Kevin Minnis

Wow, almost a month since the last update! Last week I was in Florida for almost a week to attend the Informatica World 2007 conference. I learned a lot and had a good time hanging out with Broox and Kevi. Broox was down there for and RFID conference so the timing was perfect. The weather was perfect too. It would have been fun if Kim would have gone with too, but that will have to wait till the next trip.

Back at the home ranch…the kids are doing pretty well. Josie is working on getting some teeth now so Sunday night was a tiring night as she didn’t want to sleep much. It amazes me how growing teeth can be so painful. Josie’s also crawling all over the place including going up any and all stairs she can find. Of course she can’t come back down yet, so we have to run up and get her.

Jayden has been keeping his end of the deal up being an almost 3 year old; the almost daily melt down and his big brother attitude. He is as curious as ever and loves to “do things on his own”. In his words, “I will do it!”.

Kim was very busy taking care of the kids last week, as well as, organizing a garage sale (Jayden’s pile and Josie’s Pile). It went over pretty well and we got rid of quite a bit of stuff. It amazes me how much stuff one accumulates having kids.

It’s good to be back in the groove now, but the Florida trip was fun. See more pictures in the Informatica Set

Well, here I am again. The good thing with wordpress is that you get to change whatever you want to make your site look different. You’ll also notice another change to the gallery link. It now pulls my flickr pictures and creates the albums from my site. It makes use of a pretty cool wordpress plug-in called falbum and the nifty flickr api. The reasons I’m using the plug-in are two fold. One, to see how search results change. I like flickr, but search results don’t always show the true meaning of the picture in google. The next reason is because Pioneer’s filtering software blocks all of flickr so I wanted a work around.

I’ve also been doing a kind of social experiment at work. We use a multitude of chat clients and such and decided to try and live without the main one used by our “little” group, namely, IRC. I decided to do it in part because sometimes the conversations get a little heated. Communication in a chat program is entirely different than that of person-to-person. You don’t really get the true feeling of a conversation (missing body language and the vibe that you get from talking with someone in person). It’s understandable why parents are worried about their kids being bullied from online sources. So, without the IRC client going, it’s been rather quiet. It’s hard to believe how much a person can get tied to modern technology (although IRC has been around for quite a while). Yeah, I could just go 5 steps and talk to the rest of my co-workers, but seems like social experiences are different these days. People don’t talk one-on-one like they used to, or at least it seems that way. Without IRC, I can be working and not even talk to my co-workers all day. I may have to go back and join the IRC chat. I feel alienated from the rest of the gang.

Anyway, enjoy the new look and hopefully you won’t find too many things broken.

Haha, catchy title huh? Last week after shopping at our Ankeny Wal-mart we were driving up the parking lot to leave and I saw some green stuff on the road so I pulled up by it and had Kim get it. Sure enough it was a dollar. Wow, we thought this is cool Kim will be able to get a dewski. Well, we continued up the lane and we couldn’t believe it. We found another 4 dollars. haha. It was probably a funny thing to see us running around the parking lot picking up money. But, hey, I’m sure you’d do the same if you had the opportunity. Saturday night we went to Wal-mart again to get some food for when Kim’s brother came to town. While there Kim was pushing the shopping cart and on a “blind” intersection (most intersections are blind corners in Wal-mart) this man in his 60s comes powering down the aisle. Kim stopped to see if anyone was coming and he almost ran into her. He proceeded to stare Kim down and if he could shoot flames from his eyes she would have been toast. We were all saying something to the extent of “What’s your problem” to the guy. Needless to say we made it out alive. I really do hate shopping at Wal-mart. I always feel pissed off whenever I go there. I told Kim they should take your heart rate before and after visiting. I’m sure mine would indicate a heart attach coming on. Stupid cheap.

With this small fortune that we found at Wal-mart, we went to some garage sales with Kim’s parents this weekend. I managed to find a computer for a dollar. It’s not much of a computer but I thought I’d play around with it. Jayden was all excited he got to ride in Grandma’s Avalanche. We’d ask him if he wanted to ride in the car, but he’d shake his head and say in his little voice, “No.”

Baby number two is making Kim’s life miserable. It seems that it’s already started to drop some as Kim was feeling less then great over the weekend. Hopefully it stays in the oven at least another 2-4 weeks so it’s not born too early.

Oh yeah, and I still have a job and haven’t been “re-assigned”. Hopefully it’ll continue that way. We’ll all find out more after another meeting this morning.

Okay, so it’s been a month since you’ve last heard from me. Yeah, it’s been pretty busy. A lot of time has been spent chasing after Jayden. I’m not complaining though as it’s so nice to have him mobile now. He likes to help out with about anything if you let him. We put together his dresser that we got at IKEA a while back and he was right in there trying to help out. We (thanks Grandma Wagner for your help) repainted the “guest” room, which is now his, and moved his new twin bed into it. He had no problem transitioning into his twin bed and so far (knock on wood) hasn’t even fallen out of it. The first week that we moved him in he was busy trying to take all the stuffed animals from his old room to his new one.

Works been going good. I’ve been good and busy, but it’s been hard to concentrate and do the whole “work smarter, not harder” because of some events that might be happening next week. I had a whole bit written about it, but decided to not include it in fear of getting in trouble for it. So, you’ll have to wait till after next week to see what might or might not have happened.

I thought I’d take some time to rant on about some things that suck. Some are work and some are personal related items.

This time of the year provides a lot of “admin” time at work to do all sorts of surveys and “training” at work before the end of the year.

1. Jayden getting croup - He’s getting better, but he still has a little problem breathing at night. He’s not as bad as he could have been though. The Doc said that he’s actually 2 weeks behind the peek Ankeny experienced 2 weeks ago.
2. Getting sick - because of a combination of changing of the weather and losing sleep while helping Jayden breath at night I have a slight cold.
3. Paper work - this includes, but is not limited to: flexbile spending account submital forms, performance plans, rebates (give me the price of the item from the start), timesheets.
4. When people ignore things or don’t read the signs - For example, today I went to get my usual glass of water from the refreshment center but no cups were to be found. So, I went over to a different refreshment center and brought some back. Two people during that time had told me that it was like that yesterday too. Hmm. On the wall there was contact information to re-supply missing items. I emailed them and bam…we have cups.
5. Occasional Driver Training - I’ve been driving for 17 years (actually more when you consider driving around the farm) and haven’t been in an accident yet…is it really necessary to take “Driver’s Ed” each year just to drive for work?
6. Ethical Awareness and Decision Making training - Actually, I’m glad I had to take this one. Case in point, Martha Stewart. I don’t want to be sent to prison for being unethical. Perhaps Bill Knapp and his buddy Dennis Elwell should be put through the same process as Martha. (Des Moines Register article)
7. The price of iPods - I really wish I could afford one.
8. Minimal Tinker Time - There needs to be 26 hours in a day so that I can tinker with new computer related technologies.

Well, that’s it. I could have made the top 10 list, but I can’t think of anything more to rant about and I think I feel pretty good now. haha.