Two thousand and eight was a blur for me – it seemed like a pretty good year but I was inspired by my Dopplr annual report to look more closely at what it entailed. Here’s what I found:

High Level Statistics

• Traveled 51,306km in 11 trips including one around-the-world for three weeks
• Wrote 76 blog posts, mostly about technology
• Struggled with living in the surburbs
• Succumbed to Facebook
• Learned to hypermile truck to cope with $5/gal diesel prices

Now, in Technicolor Detail

1. January
   • Technically it was 2007, but I surprised Jennifer for her NYE birthday with our a trip to Vancouver
   • We celebrated my dad’s 60th birthday in Winters with family at the Buckhorn. Also celebrated arriving alive having navigated flooded country roads en route.
   • On January 11th, I proposed to Jennifer in the Santa Clara Rose Gardens and she accepted! We’re getting married this April.
2. February
   • Went back in time for a modern-day ANSI art exhibit; something I didn’t think I would ever see.
   • Mark and I had a booth for MotorsportReg.com at the SCCA National Convention in San Antonio, Texas. It was a great event for us.
   • I took one day off in February.
3. March
   • Traveled to Salt Lake City to present at a BMW CCA conference. Went snowboarding at Snowbird and my burning legs told me I was way out of shape.
   • I took one day off in March.
4. April
   • In April I was working around the clock, eating microwave dinners at the office, trying to complete a major rearchitecture of MSR that was already months behind schedule.
   • Attended the Indo-Japanese wedding of Brian and Mala Masuda in Santa Barbara. Had some of the best wedding food ever!
5. May
   • Released major rearchitecture of MotorsportReg.com May 3rd. Had performance issues but, like usual, worked around the clock to resolve. Saving grace was incredible customer goodwill earned from years of great customer service – the bump in the road was forgiven.
   • Spent rest of month recovering.
   • Steven graduated with his Masters in Florida. Congrats!
   • Actually had fun at my 10-year college reunion at Santa Clara University.
   • Memorial day camping at Shaver Lake near Yosemite. It was cold, rainy and miserable, but we still managed to have fun defeating the elements with blue-tarp-o-mania and waiting for Dan and Dacia to arrive.
6. June
   • Decided being out of shape sucked, joined the Jewish Community Center gym around the corner from my house.
   • Traveled for R&R to Puerto Vallarta for five days. Injured my back boogie boarding in 2 feet of water. Made gym membership useless.
   • Dexter, our tuxedo rescue cat, arrived from Utah to much rejoicing.
   • Drove my racing kart for the second time in six plus months. There goes the racing season…
7. July
   • Jennifer and I spent a day at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve enjoying wine and cheese on the beach. Watched sea lions lounge around.
   • Left on a three-week around-the-world trip to cover the 2008 TransSyberia Rally from Moscow, Russia to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for SpeedTV.com courtesy of my friend Marshall Pruett.
   • Slept in the Moscow Kempinsky looking out window at St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin.
   • Flew in a Soviet-era helicopter to watch the first stage of the rally race.
   • Visited cousin Patrick in Rome.
   • Took overnight train to Munich and stayed with former business partner Rob who was interning with IDEO.
   • Went to Hockenheim to see the Formula 1 German Grand Prix! Bought Kevin a sweet Red Bull hat that I secretly wanted to keep.
   • Flew to Mongolia via Beijing, China. Two weeks before the Olympics, I went to Tiananmen Square and completed a hat trick of communist capital photos (Vietnam, Russia, China).
   • Explored the countryside of Mongolia and watched the final stage of the rally. American team disappointingly broke down the day before the final stage. Flew back to California.
   • A sad day: returned Dexter the cat to the rescue shelter. He spent his entire time with us under the bed or dinner table and needed other cats to feel comfortable.
8. August
   • Labor Day weekend in San Francisco for food and touring and a trip on the Niles Canyon Wine Train near Fremont. Jennifer tricked me into my first pedicure complete with a glass of chardonnay. Ffffffabulous!
   • Jennifer was hospitalized with a kidney infection. It was scary for awhile but everything turned out OK. Kaiser Permanente did a great job taking care of her.
   • After three years of putting together paperwork, my dad, brother and I applied for dual Italian citizenship at the Embassy in San Francisco.
   • Flew to Las Vegas for Jason’s bachelor party-pa-looza
9. September
   • Just three weeks later, I became an official dual citizen of Italy! So much for lazy Europeans!
   • Kevin and Natalie chowed down with us at the Kendall-Jackson Heirloom Tomato Festival.
   • Celebrated my 32nd birthday. Jennifer buys me a bike and tells me to get on it. Embarrassing.
   • Surprised my mom for her 60th birthday with her parents and a cousin in Redding.
   • Was a groomsman in Jason and Nicole’s wedding in Morgan Hill. Got my boogie on.
10. October
    • Received my Italian passport and right to work and live in the EU. Sweet, sweet success.
    • Working with Mark Mazelin, got serious about cfpayment, my open source project for credit card and e-check processing for ColdFusion developers.
    • After twelve months of planning and execution, gave up on trying to reach PCI DSS credit card security compliance in a two-man startup. Outsourced to the tune of $2k/month.
    • Cried like a failure for the balance of the month.
11. November
    • Recovering from boogie boarding gone wrong, signed up with Jennifer for Fuse Gym boot camp.
    • Voted for Barack Obama on November 4th
    • Made a foursome of it with Kevin and Natalie for the almighty three-michelin star restaurant The French Laundry. Having achieved such highs (and emptied my wallet at a supersonic rate), readied ourselves to die (happy).
    • Relocated our mystery Christmas tree farm using Google Maps and felled our second annual Silvertip (the only real Christmas tree)
    • Having left most of our holiday decorations in storage, went for the “modern” look of little more than lights.
    • Got busted by the Aventino apartment complex for having lights on our balcony. Fascists: 1, Brian: 0.
12. December
    • Raced as part of four-driver Team Bimmerworld in the NASA 25 Hours of Thunderhill enduro achieving a goal I set several years ago.
    • We took our engagement photos with Tanja Lippert… this wedding thing is getting serious.
    • Took a rock climbing class at REI in Saratoga.
    • Jennifer’s niece Zoey stayed with us right before Christmas; we made cookies and took her to see the Festival of Lights. Experienced schizophrenic alternating squeals of joy and crying for mommy.
    • Celebrated Kevin’s 30th birthday in style in San Francisco after having a great dinner at Fish and Farm with Jason and Nicole. Partied with Spec Miata master Jason Hoover before he moved to Atlanta. Dan showed up, because he knows everyone. Went big, went home (to hotel) and puked my brains out.
    • Spent two days recovering.
    • Celebrated Jennifer’s 33rd birthday with a house party

I’m 25% Greek and was exposed to Greek foods growing up including one of my all-time favorites, baklava, and I really like mediterranean foods in general. My time in Santorini and Athens in 2004 was punctuated with some of the best food on my trip and feta cheese that I’m still trying to find an equal for here at home. Check this out next year if you’re around San Francisco in September. Opa!

After celebrating our friend’s birthday at Dona Tomas in Oakland (who have an absolutely fabulous hand-squeezed Margarita Reina), Jennifer picked up their cookbook which included a great picture of these little monsters. We both love mexican food so we decided to give them a shot and get our meat quota for the day. Mmmmm… meat.

Preparation wasn’t particularly difficult although a bit lengthy. The soup and meatballs are prepared separately. I think we could season the meat a bit better – we should have taken a little bit of the combined meat mixture and pan-seared it so we could taste it before forming the almost-baseball-sized meatballs. The only real problem is that the proportions of soup to meat were off and we have a lot of leftover meatballs!

We called Friday evening at 5:30 on a whim to see if we could score a reservation and were able to get in at 6:15. When we were seated, there were two immediately obvious things. First, it was light and airy inside with high ceilings and a lot of sunlight. Two, seated in small booth along a half-rise wall, the top of the half-rise wall was absolutely filthy. It was thick with dust which we might not have noticed except that someone had obviously laid a jacket which had swept clean a small area making the difference obvious. The live jazz they promote 6 nights a week strangely doesn’t start until 9pm.

Our waiter was pretty tight-lipped; not unfriendly, just not very talkative. The next waiter over was thoroughly explaining all of the dishes and wines and ours pretty much asked us what we wanted. We started with the grilled peach and watercrest salad which was great. The server even split the salad into two for us. Jennifer ordered a glass of white wine and I ordered the Spanish Flight to try 4 red wines from Spain.

For dinner Jennifer had the fresh pacific wild Salmon. Apparently they had opened up fishing for a single day on the 26th and we were eating on the 27th, so this was about as fresh as it would get since they aren’t allowed to fish for it much. I had the braised lamb shank which came with an apple-barley risotto.

The lamb was perfect – it was well-cooked and falling off the bone. I didn’t need a knife which is good because the first one I was given had a large chunk of foodstuff still crusted to it. The barley risotto was interesting; where regular risotto is creamy and very rice-like, the barley version was almost squishy, a bit like a corn kernel pops in your mouth but more subtle. I really liked the texture and the taste was a perfect match for the lamb. One of the best executions of lamb I’ve ever had.

Those who know me know I don’t really eat much seafood but there was a breakthrough. While some fish makes me gag, mostly I just haven’t found fish that I would order over another meat. I tried Jennifer’s salmon and, I think, I would maybe just order that. It was grilled and had a little bit of a crust and the flavor was mild but really good (by my wacky standards). Combine this with the crab leg I tried last week and didn’t find fully offensive and my taste buds just might be coming around.

For dessert we ordered a cheese sampler (at a kind-of-ridiculous $18 price) and a “Strawberry Milkshake Panna Cotta”. The cheeses were well-presented and we chose a nice selection of a blue, a goat and a triple-creme. The panna cotta was incredible. It had a creamy texture that reminded me of a upside-down jello mold my grandmother makes at Thanksgiving and was accompanied with a couple of snickerdoodle cookies and a mint couriri. You could eat each component separately or combine them in any way and it was like an entirely new dish.

The waitstaff was excellent in always being there are more or less the right time and without intruding on our conversation.

Entrees run between about $25 and $36, appetizers and desserts are all in the $8-20 range and wine could max out your American Express Black Card if you aren’t careful. Minus the dirtyness we experienced, we both felt the dinner was excellent but the ambiance of our visit lacked the same “pizazz” from other eateries like Boulevards.

Beef Wellington is one of those things probably most people have heard of but I had no idea what it was. It sounds old, stuffy and English. In reality, it’s a complete beef tenderloin covered in foie gras, rolled in sliced mushrooms and finally wrapped in a dough and baked. It sounded laborious to cook; you sear the meat and then fully chill it before wrapping it and cooking it inside the dough. But the results are well worth it – it was an awesome dish.

Marie, the school founder explained that Beef Wellington is a classic dish that was an example of the very best. It uses the best cut of beef, expensive foie gras, the best dough and it takes a long time to prepare and cook. Apparently pre-early-70s, the dish was cut and served table-side (like many dishes) but that approach was phased out because it often delivered cold food (I didn’t understand why that would be the case?)

Both the salad and dessert were equally tasty. The fava beans were lightly pureed into the consistency of a chunky guacamole and served on top of the asparagus. The crepes had a Brandy flambe at the end. It was entertaining to watch the students over-cautiously try to light it without setting themselves on fire. No Michael Jacksons at this lunch.

Sometimes it’s better to not see your food prepared; the crepes started out by melting 1/2lb of butter in this ~16″ deep dish pan. It’s not really a secret why French-style food is so tasty… it anesthetizes your arteries with each bite!

The Guys

The “normal” picture before Bugna tried to grab some ass

Last year the weather wasn’t quite as warm as we would have liked and this year was similar. Everyone still got in the water but it was definitely chilly. Not so chilly to prevent one tube-rider from going naked, but that’s another story (and picture). It sprinkled around us but we only saw a couple of drops the entire weekend and some beautiful sunsets. Most everyone tried wakeboarding and got up or did some tubing. One boat load just took a long ride up the Squaw river as far as we could go to enjoy the scenery. A great time was had by all including the virgin houseboaters.

One thing I love about these annual camping/outdoorsy trips is the cooking. We had some tasty food including a rendition of my favorite Cafe Habana cuban corn. We were cooking for 4 but all 10 ears were quickly consumed. Using cotija cheese is the trick… don’t buy into Feta being “close enough”.

Thanks to everyone who came out!