Playing Peak-a-boo with Miriam

Miriam is 11 weeks old now. She is quite content being cuddled, played with, or generally just part of the family activities. Here, daddy and the video camera are playing peakaboo with Miriam. As the game goes on the smiles and laughs get bigger. Enjoy!

Little Boys and Their Incredible Robots

David and I spent some time this weekend building another robot from his Lego Mindstorm kit. This one is a robotic vault that is activated with a keycard. David explains it in this video:

Goodbye Toby

Today we said goodbye to Toby as he was adopted by some nice folks and their four grandchildren who live in Newberg. We're sad to see him go and the kids will have some adjustment time for losing their furry playmate but we're happy to see him go to a family that will give him the love he is used to.

Adoptable Doggie

Toby is a 9 year old Beagle who has lived with us for the last 3 years and now he is looking for a new home. Toby has a chronic stuffy nose that causes him to sneeze which has been making it very hard to keep him as an inside dog, but we don't have the space outside to let him play like he deserves.

Toby is looking for a home with a warm place to sleep but lots of space outside to have adventures in, and ideally another dog to be a companion with. He is a sweet and loving dog, he adores the children and they adore him. Toby is obedient but he does like to have adventures if left outside on his own so a fenced area is a must. If you have a good home, maybe a farm or some good acreage and a warm place for Toby to sleep as well as another dog for his companionship, let us know by email that you are interested in adopting him. (Toby will come with two sleeping mats, his doggie dishes, and a few toys.)

My Easter, by David

I have three favorite things about Easter. I liked the egg hunt because it was easy. The angel food cake was, of course, yummy. I like the flashlight that I got for Easter because it is fun and cool. These were the best things about Easter Sunday.

Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad

My parents, Dave and Sherie Henderson, celebrate their 32nd anniversary tomorrow. From the time I was a child, growing up on the mission field, I watched them work together as a team. Despite the living conditions, the pressures, and the lack of comforts their marriage continued to build and they helped each other through it all. Thank you mom and dad for the amazing example you have set. Here is a picture they sent to us from their apartment in Moscow Russia, taken just a few days ago as they enjoyed Easter with my youngest brother Sean. All the best to you mom and dad!

New client web site

Christina mentioned in the last post that I recently completed a client web site, so I'll go ahead and announce it fully here! The company is called GQM Associates and this is their first web site:

Visit the GQM web site

GQM is a company that specializes in helping other companies develop quality management systems, especially companies that are seeking ISO registration or nuclear certification. I have been working with the Paul and Robin Gladieux over the last year to help define an online marketing direction and then bring that direction to your web browser.

This site blends the marketing materials traditional to a company web site with the knowledge sharing power of a blog - something that each of the associates in the company will contribute to over time.

Don't miss the short multimedia overview of GQM - on the home page click the "Enter" button in the lower right (the Multimedia section).

Drum Roll Please!

Big news for everyone this week. Adriel finished the big side project that he has been working on for many months. Now he can move on to all of the other work he has had to put off. He hopes to soon get enough house projects out of the way so that he can have a little well deserved down time. David and his mom are starting to move back into their house after the remodel. They have been doing without a kitchen for a while now and finally things are getting put back together. As for Abigail, she has officially started to read. After many months of just knowing letter sounds she has gotten the concept of blending the sounds to make words. We won't be reading War and Peace anytime soon but we are all very proud of her first read sentence ... "Pat the fat cat." She even showed off for grandma today. The news that has affected my life more than any other is that Miriam is sleeping through the night!!! Three nights in a row now she has slept more than 7 hours. What a great kid! I am off to take advantage of that now sleeping baby and crossing my fingers that she keeps it up.

San Diego Update

If you are jealous of me being in San Diego - Don't be. It's been rainy and windy most of the time I've been here, I was rained straight out of the hot tub last night, it was like being back in Indonesia again, downpoor. I'm hoping things will calm down before I fly out tomorrow or else I'm in for a rough ride.

Today I attended sessions on the oh-so-motivating topics of Taxonomy (how to stuff and hang web sites that you have shot in the wild) and User Interface design (yeah!!! Something that speaks to my heart) and Knowledge Management and oh, another session on... Taxonomy.

There was also a mid-day panel discussion between the vendors, one of which was a Microsoft rep who straight up stated that the open source community tends to be followers not leaders. Um... who's been following who for the last few years?

Another vendor stated that it costs so much to support open source - of course his company's product ONLY costs $1500 per seat, plus yearly maintenance contract costs. (To be fair he said that the cost goes down when you buy a large number of seats, say like McDonalds who has over a million seats licensed.)

To help you feel included in my learning experience, here are some of the terms I have heard today - feel free to look these up on WikiPedia:

• KM - Knowledge Management
  
• Taxonomy
  
• B2B, B2E, B2C
  
• The Happy Path
  
• Mental Model
  
• Findability
  
• Instantive
  
• Parentive
  
• Equivalency
  
• Associative
  
• Hierarchical
  
• Master Data, Transactional Data, Meta Data, Reference Data, Setup Data
  

And finally, the phrase of today: "Welcome to the firehose, please take a sip" - This was from the session on interface design, a very applicable quote to many interfaces that I have seen.

And now I'm off to visit Cafe 1134 as recommended by Brian in his comment on my last post!

Live from San Diego! It's the adventures of Adriel, Christina and the kids.

I'm down in San Diego for the next few days attending the "Portals, Collaboration & Content Management" conference - since I have some extra time on my hands I thought I would try and catch up on this blog!

Keep reading, because this entry will be a long one. On tap today are the topics of San Diego, Flying, Awana Grand Prix, and of course the Baby Miriam update. (Not necessarily in that order)



I'm staying on Coronado island just off the San Diego bay, my meager accommodations are the famous Hotel Del Coronado. The waves of the Pacific are soothingly crashing on the sand just outside my window. OK, pretty nice life, eh? Except I'm down here on my own so there isn't really anyone to share it all with - except you who are reading this bloc!

What's a portal? Well, it's the next best thing on the Information Technology outlook - that according to the first presenter today. The second presenter was a little more realistic. In reality, all of us web designers have been making portals for years, the industry is just now getting around to giving it a term and creating portal development toolkit softwares. Anyway, that is my "going in" thought. We'll see what the conference brings to light over the next few days. :)



After the sessions today I walked about four miles down the peninsula of Coronado Island. There is a naval amphibious base that I walked past (even saw a stealth ship in berth) as well as a Navy airport on the other end of the island. There was a helicopter flying circles around the island all day, I assume providing security for the bases, I'm sure that everyone around here just gets used to that. I would love to take a harbor tour cruise, but I'm not sure that I'll get the time to do that while I am here.


OK, next topic: Awana Grand Prix!



Last weekend was the pine car races, and the kids both did great. A few weeks back I had the kids pick out a match box car each and that is what we modeled their pine cars after. Abbie had a bright yellow car that our friend Jeremy helped cut on his tablesaw and I finished up. David had a cool dark green car with lots of aerodynamic features (dad went a little crazy with the Dremel tool on this one). We learned that creating pine cars takes a lot of time, next year we'll get started much sooner. But in the end both cars worked great. Both kids won trophies for design - Abbie came in first for her class in this category and David came in second in his class for this category. David's car won the first heat, he was beaming with pride, and was able to participate in the finals.




Want to see the action? Here's a video clip of Abbie's heat (her car is the yellow one closest to the camera) and a video clip of David heat (his car is the green one closest to the camera)

It was a pretty fun day for all of us, even Miriam participated. (By the way, Christina cut her hair, it's pretty cute.)



Speaking of Miriam...

... She's starting to smile once in a while now, it's very cute. I was lucky enough to get her to laugh with me the other night, that was special. Now I am continuously making obnoxious sounds and coo's to try and get her to repeat this little trick while her mommy is in the room - to no avail.

She's seven weeks old now! It's amazing how fast time goes - we're almost out of the "two month window" - that time when life starts to feel back to normal. But we're not quite there yet, so there's still a lot of sleepy times for all of us.








Now, for my "hobby" - RC Flying


The weather has been improving a little around here (you heard about our snow at the beginning of March right?) and I've been able to get out to fly with my flying buddy Jeremy a little more often. My earlier plane, the P-51 Mustang, took a nose dive after a radio malfunction a few months back. I replaced it with a cute little biplane which is also an excellent flyer. Jeremy has a new plane as well, I'll close with these pictures from our trip to the field last week.