Dallin's New Bike

Our neighbors were getting rid of their son's old bike since he grew out of it and asked us if we would like it for Dallin. He's still a bit little for it but he still enjoy's riding around the cul-de-sac with a couple of training wheels.

A couple of times he's taken a turn to sharp and fallen so he's a little more aprehensive now about riding it, but he still enjoy's it. We can never get him to come in once he starts.

The Boys

My two boys... It's nearly impossible to get both of them smiling at the same time for a picture. Thatcher sure is happy and they are both looking at the camera at the same time which turned out to make a nice picture.

Blog Up-To-Date

Ok guys... I've finally got this new blog up-to-date. I've just spent nearly all Sunday afternoon and evening posting pictures videos and stories about what's been going on for the last two months. So, scroll down a bit and you will see lots of new content.

I'd also like to throw in here that so far I am completely unimpressed with Google's Blogger utility. I was truly expecting a "canned" blogging utility designed by google to be much easier to use and more bug free, neither of which are the case. In the last few hours that I've spent blogging I've hit 3 unkown errors while trying to publish posts. These spit out some random error code with a message saying I should use this error code when discussing the issue with google... yeah... sure. At least they autosave drafts of my posts so I didn't lose too much content when this happened.

I'm mostly dissappointed with the post editing tools. The window that they give you to edit your post in is about 3" tall by 7" wide and not resizeable. When I insert pictures they always go directly to the top of the post instead of where my cursor is located when I clicked on insert picture. And trying to get the pictures to layout the way I want using their tools is just about impossible without actually editing the html which is not formatted very well to say the least. The pictures take forever to upload. When selecting which pictures to upload I can't select a group of pictures at one time, I have to click on add another picture, browse, find the next picture, and okay for each picture that I want to upload for one post... Ughhh! And last but not least I'm not too thrilled with any of their preset templets, I'm going to have to spend some time tweaking it some to at least get the layout I want.

To be honest I expected a lot more from Google... since they are the reining King of the Web. Of course it's also 1:30am and I'm really tired... so please just ignore this rant!

Breakfast in Bed

Jen had a few piano students this morning and I was sleeping in a little since I was up late working last night. Dallin was trying to wake me up for sometime pushing my shoulder and telling me to wake up. He finally gave up and went downstairs. A little bit later he came back into our room and saying, "Here daddy". He had gone downstairs, got a cup out of the cupboard, filled it with ice and water from the dispensers in the fridge, added a plexi-straw and brought it up to me in bed :)

Cute little guy thought I must be thirsty. I drank it all and said thanks, a few minutes later he brought me a refill :)

I gave in...

Well... my blog has been down for nearly two months now and today I'm finally giving in... throwing in the towel and creating a "blogspot" blog hosted by google :(

Here's the deal. The family with whom we are currently staying subscribes to comcast's "home networking" package. This package differs from a regular account in that they let you "rent" a preconfigured linksys router running firmware with their own "features" added in... Among these features include only allowing 5 dynamically allocated IP addresses and only allowing those 5 computers access to the internet. So, you can add a network printer with a static IP that won't have internet access but won't take up one of your 5 slots for internet access. While this "feature" is quite annoying I was able to move enough network devices to static IP address to allow my laptop to connect to the internet.

The more severe problem with their router is it doesn't allow me to forward inbound http requests to my web server... I guess their EULA doesn't allow for running a web server and they use their router to enforce the restriction. So, naturally we could use my own router and cancel the "home network" package. However, since I've taken my new job with windows mobile I don't have as much of a need to work on my C++ at home since I get plenty of C++ projects at work. I've had less desire to finish up the features I've been wanting to add to my web server and figured I should just go for a "canned" solution.

So, here it is... the "Hep and Happy" blog. I'll work on importing my previous posts into this location as well.

Enjoy!

Sprinkler Time

After the pancake breakfast this morning it got pretty hot. Dallin wanted to cool off by running in the sprinklers. The sun was at an interesting angle that made for some pretty cool pictures.

Fourth of July - Flag Raising

We had a very literal "flag raising" this morning at our ward building to celebrate the 4th of July. One of the scouts put in a new flag pole for his eagle project. The whole ward met early this morning for the regular pancake breakfast and then we all raised not just the flag but the entire flag pole Iwo Jima style.

It was a great ward activity and very patriotic.

Jen snapped an adorable picture of Thatcher sleeping in his car seat. She also got a candid shot of Dallin and me out on the grass... I was trying to build up Dallin's courage to go over and play with the girls but he just wanted to watch what they were doing from a safe distance :)

After the flag raising all of the kids had a bike parade. They had decorated their bikes with red, white and blue streamers, flags and what not. It was really cute. They just kept riding in a circle around the parking lot having the time of their lives!

Dallin and Thatcher

Jen dressed Dallin and Thatcher in matching outfits today just for fun. We got a cute little picture of them laying by each other in our bed. I think Thatcher is actually starting to look quite a lot like Dallin.