dukeya!

I went to pick up dinner from Sushi O Sushi tonight. It's a very good restaurant, and there was quite a line for both seating and take out. And as I was waiting for my food, one of the waitresses came up to me and said, "I remember you! From the airplane!"

Apparently, she had recognized me and was trying for the past 15 minutes to figure out from where. (It was quite a wait for our food.) But all she could say was "yes, yes, that's how I know you," and I really thought she had mistaken me for someone else.

But eventually she was able to articulate further, "on Christmas" (yes?) "on Southwest" (ok?) "from Ontario" (whoa!). She really did have a good memory, which she was proud to admit, "I have a really good memory!"

Turns out she was sitting in the row behind us, so we had never even met. Cindy and I each had a baby in our lap, so with our neighbor in the third seat that made five people in our row. There are only four oxygen masks that drop from above, so I had to take one of the kids and move to another row. The lady/waitress behind us remembered us all from the commotion of changing seats. She didn't know why I had to move, but thought the airline was being mean for separating our family.

Small world. Good memory. And then she was nice enough to hurry our order along because I had been waiting a while. Maybe she remembered I had kids waiting at home.

/d

Posted by duke at 10:07 PM | Permalink

I can't believe we're at the elite 8, and I don't recall hearing a peep or mention of the tourney at all so far! (Go UCLA!) I know I don't watch a lot of TV, but how could I have not seen anything remotely resembling madness yet? In hindsight, maybe there were a few tv commercials riding the tourney season, and Warren did ping me when Duke trailed LSU...  but I still didn't quite draw the connection that March and Madness were in full swing. If I thought about the date, I suppose I should have realized they wouldn't finish the tournament if they started next week.

Now, it's not that I'm such a big college hoops fan that I would've watched all the games. I've actually been sick the last couple weeks, which now occurs to me might seem suspicious to my boss who could be thinking I've been staying home with a case of March Madness. But the real reason why the tournament has zipped by without me noticing is because I haven't heard a single crack about my name this year. At all!

For those of you who don't know, my last name is Fan. Give it a minute, and then you'll see why all dukkies seem to like me even though I continue to curse the Blue Devils. However, I often draw more comments from duke-haters than from duke-alumni. I've spared our son Jaden, as I've joked the past decade that I'd name my boy Calvin so he could be Cal Fan.

Anyways, I know there are still some big games to come, but this is more peace than I've ever had for a March. I'm already hoping for a repeat next year.

/yes i am, duke fan

Posted by duke at 12:09 AM | Permalink

My team gave us a generous gift certificate to Toys R Us when Jaden was born. Although we bought this last summer, it was quite challenging for Jaden back then. Now he's practically ready to jump off. Thank you Yahoo! Team! Jaden really enjoys your gift.

More picture of Jaden enjoying his gift from my team at Yahoo!

/d

Posted by duke at 12:26 PM | Permalink

I finally went through the backlog of photos we've taken the past few months. Please consider getting a Flickr account, because I may start limiting access to friends and family. But for now, these are open to the entire world:

Pictures from the past few months

Pictures from Jaden's 2 year birthday party

Regards,

/d

Posted by duke at 11:48 AM | Permalink

We were just having a team meeting for our latest Yahoo! Toolbar Beta, and we wished our users could see how helpful their feedback is and how grateful we are for them.

We've had over 50k installs of the latest beta, generating over 1200 feedback messages. We know what it's like to test beta products and how thankless it can feel. Everyone gets an impersonal auto-response confirming we received their feedback, and if you hear from us again it's because we're hoping we can bug you for a problem we're not able to reproduce. But although it's impractical to personally write back to everyone, we really do read every message. I'll admit not every message is valuable, but we don't know which ones are until we read them all!

Beta testing can be fun, but I wish it didn't feel so thankless. I've been doing this over 10 years, and it's just not possible to develop consumer software without beta testers. In this upcoming Y! Toolbar release, we've again made many changes and fixes based on ideas and feedback from our beta testers. So thank you beta testers!

/d

Posted by duke at 11:30 AM | Permalink

I don't want my first post about work to be negative, so I'm not going to write about the problems I had with support from my own company. But if you have any problems with Movable Type on Yahoo!, drop me a line.

Instead I'll chime in on what everyone else in the industry has been talking about: Google Analyst Day (GAD). Egads, they've got so much going on, they're turning into us. Also like us, they have a large war chest and pretty much no debt, so more power to solving the worlds problems while making money doing it. But I'm dismayed that at the end of the day, the Google plan seems to be to not rely on any plan. Perhaps it's typical Google attitude: we're going to do whatever we feel like, and you're all going to think we're cool. It's just so different from my group at Yahoo! which has clearly stated objectives and a plan to actually do it. Of course I'm also jealous that Google often gets away with this.

There's plenty of coverage on GAD, but one fun tidbit was how they "accidentally" mentioned their revenue forecasts ($9.5b?) while they decline to give financial guidance. Perhaps they need more practice at this. But it's awesome that Google can hold an event for analysts and then refuse to tell them what they all want to know -- which is how much money do they think they'll make? Go Google go.

/d

Posted by duke at 05:17 PM | Permalink

Jaden gets a hold of my camera all the time, and he seems to be getting better at taking pictures. So I've given Jaden the honors of the first photo set we share on Flickr. Click here for some shots he's snapped over the past few months. The world's a pretty big and colorful place.

Enjoy!

/d

Posted by duke at 12:15 AM | Permalink

Today Cindy and I celebrate our 3rd anniversary, with two children already in tow. This year it's leather (after paper and cotton). If you'd like to know what comes before silver, here's a list of anniversary traditions.

We were married on March 1, 2003 in Burlingame. There are still photos on dukkie.com here.

Today is also Cindy's last day at Fluidigm. She gave notice a month ago to look for something more rewarding to do.

As we celebrate today, we'd like to again thank all our family and friends who have supported us throughout our lives.

Now if only the kids will go to sleep early tonight...

/d

Posted by duke at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)