This past week, Bazaarvoice had its annual US Social Commerce Summit where I served as photographer again. It was pretty cool, with Google being our platinum sponsor, but also pretty tiring. You can view my photos in my flickr set, but here are a few:

After the summit, I took the rest of the week off to chill and recharge. I did mostly nothing, but I did cheat a little and showed up to my team’s offsite to hang with them for a bit at Crown & Anchor:

Friday night, I went to Uchi with Al, Eduardo, and Scotty, which was pretty tasty as expected then went to meet up with Melissa at Sarina’s birthday party… where I spent about 30+ minutes trying to find parking in west campus… oh west campus…

I started to mess with Aperture 3 and decided to make the switch from Lightroom over to it. I was experimenting with the pics above and also reedited some shots from when I went to Salt Lick with some BVers (that batch happened to be on my laptop when I was looking for photos to play with). I think the Salt Lick ones turned out pretty well.

I’m still getting used to having control of curves in the individual RGB channels, but I’m liking it lots so far. =) Good job, Apple.

Some other random tid bits:

• finally got around to watching Slumdog Millionaire


• started using Time Machine for backups on my iMac


• looked at reviews for Canon’s 1D Mark IV, but promptly stopped deciding it was too dangerous (don’t think I could give up full frame, anyways)


• watched a few classes about iPhone app development on Stanford’s iTunes U


• went to the Glee sing-along at the Drafthouse

I’ve probably left stuff out, but whatever… you’ll live. =)

Hah! Okay, I really don’t have anything juicy to hide, but I’m not particularly in the blogging mood, so you will have to live with not knowing what I did this weekend. =p I just feel like I have to hit my weekend blog post quota…

This coming week is the Social Commerce Summit which I am shooting again. Hopefully my ankle is up to the task (I think it should be as long as I don’t do anything crazy). I haven’t done a good amount of shooting in a while, so it’ll be nice to spend a decent chunk of time with my camera again.

Now that I have rewarded you with a boring blog post with misleading title, I will now say goodbye. Hah!

I recorded this yesterday during our WoW night. Warning: contains profanity. Enjoy. =)

I think it’s a childhood fantasy of most young boys to have a pet dragon. I remember really enjoying Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher and an assortment of other dragon pet books. Dude, and Neverending Story? Yeah, that dog/dragon guy was pretty cool (I don’t think I should watch that movie again and just bask in my childhood memories of it).

Anyways, Sunday, I went to Vox with the usuals then went to Estancia for Sam’s 27th birthday (happy birthday!). After that stuffing of the face, I lasted about an hour or something playing WoW at home before I succumbed to the food coma and slept for almost 3 hours. I woke up to various tweets regarding How to Train Your Dragon 3D, and seeing that it has a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I opted to try to catch the last showing of it at Alamo South Lamar. I also managed to steal Melissa away from her studying (I might be a bad influence) to come along. I enjoyed it pretty well. I noticed that a few reviews on RT called it “Avatar for kids” which is an easy comparison to draw, although I enjoyed it more than the Cameron behemoth of a movie. IMO, James could learn a thing or two from this “kids movie” about story telling and bringing out emotion. I just felt like it had more character and soul, I suppose. =) Plus, I would take the stealth-fighter “Night Fury” dragon over whatever crazy bird thing that was in Avatar any day.

Going in reverse chronological order, on Saturday, I spent a bit of time at Zilker with Melissa and some of her peeps, then went back up north for some ultimate action only to have Sam bust my ankle. Needless to say, I didn’t run the 10k I had signed up for on Sunday (I might’ve skipped anyways, but that’s not the point ;-)). Wrapped up that day by spending a bit of time at Chancy’s for Sam’s pre-6th, pre-birthday bash then started watching some Modern Family, which is solidly amusing.

I think that’s all I can remember for now… tata!

So here I was minding my own business casually throwing a frisbee around for ultimate warm up, when Sam goes ballistic and charges me yelling “I’M GOING TO SMASH YOU BECAUSE YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME!” Luckily, he is slow and I managed to avoid him, but unfortunate for me, a rock or something on the ground was too slow and did not avoid me at all. I stepped on it in a rather poor fashion causing me to roll on my right foot. So now I have a sprained ankle. =( Thanks a lot, Sam… and you too, rock.

There shall be retribution.

So yesterday we were all minding our own business playing WoW when Sam, who is sitting next to Brook, suddenly exclaims “wow, Brook, have you been working out? It looks like you’ve got a hot bod under that shirt.” Brook blankly stares back at Sam as he goes on “…what would I need to do get you to take it off?” Brook was pretty flabbergasted, but eventually gives in to Sam’s wily ways under the condition that Sam also go shirtless.

Sam happily agrees and I managed to capture the moment with my handy camera. I guess Sam just really wanted some man eye-candy next to him as he tanked ToC. Whatever gives you motivation, I guess, Sammy.

On Friday night, I saw Phantom of the Opera with Melissa and some of her friends. It was my first time seeing it, and was pretty enjoyable. =) Walking around campus makes me feel a bit old though… However, what makes me feel even older is the fact that I have my 10 year high school reunion next year. 10 years! Eep…

On Saturday, I took Melissa to Lockhart for some tasty BBQ. I had only previously ever been to Black’s and Chisholm Trail, so I figured it was time for me to hit up either Kreuz or Smitty’s (which I feel are actually the more well known/visited places). We ended up going to Smitty’s but I must unfortunately say that I was underwhelmed. They ran out of prime rib, so we didn’t get to try that, but the brisket and pork chops were both fairly dry (yes, I asked for fatty brisket). The pork ribs were pretty good, though. I might be down for giving them another chance, but I didn’t get a very good first impression. It made me want to do another meatcation…

Sunday, after church, we had a bit of an introduction lunch at Arpeggio Grill for Viraj and Stephanie King to meet Melissa and for two of her friends, Sarina and Helen to meet me. Can’t go wrong with a tasty 30” Greek pizza. =) That was pretty fun, then I went home, hung out for a bit and passed out for a few hours.

Throughout the weekend, there was Pushing Daisies watching as well… we’re approaching the end of the second/final season. It has also been pretty enjoyable, so I would classify this as a solid weekend. =)

On to the work week!…

So I got bored and I went back and found archives of my “blog” posts from 1999-2004. Back then, there weren’t many (if any) blog platforms, so I was using some funky “news” posting software. Apparently it stored all the posts in a text file with delimiters of “x”…

Anyways, I whipped up a quick script to convert it into an XML format WordPress could import and… tada! I wouldn’t be surprised if links were broken, by the way…

It’s kind of crazy to see over ten years worth of blogging on the right sidebar now…