Today is Blog Action Day. I, along with over 12,000 bloggers, am supposed to blog about this year’s theme - poverty.  I live a pretty affluent lifestyle, pretty much having little to no exposure to poverty.  I really had no idea what I was going to blog about today, possibly talk about my work with YouthInkwell and what we’re doing to help people in Ethiopia.  But today, after a visit to USC, my mom decided to take me by her old houses in L.A. before she went to college and met my dad.  It was a really great coincidence that we did this today because I feel like it fits nicely into my poverty post.

My mother came from very humble beginnings.  She moved to San Francisco from Hong Kong at the age of four, and at seven her family moved to Los Angeles.  She, her two younger brothers, mom and dad crammed into a tiny little apartment on 42nd Street about a mile away from Exposition Park.  She attended public school her entire life while I can probably count the number of times I’ve stepped foot on a public school campus on my fingers.  At age 14, my grandparents had saved enough money to buy a little house in the “good part of town” at Van Ness Ave. and 41st Dr.  They spent $16,000 on that house.  My car is worth almost twice that.  I thought it would be nice to highlight some of my mom’s origins in Los Angeles and to show how she came from living in a working-class household in the middle of the city to a suburban house complete with hardwood floors.  My mother worked very hard.  She took buses to take classes that her school didn’t offer and excelled in all aspects of her work.  Today, we drove by her old homes in a 10-month old Lexus.  Her hard work paid off.  Congratulations, Mom.

My mom’s first home in Los Angeles: 957 42nd St.

The Wong’s first Los Angeles house: 2007 41st Dr.

Driving by Manual Arts High, my mom’s high school

Okay, so I’m driving up Coldwater Friday afternoon to pick up some stuff when I see about six men and women with cameras, still and video, pressed up against the west fence.  Apparently, this Ashton Kutcher guy is a hot commodity.  But the best part is that when I was leaving school and driving down Coldwater, I saw our Head of School, Dr. Jeanne Huybrechts hanging out with them too.  She said that she simply wanted to see what the view was from over there.

I had to snap a few pics:

Before

After

Today I found something new and exciting in my mailbox.  Wait, I feel like I just misled you. I knew the thing was coming (cause I ordered it online) but it was still really lovely to find it waiting for me when I got home.

I ordered a set of Minicards from Moo.com».  I know, right? What on God’s green earth are Minicards?  They’re like little mini business cards except you get to upload pictures to put on one side of the card and the other half is yours to put text on as well.

Why do I need business cards or Minicards for that matter? Who knows? But they’re pretty cool. Moo is one of my recent favs.  And for shipping all the way from Great Britain, they’re pretty cheap too.

Check out the pics:

I got some new music! Always exciting! Don’t you ever get tired of your music? I feel like I’ve been listening to the same songs forever.  It’s time for my iPod to get a makeover.  So, I bought two new albums: Viva La Vida by Coldplay and A Good Day by Priscilla Ahn.

I like some of Coldplay’s music.  I wasn’t a huge fan of A Rush of Blood to the Head, but I loved X & Y.  I’m a bit partial to the more chill Coldplay of X & Y (What If and Fix You) and Sparks from Parachutes. Viva La Vida is a bit of a departure from older Coldplay albums.  They took on U2 producer Brian Eno to produce most of the record; you can definitely hear the influence.  Viva La Vida is infused with a little more electric guitar and other effects, a little less e. piano from frontman Chris Martin.  The title track is by far my favorite, blending a simple beat, nice synthesizing, and beautiful poetic lyrics. To be honest, I didn’t really like the CD very much when I started listening to it, but it’s definitely starting to grow on me. Check it out on iTunes.


I first heard Priscilla Ahn when she gave a short interview on NPR.  It was the Fathers Day special of Weekend Edition. She spoke a little bit about her inspiration for her debut record, A Good Day, which hit stores earlier this month.  Then after listening to a couple of clips, I started thinking, “Wow. This girl’s pretty good.”  I downloaded the entire album, banking on the fact that I would like the other 10 songs.  I wasn’t disappointed.  The entire CD is great.  Rich lyrics tell stories of Ahn’s past as she beautifully captures tonal subtleties.  Definitely at the top of the singer/songwriter charts.  Check it out on iTunes.

Alright. So Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, held annually in San Francisco, started yesterday with the typical keynote from Steve Jobs. For nearly two whole hours senior executives at Apple gave us information about the lastest and greatest on the iPhone. The big news was the upcoming release of the iPhone 2.0 firmware (in Early July). The new release will incorporate improved enterprise features with support for Microsoft Exchange and ActiveSync; push email, contacts, and calendar; enhanced security measures provided by Cisco; and a remote wipe option if you lose your phone. Now those of us who aren’t enterprise users are probably thinking “What about us?”. But Apple has an answer to that too: it’s called MobileMe.

Their tagline for it is “exchange for the rest of us.” It basically incorporates a lot of the nice enterprise features for personal consumers-push email, contacts, calendar, and photos. The big thing about MobileMe is a suite of web applications that comes with it. They’re actually really well written apps, with an online interface that very much resembles a desktop environment. Take a look:

Now, for all this who could really expect MobileMe to be free. I, for one, didn’t. In fact, I kind of felt a .mac-esque aura, so when Phil Schiller annouced that MobileMe was replacing .mac, I wasn’t surprised at all. MobileMe will be priced at $99 a year for 20GB of online storage.

Next, Jobs brought up Scott Forstall to talk about the iPhone SDK and the App Store which will be released with iPhone 2.0. About 10 developers came up on stage to introduce their apps, and Jobs came back to talk about the new features in the upcoming release: contact search, bulk moving/deleting, full iWork/MS Office support, ability to save photos from email attachments, a scientific calculator, parental controls, and more language support (because iPhone’s will be distributed in 70 countries by the end of the year!).

Then came the big one.

Yep. That’s right. Then, Steve Jobs announced the much anticipated sequel to the iPhone: the iPhone 3G. The new iPhone looks a little different. It is slighly tapered at the ends and has a full plastic back. There’s also improved audio and a flush audio jack on the top, so you can use all headphones without an adapter. iPhone 3G runs on a 3G network with speeds over two times as fast as EDGE, it has interegrated GPS, and will be half the price of the first generation iPhone.

So that’s the update on the WWDC 2008.  Good news for the mobile leg of Apple, Inc? Bad news for RIM, Motorola, and Palm? Well, whatever it is, it’s big news for us either way.

It was a really hot day today. Sometime around 4pm I got a sudden craving for some Pinkberry. BUT, instead of going to the one (that’s actually probably a little closer) in La Cañada, I decide to drive down to the one at the Americana in Glendale. The Americana, if you haven’t been there or heard about it, is a brand new, open air mall designed by Rick Caruso (who also designed the Grove). It’s actually quite pretty, with all sorts of little shops with odd façades that make it seem like you’re either on the back lot of a movie set or walking down Main Street in Disneyland.

There is an eight-floor parking structure, so parking should never be a problem. There is a beautiful lobby on the bottom floor and three elevators in which I rode up and down numerous times trying to get good shots to share with you. Here’s what I came up with:

I’ve only been to the Americana @ Brand twice now. The first was for lunch at Cheesecake Factory (oh god the line!) with Mom and to check out the place a couple days after it opened. Both my experiences have been positive. I haven’t had trouble at all parking, it’s easy to find your way around, the weather’s been nice, and overall, I’ve had a good time. If you haven’t gotten the chance to take a look yet, or maybe you were just waiting for a positive review, you should really check it out. Maybe I’ll run into you there.