Welcome to My Corner of the Internet

Kan Family News

2/13/09

Welcome 2009. It's almost been a year since the last update, even though tons of stuff has happened. At the end of every year I like to look back reflect on what happened during the year.

  • Matthew and Benjamin graduated from montessori and started kindergarten at Mary Silviera with the associated drama of starting a new school, including dealing with some bullying
  • Got my kids painting miniatures, reading Warhammer books, and playing games, which started when they pulled out all of my miniatures from the closet; set up a small gaming table in the office for the boys to do their set ups.
  • Relaunched my painting website on 5/5/08 and wrote 50 new articles over the course of the year
  • Completed the painting of 150 figures and sent another 80 out to be painted and got started with terrain and produced 3 pieces, including 2 Iron Scenery entries and 3 objective markers
  • Wrote 63 articles for my Excel website
  • Completed another good year at work (more on this later). I've been at FFIC for 3.5 years now, which is certainly longer than usual
  • Actually got to spend the Christmas break relaxing with family and friends instead of remodelling the office
  • Rediscovered the Lego Batman, Starwars, and Indiana Jones series with the help of Lego Starwars for the Wii and the game controller for the PC as well as Spore and the I Spy games; finally stopped playing Quake Wars after nearly 18 months.
  • Made it out to Dallas for Quakecon 2008, which was pretty fun despite not having a computer. Not sure if I'll go this year.

5/19/08

Guess it's time for the mid year update. We did actually get a lot of work done in the office, which is looking much better now. We've been clearing out the garage, selling what we can via e-bay or garage sales, and taking the rest to the appropriate recyling center. In May, we took our annual trip to Disneyland for the 2008 CDA convention. You can see the picture gallary here. Other than that, I relaunched my miniatures page and Tip of the Week is going well -- I'm actually learning tons about Excel.

12/31/07

Matthew and Benjamin opening Christmas presents under our little tree.

I'm still working on site content, haven't had much time with the office remodel and cleaning out tons of stuff both at home and down in Los Angeles. I got a short Li family timeline from my Grandmother, and I'll post that for review and commentary when I get it written up and marked up. The site will eventually get there.

12/25/07

The site remodel is coming along faster than expected. I think I'll be able to put it up tonight before we head down to Los Angeles.

12/24/07

Well, it's 11:00 PM Christmas Eve and I've spent close to 18 hours in the office remodeling .... and what am I doing now? I'm remodeling my home page. Anyways, I'm still noodling around what I want this to look like, so bear with me and ignore the dust.

11/9/05

The family at Regina's wedding in August

Isn't that odd? 11 months later and neither Benjamin nor Matthew have really added any height, though they've added a few pounds. The boys are good though, full of energy and talking up a storm ... expressing complete thoughts. It's so funny to watch them. In the mornings, they help me get breakfast ready by taking out items, taking food to the table, putting items away. Sometimes I can get Benjamin to help Matthew take off his shoes. All good. Now we just need to get the potty trained.

In other news, I left Susana's office and went to work for Fireman's Fund Insurance Company (FFIC) in June. I'm in their Supply Management Group, so I'm back in Procurement now. My commute is a whopping 12 minutes, against traffic, and so far, the work environment seems great. The group is very down to earth, doing a lot of great things, and very family/quality of life oriented. There's been a fair amount of turn over in the group after a major reorg, so about a third of the team joined after I did.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to go to China at the last moment, though we did go to Connecticut for Regina's wedding and then I made it down to Cabo San Lucas for Henry's wedding, where I found Elaine was in the bridal party. \o/. After years of living in the North Bay and we finally meet each other in Mexico.

On the hobby front, I released another map (Tactical), got 90% though a second (Rochelle), then decided to give up mapping since it wasn't worth supporting the comp community anymore. Oh well. On a high note, Reactor was picked up for play in QCon, which I went to in August. That was a good deal of fun and I got to meet up with a lot of people from ET-Center and other teams.