Wow, are we pleased!

What great blogs. Jared, yellow belt, way to go! Also, we love your creative rocket. No wonder you got an award! We can hardly believe that Crystal is 12! The pictures of all of the activities, as well as Crystal and Darrell's fun birthday picture are great!

We have to say that your write-up on Ibahn and your feelings for Doug stole our hearts!
We couldn't be happier for you and feel that you deserve the fun challenges ahead in your new job!

Way to go!!!!!

Jared is a yellow belt level 1 in Aikido!

After 9 long weeks of Aikido lessons, Jared passed off and earned his yellow-belt tonight, as well as a medal for perfect attendance. I was very proud of him!

WAY TO GO JARED!

A new journey is about to begin

I have been working for iBAHN for nearly 7.5 years. For more than 6 1/2 years, I have had the privilege of working with Doug. I had left STSN (the original name of iBAHN) after working here for about 6 months, and I went to work at Alcatel where Doug was doing a great job. After three months, however, I was unable to figure out what they wanted or develop anything, and so I worked out a deal with Jan Dehoop at STSN to hire both me and Doug.

We started out working on the old IRMs, but as things progressed over the next several months, we were given problem after problem to solve, and began to do things such as:

• Support 3rd-party devices
• Reduce cost of installs
• Develop our own switch
• Invent the HEP-300 gateway - a very revolutionary idea that took our in-room solution, handled the network traffic for a entire hotel, spoofed all access to the hardware so that the property controls didn't have to change, used port VLANs in a new, unforeseen manner, to provide security.
• Ported the entire HEP from VxWorks to Linux in less than three months, solving numerous technical difficulties along the way

And it has been a great ride. We had so much fun as we worked, coming up with unique product names like Redwood, and project Sequoia, as well as unique project names such as the Solitary Saturn Project (to make a stand-alone HEP not requiring controls). Our coding style would make one laugh to see it...like when we started using SOAP protocols, we named all of our SOAP variables after animals, like soapyGrizzly, or soapyMonkey. Then, of course, we had to make up funny error messages, like "The soapy Emu ate my Timeu", or "The soapyGrizzly was so dangerous looking, that the controls didn't send any ManagedDevices!". And let's not forget some of the crazy variable names like superDuperLoopyCounter, or
NeedToWriteConfigDataToFlashButItHasNotBeenLongEnoughYet. Talk about fun!

And then there were our old checkin comments to CVS - which, thankfully, are now gone with the repository, though there are still some very funny ones out there. Sometimes we would write complete stories or jokes, or short little things like "made a change", or "Doug said I had to do this". We also came up with the DB^2 moniker - basically meaning that Doug and I were better than 2 people exponentially - because we were so good at working together. It turned out that each of us do extremely well on our own also.

A few years ago, Doug moved to Avon, Indiana, and began to work on the Controls side of things, the Java world. I continued to develop HEP firmware and update Linux Kernels, work on network drivers, etc. Doug proved himself to be more than capable of becoming an expert on yet another technology, and has recently been given a huge promotion to software engineering manager. In that position, he takes on the management of the entire team of developers in India, as well as manages all of the software tasks and assignments. I am very proud of him.

Now, on my birthday this coming Monday, I am staring a new job at Blue Coat Systems. It is a little scary, because they are asking me to invent a whole new product line, essentially, and head up the development and design team. I am confident, however, that the Lord will help me and watch over me. I will help out a little here and there for iBAHN as a contractor, but my new focus will be Blue Coat and their requirements.

And now, as I say goodbye to a wonderful chapter in my life, I must say that I love you, Doug, and I pray for you to continue successful in your career and in life. I await the day you return to live close to our family here in Utah, but I am always with you anyway.

Crystal is 12 years old!

Crystal turned 12 today. She had her favorite dinner (lasagna + garlic bread), plus cake and ice cream. She decided that for her birthday, she wanted to go on a shopping spree with Mom on Saturday. Yeah!

She also has tried out for a solo at school - though she was a little nervous.

Space Derby and fun

Jared raced his rocket, "The Yellow Star", at the pack meeting tonight. He came in 5th overall out of about 16 rockets. Silly me, I hadn't read that you are supposed to put rubber lubricant on the rubber bands!

Anyway, Jared won the "Clark Comet Colossal Color Award". I think part of that was that Jared's yellow rocket also glows in the dark.

It was a fun pack meeting, though it took a couple of hours to finish, due to an arrow of light ceremony and a bunch of other awards also given out.

There is a first time for everything

Like this blog post - I really have nothing important to say. I have wanted to create a family blog for some time, and this is the first time I have done it. I am open to suggestions for topics of discussions, or anything else you may want to talk about.