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Whew! What a tiring weekend. We just got back from my first trip to the mecca of Comic Conventions (San Diego Comic Con) and Jaci’s first trip to San Diego evar. I have to say, the trip was fun, exciting, hectic, crazy, and I’d do it all over again (although I can’t say the same thing for Jaci).

We were greeted in San Diego where every street sign was lined with a Tron poster and buildings had epic banners of epicness.

There were celebrity sitings galore as the 1st night we were there we saw Charisma Carpenter outside our hotel, followed by eating at the same restauraunt as LL Cool J, Lou Feringo, and Danny Devito. We then walked by the entire cast of V, saw the King of Vampires(Mississippi?) from True Blood, Peter Jackson, among others.

The trip was long an tiring but without further delay here are some of our pictures!

We got up bright and early on Friday to get in line for the convention and on the way Jaci stubbed her toe (not a good start to the day) and remained grouchy for the majority of that morning. Then again, who wouldn’t be grouchy when you had to wait in the line pictures below.

In line at SDCC

Little did we know(since this was our first time) was that Friday is actually a relatively mellow day and it would only continue to get crazier and crazier.

In the convention:

Lifesize Aspen Statue by CS Moore

Iron Man - Hall of Armor

Random celebrity sitings:

Charisma Carpenter at Hard Rock

Me and Seth Green

Chris Evans Signing

New cool art:

Jaci and I refer to this one as the “Taylor Swift as Supergirl” piece. This is probably one of the favorite pieces in my collection now. Also Scott drew this on a giant board, I didn’t full measure it but I think its 18×22 or something.

Scott Clark - Supergirl

Omar hasn’t done a Supegirl before and he was concerned with how it turned out, but I was blown away. This was such an incredibly cute and awesome Supergirl!

Omar Dogan - Supergirl

I have another Supergirl from Philip but once I saw him working with ink wash I knew I needed to have another one! Well here it is:

Philip Tan - Supergirl

I’ve been a huge fan of Stephane’s for a long time but he’s never come up to the Nor Cal shows. Once I found out he was going to be at SDCC I knew I had to grab a piece and I lucked out!

Stephane Roux - Supergirl

The Udon team continues to blow me away with their art style. This is another take on Supergirl by Eric Vedder!

Eric Vedder - Supergirl

I have quite a few more pieces that I haven’t shown here, you can check them all out in my personal collection at http://demianlee.com/photos

So the start of this leg of the trip kind of sucked. We had to wake up at 5:00am, and some of the pictures in the previous post with the sunrise are the ones we took at like 5:30 or 6:00am. We had to get up this early to take a ferry ride to Mykonos (about a 5 hour trip) which was overall kind of sucky. I think we each slept about 2 hours each and was pretty uneventful other than checking in our bags aka dropping them off at an unguarded area in a big pile of other junk, a really annoying Greek soap opera about a whiny grandmother, and an annoying guy who was going around the whole ship yelling things carrying a basket of food. I’m assuming he was selling stuff, but even the people who spoke Greek seemed to be laughing at him so *shrug*

After the trip, we arrived at the lovely Hotel Vencia and checked into our rooms.

We had lunch at the hotel consisting of a local salad and dessert and then just lounged by the pool afterward for a couple of hours for some R&R.

In the evening for dinner, we decided to get to “downtown Mykonos” where there are lots of winding streets. Our directions literally consisted of: Go in between the parking lot and a white house, walk down the road, take the stairs down the Phillips, pass a blue house, pass a white house, pass the LOL graffiti, then make a left and you arrive in downtown. Jaci was in love with all the buildings, she said they reminded her of Mamma Mia…

While walking around downtown we bought some stuff from this pretty epic honey shop. It was all decked out in bee junk and had like 10 different kinds of honeys and in different forms (cream/drops). Jaci got some of their special honey, I don’t really remember what it was though =P

For dinner we ate at Kounelas Fish Tavern. They don’t have a menu for the fish as they serve whatever they caught fresh that day. You pick your table, then you go downstairs and pick out the fish you like, and then eat it! I had a grilled tuna and Jaci ordered some shrimp which was pretty delicious. After dinner, they gave us these pretty epic cinnamon shots — to start the evening. It was literally like taking shots of the big red gum. Wonky.

For dessert, we went to the One and Only Gelato place in Mykonos.

Day 2

So now we’re going to have some pretty chill days ahead of us with not too many photos. Jaci woke up late (around 11:30am) although I was up at like 7:30 because of stupid jet lag. We once again grabbed a quick lunch and then head to downtown again.

Jaci picked up a small sculpture of a fancy olive branch. This is the same sculptor who designed all the bronze olive branches for the last Athens Olympics, which were given to all the heads of state. We don’t have any pictures but we’ll have it when we come back!

We then got massages at the Belvedere Hotel which was pretty schamncy and nice. I think if we were to come back to Mykonos we’d probably stay there next time; it was very hiptastic.

We then then had dinner at Matsuhisa (aka Nobu’s), the only open air restaurant that Nobu-San has. This place was way delicious. We went to Nobu’s in Hong Kong which we thought was okaaay and nothing that special, but this place pretty great. We had the 8 course omakase, Jaci had a lychee mojito, and I had a Japanese bloody mary (wasabi instead of horseradish). We also met a nice old couple who suggested a beach and a couple of places to eat at and another group of people who were obsessed with Jaci’s iPad. I’ll do my best to remember what we had for food below in the pictures:

Dinner fin

Day 3

Soo… tired… of… writing….must… keep… short.

So we woke up again… yay, had lunch in the hotel. We then went to the Psarou beach which was the recommendation of one of the old couples yesterday. We chose this beach because it was supposed to be the beach with the fewest naked people. I didn’t want to bring my camera to get sand stuck in it… and Jaci forgot hers… So all we have are cellphone photos and a couple of random flip videos. It was a pretty nice beach, very relaxing, seems kind of interesting but I think all the beaches are privately owned and you have to pay to sit and relax which was kind of wonky. Either way was a nice place to chill and relax for awhile.

After that, we went to grab dinner and hang out in “downtown” Mykonos again. We ate at Philippi Restaurant which was pretty durned delicious. We had a delicious fruit salad, had these Dolmades which were amazing and covered in a gravy time sauce (mmmmmm), and a “Mountain and Sea” spaghetti (misc seafood and cheese and vegetable type thingies)

After dinner we just walked around town, had some more gelato, and then went back to watch Wall Street (I’m pretty sure Jaci didn’t like it… thought it was very strange =P).

Day 4 – Sort of

Just finished eating our first breakfast (woke up in time for it finally), and are about to pack up and head to Santorini! See you guys there!

*** Due to my epic laziness, I don’t think I’ll go through and put all the images inline. Let’s see how this gallery thing works…***

So we used our miles to upgrade to business class for this first leg of the trip (San Francisco –> Frankfurt) and this gave us access to the wonderful Red Carpet Club. We got to the airport about 3 hours early so we had time to kill. This was Jaci’s first time in the Red Carpet Club and she was amazed and how it made the time fly by much quicker! They included free drinks, free access to internet, and some free snacks (cookies and fruit).

Red Carpet Club

They were even kind enough to announce when you would need to start walking over to your gate, so we just chilled there until we were ready. Then of course we got to skip all the lines and enter via the fancy “business class” line which was a breeze. Once onto the plane we were welcomes with this view:

In Flight TV Screens

Each seat had these fancy tv-screens, I didn’t take a picture of it, but below the tv screens are two different foot rests (one on the ground and one higher up). In order to control all these things, the arm rests have these consoles:

In Flight Arm Rest

Try to figure out what everything does! It took us a little while. I’m pretty sure the green button on top made the plane take off and land at our discretion, because this flight was by far the most comfortable one we’ve ever been on.

- The seats were fully reclining -  there was SO much leg room (I could literally swing my legs to a full extension and not worry about kicking the seat in front of me (even though there wasn’t anyone sitting on the opposite end, since they have seats facing each other).
- They had a fairly decent selection of movies, I watched Book of Eli (terrible movie btw) and Jaci watched It’s Complicated (she thought it was good, it looked pretty terrible to me), and she was going to watch shutter island but we ran out of time (You heard that right… ran out of time).
- Every seat had regular electrical outlets for charging items (My Laptop in this case… I had to write up some stuff for work *wohwohwoh*)
- Fancy dinner menu selection (Jaci had the “first class duck” and I had some sort of chicken eggplant thingy)
- Lastly, (probably forgetting a bunch of stuff but oh well) this was probably the first flight where I didn’t get off feeling dehydrated. They literally keep refilling your cup with bottled water so you always have something to drink.

One of the flight attendants seemed a little grumpy, but otherwise this leg of the flight was absolutely fantastic! Unfortunately, we had a 5 hour layover in Frankfurt, with no access to the red carpet club (apparently flying in business isn’t enough, you have to fly out business as well) so we just hung out at a cafe for a few hours (and I continued to do my work work) until we took off for Athens. The flight to Athens from Frankfurt wasn’t half as enjoyable as our San Francisco to Frankfurt flight, but ah well, only so much business class we could get =)

Here are a couple of pictures from the flight!

Frankfurt From The Air

Almost In Athens

Just as a little tidbit of what to expect:

- United Business Class flight = awweessommme
- Athens Walking tour
- Beautiful Mykonos

A few weeks ago EVGA (makers of the BEST video cards in the world) — no bias here at all — held a bunch of really cool contests. One of which, was FREE to sign up for, where all you had to do was play this video game (Team Fortress 2) on one of EVGA’s servers on “TF2 Weekend” and then you’re entered to win a drawing for a bunch of different prizes.

Anyhow, I sent the link to a bunch of my friends and I got mixed responses from “Ohh maan, I’m not very good, I don’t think I’d be able to win anything” (it’s a free raffle, just enter, play, and win), to “bah, I’m just too lazy” (apparently too lazy to win free stuff).

Either way, what happened was, the TF2 weekend came about, I queued up to join the EVGA server and play a round… loh and behold, all my other friends we’re playing TF2 at the exact same time (just on a different server) when they could have been playing on the EVGA server. Anyways, I played a few rounds on the EVGA server, quit that server to play on the same server with my friends and a few weeks later I am now a winnar:

My winnings! (New 23" Samsung 120mhz widescreen monitor, and 3d evga glasses -- floss not included)

EAT IT!

How it got started:
I met Terry at a comic book convention a couple of years ago (Super Con in San Jose) and we somehow got talking about some previous issues he had with his website and I offered to help out if he ever needed it. Recently we got in touch and developed this beauty below!

Terry Dodson's homepage

Terry Dodson's Portfolio

Design: All of the design was done by Terry Dodson

Development: Built this mostly with plain html/css, just using php for includes and other simple functions. Used a little bit of jquery to get some fade effects and for the portfolio slideshows.

Visit Terry Dodson’s Official Website

So at work I don’t have a mousepad and so I’ve been waiting around and decided to just buy one from Zazzle to have at my desk. Then it suddenly dawned on me, “DUH, I collect all this art at home, I might as well turn one of them into this awesome mousepad”. So I printed the mousepad below!

Philip Tan Supergirl Mousepad

Pretty cool huh? Anyways, I’m really pleased with the way the mousepad turned out, I’m thinking of getting some mugs or something else with the art on it.

On a semi related note, there is a sort of new restaurant with the chef from the Grateful Dead/Google in town and country village in Palo Alto called Calafia and they have the moooossttt delciious smoothies. My favorite smoothie has organic orange juice, carrot juice, peaches, honey, agave and vanilla yogurt. So everyone should go visit and try that smoothie. Oh yeah… and it’s called the Zazzle Zinger (coincidence? I think not… Awesome T-Shirts = Awesome Smoothie). In all seriousness, the smoothies ARE really good and the Zazzle Zinger is the best one…

Zazzle Zinger

I’ve had the functionality updates done for a little over a year but just got too lazy to implement the back-end to update it. Some new functionality that the wishlist provides includes: new jquery sorting, print page option which removes all styling and prints all the notes, additional sidebar navigation, and new icons that you can hover over which will say when the item was added or if it was updated recently. The big new edits were in the admin section which most of you won’t see, but I enabled one click completion, one click delete, and a tabbed interface to allow for quicker loading.

Some things I plan to work on still / troubleshoot: The entire teamsiudemian.com domain seems to be running a bit slow. I’m not sure what might be causing that but I’ll keep looking into. The lag seems to also pass on to the wishlist. I’d also like to take a look into adding auto completion, shared wishlists, and hidden wishlists for the admin side.

Anyhoo, if you guys run into any problems with the new wishlist let me know so I can take a look into it.

New Wishlist Interface

Wishlist Admin

Oh… and btw, my bday is next week. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!

We shot quite a few different of pistols including, two .22 pistols, 2 .357 revolvers (long barrel and short barrel), a .40 pistol, an mp5 variant submachine gun (although classified as a pistol I guess since it was modified to be a single shot). For the rifles we had a .22 rifle, something that was similar to a m15 assault rifle (I forget what it actually was), an AK 47 variant, and a pretty big rifle which was a called a PAL, FPL or something… like that. For the pistols we shot at 10 yard and 20 yards and all the rifles we shot at 50 yards.

Anyways, so since this would have been a very picture heavy post rather than having a story for every picture, I just threw a bunch of mini thumbnails below. Going shooting was super fun as always, but some oddities of the day include Steph, who was literally just crocheting the whole time, and the first 10 minutes we were there, Jaci was literally jumping every time a gun was shot.

Pictures below!