Happy Holidays

The Chan Family Christmas, New England style


Dinner on Christmas Eve, complete with Christmas Ham (from the Cancekos), salad, rice, and Italian wedding soup.


Christmas Day! Roger and Genevieve


Anita and Avi and her new iSight! the greatest gift (My brothers gave us one too!)


The scene after the all presents are opened

Belated Thanksgiving photo

Everyone was home for Thanksgiving holiday! Here, the Canceko family enjoy some Thai food at Kalaya's Thai before heading out for a musical.

Have you picked up your Christmas ... turtle?

Anyone who knows my brother Jeremy knows that he likes turtles - nay, he's obsessed with them! When he was younger, he was all into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as most kids born 1980-1984 were, and this spun off into turtle drawings, turtle figurines, and of course real live turtles that Jeremy inherited from his elementary school teacher. They lived in a plastic pool in our backyard and Jeremy watered them often with the hose attached to our garage.

Evidence of Jeremy's love for all things with a hard shell can be found on his design website, www.canceko.com (burrow through to find his "silly cards") and his blog, www.cuporobots.com.

His latest blog entry mentions his newest addition to his turtle collection: Takara's Walkie Bits. The turtle love is global!

Click over to Jeremy's site to watch his home movie of Walkie Bits in action!

Holiday spirit

Roger and I got into the festive spirit this past Saturday when we attended the cardiology department's holiday party at the Collis Center.

Woo-hoo!

O Tenenbaum

Tonight, after work, Roger and I drove to Sharon, VT to cut down our Christmas tree! This was the first time doing this for us. One of Roger's co-workers owns a Christmas tree farm and invited friends to come over, choose a tree, and saw it down.

At first I was a little skeptical, but Roger was right - it was a lot of fun! Although it was dark out, it was kind of neat going out in the night to pick it out. We followed Roger's co-worker to the farm and parked our cars so the headlights shone into the forest, spotlighting just a few of the rows and rows of trees. (Brenda said they have about 400 trees.) We walked around for a while, mindful of the stumps of trees that had already been chosen. We chose a nice bushy specimen, about seven feet tall and Roger, handling the saw himself, cut it down in a few minutes. Just like that!

After we brought it home, we spent a few minutes trying to make it sit straight in the stand. When we were finally satisified - it wasn't leaning too much one way - we dressed it with our simple white lights and our red, silver, and gold ball ornaments. The white lights are very bright and pretty, like snow. I put up what random ornaments we collected last year: a few wooden pieces, including a small covered bridge, a sled, and a reindeer; a glass snowflake, and a beautiful, big, burgunday ball ornament that was a gift from one of my co-workers.

We'll have pictures soon - once we get more presents under the tree.

And we're definitely going back to the farm during the daytime, just to see all the trees!

He's our age

Have you heard of Reggie Fils-Aime?

He's the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Nintendo. The guy has his own Wiki entry. And he's our age!

Last year, at Nintendo's E3 conference, he gave this famous opening speech: "My name is Reggie. I'm about kicking ass, I'm about taking names, and we're about making games."

Who knew I would be trying to stay abreast of the gaming market? My current job is definitely something that has piqued my brother's interest. What with my attending Digital Life, going after Peter Moore, and reading engadget.com fairly regularly.

It is kind of fun, and it's even neater having a new topic that I can now talk to my brothers and Roger about.

Gen Does Podcasting

I'm jumping past a few blog entries here .. there are a couple of drafts still in my blog folder that have yet to be published. But I wanted to share the news ... I'm podcasting!

Actually the Center for Digital Strategies is podcasting is its Radio Tuck program.

Radio Tuck was one of the cool things that first drew me to the center job. Radio Tuck is a series of interviews with leading executives organized and conducted by the center's second-year MBA fellows. Topics broadly fall into one or more channels: technology, supply chain and IT, marketing in the networked economy, etc.

For the longest time, it existed as a static webpage with links to mp3 and streaming audio files to download. One of my responsibilities is to maintain the site: update the page content, as well as line up interviews for the students, help them record the interviews, and convert them into audio files.

Well, this was content just sitting there ... waiting for the podcast revolution to happen!

This fall, I was doing my belated "orientation" around Tuck, which meant going around to different departments and meeting heads whom I would expect to interact with on a frequent basis. One person was Geoff Bronner, over at Tuck Computing, and he and I started talking about making Radio Tuck into a podcast. Eric and Hans (my bosses) had been dropping the word all summer and they pretty much said, "Go do it, Gen!"

Step 1. Create content. Already there! We have over 20 interviews logged into the website. And this year's fellows class seems even more eager to do interviews, which means more in the queue.

Step 2. Create an RSS feed. Geoff showed me a couple of Share Ware apps, including FeedSpring, that help you assemble the XML file for podcatching. I just finished drafting it, and decided only to put up the last five interviews (some of the interviews are cool, but getting old). I added the link to the feed and the RSS logo on the website today. Yay!

Step 3. Market as a PODCAST. I'm planning on swapping the RSS logo for the POD logo, just as soon as I read more up on what is rightly a podcast. I'm also talking with our local Apple rep this afternoon and we're hoping to get this feed up on the iTunes store in January.

We have an announcement coming out in the next Tuck alum magazine and will do a press release just before Tech@Tuck.