Sunday, July 31, 2005

Made it to Los Angeles (An Update)

Hey everyone... its been a crazy couple of weeks, but I've got a little time to catch up on this blogging thing.

First off I'll apologize for the lack of posting and the lack of pictures, but we've been quite busy with everything that is going on.

1. I finished the Harry Potter book after waiting in line for an hour at midnight at the B&N is Sandy. Great read. Can't wait for the 7th book.

2. Aaron finished "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" so Mom and I took him and Aimee to go see the movie. I give it four stars and say it's better than the Gene Wilder version (1971). Aaron liked the movie better than the book.

3. We went to Lagoon with the whole fam damily. Quite a time. Pics to come.

4. Kerry's married... finally. He and Michelle make a wonderful couple and they've spent the last week in Pocatello at their apartment "scrubbing the cupboards*."

5. Jamie is married too... at least that what Mindy reports.

6. I gave up my seat for my Thursday flight to LAX for dinner, a hotel stay and $400 in Delta tickets. I caught an 8:30 AM flight the next day. Pretty good deal. Now we can fly the Grandmas out for the baby in March.

7. Oh yeah, we found out two weeks ago that Mindy is due with #4 in March 2006. The baby is referred as "Bean" and in "We have three kids and a bean."

8. I hung out with James for awhile here in Los Angeles. We went to Venicec Beach, The Arclight Dome to see "The Island" [**1/2], went to Gloria's Mexican/El Salvadoran Restaurant, the Santa Monica Pier and Johnny Rockets.

9. Spent all day yesterday in the Professional Chapters Meeting for the SIGGRAPH 2005 Conference. Met a few cool people and learned how to better serve the local San Antonio chapter. The conference started today, but I'm not going to the Conference until Tuesday night.

10. Went to church with Joan, Donna and Grandma. Saw David and his family, Camille (Paul's wife), Mary and Eric (Mary's son). Had 'sloppy joes' for dinner (yum), and chatted the day away.

Well, that's it for now.

Hope that wasn't too quick.

* no really, their apartment was a mess so the removed all the contact paper and scrubbed the cabinets. Sheesh, what were you people thinking! ;)

Monday, July 04, 2005

It's Getting Hot in Herrrrre!...

... so take off all your clothes. (I am getting so hot, I wanna take my clothes off.)

Let me tell you something, not having AC in the middle of summer is not something I would recommend.

We came back from dinner on Saturday only to find that our A/C died... and that's no fun. And the best part is that we are leaving for our vacation this Wednesday and there is no time to get it fixed before we leave.

So we toughed it out Saturday night. We had the ceiling fans going and the kids were still hot upstairs, but they slept well (I guess). Min and I moved the bed back under the ceiling fan and were fine.

Betsy had invited us to Hazel's blessing and we skipped out of our church and headed north to attend with them. We stayed until 7 PM and then came back to a somewhat "cool" house (88° inside).

It was a little warmer that night for the kids, so we opened their windows but the humidity crept in and it was quite the sauna.

We got up this morning for a 4th of July activity at the church, and while were in the breakfast line, Alex got sick. Must have been the heat. But with a little water he was back to normal in no time flat.

While we were there we shared our plight with some members of the ward and found out that we are the third family in our neighborhood (from the ward) to have their AC die on them. We explained to them that we have the second AC unit in the office for the computers and we were going to put all the "stuff we don't want to melt" up there and keep it on 78°s the whole time.

We received alot of offers to go over to peoples home and cool off, but Min and I decided that we are going to stay in tonight, let the kids sleep and we'll pack, then head out tomorrow, stay over in a hotel with a pool and finish the trip to Phoenix on Wednesday (since our friends are returning from their trip Tuesday, we don't want to show up on their doorstep early).

Then when we get back from our trip we'll under go the task of getting it fixed.

It'll be a few miserable days until it does get fixed, but we can tough it out then.

Anyways, that's it.

And no, I'm not sitting here typing this naked in front of a fan.

Friday, July 01, 2005

Testing the RSS Feed

Ha! This is great stuff. I'll explain it later.

UPDATE: Okay, it worked.

There are several applications out there that will notify you of an update to someone blog using XML and RSS (Real Simple Syndication).

On my new iMac I'm running Mozilla's Thunderbird which is an eMail application that can handle multiple accounts (I have about 10 different eMail addresses believe it or not) and it also has an RSS Content Manager.

The RSS Feed address for this blog is:

http://minsroom.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Add that to the manager and it will check for updates and show them in you email with a link out to the actual page so that you can read the comments.

Anyways, if you are a tech geek like me, you'll think its cool.

Later...