Ninety years without slumbering, Tick, tock, tick, tock…

January 16, 2010 9:37 pm

We got a clock!

Ok, ok. I realize that statement is probably not very exciting without explanation. Mom had asked me if there was anything in particular we’d like as a graduation/wedding/Christmas present. We thought about it and we need things like nightstands and a dresser and such, but felt like it’d be nice to have something less utilitarian—something classy, traditional, nice, and would be with us for awhile. We thought it’d be nice to have a key-wound chiming wall clock. Growing up we had a chiming clock in the living room which was nice. So I mentioned this to Mom and on Christmas morning one of our presents was a list of clock options (so we could pick one in particular that we liked).

Later in the day we sat down and went over the list several times slowly whittling it down. We eventually made our selection and Mom put the order in. Then we eagerly awaited its delivery.

It was shipped in a box within a box:
IMGP0023It was made in Germany. Apparently the Germans are the only ones who still make nice fully mechanical clocks like this.
IMGP0024Here it is in the box. The first language on the instruction manual was German, not something you see everyday.
IMGP0025And here it is on the wall:
IMGP0032We like it. I appreciate the level of skill it must require to build a clock like this. I think if I lived before the era of computers I might have become a clock maker, putting together the gears and stuff is like programming but with metal! Though, there is the problem that if I lived during a time without affordable eyeglass solutions I would’ve had an issue.

Here’s a video of the clock chiming:

(In case you were wondering the title of the post is from “My Grandfather’s Clock“)

New Year’s

January 13, 2010 6:44 pm

Megan and Chad came to California after Christmas. With three Dickersons within a hundred miles of each other we reached critical mass and a bowling trip was induced.

Megan and Chad drove down from Sacramento to our apartment on the 31st. Jess, however, had a migraine that day which wasn’t responding to medication so she got to stay home and be miserable. Megan, Chad, and I drove down to Sunnyvale to meet Mike and Tina. We pulled up while Mike was out walking the dog! We found it quite comical, I tried to take a picture, but discovered that the batteries I had brought were dead.

We went to lunch at Country Gourmet, which was kind of like eating American food at a restaurant in another country—mostly what you’d expect, but not quite. The food was fine though.

Then we headed over to Google so Megan and Chad could get the tour. It was at this point that we started using my phone to take pictures. We discovered why Google is so powerful—it’s because they have these:

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Mike showed us what he spends his time doing. This involves complicated tasks like walking up the building supports:

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and getting Nerf darts to stick to the ventilation ducts:

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Apparently it is these highly developed skills that cause Google to pay him the big bucks.

Megan and Chad needed their picture with the Android statue and his pastries:

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At this point we headed off to bowling in hipster central, Cupertino (home of Apple Computers). They’re so hip, in fact, that their malls don’t even need stores, just hallways to walk through and be seen by other hipsters. We walked through a good 100 yards or more of indoor mall hallway without a single store or commercial presence. The bowling alley itself turned out to be more of a club which happened to have a bowling alley in it. While there were families there with kids, I would have bet it looked different 6 hours later as New Year’s parties were gearing up.

There wasn’t enough light to get any worthwhile pictures at the bowling alley, but if I remember correctly, I won with a score of 153. Wii Bowling has really been paying off, apparently.

Christmas Vacation Part 1

December 23, 2009 8:40 pm

Jess says it’s my turn to blog, so we’ll see what we can do here.

We got to the airport about 2 hours before our flight. Which was good, because we were apparently going to need most of that time. We went to the American Airlines self-check-in, walked up to a computer, punched in our information, got our boarding passes, and then waited for someone to come down, put the luggage tag on our bag, and place it on the conveyor belt. And we waited. And we waited. We watched while the guy who hates his job wandered up and down the line throwing people’s bags onto the conveyor belt. We watched while other employees walked into the back room and disappeared for several minutes at a time. We watched while people piled up at the kiosks and the line. After something like 30 minutes of standing there someone finally came around to take our bag.

Then we got into the security line. Something like 7-10 TSA employees to run a single line. By the time we got halfway through from where we started, the line was twice as long as when we got in it. They eventually opened a second line which sped things up considerably. I won the security-theater lottery and got patted down. Nothing like having your 4th amendment rights violated to make the holiday season cheery. However, TSA seems to be making some intelligent improvements. Further in front of us a mom and a dad were both holding small children when they got to the front of the line. The TSA employees allowed them to go through the metal detectors while holding the kids. Previously I’ve seen the employees demand that the children walk through by themselves, so the screaming, crying kids who have no idea what’s going on get pushed and prodded through the detector. So I’m glad someone with intelligence decided it wasn’t any less safe to let parents carry kids.

When the plane started boarding, the airline was offering $500 travel vouchers for people willing to bump to another flight. Which seems pretty decent, but that wouldn’t have covered the cost of the flight for our tickets; we might have considered it except for our hotel reservation and the plans for the next day.

The flight itself was uneventful, though American Airlines didn’t give us anything but a couple cups of soda during the 5-hour flight (you could, however, purchase a small sandwich for $10, or crackers and cheese for $5).

We arrived in JFK and went down to get our bags. For unknown reasons, the baggage claim signs weren’t providing any information at all, but the captain had announced which carousel our luggage would be at. That took forever. We did finally get the luggage and meet up with our pre-arranged car which took us smoothly to our hotel.

After checking in around 1:00 AM we asked if there was somewhere to find food. We were directed to a 24-hour deli on the corner which was acceptable.

The next day we checked out and left our bags at the hotel while we wandered around the city. When the rest of the family arrived (after a delayed train) we further wandered around the city ending up at Macy’s. We walked through their “Santaland” and then had dinner at one of the several restaurants in the store (there are something like 3 or 4 Starbucks inside Macy’s!).

N08_secondary-banner_colorOnce we finished up at Macy’s we booked it back uptown to see The Nutcracker performed by the New York City Ballet. It was fun. Jess didn’t cry and was able to enjoy the show. After the show we went back to the hotel and got our bags and then headed towards Grand Central. Jess had a battle with the subway again. She was being too nice to the ticket reader and it kept telling her to re-swipe. Once she flicked it through nice and quickly, it let her in.

The train ride back was fine, although we had to switch trains because there was some concern about whether our train was in proper working condition or not. I also spent most of the train ride fixing the Board. There were a few minutes when Mom and Dad called me over to solve a logic puzzle for them (which was part of an ad on the wall).

The next day we did nothing: our muscles and joints were a bit sore (did I mention that we walked around NYC for 6 hours?). Today we also did mostly nothing. We went over to the high school for a few minutes to say hi to some of my old teachers. Due to vehicle scheduling conflicts we then had no ride back home. So we walked home, pausing at Subway for lunch and to warm up again. This evening we went up to the Trinity College campus and watched It’s a Wonderful Life on the big screen, which Jess had never seen.

That’s been our vacation thus far.

Mini-Christmas: Your Pictures, Our Frame

December 19, 2009 4:43 pm

Jess’ parents sent us a Christmas present (of the afore-mentioned eyes-closed-wrapping fame). We were told we could open it before we left for Connecticut. So today we had Mini-Christmas. We got up, turned on the Christmas tree, put on the Christmas music, and opened our present while wearing our pajamas.

We received an Internet-enabled digital picture frame! We’ve been having fun playing with it and getting it all set up and such. One of the nifty features is that you can email pictures to a service which the frame will then grab and display for you. It actually provides two different services you can pick from which offer this feature. The first one we tried “MemoryFrame.com” is having some technical issues, but then we discovered the other one, “FrameChannel.com”, and it’s tons better. It allows you to monitor RSS feeds and all sorts of things.

So now we have some information gathering to do.

Do you have an account with a photo-sharing website? If so, we can probably connect our frame to your shared pictures so we can see your pictures right in our own picture frame! So let us know.

If you don’t have a photo-sharing setup, you can still share your pictures with us easily by emailing them to KBD_JHD ( at ) framesend dot com. But, you know, make that look like a real email address. Hey, you can even send us messages by writing something in Microsoft Paint and emailing that to us!

We’re hoping to get enough feeds from our friends and family set up that the frame will act kind of like a digital window to all of you.

I will admit, I’m quite impressed with the simplicity and quality of integrating the FrameChannel website with the frame itself. The combination of the two basically fulfills all the awesomeness that digital picture frames promised.

So far Christmas is off to a great start. Hopefully the gimongous snow storm on the East Coast won’t cause us any trouble.

Ready for the world: ARegistryFor.Us

December 9, 2009 11:55 pm

As many of our readers know, I built a registry website which we used for our wedding registry. The main reason for going through this hoopla was that there wasn’t a good online wedding registry website that didn’t also solicit the people visiting your registry for their email address. I found this to be unacceptable and thus created my own (harvesting emails to send ads to my friends and family is just not cool).

At the time, I had made the visitor-side look fairly nice and clean, but hadn’t spent any time polishing up the user-side. I’ve been working on finishing this up since the middle of November and now things have come together pretty well. So, go ahead and take a look at the site: ARegistryFor.Us. But, bear in mind that I’m not a marketing goon, so the “marketing” material on the home page is probably pretty low-quality. If you’ve got suggestions, or are a marketing goon and would like to give me some tips, feel free.

Also, if you know anyone who’s getting married and might be interested let them know of this option.

Oh, also, please let me know if it doesn’t seem to display properly for you. I don’t really have access to a bunch of different browsers and operating systems to test on.