Hi I am Dave

this is my post

It's a boy!

Jenni and I went to the doctor for her ultrasound and we found out that our little baby is a boy (I had been saying that I thought it was a girl, but Jenni got it right). We're both really excited and we went out and bought some clothes for the little guy, but you'll have to wait for Jenni to post about all of that (which I'm sure she'll do as soon as she gets a chance). But the doctor said that he's about 6 ounces and that everything looks great.

The top left photo is how we know he's a boy. You can tell because "the twig" is on the left and "the berries" are on the right. It's pretty tough to tell what's really going on in that picture, but we'll take the doctor's word for it. The top right photo is his foot. I'd guess the right foot, but that's just a complete guess and it probably doesn't matter. The bottom two photos are shot of him "smiling". The one on the left is just the original shot and the one on the right is one that I labeled to try and help people tell what they were actually looking at.

We were also lucky enough to be able to get a video of part of the ultrasound (I guess you could say that this is our very first home video of The Johansen Family) and fortunate enough that Lynn (Jenni's mom for those not in the know) let us use her DVD recorder to digitize the VHS tape. Unfortunately, there's no audio, so I went through and overcompensated by adding a cheesy newspaper theme to the video. Hopefully, it makes the video a little easier to watch and helps people understand what's going on, but you can check out the video on YouTube, on Google Video, or you can just watch it in the embedded player below.

If you're interested, you can also download the original version of the video that I uploaded to YouTube and Google Video here:

Original Version (26 MB)
Medium Version (14.5 MB)
Small Version (2.9 MB)

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

Or at least as much as it can here in Tucson. So there's no snow, or sleighs, or jingle bells, but people do put little chili pepper lights on cacti. But as I stated previously, I actually don't mind the lack of snow and cold.

But onto the real story. Today and yesterday, Jenni and I spent some time putting up Christmas lights on our house. We started out trying to use these little plastic clip things that we got at Target for a couple bucks, but I decided that it was worth taking the time to just use metal hooks like Jenni had originally suggested. It was a pretty big pain, but I think it will make this whole process a LOT easier next year (or at least I hope so).

Also, as you can see it was a "very cold" 60 degrees outside, so I had a jacket on.

I think I'm turing Tucsonese

My family came into town for Thanksgiving and we did the standard eating, watching movies, etc. But on Saturday it started to "cool off" here in Tucson, and Jenni and I were freezing. My family kept looking at us funny because the high was still like 65 degrees, but that was "really cold" to us. I guess that our blood has already started to thin out and we're just getting a little to accustomed to the warm Arizona winters.

24 in 1994

If you're ever used a dial-up modem and seen 24, then this should be pretty entertaining:

The Questions of the 21st century

I've always readily admitted to being a computer nerd and I thoroughly enjoy cataloging everything online (MySpace/Facebook, blogs, and especially pictures), so I've started to consider if we'll create an online "identity" for our kid. There's just something about being able to have pictures and info about your life readily available in an organized and easily viewable format that I really like. Despite the fact that I appreciate the shoe boxes of pictures that my parents kept of me, I just don't really see myself looking through them all that often. Jenni's still a little hesitant with the idea, but I'm just fascinated by the ease of communication and connectivity that the services like email and Facebook provide. But our kids are probably doomed to have at least a little computer nerd in them, so I imagine that things will eventually go that way whether we like it or not.

Score One for the Good Guys

Well, I guess that it's "officially official" now. Jenni and I went in to have our/her (I'm not sure what the right vernacular is) first ultrasound and it was a fun/exciting/scary experience. It was pretty crazy to finally see the little guy/girl and was really cool to be able to see the little heart beating (I've always been fascinated by the human body and such). But it was also a little overwhelming to think that one day in the not too distant future, Jenni and I will be responsible for this little person's survival and well being. We haven't even really started yet, but I've already started to get a TINY glimpse of how humbling/sobering/educational it must be to be a parent. Hopefully, Jenni and I won't screw the kid up too much and will really enjoy the experience along the way.

But enough of the "mushy" stuff, and onto the interesting parts of the picture. The black part of the image is the gestational sac and the little circle in the middle is the yolk sac (something that I didn't even realize existed in human pregnancies, but the doctor said that it will simply be absorbed by the woman's body or expelled during delivery so it serves no real purpose). The white blob above the yolk sac is the baby. The head is the larger area just above the yolk sac and the black dot is the beginning of the brain cavity (you could see the brain a LOT better in one of the other angles, but they didn't give us a photo of that). The rest of the body is sticking up and to the left, so you can see the one of the arm buds sticking up from the top in the middle of the body and you can see both of the leg buds out near the end. So it's kind of like the shape of a little teddy bear.

It's just over 1.4 cm long (just over a half of an inch) and the doctor said that everything looks great, so we're keeping our fingers crossed that everything will continue as expected.

The Anti-MacGyver Award

So some of you may remember that a little while ago I nominated myself for a MacGyver Award. Well, in the middle of all of the craziness of us moving in two weeks and Jenni's family moving to Tucson, my car decided to have a problem that would turn out to be a lot bigger pain than I thought it would be. I won't go into the details, but here's a picture of all of the crap I had to pull off the car to get access to a single wire. And the answer is "Yes, it was just as big of a pain is it looks".

But on a positive note, the NFL season started this week, so I'm excited and the fact that my fantasy football team is ripping it up this week doesn't hurt.

Update: I just noticed that there's a problem with my template when there's a long picture with minimal text to the side (it just overlaps the next post), but I'm too lazy to try and fix it right now, so I'm sorry but you'll just have to live with it for now.

The Last Question

"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov
It's definitely a sci-fi/geek story and it gets a little long in the middle, but it's got a really interesting idea to it and will definitely make you think a little.
I think that I still like the idea behind "I, Robot" better, but this was definitely a good one.

Happy Maddenoliday

So it was actually yesterday, but I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Maddenoliday. For those of you who aren't huge fans of the greatness that is the video game Madden (or lucky/unlucky enough to be married to someone who is), then let me explain. Maddenoliday is the day that the yearly installation of Madden is released, so it's an exciting day for video game playing goofballs everywhere and before I "became a real person" (which is a whole other story), I would have taken the day off and just enjoyed playing Madden all day.
But Jenni was nice enough to pick up a copy for me at Costco and I was able to get a few games in last night. It's definitely a much improved game over last years version (which basically sucked for all intents and purposes), and it's kind of frustrating to play right now because I haven't played in quite some time and have a lot of rust to knock off, but it's looking like it will be a really fun game and I can't wait for the Madden Challenge this year because I won't be playing as the Raiders this time (which got quite a few funny looks last year since they basically suck) and I'm hoping that I can bust the top 8.

My life's work

So hopefully by the time I die I'll have done something of worth that's cooler than this, but for right now this is all I have. That's right it's my thesis. It's finally available for the viewing public and you can download it here. It had to be held private for a year for copyright reasons, but I know that everyone has been "anxious" to read it and now you can. It's pretty long (just over 90 pages if you ignore the title pages, table of contents, etc) and pretty boring, but even though I want to rip the thing up every time I think about how it took over my life for so long, I still am proud of it and glad that I did it.

Like looking in a mirror

I saw this commercial and couldn't help but laugh, because this is the same type of stupid "arguments" that me and Jenni have.

A sad, sad day in the world of Dave

Since Jenni's out of town I had setup to "kill some aliens" (playing Halo 2 for those of you not familiar with the ways of alien killing) with my brothers this afternoon, but it turns out that my XBox 360 is busted. I called up the customer support and they said that the repair would be covered under warranty, but that it could take up to 4 to 6 weeks for me to get it back. Normally this wouldn't be that big of a deal, but Madden 08 comes out on August 14 and I've been looking forward to picking up a copy of it for months. I know, I know, I live a really crap and horrible life full of sadness and misery, but I guess I should just look on the bright side and be glad that I will have it back in time to play Halo 3 right when it comes out.
The one good thing that did come from this is that I finally got all of our pictures posted onto my Facebook and my Picasa Web Album.

New and Improved

So I finally got the new template all done. It seems that there's still a quirk with it (the first post goes all the way to the end of the sidebar), but hopefully I can fix that.
If you want, feel free to use this new layout. It's setup so that you can use the standard stuff to change all of the colors, and I'll see if I can post the XML file with the template somewhere for easy access.

Update: I fixed the problem. It turns out that the template that I based mine on was inserting some "clear divs" that caused problems with the way I did the fluid layout. So the problem should be fixed now.

Dr Love and The Disco Duck

So last night Jenni and I went to a play/musical thingy at The Gaslight Theatre. We were a little worried that it might be boring/lame, but oh boy were we wrong. We saw "Secret Agent Man -or- Gangster's Away" (don't ask me why it has two titles) and it was just what you'd expect (an over-the-top, cheesy play with lots of puns, one-liners, and crowd involvement). We enjoyed the play and were ready to go, but then we were told that there would be a "disco olio". We had no idea what an "olio" was, and Merrian-Webster's Dictionary defines is as "a miscellaneous mixture", but after seeing one last night, I think that it's best described as "a bunch of random, REALLY weird crap". We were treated to an old man in a sparely, red suit and big hat singing some weird song (Dr Love) and a grown man in a duck suit disco dancing with two woman in yellow dresses (The Disco Duck). It was definitely a night to remember and reminded me of all of the crazy adventures we had in Utah with the likes of Bryce, Christina, and Cody.

And people say there's nothing to do in Tucson.


Here's a picture of me and Jenni at the show. I promise that my eyes are actually open.

Semi-new Template

So I have started cutting my teeth on this whole "web programming" thing and I started by playing around with my template. The whole CSS thing is pretty slick and is a DRAMATIC improvement over the table layout stuff from back in the day. So far the changes that I've made have been minor, but I'm planning on revamping the whole thing and I'm gonna start by getting rid of the stupid fixed width thing.

My rant for the day
I know that a lot of people say that liquid or elastic layouts are "harder" to read, but I really don't see any logic behind that. I mean if it's a non-fixed layout and you don't like how wide the text is then just run at a lower resolution or resize your window. Because then people are free to view it however they feel is best, instead of what you thought was best. I mean isn't that freedom and flexibility the whole point behind CSS?

Nominated for a MacGyver Award

So back in the day when I worked at the BYU MAGICC Lab I would occasionally "go flying" with the rest of the crew. There would always be a problem with something and we would give out a "MacGyver Award" to whoever could pull off some engineering magic to save the day.
Sadly, I was always on the lower end of mechanical skils (I was the code monkey that usually just sat back and watched), so I never got one, but today I was able to pull some mini-magic when I fixed the handle on Emily Blais's car door with a screw driver and some Making Memories wire (talk about fixing something with random crap). I don't know think it's worthy of a full-on "MacGyver Award", but I think it deserves at least an honorable mention.

Happy Birthday to me!

So my birthday was on Sunday and Jenni made a Jeopardy game that we played with Mark, Cami, and the Burns family (sadly I didn't win). We went a little non-traditional and had pie instead of cake and everybody had a good time. Here's a couple pictures of me trying to blow out the trick candles (it didn't work, but boy did the make a lot of smoke) and I think that Carter liked the pie and ice cream almost as much as I did.

My Ridiculously Loud Voice

I've been told by several people during my life that I have a loud voice and that I do a fairly poor job of controlling the volume level, but it looks like that may not be all that bad.

Plus, I usually kick butt at the game Blurt since I can yell louder than most people.

Giant Alien Robots

Some of you may not know this, but I'm a HUGE Transformers fan (I own the original movie and some of the seasons on DVD). I have been anticipating and fearing the upcoming movie, because it would either destroy everything good that I remembered about my childhood or be amazingly awesome. I'm relieved to be able to say that I loved it! I realize that as a Transformers fanatic I'm probably a little biased, but it was a GREAT movie. I wish that there had been a little more focus on the Transformers and developing their characters, but it was an entertaining movie from start to finish. In summary, it was a lot better than I expected and almost just as good as I had hoped for.

A good laugh every now and then

Today I stumbled on a webcomic that I am now an officially devoted fan of. It's called xkcd and while it will never win any contests, it's usually worth a good chuckle or two. Be warned that it's geared more towards the "geeky whit" type of humor, and some of the comics are odd or maybe even a bit "inappropriate", but here's one that I thought all of the bloggers out there would really appreciate (click on it to see the whole thing).

Be sure to check your tires

On Saturday, Mark and I were working on our cars and Mark noticed that my back tire was low on air and told me that I needed to get that fixed. So this morning I went with the quick fix and put a can of fix-a-flat in it before starting my drive to work. When I got on the freeway, it started making a funny noise and I pulled over at a gas station to check it out. I started putting air in it and noticed that there was a pretty big crack in the tire. As I was debating if I should just take the tire off and drive with the spare to work, the tire exploded. Luckily, it blew out the backside of the tire and all that happened was that I got a little dirt in my eye and a headache/neckache from the noise and pressure, but it definitely wasn't the best way to start off my week.
So the morale of this story is that everyone should make sure to check their tires on a regular basis and if you're tires look bad, then get them changed right away, because you might not end up as lucky as I was.

Comments, Comments, Everywhere

Comments are the true life blood of blogging, so here's a little tip to make the comments on your blog a little more accessible to the visitors.

1) Go to the Layout of your blog
2) Click the "Add a Page Element" link
3) Click the "Add to Blog" button under the Feed part of the window that popped up
4) Add "http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default" as the Feed URL (where YOURBLOG is replaced with the name of your blog and you don't need the quotes)
5) Then change the title to something like "Recent Comments"
6) Then you can select the number of comments to show (sadly it will only show 5, but I'll see if I can figure out how to up that number)
7) If you want it to show when the comment was made, then check the "Item dates" box
8) If you want it to show who made the comment, then check the "Item sources/authors" box
9) Click the "Save Changes" button
10) Finally, move the new page element to where you want it on the page

Now, people can see the most recent comments that have been made on your blog (even if it was on a really old post that isn't on the main page anymore), and it should make your blog all the more inviting and fun to visit.

Helpful Stuff

So this post just has some little tips of things that you can do to make your blogging life a little easier.

Profile Picture
Here's the "official" instructions of how to add a profile picture:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42093
Basically, you just post a picture of yourself, then you get the link, and add it to your profile. You can then delete the post (but not the picture), if you don't want it to show up on your blog.

RSS Reader
RSS feeds are awesome. They're basically ways for you to get updates from sites automatically, so then you don't have to keep checking them to see what's new. I use it to get my daily fix of information/news, but it also works great for bloggers. Then you can just go to a single place and see a list of all of the new posts and comments on all of the blogs that you're interested in. It really is a HUGE time saver and makes you a much more efficient blogger/surfer.

So how does this all work?
First you need to choose an RSS Reader. I recommend using Google Reader (the one that I use), but you're free to use the one built into your browser or any of the MANY available RSS readers.
Once you have a reader chosen, then you need to import all of the feeds. I'm actually working on creating a little webpage that will create a file that you can import that will have all of the feeds for the blogs that you link to on your blog, so you can wait until I get that finished, or if you're really anxious to get started and want to set it up by hand, then here's the steps for Firefox (on a side note, if you don't use Firefox, then I suggest that you do):

Firefox 2.0 (If you have Firefox 1.5 or older, then I suggest that you upgrade to 2.0)
1) Select "Options..." from the Tools menu
2) Go to the Feeds tab
3) Choose the "Subscribe to feed using" selection
4) Then select the reader that you want to use from the list
5) Now, go to the blog that you want to import the feed of
6) Click on little orange icon in the address bar
7) If it's a blogspot blog and you want to get a feed for the comments too, then replace the word "posts" in the URL with "comments", put that in the address bar, and hit enter.
Here's an example from Jenni's blog: The URL for the feed of her blog is http://jennijohansen.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default so the URL for the feed of her comments is http://jennijohansen.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default.

For those of you that use that use Internet Explorer (hopefully IE 7), then here's Microsoft's wonderful set of info about it:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/tour/rss/

Sorry, Mac users I don't have that much experience with them so I can't be of any help, but Macs are so user friendly and intuitive that you shouldn't need any help (I kid, I kid).

Google Reader
For those of you that decide to use Google Reader as your RSS Reader, then I would recommend that you have it sort everything by oldest first (it's retarded and sorts by newest first for some REALLY stupid reason that I will never understand). You can do this by clicking on the "Folder Settings" button in the upper right and then choosing "Sort by oldest". You have to do this for every single feed (once again something that is unbelievably stupid) or you can just always click on the All Items thing and do it there.
You can also add "tags" to each of the feeds. The tags let you sort the feeds into a folder type structure and then you can look at groups of feeds using the tags. Not necessary, but it helps keep things organized.

35 face balls in 32 seconds

Videos like this are why God created the internet (I kid, I kid). But seriously, this video is a classic, and if you have a digg account, then go digg it so that the whole world can enjoy the joy of watching people get hit in the face with a ball.
(And for those that don't know what digg is. digg is a social bookmarking site that let's you "digg" website, videos, etc, and let's you see what the "word on the internet" is.)

The Joys of Traveling

I spent basically the whole week in Dallas, TX at a conference and after spending 10 hours a day in meetings and presentations I was ready to come home. It just reminded me of how much energy it takes out of you to go on business trips and stay in hotels. That probably sounds dumb to those that have never done it before, but it really is a draining experience.
But the best part of the week was when I was checking my work email on Friday morning and I got a notice that Raytheon decided to go forward with patenting one of the projects that I've been working on and trade secreting another one. The patent one is a method to create a super resolution version of a video stream and all I can say about the trade secret one is that it's a method to find the right point on a missile in challenging situations. It was just cool to finally see something really cool come of all the time I've spent in a classified lab. But that's probably enough of me patting myself on my back.

Action Shot of Our Dirt

I was down in Rancho Sahuarita to help Mark and Cami move into their new house, so I stopped by our dirt to check out what had been done in the last week or so. I ended up seeing the construction workers laying the cement for the foundation. You can check out the action shots by clicking on the image below to see the Picasa Web Album.

2007-05-11 - Action Shot of Our Dirt

So it turns out that Jenni really does look like Reese Witherspoon

So I stumbled along this website that let you compare a picture to a bunch of pictures of celebrities and tells you the ones that you look the most like. Here's mine:

So I actually messed with the results. It selected Helen Hunt as the number #1 at 74%, but I just wasn't a big fan of the whole it picking a woman as the person that I looked the most like, so I removed her. From looking at the pictures, it looks like nose is the biggest determining factor, because all of the people had noses that looked a lot like mine (even the 2 women that it selected of the 8). But who knows.

And here's the one of Jenni. As everyone might have suspected, it selected Reese Witherspoon as the #1. So I guess that it is finally a scientific fact (proven by some random program on the internet) that Jenni looks like Reese Witherspoon.

A Change of Plans

So I decided to break it into 2 separate blogs. This one is for personal stuff and the other one is for me to talk about "work" (code, ideas I'm playing with, projects I'm working on, etc). I just figured that it was better to keep them separated.
You'll also notice the corresponding name change to symbolize the grand re-opening of my blog.

It Has Begun!

So I finally decided that I would create a blog. I know, I know. It's mega-lame, but hear me out for a second. I'm not all diluted and imagine that millions of people care about my incessant ramblings and daily activities, but I do really enjoy programming and I've always admired the open source community. So I've decided to use this blog as a vehicle for me to post all of the code that I've worked on for school and other projects and to post updates about projects that I'm working on.
But if you did come here to hear about the amazingly great person that I am and all of the wonderfully cool things that I do, then don't get too discouraged, because I'm sure that I'll be adding posts on here when me and my beautiful wife, Jenni, do something cool together and post pictures. So don't worry, all is not lost.
You can also find out more about me at my website.