Thursday, March 26, 2009

But Winter was over last week...

A couple of people have been asking me about the snow that Colorado has been getting today, so I thought I would post a few pictures.

Click on the house to see them.


Now remember that on Sunday it was about 80, and today... think it was about 20 when I took these pictures

Jody says that I am wrong...

Jody said that I actually did so something fun this week. Last Sunday (3/22) I flew a kite in the backyard with Dez, Tim and Caelum.

I'm not sure Caelum was really into it that much, but I enjoyed it. It was a beautiful day, the sun was out, and it was about 80 outside...

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Not much going on....

Well, it is tough to keep up a blog when all you do is work... Since, you want to have something good to write about to keep people coming back, at least occasionally.

Lately, all we have been doing is keeping up with things. Jody has been dealing with 200+ work emails a day and all the other things like hiring people, filling classes, and finding instructors. Oh, if you have 18hrs or more of graduate level Mathematics and want to teach online, contact Jody, she might have some work for you.

I've finally got some funding to do some development work on my project. Doing support is rather dull, especially when it is working well, and being able to create some of the things that I have had on my list makes the days go much faster. Lately, I've been writing additional user interfaces for our content authoring system. The program is all web based so everything is done thru a browser. I write the backend code in Perl and that Perl code writes code in javascript so that the user has a rich and fast experience on their end. Yes, that is me writing a computer program that writes another computer program in a different language, I think it is kinda neat. We have to do this cause the Perl code runs on the server and the javascript runs on the client (browser) side. Eventually, what this means to the user is that when you click things, it responds fast, since it does not have to ask the server for more information, since slow sites suck. And with how our people are organized, latency (the time to request and respond to a click) is more expensive timewise than sending a lot of data one time.

So that is what we are doing, maybe we'll have something more exciting next week.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Yogi's water dish

Jody's brother has a dog named Yogi, he is a 3yr old red/yellow lab and is a pretty good sized dog that likes to chew stuff up. So Jody decided that he needed a new water dish since he wrecked his old one. So about a week or so ago we took it over to him.

Unfortunately, Yogi used it as a dish for about 5 mins and then decided it would make a better frisbee. Now remember that this is a softish rubber dish that weighs around 3-5lbs and he was carrying it around like it was nothing.

Yogi playing keep away with it

Yogi trying to get Doug to throw it


Racing back from fetching it
So we are glad that he loves his new dish, but I don't think there will be much water in it, ever....

Weekend Adventures

On Friday, I had a conference in downtown Denver…so I talked Kevin into going with me. We actually went Thursday night, and then stayed till Saturday. It was really fun.

Here is our room:


The drapes are closed, but this is a huge rounded window overlooking the cityscape. I love big cities and this was a good view.

The conference on Friday was productive and I was able to do some networking, I think I was able to recruit a few people to come teach for me! :)

Friday night Kevin and I went to see Confessions of a Shopaholic and then went to the Paramount CafĂ© for dinner….The movie and food were both good, and the company on our date night was wonderful!

Saturday, we wanted to do some shopping so off we went. But the real excitement for the day was lunch. We had lunch at Casa Bonita! For those South Park fans, they did an episode once on the famous restaurant. We enjoyed our lunch, the all you can eat sopaipillas, and the entertainment. We also watched Black Bart lose to the sheriff and over into the water he went. We saw the “500 lb” gorilla escape, and we watched the cliff divers. Yes all that in one lunch time special :)

Here is the famous pink building......




This was our lunch...we both had the chicken dinner....chicken taco, burrito and enchilada, with rice and beans, it was yummy!



Here is the Sheriff, shooting Black Bart....when will Black Bart learn..... Kevin and I also had a chance to walk through Black Barts Cave...yikes that is scary! :)



From our table we could not only see the stage above, but we could see down to the pool below as well.


The Sopaipilla area....they were making them as fast as the wait staff could take them out.


What fun decor don't you think?








It is a fun place to go and if you ever come to visit we will take you ;)