Tam and Xander were in SoCal since Thursday so other than my brief devolution back into bachelorhood, it was surprising to see how much Xander has grown over the span of five days. He’s definitely grown taller, but also decided to grow some more hair. My mom is going to be in for a shock when she gets back from Taiwan on Monday since she’ll have gone for twelve days without seeing him.

On another note, I think we need to send Xander to the Chinese circus or something. He was thrashing around last night and finally passed out in this position…

I know there are all sorts of little gems in Oakland’s Chinatown but I’ve been too lazy to seek them out. I’ve heard of a kick ass dumpling place so after some searching, I found the joint…Shan Dong. The staff is super friendly, a far cry from your typical indifferent Chinese restaurant. What it may lack in ambiance, it well makes up for in its food. Arguably, this type of ambiance is needed for good Chinese food, but I digress.

We dialed up the 宮保雞丁 (kung pao chicken), handmade 炸醬麵 (spicy meat sauce noodles), Tam’s favorite veggie 豆苗 (pea sprouts), and their renowned dumplings. We tried one plate of 韭菜水餃 (pork and leeks dumplings) and another of 山東特味水餃 (pork and cabbage dumplings). Everything was outstanding. Especially since everything was roughly $5-6 per plate and they weren’t skimping on the portions. There was plenty left over for Tam’s lunch tomorrow.

The reviews on Yelp suggested avoiding the restrooms so we didn’t venture in there, but everything else was clean enough. I don’t think my mom would approve, but that won’t stop us from going back. They also make frozen bags of 50 dumplings available so we couldn’t help but get a bag of the 韭菜水餃. Looking forward to boiling those up at home.

Apparently Xander got flashy-thinged into oblivion earlier today by an overzealous mom and grandma. My mom is making a quick trip back to Taiwan later this week and wanted some photos to take with her. Tam was happy to oblige. With no less than 71 photos. I bet his corneas taste like burning.

Of course, we’d like to share the fruits of that labor.

You can kinda see Xander’s two lower front teeth

One of his favorite current pastimes is to pull his socks off. Here’s some double fisted action.

He also likes to make all sorts of smacking sounds with his tongue.

Here’s a slightly better shot of his teeth.

The Shih residence is now officially House of Hondas. Tam decided to get the new 2007 Honda CR-V to replace her 2003 Toyota Corolla. So with my EP3 and my mom’s Accord, we’ve got a few Hondas up in here. We got it last weekend, but I finally had a chance to wash and wax it this morning. Here are a few shots:

We went with our trusty auto broker, JB at Direct Auto, to get the car. If you’re unfamiliar with the auto broker process, you figure out what car you want, test drive it, and give JB a call with all the relevant specs. He tracks down the best deal and then has the car delivered to your front door with all the paperwork. No fuss, no muss. No need to throw down at your local dealership. Not that I’m not into that sort of thing, but I’ve got better things to do with my time these days than play grabass with the dealership. Interested? Just give me a shout.

So…anyone interested in a white 2003 Toyota Corolla with manual transmission and low miles?

I use WordPress to power this blog and upgraded to the latest version not one week ago and all of a sudden, another release was announced yesterday. Apparently there was some PHP security problem that some jackass hacker was exploiting to overrun a bunch of WordPress blogs. For whatever reason, the hacker decided to target SEO blogs.

If you’re unfamiliar with the world of SEO, the acronym stands for Search Engine Optimization…something that I’m nominally responsible for at my day job, among many other things. In a nutshell, it’s the practice of optimizing your website’s pages to naturally (or organically, as some put it) show up at or near the top of search results when searchers search for certain keywords and phrases. As you can probably imagine, there are folks who use it to legitimately support the content of their websites and others who try to game the system to make their pages rank well for things they have no place ranking for. And then there’s everyone in between.

I suppose SEOs just got a bunch of free publicity out of this one. Oh, if you use WordPress and haven’t upgraded to 2.0.7 yet, get on it. The official WordPress announcement was rather anticlimactic:

Recently a bug in certain versions of PHP came to our attention that could cause a security vulnerability in your blog. We’re able to work around it fairly easily, so we’ve decided to release 2.0.7 to fix the PHP security problem and the Feedburner issue that was in 2.0.6. It is recommended that everyone running WordPress 2.0.6 or lower upgrade to this new version.

I would have hoped for something with a bit more urgency, but whatever.

After throwing on the Mugen Sports Suspension on the EP3 late last year, I was negligent in getting an alignment done. After poking around on ephatch.com, I went to Roger Kraus Racing over in Castro Valley. Great call. They’re an outstanding shop and really know their stuff. Brandon Kraus did the alignment and I got some grim news.

Check out the computer readout:

Everyone see how much toe my front had? Maximum scrubbing of the inside of my front tires. There was definitely some shred-age of my tires driving around like that. He got my fronts aligned properly, but I definitely need a rear camber kit to get my rears within spec. Even with just the fronts aligned, the EP3 drives much better now.

The butt slide from a few days ago just ain’t cutting it any more. Forget having to wait around for someone to hold him up. Xander is now all about taking advantage of our hardwood floors in another way that still doesn’t really resemble crawling — pushing himself around backwards with his hands. Check out the video…

Problem is, he can’t see where he’s going. He quickly finds himself jammed up against walls, table legs, under chairs, etc. but keeps pushing away. Too funny!