Things That Make Me Happy/Crazy

Phones. I really need to get a new phone, if only so I'll shut up about it and stop devoting so much time to it. Currently I'm trying to decide between the G2 and the Nexus S, but neither is exactly what I'm after, so I'm waiting until CES to see if any cooler phones for T-Mobile come out.

Laptops. My current lappy is progressively getting worse and worse, freezing more and more often. I have Christmas money burning holes in my wallet, so I need to get this done and over with. I've got my eye on a few, but currently don't have mental bandwidth to spare to the process because of:

Blackberry Development. My app for the upcoming Blackberry Playbook is coming along nicely. I need to get it done and in the app store before the tablet launches, though. I suspect it may launch at CES, so that gives me a week to get it done and in. That's eating my time.

Smallworld. Jen got me this board game for Christmas, and it has taken over whatever mental resources that are not at work on Blackberry development. It's fun, quick, and very interesting.

Webcomics. A few I'm enjoying a lot right now are The Meek, xkcd, and three new ones (Hanna is Not a Boy's Name, Manly Guys Doing Manly Things, and Sailor Twain).

Hearing God. In the frenzy of the holidays and all these other things exciting me, it's harder to fit this in. However, I'm reading a book called Can You Hear Me? by Brad Jersak. It's really excellent so far and tuning me in to ways of hearing God, some I wouldn't normally consider. The anecdotes are enough to buoy me by showing how God still speaks and moves today.

Okay, and now I'm going to go do more Blackberry Dev. Gotta get that free Playbook! And maybe see True Grit! Or Tron! Or Narnia! Or...

Oh yeah, Happy New Year!

Annual Christmas/New Year Letter Thing

The holidays have been good to me so far. I'm feeling nice and relaxed after some frenetic last minute preparations. Christmas has felt good and restful, especially this week after. I even had time to work on our Christmas letter. Jen wrote it and I did the pictures and design. Please read it and enjoy! I hope you had a Merry Christmas and will have Blessed New Year! And if you want to see pictures from this Christmas, I've got some up in my gallery.

Bye Bye Brightkite

I've been using brightkite as my social networking status update site. I could check in at locations and then post messages and photos to brightkite, Facebook and twitter. It was convenient to be able to update 3 different networks all at the same time, plus with geolocation. I liked being able to see the posts from people geographically close to me, as well as socially close to me.

Yesterday, however, that stopped. The posts section disappeared from the website and I could no longer post from the app on my phone. I filed a bug, because I figured something must have gone horribly wrong. The response told me that wasn't quite the case. The mediator told me that they were removing that functionality from the site and pointed me to this blog post as explanation. I think something went horribly wrong with brightkite, but it happened around a conference table. I am mystified by this change of direction.

So since they've removed the functions of the site I used, I guess I will be moving on. Anyone have a recommendation for a similar site? Does Foursquare do this stuff?

Unfortunately, my phone has stopped letting me download new apps or update existing ones, so whatever I move to for mobile updates will have to wait until I can figure out what my new phone should be. But that's a subject for another post. For now, bye bye, brightkite.

50 Years in Hawaii

Until now, I had never been to Hawaii. Neither had my parents in the 50 years they've been married. That seemed like something that needed to be rectified, so my whole family (my folks, all 6 siblings, and their families) got together on Maui to celebrate.

Jen and I flew in on Wednesday and were the last to arrive. We chatted with the family and had dinner. The next day we wandered around downtown Lahaina collecting trinkets and taking in the sights. We then split up and some of us went to the aquarium near Kahalui. Although the aquarium was small, we saw a lot of awesome fish, many of which I had never seen before. They definitely had some excellent displays, including a tunnel through a giant tank filled with sharks and rays.

That night we went to a luau at the Hyatt Regency called Drums of the Pacific. I had heard a lot of the luaus offered pretty mediocre food, but the eats there were quite good and the dances were entertaining. This was the main celebration for my folks' anniversary, so we were glad that although the wind was blowing something fierce, the weather held and we had a great time.

The winds that were blowing on the night of the luau brought in quite the rain storm, just as our server there predicted. It rained hard for most of the day, so we played a lot of board games and went for a walk in the rain after our cabin fever got the best of us. We went along a nice path that lined the beach through hotels and bird sanctuaries.

Thankfully the weather cleared on the next day. Jen and I went to the beach and watched sea turtles swimming in the surf. I also tried my hand at swimming. I chose my location poorly and ended up being at the focal point of the little bay where the waves came in strongest. After being tumbled a couple of times, I decided that was enough. I went back up to where Jen was with our stuff on a berm above the tide line. However, it was not far enough beyond it and a big wave came up and washed over our clothes and my camera. Thankfully it emerged unscathed, because the best sights were yet to come.

We went en masse to Iao Valley State Park. It's a very small park with some cool rock formations and a little garden-like patch. After that we journeyed to the wet side of the island and hiked up to Twin Falls, which included a painful barefoot wade for the last 100 feet or so. That's what I get for not hiking in sandals. Of course, hiking in sandals probably would have given me blisters. The trail was lined with all sorts of cool flowers and plants growing in the wild.

After the falls, we split up and I was with the car that headed along the exceptionally twisty and intermittently terrifying road to Hana. Our target was the Garden of Eden botanical gardens. The garden is good-sized and packed with all sorts of tropical wonders, many of which I had never seen before, despite trips to other tropical botanical gardens. It also had a plentiful stock of mosquitoes, which proceeded to eat me alive. My dad opted to stay in the car. That explains the $10 cans of bug spray at the garden's gate. The show stealers for me were the painted eucalyptus trees and the amazing jade vine.

Then it was back through the curves, through Kahalui, into an amazing sunset and back to our rooms in Napili. After dinner we had to leave. We couldn't check in beforehand, because the hotel lacked a printer, so we set out early to the airport to catch our red eye to the mainland. It is a really, really, really good thing we did. There was a fatal accident on the road to the airport, and traffic was backed up and motionless. We sat and sat and fretted and prayed and sat for 45 minutes. Once we were through, we jetted to the airport. I bolted out of the car to the check in counter, not even bothering to close the door. Jen hefted the luggage out and then we ran to security and slung our bags through the x-ray machine. I was wearing my hiking boots, and didn't even stop to put them back on. Boots in hand, I ran in my socks through the terminal. Of course, we were at the gate at the far end of the concourse. I pounded down the hall to the agricultural inspection station and shoved my stuff through the scanner. We arrived breathless at the gate, where we were told that the crew for the flight had been stuck in the same traffic jam we were in. That gave us enough time to fill water bottles and catch our breath, but if they had not been delayed, we would have arrived 10 minutes before the doors were shut.

Then it was a long fitful flight to Phoenix and then to Denver. We crashed at home after a meal and started the long process of regaining our energy. After our nap, I awoke and was so groggy and out of it that had I not known what I just went through, I would have sworn I was drugged. Today I felt better, but still like I was running on half my normal sleep. Jen says she feels fine today, so we'll see how I fare tomorrow.

It was great to see my family again and get to celebrate my parents' 50 years of marriage. They're quite the inspiration. You can see a large swath of the pictures I took in my gallery.

Maui Christmas

So, I'm back from Maui. We were there for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. That's a pretty impressive milestone. We got to see all my family and I got to see Hawaii for the first time. We're exhausted and glad to be home, but we had a good time and got to see a lot of cool stuff. Of course, pictures will be forthcoming once I recuperate a bit. We left on Wednesday and flew out on Saturday night, arriving back home about noon on Sunday. The travelogue will be up soon!

Getting Christmas Done

The weekend, which is long past, is when Jen and I got stuff done. No, wait. We Got Stuff Done. There, that's better. Among our many accomplishments was getting the Christmas decorations up. The tree is up, the lights are hung, the garlands are ... garlanding? ... woven through things. It feels good. I do love Christmas lights.

Most of the Christmas shopping also fell to our productivity this week. Shazam! I only had to resort to a few gift cards. I still have my parents and Jen to buy for, but other than that, it is in the mail! Thank goodness for that.

I finally am feeling over the sore throat that has dogged me for the past two weeks. Perhaps I should have rested or something. Feh. I also got some quality coding time on my Blackberry project. It still seems to freaking difficult to get time to code, let alone actually do the coding. It makes delays in the coding, the regular snafus and bugs, all the more painful. And since it 'tis the season to be freakishly busy, quality coding time is in short supply. Maybe after Christmas?

Oh, and the rest of the time is spent obsessing about cell phones, in particular this one. More on that later, I imagine.

OK Vacation

I just polished off the last of the mince pie from Thanksgiving, so I guess I should start writing about it. It all started in Boulder where we got together with Jen's local family and friends for Thanksgiving dinner, which was held at Jen's parents' place. We enjoyed plenty of good food (best yams ever!) and company, but that was just the beginning.

Quite early the next morning, Jen, myself, Jen's parents, and Jen's sister Christine all jumped into the van and started driving towards Oklahoma. The goal was to reach the Tulsa area to see the family from that neck of the woods.

The drive took us about 10.5 hours. I had brought along my laptop to play movies and downloaded radio shows. Unfortunately, what I discovered when we tried to play the media was that the speakers in the laptop were so weak that they couldn't overcome the road noise and we couldn't hear anything. I called ahead to a Radio Shack in Hays, Kansas and found some possibilities that could work. We ended up buying an FM transmitter for my laptop so the sound could be picked up on the car radio and broadcast through the car speakers. Of course I also had to buy a splitter for the cigarette lighter so both the transmitter and laptop could be plugged in. Our "free" entertainment had become quite costly. Still, it was quite a boon to have movies and This American Life to entertain us. Though honestly, it felt good for me to just sit, be still and space out while staring at the Great Plains whizzing by.

Once in Tulsa, we visited Jen's grandmother and met Jen's uncle Mark and his wife Theresa. The next day, we went out to Claremore, OK and met with Jen's Aunt Margo and her daughter who run The Pink House. It's a tea house style restaurant in a century-old houes, and they serve some fantastic food there. We worked most of the day helping out around The Pink House. I raked leaves, organized the garage, pulled Christmas decorations out of storage and helped decorate. It was quite a bit of work, but I got paid well with a fantastic ham salad sandwich, excellent potato soup, and some magnificent desserts.

On Sunday, we did a little more work at The Pink House before getting together for a second Thanksgiving dinner, which of course was smashingly good. However, I've been nursing a sore throat, and even before I ate anything I wanted to just lie down and sleep for the rest of the day. I'm afraid I was not the best conversationalist ... or even a conversationalist, for that matter. You can see pictures from the trip in my gallery.

That night we left for Salina, Kansas to cut our impending drive into more manageable pieces. We stayed overnight there and continued back to Boulder on Monday. That proved wise, since in eastern Colorado there was some nasty blowing snow and strong winds. We saw one van off the side of the road, backwards, and propping up the large highway sign it had removed a leg from. Yikes. Fortunately, most of the drive home was on clear roads.

Monday, besides being the day of our long drive back, was also Jen's birthday. Her family got her a bunch of small presents and doled them out along the drive, which was clever and I very much wish I had thought of it. My personal celebration for Jen was to take her out to Sushi Den last night for some inordinately wonderful sushi (crispy bincho roll = happiness), followed by dessert at d Bar. Jen had a waffle ice cream sandwich and I had this amazing concoction of vanilla roasted figs, a crisp cookie, and a rosemary-flavored brulee topped with hazelnuts and a port granita. Incredible. Just incredible.

This Saturday we'll get together with Jen's family for a proper birthday celebration which will roll in her dad's birthday too. I'm left looking at the rest of the month a bit bewildered. There are some cool things coming up, but I'm wondering where I'll fit in anything else. I've got an app to write, an epic game to complete, Christmas shopping, and more. How is this going to work?