As if I didn’t have enough going on in my life, I bid farewell to Voxify last Friday and started a new job at Dolby Laboratories today. It was a fun and educational experience being in the software startup world again, but it was high time for some new challenges. It’s always hard to leave a company with people that you’ve known for many years, but life gets bigger and you just have to make the tough calls and move on. So a huge thanks to all of you who helped me be successful at Voxify, and I’m looking forward to the challenges ahead at Dolby.

The checkup from earlier this week indicated all systems nominal. Baby Shih was asleep during the exam so we have no stories of him eluding or kicking the doppler to report.

Something tells me we may have picked the wrong shirt to do this in…

You are in the kill zone of a large Zachary’s Spinach & Mushroom deep dish pizza with our personal touch of sausage added as a topping. I picked it up half cooked and finished off the baking at home.

For those of you unfamiliar with Zachary’s pizza, you are seriously missing out. The winning combination of perfect deep dish crust, chunky tomatoes, insane amounts of cheese, and tasty toppings (are they still toppings when they’re technically inside?) makes for the best pizza you’ll probably ever eat.

I figured I’d switch things up a bit and rather than the predictable bouquet of red roses, I went for something far more enjoyable: ginormous strawberries. I jokingly told people that Tam would have no problem polishing off 16 of these suckers in one night…but it was still a sight to behold.

All gone!!!

Oops, a bit late on this one.

Yeah, he’s growing for sure.

Oh, dear God…someone save me. My CS clanmates have been slowly defecting over to playing Battlefield 2 and I finally took the plunge. I can definitely see how horribly addictive it is. I shall use this as training for the all-nighters I expect to pull when Baby Shih arrives.

We went to the Aerosmith concert last night at the Oakland Arena and came away with mixed feelings. I had the additional bonus of coming away with impaired hearing, but more about that later. To begin with, I must have missed the ads for the show because I totally missed the on-sale date. When I got around to looking for tickets, the available seats weren’t that great. I did notice that the show wasn’t close to being sold out so I tried my hand on eBay for tickets. I somehow scored pretty decent seats on the aisle of the lower club area (Section 115, Row 9 for those keeping score) for less than the face value of the tickets from some guy in Canada…go figure. I immediately thought a scam was at hand, but the tickets worked just fine.

I was pretty surprised to see Lenny Kravitz as the opening act on the bill, but I’m not complaining. He sure puts on an entertaining show. Tam-ay decided to forget her earplugs at home and since I’m more suicidal than her, gave them up to her. I can assure you that Lenny’s 9 piece band was plenty loud to fill the Oakland Arena with rock-and-or-roll. It’s too bad the fools in front of us wouldn’t sit down. I mean, if you want to stand and dance all night, get some bloody floor seats already. If you’re going to be in the stands, sit your ass down. But apparently that’s too much to ask.

I noticed that Lenny went on a bit late, closer to 8:00pm than the published 7:30pm start time, but didn’t think much of it at the time. When he packed it in for the night, it must have been sometime after 9. Then came the painful wait. Unbeknownst to us, Aerosmith was actually in LA at the Grammys and were flying up to Oakland to play the concert. They didn’t go on until 10:15pm…ouchies. By that time, quite a few people had already left in disgust because they couldn’t stay out that late.

Even in their old age, Aerosmith still puts on a great show. Brad looked like he was dragging a bit, but was still wailing away without any problems. They opted to go away from the popular crowd-pleasing hits in the middle of the set and even tapped Joe to do some songs from his solo projects. That didn’t really do it for me, but they finished off with a bang. The enjoyment of illicit substances in our section got a bit too bothersome near the end so we had to make a break for it before they finished their encore.

I doubt anyone has noticed, but I made the switch to a new website hosting service yesterday evening. I’ve continued to have sporadic timeout issues with Total Choice Hosting, who I’ve been with since the inception of this site three years ago, and have given up on them. I made the jump over to Frozen Webhost and have been thoroughly impressed so far.

I’ve been procrastinating on switching hosting services because I was under the impression that I’d have to reconfigure everything that I previously mucked with…Gallery, MySQL, WordPress, my bajillion email addresses, and the list goes on. So I started tinkering around with my new host yesterday evening and quickly reached an impass in how to port things over. So I IM’d their support contact and got a speedy response…from Frozen Webhost’s owner, Steve Gorkes, no less! Steve graciously offered to move everything over to me, and in no time, had everything clicking like a DA10 drivetrain not built by me.

I’ll post more thoughts as I get a better feel for Frozen Webhost, but things look really good so far!

Stylin’ maternity jeans!