Okay, it’s a bit late, but here are photos from Chicago. We’ll start off with some from Alinea, which was pretty ridiculous. I’d consider going again in a few years, definitely.

This was my favorite:

The dessert was pretty crazy. I don’t even know what was in it.

It was pretty cold… I think when we got in it was somewhere in the lower teens.

We went to the John Hancock Observatory which was pretty cool. Nice view of the city.

I think this one is funny because it looks like an ad photo.

The day after Alinea, we went to Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak and Stone Crab, which was pretty awesome. This is the same restaurant I went to in Las Vegas.

After that, we had stuffed pizza and Chinese:

The next day, we had brunch and italian and visited The Bean:

The last day… I don’t remember the place. It was good but not memorable. It did have wood ice-cream though.

We also…

• Saw Les Misérables, which was enjoyable.


• Saw a small play that was put together with various real love/break-up letters. It was amusing.

I had fun this weekend looking at some old photos from 2004-2005 time period. A select few have now been uploaded to Facebook.

HAHAHAHA. My sisters love me so much. =D

More here.

Yeah yeah yeah, I went to Hong Kong and Singapore. Here are some photos:

There was a Korean place in this alley that was awesome:

I like to think of this as SAW VII: PANDAMONIUM:

I picked my own fish to steam from this lot of live seafood:

It was mighty yummy. =)

Clown barf!

This chili-crab in Singapore, OMan recommended, was also rather yummy.

Lots more photos on flickr.

I also made a movie trailer starring Melissa!

Our family typically celebrates Christmas more on Christmas Eve than on actual Christmas day, so that’s what happened again this year. I picked up iLife ‘11 and took it home and Olivia toyed with it a bit and quickly came up with this using its new trailer “mode:”

Here are a few shots of the Wong family opening presents, and related shenanigans:

Then, at around 1AM on Christmas day, Steph and I repeated our early morning IHOP run with Sam, Heather and Viraj this time (last year OMan and Mikey were there). We ended up staying there until 6:30AM. Craaazy.

We also didn’t let Christmas get in the way of our usual ultimate game, so we rounded up a group of six and headed to the field with the wind blowing and the temperature in the 40’s. We ended up revising the rules so that the frisbee was still live if it was rolling which caused quite a bit of hilarity. We played until until a team scored five and got out of there. Heather invited me over to Jimmy’s for dinner and they (plus Steph) cooked dinner which I was able to mooch off of… woo!

Now it’s time for me to play with iMovie… adios. =)

I did not play ultimate this weekend because I was lazy and slept through it. Very sad. =(

I went to see The Blistering Speeds at Spider House with a bunch of BVers (Al and Scotty are in the band).

After that, I hung out for a few hours with Steph, Heather, OMan, Sam and Ryan. I also uploaded some photos I took for a photobook I made for Melissa…

On Sunday, Heather and Steph came over and OMan, Sam and I joined their scheduled P90X exercise which was intense. I think Melissa and I will start it when she comes back next year. Sam has also committed to doing it, so we’ll see how that goes. =)

Speaking of Sam… there is now a new Samitic.us post all about Sam Ni.

Nancy and Ochs had a party at Chancy’s for their combined birthdays. Some photos:

More photos.

On Saturday, Sam tried to molest Kat on the ultimate field. I’ll post more about that on Samitic.us sometime… along with some videos of Sam from the birthday party.

November is the first month of our new quarter, so BV flew in our international team for our All-Hands. Because they were here, we also had an early holiday party at the Austin Music Hall. I don’t have pics of the latter event, but Anne-Marie was there in photographer capacity so I’m sure she’ll post awesome photos shortly. =) Here are some of my shots from our All-Hands featuring new BV band, FEEDBACK:

Also, congrats to the culture award winners, especially the TS folk!

On Saturday, we played an early game of ultimate so that Simon could join us. We ended up playing for around four hours because the weather was so awesome and Jonney brought us Krispy Kreme donuts to fuel us through the game. It was pretty awesome, but now I’m sore. Luckily, my shins aren’t too bad this week so I guess they’re getting stronger. =p

Sunday was not all that eventful except I met up with the Tings and co for brunch at Tacodeli to see Alex again before he goes back to California. After that, went around eating/snacking with peeps then throwing frisbees around. I think my throwing technique could still use some work…

Okay, so I returned Friday night, but my schedule’s pretty much back to normal now. For a while over the weekend, even though I seemed to have quickly returned to a normal sleep schedule, I think my eating schedule was still off. I felt like I wanted to eat even though I had already eaten and felt full still. Hungry and full at the same time. It was weird. Anyways, I’m good now.

I’ve used my Kindle pretty heavily and I read three books on my London trip: Ender’s Game, Hunger Games, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I’m also now about 90% through the first Wheel of Time book. That one starts pretty slow, but it’s finally picking up now.

On Saturday, I was really looking forward to playing ultimate again and it was pretty fun. Last night, we skipped WoW (didn’t have enough people to raid) and played DotA instead, which was also good to get back to. We need to start HoN sometime soon… =)

Oh, and as usual, Flickr (but not my account!) has photos from the London Summit.

On Friday, the Technical Services and Design Services teams went to SeaWorld. Woo! It was my first time there… here are some photos:

I also finally uploaded some photos I took of Oriana’s dorm room. She’s got this thing for Edward, apparently… it’s a little creepy.

On Saturday, we played the usual ultimate game… I don’t think anyone was seriously injured this time. I watched Equilibrium which I recently purchased on blu-ray with Mark and Ryan, then hung out at Chad and Nancy’s for a long long time.

I think Sunday was fairly mellow… as was Monday where we had the usual WoW night with some DotA splashed in. We finally beat Sindragosa! That cursed dragon… Greg cooked for us and it was tasty.

Oh yes, and on sister-site, Samiticus, the Sam Ni fan site, apparently Viraj has struck again!

My last self-portrait was so much fun, I had to do another set. This time I decided on an emo one. I originally wanted to do emo goth, but after a (too expensive) visit to Hot Topic, I ended up a bit more emo punk/rock than goth, so I just went with that. I had the “gear” for quite a while, but finally went and did the shoot with the help of Sam, Melissa, TC, and Oriana tonight (also thanks to Nancy for the hair straightener). Enjoy!

That was pretty amusing. =) I think Sam has a few setup shots on his camera he may post eventually. As usual, Flickr has the rest.