Today was a great Friday. This morning I went to work and had Panera Bagels waiting for me. I love the way Cinnamon Raisin bagels smell, there is always something special about that smell that reminds me of my grandmother. Anyway after that I did some work and before lunch our shipping guy came in and told me that I was not supposed to bring pets into work and that I needed to go pick up my snapping turtle from outside I thought he was just being silly but decided to go and check it out, boy am I glad I did…

Link To Photo Gallery
Check out the tail on that thing it looks like a dragon tail. Anyway I snapped a picture with my iPhone and sent an email out to the whole building to tell them to be careful not to disturb the turtle and to watch out for him as they drove past in the afternoon. Well that got everybody out of their seats and made them come down to see it for themselves. So many people came that facilities thought it best to put him back near the pond. It was a fun break away from work and got everybody talking about it.

Anyway then we headed of to La-Hacienda and had some great Mexican food. I always love to go “Suck Cheese” with my amigos from work. So anyway some more work and then off to the house. I bought Daniel two new Koi fish to put in his tank as his last fish had bit the dust over a week ago. He was super-excited to see me home and even more excited when I told him that today was the start of the weekend. He currently only associates the word weekend with Daddy being home for two days. So I setup the fish and then went outside to grill up some tenderloin as Maw-Maw, Paw-paw, and the girls were coming down to spend the weekend. About half way through the Grilling I notice that we had run out of propane for the grill (go figure). So I packed up Daniel and the propane tank and headed to our local gas station to get it exchanged. Daniel was super grubby from playing in the gravel in my carport but I didn’t think anything about it as we where just heading out for a minute.

On the way to the gas station I got in-behind the very nice looking older car and noticed it was going to the gas station as well. I knew the driver as he lives up the street and thought nothing more of it until I got to town…

As you can see we where very surprised that there was a car show going on… there is always something happening in Madison during the summer. So me and Daniel took a little detour and looked at all the cars. All of the owners were super nice and one even let Daniel drive their car. Take a look at all the great cars they had. If you’d like to see them in person you’ll have to wait until the second Friday of next month.

Link to Photo Gallery

After the show we went back home grilled up the tenderloin and enjoyed the evening with the family.
One more thing I’d like add is that finally the old truck is gone! I sold that thing about 3-4 months ago and the new owner had never picked it up… What a perfect ending to the day.

Thanks for reading
David Bates

Hi All,

I know it’s been awhile but we sure have been busy around here. I have been hard at work securing websites for my side business as well as maintaining my current websites and of course the most important one rfmd.com So far I have several new sites mediabrewer.com, The Neal Tractor Museum, Frye Heating and Air, and Paul Milam. They are all in different stages of completion like mediabrewer is up but not with the right theme, the tractor museum is in design, as well as Frye heating and air, and Paul’s site will be managed by me with a third party doing the actual development. So this is an exciting time to see if I can really handle doing all of this without letting my home-life or my work slip. So far I have been able to handle it all but it does cause me to be very busy so well see.

Jess has been hard at work trying to get into the groove of now having two babies to care for. We recently had to switch formula from one labeled advanced to one labeled good start because baby Same has been very fussy and gassy. We also switched bottles so that we where sure to knock it out. He seems to be doing much better now. Daniel is taking to the new addition very well. There are times that he requires one of us while we are trying to take care of Sam but for the most part it all seems to click together. At least he hasn’t asked us to send him back .

So about this weekend we started off visiting my mom’s (me-maw) so that she could get her baby fix and then set off early Saturday for a trip to the mountains. This is the first LONG trip we have decided to undertake after having baby Sam. Steve one of his paw-paws or his great grandmother (Maw-Ri) had never seen him before so we hoped to have him all dressed up for the occasion. When Daniel this would not have been possible as he used to get very car sick on long trips. I must say the trip went very well. He was fussy sometimes but for the most part he just hung out and looked out the window. We found an awesome yard sale along the way and got a pack and play as well as a mirror for my car that mounts on the headrest all for under $10. We then visited with Steve and his Maw-Ri for awhile Daniel amused himself there by throwing bottles around and they never looked happier to see a new baby. We then visited Steve’s brother as they had just bought a house. We then took a beautiful trip through Floyd and then went to maw-maw and paw-paw’s for a visit and to relax a bit before the hour and half drive home. Daniel and the girls played really hard and Sam kept Jess and maw-maw very busy. She will surely blog about this trip as well on merryheartcrafts.com so there will be some really cute pictures on there. We had a lovely outdoor meal. it was so nice, cool, and serene up there I didn’t want to have to come home. I also got to fix Maw-Maw’s computer so she could post to her blog. We stayed as long as we could before driving home and the drive home was very nice, Jess and I always love to be able to spend so much time together we get to catch up on each others lives without interruptions for the most part.

Today we are going to try and pick up the house from the tornado called Daniel that came through it and then rest and relax before I have to go back to work.

Hope your weekend went as well as mine.
David Bates

Update: Maw-Maw must be slacking as I got this post up before she could… and she said I never updated my blog

So as the title suggest this post will be a little out there. It is totally fictional and is the start to maybe a fictional book I have been longing to write. Time travel remains one of those few mysteries that remains unsolved. As with all science fiction it is normally based on science fact and normally inspires us to find ways to make the fiction reality. My realization of science fiction to fact started with 20,000 leagues under the sea, we built submarines. I then realized that airplanes had been idealized as science fiction until the wright brothers created one. Phazers turned into Lasers, and whole body scans turned into MRI machines. Even now newer movies like Vanilla Sky have introduced us to multitouch/finger/gesture based computing. So it is not far fetched to think that things like Time Travel will never be possible it is just not possible yet.

Now the other part of my title “Ghost”. The term may throw you off especially since we have a prelude that seems based on science both factitious and real. Ghost have been in many stories and scientist has sought to prove or disprove them for years. Ghost is an elusive term that sit’s right on the realm of science since it is only believed in by those who think they have seen them… or those that want to. Either way I am referring to ghost as being able to see or hear someone after they have passed. I don’t necessarily believe this is possible but that is not relative to this abstract as I am not trying to prove anything just provide an alternate theory as to why they may exist.

So why the two topics together you might ask? I recently watched a movie “The Time Travelers Wife” which gave me the inspiration to this theory of mine. So now I will attempt to intertwine the two theory’s of Time Travel and Ghost in a manor that would explain my peculiar title.

There are those among us with special abilities. Since we humans began to keep record there has been reports of those among us who posses abilities beyond the explanation of science at the time. We see these today with stories of tree people and mind movers. We even watch shows like Heroes that depict such characters. In some of these records there are tell of people who can manipulate space and time itself “traveling” to any destination at anytime they wish. Such was the case of Henry DeTamble a Time Traveler. In his case he could not define the when and where of his travels but he traveled nevertheless. Time Travel was not as sparkling for him as he longed to be part of society but wound up naked in several weird positions. In the end it was time travel that finally killed him as he was shot mistaken for a deer. What I find odd about this is that all through the movie he kept stating he could never travel beyond his own life but yet after he died his daughter and mother saw him briefly in a field. Now I don’t know a specific definition of a ghost but as I defined it previously at this point Henry was a ghost.

So let’s say for a moment that Time Travel is possible by a genetic alteration in a human and that not every time traveler possesses the aptitude to control their ability. Lets also say that like in the case of henry time travel starts with an emotional escape (his mother died in a wreck where he was in the car). Would you not say that it is possible that a time traveler may live their whole lives and never travel until they are beginning the most emotional thing in their lives. death? I think so.

So now we have established three things. Time travel is possible. Some if not most travelers never know they can travel until an emotional, near-death experience. Time travelers can travel outside of their own lifespan. So with that we can hypothesize that maybe ghost are humans that posses the travelers gene. But let me give a little more backround on ghost behavior before I give my full hypotenuse.

Ghost sightings happen quite regularly and scientist have been trying to prove or disprove them for years. Nobody knows what triggers a ghost sighting and no one knows when one will occur. all that we know is that thousands of eye-witnesses have described the encounters differently from strange sounds to full on people able to interact with the living. There have been movies about ghost like “Ghost” and even several tv shows such as “Dead Like Me”. Ghost are normally described as a tormented disoriented soul. The sounds heard are normally of someone in agony. The images are normally of someone old and grotesque. Ghost have never been seen as friendly and ghost if you think about the descriptions normally describe someone near death.

So what if we were to now hypothesis not only that ghost are humans that posses the travelers gene. But also that ghost are time travelers that do not know they can travel and are near death. Maybe the travelers travel repeatedly and only for a second at a time? That would explain why sightings are brief and rarely recorded. Since such a traveler is in the agony of death combined with the disorientation of travel itself would they be portrayed as ghost and not time travelers.

So now you have it. I think ghost are not ghost at all but merely time travelers that did not know they where.

I hoped you enjoyed this little trip of mine down science fiction. If the tweet/comment response from this post is good I will write some more on the topic.
David Bates

Today Adobe released their new version of the flash player 10.1 and I will say it was a much anticipated update for me. I love flash and have developed in it since it’s early day when it was another product altogether. Flash started out as a way for me to program desktop apps that looked and felt the way I wanted as I have always loved to be able to create the interface and then program it to do what I want. Since then my love of Flash has faded in and out as changes and flaws where found in the system. I almost completely wrote off flash until YouTube and Air had launched. I had been writing projectors for autoplay cd’s for years and air gave me a whole different type of application delivery mechanism. Anyway I love flash and even though I use Silverlight quite a bit, when someone needs a project completed in a hurry and want it to look custom my default is always Flash. So with that here are my thoughts on the release.

The Good:
As you all are aware Apple recently hit Adobe below the belt saying that security flaws and memory errors. I would have expected that in Adobe’s press release they would have addressed that first. But instead they slyly take on the mobile market slating that performance and low power was their main focus. This should make Google happy as it show them that Adobe is not lying down and taking Apple’s low punch lightly.
Better Hardware video decoding… they already own most of the video market. HTML is too early and silver light is just now hitting the market hard. I would have liked to have seen more about HTML 5 video and how Adobe was going to provide tools for video publishing compatible with HTML 5.
Mac Specific Improvements: this is a straight jab at Jobs. I read this as here you go. You wined and we fixed it, now put us in the iPad

The Better:
Mulitouch: I have been having to use third party apps to accomplish this thusfar it is great to see this come to the mainstream and is also another sideways jab at Jobs
Multi-Tab memory usage: This is much improved and a much anticipated release. If you have a ton of windows open and multiple flash objects they each have their own memory space. Adobe has streamlined this now.

The Scary:

Ok this one paragraph scared the heck out of me:
“Now, content that runs in Flash Player will automatically shut down when the available memory is running low.”
This is scary because what if you are running a mission critical flash app and you run out of memory? They also did not state whether it was physical RAM or paged? Scary stuff.

Hope you enjoy
David Bates

Heres to a bright future and much daddy play time
David Bates

So I hope to update this site more frequently as I believe I will have a little more time soon.

Thank you for reading
David Bates

We then went to get strawberries, a new tank for the grill, and some hamburgers. We all eat and played until about 1pm when the mountain folk had to go. Daniel was very sad afterword… Until we informed him that he would be spending the rest of the afternoon playing with his cousin Zach.

We went to my Mom’s where I had a ton of son duties to perform as Jess, my mom, and sister prepaired the house for her baby shower next weekend. We all had a great time and the boys got super nasty playing in the sand. We had steaks and salad followed by icecream. It was an awesome Saturday.

Thanks for reading
David Bates

Sorry I havn’t posted anything for a couple of weeks. I have both been busy at work and home. It almost seems like I have no time anymore. Let me catch you up real quick and hopefully I will be able to catch up on post so that you can read all the exciting news in depth.

I had a guest blogger as you can see from the previous post. This is a new area for me as I orginally intended this blog as a personal outlet. I now see that in the technology arena I am in sometimes it doesn’t hurt to bring in other folks and hear their ideas. The last post was a test of that. Since this site is getting a lot of hits from others besides my family I thought it wouldn’t hurt. Let me know if you liked his post or not and I will evaluate bringing in other talent again.

I went to Devconnections 2010 in Las Vegas last week… yeah I said VEGAS!! it was great I got to meet a lot of people in my industry which is rare and had time left over to take in Vegas and all of it’s wonderful sites. I had never been to Vegas as an adult so it was very exciting for me. I hope to go back again soon. DevConnections allowed me to learn a lot about web development, web services, and silverlight 4. You will be seeing my site switch from php/wordpress based to asp.net/silverlight based in the near future. I have secured serverspace with rackspace.com and am currently working the final stages of my own asp powered CMS. I will be selling this CMS as a value add to the customers that I already host to allow them a more robust system under their current hosting contracts. So those of you who host with me know an email is coming

Our new baby is coming soon as well 7 weeks and counting. My wife had me put up a be back banner on her page southernmama.com as well as create an e-invite platform for her babyshower coming May 8th. We have decided on the new baby’s name but I will not ruin the suprise here yet. Daniel keeps asking when “Baby ____ is going to come out and play” we can only laugh and reply soon.

Work is going well we are hiring new people and others are leaving. I will have my hands full soon, if I didn’t already, with training and managing. I am hoping that I will be able to do more managing and actual coding instead of data entry type stuff with the addition of new staff. We will see. I have been delving hard into sharepoint and want to switch our external site over to it but given our current constraints I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I have however been able to build a full youtube clone as well as a twitter-ish clone within sharepoint and I am working with SP webservices more. I just can’t get enough of this stuff even now I should be asleep but just can’t help myself researching and playing in tech. It is great to have your hobby also be your job

Well that’s all for now hopefully you are fast asleep or doing whatever is usual at this time in your timezone as for me I am going to search about CDN’s and silverlight smooth-streaming.

Thanks for reading
David Bates

You may say to yourself one day, “I seek help elevating my electronic promiscuity, so I paid astronomical dollars for a product as an idiotic higher echelon of retarded dimwits member.”

Fear not my friend, there are those of us willing to help.  But first, we need to break down your statement to better understand the complexity of your issues and to be able to give you the help you are so desperately crying out for!

“I seek help elevating my electronic promiscuity” – The solitary reason you buy Apple products is because everyone else has one, right?  You don’t want to seem “uncool” so you “just have to” buy one too.  Failure to do so will decrease your chances of being viewed as cool, which, when dealing with gadgets, seriously lowers your potential promiscuity.  This is known as an “iSheep” syndrome.

“I paid astronomical dollars” – $499 for the cheapest model, but did you stop at that?  Of course not.  You *need* that 32GB model, I mean after all, where are you going to store you movies, right?  You know, the ones you more than likely already own on DVD or Blu-Ray and enjoy watching through that 35″+ wide screen TV with sweet surround sound setup, but are about to forget all that to watch them on your beautiful 9.7″ LED with audio heard through the Built-in speaker.  Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of books that you, as an avid reader who somehow sidestepped purchasing a Kindle, are going to now purchase for your new device.  But, as said avid reader, at least you don’t have to toss out all your physical books, right?  I mean, you can’t toss what you didn’t purchase.  We call this the “iPad” syndrome.

“idiotic higher echelon of retarded dimwits” – The definition of insanity is sometimes thought of as “repeating the same process and expecting different results.”  Well, based on my observations, I can safely redefine the definition to state “when consumers buy first generation Apple products.”  The observations, you may wonder?  Simply put:  Apple releases a product and a consumer buys it.  One year later, Apple releases a second generation of the product with one or two more features, and the same consumer rushes out to purchase it.  Repeat a year later for the third generation.  It is with this third generation that the Apple product finally reaches that I would say is the “complete product” – yet the consumer isn’t asking why these mundane and basic features were left out in the first two generations, oh no.  They are to busy with their “shiny new innovative” toy to even stop and ponder the common sense questions.  This issue is collectively called the “iHerd” disorder.

An iSheep, buying an iPad to remain in the iHerd!  You, my friend, are a true and through, Apple fanboy!  But fret not, we have the cure!  Merely submit to us ten* payments starting with the forgettable amount of $0.99 and doubling every payment.  Before long, your disease will be gone and the light will have shown you the way!

*Some treatments may require twenty “doses” to be 100% effective, if you are in doubt, please do not take any chances!

This post was made by Inacurate a friend of mine I met on twitter. He is a great Nokia enthusiast and leader of the iSheep resistance.
Check out his blog here. His twitter profile reads: I am me. Learn to love me because I do everything in my power to always be right or hate me because you can’t see the effort and think I am arrogant.

Just confirmed it. The Motorola Droid by Verizon has pinch support or rather full multitouch support.

Check out the verizon site about the update here.

Thanks
David Bates