I am sooooo trained now.

I just spent the whole day in a training on how to use the global "Product Lifecycle Tool."

A software tool that we use to do thrilling and exciting things like add and change dates of when products will be visible on the corporate price list, when they will be obsolete and when they will eventually have support removed.

Ahhh, 8 hours well spent on things like maintaining records, setting up profiles...

I generally spend all my time in new tool testing trying to break it by coming up with bizarre cases and examples. I figure if the tool is robust enough to withstand me trying to utterly destroy it on purpose, then it should be fine for the normal day to day use. I think I was annoying the trainers by the end of the day. I hate when I go to these things and the whole day is spent sitting quietly in a room while no one but the trainers say anything. I have to make my own fun to keep from going nuts. I also think that I am helping to further the understanding of the tools by my theory of "how can we smash it?"

Here is the dynamic and exciting presentation that I sneakily took a photo of with my phone.

Finished Reading Harry Potter.

So I just finished reading this on Saturday evening. I know it is a kids book and there is all kinds of hype about it... but I thought I may as well read it right away to lessen the chance that someone would spoil it for me by giving away the end or something.

My spoiler-free opinion of the book? It was OK, better than the last couple, but still not as good as #4 which I think was about the best of the lot. I don't think that J.K. Rowling is really breaking any ground with her story telling style or the actual details of the HP plot, but it was a fun enough read.

I had a lot of predictions about what was going to happen based on the last book and I think I was mostly wrong. I had the right idea about the direction in the vaguest of ways, but the details were certainly different to anything I would have predicted.

The biggest problem I have with the HP books in general is pacing and this one suffers from it again. The characters always seem to drag their feet and take a long time doing the things I am not so interested in, and then when the story gets to a point where I want some juicy details, it blows by in a page or two. This happened yet again with this book and I found that the beginning (chapter 3 onwards,) took a little too long to get going... then the end was over pretty quick. The epliogue in particular was a let down, I really would have liked to see some more detail there.

All in all it was a decent end to a series that I have mostly enjoyed. I don't know if I would ever bother with another book by J.K. Rowling that was not a Harry Potter one, but if she wrote something else taking place in the same universe, I would probably give it a try.

Never Turn Your Back on a Two Year Old

I was left home alone with Liam recently and I foolishly left him in the living room while I went to get something from upstairs. It was less than five minutes but he managed to get into this mess.

A word of advice to anyone with a little kid. When the noise stops, you know there is trouble. Silence is the main indicator that they have found something very interesting that requires full concentration. It is almost always something bad.





To his credit, this is very very good pudding. I was a little annoyed he ate the last one. It was mine.

My Devious Plan

So in order to avoid watching horrible mind killing children's television, I have been showing Liam shows that I also enjoy watching. The idea is that I will expose him to fun shows that I also like to watch. So we sit with Spongebob and the Muppet Show fairly often.

It seems to be working as he will now ask for Muppets without my coaxing and he will sit nice on the couch for a little while while they are on. He seems to like Kermit best. The down side of this is that Liam will be learning that all the big stars of our time are the same as they were in 1974 or so. Claudia walked into the room the other day and asked what the heck we were watching and I had to say "Joel Gray dancing on the Muppets of course." He was a big star.... or something in the early 1970s. Come on JOEL GREY! went on to be in the fine film "Remo Williams"

Here are two little videos of the cute way he asks for "Mutt-ettts" I like in the first one how he is pleading with me "Bittttte!"

Shocking developments at work

So I just heard officially today that they(my company) are moving the Large Format printing business management to Barcelona Spain from San Diego and Boeblingen. This was talked about for quite a while and has now been implemented. Two of my colleagues now report directly to the Spanish boss.

This has some implications for me that are not yet clear, I do the forecasting and analysis for the LF guys, but I report to the consumer ink people in Germany. So, this means:

1) They move all the LF duties to a Barcelona person, decreasing my workload and making me happy.
2) They leave the work with me, all the people I need to do stuff go to Spain and I end up having to trek over there every few months for endless meetings.

Given how well these things are thought out... I would place bets on option #2, which would not be ideal for me. Not that I have anything against Barcelona, it is a pretty nice place to go. I just do not relish the idea of all of the people making decisions and plans sitting a few thousand KM away. When everyone in the team but one is sitting in the same location, the odd man out tends to miss quite a lot of the information and loses touch with the business.

Oh, I would also have to go to even more teleconferences, which is a prospect to which no sane person would look forward.

Horror Weekend

Ugh, Liam the horror boy just gave us a nasty weekend. The little beast is so horrible when it comes to sleeping that it is really wearing us out. We gave him a really really fun weekend, lots of playing, a party with his play group and then a neighbourhood BBQ with lots of other kids.

He had a super good time all day and was a very good boy as long as the sun was shining.

Then after dark, the terror began. First I had to wrestle him into his PJs amongst the screams of "HOSE HOSE HOSE" as he wanted his pants back on. Then he got to sit on my lap and watch Bob the Builder to calm down as is normal.

Then it was off to bed, where the screaming began. scream scream scream scream. Then Papa goes in and calms him down... I leave... scream scream scream scream. Mama goes in and calms him down.... scream scream scream scream. Papa goes in and sits with him for a little while. scream scream scream scream. Parents get mad and shut the door and turn up the TV volume. scream scream scream scream. It is around 11pm now and we yell at the little beast to shut his noise hole. scream scream scream. Finally he gores to sleep.

here are some pictures of him not screaming.



Oh one more thing, I just played a fun online game to check if your reaction time is good enough to hit a 90mph baseball. I am proud to say that my reaction time is consistantly between 0.14 and 0.22 seconds. Give it a try and see if you have quicker hands than me.

LINK HERE

The nice Family

I took a photo of us standing in front of the house. This is that photo...

Since I rarely appear in any pictures myself, it is nice to see my smiling face upon the internet.

Photo Quality of the iPAQ 514 ??

So the wonderphone has a built in 1.3 megapixel camera... nothing too exciting these days, but it is not bad for a business focused phone.

Here are some photos I took with it.


Oh, and just to keep the focus not ENTIRELY on my new phone, I took a photo of Liam sleeping in his land of bears. I suppose it is cosy when you have bears all around you. He will not even consider going to bed without all six bears in there. I have cropped the photo, so you cannot see that the rest of the bed contains three trucks.

It is getting to the point where he is going to need a bed with an addition and/or its own parking.

More on the wonder phone - HP iPAQ 514 voice messenger

So I have of course been getting the most from the wonder phone over the past few days and I think I have learned most of the main functions of it. Of course, being a smart phone, I can load on new applications whenever I like so the functionality can of course be extended greatly.

Here is the home screen, lookin' good.
The first thing I did was see how hard it was to link up to my home network over the WiFi. Easy-peasy. I just click on the connections from the main screen and I get this menu, allowing me to turn on and off the various radios in the device. WiFi, Bluetooth, and phone. The phone found my home network and prompted me for the WEP security code. Once the code was accepted and connected, this is saved as a profile and will connect automatically in future.

By using the local wireless connection, I can do things like use the internet on the phone without using up any of my costly cell phone minutes. I am on a prepaid plan with O2, so I don't really want to need to buy a bunch of minutes because I am playing around. Mobile internet is neat, but not that practical yet. I have just tried google and checked the weather. I need to figure out what mobile sites are actually useful. I just learned that you can shop Amazon over the mobile web, so I may give that a try sometime.
Next I tried dialing. A neat thing is that even the dialing is "smarter" than on a normal phone. If I key in 263, the phone displays a list of all the contacts in my book containing 263 in the phone number or in the name (letters on the keys.) In this case of course 263 is AND and gets all the Andersons to come up. I scrolled down and clicked on myself and you can see that it pulled up my contact with all numbers to choose from and of course my handsome face looking out.


The phone synchronizes with my outlook, including all email inbox and calendar appointments. I like this a lot since I have a lot of crap in my calendar that I don't want to have to look in my laptop to remember. It carries over all of the alarms and reminders as well so I won't forget any of that important stuff.


Finally, I tried playing video on the phone. I imported a television show and then saw what the results were like. Better than I expected, although I think I still need to play around with the video encoding settings to make sure everything is optimal as far as audio and video goes.The next things I will be checking out will be the music playback and voice command functions on the phone. Sorry to anyone reading who is not interested in my new phone, but that is the thing that is keeping me busy the last few days, so you will need to bear with me until it is out of my system.

The wonderphone is here at last

So all my waiting is finally over, my cool new smartphone has arrived. I have been waiting by the mailbox for three weeks now, hopping from foot to foot in anticipation...

So I photographed the whole glorious event. First, the big box had to be opened, notice that some quick little fingers darted in at the last second to try and get in on the action.Then I revealed the inner HP box in all its glory. A nice small package:Kudos to our packaging department for putting the "quick start" info on the flaps of the box with very complete diagrams. I used that to get up and running in about 5 minutes and did not have to fiddle around with manuals and inserts.


Here is the handset in all it's unpacked glory... It is exactly the same height and width as my old Siemens C65, but significantly thinner.
I plugged it in and it took about 2.5 hours until the battery was fully charged. This was on the fast side of the 2-4 hours the box advised. Then I plugged it in to my laptop and let it synchronize. Worked like a charm and all of my contacts, email, calendar info was copied to the phone.

Here is a shot of the phone turned on, look at the pretty colours.
Well, enough gushing on the phone.... for now. I will be putting up some exciting shots of the phone in action as I try out the various features.

On day one of the smartphone, I am soooooo satisfied with it. Yay for HP.

Playing with Bobby

This past weekend, Liam wanted to play some game with Bobby the bear. It was amusing for me, since I like watching him do sort of strange things...

First he strolled into his room and grabbed Bobby:



Then he took Bobby over and sat him at the little table:

Then he proceeded to try and get Bobby to try and do his farm puzzle with him.

When Bobby did not seem to be making any progress, Liam decided to let him try the farm puzzle on the other side of the table instead.

Bobby also could not seem to get the hang of this one. In the end they decided to throw all the puzzles on the floor, clap their hands and then dance around stomping feet. This was a pretty nice resolution to the problem.

The Music Fan

On the weekend, Liam saw me wearing my headphones and listening to music and he really wanted to get in the game himself. He had no clue that there would be any sound coming through these things, he just saw them as an interesting hat.

He did seem to like the music once it was on his head. Once he learned there was more to this than an amusing hat, he wanted to keep them on and hear the songs. Judging by his reactions, it seems Liam would give the following musical reviews:

Kirsty MacColl - Good, got smiles
The Lightning Seeds - A look of confusion
Guillemots - Happiness returns, smiling boy
Baby Bird - More smiles

Then the music became less interesting and he wanted to see Bob the Builder.

Photos from Liam's b-day

I realize that I never posted any of the photos from the chaos of Liam's birthday. Just imagine about 8 little kids running amok in a small room. Two year old kids don't really play with each other, they just play near each other. Play is also a word that can be regularly substituted with destroy. They all started out in the living room/dining room area, which has enough space, but at one point the horde decided to squeeze into Liam's room.
Liam used this opportunity to show off his bear-hurling skills to his friends. He is pretty good and throwing most things. I am trying to put an end to this exciting new sport.
All that hub bub tires out some of the kids, but it is hard to take a quick nap when all your friends are running around, screaming, throwing bears and jumping on your face. Not much rest was enjoyed at this moment.

Summer Weather

Well, as is typical for the nice summer in Germany, it is raining almost constantly. One of the only benefits of the weather is that we often get some quite nice rainbows. Here is a nice one as seen from the office window out the back of our house.

Click on the image to enlarge a bit.
Out the front of the house was the other side of the rainbow, which was appearing to touch the ground just next to the castle/beergarden up on the hill. If I had not been so lazy, I think I could have popped outside and taken a nice photo of the full arc of the rainbow. Sadly, lazyness won yet again.

HP Company Picnic

This past Saturday was the HP company picnic, the one event where families are invited. It was held, as usual in the gorgeous venue of our parking lot. Seriously.

Anyway, there was lots of food there, including french fries:Then there were some fun attractions for kids to enjoy. For the tiny people, there was a little train to ride. Liam loved this and rode about 4 times in a row. We had to pull him kicking and screaming from the train. He would have happliy left the family and begun a new life on that train if we had let him.


For the bigger kids, there were other distractions, like a life sized foosball table:


There was also a bouncy castle with fun characters that resembled a certain mouse and duck. Although they were cleverly different enough to make sure no copy writes were infringed upon.
There was also another football game where kids had to kick a goal past the ever moving robotic wonder goalkeeper:

All in all it was an OK day. Not that I am calling HP cheap, but to compare, my brother in law who works for a car company, gets an entire amusement part rented for the whole day. I have to say that roller coasters and proper rides are slightly better than the robotic wonder-goalie.

I just think that for the only family event of the year, the least that they could of done is set it up in a nice field or park somewhere instead of our parking lot...