Mary and I went out for dinner at a Japanese restaurant in San Jose. After we had ordered and while we were waiting for our food, we had the lovely experience of a magnitude 5.6 earthquake centered to the northeast of San Jose (see wave form above extracted from the USGS site). The quake started (at least what we noticed) with about 5 seconds of strong side to side motion followed by another 30 seconds or so of slow swaying. It was long enough for people to start to get concerned, but even though the shaking felt pretty strong, nothing seemed to be falling down or anything. For the next 10 minutes or so, no one was able to make a call with their cell phones. After we finished dinner, we headed home to check on things. It turns out our house is only about 6 miles from the epicenter. Fortunately, other than a small table-top picture frame that had fallen over, nothing appeared amiss. One thing is for sure, we’re not prepared for a strong temblor like the Loma Prieta earthquake that wreaked havoc on on the Bay Area in 1989.

For the last couple weeks I’ve been pretty busy with my new business venture, Aptility. I’ve been traveling up to Berkeley nearly every day, working with my business partner on business plans, investor pitches, and grant proposals. The business plan competition we’ve entered in is nearly over, although the winner’s won’t be announced until October 29. You can read more about the venture on my other blog.

Since I’ve been busy with the new venture and the CCTO competition, Mary and I didn’t get a chance to go to Sequoia National Park for our yearly pilgrimage on my birthday. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to go in early October, now that things are a bit quieter with the venture. Hopefully I’ll have more pictures and more to talk about at that point…

This past Saturday was my birthday. Mary gave me the complete 4-season set of one of my favorite animated series, Samurai Jack. To celebrate further, I played basketball on Saturday morning as usual. I was rewarded with a pretty decent turn out. It was the first time we had 5-on-5 for a long time. In the afternoon, Mary and I went to Don Edwards and the surrounding area of Alviso to look for raptors. I was rewarded once again since we had some nice sightings of red-tailed hawks, northern harriers, barn owls and cute little burrowing owls (see above). We also went to downtown San Jose to look for peregrine falcons, which we haven’t seen for a while. As luck would have it, we spotted Espie on City Hall!

That night I went to dinner with Mary, Ashish and Matthieu. We went to a high-end steak place in Cupertino called Alexander’s Steakhouse. The steaks are huge. Ashish brought a nice bottle of Cab to share. After dinner they gave me a small dessert on a nicely decorated plate (see picture on the top left). Of course, it was not so pretty after we had at it (see picture on the right). I reviewed some of the dishes on dishAdish. I had the T-bone, Mary had the “All 4 Love”, Matthieu and Ashish both had the NY steak and we all shared the side dishes. It was a nice dinner. Thanks to Ashish and Matthieu for sharing the evening with me!

On Sunday Mary and I had dinner with her parents and her brother, Peter. We went to Claim Jumper in Fremont. It’s a pretty nice place, one of the nicer family restaurants around. It has a bit of a ‘49er gold rush theme. My favorite dish there so far is the Chicken and Buttermilk Biscuits. They also gave me a birthday dessert, Cookies and Cream Mudd Pie (picture on left). I liked the dinner better than the dessert.

Mary and I went backpacking over the weekend. You can read all about the trip on my travel blog. There are links from there to all my photos from the trip as well.

My friend Greg and his family will be coming in to town tomorrow. They are from Alaska, although I know him from my high school days in Florida. He visits the Bay Area once in a while for work, but we haven’t seen the rest of his family since we went to Alaska in 2002. It will be great to see them.

I started playing around with a new blog specifically for my new green venture. I’ve set up WordPress on my green domain and you can see the new blog here. I may move it later, but I’ll be sure to post the new location if I do.

Nate and I managed to make it to the finals of the California Clean Tech Open. I believe 51 teams out of about 120 made it through. We were one of 6 teams to make it out of 16 for our category, Smart Power. You can see a list of all the finalists for 2007 (and 2006) here. Our team is Euclid Street Technologies. We still need to come up with a company name. Any good ideas?