as part of my birthday celebration, we spent the afternoon at ‘taste of chicago’ in downtown. with food tickets in hand, we visited the different booths and tasted a few things.

we were also excited to see stevie wonder perform…although when i say “see”, i mean we saw him on a jumbo-tron from a distance. unfortunately it was SO crowded you could barely move, and so we didn’t stay for too long and opted to end the day with some oreo cheescake and icecream with our last 7 tickets.

thank you to all who sent me birthday wishes . i was surprised to receive a beautiful bouquet of flowers from mommy and daddy lam.

it was really big.

despite having busy schedules lately, we found time to hang out a bit with mike before he leaves chicago and heads off to santa monica boulevard . at lula cafe, we had brunch eventhough it was already a late lunch. how could i pass up the chance to have buttermilk pancakes with figs, almonds, candied walnuts, and creme fraiche in some fancy champagne sauce?

Here it is… our brand new Western Digital 1 TB external harddrive. We recently got a new laptop, and between that and our old desktop rapidly running out of harddrive space, I thought that it would be useful to have a little more backup and extra storage. 1 TB (1,000,000,000,000 bytes) should last us a while, though you never know, if Moore’s Law keeps up (and the corresponding space requirements for software continue to inflate along with exponential improvements in hardware).

How far we’ve come technologically. I still remember my brother’s first computer back in the day… the Commodore VIC-20. Get this: it had 5K of RAM (expandable to 40K). Just as a comparison, a blank Word 2002 document is 10.5K in size. Back in the 80’s, if you had told me that one day I’d have 1 Terabyte of storage sitting on my desk, I would have looked at you like you were insane.

And oh, the more things change, the more they stay the same… here’s a clip of an 80’s TV commercial for the VIC-20, starring none other than William Shatner:

summer has arrived, and it’s feeling sticky. it’s also usually more humid and stuffy whenever there are thunderstorms in the forecast. we haven’t been able to install our air-conditioning unit yet, and so in desperation i discovered a new way to help feel cool today; sucking on sore throat menthol lozenges.