It’s hard to squeeze an entire year down into one Kenny Rogers song, but here’s my attempt. I love you Elijah! Happy Birthday!
You can find all of Elijah’s birthday videos in this YouTube playlist.
It’s hard to squeeze an entire year down into one Kenny Rogers song, but here’s my attempt. I love you Elijah! Happy Birthday!
You can find all of Elijah’s birthday videos in this YouTube playlist.
As I was putting together a montage video for Elijah’s 5th birthday (coming Friday!), I realized that we had enough clips from Disneyland to put together a short video. It will be interesting to see how much of this he remembers as he gets older, but I suspect that all the pictures and videos will help trigger the memories. If I was going to make the most awesome family trip video, I would have been a lot more rigorous about the shots we got, but for just winging it, I think this turned out pretty well!
And if you missed it, there’s a (long) post with lots more details about our trip.
I’ve been thinking about building an internet enabled scale for years now, and recently, I finally got around to building it. Sure, there are plenty of WiFi scales these days, but I wanted one that automatically took a measurement every few seconds and uploaded it to the internet where a website would display a continuously updating chart. I suppose a product like that exists, but I thought it would be more fun to make it myself.
The electrical components came from SparkFun. They make an OpenScale board that did almost everything I needed when connected to a load cell. The board was already programmed to have all the features I needed for calibration and taring the scale. Originally I had planned to hook that up to a WiFi-enabled Arduino or Raspberry Pi, but I kept it simple and just plugged it into my computer. The computer ran a simple program that I wrote to communicate with the board and get a reading every 30 seconds. Those readings were uploaded to a SQL database in Azure and then I wrote a website that used the Google Chart Library to display the measurements.
There are a lot of technical terms in that last paragraph, but it was mostly just plugging together a bunch of components to make the solution and I had it finished in a couple nights (after a lot of research to find all the components!) I mounted the load scale on a piece of plywood and connected a bowl to the top of the load cell. Voila!
The scale made its debut at work to celebrate my 12th anniversary at the company. You can see the live website at http://candyscale.azurewebsites.net/ It will always show the data from the last time I had the system set up and running. I’m hoping to try it again at Halloween.
Don was nice enough to offer up his timeshare points for us to get some rooms in Ocean Park, WA for Memorial Day. Ocean Park is on a peninsula in the very southwest corner of the state. We headed down there in a few groups, but thankfully, we all avoided the worst of the traffic unlike last year.
The weekend was spent enjoying the beach, swimming in the pool, eating lots of food, playing board games, and enjoying being together. Don has been working in Idaho so it was especially good to spend some time with him.
The condo was right across the parking lot from a 9-hole golf course. Elijah was very interested in it so I squeezed in a quick round with him riding along in the cart (and Logan came too.) I haven’t golfed in over a decade and I was using rented clubs. It wasn’t pretty but we survived and Elijah seemed to enjoy it. It did make me miss the game, but I need a lot of practice before I’d be willing to go out on a busier course.
Ever since Elijah was born, Tyla and I have talked about if and when we’ll go to Disneyland for vacation. We know that we’re probably not going to end up being frequent Disneyland visitors so we hemmed and hawed a lot about what year would be a good one, but eventually, we pulled the trigger and put Disneyland into the 2018 budget.
This post is going to be a bit like when a relative sits down with a huge photo album, but hey, at least you can skip through this without hurting my feelings. Note that you can click on any of the photos for a bigger version.
Planning a trip to a Disney resort felt overwhelming. Neither one of us has ever been there. (I was at Disneyworld when I was in kindergarten.) So many people have been there and they all have opinions. Searching around on the web reveals endless websites, videos and podcasts telling you the right way to do it. I ended up reading The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland mostly because it had good reviews on Amazon and it was available for free as an ebook from our library. I got so much out of it, that I ended up purchasing a physical copy of the book too. The book covers everything from hotels to rides to food and more. There’s an incredible level of detail if you really want to maximize your trip (for example, stand in entry line X when entering the park because people end up forming one line but when you get to the tree it splits into two lines so it moves twice as fast.) But for me, it was simply nice have a full picture from a single source. I took lots of notes on my first read of the book and then went back to reread some of the sections again.
We decided to pony up for one of the official Disney hotels and we booked a room at Disneyland Hotel. We even upgraded one notch to get a pool view instead of a parking lot view. If you stay outside the park, you can stay close and get a bad pool or stay farther away and get a better pool. Staying in the park gives you both. A good pool was important because our plan was to spend two days in the park with a day at the hotel/pool in between. Staying in a Disney hotel also gives you early access to the parks on certain days.
To figure out dates for the trip, I went back to the book, or rather, to the website associated with the book: touringplans.com. I spent a couple bucks and bought a one year pass to the website. They’re a bunch of data science geeks who happen to love Disney so they have built up a sophisticated model to predict traffic at the various resorts and even wait times on every ride. I used their data to pick relatively low traffic periods (and low hotel price periods) that coincided with our availability.
Once I had the dates, I found our flights and a shuttle service between the airport to the hotel that wouldn’t require us to bring a car seat for Elijah.
The next step in the planning process was going through all the various rides and trying to come up with some sort of a plan going in. I narrowed it down to the rides that I thought Elijah would enjoy (nothing to dark, nothing scary, nothing too intense, etc.) Then I plugged them all into the Touring Plans website and it created an optimized route for us based on our walking speed, predicted waits for every ride, etc.
The final step of planning was figuring out food. I heard from multiple people that you need to make reservations for your meals if you’re planning to sit down and eat. I picked out one character dinner for our day off and then booked a meal at a restaurant in each park for dinner.
I was on my way home from work on Friday when I got a text from Tyla telling me to come straight inside as soon as I got home because Elijah had a big accident on his bike. He was zooming down the hill in front of our house and ended up going over his handlebars. He scraped his face across the pavement and came to a stop. He ended up with pretty bad cuts around his eye and a big swollen lip.
Thankfully there was no permanent damage (other than a slightly chipped tooth which we did get checked out when we got back). That was less less than 48 hours before our plane was scheduled to leave so you’ll see some sores on his face in the pictures. It was incredible to see how quickly he healed. Seven days later, you could barely tell he’d had an accident!
There are three Disney hotels and Disneyland is the second closest to the park entrance. It has a nice pool with some good water slides. In our final minutes of swimming on the trip, Elijah finally got up the courage to try the yellow one (the middle of the three intensities.) He did great and wanted to do it a million more times.
We were in Frontier Tower on the third floor facing the pool. It was a reasonably nice view and we were able to see some of the fireworks in the park every evening. The room felt nice and big. The highlight was the big headboard that stretched across both beds. It had the castle drawn into it and when you flipped a switch on the nearby lamp, lights came on that looked like fireworks.
One of the buildings that was part of the hotel also housed Goofy’s Kitchen which was the site of our character dinner. We did that on our day at the hotel/pool so it was convenient to not have to go very far for dinner. The dinner was the most expensive frozen kid’s food that I’ll ever eat, but it was fine if I thought of it as private time with 5 characters. As a surprise bonus, Mickey was there and we got to take our picture with him as we checked in with the hostess. Throughout the meal we got to take pictures with Goofy, Minnie, Pluto, Chip and Dale. If I had that to do over again, I’d probably book breakfast or lunch since I think the characters are similar but the meal is a little cheaper.
We arrived at the hotel Sunday afternoon and then spent all of Monday in the park. The park opened up at 9am (no Magic Hour early entry that day). We had decided to use the park’s stroller rental instead of other options, so we walked from the hotel to the park entrance and arrived at about 8:30. We picked up our stroller and walked into the park around the time it opened. (The stroller rental opened a bit later than normal for some reason.)
We walked up Main Street with smiles on our faces and headed through the castle for our first ride: Peter Pan. No deal. I think all the people and excitement were too much for Elijah. Looking back, I shouldn’t have been quite so ambitious on the first attempt. There’s no way for him to see what he’s getting into with that ride since it’s all inside. No worries. We scrapped that and moved on. We were there for a fun family time, not to ride every awesome ride. Here’s how the rest of our day shaped up. It’s pretty close to what I had planned on the Touring Plans website, but we definitely moved slower than I thought we would. No problem though, I was able to use the app to re-optimize our remaining rides. That app saved us a lot of steps and a lot of time.
As I mentioned earlier, Tuesday was our day to rest, hang out in the pools and go to the character dinner. Wednesday was another park day and this time we got to use the Magic Hour at Disney California Adventure. We were near the front of the line and got to walk into the park with the first wave of people.
Our first ride was in Cars Land and before I get to the rides, I have to stop and talk about how amazing Cars Land is. That movie has gotten a lot of air time in our house, so maybe we’re biased, but I think all three of us would pick that as our favorite area of either park. The detail is incredible and it’s a blast to walk through the town that looks so much like the movie!
Throughout the day, we took a lot of photos including Lightning McQueen, Mater and Red. The cars must have had people inside to drive them because they could also hear what the kids were saying and use canned movie quotes to respond to the kids. Elijah loved Lightning and Red but I think he was a little intimidated by Mater’s big teeth.
That was a lot of detail about a bunch of rides that you maybe have never heard of. How about some more general impressions?
4300 words later you’ve probably gotten the idea that we did a lot of planning for this trip and it turned out even better than we hoped. The plan let us ignore a lot of the stuff that didn’t fit our family goals and focus on the areas that would be fun for us. I didn’t have to constantly worry that we might be missing something fantastic and we knew that with two days in two parks, we’d never come close to seeing it all. The goal was to leave wanting more and we succeeded, but I also think that a third day in the park might have been too much. Two was perfect for us at this point in our lives, and while I don’t expect us to do this again soon, I bet we’ll be back at some point.
Thank you to all the wonderful people at Disneyland for making our trip so memorable!
OK Go is famous for their incredible Rube Goldberg style music videos. They recently published a series of videos that is kind of a mix of “how we make music” and “science for kids”. They have a playlist on YouTube. I’ll embed one example below, but if the whole playlist is worth a perusal, especially for parents.
Bob Clagett makes yet another appearance in this post category for his recent ping pong table build. It’s a collaboration with two of my new favorite YouTube makers, Evan and Katelyn.
Colin Furze has another ridiculous build: a huge Hulk Buster from the Avengers movie. It’s full of hydraulics so it’s not just a big statue. The reveal is embedded below, but I recommend watching his build videos too: Part 1, Part 2
A few weekends ago Tyla, Elijah, Megan, Logan and I headed up to Birch Bay. Logan, Megan and Tyla had signed up for a 5k and Elijah and I were along for the ride. Don graciously let us use his timeshare up there.
The forecast for the race was horrible. Incredibly high winds and heavy rain. As it turns out, both of those did happen, but they came at separate times and the race was just wet. The race conveniently went right by the condo, so Elijah and I stood under umbrellas and watched the three of them go by. For their return leg, we waved to Tyla from the balcony of the condo.
But even in the nasty weather, they all did a great job. Megan set a personal best, Tyla got 2nd place in her age group (she lost to the overall winner who had a blistering pace), and Logan won his age group, got seventh overall and set a personal best. They got medals and plaques. It was fun to see them all so excited.
We spent the rest of the weekend enjoying the pool and walking along the waterfront. It was a little weird being there without Don or Nancy but I think we all had fun.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Cricut that we bought as a family Christmas present. I bought a roll of vinyl and transfer tape, and I’ve been having fun experimenting with them. Below are a few photos of things that I’ve drawn and cut. I realize that some of them won’t make sense because they are random words from projects at work, but it’s still neat to see how cleanly and nicely these come out. I have access to a large-format vinyl cutter at work, but it’s a lot easier to experiment and learn with the Cricut at home. Plus, all of the drawing work that I’ve done for the laser cutter in the past transfers very well to being cut out of vinyl too.
Whenever I hear about dash cams, I think about people in eastern Europe or Russia recording meteors and crazy crashes (the audio of some of those videos is probably NSFW.) But then I was at a party for one of Elijah’s classmates and a King County detective was talking about how he was installing dash cams in his car and his wife’s car. Huh? It turns out that there are groups of people who travel around the country basically putting you in a situation where you have no choice but to rear end them. With no evidence, the person in the rear is generally at fault because hey, you should have stopped. He said that Seattle is swamped with this stuff right now.
It’s highly unlikely that will ever happen to me, but you know how much I already enjoy doing timelapse video, especially on road trips so having a camera mounted nicely in the car was appealing. The fact that it might come in handy some day for insurance purposes was enough to push me over the edge.
I started with my truck and was lucky enough to find a video showing the camera I wanted being installed in a truck very similar to mine. It was super handy to see where the fuse box was, how to get the various pieces of molding off, etc. Here’s what I ordered:
While Dad was visiting, we got it all installed in my 2016 F150 without too much hassle and it has been working well. You can check the Amazon page to see samples of the video quality, but it’s plenty good for what I want. The camera itself works nicely and is low profile, especially compared to some of the other big suction cup versions. The wire exits the camera and is hidden all the way down to the fuse box so there isn’t anything dangling down or plugged into my cigarette lighter.
It went well so I decided to install the same setup in our 2013 Escape. The only difference was that the Escape used mini fuses instead of the micro fuses that the truck uses. Installation there was a little more tricky because of the goofy shape of the plastic around the rear view mirror, but I found a good spot for it and was able to run the wire down to the fuse box under the glove box. I can get free access to the Chilton’s website via our library and that came in handy for figuring out how to remove a couple pieces of trim. I also stumbled across a YouTube channel devoted to the 2013 Escape which will come in handy in the future.
I’m excited to go on a road trip and use this instead of the hacky/messy/annoying GoPro setup that I used to use. With the 64GB card, I could record 11 hours of 1080p video or even more than that if I use the timelapse mode in the camera.
In other countries, insurance companies offer discounts for dash cams, but that hasn’t been popularized here yet. Even without the discount, I do wonder if/when car manufacturers are going to build these in. It’s not a big stretch to imagine this as part of your rear view mirror mount or maybe even using some of the parking cameras that are already installed.
Safeway Monopoly
One big positive for this year was that the phone app not only lets you scan in the second chance pieces, but it also keeps track of your Monopoly properties for you. The skeptic would say that I never won anything because their app was “keeping track of my pieces”. Possible but not plausible.
I got a few free item coupons too but those items are always out of stock and is it really worth it to spend time trying to hunt down free packets of gravy?
So this year was a bust, but I’ll probably get suckered in again next year.