... december holiday party ...

As always the holiday party was an exciting event – a nice combo event held to usher in the holidays, to celebrate some of our member’s birthdays (apparently we have about 10 members who were born in December) and to welcome the new NSBE graduates to the alumni chapter. We won our soccer game the night before … 11-5. Straight bullying!

Thanks to Jessica for cooking the main course, two turkeys frozen over a whole month (Thanks Guidant!), Diego for hosting, Tiffany for the decorations and everyone else for their help in making the event a success. As always there were the usual memorable moments … talk of sibling rivalry/ love and car (read as violence) from waaay back in the day, Tari and his lovely teddy white elephant gift, Renee and the 10 year old zip drive, Seitu and the Panasonic batteries (not even energizer). Good times. Fun times.

... gooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaal ...

Unfortunately I didn’t study journalism in school and as such I cannot describe the first win by the Black Stars (there is actually history behind the choice of the team name) with as much color and emotion as a sports writer would say when Michael Jordan hit the game winning shot, when Peyton Manning obliterated defenses with a record number of touchdowns, … you get the picture. The moment was as epic as any other when the final buzzer sounded and the black stars prevailed 8-2. There was no confetti … I think we were robbed on that. Now that we finally have a win this would be a good time to share the results from the past couple of games we have played.



Nov 10, 10:25PM - Black Stars 1 vs Relentless 8
Nov 17, 10:25PM - SVSE 10 vs Black Stars 4
Dec 1, 8:45PM - Black Stars 2 vs Smack! LE 9
Dec 8, 7:55PM - Black Stars 8 vs AC Milan 2
Dec 15, 8:45PM - Black Stars vs Benchwarmers
Dec 22, 8:45PM - Black Stars vs Relentless
Jan 12, 7:55PM - Sports Basement SV vs Black Stars
Jan 19, 6:15PM - Black Stars vs Smack! LE
Jan 26, 7:05PM - Black Stars vs AC Milan
Feb 2, 7:05PM - Black Stars vs Benchwarmers



All games are held at the MVP arena on Friday nights. You should come out and check it out. Be sure to bring your pom-poms. Team spirit was well alive during this magical night, Tari on the sidelines doing the ESPN play by play announcements, Chris screaming “Go show off” all the way from the goalie and I believe that all goals were actually scored by the girls. Part of the feminist agenda “ … score all the goals in Coed soccer leagues”



Needless to say, the ambiance at the dinner table was fabulous. Applebees – we ate good in the neighborhood all the way till the restaurant closed. Quite the way to close out a winning night. Next up – The bullying of the Bench Warmers, December 15th @ 8:45. No feel good movie comeback by the benchwarmers this time around – just straight ballyragging!

... Golden Harvest Food Sort #2 ...

The food sort activity this Wednesday was definitely much cleaner than last time. Renee was a little bit disappointed that it wasn’t as challenging as it was the first time around; damn overachiever! Diego actually pulled his act together, showed up on time and spent a record 0 minutes on the phone. Now if that doesn’t define success I don’t know what does. Dinner afterwards at Olive Garden was spectacular. I guess they really do make you feel like family there. I wont get into details but talk of beef medallions, the four ladies from sex in the city and waterfront properties had a lot of people cracking up ... some a little bit more than others ... being easily amused isn't exactly the worst thing that could happen to somebody.

This time around I thought I would present some statistics just to show what effect such an event has on our community. After all, any event held in the name of NSBE should be geared towards fulfilling the mission statement … the relevant part here being “… and to positively impact the community” Now the definition of “community” will vary from person to person … I’ll let you pick your own definition.

A lesson in demographics …

Ethnic breakdown of people receiving aid from Second Harvest
40% are Non-Hispanic White
38% are Non-Hispanic Black
17% are Latino or Hispanic
6% are American Indian, Alaskan Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander

Breakdown of the US population by race
60% are Non-Hispanic White
12% are Non-Hispanic Black
14% are Latino or Hispanic
14% are classified as other

From this, we can see clearly that the black population is much much more reliant on food donations than any other racial group within the US. Gone are the days when we sit down and rely on African American public figures to help drive a positive socio-economic within our community– the Martin Luther Kings have been replaced by the Flavor Flavs, the Mohamed Alis have been replaced by the Mike Tysons and so on and so forth. NSBE IS trying to mass produce the new age MLK’s; are YOU on the bandwagon?

... Golden Harvest Food Sort ...

The scene takes place in San Jose at the Golden Harvest food sort facility (wait – isn’t Golden Harvest a Kung-fu movie studio? How ironic). A large warehouse sits in the background, filled with all that warehousy stuff – cool little forklifts that they will not let you touch – but they are more than happy to drive them around the place with those buddy buddy looks on their faces expressing sheer delight over the unimaginable amount of joy and happiness they derive from pulling donuts in the forklifts.


Stage goes dark (or rather suns sets completely). 6 o’ clock just hit. The staff at the facility waste no time in breaking up the volunteers into little functional groups. They read what must have been a good two pages of directions as they attempt to explain how the evening’s activities will be carried out. Nobody listens. In an out of the other ear as expected. Total chaos starts to reign …

Loud Voice 1**: 4BBE56M … To the right, 7NSB9767H … in the other box.
Even Louder Voice 2**: Which one was the veggie can again
Medium Pitched Voice 3**: 4BDA56N
Normal Voice 2: Ok
Extremely Loud Voice 1: Wait! 4BDA56N goes in the beans pile not the veggies pile
Voice 3 (with a tone of accomplishment engulfed in confusion): Damn! Ok.

Diego walks in late with his cell phone sandwiched between his ear and shoulder …


The food sort activity was pretty fun. With people like Dez trying to “hook shot” cans into containers and Zack showing up like the block monster he is. The theme of the night was basically number and letter combinations. Lots of combinations each corresponding to something different; beans, veggies, mysterious stuff (I am not kidding on this one), beans with labels, beans that needed labels that weren’t just beans, … the list goes on and on. As always, we took the regular corny “look at me, I am sorting cans” photos that we use to blatantly show you much fun we are having. We closed up with a good old family style Italian dinner at Buca di Beppo. Fun times. All in the spirit of impacting our community positively.


Diego walks out with his cell phone sandwiched between his ear and shoulder … Stage goes dark.
** The pitch and or tones of the voices may have been slightly exaggerated

... Friday Soccer Season Opener ...

Well well well. Game numero uno was quite the game. First, kudos to Erika for her bravery out on the field. It really is a jungle out there. The game went well, we definitely had the largest supporting crowd of all the crowds that showed up – team sprit was high, you couldn’t have asked for a higher morale level from the team. Several stars shone and we truly had a memorable night. We learnt of our strengths and weaknesses; all a learning experience that should definitely make us a stronger team. Hats off to the team and all the supporters. See you all next Friday.

... who reads this crap anyway? ...

I’ve been wondering the same thing. Better yet, who writes this crap anyway? I thought I would take a different approach and post a different kind of entry … you know … something a little bit more techy (for all the guys and gals out there who like to have a Rubik’s cube thrown their way every now and then)

So I track the hits on this page, you know, all that little stuff down to the color of “insert very personal clothing item name here” you were wearing when you got on this page – just kidding. Breathe in. Anyway, among the stats that I pay attention to are: the number of hits, the region of origin and the blog retention rate.



The chart above indicates the number of hits/ our retention. The plotting is done on a week-by-week basis and among the points of interest are the spikes at W31, W34, W38 and so on. These correspond to periods following our major events such as meetings and stuff – makes sense as this is when we would usually send a nice little email saying that the pictures and event update are available on the blog (quite the sleazy way of stuffing the ballot box and getting more “hits” on the blog)



The pie chart above breaks down the numbers – you know – the ones who have stuff to do and the ones who have even more important things to do i.e. read this blog on a regular basis. We see that about 50% of the users are “first time users”. This is a little bit deceiving in that the counter relies on IP addresses and cookies to determine whether someone has visited the site before. In case of the latter, situations where browsers do not accept cookies or regularly dump their cookie loads (I don’t understand why one would not want cookies or even worse why you would wanna dump cookies esp. the heart shaped ones! Mmmmmm. Cooooookkiiies) would throw off the actual number while in the former, visitors on dynamic IP’s e.g. the AOL guys or internal company networks would record as “new visitors” even though they had checked out the site several times.

The short: At least 35% of the visitors read this blog on a monthly basis and another 20% read the blog on a biweekly basis.



Lastly, we see that we have some good faithfuls over in Chile and in the UK checking out the blog. Power to the world man. If you haven’t bought onto this globalization thing yet … you might just wanna jump on the bandwagon … it’s for real. Trust me. The previous months have recorded visits from France, Japan, Tanzania among others. At the end of the day though, we see that the biggest spender is the San Jose resident commanding a whopping 50% share of the blog traffic. Yay for good old Silicon Valley – After all we are Silicon Valley NSBE Alumni aren’t we?



Enjoy the corny ending and have a great week/ weekend!

... black stars ...

THE NIGERIAN NIGHTMARE. Need I say more? Hopefully Devaris wont sue me for using his coined nickname. The soccer practice was some good stuff – went through the regular small talk after the meeting – all that bonding stuff and then … we moved on to enjoy the heavenly nickelodeon day. Jessica was not smiling on the field – she had us doing drills; no smiles; no warm fuzzy “you have it in you’s”, “you can do it” … just plain cold heartless drill sergeant attitude.





We got to vote on the team color and name; red and black stars respectively. Kwasi was pretty stoked about the team name (for those of you who don’t know, the Ghana team is called “The Black Stars”) – Do you think that it is ironic that he was wearing a Ghana Black Stars Jersey at the park?





Anyway, the games are gonna be every Friday starting on the 10th of November. We are a coed team signed up at the MVP arena. If you would like to join, Jessica’s the contact (littlejp52@yahoo.com).





The practice session was great. We held it at the park next to Rivermark Plaza (this should be the location of future practices I believe??) after which we all strolled over to Jamba Juice and Chipotle for a good filling and some team bonding conversation. Games start 11.10.06 – If you are down, you know who to call. With the NIGERIAN NIGHTMARE aka Dez on our side + the KENYAN WANNABE NIGHTMARE at goalie all other sides are guaranteed to flop. Guarantee!