Philadelphia

This Saturday we decided to explore Philadelphia. Shortly after arrival we realized that this city might require another visit to see it all.
Aiden was great! Maybe he is starting to get used to all this traveling. He got to officially break in his new sling.
Mommy loves this new sling and is going to invest in several more (you can use it til they're toddlers and still have free hands) www.lucky-baby.com (based in Utah).

From the moment we woke up Daddy was singing the Rocky theme song. Here they are. The Rocky steps.

Independence Hall


and of course Aiden's first visit to a Hard Rock Cafe! Mommy's favorite!
More pictures of Philadelphia check out 2007 album on the Em & Josh photo link

Magellan RoadMate 3050T Vs. Garmin nüvi 350

Over the last several months Em and I have had two different vehicle navigation systems while looking at houses in Maryland. We started out with the Magellan RoadMate 3050 from Costco and nicknamed Dolly by Carol, after her aunt. Dolly had a nice big screen and auto dimmed at night. She was usually quite accurate about when to turn and where to stop. Her best feature was her voice, she is very very easy to understand and usually gets pronunciations correctly. Dolly's biggest problems were all the buttons around the outside edge of the case. Any time you try to pick her up or pull her off the windshield some random button gets pushed, putting her in some random screen that you would then have to get out of. The only other major problem with Dolly is that she had a problem with locking up while being used (she ran windows). At times this would leave you driving several miles past a turn before realizing she locked up and then having to reboot her and wait for her to recalculate. We had two units and had taken the first one back because it locked up too often but found the second one had the same problem. Eventually we took Dolly back for a refund (isn't Costco wonderful!).

For our next trip we bought the Garmin nüvi 350, initially called nüvi but eventually renamed to Dolly. This Dolly is much smaller so she doesn't block as much of the view out the front window, doesn't crash, and has a touch screen so there are no side buttons to accidentally bump, and has most of the features of the old Dolly. Yay! The only big problem with this new Dolly is that she doesn't say the name of the street that you are going to turn on so you end up having to look at the screen for clarification while driving.

First pass at vacation pics

We got back from our anniversary trip a few weeks ago and finally got a chance to go through and kick around at the pictures. Em picked a bunch to share, here they are.

Ice Storm

I've been coming out to MD to do work at ARL for the last 3 years or so. Several of the trips have been during winter snow storms, causing the entire area closes down (including canceling church). Every time there is a storm and stuff gets canceled I wonder why everyone out here is so afraid of the snow, till now. Earlier this week we got a few inches of snow with intermittent rain and hail. This combination turned the snow into fairly solid ice. I can walk around our back yard on top of 4 inches of snow and not leave any foot prints!

All this ice makes driving a real pain. Before we can even think of going some where we had to dig the 1-2 inches of ice off of the car windows, which takes about half an hour. After finally getting into the car we found that the roads, including I-95, were not fully plowed. It took them about a day after the storm ended to get things cleared up!

The rain didn't just freeze to the ground. Some of the windows on our house had some very pretty and elaborate ice crystal growths on them. The trees caught a lot of the ice on their branches and like to throw it at anyone who happens to walk by. Some of the trees that have lost all of their leaves look pretty with the sun bouncing off their ice covered branches. Combine the shimmering trees with smooth unbroken glistening white covering the ground and you get some pretty picture opportunities. I hope I can get out and take pictures next time.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it's off to MD we go!

It's official, our stuff is all packed up and will soon be making it's way across the country for delivery in a week and a half or so. Em, Joce, and I took a quicker route and were safely delivered yesterday evening, though our luggage failed to follow us. We will be living out of the hotel, maybe till our stuff shows up (not the lost baggate but the stuff being shipped), not sure yet.

Now that we are all here (Joce has been back in Draper for the past few weeks) the dogs have gone back to their normal behaviours, Zeek and Joce playing nicely together and Toby picking on them till they gang up on him. They are also enjoying play time at the post offices big field next to our hotel where boys chase each other around and Joce sniffs about. We can't wait till the fence gets put in at the house so they can spend as much time outside as their little paws can take before freezing. We close on the house later today.

Training classes

I just taught a fairly successful system training class at LANL. The interesting thing about this class is lacked preparation of other classes I have taught in the past, just a course outline posted to a wiki page (I couldn’t bring any computers in with me) and a single system diagram. Other than that I was able to get discussions going about interesting system topics and let the class go, watching this is a lot of fun. Other classes I have taught have had a few weeks to a few days worth of preparation (slides) and seem to be generally boring. Though I can’t rule out that this group of ’students’ were just exceptionally interested. What makes a training class good, students? content? method that content is presented? presenter?