welcome to spiceland.

Trick-or-Treat! Well, Tru had her first halloween experience. She’ll always be able to remember this wonderfull night as a cold, itchy experience that makes everyone say “awww”.

We actually had lots of fun. Our neighbors invited us on a trick-or-treat hayride round the neighborhood. Using a tractor, the hayride took all the kids around, stoping every 5 houses or so. It was pretty cold.

Pictures are here.

Today started out very unfortunately. Our friend Matt let me borrow his RC cars to play with. While I was driving one around outside, the antenna kept getting stuck on the wheels. I decided to tie the slack off on the body of the car. I tied it right next to the motor. Well, this caused lots of noise on the antenna and made the car not respond well. Just as a car was driving down our street, it crept forward and would not repsond to come back in reverse. The RC car had a wreck with the real car and you can probably guess who made out better.

Next, we ventured off to Susies house for a grand pupkin carving extravaganza. I brought Matt’s other RC car and another man had an RC plane. There was also a air powered rocket.

The rocket in mid-air

Next, we started carving pumpkins. You can find lots of pictures of the event in our photo gallery. Here is the end result.

Everyone’s pumpkins (ours is on the far right)

When we got home, Erin thought it would be cool if it was lit using low power, cool to the touch LED’s instead of a dangerous candle. I pulled out the soldering iron and whipped out this bunch of LED’s connected to a wall plug. The end result was only 1/2 a Watt (12V, 45mA). At our current rate of $0.06 per KWattHour, that means that it only costs us $0.0008 per day to leave our pumpkin on! It would only cost us $0.28 if we left it on all year.

The LED’s

The pumpkin lit up with the LED’s

If you missed the link before, check out all the pics in our photo gallery.

We are thinking about getting an electric train for starting a Christmas tradition. We’d start with just the train. Each year, we’d go out and get a village and a street light or something. Here are some of the things available at Michael’s in case anyone else thinks it is neat and might want to do the same thing. In case you are, the train itself is at HobbyTownUSA for $89 and the little houses and such are at Michaels arts and crafts store.

We need the help of all you who have been parents longer than we have. All of a sudden about a month ago, she decided she didn’t like to sleep. She won’t take naps without a little coersion, and she won’t go to sleep by herself at night without a 20 minute car ride. She cries if we even walk into her room when the room is dark. She wails if put into her crib. We’ve tried lowering the crib, feeding her more, less, and different food, giving her gas drops, orajel, teething tablets, more clothing, less clothing, a blanket, and more. We haven’t tried putting the mattress on the floor or putting her in a toddler bed because we don’t have the house baby proofed yet. Its 10:23 pm right now, and Tru is still wide awake. Tonight we’re going to try leaving the closet light on in her room. Does anyone have any other suggestions? Her bedtime is now an hour past mine!

Ok guys, sorry for this one, but Erin accidentally deleted the email subscriptions file AGAIN so we just added everybody on our contact list back into it. Feel free to unsubscribe if you don’t care about us!

Well, for an upcoming project, Erin and I got some new equipment. I’m doing a quick test to see all of the pieces come together. Let me know what you think of the quality. I’m trying to get above the “home video” sound and look without having to get expensive equipment! Also, I haven’t paid for the software yet which is why there is a “Main Actor 5.5″ overlay on the video.

Sample Video Blog with higher quality audio and lights

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Michael

We have 2 new exciting videos to share! As always, use the java popup for a quick and easy way to watch the video but to download it or for high quality right click and do a “save as” on the divx link.

In the one of Tru clapping she uses her left hand the most. Does this mean she is left handed? She eats with her left hand also!

Tru crawling around and finding it histerical when she finds us

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Tru Clapping

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Also, there are new pictures in the 9 month folder.

My mom and Jessica are in town! Last night we had “movie night” per Mrs. Pinder’s suggestion. We took our projector outside to show Finding Nemo on a 12′ screen in our front yard. Lots of neighboors came over and everyone had a great time (I think).

Michael

I stumbled on a sad fact today. An acquaintence of mine from Georgia Tech died on September 17th from cancer at age 24. He was a regular attendee at the Georgia Tech Linux User Group that I was vice president of (for a short while). I remember him well as being very nice, smart, and very impressive. He wrote a book called Programming Games in Linux. His website is here and his blog about his fight with cancer is here.

A noteworthy quote from his blog is:

We’re all mortal. And yet a lot of us live like we’re immortal. Days come and go, and we assume they’ll keep on coming. There is no sense of urgency. We treat time like water; so cheap that we can pour it on the ground. Most of us have a vague sense that we’ll eventually die, but it’s not something we tend to think about often. We assume that we’re entitled to our 75 years, which invariably seems like it’s a long way off, so we forget about it and go back to our day to day routine.

– John R. Hall

He died of Melanoma. His blog urges everyone to go get any worrisome moles checked out. I am passing this on to you by recommending that all of you go get yours checked out! He said that his was about a centimeter and bled a little.

Michael

We updated our webpage design. We’re lazy so we did this in about an hour. What do you think?

Michael