Festival of Colors

This past Saturday, we went to the Hare Krishna celebration ("Festival of Colors") with Clinton, Tera, Ryan, and Jayna. I don't know much about their religion, but their temple is beautiful and it sure was fun throwing chalk at everyone. They even had llamas! And you can't go wrong with llamas.

H-O-R-S-E

Last night we decided to go shoot hoops at the church gym. I've been wanting to play basketball for a long time now (it's amazing how much you want to do things when you can't and how you don't do things often when you can). Well, I use the word "play" loosely because I made sure I didn't jump at all while shooting. Kevin and I just shot around--I shot a lot of free throws (and I'm glad to say that my FTP is better than most of the BYU players)--and then we ended with a game of H-O-R-S-E. This is one of the only games I consistently beat Kevin at. Don't worry, he smokes me at 1-on-1. But I had no expectations for the game last night. We had to make it a rule to shoot within 15 feet of the basket, because that is about my range without jumping. After about 15 minutes of playing, we decided to call a truce. I was at H-O-R and Kevin was H-O-R-S. I think that should mean that I won, but he disagrees. I think he wanted to stop the game before he really humiliated himself and lost to his pregnant wife. :) Needless to say, it was good to "get out there" again. However, I was pretty worn out after only 30 minutes of shooting around. Sad.

The Pregnant Belly

Here is a requested recent picture (just over 6 months pregnant).

Bocce

This weekend we went to the coolest park in the world...it's located near Walmart and has a giant swing (like the ones at amusement parks except it's not automatic). We didn't swing this time, but the park has huge open fields so we played bocce ball with our good friends, Ryan and Jayna. Each couple won a game...we decided to leave before it got too competitive and we were both still happy. :) Here are a few pictures. Kevin tried to pick me up, but I think my extra pregnancy weight took him off guard (sad).

Happy Easter

Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Easter. Here are some eggs we dyed a few days ago. Which one is your favorite? The brown egg is a tradition in my family.

Let the Madness Begin!!!

For those of you who don't know, March Madness begins today. It is the NCAA Mens' College basketball tournament, the biggest tournament of the year. I like basketball (especially BYU) and I know some stuff (pretty much only about our Conference, the Mountain West), but I still find it fun to follow the NCAA games. BYU is in the tournament again this year and we play Texas A&M tonight at 5:30pm. Kevin claims he is an avid BYU fan, but he thinks BYU will lose! I, of course, have faith in my team. Kevin and I filled out separate brackets this year and bet to see who guesses the correct teams to win. He won last year but only by one game! Nonetheless, we both come out as winners because we bet ice cream (just different locations depending on the winner). So if you're a basketball fan, you already have anticipated March Madness since the season began and, if you're not, at least watch the BYU game. Go Cougars!

I married a geek

I just read Kevin's blog. Don't worry, I won't let him post again. Just kidding. I love you boy!

Well, I'm officially going to post my first post on this blog. (This is Kevin). Seeing how the majority of my life is spent doing remarkably geeky stuff, I'm going to post about the geeky stuff that I've been trying to do.

1)I've been trying to download, install and run a version of Storesonlinepro on my PC for the last couple of months. I gave up and took a rest but then at work (As of Friday I worked at Storesonline) I heard they made an update to the download. So this morning I tried it again and.....it worked! The only issue now is that none of my licenses and passwords will get me into the downloaded version. So now I have to figure out how to get the license and password without getting dinged with a download services fee (I heard they were going to charge people who called in for help with the download). I may just wait and see if I can get my new boss over at PMI to go get everyone the password.


2)In the storesonline software, there's a way to download a backup of your website. Until a couple weeks ago I didn't know how to open the format it was in. However, someone at work introduced me to the wonders of winrar, an extracting program similar to winzip, but on steroids. It opened up the backup to reveal nothing but beautiful XML files. I thought I had hit the motherlode. Quickly and easily creating entire websites seemed to be within my grasp, however, I noticed that each element and page is assigned a lengthy ID. I'm now afraid that Storesonline is storing all of the contents of the various elements and pages in one mega-database instead of miniture databases for each site. If the former is true, then that puts my plan of automating the site creation on hold until I can either figure how to create elements with different ID's without jacking up some poor suckers website just because he had the same element ID, or quickly creating the elements and pages in the actual builder. I'm guessing the latter is more likely, so I'm going to have to investigate how I can do this.

3)I've been preaching to the world about AutoHotkey. It is amazing at taking repetitive jobs and automating them. The big problem with hooking it up to the Storesonline storebuilder is that the download time from the various pages varies so dramatically, that I would have to create a 15 second delay between each page change just to make sure that the script doesn't get ahead of the actual program. Another problem is that the storebuilder's buttons are always changing position as more elements are created. So I can't set the screen coordinates for the various buttons, which is pretty frustrating.

Today I start at my new job, back at PMI. While I would be lying if I said I was excited to be going back to the company that I quit just 3 months ago. I am hoping that programming for PMI will be better than coaching for PMI. Less time on the phone and more time actually building websites. I am looking forward to the hardware/software they promised us. 2 widescreen monitors and photoshop instead of fireworks. That's going to be fun. It's amazing what a difference these little things make to geeks like me. Everyone who found out they were moving to PMI was upset, but when they found out they'd each be getting dual widescreen monitors they started to chill. Funny, everyone is OK about PMI now because PMI spent an extra $250 for a second monitor. Yet, we are all going to end up paying an additional $300-$700 for our new healthcare plan each year. But I guess that's just human nature.