This was one of the best Christmas celebrations either in spite of or because it was so simple. I got some really great gifts including:

• Final Fantasy 6: Grand Finale - this CD has some AWESOME symphonic recordings of the best songs of FF6
• Fantastic Plastic Machine: Les Plus - a great remix CD of that funky Japanese DJ, FPM. I’m sure you’ve heard him in commercials and movies and didn’t even know it. For example, one of his songs from this CD was in the second Austin Powers movie.
• Linux Shell Scripting with Bash - to help me continue honing my programming skills
• A great book on creating surreal artwork with Photoshop
• Hollywood Shuffle - a great movie about Blaxsploitation films
• 1776 - a book about the American Revolution
• some other stuff that was ordered, but didn’t arrive on time

But my favorite part was giving my presents to my family members. I made a calendar for my mom and her brothers with old pictures from their childhood since their mother died this year. I don’t know how my uncle in Miami reacted, but my uncle who was with us in Tampa was near tears. I’m glad I was able to make them emotional in a good way as they remembered simpler times. I think that’s one of the reasons God gave me the talent of photography and photo editing. Oh, and I gave my cousin a blog for Christmas as one of her presents. She loves to write and now she can write for the world. She has some great poetry up. You can check out her site here.

Went to Disney a few days ago with my family and found out that Disney is not quite the innocent little park it once was. I never quite felt the same about the park after 11 Sept 2001 when they began checking bags, but this time it was even more invasive. In order to enter the park I had to insert my ticket and then be digitally fingerprinted. Why did I have to be fingerprinted? To tie the ticket to me. In addition to the fact that it had my name printed on it, it now had my fingerprints attached to it. Now, I can’t really think of too many nefarious things Disney can do with my prints, but it was just really weird. Are that many people having their tickets stolen?

The timing of this holiday is perfect. Coming near the end of the year, there are basically 11 months upon which to look back on. As my wife reminded me last weekend, a lot have happened this year. As a matter of fact, I think this has been the most eventful year of my life. Here are the things I have to be thankful for this year:

May: We both graduated from Cornell with excellent grades; I had two job offers and selected one in the last week of school.

Mauricio replied to my post yesterday in order to placate my fears about his changing. (You can read it by clicking on comments below now that it’s been approved) In his post, he reminded me of why most of us blog (if our blogs are not simply parroting the news). We blog to sort out our feelings. We write what we would write in private in a journal or diary. But, unlike those devices, we put our lives out on display - really put our hearts on our sleaves. I know I’ve written some blog posts that we so slanted towards the way I was feeling that day, that they don’t represent the average me. They represent me happy/mad/sad/etc. I knew that in the back of my head and his comments just reminded me of the fact.

back from my honeymoon. Just found out the server was down the entire time. I plan to buy a UPS tomorrow if I get the chance. More posts to follow.

Oh, and FC4 is 4k kernel stack, but linuxant has finally released a 16k kernel patch so I should be able to upgrade my main linux computer!

Enjoying Mexico and each other…

happy birthday USA

Today’s the Asian wedding ceremoney and reception. If you’re good you’ll get to see some pictures.

If nothing has gone wrong, I am getting married today and thus will have no time to blog. Tell you about it when I get back from my Honeymoon.

weather has delayed her arrival to 1 am !

get to see my fiancee in about 5.5-6 hours! Then we’ll never be apart for more than the length of a business trip.