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After a month and a half of non-stop rain, we got a break here in the Bay Area. It couldn’t have come at a better time. It’s the kids’ spring break, you see. I took advantage of the wonderful weather and took the kids out on two separate days.

Last Tuesday, the kids’ cousin from my side of the family joined us to go to the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito. It’s nestled at the base of the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s got lots of little things for children 8 & under to do. The bigger kids had fun anyway.

Once we were done at the museum, I decided to drive up to the Marin Headlands to check out the view of the Golden Gate Bridge from the western side. Could you believe I have not been on that side before? The view was absolutely spectacular.

Yesterday, we headed out to the San Francisco Zoo. This time the kids’ cousin from my wife’s side of the family went with us. We got there pretty late but we covered the entire zoo in two hours. We had fun checking out the animals but we were pretty exhausted by the end of the day.

I chose these San Francisco spots because, first of all, the kids have never been to these places. Secondly, thanks to the internet, I found out that SFUSD’s spring break was last week so there were no big crowds to contend with. There’s also a third reason: these places were actually slightly cheaper than their East Bay counterparts. The online coupon for the museum, for example, helped a little bit.

The older boys are now at my parents’ house. They’re spending time with their grandparents for a couple of days. I heard they went kiting at Berkeley Marina today. It was another beautiful day, I bet.

Here is a picture I took of a Capybara at Happy Hollow Zoo in San Jose, CA this past weekend. It’s a small zoo with an impressive collection of exotic animals. I only caught a glimpse of the backside of their jaguar. I could have taken some cool pictures of my sons in the petting zoo but they thought the place was too stinky. *sigh*

More animal pictures here.

O’Reilly, the publisher of computer books, is known for depicting various fauna on their books’ covers. Being that I am interested in Mac computing, I noticed that the books pertaining to versions of Apple’s OS X, like Panther and Jaguar, do not feature big cats on their covers. Instead, they feature dogs. Now, why would O’Reilly do a seemingly illogical thing like that? Choosing a panther for a book on OS 10.3 would be the easiest thing to do. But no, they chose a beagle instead.

This year’s Macworld gave me the opportunity to ask someone at the O’Reilly booth the reason why cats aren’t being used on OS X books. The nice lady behind the counter told me that for Macintosh book covers, they’ve always used dogs. This is confirmed by a post at MacSlash by an O’Reilly employee:

We chose to use dogs on the covers of our Mac books long before Apple chose to release versions of Mac OS X with kitty names.

Our earliest Mac book, REALbasic: The Definitive Guide, sported a greyhound on the cover, so we decided to follow that motif and run dogs on the cover of all of the Mac books. There’s a bit more to this story, but that’s basically the gist of it.

I wonder whether O’Reilly’s decision to initally use a dog has something to do with Apple’s unofficial mascot back in the day, the dogcow. This was a system icon of a dog that was often mistaken for a cow. Now that’s one hoofed animal I don’t think you’ll ever see on O’Reilly’s covers.

As we arrived at the local Starbucks, my three year old son and I witnessed an ongoing animal rescue effort. A raccoon apparently had climbed up a tree and got stuck up there.

  

A policewoman borrowed ladders from nearby establishments, first from Starbucks but theirs was too short. She got a taller one from Autozone.

A crowd immediately gathered around the tree. One manong came up to me and asked me what creature was up there. I told him it was a raccoon. The rescue effort took about 15 minutes in all. People applauded when it was over.

Dogster.com is a growing social networking site for dogs put together by “self-described computer and canine geeks.” In this chart, it shows the Philippines as the fourth most represented country on the site with 124 registered dogs (the United Kingdom has 121). You realize the Philippines’ numbers can be much higher than that, don’t you?