Top 10 most memorable things in 2006 (part 2)

As promised, here is the rest of exciting things happened around us, hope you are having \”fun with Jane and Sherwood\”.

6. Christimas holiday celebration is the largest in scale so far. First of all, this is the first time Sherwood\’s parents to come over US to see how American people enjoyed the holidays. Secondly, Jane and Sherwood setup Christimas tree to celebrate the holidays for the first time ever since they moved to the house 5 years ago. This is also the first time for Sherwood in his life to setup one. The end result has been pretty stunning, especially in the night time thanks to 1250 lights and 50+ ornaments on the tree. Finally we have such a huge Christimas eve dinner that totally eight people barely eat half of the stuff.
7. Getting crazy to buy a PS3.  Sherwood and Jane participated in an online fight to place a PS3 station into their cart on launch date, but unfortunately, we failed miserably, leaving both of us sad and mad.  Half an hour before the official time Costco said it would post the PS3 link, we were nervewrecks hawking at the site…around 10:40, chaos began.  Each of us had about 10 windows opened simultaneously and were alternating back and forth in an attempt to get through (kept on getting page errors due to the overload) - it was a REAL test of endurance and patience!!! Each time we reached the next step, the very next one would fail and we would have to start all over again.  It was not until later that we learned from a forum that there are tricks - such as saving the page each time a milestone is reached, and holding down the control key down while clicking furiously at the link - word has it that out of the 10 windows, 8-9 will fail but one will go through).  Maybe the traditional way of physically lining up isn’t so bad after all…*sigh*
8. Sherwood finally travelled so much that his frequently flyer mileage is enough to buy a round trip ticket to Asia, meanwhile, Sherwood\’s contribution to RDU airport has tripled, he has used the airport 21 times this year.
9. Tigeryao.com has changed a lot without incurring significant development expense. Major changes include: New baby blog is created and owned by Owen, it is very well received among families and friends, new features added to main blog and baby blog to prevent spams, 26 new albums added to photo gallery. Overall in 2006 site total page view reached 305529 hits and 3.4GB total data usage (according to my web host). Maybe it is time to add google adWords for some cash.
10. Among the first few people installed and used legal copy of Microsoft Windows Vista because I have MSDN. Overall, the real excitement was the moment after the install ended, that is also when the excitement ended. The only thing that I liked is really the cool Aero 3D user interface. Nevertheless, I have a firm belief that Vista will create huge positive impact on the overall PC hardware business because it needs such powerful computing power to render it nicely. Somehow I think Vista is more of a copycat of mac OS X on several things, you know what I am talking about if you are a MAC user.  

Add comment December 25th, 2006

Top 10 most memorable things in 2006 (part 1)

Merry Christmas, dear readers to tigeryao.com! 2006 is a great year to remember to each of you, here we want to share with you something special that happened to us, enjoy reading and hope you can share with us the news about you.

1. First and also the most importanly, we are lucky enough to be the first two among 5 billion people in the world to see a little guy named Owen Yao.
2. Jane celebrated her first birthday for not being a twenty something, Jane viewed this birthday very special just because now we have three people to celebrate.
3. Sherwood got his first time cruise experience on a beautiful Norweigien Cruise ship - Jewel - to East Carribbean, include San Juan Purto Rico, Antigua, US Virgin Island, Bahama etc.  Interestingly this is also his first time experience to travel (leisure) without Jane for the first time - amazingly, Sherwood survived himself by bring his parents, and brought home some very dark skin which made Jane had difficulties to recognize Sherwood.
4. 2006 is the first year that Jane and Sherwood didn’t travel to overseas, but we did manage to travel pregnantly (hope this is a word, screw the grammer) to some USA places include Portsmouth, NH, Cape cod, MA, Newport, NH etc. The most memorable thing was a half day whale watching boat tour.
5. We watched about 52 movies together this year, that is more than 60% drop Year over Year, but this still beats main street’s estimate for a first year parents. The 10 best in our humble opinion include “The Departed”,   ”Cars”, “Da Vinci code”, “Over the hedge”, “Click”, “Eight Below”, “World Trade Center”, “Pursuit of Happiness”, “Borat”, “Thank you for smoking”.

Stay tuned and look for the update for part 2.

Add comment December 25th, 2006