We miss being single...

So, much to Mary's and my dismay, we had a rude awakening today. We thought we were forever leaving the awkward environment of the BYU singles ward. Not so. Today we attended our new BYU married ward for the first time. And we've both come to the same conclusion.

BYU married wards are just as strange as the singles ward.

No kidding. Literally, half the ward is pregnant, and other half have newborns. And, according the Mary, the Relief Society lesson was all about babies. "Multiply and Replenish" was the theme of the lesson today. Mary's wondering if we could get our old Bishop to let us back into his ward. At least that strangeness we're used to.

One of the oddities is that I sort of expected or imagined a married ward to have a lot more spiritual maturity. Again, not so. The people in our singles ward are just as 'spiritually mature' if not more than the members of our new ward. They just don't have spouses. Or babies.

So, in short, we miss being single. Or at least our singles ward. But sex is frickin' awesome. :)

One more day...

Tomorrow I will leave the realm of single-hood forever, hopefully :)

It's been quite a crazy adventure thus far. Mary and I have been super busy with all the planning and such. We've basically done all the planning ourselves, with some great help from Mindy. Mary has lamented at times about being frustrated with my lack of opinion when it comes to various wedding details. All I can say is, "Honey, I'm a guy. We don't care about this stuff. In fact, you'd be worried if I did care." So I've offered help where I can, but Mary has done most of the work. We have barely had anytime to really enjoy being engaged. We have often commented on how we can't wait till the wedding is over and things will quiet down again.

So... one more day. Sometimes we think we should have eloped. We hear that's much less stressful. But we're sure we'll have a great time tomorrow. Until then, lots of things still to do.

*sigh*

One more day...

She said Yes!

That's right folks. Somehow I have managed to convince Mary to marry me. After much begging and pleading and downright groveling, she finally agreed to let me marry her :)

So Mary and I have been talking about marriage for a few weeks now. And it's probably a good thing. I'm not an impulsive person and the idea of getting married has always been in the hypothetical future. "Someday I would like to be married..." But when in a serious relationship, the possibility of that hypothetical future becoming a reality scares me. So it's taken some time for me to warm up to the idea.

But once I made the decision, I knew I had made the right choice. I wanted the evening to be really special. Mary and I had plans with Mary's sister, Mindy, to organize wedding stuff. (Funny that we're doing stuff like that without having actually proposed and accepted.) So I got Mindy to occupy Mary until about 6:30 or so, when they would come back to Mary's apartment to plan. When Mary got home, her apartment was clean and there was a rose and a card waiting for her. The card said some romantic things and let her know I would pick her up for dinner 7:45.

When I went over there, Mindy was just leaving. Mary had asked Mindy to stay and help her get ready. Mindy left and Mary looked amazing. I told her I had something for her. I pulled out a small wrapped box. She thought it was the ring. It was actually a pair of pearl earrings. She put them on and we went out to dinner at her favorite restaurant, Tucanos.

Dinner was excellent. We played our little game of favorites. Basically, one of us asks the other one about a favorite. Then that person answers the question, and the asker also has to answer. And it just goes back and forth. We did that all through dinner. It's probably a sign that we know a lot about each other when it's hard to think of favorites that we don't already know. Before leaving I "had to go to the bathroom" and I called Andy.

After dinner, I took her to the Provo Temple. We walked a bit in the gardens and sat down on a bench and talked some more. It was a very pleasant evening. There was a slight breeze and the stars were out.

Meanwhile, my phone call to Andy was his cue execute his mission, which was to go over to Mary's and put down a bunch of rose petals, light some candles, and turn on the music. So he, Shawn, and Mom went to do that and to put the ring box on top of the entertainment center.

After some more favorites talk with Mary, Andy called me back and asked me a random question, which was my cue that they were done. So I told Mary I was getting the chills (yeah ... right), and went back to the car and we drove home. Mary was still very happy, but I could tell she was trying to figure out what was going on. As I opened up the door, her eyes lit up.

The candles were glowing, one of our favorite songs was playing, and there were rose petals everywhere. Mary was smiling from ear to ear. We danced and kissed for a while (our first dance actually) and I said some more romantic things to her. Then I reached up on top of the entertainment center to grab the box. I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me.

And she said yes.

We danced and kissed some more. Then she called her dad to tell him to good news (he already knew).

That's pretty much it. She absolutely loved the whole evening. She's been bragging about it all morning to everyone. So our wedding date is probably going to be on the weekend of October 17th. That's the best we can to do with family member's schedules. So it will be a hectic 7 weeks but it will be worth it.

Jib Jab video "Time for Some Campaignin' "

I know this came out a few weeks ago, but I think it's really funny and creative! Enjoy

Time for Some Campaignin' | Funny Jokes at JibJab

Where the Hell is Matt?

I've been aware of this guy Matt and his world travel videos. I particularly liked this one he just recently released. It made me smile.


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Please don't be a lemming...

Tis the season for the U.S. Presidential elections! And we all know what that means. Tons of erroneous and fabricated emails passed mindlessly through the tubes.

Please don't forward them to other people, especially to me. Those emails are always crap; blatant fabricated lies or half-truths about one candidate or the other. I don't want to hear about Barack Obama being a closet terrorist or that John McCain ate the head off a baby kitten. I really don't want to hear it. Cause it's just not true.

If you believe crap in these emails, you're probably the ones that also believe the cousin of the deposed king of Nigeria needs your help. If you want to know the truth about a candidate, believing email threads is hardly the way to go.

Instead, put forth some effort and spend time learning about each candidate and what their views are by watching the debates, reading their websites, etc.

But please don't forward propagandistic emails. You're just perpetuating the problem.

My baseball cards are starting to pay off.

Back in elementary school, I collected a lot of baseball cards with my brothers. One of the coolest (ie most expensive cards) I got was a 1989 Fleer Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. It was worth about $10 as I recall. So I bought a nice case for it, and stored it away.

So I was being bored today and I ran across an article about Ken Griffey Jr and how he's approaching his 600th home run. That got me to thinking about that rookie card of his. I looked it up online and one site has the card listed for $49.95! Sweet!

As kids, we loved collecting baseball, basketball, and football cards. But mostly just baseball cards. I have no idea how much money we sank into those cards, either. It seemed like that's all I bought for a while. There was a sweet sports card store right in Alpine. "The card shop" as we called it, although I doubt that was the real name. We'd ride down there on our bikes or rollerblades and buy a few packs of cards and a soda.

The card shop owner was cool too. He'd shoot the breeze with us, give us deals on candy or cards. We'd trade for specific cards, or just plain sell them. We'd check out the latest Becketts (monthly price magazine for sports cards) and see if our cards had gone up in value. We knew most of our valuable cards numbers by heart, so looking them up in the Beckett was easy.

Ah... good times. Many hours were spent hanging out at the card shop.

Mom really didn't have anything against it either. She was just glad we were outside, instead of playing video games or watching TV.

We have boxes of cards somewhere, probably in a dark closet at my parents house. I wonder what they are all are worth.

Kiting... again

So we went out the next day. This time, Marc brought his 5 meter kite and we got to give it a whirl.


Here's Marc, showing us how it's done.



And then there's me. And yes, Andrew is holding on to my harness. The wind was super strong that day, and we were nervous about being thrown around by the kite.

All in all, a fun day. Marc has a kite buggy as well. I think we should try that out sometime this summer.

Let's go fly a kite!

Seriously, let's go fly a kite.

That's what I did this afternoon. My coworker, Marc, told me he and some people went kite flying today during lunch, and I mocked him. Something about how I haven't done that in about 24 years, being something I gave up when I graduated from kindergarten. Anyway, I was wrong.

The kites Marc has are some serious kites! There more like mini parachutes, really. The kite in these pictures is a 4 meter kite, meaning there are four square meters of surface area. Marc started me on the 1 meter kite. The "trainer", he called it. After playing with that one for a few minutes, he let me try the 3 meter kite. That pulled a lot harder, of course, than the 1 meter kite.


In these pictures you can see that this 4 meter kite has four main strings, and the handles are actually strapped on to me! The straps are for safety, believe it or not. If the handles were to slip out of my hands, the straps would pull the strings in such a way that the kite literally collapses and falls gently to the ground.

The handles allow me to control the kite, and I can make the kite turn to the left or right. I'm told this is method of control is very similar to the way parachuters control their chutes.


You can see from this pic that I was doing everything I could to stay in one place. This kite had some serious pull to it. It's hard to stay in one place wearing flip flops. I think next time I should wear cleats. Even then I'm sure I'll get pulled around some. Like I said, this kite is only a 4 meter kite. Marc said his 5 and 10 meter kites have harnesses that you put on, like a climbing harness! I'm thinking I may want to strap that harness to a car or something.


You can view all the pics that we took on my PicasaWeb album.

Scuba diving at the Crater

So Mary and I just completed our first scuba diving class. We took the class through Scuba Ted's, a local shop in Springville. The class was great. It was four Friday nights worth of class room instruction and pool time at the local pool. Scuba Ted's had all the gear for us to borrow during the class, including the BCDs, tanks, regulators, fins, and masks. We really liked the staff there, too.

We did our open water certification at the Crater, a geothermal pool up in the mountains above Provo. The Crater is about 60 ft deep and maintains a temperature of about 90 degrees. When we went, the water was 92 degrees. We went down 20 feet or so and did some exercises like flooding and clearing our masks or establishing perfect buoyancy. We did four dives on two different trips to the Crater. The owner Ted and our instructor Greg were both really nice and made the class a lot of fun.

Here are some of the pictures that we took at the pool and up at the Crater.

Scuba

A Totaly Money Makeover

So I was introduced to a book called Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. I'm usually not a fan of self help books, but his book really hit the spot. I recommend it to anyone. For the $17 cost, it's entirely worth it. His book is all about the down-to-earth wisdom of getting out of debt, and how to stay out of debt.

His book doesn't contain any secrets. Nor does it contain any special financial products or services. It's just plain reason. He explains the fallacies and myths that a lot of people believe in. And he explains the simple plan of getting and staying out of debt.

In all my 28 years, I have never kept a budget. Never. I never thought I really needed one. But this week I will create my very first budget and I will keep it. I have come to the realization that I need to take control of my spending and focus my money on staying free from financial bondage. One thing that I really like about this book is that the ideals taught in the book are the same ideals taught by the Church. So after having read his book, I look forward to taking control of my financial future.

My parents are giddy.

So I met this great girl a week before Christmas a few months ago. Her name is Mary. She's from Texas, and is going to school up here in Utah. She works at Novell in the corporate sales department. She works in another building, so thankfully the faux pas of dating someone you work with really doesn't apply here :)


As I mentioned, Mary is great! She's very athletic and adventurous. She loves kayaking, camping, hiking, and just plain being out doors. She has a ton of gear, so she can hit the mountains at the drop of a hat. She has recently picked up skiing, and I'm taking her snowboarding next week. (Hopefully I can convert her)

Anyway, I brought her up to meet my parents and they adore her. On more than one occasion my mother told me "She's a keeper". Both of my older brothers also voiced their approval (not that I need it, but it's nice to have anyway). Andy and Shawn are super excited to have Mary and me join them on some road trips and vacations.

In three weeks I'm taking the plunge and flying to Houston to meet her family. I've heard a bunch about her family and she talks to them on the phone almost daily. Mary tells me that they're going to love me. I sure hope so. It would make for a really awkward weekend if they didn't! (and Texans all have guns... and her dad is an ex-cop, so.... yeah). I'm looking forward to the trip and hope I don't make a fool of myself. :)

Anyway, my parents are just really excited to see me dating such a great girl. We'll see what happens!

Brighton discount tickets

Being from Utah, I grew up going skiing and snowboarding at Brighton. It has always been my favorite place to go. I especially like their night-skiing. It allows me still go snowboarding, but without having to take the day off of work. And it's always less crowded than day skiing.

So Brighton always offers discounts for their night skiing passes. I called them up just now and asked them where to get the discounts. So here goes:


Mondays: Download and print the coupon from Warriors Against Tobacco and get 1/2 off (ie $15).

Wednesdays: Get your 2 for 1 tickets from Arctic Circle. One combo meal will get you the discount ticket.

Fridays: X96 night. Show your X 96 Freeloader card and get 2 for 1.

You can also get $10 off by purchasing two Peanut Roll candy bars.

no habla Espanol

So I was able to take a trip to Madrid, Spain for a conference, the annual Mono Summit. We flew out a few days early and were able to take a trip to Toledo. During the evenings, we were also able to see some of the sites.

On Sunday, we took a train about 30 minutes south to Toledo. This city is so cool. The architecture is phenomenal. I loved seeing the old buildings and cobble stone roads. Being from Utah, the oldest thing we have is from the 1850's.

I posted some of the pictures on Picasa Web

The food is Spain was really good. We had good variety of food. Chocolate dipped churros, typical European breakfasts, kebabs for lunch, and some great tapas.

Madrid has a great subway system, so all we had to do was buy a 7 day pass and we were good to go. The subway made seeing the city a lot easier. We even took long lunches, hopped on the metro, and checked out some cool building or the famous Prado Museum of Art. I wish we had more time there, but I can't complain. It was free.

Digitial cameras and openSuse 10.3

I just recently bought my first digital camera. I took advantage of the Black Friday sales a few weeks ago and bought a Nikon Coolpix S51. It's a small point-and-shoot camera, but it worked out really well for me in Madrid. Maybe later I'll buy a big fancy SLR, but this will do just fine for right now.

I was really excited to use F-Spot to manage my pictures. F-Spot is shipped by default with openSuse 10.3. When I plugged my camera in to the USB port, F-Spot popped up immediately and asked if I wanted to import the photos. Once the import was done, browsing the photos in F-Spot is really simple (and quick).

I also used F-Spot's export feature to post my pics on Picasa. I used Picasa's web uploader to post my first nine pictures, before I remembered that F-Spot can do it for you, and their interface is so tedious. You have to browse for each picture by file name (oof) and you can only upload 5 at a time. F-Spot's export allows you to pick as many images as you want, and because you can see all the thumbnails, selecting which ones to upload is super easy.

Videos are another story. I only took one video while in Madrid, and that was more just playing around with my new toy. But now how do I get this video off the camera? (F-Spot actually does this for you, but I didn't know it. I had to ping F-Spot contributor Stephane Delcroix for help) From Google, I learned that USB cameras behave in one of two ways. One is that the camera gets mounted to the file system and you can manually pull files that way. The other is the camera can only be accessed via USB commands (not sure of the proper terminology here).

I determined that the camera had not been mounted, so in searching I came across gphoto2, a library and command line tool that talks to USB cameras. (I also learned later that F-Spot actually uses gphoto2 to do all its work.)

:~> gphoto --auto-detect

This will show you all the digital cameras currently connected to the computer.

:~> gphoto -l 

This command will list all of the directories in your camera's file system

:~> gphoto2 -n
Number of files in folder '/': 0

This command will list all the files in any directory on your camera. Combine this with the -f switch and info from -l switch to get some useful information.

:~> gphoto2 -f '/store_00010001/DCIM/100NIKON' -n

If you want to get straight to the meat, you can just run --list-files.

linux-dlfm:~ # gphoto2 --list-files
There is no file in folder '/'.
There is no file in folder '/store_00010001'.
There is no file in folder '/store_00010001/DCIM'.
There are 200 files in folder '/store_00010001/DCIM/100NIKON'.
...
#61    DSCN0062.JPG    1653  KB 3264x2448 image/jpeg
#62    DSCN0063.AVI    15664  KB video/x-msvideo
#63    DSCN0064.JPG    1648 KB 3264x2448 image/jpeg

There's a lot more output than this, but this shows you that the video that I want is /store_00010001/DCIM/100NIKON/DSCN0063.AVI Now to pull that video from the camera, use -p.

:~> gphoto2 -f "/store_00010001/DCIM/100NIKON/" -p "DSCN0063.AVI"

So that works. But as I said earlier, F-Spot had already pulled that video for me when I imported all the pictures from the camera. :) It's listed in the import window, where you select all the images that you want to import. It's just not listed in F-Spot's main browsing window, or anywhere else for that matter. But it's on the file system.

:~> find ~/Photos | grep -i avi
/home/rhowell/Photos/2007/11/25/dscn0063.avi

And there it is.

Mono Summit 2007

As a member of the Mono team, I went to Madrid, Spain for the annual Mono Summit. There we meet with all the other Mono team members from around the world. Because our team works primarily via IRC and email, it was really great to put faces to the names.

The Summit took place on Nov 26th thru Nov 30th. The first two days were meetings with just the Mono team members and partners. We had a number of impromptu meetings about the various sub-projects that we have, including MonoDevelop, Moonlight, and yes, the long awaited Mono debugger. The last three days were open to the public. We were fortunate to have presentations from Mono team members as well as from partners. We had demos from the Second Life guru Jim Purbrick, one from Unity, a 3d game development tool.

Very cool stuff. I posted some pics from the summit on Picasa

Once a year seems to be enough

So I guess posting on my supposed blog once a year is enough. :) I just haven't really gotten into the whole blogging thing. I thought I would but not yet. Since last year, I have been hired on at Novell, and am part of the Mono team. I am working in QA for the Mono implementation of Silverlight called Moonlight.

This year's Mono Summit will be held in Madrid, Spain from November 28th - 30th. I'm excited to meet the Mono members that I only know from IRC.

Hiking Santaquin Peak

Andy and I recently bought new camping backpacks and I bought a new sleeping bag and pad. We also bought Trigger a new dog pack. So we tried out all our new gear last weekend on Santaquin Peak. It was a great hike and a great view.

A new iPod

So I just bough a new 60 GB Video iPod on Saturday. I must say it's pretty sweet. I've imported a lot of my music already and I'm quite pleased with it, despite the $400 price tag.

I learned also that you can put other things on it as well, like contacts from your address book. You can even use your iPod as a massive USB external drive. Pretty cool. I found a Mozilla Thunderbird plugin that will export your Thunderbird adddress book to the iPod. It's still in beta, but it worked ok for me.

I haven't tried out the video features yet, but I have high hopes for them.