... 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!