Tech Museum

April 11, 2015 12:54 pm

Heather’s been feeling a little uneasy about the new family organization.  So on April 1st I took the day off and we went down to the Tech Museum in San Jose for which Mike and Tina gave us a gift certificate for Christmas.

Heather had a blast.

We started with the requisite Chick-Fil-A, since one was in the area.  As we pulled in to the parking lot Heather began exclaiming, “I love Chick-Fil-A.  We’re so close I can almost taste it!”  And as soon as we walked in, “This is the best day ever!”

IMG_20150401_120704So the trip started off good.

At the Tech Museum she liked playing with the infrared camera:

IMG_20150401_134349And anything she could put her hands on, which was pretty much everything:

IMG_20150401_140418The downside of the visit was that the place was crawling with school groups with little to no supervision.  Nothing particularly bad, but every exhibit was therefore swamped and trying to get a chance to play with it was difficult at times.  But, after about 2:30 when all the school groups left it was quite nice.  Heather got a chance to have the robot artist draw her picture:

IMG_20150401_143934And the spelling robot wrote her name in blocks:

It was fun. We’ll have to go back sometime.

Supercharging Slickdeals

March 3, 2015 10:46 am

I’ve been using Slickdeals.net to discover good deals on things for several years now.  Today I thought it’d be really helpful to be able to hide deals from companies that I don’t ever buy things from (like Tigerdirect and eBay).  A quick Google search turned up nothing, but playing around with Slickdeals revealed just such an option.

Open the Frontpage preferences by clicking the little gear icon at the top-right:

slickdeals_preferences_1Doing so reveals the Preferences panel which allows you to adjust Category Preferences (on the left) and Store Preferences (on the right).

slickdeals_preferences_2The Store Preferences allows you to type in a store name and it will provide suggestions for matching companies.  Select the match and it will appear with a dislike/neutral/like slider you can adjust.

Any category or company set to “dislike” is hidden.  Any category/company set to “like” will result in more deals matching that category/company being shown to you.

This makes Slickdeals even more useful since I can stop seeing stuff from companies and categories I don’t care about and instead see more stuff I might actually be interested in.

Family Pictures

February 24, 2015 8:26 pm

Heather drew pictures of each of us today.  I find it fascinating that all children go through a phase where people are just heads with appendages.  But look at those faces!  Eyebrows!  And the possibly intentional size difference between Heather and us!

IMG_20150224_175245a IMG_20150224_175455a IMG_20150224_175656a IMG_20150224_180021a

If you look really closely at Heather, next to her right hand is a little dot.  She added that so that she wouldn’t be lonely.  She’s been spending a fair bit of time on measures to not be lonely lately.  I think she’s feeling a little neglected with all the turmoil happening in the house over the last couple weeks as we try to get everything rearranged and ready for the baby.  Hopefully we’ll have time to give her some attention before her world gets turned completely upside down.