Otherwise, she’d probably still be in the hospital!  20.2 Hands tall!  Holy cow!!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/picturesoftheday/6242540/Pictures-of-the-day-29-September-2009.html

Wow!

What a crazy week.  I’ve been working on this deal at work for the past 10 months or so.  We are designing a building a new thing that doesn’t exist.  I can’t really explain what it is due to security, so, I’m trying to think of something that is of a similar level of complexity.  The best thing I can think of is something like a digital camera…  that can survive outerspace.  Of course, that’s not what I’m working on, but something like that.

At any rate, I’ve been working on this for forever.  We’ve been designing it and everything.  This week, we started putting the sucker together.  To my delight, it worked.  It still hasn’t passed EVERY test we have planned for it, but, its done a lot to make me feel like maybe I knew what I was doing after all.

This is the most involved I’ve been in a mechanical design like this.  So much of the work I’ve done in the past has been some sort of analysis or writing some sort of paper.  The nice thing about that type of work is, if you get to the end of it and you get an answer you don’t like, you can generally explain it away somehow.  You can blame it on some assumption you made or some piece of information you were provided.  So, you do some hand waving at the end and, even if you made a mistake, you can explain it away.

Not so with this.  Here, when we put it together, it either works or it doesn’t.  There is no hand waving.  There is no wiggle room.  That was VERY stressful for me.  I had to learn SO MUCH new stuff.  Then, I had to put it all together on the fly and hope that we made good decisions so that things would work out.  So far, things have gone well.  So, I’m feeling really good about myself right now.  There could even be some patents with my name on it that come out of this, so, that’s really exciting.

On the home front, things have been going well too.  Mandy is in better health than she has been in quite some time.  She seems to be healing really well from her second surgery.  We had a few other hiccups, but, right now (cross you fingers!), she’s doing good.

So’s Emma. 

The kids have been really good lately too.  Tyler is pretty much fully potty trained, which is awesome.  Logan is pretty much there too, although he still sleeps with pull-ups when he naps and such.  So, that’s really awesome.  They are still a lot of work though.  Logan, especially, requires pretty much constant interaction of some point which is just exhausting.  Tyler is starting to get a bit of independence, which is really sort of nice.  I’m looking forward to the day they both can entertain themselves.  I know that part of me should be sad about that and really cherish this time when they are so dependent on us, but, quite honestly, I’m too tired.  I’ll feel regret later, after I’ve napped some more.

Certain family members have brought it to my attention that I have been a bit lax lately concerning significant blog posting.  They have accused me of only putting stuff on twitter/facebook **cough**DAD**cough**.

So, in an effort to appease these individuals, I present you with

KID-CENTRIC MULTIMEDIA EXTRAVAGANZA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The past few weeks have been really good, kid wise.  Logan is DARN close to being potty trained, which is awesome.  Also, Tyler has recently developed an addiction to Wii Sports Resort, which makes me so so proud.  The only thing about it is that he drives us NUTS asking to play the dang thing.  All the time “Dad… when can I play my game?”

But, it makes me happy to see the genes run true.  Logan may also have “the gift” as well.  We took some video of them playing Wii together.  Logan is the star here as he has a unique full body technique when playing Wii that we thought was pretty funny.  Behold:

This past weekend, Mandy and I heard about this thing called the All Ohio Hot Air Balloon Festival.  Basically, it was this festival thing up in a town called Marysville where the main event was the launching of a bunch of hot air balloons.  The drive was about 45 minutes and it wasn’t too expensive, so, we decided to take the boys.

We kept it a secret from them for quite a while.  However, Tyler was starting to get really excited as we were driving in cause he kept seeing vans with hot air balloon baskets on the back of them.  So, we caved in and told him where we were going.  It wasn’t really crowded at all, so we got pretty good seats.  Logan liked to use the seats to scope things out.

Before long, we could see lots of balloons getting ready to go.  Once they were ready, they just started taking off.  This one was Mandy’s favorite (its pink!!).  This one flew right over the top of us.  Before long, there were TONS of them in the air.  I think in all, around 20 balloons launched in the space of 30 minutes or so.  It was really  neat.  Tyler, for his part, totally freaked out.  Logan didn’t care all that much, but Tyler thought this was the coolest thing he’d ever seen.  For proof, just watch the videos below:

So, all in all, it’s been a good couple weeks.  We had a lot of fun at the balloon thing.  Thanks for reading.

Well, we’re just now recovering from a good week spent with Mandy’s folks.  Nothing huge happened in terms of “we went to X and did Y”, but it was still a really good week.

Probably the biggest single thing that happened was that Mandy’s Mom got Logan well on his way to potty training.  He’s gone about 5 days in “big boy underwear” now and hasn’t had any accidents.  He’s still very much a “frequent flier”, but, hey…  you gotta start somewhere.  So, that’s really awesome.

Another very significant event was that Mandy had another surgery on Friday.  Her orthopedic surgeon had decided that she just wasn’t healing as well as she should so he wanted to take all the hardware out of her ankle.  It was an outpatient procedure, but, she got knocked completely out and is in quite a bit of pain.  She’s got to wear her boot for a couple more weeks and then she gets to go to an air splint type thing.  Hopefully, this is the last trouble we’ll have with this mess….   but, with the infection drama from last time, I think we’re both pretty nervous about that. The only cool part is they let her keep the hardware that she had in her leg as a souvenir.  I’ll try to post a picture soon.

Other than that, the family visit went well.  Grandpa cooked a ton (he’s a great cook) and Gram was the kids primary caregiver for a week.  I even got to sleep in a little bit on Saturday.

This post today is a bit different than my normal ones.  This post isn’t really intended for my “usual” audience, such as it is.  Rather, this post is a service to the internet at large.  I recently switched over to using Google Voice, a service that I’m very much a fan of.  However, the switch wasn’t without its headaches.  After a lot of searching, tweaking, and experimenting…  I finally figured out a way to deal with most of the problems.  This post is an attempt to roll together all the information I found to help other folks who might have the same problem.

So, what exactly is the problem?  Well, it has to do with caller and text ID when calling or sending from your windows mobile phone.  Lets say I have a contact called “Steve”.  In my phone, I have 3 numbers for Steve: home, work, and mobile.  If Steve sends a text to my google voice number or calls it, google voice can and will properly identify Steve and I will see his name on my phone.  (That is assuming that Steve is also in my Google Voice contacts, more on that soon).  However, if I want to send Steve a text myself, if I just pull up his mobile contact number and fire it off from my mobile phone, when Steve sees the new text, it will appear to be from my old “real” cell number rather than my new Google Voice number.

That’s a nuisance at best and annoying at worst.  Plus, it makes it confusing for your contacts when you have all these various numbers showing up for you.  The same thing is true for outgoing calls.  If you just pull up your contact info on your phone and call them, the call will appear to come from your old cell number rather than your Google Voice number.

What to do?

Lots.

First, I’m going to recommend that you get all your phone contacts uploaded to your google voice account.  You can do that the painful way of typing them all in, or you can do it the slick way of syncing them via ActiveSync.  Google has a walkthrough for how to do that here.  Before you do the Google Sync, I would recommend using a backup utility, cause there is a chance you might nuke all your contacts.  PIM Backup is a common one.

Ok, now, I’m gonna assume that one way or the other, you’ve got your contacts into your Google Voice account.  The first thing you need to do on your windows mobile phone is install an application called GV dialer.  GV Dialer basically automates the process of dialing into your google voice account, giving it a number to call, and placing the call.  In other words, you can now automatically make every call from your GV number if you want to.  GV dialer comes with a free 30 day trial and then it is $10.  Not too shabby.  It works well.

However, there is a drawback to the GV dialer method:  you have to wait on your phone to automatically navigate the GV phone menu.  That means that placing a call is now a 20 or 30 second process, which is a bit annoying.

Can’t we improve on this?

Oh yes, we can.

I am about to introduce you to the magic of 406 numbers.

Call up a good friend (via any method you like) and have them send you a text through your google voice number.  When the text arrives, you will see that the text appears to come from a 406 area code number.  This number is very important.

That number is a unique number that identifies that contact for you to google voice.  In other words, if you were to pick up your cell phone and directly call that number, what you are technically doing is calling a google voice server.  However, when it sees what number you dialed and what number the call is coming from (ie – your registered cell phone), that creates a unique combination that google voice can match up and it can then connect you the person you are trying to call.  Even better, when the person on the other end receives the call, it will appear to be coming from your google voice number.  It all happens naturally, without having to mess with calling into google voice.  It’s just like calling a regular number.

Even better, the same idea applies for text messages.  If you send a text message to that number, it will go to your contact and will appear to come from your google voice number.

Bingo, problem solved.

Now, how to implement the solution?

You will have to figure out who you call often enough to mess with this change.  Ask them to send you a text message to your google voice number.  Once they send it, make a note of the number.  What I did next was to add that number as that contacts mobile number.  Their old “real” mobile number I moved to be a second home number.  That makes sure that caller ID always works for them.  Plus, I’m never a fan of destroying information.  So, the whole thing is a little bit of a nuisance at first, but, once you have it running, you can naturally make calls and send SMS from your cell phone via your google voice number and everything will show up correctly to everyone.

I hope that saves someone else a little searching and experimenting.  Good luck!

Well, Mandy’s folks arrived over the weekend. They drove up from Texas and will stay a week with us. Guys at work always wince when I say my inlaws are here for a week, but, I actually don’t mind. They are great guests. She cleans and he cooks, meaning I just play with the kids. You might recall that a year or two ago during one of these visits, Jeanelle potty trained Tyler. She’s going for a repeat performance with Logan. So far, the initial reports are that things are going pretty well. Lets hope so.

They also brought there new 10 month old chiuhaha named Sophi. Sophie is… well, she’s about the size of an eggroll. Seriously. Imagine a large egg roll with a golf ball for a head and that is Sophie. To me, a lover of large dogs, sophie falls squarely into the “more rodent than dog” category. However, don’t tell that to the boys because they are absolutely enthralled by her. Tyler’s entire day, ever since they got here, has revolved around when and if he can play with or hold Sophie. He’s totally drawn to her. It is cute… and also a bit bizarre. Tyler is pretty careful with her. He gets a little carried away chasing her, but he can mostly be trusted to sit on the couch and hold and pet her. Logan, on the other hand, is about 3 seconds away from snapping her neck at any given time. I think he wants to grab her by the head and throw her. Needless to say, Gram is pretty busy watching all that.

Emma, to her credit, is mostly uninterested. We brought ‘her’ chair up from the basement so that the adults would have more seating. Of course, it took Emma about about 45 seconds to catch us all not looking and work her way back into the chair. So, now she just sits in her chair and imperiously peers over the action.

Anyway… that was the weekend. Tomorrow night, we hope to take the boys to a hibachi steakhouse, which should be really fun. Neither of them have ever been, but, we think they’ll like the show.

Life has been pretty good lately.  Today is a slow day at work as I wait on some parts I ordered to show up.  Once they get in, I’ll be pretty busy again.  But, for now, it is wait wait wait.

Parenthood has gone pretty well lately.  The boys are both doing pretty good with their newfound sleeping routines.  I was worried that Logan would really have a hard time adjusting to his new bed, but, if anything I think he sleeps better in it than he did his crib.

Tyler is still getting up a lot, but, we’ve found a new way of dealing with it that seems to be making some headway.  We give him the silent treatment.  We realized that really what he was after was our attention…  it didn’t matter about what.  Now, when he gets up, we just quietly go up and put him back in bed.  Unless there is something life threatening, there is no talking.  It drives him NUTS.  He goes bonkers when we don’t talk to him, but, he calms back down really quickly.  Just so you know that we aren’t just being cruel, we DO tell him every night what is going on and that if we come back up, we aren’t going to talk.  That doesn’t stop him from trying, but, it does seem to have cut back on the number of trips out of bed, so, that’s progress.

Emma is doing really well.  I honestly can’t remember how much I’ve talked about her on here (and I’m too lazy to go look), so I’ll give a brief summary.  Our problem was weird enough that we got a pretty high end vet.  Emma had two problems, a lymph node that had a bad infection and a thyroid tumor.  The tumor we just happened to find while trying to figure out what was going on with the lymph node in her neck.  The vet new we’d kinda been jerked around with the diagnosis and everything, so, he was willing to put a cap on the costs of the surgery to remove both the lymph node and thyroid tumor.  That was the good news.  The bad news was that 80% of the time, thyroid tumors are malignant… meaning that Emma would probably only live another year or two.  We decided to go ahead and do the surgery and let them biopsy everything.  A few days later, our vet calls to give us great news:  no cancer anywhere and Emma should be able to make a full recovery.  She certainly seems to be on her way to that…  so, all that worked out pretty well in the end.

Work has been interesting lately.  We’ve started this new deal that is basically an internal Facebook for people that work here.  They also have these new communities, which are social sites w/ discussion boards and where you can share files and stuff.  I started a community for MATLAB users.  As a result, my boss’s boss found out I was involved in the new “Communities Initiative” and asked me to come brief my department’s management about the whole idea.  So, on Thursday, I got a free lunch and got to give a half hour presentation to some of the senior guys in my group.  It went pretty well,  I think.  No one fell asleep and they even asked quite a few questions.  I’m pretty excited about the whole thing as I think it is something we sorely need.  So, that was cool.

This weekend, Mandy’s Mom and Dad are coming to visit for a week.  They haven’t been up in quite a while, so, it’ll be nice for us all to visit.  At any rate, that’s about all I’ve got to talk about now.  Thanks for reading!

Well, VBS is officially over.  Last night was the big picnic to wrap everything up.  Our theme this year was the story of Joseph.  So, all the kids got to make tie died shirts that they wore last night.

They really went all out this year to get some cool things for the kids to do.  They had these giant hampster ball things, an inflatable laser tag arena, and a giant inflatable trampoline thing.  Tyler and Logan loved the trampoline thing, much to Mandy’s amusement.  We did manage to get Logan away from it long enough to pose for a picture with Mandy.

I was the burger flipper.  Me and this other dude used a huge grill they brought out to cook probably 150 burgers and 100 hot dogs.  I went home smelling like a huge grease trap, but, it was pretty fun.  I did end up losing a few arm hairs though.

All in all, it was a really fun but exhausting week.

Wow… what a busy week!

This week was VBS and through some sort of herculean parenting effort (mostly on Mandy’s part), we managed to get the kids there every night.  But, it has really taken its toll on us.  I think we’re all pretty exhausted.  Tonight we have a picnic there at the church to go to, and then this weekend, I think we’re going to try to do as much nothing as we can.

Some big developments on the child rearing front as of late….

Tyler has graduated up to sleeping in “big boy” underwear.  He’s actually done REALLY well with it.  We took the child lock off his bedroom door so that he could get up in the middle of the night if he needed to.  That has led to the biggest problem with the whole deal… now he “has to pee” about 6 times in the half hour it takes him to fall asleep.  He also now comes to wake us up in the morning.  To be honest, I kinda like that part of it.  It is much better than him screaming at us from the other room.

Logan is also making progress on the sleeping front.  This past weekend, we took his crib down and put him in a twin bed.  He thinks he is SO COOL with his big boy bed.  Whenever we get home, we have to go right upstairs to “check on it”.  I dunno why… I guess he thinks it is going to walk away or something.  He’s done pretty well with it too.  Mandy and I both thought that he’d be really bad about wandering around his room instead of sleeping, but, that doesn’t seem to be the case yet.

So, that’s kinda it for us lately.  Boring, I know.