New Years Countdown

Wish List 2008

Here's this year's wish list that I'll update as ideas come to me:

Download in PDF, Excel, or Text.

Live Shiba Inu Puppy Cam!!

Watch all the little Ember's live :) It even has sound. This totally made my day...

Map of Live Results of Election

Happy Halloween!

Some cool and funny pictures I've seen floating around the last week or so:

Denver Pics

I'm a little late as usual with the notice, but the pics from all our cameras from our trip to visit Kristin in Denver are up. Check 'em out.

Actuate Conference in Vegas

Still catching up here...

About a month ago, I made way to Vegas for the Actuate International User Conference at Red Rock in which I delivered a couple of presentations/workshops:

• Investigating Actuate iServer Logs and Monitoring Performance
• Understanding, Parsing, and Reporting off of Encyclopedia Logs and Monitor Script - WORKSHOP

Cool thing about this trip is I got to meet my mentor, Justin Miranda, for my OpenMRS project that I just wrapped up for the summer. He made a presentation in which he discussed what OpenMRS is and how they are using BIRT and touched on the ODA that I am working on.

The blowout party was impressive as usual and was at TAO Nightclub at the Venetian. The food and drinks were top shelf and I wasn't complaining about the ladies in the bathtub :)

The rooms at Red Rock were probably the nicest I've stayed at in Vegas. I was particularly impressed with the flat screen TV in front of the bathtub:

I also had a good view of the Red Rock Canyon:

And the pool area below:

Red Rock had a lot to offer as far as live games, food, movie theatre, bowling alley, etc., but it just didn't have that Vegas feel because it's so far from the strip. For some people, this is exactly what they want, but I'm not one of those people :)

Fencing Things In

Wow, I haven't written on here in more than 3 months. I've been crazy busy with my Google Summer of Code project and spent most of my free time on this. Quite a bit has happened since then and I'll try to catch up in the next couple posts.

So, at the beginning of the summer, my dad and I started the project to fence in the backyard with a privacy fence. We chose treated lumber for the posts and rails and used cedar for the pickets.

All the pictures from the project are here, but I'll highlight some in this post.

Here's the holes from the post hole digger next to the neighbor's chain link fence. Annoying neighbor wanted to keep his fence so we ran the privacy fence right next to it:

Dad and I starting on the concrete work to get the posts in the ground:

The next picture is my favorite. While dad and I were making the holes for the post, we ran into what we thought was a gas line. After closer inspection, the end of it had a U-joint! After almost 2 hours of messing with it, we pulled out an 8 foot drive shaft that was buried in the back of the yard more than 3 feet at the deepest point. Here we are posing with our "trophy":

Setting the posts:

Got the rails up:

Dad pre-built a nice steel tube gate that we braced with extra lumber and concrete and hung:

After a good 5 or 6 days, we had the whole fence framed out. I spent the next month or so hanging up the pickets:

The dogs have certainly been enjoying running around the backyard with no supervision. However, I've recently started redoing the entire backyard since there's virtually no grass so the dogs are no longer allowed. More on seeding the backyard later...

Many, many, many thanks to dad for making this happen!

New Colorado Pics

Finally got around to uploading pics from the Colorado trip I took with my parents a few weeks ago. Check out the album here.

This semester is almost over so hopefully I'll get my sanity back soon :)

Accepted to Google Summer of Code

I found out on Monday that I was accepted as a student for the Google Summer of Code for this summer 2008. I will be working with OpenMRS which is an open source medical application primarily used to track prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS in developing countries. I'll be extending and enhancing their BIRT ODA among other things. Info about the accepted projects with OpenMRS are here and more details about my project are here. The official start is May 26th. I'll be blogging on this separate blog to track my progress and experience with this.

Super Mario

Can you spot Julian Wright?

Rock Chalk Championship!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Championship Bound!

'Nuff said.

Final Four!!!!

Here we come Roy!!

50 Inches of Heaven

I'll be picking up the TH-50PX80U later this week!! More to come...

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

New Dog Pics

Here's some new pictures of "the girls". We catch them sleeping quite a bit in the office. Look how angry Sugar looks:

Here's a better one:

My personal favorite is this pic of the treat Megan got Ember from Three Dog Bakery:

Going to Wicked in Kansas City

For Valentine's Day, I got tickets for us to go to Wicked. This is the musical that we wanted to see on Broadway while we were in New York but weren't able to get tickets. Well, the Broadway show is coming to KC and tickets went on sale two days ago on Friday.

The musical is based on the book Wicked which is a prequel to the Wizard of Oz. Megan actually got me the book for Christmas but was still reading it when she gave it to me. So, it was pretty much me unwrapping my gift and giving it back to her to finish reading :)

Anyways, the tickets were going super fast as soon as they went on sale. There are about 25 shows but I was focusing on a Friday or Saturday date. The best tickets I was able to get was on Friday the 16th of May. All the other dates had tickets up in the balcony or crappy floor seats. I've highlighted our seats in red on the Kansas City Music Hall diagram below:

Superbowl Grub

Ok, I'm trying to catch up here. Two weeks ago was the superbowl and Megan and I made Black Bean Salad and Wild Mushroom Quesadillas with Warm Black Bean Salsa:

The Black Bean Salad was just ok, but the real star where the quesadillas. I highly suggest making these. I thought the idea of BBQ sauce in salsa was weird but it was really good. I even cleaned up the left over salsa with some tortilla chips.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Wow, I've got a lot of updating to do. Hopefully I'll get to it this weekend. I'm heading down to Lawrence today for the KU Engineering Career fair to do some recruiting. In the mean time, here's a hilarious Valentine's day comic from the folks at Explosm:

Dad Finally Got the Muskrat

When I was in Wichita a few weeks ago, I got to check out the muskrat that dad has been trying to nab for quite some time. It's been living in the lagoon and muskrats are known for damaging lagoons hence the hatred for this little creature. Anyways, he used a trap that looked something like this to snap the little sucker's neck:

I took a picture with my phone of dad next to the kill (you can see a little post sticking out of the lagoon which is where the trap is attached to):

Here's a nice closeup where you can see its nasty yellow teeth:

Checking out Venues in Wichita

Last Friday, Megan and I went down to Wichita to check out venues for the wedding reception. We made reservations at 3 different places to check them out and Megan, Megan's mom, Morgan, my mom, and myself went and checked them out on Saturday.

The first place we went to was the Airport Hilton Hotel (map). This place was just average to us and the location of the place (right by the airport) wasn't very desirable.

The next place we went was the Hotel at Oldtown (map). The cool thing about this place is the location in Oldtown and the rooms that you can stay in. Here's a picture I snapped on my new Blackberry Pearl of the lobby area that shows the rooms:

However, their conference area was across the street and away from the look and feel of the actual hotel. One thing that was nice was two large patios connected to the conference area.

The final place we went was the Petroleum Club (map). The club is on the 9th floor of the Bank of America building. Their main reception room has windows on two sides overlooking Wichita. The other side overlooks the large indoor atrium. The vaulted ceilings, scenic view, and overall layout was exactly what the other places were lacking. Here's the only picture I was able to get with my phone (it's a pretty bad picture):

We all liked the Petroleum Club and that looks like where the reception is going to be. We just need to hammer out a few more details and look at reserving this place for a specific date.

Ember vs. Cupcake

For those of you who don't know, Ember is my Shiba Inu and Cupcake is Megan's hamster. Yes, she has a hamster.

2007 Courtesy of JibJab