just a little breeze, but if you know anything about San Francisco the weather is very unpredictable in the Spring… Fortunately we had called the hotel earlier and verified that we could do early check in! We arrived at the Sir Francis Drake hotel and were in our room by 12:00 PM. Our hotel was in the downtown area of San Francisco, so we were in the perfect location to use as a staging area to get, go, or do anything we wanted. After we unpacked we headed out to find ourselves some lunch. As we exiting the hotel we saw there was a coffee shop by the name of Sears Fine Food. We crossed the street and had some sandwiches for lunch, if you take a look at the pictures previously posted you can see a couple pictures from our lunch. After lunch we went walking around downtown. Kelly saw that were close to stores so we did some window shopping and ended up at the Lucky Brand Jeans store where Kelly bought herself a pair of Classic Rider jeans, which she declared she would not wear to work! We then relaxed in the hotel room for an hour and headed towards Market Street to catch the F-line to go and explore the Pier 39 / Fisherman’s Wharf area. We walked around Pier 39 and took some pictures of the Seal Lions and then we decided to check out the USS Pampanito, a WWII submarine on display. The sub was cool; it’s amazing how small it really was inside there. After that we had dinner at the Boudin Café, which unfortunately wasn’t a great experience because the waiter completely sucked! Lastly we took the Powell – Market cable car back to our hotel. As the sun was getting close to setting the fog and wind rolled in…

Day 2

This was to be our busy day. We had early bird tickets for Alcatraz, so we woke up at around 7 AM, cleaned up and headed to Pier 33 to get some breakfast and wait for our boat. It was cold, windy, and foggy; probably somewhere around 50 with 30 MPH gusts that made it feel lower. We were the first ones there and discovered there wasn’t anywhere to eat around Pier 33, so we walked about a mile down to Pier 39 and nothing was open there except for the coffee shop, we ordered something to drink and a quick bite to hold us over till lunch, and then walked back to Pier 33. When we arrived at Pier 33 to wait for the boat there were about 15-20 other people waiting now, we lined up and waited. Boarding was supposed to start at 8:30 but didn’t start till 8:50, and for some reason even though we arrived long before them, a large group of high schoolers from Oregon were allowed to board the boat before all the other passengers that were already lined up and waiting. The trip out to Alcatraz via boat exponentially added to the wind and cold as it appears that the wind on the bay itself is about 10-15 MPH higher in the open water, but we survived and made it to Alcatraz Island! It was nice being the early bird group because you don’t have to deal with big crowds because you are the first group to get there for the day. We explored the island and the prison for about 2 ½ hours, and headed back to the mainland. Being that we were starving we went to the Fog City Diner, which was just down the street to eat lunch. We looked over the menu and realized it was a somewhat upscale diner and it really didn’t have the type of food we were looking for, so we left. I had suggested to Kelly that sometime during the trip I wanted to go to this burger joint that I saw on the Food Network’s, Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, called Joe’s Cable Car, so she suggested we go there. The only problem with this decision is that it was on the completely other side of San Francisco, the area most tourists never see, South of the I-280. We hopped on the F-Line to get back to downtown, and then we took the BART (subway), unfortunately we got off 1 exit early, so after we figured out where we were we went back on BART to the next exit. From there we had to take the bus about 1 mile. The only problem then was that since I didn’t have the exact directions with me we had to look around to find it, fortunately that didn’t take too long. At Joe’s Cable Car, Joe grinds his own meat, but he doesn’t fire his bad waitress who is a ditz and completely out of it, I have a hunkering suspicion that she is married to our waiter from Boudin Café, because they both were terrible at providing service. The burger was great though, but due to the circumstances of getting there and the bad service Kelly wasn’t that impressed with it. After lunch (@2:30) we hopped on the bus back to our hotel to relax before our next adventure. I told you this was our busy day; we also had tickets for the San Francisco Giants vs. Arizona Diamondbacks game. I bought awesome tickets online from a season ticket holder through Stubhub. We were just passed first base on the field in the 2^nd row! The seats were some of the best I’ve ever had; I got some great pictures of players, which look like I was right next to them. I wore my Dodgers hat and shirt to support my home town team, and some of those around me asked where we were from. I talked a lot to this one guy that has both Giants and A’s season tickets, he was pretty cool even though he gave me a hard time for being a Dodger fan. We left the game in the 6^th, because Kelly was getting cold and we had had a long day. Some people yelled at me that the Dodgers sucked while I was leaving so I tipped my hat to them to show my appreciation… We took the bus back to downtown and since we were still sort of hungry ate some food at Lori’s Diner.

Day 3

Vacation is all about doing things you don’t normally do while you are not on vacation, so we treated ourselves to breakfast in bed with room service this morning! Kelly said it was probably the most expensive breakfast she had ever ate, but we didn’t care we were enjoying vacation. Today was our drive around do, so we called down for our car and drove North over the Golden Gate Bridge to Muir Woods National Monument to check out the tall redwood trees. It was pretty amazing that there is such a lush forest only minutes from San Francisco. After finishing our hike through the forest we went to Sausalito to eat at Fred’s Café, another burger joint. Another place with great burgers! After lunch we drove around Golden Gate Park. Kelly got scared at one point because on one of the roads out of the park there is a one lane tunnel, while we were waiting for the light to turn green for us to use the tunnel there was a couple standing near the light that asked us for a ride through the tunnel because pedestrian traffic is prohibited. We of course did not let them go with us, but Kelly was weirded out by the experience. We went back to the hotel and then back out adventuring San Fran via foot. I wanted to get a new camera bag so we went to the Wharf area to see what type of deal I could haggle at the camera stores there. I got my bag and then we took the bus up the hill to Coit Tower, if you looked at our pictures it’s the round tower that I took some pictures from. From Coit Tower you can get a fantastic view of the entire city. Then we went back to our hotel, via two busses. We cleaned up a bit and headed back out on the town. We took a bus to Little Italy to find an Italian restaurant that I read about in my Frommer’s book; unfortunately I didn’t realize that they were closed on Wed. so we went to another one that ended up being closed down! We were having really bad luck in Little Italy, but there was one more place that sounded good, Sodini’s Green Valley Restaurant. I’m glad the other places weren’t open because the food was fabulous, and there was a cool little record shop across the street we checked out afterwards. The record shop was filled with tons of stereo equipment and there were no records to be found, until we got to the back of the shop and realized there was a stairway leading underground to a basement that was filled with well over 50,000 records. The only problem was that the records appeared to be in no actual organization! This however did not stop me from finding a record for my dad that I knew he didn’t have, not bad for only the third record I flipped to. We then went back to the hotel and walked around the shops again. Kelly found a jacket she liked at the Ben Sherman store but she didn’t end up buying it, most of the other stores were already closed since it was getting close to 8:00 PM. We then walked over to this bar that someone on a message board told me about, called the Gold Dust Lounge, it was a great little place that were were able to sit down and order a ½ liter of Paulaner Hefe for myself and an Irish Coffee for Kelly, for only 8 bucks! After the Gold Dust we did my traditional pilgrimage to the Wharf to have a late night crab sandwich, which again wasn’t as good as the first one I ever had back in 2004, Kelly got some fried shrimp which were real good. We then went back to the hotel and called it a night.

Day 4

We slept in yet still ended up heading out to breakfast by 9:00 AM. We decided to end our San Francisco portion of the trip the same way were started it, going across the street and having breakfast at Sears Fine Food, where I ate 18 pancakes, but they were small silver dollar size Swedish pancakes, not huge ones… After that we went back to the hotel and packed up our things to head to our second vacation destination, Monterey.

(to be continued)

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