Armen Chakmakjian's Blog, page 3
January 15, 2016
2015 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 22 trips to carry that many people. Click here to see the […]
January 5, 2016
Armenian Christmas Eve
So you can read in many places about why Armenians celebrate Christmas on January 6th. There are many wonderful explanations out there. Yes it is interesting that Armenians celebrate traditional or Orthodox Christmas, but their Easter falls on the same Sunday as the western Easter. At the end of this article I will explain the rough […]
December 30, 2015
Star Wars VII: The Force Forsaken
Last night I went to see the new installment of Star Wars, now under Disney control. For the most part, had I not seen the previous movies, highs and lows, good and bad, I might have thought that this was a decent if somewhat cliche space cowboy thing. Snap-cracking old guys, fuzzy loyal friends, beeping […]
December 23, 2015
Apple Watch 6 month personal review
It’s a few hours until Christmas and I’m sure several of you are thinking about buying an Apple Watch, whether for yourselves or someone special. I received for Father’s day (i got it several days later due to availability) and it has become a great enhancement to my phone and replaces the other wrist devices that […]
September 11, 2015
iOS 9 beta (well by this point 9.1)
So I’ve been playing with iOS 9 beta on my iPhone 5s and my iPad Air (gen 1). Today I got the update for the 9.1 beta and I am relatively impressed. I’ve also updated my MacBook Air (gen 2) and my Mac Mini (last year) to El Capitan (first the beta and then the GM […]
August 29, 2015
Villa Antinori 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
So 10 years ago I started buying bottles of Villa Antinori wine from Costco. I had been buying Villa Antinori for some time, but then I saw the story about the family Vineyard on 60 minutes and it might’ve been a repeat at that time. For whatever reason, I was so enthralled by the story, […]
August 18, 2015
On being Armenian…and languages…
So what is it to be Armenian? I’ve written before of the circuitous route that my sides of my family took to get to America. Unfortunately for many years, the Armenian Genocide defined our people. We were the genocide people…this would be in contrast to the 3000 years of history that would have — should […]
July 22, 2015
Apple watch — Man I move fast!
I’m having an interesting problem. The first few weeks, I had success with using the workout app for running and walking. Having my phone in my at all workouts. I always used the “no goal” since I just wanted it to record my stats as I run a fixed loop in the neighborhood and walk a […]
June 24, 2015
A couple of days with the Apple Watch
This was a gift for Father’s day from my children and wife. It was a surprise to me when they took me to an apple store on Saturday to pick one out (this was before I found one of course) and of course they were out of everything. We were all disappointed. Next we tried […]
June 20, 2015
Father’s Day…
Originally posted on We called my father “Baba”. This being amusing to the other kids we grew up with, some of them took to calling him “Baba” since that was easier than “Mr. Chakmakjian”. I remember, he called his own father “Baba” also. In some ways, my father was “Baba” to all…
