Baby Yanovsky

Whoo! Just got this from Ken:

Vasily Yanovsky, born April 2 2008 at 2:49 pm, weighing 7 lbs 6.5 oz (3.36 kg) and 20 inches (50.8 cm) in length.

Congrats Ken and Inna!

Hanami

While the wife went to work, I decided to visit Shinjuki Gyoen. We'd heard that with the weather being so warm lately the sakura had bloomed early, and I wanted to make sure that I got some nice pictures before it was too late as the wife wouldn't be free till Saturday. I got to the park around 10:30am; it was a beautiful day, and the sakura trees were more than accommodating.

That's not snow in the last two shots, that's the flower petals blown loose by the wind! The park is pretty big, and I spent more time there than I'd expected, so I just bought a bento box and had lunch under a tree like everyone else who were on their lunch break.

By the time I left, it was around 1:30pm, and I was driven out more by my allergies than the fact that I really did need to get back to the hotel to do some work.

For more pictures, check out the Picasa album. I was playing with a circular polarizing filter today, which is why the sky looks such a beautiful shade of blue in some shots but not in others.

Back in Tokyo!

The wife's working in Tokyo for the a couple weeks and convinced me (it didn't take much) to spend a few days with her here. The timing is especially good because we're just in time for hanami, or flower viewing (and almost always referring specifically to cherry blossom (sakura) viewing).

Even the runway that we landed on was lined with sakura trees, so we're off to a good start! Here's a shot of the street next to our hotel, the Cerulean Tower Tokyu Hotel in Shibuya.

And with a room on the 33rd floor, we had an amazing view:

That green patch on the top of the roof of the building in the lower right is actually a soccer field!

Based on the advice of the concierge, we went to a nearby restaurant named (appropriately enough) Sakura for dinner and had a delicious meal.

Construction Day 55

With all the in-wall work pretty much complete, the house has been taken over by the insulation people as they pack the walls with UltraTouch natural fiber insulation.

We picked this over standard fiberglass insulation because of it's green properties. It's made out of 85% post-industrial cotton fiber (i.e. denim scraps from manufacturers) and is 100% recyclable. Even better for me is that it's VOC-free and formaldehyde-free, which should help the indoor air quality. As a side benefit, they should also work pretty well as a sound barrier.

With all the walls filled in, the rooms are really starting to take shape as you can no longer see from one end of the house to the other. The drywalls go up next and will probably take a couple weeks to complete.

Airborne Debunked

This winter it seemed like everyone was taking Airborne, an alka-seltzer style dietary health supplement that's supposed to boost your immune system. Even my wife, who's usually extremely leery of medication, tried them out a few times based on recommendations from her father.

Personally, I had my doubts, and it looks like my suspicions were right: the makers of Airborne just settled a class-action lawsuit for false advertising. The most interesting part? As part of their settlement they are offering a refund to anyone who has ever bought their product.

French Laundry

After trying to get a reservation for more than a year, we finally made it to the French Laundry last Saturday for lunch, where we spent five hours working our way through nine courses of oh-so-delicious food. I won't go into detail about the individual dishes; sufficed to say that they were all very good. My only complaint is that I liked C's dishes more than mine!

One of the biggest surprises for me was the water they served. It's local water, but they're using Nordaq Fresh, a relatively new super-duper water filtration system that removes everything you don't want (impurities, VOCs, bacteria, etc.) but leaves everything you do (minerals, salts). And while you normally wouldn't think twice about water, the stuff they served made us all sit up and pay attention, because it was really, really good - clean, fresh and invigorating. Even better, it's local water, so there's no need to ship it from halfway around the world. I hope more restaurants start using this system soon.

When we were done with the meal, we even got a chance to check out the kitchen where all the magic happens. C. kept mentioning that it was smaller than she expected. One cool touch they had was a big LCD hooked up to a camera into the kitchen at Per Se in NYC.

Construction Day 44

It doesn't look like much has changed since my last update 19 days ago, but that's because most of the work's been happening either in the walls, the attic, or the crawl space as the electrician, plumber and heating guys has been doing their thing. The only major visible change is the patio doors and the new landing in the garage:

The good news is that we've finally got all the approvals we need from the city. In the process, we've had to (a) add two strong-walls in the living room, (b) convert the wall between the patio doors into the family room into a shear wall, and (c) convert two walls in the master bedroom into shear walls. While the first two were relatively straightforward, the last one required us to re-do some work.

Pleasure and Pain

We ended up spending Friday and Sunday at Snowbird and Saturday at Solitude.

Honestly, I was/am so out of shape that day two at Snowbird wasn't as fun as it should have been. By mid-day, my feet and legs were hurting and I was more than happy to call it quits when 4pm rolled around. While I had a few good runs here and there, and I definitely appreciated the fact that almost all their chairs were fast and had foot rests, I can't say I was too impressed with Snowbird.

Even their most interesting feature -- the $1.4M tunnel they built to connect the front of the mountain with Mineral Basin on the back -- was nothing more than a novelty since you have to stand on a conveyor belt the whole way (I would much rather just sit on a chair). Although now that I think about it, you have to stand no matter how you get to Mineral Basin since the only other option requires you to be packed liked sardines into a tram.

After the troubles I was having on Friday, I almost took Saturday off, but I decided to persevere since I really wanted to check out Solitude. And I am so glad I did. Saturday turned out to be my best day on the slopes. I'm sure the ibuprofen helped, but my body must have rallied because the aches and pains seemed to just recede into the background.

Despite the fact that there was only one high speed chair, and most of the lifts were doubles, I found Solitude so much more enjoyable because of the terrain. Specifically, the sheer abundance of opportunities to go into the trees and pretty much play in powder. And did I mention that it more or less snowed the whole day? I could easily have spent all day on just the Eagle Express and Honeycomb Return chairs. I only went off the summit into Honeycomb Canyon a couple times because you have to cut across the entire front half of the mountain to get to the summit again from either of these chairs.

I also had a bit of fun at their "family friendly" terrain park. I've been trying to work on my jumps for a while now but a few nasty falls early on has made me overly cautious. The kid-sized jumps here really helped me build up my confidence so that I'm more willing to hit the jumps faster, and knowing that I can land them will hopefully enable me to keep trying to get more height and distance.

For our last day, we had to decided between Snowbird and Solitude, and I decided to vote for Snowbird because I really wanted to give it another chance. It was Bryan's favorite resort, and I wanted to make sure Friday's pain wasn't coloring my judgment. And it turns out it really didn't. After Solitude, Snowbird just seemed dull. I ended up closing out the day in the terrain park, and I found myself a lot more relaxed after Saturday's "practice" at Solitude. My last few runs down Mid-Gad was definitely my best of the day.

All in all, this was a great trip. It was my first time in Utah, and all thanks goes to Bryan for organizing the whole thing. I think I'm going to have to make snowboarding in Utah a more regular thing. After all, it's almost as fast to fly out here (2 hours) as it is to drive to Tahoe (4 hours), the snow is supposedly more reliable, and it is much, much less crowded.

Park City

We're in Salt Lake City, Utah for four days of snowboarding and we kicked it off today at Park City. This place is big, with some great runs, and there was even some powder! Definitely the best bit of snowboarding I've had in the past couple years.

Time to crash now. Gotta get up early to go to Snowbird tomorrow.

15ms of Fame

So I just found out that the wife will be on the news tonight on national TV. In Japan. It looks like the clip's available here, but I doubt it's going to stay there for long so I've archived it on YouTube for posterity.

Can you spot her?

Undocumented YUI TabView Feature

We've been using dojo at work for a while now but bugs in its UI components have really prevented us from doing everything that we wanted with it. Lately, I've started switching our code over to use YUI instead and have been surprised at how easy it's been.

One of the most critical components for us is the TabView component. While the docs for YUI are generally pretty good, I couldn't figure out how to display a "Loading..." image when dynamically pulling in data for a tab until I stumbled over this undocumented gem. Suppose you declare your tabs like so:

<div id="myTabs" class="yui-navset">
  <ul class="yui-nav">
    ...
  </ul>
  <div class="yui-content">
    ...
  </div>
</div>

Then adding the following CSS rules will automatically do the trick:

#myTabs .loading {
  background-image: url(/images/loading.gif);
  background-position: center center;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
}
#myTabs .loading * {
  display:none;
}

I stumbled over this while checking out the examples for the Bubbling Library's Dispatcher YUI plug-in, which in turn solves the problem of executing JavaScript in the dynamically loaded content.

Year in Review

Yesterday was my one year wedding anniversary. We didn't really do anything special since we've had family staying with us all week, but we did get a single sheet of our wedding cake to celebrate the occasion. This was entirely the wife's initiative though. My sole contribution was to mention how much I loved our lemon and poppy seed cake a couple weeks ago.

In our first year together we

• spent a month going around the world for our honeymoon,
• slowly merged our two separate households together,
• bought a huge piano,
• moved out of our house when we finally
• started our long planned-for remodeling project.

I don't know what the future will bring, but personally, I couldn't be happier and can say that I'm 100% better off now than I was 366 days ago.

Construction Day 25

All the windows but one are in now, and the patio doors will be arriving next week. They've also started to finish the shear walls.

Construction Day 21

Everything's still going pretty well despite the trouble we're having finalizing our plans. We've had to switch structural engineers because the ones we had been working with are asking for an arm and a leg to do the new calculations. We've also been told that we do not have enough shear wall in the master bedroom due to all the new windows we've added, so we're waiting to see if we have to get rid of a window to add that support or if there are any other alternatives.

Construction-wise, things are pretty much set in the front of the house. We decided to shorten the coat closet by the main entry last week once we saw how narrow the entry into the living room would be, and it's looking much better now. The electrician's starting to position all the recessed lighting and the first window is in!

A Slight Retraction

The last time I blogged about Barefoot I was deeply unhappy about the changes they'd made. This time I'm writing to retract my statement that I could no longer recommend them as the best place to go for coffee. While I can't say I'm ecstatic about the changes, I can at least say that I've come to terms with them and understand their reasons for it.

While I still miss the old milk, I have come to appreciate the new one as well. Barefoot is right; once I got over my disappointment that it no longer tasted the same, I did actually notice that the new milk lets the coffee come through better.

I did, however, get another surprise today when I ordered a cold latte. Apparently iced and cold lattes now comes pre-mixed using cold-brewed coffee by default (as opposed to using an espresso shot). This is probably a good thing if I was ordering an iced latte because throwing hot espresso on to the cold ice shocks the coffee. For cold lattes (no ice, just cold milk), however, I still prefer a real espresso shot. So now I have to remember to custom order my cold lattes. *sigh*

If only they'd publicize these changes instead of springing it on their poor unsuspecting coffee addicts...

Happy Chinese New Year!

Welcome to the year of the Earth Rat!

We rang in the new year with the wife's extended family, who are all in Sacramento this week since her brother is getting married this Friday.

Don't Forget To

Construction Day 16

The framing is still going on, but the major internal walls are all there now and things are really starting to take shape. The plumber and electrician have also started doing their thing, and the next major step is to get the windows in.

As for the plans, they're still not completely nailed down yet. We'd gone back to the city with an updated set of plans, but they want further revisions. *sigh*