My youngest daughter Jessalyn is 4 and has only been to a few birthday parties. Her take on a birthday party is one of the following or a combo of any of these:

Place:

• at a park
• while camping
• at the beach
• in the living room
• in someones back yard
• a restaurant

With some of these activities:

• see people you’ve never seen before and hide from everyone
• only close family and a few close friends
• eat food
• sing happy birthday
• eat cake
• eat pizza
• watch others take a wack at piñata
• watch a baby eat a special cake no one else wants to eat because he put his face all over it

My 32nd birthday is tomorrow and Jessalyn is VERY excited and I’m curious as to what she thinks my birthday will be and what combonation above she thinks will be occurring. I didn’t plan my birthday this year my wife did, my understanding is that she hasn’t told Jessalyn about it since she wasn’t quite sure what the activity would be. It was either going to be a trip to the mountains to see and play in the snow or a trip to Disney Ice to go ice skating. Jessalyn hasn’t done much of the former and has never done the latter. Due to the harsh weather that we have been having here in California it looks like we’ll be going to Disney Ice and have fun ice skating. Lately Jessalyn and I have been reading this book before bed called “Skating with Bears” by Andrew Breakspeare. It’s about a boy that isnt good at skating and sneaks out and night and puts his skates on and tries to learn. These mounds of snow near the rink turn into bears and they help him learn to skate. With us reading this book from time to time she’s been asking me about skating and if I’ve ever done it before. We talked about how I use to go skating yearly and how I also use to roller blade quite a bit. The connection of skating and roller blading didn’t quite work out in her head until one day I put them on and showed her. I’d imagine once we take her ice skating she’ll get the connection even more.

Ice skating and my birthday have quite a history. When I was a kid we would pile in as many friends as we could into the car and drive up to Blue Jay to go ice skating at the Ice Castle. We must have went to the Ice Castle at least 4 or 5 years in a row. In 2001 I wanted to go to the Ice Castle for my birthday and that year after a major storm the Ice Castle was severely damaged when the roof collapsed and they closed the place. A few years later we went ice skating at Disney Ice which looks like is now called The Rinks Anaheim Ice and we’ve been going there ever since. I wouldn’t mind making my birthday all about ice skating, everyone but Jen loves doing it. She typically sits on the side or in the bleachers and watches and takes pictures of us. Some day I’ll get her on the ice!

Jessalyn and Dad

My Daughter Jessalyn turns 4 today; she’s grown from this little tiny infant to an awesome 4 year old “big girl”.  It’s funny the nicknames you give your kids and how sometimes they contradict themselves. I call Jess by many names: “big girl”, “short stuff”, “sweetie”, “sweet pea” (she gave herself that one) and my fave “love bug”. Big girl and short stuff are all relative and it just shows how much she’s grown over the last few years.

We’ll be celebrating her birthday at Disneyland and she’s extremely excited to get to buy some stuff with the money that Disneyland is giving her due to us having Annual Passes. Your gift from them can be the value of a ticket or a few other things. She’s had her eye on this awesome Disneyland castle so we’re thinking she may end up with that.

Jessalyn, thanks for giving loving me the way that you do and letting me be the best Dad that I can be for you. It means a lot to me and I hope it means a lot to you.

Brandon and Corey

My brother Brandon is getting married tomorrow and today we’re trekking out to Hesperia where his soon to be bride lives to take part in the festivities. Today is their wedding rehearsal, my youngest Jessalyn is in the wedding as the flower girl and I hope we can practice dropping flowers enough that she does awesome in the wedding. After that is the rehearsal dinner and then we’re staying the night out there since it’s about 78 miles one way. Friday is the wedding day, from what I gathered from Corey is that March 6th is her parents wedding day so she wanted to have it on the same day as theirs. I hope the traffic out to Hesperia isn’t bad for everyone tomorrow since the way there is also the most popular route from LA to Las Vegas, this is also why were staying the night out there instead of fighting traffic to make it to the wedding in time.

The wedding day I’d imagine will be filled with excitement and will be a joyful occasion, I’m glad to see my brother settling down and I’m happy to see hes settling down with such a great girl.

http://www.coreyandbrandon.com

I will be streaming some of the back end stuff happening before and after the wedding so feel free to checkout my live page.

Last weekend I attended BarcampLA, this was their 6th event and it was quite good. It was held at the Mahalo office space in Santa Monica CA Oct 25th and 26th. I took my brother along since he’s never been to an event such as this. I could have taken him to some of the previous events I’ve gone to lately but most of them are about podcasting and he isn’t really into that (no matter how hard I press it on him!). Barcamp was a great experience in sharing all sorts of knowledge in an open forum format. Typically someone would plan out a speech or a slideshow or powerpoint and then there would be a time for open questions. Most of the time the person talking was knowledgeable in the topic at hand but I ran into a few instance where they were only running it to being the discussion. Either way is fine since I’ve learned that at these events there is always someone that know more than you do and in some cases LOVES to make that fact quite known (and sometimes annoyingly too).

Our schedule was as follows:

Saturday

• NIA – Play Pong with your brain
• Wordpress – Birds of a feather
• Amazon EC2
• Intro to Hardware Hacking

Sunday

• Swiss Army Knives and Multitools
• Using Photography to build your social network
• Widgets and sharing online
• Microsoft Surface
• Lucid Dreams

Saturday

We arrived around 2pm on Saturday, we left our house at 12:30-1:00 and hit a bit of traffic along the way. I tweeted that I’d be arriving at Mahalo at 2 and my friend and fellow OC Podcaster, PodcastJunky replied stating she was leaving at 2 and I could have her parking spot. Santa Monica is known for its crap parking and expensive parking garage rates so it was a good thing she was leaving when we were arriving. We later found out that quite a few cars were parking in adjacent company spots and they were being towed. When we walked up to Mahalo we were greeted by Jason Cosper who was one of the people running the event. I met Jason (known to his friend as boogah) at a local group he started a few months back, a LA Wordpress Users Group. For having the entire event on his and his partners shoulders he was quite chill about the whole thing. I asked how things were going then headed inside. We walked in and wrote our names on some name tags and headed to the events board.

We headed to the NIA – Play Pong with your brain group first. The room quite crowded and after a few small technical issues the presenter was about to demo how to play pong using only his brain. He had a headband with some electronics attached allowing for variations in his brainwaves to move the paddle up and down. He did a couple of great his and then during one volley missed it. It was a great demo of what could be done with so little. He also spoke about some research hes been doing with other forms of input, tounge, nose, eyes.. etc.

Our next stop was WordPress Birds of a Feather by Joe Crawford “artLung”

This was a great talk involving many aspects of wordpress. Upgrade frustrations, not being a crappy shared hosting customer using wordpress (wp-cache anyone?), and some great tips on various wordpress plugins. One thing that was not mentioned was podcasting, interesting.

They handed out free BarcampLA shirts

After that they had snack time and then we headed to the Amazon EC2 talk, the room was quite dark since the room being used was where they shoot the green screen video for Mahalo Daily. EC2 is a way of using Amazon’s servers as a private server of your own. You setup the connection to the server using different methods, we used ElasticFox, a firefox plugin that lets you setup and maintain these virtual servers remotely. After spending $0.10 on my credit card I had a fully functional Ubuntu Hardy install running on a virtual machine. I made sure to terminate the connection and the virtual server so I wouldn’t be changed a fee per hour of it running.

Next up we went to the Intro to hardware hacking with Eliot from Hackaday.com. This was one of the talks I really wanted to see and it was cool to see the guy behind one of my fave sites out there hackaday.com talk about all the cool stuff he deals with. The session started with Eliot bringing in this box that had a bunch of hacked hardware in it. In a very Carrot Top fashion he began pulling things hes hacked in the past from it. WRT routers, LED arrays, LED POVs, Dreammaker, etc. It was good fun to be had by all. He also explained some things about how to get into hardware hacking and the various types of breadboards and some examples of the stuff he uses to hack. I need to find one of those small FON routers and hack it.

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Sunday

Brandon and I arrived early on Sunday so we wouldn’t have a hard time finding parking. Once we arrived we checked out the board and got an idea of what we were interested in hearing about for the day.

Swiss Army Knives and Multitools What a cool and interactive presentation. It was mainly a show and tell of all the cool tools people carry with them, oddly even to events such as this.

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The 1st minute or so of this video appears to be upside down, it corrects its self.

Using Photography to build your social network. William Marc Salsberry did a great job showing how he has used his photography to draw attention to himself and his businesses. By doing so he showed us how we can take photography and making people look good to draw attention to our social networks. One of the things he empasised is making your subject looking good allows for a somewhat viral or word of mouth draw to you and your network. People like to talk when something good happens to them and Marc has learned that by taking great photos he’s not only developed a great relationship with the subject but also with their social network. I’ve recorded his session on video, most of it unfortunatly is the screen or the back of his head.

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Widgets and sharing online. Justin Thorpe from ClearSpring Technologies did a session talking about Widgets and how to use them to share info with others or to use for yourself. The sharing with others bit was interesting because there are many websites out there that provide a service that will take existing content and “widgetize” it. You take your RSS feed or other dynamic content and tell the webservice about it then they create a widget using this data. It can be video, audio, text etc. The idea of using widgets for yourself is interesting because you’d use these on a start page such as igoogle or yahoo. You can see your weather, bank balances, traffic info etc all from your private start page.

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Microsoft Surface. My brother and I were really looking forward to seeing this thing in action. It’s an tabletop based interface that allows you to manipulate “assets” on the screen. It uses a camera below the table to read where you fingers are and allows you to move and interact with items on the screen. We were pretty impressed with this Microsofts effort and we’re looking forward to seeing what the future holds.

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Lucid Dreams. It looks like the Tucker Brothers are both avid dreamers. After listening to this session on Lucid Dreaming and how you can control your dreams and interact with the “dream world” it dawned on us that we both have vivid dreams. I asked about taking in your sleep and no one had much to say regarding that.

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Closing

I think BarCampLA6 went off without a hitch, at least I didn’t notice anything. Things went quite well for the group that attended, twitter was in full effect at this unconference. @jasontucker if you want to send me a shout out.