Dad (Brett)
All around rockstar geek. Brett enjoys his job as a Clinical Data Manager (helping research medical breakthroughs at Celgene); in his time off he enjoys reading books, watching movies, and learning new tricks on his camera and in Photoshop. He absolutely adores his wife and 2 daughters.
Mom (Erin)
Complete supermom. Erin loves her job as a Youth Field Researcher (aka 'mother'); in her plentiful spare time (ha!) she enjoys sleeping, re-reading Twilight or Harry Potter, and cuddling with Brett.
Aeriana ('Wacko', 'Princess')
Hybrid Angel/Devil. Aeriana loves her mommy and daddy, each of whom she loves to test at times and pretend innocence at others. A veritable sponge, Aeriana wants to do anything she sees an adult doing; she loves babies and especially adores her little sister, taking great care of her every need.
Zoe Jean ('Stinker', 'Cutie')
Growing fast, Zoe wants to be just like her big sister. Very goal oriented, she'll find a way to get that toy she's been looking at. She loves her pacifier and can't help but snuggle up to her blanket. Zoe is as relaxed as they come, she just loves chillin' out and watching TV.
General Conference is this weekend and I'm really, really excited. Not only will this weekend be a spiritual feast, but things have been kicked off in a spectacular fashion.
The October Ensign (available electronically in text and audio as of today) is focused entirely on temples.
Also something I saw on the lds.org site today was a link to a new documentary, apparently posted on BYU.tv yesterday. The documentary is called 'That Promised Day' and covers the incredible work that was performed in the 70s to reformat the standard works; adding chapter headings, cross references, and everything else that someone like me, born after this was all complete, takes for granted.
I haven't watched the documentary yet (I'm at work), though the trailer alone is really interesting. It seems that it will be aired immediately after the Sunday morning session of conference, but thankfully the full documentary is also available to watch whenever you want on BYU.tv. Enjoy.
Light Writing is awesome, way more fun than trying to complete bizarre analogies in random blog post titles... so I'll get straight to the point. I saw this video this morning and had to share, this is absolutely incredible and must have taken a lot of time and energy for this group to put this together. Erin and I use the iPad for some cool stuff, but never anything as cool as this.
P.S. Yes, I know we need to post about our two girls (Zoe's first birthday is next week!), and we're working on it, but I couldn't hold back this incredible video.
I've forayed into video tutorials in response to a special request. Check it out on my Back In Focus blog, and then let me know what you think and if you'd like to see more.
I'm particular. Really particular. I don't think it goes so far as OCD, but I like things to be organized and consistent. I've spent way too much time organizing our movie library (html code from scratch), our online book library (Librarything.com), our music library, and of course our image library (Flickr). Then of course there are our book shelves which have to be organized... because Harry Potter needs his own shelf, all the leatherbounds must be lined up tallest to shortest, and it would be downright blasphemous to mix the mass-market paperbacks with the hardcovers... um, really I swear it's not OCD (but if you put Stephenie Meyer next to Isaac Asimov I just might flip).
Anyway, when we first got our Mac Mini, I played around with iLife 08 but wasn't too impressed... my own personal system worked better for me. But when iLife 09 came out about a month ago, I knew things were going to change. The main reasons we upgraded were iMovie and iPhoto.
iMovie has been great, allowing quick and easy movies... I used it to make the announcement video in the previous post. I've used many different tools to make video clips/shorts before and iMovie 09 is definitely one of the simplest while turning out great quality (though it is limited and can't match the $300+ PC software I'm used to... also the prior version, iMovie 08, was a completely different story and a complete waste of time).
Even better than iMovie, iPhoto has been my favorite part of iLife. I used it to quickly and easily make this slide show for Aeriana's cousin's birthday.
It has the Places feature which allows me to map the location of where I took photos, and then plots them for me (also searchable based on location, etc.).
Then there's the Faces feature which auto-identifies people with some pretty impressive accuracy.
Finally there is the Flickr feature, which let's iPhoto sync with our Flickr account and vice versa. And here is where my 'particularness' comes in... you see, the Flickr feature is limited to only new uploads directly from iPhoto. With thousands of images already on Flickr unable to take advantage of the new organization/tagging features, what is a nearly-OCD guy to do? Well, delete the thousands of online pictures and re-upload all 8+ gigabytes of photos, of course. And so it's been almost non-stop (Erin would probably try to make me delete that 'almost') over the past couple of weeks that I've been sorting, organizing, naming, placing, tagging, deleting, and uploading pictures.
Finally, as of tonight, I'm done. Sort of. There's still some minor updates I'll be doing, but at this point everything is synced so I can go into iPhoto whenever I get a chance, make a change, and then see that change reflected on Flickr soon after. And one of the main benefits is that from now on, adding new pictures we take will be extremely easy; I've figured out the shortcuts and tricks and will be able to manage all future albums in much less time.
To me, the 'particular' one, all this up-front work is really worth while... now with literally three clicks of the mouse I can see every single picture of Aeriana we have. Or every picture of my parents. Or my sister Dacia's family. Add a couple more clicks and I can make a slide show of pictures of Erin and Aeriana together. Hey that's not a bad idea... maybe it will soften up Erin and get me out of the dog-house for being practically non-existent while working on my latest project.
Wow, that was easy. I love iLife!
**Update** It's Saturday morning now and Erin read the post and saw the slide show... everything backfired. I asked if I got bonus points for the slide show, she said "No, I know how easy it was." That was definitely an unintended consequence. So then I asked if the fact that our pictures were now so well organized gave me bonus points. Her response "Nope... pizza would!" Ah pregnancy cravings...
A look at Aeriana's first year (technically first 13 months). When you get to the "Insanity" poster, look carefully at what Aeriana is holding in her hand...
'Pony tails' sounds cute enough... But 'pig tails'? That doesn't sounds cute at all. Anyway, here is Aeriana's new hair-do ('new' in the sense that she finally has enough to do something with).
And here's what Aeriana looks like after the pig tails come out...
We've also discovered that Aeriana may have a future as a beautician.
Sorry for the jagged picture quality, I'm trying to work out technical details to correct it. Also, don't forget that you can push the 'play' button to see this and many of our past videos with an option for full-screen viewing glory.
It's Feb. 20th and we got enough feedback to know that the new blog design just wasn't working... so we're back to the old version, for who knows how long. I guess with my next attempt I'll keep it to a more standard format.
**End Update**
I'm sure many of you know someone who has "music A.D.D."; you're driving down the road and they listen to 30 seconds of a song and then change it, never settling in to listen to an entire song. Well, I apparently have blog-design-A.D.D. and have been itching to redesign our blog for a while. Attempt number one resulted in what Erin correctly called a "complete failure." What you see now is attempt number two.
I personally love the new design... but I designed it. Erin's not completely convinced yet, but it seems like she's starting to come around. Anyway, I'm curious to hear what all of you have to say... do you like the new look or the old look better? I've backed up my old files, so I can reset to the old layout in about ten seconds if the response to the new design is overwhelmingly negative.
As for the new design, there is now a lot less scrolling and a lot more buttons. The buttons hopefully won't be too confusing, but just in case here's the breakdown.
- Out of order, but most important is the "stop" button... most of the buttons trigger a pop-up and the stop button closes them all. - The "power" button will take you to blogger.com, if you have an account this means it'll take you to your dashboard. - The "rewind" button will display our monthly archives and ten most frequent posts. Hit the stop button to close. - The "play" button will display our uploaded videos from Vimeo, these can be browsed chronologically (based on when we uploaded the video), there is also an option for full-screen viewing. Again, stop will close this. - The "fast-forward" button takes you to the LDS website. Erin looked at me quizzically, wondering how that made sense... I told her the church is all about progressing and moving forward. I'm a dork, this should not be news to anyone.
- The "home" button will reset the page. Using this will reset everything and close open pop-ups, but may take a tiny bit longer than the stop button. - The "B" button (Blogger icon) will display a list of blogs we follow. If your blog is not on this list, let me know. Use stop to close. - The "globe" button will display a list of websites we love. Stop closes this (see the repeating pattern?) - The "camera" button will start a slideshow of a subset (as defined by me, this may change) of our photos on Flickr. Once the slideshow has started, you can zoom into full-screen mode, browse through the included photos, or you can click the Flickr logo to see our Flickr site. Stop closes the slideshow, or the open Flickr page. - The "book" button will display our never-too-long list of books. Again, use stop to close the LibraryThing page.
Please leave your feedback, since I designed the page it all makes perfect sense to me... if it doesn't for you, or if anything isn't working how it's supposed to, please let me know.
Aeriana is an adventurous girl and shows no fear, except when it comes to walking. But if her daddy is tossing her up, or even across the room to a friend, she's one happy girl.
Aeriana loved all of our Christmas decorations, of course her favorite was the tree with its tiny lights and blue/silver ornaments. It was a constant battle keeping her away from the ornaments. At one point we thought "hey, let's put some boxes and chairs in the way so she can't get to the tree!" Next time we'll have to remember to not use empty boxes that she can just push out of the way...
Also, we've been working with Aeriana for several months now, trying to teach her some sign language. Her first signed word was "milk", which is still the word she signs most readily. She's also signed on occassion "more", "daddy", and "all done", and she's quite proficient in telling us when she's happy about something by clapping (generally her way of saying "yes! you figured out what I want!") and by raising her arms high in the air as if to say "hooray!" or "look at me, I did something cute!"
We just celebrated Aeriana's first birthday and realized that we've got a bunch of great video of her first year that we haven't shared. Over the next couple of weeks we're going to try to post several of them. To start is this great clip... Aeriana has always loved peek-a-boo (the first part), but as she's gotten older she's learned to love music more and more. All the time we'll find her playing music on her toys and swaying or dancing to the beat; the second part of this clip is one of the few times we were able to catch it on video. It's not the greatest, sometimes she'll be getting her boogy on way more than this, but it's a good example of her getting lost in the music... it's towards the end, but worth the wait.
We've been having a lot of fun with Aeriana lately. She crawls all over the place now, loves to walk with our help (or the help of whatever she can use to pull herself up and shift around), and we're discovering new joys practically every day.
This past weekend we discovered that when we spin Aeriana around, she gets dizzy and her eyes go crazy... enjoy. (Sorry for the poor video quality).
Guitar Hero III is, in my humble opinion, the greatest game ever made. I was addicted almost as soon as I touched my first wii-guitar. At the time, Erin was violently pregnant, and though she tried the game, her belly proved too large an obstacle to overcome in order to actually correctly hold the guitar, and so it was impossible for her to enjoy the game.
Luckily in the past couple of weeks Erin has picked up the guitar and has since become addicted herself, though she still hasn't played nearly as much as I have. Last night we recorded each of us playing, and thought some of you might enjoy seeing the videos (granted, I figure the vast majority of you simply won't care, if you haven't played you might not understand the awesomeness that is Guitar Hero).
Here is the video where Erin plays The Metal on Easy, she got 5 stars, and considering she'd only played the song a few times before, it's obvious she's quite the natural.
Then, here is a video of me playing The Metal on Expert... I can only get about half-way through the song before the complicated note sequences get me booted off stage, but it's a fun first-half. (FYI - the first 60 seconds of this are Erin figuring out the video camera and me feeling awkward on camera... so feel free to skip that part).
Finally, here is a video of me playing Knights of Cydonia on Hard. This song is super intense and my arm gets tired half-way through, but luckily I'm able to finish the song. This one is pretty long so you might not want to try to watch the full 6+ minutes.
The passing of our prophet and president of the church has weighed on my mind this week, as I'm sure it has countless others. What sorrow to think that we will no more have the privilege of listening to his council at General Conference, but how happy to think that his pain and discomfort is over, and that he is finally reunited with his wife that he missed so much.
My friend Sariah posted some tribute videos that I enjoyed. Here are my two favorite, if you'd like to see the other two she posted check out her blog under the "Sariah and Ryan" link to the right.
In June our family went on a trip to Cancun, Mexico. At the time I was put in charge of making a video from all the pictures... of course I wouldn't be me if there was no procrastination involved. So finally after all this time I present our family trip.
If Only...
Dad (Brett)
Mom (Erin)
Aeriana ('Wacko', 'Princess')
Zoe Jean ('Stinker', 'Cutie')
Back In Focus Update
iLife 09
New Blog Layout