New Year’s Eve

New Year’s Eve landed us at the First Avenue for karaoke, games and lots of fun! Turns out that Todd even won a door prize, an xs schnapp’s t-shirt (perfect for me) and a golf visor (he doesn’t golf) but hey, it’s always fun to have the winning number! Our group included Troy and Cindy-congrats on their engagement, Hollie, Heidi, April and Chris, Michelle, Lance, and several others. We closed the place down, went back to Cindy’s, a trip to McDonald’s at 2:30 (never been so glad for all night drive-thru service) and home to bed around 3:00 a.m. It was a fun welcome to 2008!

Party!

Okay, in my last post I mentioned that a party may be coming on? Well, it actually did! I’ve decided that going public on a blog is pretty good incentive, but I won’t bore you with my New Year’s resolutions. I will say that normally the tree and decorations are down by December 26, and several years I’ve undertaken the project on Christmas Day. However, it’s January 5th and everything is still up, including our dehydrated tree. I’m finding it hard to say goodbye to the first Christmas in our new house, guess I’m being sentimental.

As for the party, we ended up with about 30 people, some of whom we hadn’t seen in quite some time. I must say judging from the few (three) pictures that were taken, it appears that some of us SEEMED to be having more fun?

Not that I’m complaining, but I do think it’s the perfect excuse to have ANOTHER party. There….it’s out, publicly on the blog…… and next time I’ll plan to take more pictures, relax and of course, it would help if the guys played along!

Getting ready for the holidays

I am really hoping to have some time to think about the convergence of a work/home blog. This of course is the personal side of things, though I feel that I’d really like to start to contribute on the work side as others are doing quite well on that front. I’ve been reading alot of articles as of late to prep for our Tech110 course that I’m going to be co-teaching with a faculty member from the Fine and Performing Arts College. He has some great ideas regarding module based learning. I too am interested in this concept though I feel even more compelled to embrace the social technologies that have been evolving for some time now. Combining these two agendas could prove to be quite the offering. I’m also going to make it a priority to start a podcast at UNL regarding technology happenings, education technology, and whatever else I see fit. My hope is to get anyone and everyone interested in these concepts on the agenda and do one every couple of weeks or at least one per month.

Happy Holidays early if I don’t get back to this thing before then. My hope is to segment a bit of time and try out some new releases of things, specifically MT4. I’ve been perusing the content at Penn State and the things they’ve been working on for a while. Their ETS Tech talk is quite interesting, they seem to be embracing the open source community in a major way. I hope to follow their lead and explore some of the things they’ve been able to implement on a very large scale.

Holiday Prep

I’m typically a Grinch this time of year, not really into the whole Christmas scene (carols, decorations, rushing around, spending money…. HOWEVER, this year, I have to admit that I’m enjoying it, well all except for the music. It must be the new house that has put a little spirit into my heart. So, of course I’ve been pouring over all of the decorating magazines (since my house now resembles those layouts) and my Pottery Barn catalog and have been replicating the looks that other designers have achieved! I’m loving it, even thinking of a holiday party perhaps…. and for a recovering “Grinch” that’s a big step! I’ll keep you all posted……………..

Piano moved!

Thanks to everyone who helped moved the piano! It was very painless, no problems, most logistics of getting things together before the move. After work, we all conglomerated at Ace Hardware as a central meeting place. I purchased the handy dandy ratchet straps to keep things tight. Craig and Tim decided to take a detour (not really, just forgot to tell us they had parked along way, so we thought they go lost). I picked up my pickup from home and some blankets. We proceeded to load it (which we did in 5 minutes), tied it down in another 10, drove to the destination (home), and unloaded in another 10.

Emily has been playing all morning, she is in heaven! Thanks again to Andrew, Craig, Tim, Sourabh, Arjun, and Amy (pizza delivery) who took their time to help. Hope you enjoyed the pizza. I’ll post tomorrow about the Belmont choral singer’s concert that we attended last week. Busy…busy…

2007 Chalk it Up

We had a great weekend, attended Chalk it Up where Emily received first place on floor in her level 5 twelve year old division with a score of 8.9. She was quite proud.

The meet went really well. Emily struggled a bit on the other events, but she did place 6th in the all around. Gymnastics is all about consistency, lots of determination and practice for 1-2 minutes segments.

On another note, I’ve been drywalling my garage, started around October 1st, and I’m finally complete. The last thing is to hook the underground sprinkler system controller back up, which I’m finding to be more difficult then I first thought. When I removed it from the wall, I’d hoped to take a quick photo of it for future reference. I unfortuneately couldn’t find the camera at the time. Being the impatient person I am, I went ahead and wrote it down and drew my schematic, I figured I’d be putting it back up within a few days.

It turned out that my great schematic turned into some very bad directions. The time passed and it turned into weeks and now I’m in the position of calling my handy sprinkler guys to put it back together. Looks right but I don’t want to blow a circuit board in the process.

Eyebulge!

Decided to try some different contacts last week, they were a bit rough going in but after I wore them a few days they seemed fine until yesterday. My eyes became inflamed (major red). Went to see the doc today, and she couldn’t determine whether it was conjunctivitis or inflammation due to the new contacts. Either way, same treatment. Then I started thinking maybe I should just go for Lasik, we’ve got quite a bit of funding left from med reimbursement, why not. Next week I’ll know more, not fully on board with it, but seemingly more and more interesting as the years go by. We’ll see if the price scares me off to another year.

Our curriculum request project seems to be leveling out. My goal is to complete this phase by the end of the semester. With gen ed coming, we will probably propose that the system manage the 1000+ courses that will be reviewed and updated to implemented the proposed objectives. Some of the processes will change, but nothing our system can’t handle. Time will tell, whether the current curriculum request system will truly be utilized or a manual process (and different committee or subcommittee) will be put in place to accommodate the one time sweep of courses into the new grouping.

Post every other day?

Ok, I didn’t live up to my hope of posting every day this month, but with the help of my wife we’ve been able to keep an every other day post. Of course, I think it’s just my wife and I that read these stupid things, but I must say it is fun to write back and forth. It reminds me of that movie “You’ve got mail”  with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. They pop each other notes (before IM) and they began a relationship inside the system that was absolutely different from their outside non-virtual relationship. Of course that’s not what I’m suggesting with us, but the whole idea of how each looked for what the other wrote the night before.

I attended a project management seminar today with many of the other IS project managers. It was well done for the first day, I look forward to learning more about how to juggle the many things that happen in projects. My goal is to clean up straggling projects by the end of the year and get some fresh new things happening, specifically with our core initiative projects. I would love to start a wiki of all the great things IS is doing internally. Seems as if over the past 18 months or so, our organization has maybe baby steps towards working together. Hats off to Jon Wilson for helping bring groups together and discussions forward as needed.

Enough work for the day, I’ve been working with caldav/webdav servers to figure out a solution to compliment Notes and the many other calendaring solutions on campus and at home. As for now, I’m a bit discouraged with the protocol, due to it’s client based orientation, as opposed to web based accessibility.

We’re Off to See the Wizard!

Well, since Todd has challenged himself to “a blog a day” and being the competitive sprite that I am…… I’m once again taking over!

Our Halloween costumes this year were many years in the making. Several years ago, well, 4 to be exact when we realized that we had enough kids to play the critical parts of my favorite movie the WIZARD OF OZ…. the plan was put into place. Of course then we just had to wait until everyone was large enough to fit into the costumes and able to walk extended distances on their own and of course take a trip to Judy Garland’s childhood home/yellow brick road in Northern Minnesota!

Emily was particularly proud of her ruby slippers, which by the way, DON’T come in adult sizes and had to be hand painted and glittered. Trevor, who moans and groans a lot anyway, sounded very realistic (rusted shut) while I applied his silver face paint. Eric loved swinging his wire tail back and forth and Ryan spent most of the night galloping and jumping much like the scarecrow in the movie.

Ideally Todd would have played the part of the Wizard and I was rallying to be Glenda the Good Witch, but at the last minute decided not to don my junior prom dress. Anyway, I’m not sure if we’ll pull off another themed Halloween or not, but this year was great! More Halloween photos.

Site update?

I’ve been thinking alot about giving the site an overhall, maybe archiving much of the house stuff to a home building area. I struggle whether I should break this off onto a work/home site to make it easier to manage posts, as well as more convenient. Could talk about work, fam, life, and whatever. Might post more often as well. My honey has been doing most of the posting as of late, but I think this month I’m going to try to make a post a day. Extraordinarily busy at work, with much deliberation regarding services we should offer, as well as what not. Busy time has come again, though I really love this time of year with the gorgeous fall color, Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings, etc. The season also comes with all sorts of business, between 8 nights a month in cub scouts, multiple gymnastic weekends, not to mention family transportation service, neighborhood association, and whatever else comes with a family of 6! Ah, isn’t life fun, until tomorrow.