Saying to start the day

If you live each day as it is your last, you will question if what you are doing is worth it.

Gregory Harold Boe, you will be missed my friend

Gregory Harold Boe, a resident of San Jose, Calif., passed away on Nov. 9, 2009 in San Jose.

Greg was born in Prineville, Ore., on Aug. 26, 1959. In 1977, he graduated from Crook County High School, where he especially enjoyed participating in varsity Cowboy athletic programs.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in business at the University of Portland, graduating in 1981, and he moved to California, pursuing business interests.

He enjoyed fishing, hunting, golfing, traveling, playing cards, and spending time with family and his many close friends.

Greg is survived by his parents, Wallace and Rosemary Boe of Prineville; brothers, Stephen Boe of Bend, Ore., and Michael Boe of Sacramento, Calif.; and sisters, Denise Smith of Prineville, Teresa Patterson of Santa Cruz, Calif., Mary Ann Queen of Powell Butte, Ore., and Amy Harmon of Cornelius, Ore.

At the request of the deceased, no service will be held.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Crook County Athletic Programs at 1100 SE Lynn Blvd., Prineville, OR 97754.

Update from Amanda

 

Hello my lovely friends and family! Suwadee Kah!
I have so much to tell about, so prepare to read for a while! I'll start with Bali first...

After staying in Ubud for two nights, where I watched fascinating ethnic Balinese dances and visited "Elephant Cave" and the Monkey Forest Sanctuary, I was picked up by a very friendly driver named Wayan. He took me to Munduk, where Nyoman lives and where I would (I thought) work on school gardens. We taught each other English and Balinese along the drive, and he took me for lunch and drove the long way to see some beautiful rice paddies and other farms. When we got to Munduk it started to rain, and not a warm tropical rain, but a very cold heavy rain that you only experience in high elevations in Bali. The rest of my stay there I wore jeans and a flannel it was so cold! After a little rest, they took me to see the house where I would stay in a village called Sanda. Along the way we stopped at the office to meet Eloh, Nyoman's daughter. These names are very common in Bali; Nyoman means third born, while Eloh and Wayan mean first born. Eloh stayed with me at the house in Sanda, which I now call my garden house because it was completely covered in vines and cacao and vanilla and surrounded by rice paddies. It really was a beautiful sanctuary for me. I didn't start teaching until after the weekend, once Kuningan - the holiday celebrating Hinduism in Bali - had passed. I worked for two hours in the morning with a kindergarten class, mainly teaching English nursery rhymes and songs (we weeded the small garden on the last day of my stay there), and also taught a 4th grade and a 6th grade class for one hour. The kindergarteners were so cute and so fun to be around. They know no english but can understand my meaning just by expressions and pictures and games. One day after class, Nyoman took me to see the huge Banyan tree up the road from my garden house. It was over 600 years old, and you could climb in and out of it through the massive hanging roots! On the last day of my stay, Eloh took me to a waterfall which was huge and so powerful. That night I stayed at Nyoman's house and helped them cook a delicious feast of rice, noodles, chicken, fried vegetables, corn paddies, and so much other food that I could never explain in text! The next morning Wayan took me back to Kuta to the airport, where I set off for Thailand. I landed in Bangkok and went straight to the train station to catch the night train up to Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand, where I would meet three of my friends from UCSC...

After a long 15 hour train ride and not really sleeping on chairs in a overly air-conditioned train, I found where my friends were staying, and finally got to enjoy Thailand. The food here is amazing and soooooo cheap! Everyone you meet here is smiling and everyone says hello where ever you go! I have to say its the perfect place to be travelling on my own, and in fact I would have it no other way. I spent Halloween in Chiang Mai, which was pretty uneventful as Thais don't normally celebrate it. The next night however was the start of Loi Krathong, where everyone sends off paper lanterns and sends "krathongs" - a boat made of banana leaf with candles, incense, food, flowers, maybe coins - down the river. You are meant to release something with the lantern and send away your bad luck and sins with the krathong (you can also make a wish on the krathong). The festival lasted two nights, and both nights there were parades through town, fireworks blown off at random by small children, tons of street food and street markets and way too many tourists! I also went to the Saturday and Sunday markets. They are held at night and are huge! Bags, shoes, jewelry, scarfs, candles, wooden figurines, postcards, and an abundance of cheap street food is what the girls and I were herded through by all the crowds of people. Everything was so cheap - 10 baht for pad thai, 5 baht for 2 spring rolls, 13 baht for an ice cream. (The currency is 33 baht to 1 USD!)

After revelling in the madness of the holiday in Chiang Mai, I set off for a town called Pai with my 3 girlfriends and 4 boys they had met in the south - 2 Danishmen and 2 Englishmen. I planned to spend a week or less there, and I ended up staying for almost 10 days! Pai is a really sweet little hippie town consisting of about 3 main streets, tons of artists and live music over several bars every night. The boys rented motor bikes, and us girls hopped on the back and cruised around the north, stopping for a waterfall here, a nice look out over rice paddies there. Scooter gang!!! The girls and I went on a 2 day, 1 night trek around the north of Pai, starting on the day before my birthday. The first day we hiked up a massive hill and stopped at a waterfall for lunch, then continued to a Lahu Hilltribe village where we ate dinner and slept. I was awakened by a full chorus of every rooster from every corner of town at about 4AM, and the ballad of the farm did not stop from then on. But I have to say I would want no other way to spend my birthday then to wake up in a village of such kind, gentle people in the middle of a bamboo forest in Thailand. The rest of the trek was a bit tiresome as we had to hike along a river and ended up crossing this river about 20 times. Oh and there were leaches in the river - yay. Luckily no blood-suckers found my skin, only my sock and boots!
A day later the girls left and I stayed in some nice bungalows by myself and ended up meeting a crew of amazing Isreali people that had taken over the rest of the hostel! Pai also had a really nice pool to lounge by, which was extremely convenient as it was extremely hot my last few days in Pai. I also tried to go on an elephant ride. It was something I've wanted to do even before leaving for Thailand so I was really looking forward to it. I went with a really nice girl from Hawaii named Chelleigh and both of us were amped to finally get to be with the elephants. What we didn't know was that the elephant camps were actually enslavement camps. The elephants were chained maybe 5 feet from a post, not free to graze on banana trees as they would have liked. We rode a 45 yr old female elephant (elephants live to be about 80, so this one was getting old). You could tell she had given rides her whole life and was tired. She would walk really slow, and sitting on her back I could feel her bones shift with each huge step. Every once and a while she would stop and the guide sitting at her neck would hack at her with this horrible tool that looked like a small grim reeper cane. The top was metal, and was not sharp to the touch, but could definitely leave a mark, and it was then that we noticed the scars on her forhead. The tour was meant to last for an hour, but neither Chelleigh nor I could bare to see her hit like that for more than 5 minutes. Our guide didn't understand when we said we wanted to go back, but eventually steered her around, pushing with his feet on her ears.When we got back to the camp they let us feed the elephants. I made a point to give them as much banana tree as I could carry, while Chelleigh argued with the owner of the camp that hitting the elephants hurt them. "Oh it doesn't hurt them" they say, "they have thick skin." But Chelleigh had a good point, "then why would they react to you hitting them if it didn't hurt?" The man who organized the tour was shocked, not at how they are treated, but at our disliking of it. He was very apologetic and refunded us half of our money, and later bought us a drink at the bar.

After realizing I'd spent over a week in one place, and had less than two months to see so much more, I headed back south for a night in Chiang Mai, then went up north the other way to Chiang Rai. The fiance of a man I used to go sailing with lives there, Nattaya, and she was very helpful and showed me some wonderful parts of Chiang Rai. The night I arrived we went to the night market and went through a bit of the Saturday ngiht market. I bought a kilo of mandarins for 15 baht! The next day we went to the White Temple, done by the most famous artist in Thailand who lives in Chiang Rai, but whose name I forget (its a long one). This was unlike any other temple I have seen. Most have very traditional images of buddha or buddhist art around it. His temple included traditional art, but also had a really modern, clever touch to it. The whole thing was painted white and embroidered with tiny glass mirrors. White flowers were planted around it, and white fish swam in a pond around it too. The entrance had hands and skulls (painted white of course) coming up from the ground like from the depths of Hell. Once inside the temple, you are confronted with a thought-provoking mural. At the entrance is an image of a giant (like the one at the entrance to Goa Gajah - see pics!) and coming out of his mouth is "civilazation." Right near him are Western images - Batman, Spiderman and Superman all watched over the wretchedness of western civilization - prostitution, Pepsi, the twin towers burning, gasoline being pumped into ancient dragons' mouths, converse sneakers, profanity, police...you get the picture. Floating away from that were images of really happy families in lotus petals, all with their hands in prayer. They seemed pulled by their happiness to the back of the temple, where a monk sat still in meditation. A contrast, perhaps, of east and west...
Yesterday I went on a long-tailed boat ride with a couple of Canadians that I'd met in Pai, and bumped into randomly on the bus comin to Chiang Rai from Ch Mai. We took about an hour journey throught the river to a hot spring, which unfortunately was closed for cleaning, then went to a hilltribe village where they had a massive boa constrictor. It was 100 baht to take a picture using your camera holding the snake, and the three of us went in on it. She weighed 40 kilos and was 10 years old, just at her prime. At first she lay limp in our hands (I held the back end!) then after a while she started to move a bit. I was amazed at how strong she was - she could easily kill something much larger than me! Then I saw pictures of her on the walls, stretched out for 8 hands to hold. Looking at her cage, which wasn't half the length of her full body, I felt so sorry for her. She was captured from the forest, and now was making money for her owners off of awe-struck tourists. I find it hard to support such abuse, and stayed for a while to watch her, to see what she feels. You could tell she wanted out, that she didn't know why she'd been captured or why people had to hold her all the time. She drew her head near me and sniffed the air with her tongue. I bent down to see her face and she hissed ever so softly. I just imagined her praying that I would unlock the cage and set her free, and I wished that I could...
I am back in Chiang Mai now for the afternoon, catching a bus tonight to head down near Bangkok to the ancient capital of Ayuttaya. After a day there, I'll catch another night bus to go south to the province of Krabi - watch out beaches, here I come!

Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia (note that Facebook is now creeping up – recently announced 300 million users)
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the population of Ireland, Norway, or Panama. Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
13. 80% of Twitter usage is outside of Twitter…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

Chopper

 
SOA move over :-)

Long live Kelly Binley, rest in peace

Today at 4:10 a.m. Kelly passed away. She is survived by her son Kurt and our daughter Sam. She was a wonderful person and mother, and she will be missed by many.

Bud Selig should be fired!

I am amazed as more stories continue to surface regarding steroid use in Major League Baseball how Bud Selig has kept his job and not been disband from baseball all together.

The rise of steroids in baseball was transparent to the world. Suddenly aging stars were having their most productive years at the end of their careers. Just look at the original Barry and the pumped up Barry. Suddenly in 2000, an older slower Barry is knocking more balls out of the park. Mark McGwire suddenly had a long forehead, and is hitting 24 homeruns to 70 in one season, humm something has changed. Now long after the fact the witchhunt is on for former MLB players - why? Why not focus on the top of the problem, the man that let it exist, profit from it the most, and did nothing to address it in a timely fashion - Bud Selig.

The single worst side effect of this entire scandel is that the game will never recover. This is a sport that is built and measured on statistics, and now this will never matter. There will be no more legends of MLB, what will you compare them to? So as the leader of the sport during the darkest peroid of history - Bud Selig should be fired!

Sam at Elk Fest

 
Sam, Kari and I spent the weekend at Elk Fest in Spokane. The Elk is a bar that host concerts in the street in Spokane. We had a great time.

Haircut against Cancer

 
I have someone close to me who is battling cancer. I told her if she lost her hair again I would shave my head. So here it is, a picture of my hair going away!

Sam at Santana Row

 

Sammy motorcycle shopping

 

Happy 50th to Vic

 

We spent last weekend celebrating our friend Vic's 50th birthday driving around Northern Ca wine country. It is a tough life and someone has to do it.

Wine tasting

 

Kari and I were traveling around Gilroy area tasting wines, and she had some company!

New car day!

 
Sam, Ben (boyfriend), Kari and I went car shopping in Spokane and found Sam a great deal on a Beetle. She was very happy!

Sad Day

I just received recent news that someone very close to me was dying of terminal cancer. No words come to mind on how I am to process such terrible news. I need to help her and those around her on how to say goodbye. Today is a very sad day.

My childhood house

 

This was the house I lived in from very young to sixth grade. There are a lot of great memories from this home.

Quote from Benjamin Franklin

"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."

Kari at the Boardwalk

 

Sam in San Francisco