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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.

Webmonkey shows how to make your thumbnail images grow to full-size using JavaScript. See it in action here.

On a side note, wasn’t Webmonkey supposed to have folded a couple of years ago? This is like when stores have going-out-of-business sales and you find out a couple of months later they’re still there.

Here’s a snapshot of the system profiler of an Apple iMac with a 2 Ghz Dual Core Intel chip.

Another year, another Macworld. The usual gang of suspects were there, although the crowd did seem bigger this year than previous years. There were the show presenters, the bubbly vendors, and attractive booth babes. The place was also teeming with creative folk as expected. The whole gamut was represented: agency principals, designers, hipster art students, musicians and photographers. Geeks were also in full force: there were the developers, the gamers, and Mac enthusiasts that seemed to have been Apple devotees since the inception of the Macintosh two decades ago. You’d see a couple of suits walking by once in a while.

Although it may seem like I’ve been people watching the entire time, the photos I took prove otherwise (they’re more of the booth and gadget variety). View them here.*

*about the photos, I thought of uploading them to my new Flickr account, this being a new year and all, but I ran into some problems. All methods of uploading photos failed: from the web-based technique, to the stand-alone Flickr Uploadr, to the iPhoto plug-in. Oh well, I’ll try again some other day.

I almost forgot about the photos I took last September of our local mission, Mission San José de Guadalupe, until I read Phisch’s entry on the mission in her area. Like Phisch, I was unwilling to pay the $5 entrance fee to check out the mission so the images here are of its exterior surroundings.

The plaque on the side of the church has this to say:

At the Ohlone Indian village of Oroysom, Padre Fermín Francisco de Lasuén founded this fourteenth of twenty-one Franciscan missions June 11, 1797. Taught by Padre Narcisco Durán, the Ohlone orchestra and choir became famous. By 1830 almost 2,000 Indians were living at the mission. The mission was secularized in 1836 and its lands divided into ranchos. The 1868 earthquake destroyed the adobe church and most other mission buildings. The church was rebuilt in 1985.

Yesterday turned out to be a day pleasantly spent with a couple of old and new friends. I met up with Edmund, a long lost friend of mine, to check out the Macworld expo together. Ed was a roommate/co-worker from back in the day.

Ed and I at Cha-Am Restaurant across the street from Moscone Center.

Click here to see how we looked ten or so years, and pounds, ago.

Cha-Am is a Thai fast food restaurant which occupies the space where Jollibee used to be. While dining there, I recognized Mike of Pusod and Jayadewa.com. I introduced myself, then invited him to join our table. We had a nice little chat about Macworld (which he himself attended), the internet and work.

We do! We do! We do need our steenkin’ badges!

More Macworld pics here.