You can find some here at http://www.duphotography.com under portfolios => weddings.

Last week I took my two daughters on a mission trip to build a house for poor family in Juarez Mexico through our church. The typical family we saw was headed by a single mother with three or more small children and surviving on $7-$10 per day. It was a really eye-opening experience! Our team of 13 people (half of which were under 14) flew to El Paso, Texas. We got picked up by a bus then driven over the border to the Mission Ministries “team center” located in one of the poorest parts of Juarez.

The team center is very nice relative to its environment. It’s a compound with rooms, running water, air conditioning, electricity, dining hall, and a medical clinic. It’s surrounded by tall wall with barbed wire, topped with broken glass, and with a guard dog. Because outside is not so nice. The homes in the neighborhood don’t have running water. A lot of them are just made up of cardboard or pallets. The people burn old tires to keep warm in the winter. There are gangs walking around which make it unsafe to go out at night. It’s dirty, there is garbage and debris everywhere, tremendous poverty and overall it’s very sad.

The Mission Ministries team is just making an incredible difference. So far this year they’ve built about 45 homes for people in the area. Also and perhaps even more miraculous is the personal transformation of the people around this activity. Several of the local people working with us were former gang members, drug addicts, killers, etc. now they have devoted themselves to helping others.

Mission Ministries also provides free medical care to people in the area out of their clinic which is staffed by volunteers. We had a dentist who came with us who worked out of the medical clinic there while we were building the house. We only had one doctor with us, but other teams come with several doctors and nurses. In the afternoons, we were done building at the house (it was 105°F at the construction site) we came back to the medical clinic to help out. My daughters and some of the ladies on the trip gave manicures to the local women who were waiting to see the dentist. We also did some arts and crafts projects and played sports with the local kids.

If you have the opportunity to go yourself, or even to take your children, I highly recommend it. It was a tremendously rewarding personal experience. You will see the difference God can make in action. My kids left inspired to help out and anxious to return again. I posted some photos of the construction and time we spent at the clinic here.

My fiancée and I recently bought a house in Sunnyvale. We close and move in at the end of this month. It was just a surreal process. In the news, you might hear that it is a good time to buy, and prices are down. Not here. The bay area housing market is just crazy. People think that the market is down, so no one wants to sell their house, and everyone thinks it is a good time to buy and wants to buy one. This created a supply and demand problem causing housing prices to continue to go up in my area. This was the 4th house we offered on. We were outbid before. One house before this one that we bid over asking on, we lost to someone who bid more than $100K above us. The house we finally bought had two other bidders to contend with.

Wednesday night my girlfriend Tara and I got engaged. I spent the last month planning a very special evening that fortunately caught her totally by surprise! I posted some photos here of the proposal at my house. One of the highlights was the performance of mystressfyre on my front lawn. Our thanks go out to all who helped me because I could not have pulled this off without the help of several of my close friends.

We are all very excited. The wedding will be in 2007 with more details to follow.

Update: November 17th, 2007 is the date!

I found this show while cruising iTunes. It is on FX network, but I don’t get that network. The show stars Morgan Spurlock from “Super Size Me” which is an amazing movie/book about a man who decided to eat nothing but McDonalds for 30 days. Everyone should see the episodes about Immigration and Minimum Wage. In the Immigration episode, Morgan has an anti-immigration American actually a Cuban American!) live with a family of illegal Mexican immigrants in LA for 30 days. I showed it to my kids. We were blown away. As some of you know, I am not a fan of US immigration policies. In Minimum Wage, Morgan and his fiancee move to a new city and try to live off of minimum wage for 30 days. Also quite amazing. I think these episodes can change your view on life in America.

Here is an interesting statistic on the power and reach of video blogging and YouTube. I posted a video to YouTube on September 26 about the Sony Reader. I didn’t promote it in anyway except on my site. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iroxZHH_qeA

It got:

Views: 4,155
Comments: 8
Favorited: 3 times

That is a lot more than my review on this blog. A lot!

I get all these offers like “renew your subscription to Inc. magazine and send free a gift subscription to a friend.” If you want to be my friend and get gift subscriptions to my magazines (like Inc. when it runs out), let me know. Even better, if you are also a subscriber and got the same offer, make me your friend and give me your gift subscriptions and I will save my money. Magazine buddy, where are you?

Another one of my bad consumer experience stories. I have just tried for about 1 hour to get through to Sears home delivery, Hillsdale Mall store, for a friend of mine. It is impossible to reach a live person. There are no humans to answer the line, and neither is there voice mail to leave a message. When I asked to speak with a manager at the store, I was transfered to someone in the shoe department. They told me there are no managers around. So basically the store is being run out of the shoe department. Finally, I tried to contact them via their website and leave a complaint. Well, they will not have any of that. Eventhough I filled in all the info, I got, “In order for your request to be processed, please enter your name, a telephone number, an email address, as well as your comment or concern.” Of course, there no customer service email address. Sears cannot be long for this world….

If anyone knows how to hard reset an LG-2000 cell phone, let me know. My daughter has forgotten the PIN code to this phone. There doesn’t appear to be anyway to reset this phone back to factory settings to clear this. We even went to the Cingular store and got no where. They told me to throw the phone away. Basically, the phone is now a $169 paperweight. Incredible. Thanks, LG.

Update: 9/25. It turns out that I got bad advice from the Cingular store that I went to, and LG is not to blame. I went to another store and they were easily able to unlock the SIM card. Again, incredibly, the first Cingular store I went to told me to throw the phone away. Wow, how incredbly knowledgeable these reps are….

I don’t know how many of you also got this, but I received yesterday a big box of free food from Amazon.com. It had quite a bit of stuff including lots of snacks, soup, cereal, nonprescription drugs, coffee, batteries and a small flashlight, and a Tide to Go pen. I’ve known about the grocery store on Amazon.com for while but I have never ordered from it. I think this is a very interesting promotion they did. And it shows how more and more stuff is being sold online. I totally enjoy ordering from Amazon.com, and I certainly enjoy it more than Safeway.com which I wrote about my bad experience previously.

I purchased a “TV Timer BOB” last week, and started using it with my kids. It is a small, very simple to use, household transformational device that sits next to your TV. You plug the power cord from the TV into the back and it locks in place, then you plug the device into the wall. You can program it to allow your kids to only watch so many hours of TV per day or per week. You can set up as many as 6 different accounts each with a different PIN code. It has a lot of nice options. When time is up, the power to the TV shuts off.

What was really interesting was that even though I gave my kids a generous starting allowance of TV per day, their actual TV time dramatically decreased. Before when TV time was free and uncontrolled, they didn’t mind killing time by watching it. Now that TV is measured and limted, they don’t want to waste their time allowances watching shows that are not worth it. They don’t even use their whole allowance. And oh, TV Timer BOB keeps your timer running if you forget to turn the TV off!

Today, I learned about some acquaintances who had visited this site including my myspace profile and came to the conclusion that I was obsessed with money and sex. Well, I am not obsessed with both of those. The fact is my daughter maintains the design on my myspace page. I have a myspace account to communicate with my kids who are on it, and prefer it to email. OK, I am also interested in any site which sold for $600M….

Anyway, it’s interesting what impressions people form from personal webpages and social networking sites that are so easy to create with often very little effort or thought. What can you take seriously, and what can you not? I am in the process of creating a “professional, business�? version of my website, but whatever content it contains will not change the fact that my personal photos, blog posts, etc. are all just the one Google search and a click away and with way more prurient interest….

I learned today talking with some people about market places that you can trade derivates on the housing markets at Hedgestreet and the Chicago Merchantile Exchange. These new housing futures and options allow you to hedge financial risk associated with fluctuations in real estate prices. “CME Housing futures and options are cash-settled to a weighted composite index of U.S. real estate prices, as well as to specific markets in the following 10 major U.S. cities: Boston, Miami, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.�? I don’t own any real estate in the bay area anymore, but if I did I might look into this.

Stock market got you down this past week? OK, it hit me fairly hard too. FYI, here is an interesting option I discovered today. Profunds Inverse Mutual Funds—a result that is the opposite of traditional mutual funds. For example, when the S&P 500® goes down by 1% on a given day, Bear ProFund should increase by 1% and UltraBear ProFund, by 2%. Conversely, when the S&P 500 goes up by 1%, Bear ProFund should decrease by 1% and UltraBear ProFund, by 2%. These funds are no load.

For over the past year, I have been a Blackberry user, and last month I got a new 8700c. One of the really great things about this device is Cingular’s new EDGE network which makes browsing the web in real-time finally possible. I’ve used it on many occassions to great effect including….

This weekend I went shopping with my daughter at the mall. She wanted to show me the Onyx ultimate hair straightener from herstyler.com.

It’s a great product, which retails for $175. The salesman at the kiosk was very helpful and mentioned that we could buy it right now on sale for only $119 plus tax! My daughter really wanted it too. All might have been good for him except that I pulled out my 8700c and started cruising the web to get info on the product. I pulled up the company’s website. I googled the product, and most interestingly, I found one on eBay closing in 1 hour for only $32.99. I told my daughter, let’s take a walk as I entered a bid using the Blackberry’s web browser. When we got home 1 hour later, I had won. My daughter remarked to me, “It’s so interesting that we went shopping at the mall, and ended up buying on the Internet.” Indeed. This is the future, and not such great news for retail shops. More details to follow.