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Baby Smash

/ Shane / Leave a comment

First off, happy Labor Day!

This post is for all you readers out there with young children. I know when Evie was younger, she would see us on the computer all the time, and want to participate. She spent a lot of time smashing on the keyboard and doing all sorts of interesting things I never even knew you could do with key shortcuts (in other words, she taught me a thing or two about computers).

It’s not that I minded her playing with the computer, it’s that I was worried about her messing things up on the computer. Enter BabySmash, a program for “baby proof computer fun”. Basically, it locks out the keyboard so that all those extra keystrokes don’t accidentally change your password or something. Instead, they bring up fun animations and sounds. So put it on and let them smash to their heart’s content. You can see a couple of demo videos on the website. Did I mention it’s free?

Oh ThinkGeek, what will you think of next?

/ Shane / 4 Comments

I make no attempt to hide my love of ThinkGeek here on the blog. Every time I get the newsletter, there is always something cool to report. This month was no exception, giving us the amazing Tac Bac – Tactical Canned Bacon. This is amazing, you can stockpile it up and it will last for 10 years. Well, it won’t last for 10 years, because you’ll eat it, but maybe in your hunger to get at the bacon you accidentally knock a can back behind the shelf or something and find it 9 years later…it’s still good! Why would you need to stockpile bacon? Well, for tactical purposes obviously (if you read the webpage closely, you’ll notice that they specifically mention the zombie apocalypse…I’m just saying)

But wait, there’s more! Special bonus ThinkGeek product, the Force Trainer. This thing blew my mind, basically you can train your Jedi skills in the use for the Force, like, for realz. You clamp this headgear on, which measures your brainwaves. Depending on how hard you’re concentrating, the ball will go up or down in the tube. I think this is probably as close as we are ever going to come to actual Force usage.

Yay ThinkGeek!

Seattle Part Two – Work Interrupts

/ Shane / Leave a comment

The second part of the trip was a little less interesting because I had to attend to what I was really in Seattle for; work. Let me start by saying that Microsoft is a crazy, crazy huge confusing place. It is as big or bigger than any university you have been too, complete with tons of young people walking and biking all over the place. I was not prepared for the size of it all.

Since I had to attend a training / conference, Sara and Evie took Seattle and the surrounding area by storm. Without poor old dad, they hit up the zoo where Evie got to feed a giraffe (seriously, how did they manage to get “zoo.org”, were they like the first zoo with a website?), the Pacific Science Center, a children’s museum and a full tea service. The coolest part was that our existing Chicago zoo and museum memberships got them into the first two completely scott free.

We also managed to hit up our first really good meal of the trip at Pomegranate in Redmond. Not only did everybody get something that was delicious, they had a really cool kids meal that seemed very fancy, but was really things like mac and cheese and carrots underneath.

As a side note, our rental car was actually very enjoyable. Usually I always end up with something awful, like a Purple PT Cruiser (no seriously, I had one), but this time we landed a nice, respectable Ford Focus. It was small and zippy, the perfect size to fit all of our stuff, and we averaged around 32 mpg. I had some trouble with how small it was until I figured out the manual pump seat adjustment thing, but after that I appreciated the smallness for parking and navigating. It also had this really sweet dash option that gave you minute by minute updates on how your driving was affecting your fuel economy, which was pretty cool. All in all, probably the best rental car I have ever had. Of course I would never buy something non-GM, but I guess buying any new, American car right now can’t hurt.

Unfortunately, the rental car led to another theme of the trip, which was the dreaded Elmo CD. For her birthday, Evie got an Elmo CD that is customized to say her name. I thought it was really cool, at least at the time. More and more Evie was excited that Elmo was saying her name. “He’s talking to me!” It all came together in the perfect storm on the trip when Evie insisted on listening to the CD over and over again, every time we were in the car. Sara had it worse than me with all the side trips, but we probably listened to it a hundred times. It became torturous and the songs would haunt me in my sleep. I can tell you for a fact that hell is listening to Elmo on an endless loop.

I apologize for this part of the trip being less than exciting. Maybe Sara can expound on some of the fun stuff I missed in the comments. Or you can go back and re-read Part One.

Seattle Part One – Into the Wild

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Although she has flown two other times before (Arizona and Philadelphia) it was like flying for the first time to Evie. She was pretty excited about it, but Sara and I were a little dubious since she is a little more active (rambunctious) these days and this was a loooong flight. We had a layover in San Jose, so I think the whole thing was about 6 1/2 hours, not to mention getting to the airport before our flight, etc. We had some free drink coupons from the airline and Sara had the idea that we could pass them out to the people unlucky enough to sit in front of our kicking, screaming monster child. As it (always) turns out, she was the perfect little angel and here we sit with free drink coupons, unredeemed.

Evie was practically giddy with excitement as we prepared to take off, however, as soon as the airplane left the ground her eyes got as big as saucers and she gripped the side of the seat screaming, “Go down! Go down!” When the pilot refused to heed her cries, she moaned in dismay, “It just keeps going higher and higher!” By the time we got home, she was an old pro and enjoyed in particular the take-offs and landings.

The first part of our Seattle vacation was sort of the rugged, outdoorsy, adventure part of the trip. After arriving late and spending the night by the airport, we took a car ferry over to the San Juan islands. As I expected, this was probably my favorite part of the trip. Friday Harbor was sort of Mackinac-ish, with shopping and restaurants and an awesome port to watch boats. The rest of the island is a little more sedate, and we took some awesome hikes. We saw wild deer, 2 foxes, quail, a 6 inch slug (we have a picture to prove it), jelly fish, seals, and, of course, orcas. Unfortunately, we did not see any bald eagles, which are apparently abundant.

Not actually one of our pictures

Not actually one of our pictures, not even the boat we were on

Of course the highlight of the trip was the whale watching tour to see the orcas (“killer whales”) which live around the islands. Unfortunately, the whales were waaay up in Vancouver, but fortunately the boat was willing to drive all the way up there. They said it was the farthest north they’ve ever gone in that boat. It was well worth the journey, because all 3 of the local pods were together in one “super pod”. There were around 85 whales in the water when we got there. You could see them in almost any direction and I saw several “breaches” (when they jump right out of the water). We got some pictures, but it was hard to capture the coolness. Unfortunately, since we had to spend so much time getting up there and getting back, we didn’t get to see much of the other native wildlife. We did see some seals on the way back though. We were on the boat for like 4 hours and Evie did a marvelous job, never getting cranky.

When we got back, we bought Evie a stuffed orca, Echo, and she became our constant companion for the rest of the trip. We helped Evie choose a name from the orcas that were born the same year she was. Evie was stuck to her like glue. Since Evie’s car seat was on the side of the car instead of the middle, we were worried about closing the door. We would say, “Fingers!” and Evie would say, “Fingers Echo!” I’m happy to report, neither Evie nor Echo lost any fingers in the door.

That was pretty much it for the first part of the trip, but I just wanted to mention (since we were talking about it) that we  had an amazingly weird but amazingly tasty sandwich on the trip. The restaurant was Market Chef and the sandwich was “sister’s favorite sandwich”. It consisted of apple slices, cheddar cheese, sunflower seeds, sprouts and dijon mustard, all melted into a gooey deliciousness that is hard to describe. I know it sounds weird, but it was mouth watering!

Google Voice

/ Shane / 4 Comments

I now have a Google Voice account! Have you heard about this?

Basically, you pick a new phone number, but you keep all of your existing phones. You then set your Google number to forward to your regular phone(s). “What’s the point?” you ask. Well, there’s several reasons why you might do that:

  1. The phone number is independent of your other phone numbers. So if I get a new cell phone, home phone or work phone, I just update it in my settings. Either way, people can always keep the same number.
  2. You can have your google number ring multiple phones. So maybe during the day you can have your google number forward to your work phone, and in the evening to your home phone, but have it also ring your cell phone, no matter what time it is. So when someone calls that number, they have the best chance to reach me. You can even set this up per person, so maybe when my wife calls I have it always ring all of my phone numbers, but for other people I can redirect them right to voicemail without having any phones ring.
  3. You can pick your own phone number (see more on that below).

Now, if you get to pick your own phone number, you know you want to get it right. I spent almost an entire day trying to come up with a number that spelled something cool. I tried my first name, my last name, “pirates”, “bacon”, “packers”, “go pack”, “zombie”, everything the same digit like 555-5555, etc. Nothing. I eventually came up with something that was okay, but it was a lot more difficult than I anticipated.

There are also many other cool features, such as:

  1. You can have individual greetings, per caller, on your voicemail. Sort of like YouMail, but more comprehensive.
  2. I don’t have a text messaging plan on my phone, so text messaging is expensive. But I can send and receive texts for free to/from my google number.
  3. You can set it up so that if you get a voice mail, it will transcribe it to text and send that text to your phone.
  4. Remember when we had old school answering machines? You could listen to the caller and then, when you realized it was your brother calling from jail, you could pick up the phone and talk to them? Well now you can do that again, with your voicemail.
  5. You can record any call as well as download sound files of any voicemail.

There are tons more things it can do, those are just the ones that stood out. And the best part? It’s free! Ah, Google, what will you think of next? So, if you want my new phone number, let me know (you didn’t think I was going to post it on the Internet did you?)