The shots were mostly taken by Anthony Mack and Dich Quan, using Dich's digital
camera (a Fujifilm FinePix S1 Pro) and Lisa Ray's film camera (some
point-and-shoot). We hadn't used a digital camera to record a company event
before, so Lisa didn't trust a digital camera as the only one.
Unfortunately, there are problems with both sets of shots. Unless I'm imagining
things, Dich's camera appears to have a problem where photos taken in telephoto
mode (though not zoomed mode) are squashed slightly along the Y-axis. People
look a little shorter and squatter than they should. I've therefore avoided
most of his telephoto shots.
The film shots are fine spatially, but quality-wise the scans are pretty bad.
The scans were done by Costco (from the negatives, I assume) as part of the film
processing service. The scans look significantly worse than the photo prints
-- they're "overexposed", the colors are off, and there's a ton of hair and
other crud fouling them. Costco also burns an unnecessary blue border into the
medium-sized versions of the shots. Also, they scanned at least one photo
reversed left-to-right (I noticed because my hair was parted on the wrong side).
Now, having access to the prints, which don't suffer from the above problems, I
could have made new scans, but I couldn't really justify the time spent. I just
re-scanned one shot (of myself), for reference purposes.
Anyway, this collection first goes through the digital camera shots in
chronological order, then goes back to the first film camera shot (that I
selected), and goes through those in chronological order. I've used the
provided medium-sized versions and thumbnails from Costco and Dich, though for
the digital shots I used exifcopy to copy the
EXIF data from the large versions to the medium-sized ones, and my image_info_modtime to fix
the file timestamps, which had been corrupted. I also copied the digital photo
timestamps over to the thumbnail files (which are a bit larger than the size I
generally use), as is my wont.
Click any image to go to its individual page. The image will
appear in the next size up from that shown here, when available.
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| Akiko Noguchi and Duane Thompson (looking kind of odd to me without his glasses
-- hmm, maybe he got his twin brother to come in his stead (though I don't
remember whether his brother wears glasses as well)).
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| Hee hee! Get your hands off me, old man! Hee hee hee! (Koichi Yokota and
Michele Smith.)
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| President of the company or Helen Fujiwara's new ventriloquist dummy? You make
the call.
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| John Athey and his wife. This is one of those telephoto mode shots that appears
to be slightly squashed in the vertical domain.
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| Jeff Houston and his date.
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| Scott Breeden in a relatively rare URI activity photo (when he does attend, he
leaves early).
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| The adorable couple of Ariele Ray and her husband Bob.
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| Lori and Gordon Wampler. I believe this is another of those squashed
shots, but I loved the expression on Lori's face.
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| My table-mates, minus Irene Lee and her date (a photo of them appears later).
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| The big men (in different ways).
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| Yoko Lemon and her husband.
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| Gordon pulling one of his famous "Now you're my wife" routines.
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| Koichi's turn for some sugar.
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| I try in vain to predict the roulette wheel (hey, it worked a few times at a
previous casino-theme Christmas party).
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| Mas the "playa".
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| Kelson Vibber observes some suspects, Louis Gaghan grins mischievously, and
Richard Peng and his wife... act like Richard Peng and his wife.
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| Jeff Yokota and his date know that there's never a dull moment with Ariele
around.
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| It took a billion years to get the group photos finalized, partially because
tipsy goofball strangers like the woman on the far left (there was another one
on the right who I guess didn't manage to make it into the shot -- I think Lisa
is looking off-camera at her) kept trying to horn in. Looks like Irene is doing
a little striptease to pass the time...
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| The best employees-only group shot.
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| The best employees-and-guests group shot (though it appears to be one of those
vertically-squashed telephoto-mode shots).
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| John gets an earful from Ariele about the new DVD player he's won (Ariele won a
DVD player at a previous Christmas party and was disappointed she didn't get one
of the other (lamer) gifts, since at that time she didn't know what one was).
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| The female tech employees, minus Miho.
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| A natural-light shot of Anthony Mack and his wife Susan.
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| Gene Yokota and his wife. Looks like she needs to be spouting a Mae West line
here.
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| Me. This photo marks the transition to the film camera shots. As a reference
for what's wrong with Costco's negative scans, I rescanned the print of this
photo with Unitech's aging HP ScanJet 6200C and got much more accurate
brightness and colors (see the next image).
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| Me. This is the re-scan mentioned in the previous image's caption.
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| Irene Lee, looking very belle-of-the-balle, and her date.
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| Bob does not appear to approve of Ariele's dual-man claim.
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| I find Anthony's rather deliberate Big Strong Man pose here amusing.
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| Gotta love Louis' impish grin here and his aggressively noncommital
arm-around-the-shoulder of the friend he brought to the party since his wife
was out of town. He said of all his friends, she was the one that most hates
missing a party (she goes to concerts at least weekly, for instance), so she
was the natural choice. She was indeed a character.
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| Da boss.
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| Jeff and his date share a laugh as Ariele sidles up. In every picture of Jeff
and his date at the party, they're either laughing or grinning broadly.
'T'ain't natural, I tells ya. 
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| Ariele, as ingratiating as ever (I mean that in the best possible way).
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| Me again. A note to party planners everywhere: mirrored centerpieces do not
make for good photo ops, as the flash casts mottled shadows on the faces of
those around the tables.
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| Gordon on the fast track to losing everything.
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| Miho Michigami reacting to some bikkuri, while her date is more
sedate.
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| "Dealer got back. Pass it on..."
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| Yeah, I know, enough with the photos of Anthony and his wife, but I just
thought Anthony's smile and his choice to stand in the fountain for this
photo captured his personality nicely.
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| Miho and her date show the rest of us how it's done, while Ashlynn Ray grins a
Cheshire Cat grin in the background.
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| Helen takes Lisa Ray's daughters for a spin.
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| From top to bottom, Mike, Ashlynn, Lisa, Alan, and Brittany Ray.
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| "No, alcohol actually makes you a better gambler!"
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| Michele and Jeff Yokota's date, plus someone apparently throwing an herbal
reagent into a glass (actually just one of the many foreign objects that
obscure the photos in Costco's scans).
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| The female non-tech employees.
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Michele Smith being dipped by her boyfriend Brian (?). Ordinarily I find photos
of Michele that include her boyfriend depressing, but there's something about
this shot that made me unable to resist.
Maybe it's a subliminal effect of the teddy bear in the "sexually receptive"
pose in the background.
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Gene and his wife looking pretty damn dapper. They look like extras from
Wild Wild West or
something...
Ariele looks stoned...
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| Mas Yokota and his wife.
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| I just like Irene's fetching head tilt in this shot.
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| Grampa Yokota and the granddaughters.
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| "MY MOM WAS A SIAMESE TWIN"
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| The junior high-roller.
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Kelson looking pleased as he plays Blackjack next to Michele. Michele
apparently won insane amounts of chips during the evening, and she gave
surplus to Kelson, which, combined with the fact that the people trading in his
chips for raffle tickets apparently gave him double the amount by mistake,
meant that he ended up winning something like 60% of the non-employee-only prizes
(though he stopped accepting them after the first few and simply didn't respond
when his number was called).
Oops, party foul in the foreground there...
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| Two alpha-males and their conquest.
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Each year, along with the main dress-up Christmas party, Unitech has a little
in-house party where among other things, we do a fun gift exchange game. Rather
than doing the typical boring (and potentially stressful) Secret Santa exchange,
we do a game where, to begin with, everyone brings a wrapped gift (around $20
value), which they typically do not identify themselves on via a nametag.
Then everyone draws numbers to determine playing order. The first person to go
chooses any gift from the table, opens it, then lets everyone know what it is.
The second and subsequent players have a choice -- you can either pick something
off the table and open it, or decide to steal an already-opened gift. If you
are person A and you steal from person B, person B can then steal from someone
else (he can't steal right back from you) or go to the table. If person B
steals from person C, C can then steal or go to the table. If person C steals
from person D, however, D must pick something from the table. To state it more
simply, there are a maximum of three steals per turn. Note that though person B
can't steal right back from person A, person C can steal from person A.
There is no per-gift maximum number of steals, so a popular gift can
make the rounds throughout an entire game.
In this shot (from December 20th), I ponder my choice. I was in the enviable
position of being the second-to-last person to go, so I could steal whatever
I wanted, with only two unopened mystery gifts on the table. Unfortunately
what I stole in this round (the "Shrek" DVD) got stolen back from me in the final round, but luckily it
was the second steal in that round, so I got the final steal of the game. I
ended up going for a dead hard drive that came with a $20 bill. I had been
wanting to take a dead drive apart for the powerful magnets and for the spindle,
which I was thinking of using for a homemade
arcade spinner control (unfortunately this spindle was lacking the needed
threaded hole).
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