Gotta love the weather in Chicago towards the end of April!

Its crazy when you plot out a long-haul international flight on a globe

Rarely do you see the Earth like this mainly because globes are stuck on their north-south axis. Tomorrow our twenty-two hour flight will take us over Canada, Alaska, Russia, Japan, Vietnam, Laos, and finally Thailand where we will land in Bangkok.

We’ll definitely take a lot of pictures! Hopefully I can post some up to Flickr, but I’m not going to make any promises

It’s official, I asked Jeannette to marry me on the morning of August 31 during a walk along Lake Michigan and she said yes!

Why during a walk along Lake Michigan? Two reasons; first, Jeannette and I love to take walks along the lake and Chicago is the city where we met. Second, there’s no way I was going to try to sneak a ring to Europe; I’m terrible at hiding things and Jeannette would have been on to me the whole time!

Shortly after we got engaged we took off to Europe for two weeks to enjoy some time in London, Venice, and Southern Germany, where we met up with my family to tell them the good news.

I’m excited to announce that we’ve finally shipped the beta for Poll Everywhere, a text message voting product we’ve been working on. While Sean and I still have a tremendous amount of work ahead of us in terms of marketing and improving the product, it feels great to know that we have a solid underlying product.

Please do us a favor by taking a look at Poll Everywhere. Let us know any technical problems you run into and more importantly, usability issues. We are still facing a lot of challenges in terms of making text message voting even easier so we would love to know about the areas that you’re stumbling through.

Don’t forget to tell your friends to sign up for Poll Everywhere!

Everybody does it! I’m talking about speculating what Steve Jobs is going to announce at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, which I am fortunate enough to be attending this year. Here are a few of my guesses at what Apple is going to announce.

.Mac will be replaced with or operated by Google

.Mac is a more expensive ($99 per year) service offering of what Google does with a few more bells and whistles, like blogging, file storage, synching, and photocasting. When .Mac was introduced a few years ago, it was a somewhat impressive offering (albeit expensive in my opinion) with tight Mac integration.

Today the offering is not as compelling now that Google is in town with free 2.5 gigabyte+ email accounts, blogging, and many of the other features that .Mac offers. During the launch of the iPhone, Google and Apple seemed awfully chummy with the integration of Google Maps on the iPhone. I’m hoping that this partnership extends deeper than the iPhone and into .Mac

The million dollar question is whether or not .Mac will become a free service or still require a subscription. If .Mac is offered for free, this would make the entire Apple platform much more compelling and introduce hooks into other Apple products like the iPhone (imagine synching your iPhone contacts with Google, which then synchs up to your MacBook).

On the flip side, .Mac has paying customers, which is rare internet services. I’m sure Google would love to get additional revenue by offering premium internet services, something they are just now doing for businesses with Google Apps.

CoreGraphics will be a Star of the Show

CoreGraphics is a technology that makes it easier for developers to build better looking user interfaces. The new CoreGraphics will pave the way for higher-resolution displays and more compelling applications that can be 3D instead of flat, 2D interfaces. I’m not sure what innovations we’ll see when this technology is introduced but already I’ve read about how simple applications, like TextMate, are using CoreGraphics to do some amazing things. If a text editor is taking advantage of cutting edge graphics technology, I’m very interested in how more complex multimedia applications will use the technology.

Being new to the Apple Development platform, I’m not sure what else to expect. Hopefully they pass out free iPhones at the keynote, but we’ll see

After our first night of sleeping off some 11 hour jet-lag we rolled out of bed around 5:00 AM and hit the Tsujiki Fish Market. This place was nothing short of amazing; you can’t see in the pictures but the market is a very hectic place not really meant for tourists. The first thing we noticed when we walked into the gates of the market were the forklifts running around everywhere. We had to watch our every step through this place so we would not become road kill.

As you can see, the market was huge!

Of course everything at the market was very fresh or alive. The eels in this picture look delicious!

The tuna fish they had laying around everywhere were giant. I bet this fish could eat Jeannette or Selina in one bite if it wanted to.

After an hour at the fish market we stopped at a sushi joint for some very fresh breakfast sushi. That was the first time Jeannette and I ate sushi for breakfast! We then we headed to nearby garden and waited for it to open.

To be honest, there wasn’t a whole lot to see at this place. Just some murky algae chocked ponds and a few cool trees.

After a quick walk through the garden we headed towards the Imperial Palace in the center of Tokyo.

They say the emperor of Japan lives in the temple you can see just above and to the right of the bridge. Unfortunately they weren’t going to invite us into their home for some tea so we jumped on the Yamanote Line at the Tokyo Station and headed towards Shibuya.

One neat thing about Tokyo is that its big. I’m talking 30 million people big. This is almost twice as big as New York City which only has about 16 million people. This means that Tokyo has many locations that rival New York City’s Times Square and Shibuya is one of them. The first thing I noticed right away were the abundance of huge electronic displays with video advertisements and swarms of young people moving around.

We continued to walk up some side streets into some very cool looking alley ways that felt like “Classic Tokyo”

After a generous serving of delicious noodles for lunch we headed towards and older part of Tokyo not far from Shibuya called the Meiji-jingu Shrine, a very relaxing part of town.

We headed back to Shibuya after the shrine to kill some time and get some Starbucks to help stave off our jet-lag. Apparently people don’t walk and eat in Japan like we do in the United States so we saw this funny sign.

What a novel idea! We took our coffee, got on the train, and headed to some other parts of Tokyo before calling it quits for the day.

Jeannette and I are back from our week in Japan and we had a great time. Now I’m ready to head to other far off destinations like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bangkok, Australia, and Bali but first; I need to write about our trip to Japan. This post is the first in a series of posts about our trip to Japan.

The trip started at O’Hare bright and early at 7:00 am at O’Hare.

Finally we jumped on our flight to SFO where we met up with Sean and Selina. We quickly jumped on our 747 that was bound for Tokyo-Narita International Airport.

We started the trip off right with a toast with some Champagne

On the way, Sean and I did some work on Tallyr… which explains all of the coffee and snacks laying around.

In this picture you’re seeing Saturday turn into Sunday. That is my first time crossing the dateline!

Finally we got to Narita where we were greeted by a giant hot dog that looks like it wants to eat itself

At around 5:00 PM that afternoon, we finally arrived at the hotel from Narita and checked into our room. The first room looked like something out of the the 1970’s so we switched to this newer room.

Jeannette and I hit the town that night and got some food on the strip in Ginza. After dinner we went to bed around 8:00 PM and tried to get some sleep. We both woke up around 3:00 AM, went back to sleep, and woke up at 5:00 AM to prepare to head to the fish market.

Tune in tomorrow for the first full day in Tokyo!