My Philippine Citizenship Odyssey

Background I have a fairly unusual personal background. My parents immigrated to the US from two very different countries: Finland and the Philippines. When I grew up, dual citizenship was kind of a murky thing, which seemed to be frowned upon and discouraged. But after the turn of the millennium, there was a sea change …

Purging Material Possessions: Books Edition

Since we are moving soon, I figured it would be nice to get rid of stuff we don’t need, or that we haven’t touched in years. I had heard about somewhere, so I decided now would be a good time to try it out. I pretty much cleaned out most of my book collection to …

Getting an apostille for a birth certificate in California

I have been going through the process of obtaining an apostille certifying the recent birth of my daughter. It is an international means of certifying the origin of a document from another country – in this case, her birth certificate. We need to have this in order for her to obtain her dual citizenship, from …

What’s the matter with kids these days?

A couple of weeks back, we were given tickets to the Toshiba Classic, a PGA Champions (aka Senior) Tour event here in Orange County. We were in a corporate hospitality box on the 17th hole, which was a nice way to watch the proceedings compared to simply slumming it out on the grass. The sponsors …

HAWX and Control Schemes

I played the demo for Tom Clancy’s HAWX recently, and was pretty disappointed in it. I found the plane to be quite difficult to control (for no good reason), and the “action camera” mode is extremely disorienting. You are forced to use the “action camera” for part of the tutorial, and it’s quite maddening — …