Monster Jam 2011

Tonight we took Daniel and his cousin Zach to Monster Jam. They both loved it. It was loud, smelled like burnt fuel and had lots of cool Monster Trucks. IronMan was the truck that stole their heart as they both love the IronMan movies. I also loved the fact that about 20 minutes of the show was dedicated to honoring our armed forces and our country.

I plan to add to this post tomorrow with lots of pictures and maybe even a video, if they turned out ok.

Goodnight for now… Daddy is tired

A Robot That Mows Your Lawn?

As a little boy I watched the Jetsons and several other shows that told me that by the time I grew up I would have a flying car and most everything I needed to do could be done for me by a robot. I truely believed this and in early 2002 I was rewarded as the first “home robot” was introduced… I thought who wouldn’t want a Roomba? I shortly realized that most people thought it was a gimmick, too expensive for a toy, or used any excuse they could think of to pass off this miracle. I on the other hand could not wait to get one. I encountered one in 2003 at a job I was working and could not believe that this little bot just toiled away cleaning a floor while I was away doing something else… amazing. In 2008 I happened across a Roomba for $3 that’s right Three bucks! I couldn’t believe when the wife told me not to purchase it… I just had to. Even if it was broke I wanted to dissect it.

Well that $3 has went a long way in our household my wife loves her little robot and uses it almost on a daily basis to keep our downstairs floors clean. It still holds about a 2 hour charge and I have not had to replace a single component on it… not even a filter.

So now to my title, my trusty craftsman lawn mower (a hand me down of 14yrs) is finally not worth fixing and I need to purchase another. I don’t want to just purchase a lawnmower though. I would like to do away with that chore all-together. I would love to purchase a robo-mower, but even after the years of faithful cleaning our little $3 roomba has given her I can’t convince her that buying a robot to mow our lawn would be a good decision. She is willing to buy me a zero turn John Deere instead However I am not satisfied, I must prove that just like the Jettsons we can have machines today that make our lives easier.

So today I have decided to at least investigate how much it would cost for me to replicate our Roomba and make a DIY robotic mowing solution. If your interested stay tuned and I will post updates along the way.

Update 1: Nov, 13^th Procured possible wheels and motor from broke RC toy of Daniels:

Update 2: Nov, 28^th A list of Current Robot Mowers available for purchase:
RoboMow
LawnBott
AutoMower

Summing up the year 09

Hi,

I know it has been awhile since my last post and there has been a lot of time between my post. Truth is Since early this year I had lost interest in posting as what I had to post was not at all pleasant and was very hard for me just to talk about it to my own family much less blog about it. My wife wrote a beautiful post about what happened but to re-iterate we lost a baby that my wife had carried past the second trimester and worst of all she barely made it through the ordeal alive. She developed something called DIC which is very rare but basically caused her blood to not be able to clot. Luckily her doctor had seen one case of it before and immediately knew what to do. If it was not for his quick action I would have lost both of them. So you can see why I did not wish to write about this, heck I don’t even know why I am now other than to to let you know that I have not disappeared. In fact I am more into web developing, blogging, and social media more than ever. I accepted the role as the Web Developer for RFMD.com in June and have been overseeing the website since then. I am also trying to convince RFMD as a company to utilize social media.

When all of the trouble happened at the first of the year it was easier for me to use twitter than it was to blog. I added my twitter feed to this site so that you could look along. I know it is not the same as post but it helped me stay in touch and let people know how I was doing without actually blogging about it. I choose twitter as it was the best option for what I needed. You can locate my twitter feed and follow me from the list on the left.

We also found out at the first of October that we are pregnant AGAIN! we have both been scared to death given the outcome of the last one and happy all at the same time. But fortunately this time around has been completely different from the last but we are getting close to the same time in the pregnancy so we will be on edge for at least the next two weeks. We love the fact that we have another little one on the way. Daniel and our lives will be totally different. We will move from a family of three to four.

Earlier this year I bought a house for us. We have rented in the past so this is our first home. I say I bought it as it happened along the same time as the loss and Jess was very reluctant to commit to anything at the time. I had been looking for a new home as our family was about to grow and the place we was renting was way to small for another little one. The market in housing at the time was also a proponent as we found an awesome house and saved a ton of money on it. Jess loves the house and has told me many times since that I was right to go ahead and purchase it.

That being said the house was in need of repairs since we moved in we have completely redone the downstairs bathroom going all the way to the floor joist and jacking up the house. We have also replaced the water heater, every faucet in the house, and the downstairs heating system. All I can say is thank GOD that Obama saw fit to give us some tax money to help when we replaced the heating unit downstairs we made sure to get an energy efficient one so that we can qualify for the tax credit next year as well.

I love our house and how it is becoming our home. I always find it amazing how my wife can turn a boring room into something that looks like a piece of art. She is truly a master of design and of decorating. I cannot believe she allowed me to propose to her so long ago.

Current:
Daniel has a pretty bad cold and has been real clingy to his mommy recently I love the little guy. He has started to talk plainly and we can communicate very well together. This is a huge achievement. He also knows his shapes and colors and can even draw circles now. He makes me the happiest dad every time I come home. I can also see that he is going to be a good hearted boy as he is so sweet to everybody. He says please and thank you that which I must attribute to his mom’s teaching. She is doing a great job with him.

Well that is all my pregnant wife would like a bit of the cheeseball she has made and it is 10:00PM so after that I will probably go to bed exhausted from rough-housing my playtoy (Daniel)

Happy Holidays, let me know how your year has been below:
David Bates

The Mountains

Daniel wants to swing

I love going to the mountains. There is something about going there that is instantly calming.
We visit Floyd, VA when we go to the mountains, it is a small community set right off of the blue ridge parkway. The place that we stay is about 1/2 a mile from the parkway around Smarts View park.
It is always about 10 degrees cooler in Floyd than it is in Greensboro so it is always refreshing to go there. Also there is the fact that we are on about a 1,000 acre farm so there is none of the busy noises like there is in Greensboro. We always have a good time. Today we took some pictures while we where out and about so I could include you on our get-away.

Hope your having a good weekend. Enjoy the pictures
David Bates

Twitter not accepting Tweets anymore

Dear Twitter,

Over the past few weeks I have been unable to rely on you as a collaborative platform.
First there was the attack on August 6th that went all day. I forgave you for that as it was probably some russian 16 yr old hacker with a bot-net his daddy gave him for christmas. Then there was the blackout of all apps, exept tweetdeck thank goodness. But now you have greyed out my submit button on twitter.com and have turned my tweetdeck application into mush.

Further you have not posted why this has happened on either blog.twitter.com or status.twitter.com where you told me before to look for information. This time I believe it to be your fault as I can get to the website and browse around but cannot submit tweets.

Please know that this in now way means I am leaving Twitter. I love the service when it works. This note is a simple request to try and understand why this is happening and hopefully understand how you are going to better your service so that this does not happen again.

Now to try and figure out how we published post around before twitter… oh yeah I’ll Digg it!

Thanks
David Bates

update: at 10:30 I was able to tweet again… It looks like this storm has passed! let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.