Mandie and I flew out Wednesday evening with her parents. We arrived in San Francisco really late, after checking in at the Handerly Hotel in Union Square, we crashed, since it was about 3AM our time.

When we finally woke Thursday, we had a chance to meet up with Mandie’s brother Louis, who took us around to run some errands, and to show us his kitchen and bath design business, la Dimora Design. In the afternoon, we joined Matt and went out for lunch. They had made reservations for us at Yank Sing for Deem Sum, which was fantastic. Later on, we went to the market and got some steaks and fish to cookout and just visit for the evening.

Seven stories of shopping!

On Friday after breakfast we went and did some shopping. Mandie is in love with the seven story Macy’s (that’s ALL womens clothing)! In the afternoon, we met up with Mandie’s other brother, Kris, and his wife Robin, her cousin Fran, and our niece Addison (who just turned 1!). We went out to lunch and then hung out afterwards, driving around sightseeing and shopping.

Cupcakes!

Saturday we all met up for breakfast, and then walked around shopping afterwards. The wedding was later that afternoon. We all met up on Treasure Island, where we had a chance to watch the Blue Angels air show. I took some video with my iPhone, you can watch here on qik.com, and the photos are here. Right after the air show was the wedding ceremony. The “secret” Las Vegas performer was Bud E. Luv. He performed the ceremony and later did a Las Vegas style show for us. We had a delicious buffet with steak and salmon as the main dishes, and for dessert, CUPCAKES! The photos are here.

Overall we had a really great time. We love hanging out with family, and wish we could spend more time on the west coast with Louis and Matt. It’s a trip we’ll have to do again sometime soon!

photo credit: Jurischk

Update 10/30/08: I figured out how to move over most of the content from my old website. The posts are here, but many of the images that were in the posts are missing. I’ll try to fix that when I get time.

Apple has announced the release date for the much anticipated, highly acclaimed, shiney new iPhone! Set your calendars for June 29th! Steve Jobs has commented that if your looking to get one one the release date, that you might want to go to your local AT&T store first, as the Apple stores will be very busy.

I would LOVE to have one of these phones, except for the fact that I would have to switch my cellular service to AT&T (Cingular). I know that AT&T service is not very good around where I live, so I’d be getting less than stellar phone service on a (hopefully) fantastic phone. Perhaps AT&T will get enough new contracts that they can start investing more on improving their service. By then the iPhone might have had a revision or two out, until then I’m sticking with Sprint.

Check out the iPhone commercials Apple has released!

Next step, google the error, it turns out that this problem is common. I tried all the advice found on the net.

Open command prompt and run the following:

proxycfg -d
net stop wuauserv
net start wuauserv


This didn’t work. Next I tried re-registering the msxml3.dll.

regsvr32 msxml3.dll

Those steps USED to work for Windows Update errors.But now I’ve found that more drastic measures had to be performed, basically removing the ActiveX components and reinstalling from the Windows update site. Here’s the steps involved…

1. Clear Internet Explorer’s cache and then close the browser.
2. From a command prompt type net stop wuauserv.
3. Next, stop the Automatic Updates and Background Intelligent Transfer
   from the service panel (Start->Control Panel->Administrative
   Tools->Services).
4. Remove the following files/directories:C:\windows\downloaded program files\WUWebControl Class
C:\Program Files\WindowsUpdate
C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution
5. Unregister the wuweb.dll and rename some other files from a command prompt:cd %windir%\system32
regsvr32 /u wuweb.dll
ren wuweb.dll wuweb.old
ren muweb.dll muweb.old
ren iuengine.dll iuengine.old
6. Restart the Automatic Updates and Background Intelligent Transfer services from the service panel.
7. Open Internet Explorer and run the Windows Update. It should ask to install an ActiveX component,after doing that, scan for updates, and it should work fine.

I hope this helps someone to get their updates working again. I also hope Microsoft learns to test their products more before rolling out changes that ends up breaking things.

I thought about buying one of the great software programs, like iGTD to help me out. The only problem with that is it’s a Mac program and I’m not always working on a Mac. So then I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have something online, that can be accessed from ANY computer I might be using. I stumbled upon this article that explains how to use another product from Google called Google Notebook. Google has ALOT of great products, that I use all the time, from Gmail to Web (Search) History and Calendar. I had never tried the Notebook, so thought I’d give it a shot. I must say, I wish I had this application a long time ago! It’s so convenient to be able to copy and paste something like an article or link into an online notebook and be able to access it later from any computer I might be using at the time. I had been carrying a small notebook in my pocket to write thought down, now I don’t carry it around as much. There’s also a nice add-on for FireFox that puts a little “Open Notebook” link the bottom corner for FireFox that pops up the notebook when I need it really quick. It’s very handy, check it out!