Kevin & Johna .com

We recently came back from our trip to Disney World. We’ll post more pictures later but I wanted to share some particularly interesting ones ahead of time. These were taken from the Downtown Disney area parking lot (by the Cirque du Solie building). A piece of equipment used to re-pave the parking lot caught on fire and we were nearby when it happened.

I was amazed at how quickly Disney emergency teams were on site and had controlled the fire and moved guests out of the way of danger. A few short hours later (when we returned to the site) you couldn’t even tell anything happened unless you knew where to look.

… and yes, the baby has technically been there three times this year - and he isn’t even born yet. That’s more times than I had been to a Disney park until I was 11!

We can officially share that secret now. We wanted to find out (if we could) if we were having a boy or girl and we decided to let everyone else decide for themselves if they wanted to find out as well. Its no surprise that once we knew, everyone else wanted to.

We also wanted to do the famous “ring test.” I’ve heard Tamer talk about this test for years now but I’ve never seen it first hand. He suspends a ring on a string above the belly or head of the mom-to-be any time after 20 weeks. If the ring moves in a pendillum, its a boy. If it moves in a circle, its a girl.

Last night, his test confirmed that it was, infact a boy. We’ll consider that our “second opinion” to confirm it. The first was a very obvious ultrasound picture (no, I won’t be posting that).

Now off to deciding on a name. Any suggestions?

We’ve finally posted some of the 500+ pictures (don’t worry, not all of them) from our trip to Disney World with Johna’s parents.

You can find them here.

Johna and I are happy to announce that we’re expecting!

… a baby.

… OUR baby, infact.

The official due date is September 26 (2007, obviously). So far mom and baby are doing well. Baby is causing mom a lot of morning (er … all-day) sickness but the Dr. assures us that’s still normal, even though we’re at week 14 (most people report it goes away at week 13).

We’ll be sure to keep our blog posted with details every week. We’re excited and wanted to share the news!

Just before Lotusphere, IBM contacted me about talking to “a reporter or two” about using Notes on a Mac. I said “sure!” I’m always happy to promote Macs and Notes, this seemed like a perfect way to do both.

SEVERAL calls later from more trade magazines than I can remember, I started to wonder if my comments “made the cut.” Then the phone rang. And rang. And rang. Turns out that some of my comments were published … and now a flood of sales reps felt compeled to call me and solver problems I didn’t know I had.

I’d suggest taking a moment to check out the article. Its an interesting look at how people are finding ways to bring Macs into the office, with or without support from Apple.

I also have a PDF verision of it here.

If you lived in MinneSNOWta, you would have been convinced last week that we were headed straight for the storm of the century. The media has been playing up this storm for a while now. And MN-DOT has had several statements about how their plows will be ready for the big storm.

The 18-20 inches turned out to be more like 8-11. Still, that’s a lot of snow to cause some severe conditions, including one person who was found frozen!

We got about 10-11 inches but its drifted to almost 2 feet in some places. Thankfully, I decided to change my snow removal action plan from “eh, let’s drive over it” to “hmm… maybe I should see if the snow blower works” last week. It didn’t. But with several trips to the local parts store, a couple of calls to my dad and a visit from my friend Ted from work, I (read: everyone else) was able to get it working just in time.

Sidebar: pouring a tablespoon of gas down the hole the spark plug goes into, then putting the spark plug back in and starting it up is fun, dangerous and yet effective in the troubleshooting process.

I was particularly pleased with the way I was able to work around the neighbor across the street who decided that a good place to park his car would be with the nose of the car at the edge of where my driveway begins. Yes, I was tempted to blow snow all over his car (especially since I’m not crazy about them anyway). But seeing his kids try to keep up with shoveling snow yesterday made me realize the guy would just tell his kids to go shovel AND clean off his car. What a dork!

Anyway … at least I didn’t have to crank out one of these to get it removed:

Two things happened today to convince me of that fact (again).

1. I got a call from the company that issued by corporate credit card, who said the card number was recently used to try to purchas a Playstation 3 at a store in the Twin Cities. Thankfully, they rejected the purchase and contacted me so the card could be cancelled … which it is!

While I’m still a little shocked by this, its also a bit odd to me. See, I’ve used this card on trips all over the U.S. and overseas; and I use it on-line A LOT; AND I’ve never shopped in the place where it was used, nor was it at all the type of place that someone with a business line of credit would ever shop. In addition, I rarely use it in stores in MN. All that being said, its funny to me that it occured in my “backyard” and not something a bit more complicated.

Oh, and if you’re the person who took the number and tried to use it: its cancelled. Oh, and all the other purchases & attempts are being tracked. Seriously… be nice. Get a job. Don’t put people through that.

2. I’m hooked on a podcast called GeekBrief (thanks to the recommendation from a friend). Its a great show. Each episode is less than 5 minutes and its a quick run-down of all things tech. Oh, and its in video format, so I don’t have the loss of attention span problem I do with normal podcasts (you know, podcasts like mine).

Anyway, in episode #130, the host talked about possibly doing a meet-n-greet kinda thing in the town of … Dallas. Having parents that are from Dallas, and hoping to one day move there myself, AND liking the town, AND considering it to be “the other Twin Cities” - it just kinda struck me funny that my new favorite podcast was from my new favorite city … which is like my current city, just much less cold.

Anyway … both stories made it seem like a small world. One because of all the places it could have happened, it was “at home” and the other because its a place that feels like a sort of “home.”

I posted the second album of pictures from our WDW trip (finally). Checkitout.