I haven't had the chance to blog much lately, much because of trying to put finishing touches on this video.   I enjoy working with stuff like this, but getting it finished has been anything but easy.    Nonetheless, I am looking forward to do much more of this stuff once our little one comes along.    I have some posts brewing, so please stay tuned.

Well, it's been two weeks since my last post, but that's for a good reason.   We're Home!

That's right, last weekend, Chelsey and I moved into a new house, and with a lot of help from family and friends, we're actually pretty well settled in.  It's been awesome!   It's been a journey since July living with friends out of two car loads of stuff, not having have seen 90% of our belongings since the fire -- It almost was like Christmas, as we unpacked our things.

It's still hard to believe that this place is ours.   I am overall very pleased with the quality of work that our builder did (nothings perfect, but it's fun to learn some basic maintenance).  We have had a few minor glitches here and there, but nothing major.

I really want to get a video tour for our friends up on YouTube, but here's a few pictures online for now:

From the get go, one of the reasons for this blog has been to enable me to explore new technology and learn some new coding methods.  BlogEngine, my blogging engine, is known for being one the best examples of proper C# coding standards   I made some site updates on Monday, but with the business of life -- especially with closing just two weeks away on the house -- I just haven't had time to discuss them much.

First thing you notice is the header is changed.  That's simple, but fun to reflect the season of life we are in.   

Second, I am experimenting with Twitter, which I have yet to truly find the purpose of.   Twitter allows you to send short messages, 140 characters max, to it via multiple devices.   People use it to track life-in-real-time, or to share links of news or websites to read.    It's probably not going to last on here but Chelsey does have plenty of PREGO quotes flying these days related to her hunger cravings I could share.  Anyway, there's an area on the right with my latest "Tweets" via Twitter.

Last,  but not least is I have added my Picasa site to this website.   If you visit my photos page, you'll see the 15 most recent albums listed.   This is using an API which allows me to directly talk to Picasa.   I am not doing anything here to update them, but rather communicating with Google's servers for thumbnails and album counts.    Currently clicking an album takes you to Picasa, but I might adjust that in the future.  It's pretty cool, and was a fun challenge for me to learn. 

I'll acknowledge that Danny Douglass' Flickr Gallery was helpful to see how some else crafted something similar  (I don't know Danny Douglass, just read his blog).