I thought that you would all love to see the blackmail material we captured on Cole today! I was humming a silly song, and Cole started breaking it down, so we decided to capture it for posterity sake, and I think it speaks for itself!

We had a good Christmas, despite the fact both boys were sick. We thankfully didn't have to spend this Christmas in the hospital (though when Cole started running a fever, we thought we might) and we were blessed to have Gary here to celebrate it with us. Both boys got plenty of toys and goodies, let me tell you. I'm thinking we'll need to do a toy purge after all of this. Cole got a bike, and Logan got a tricycle and the fact that it was 60F on Christmas day made it all the better for bike riding.

I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce you to the latest member of our family, Charlie the Panda. Cole recently gave up Pacy and Hair so we made a big deal about going to pick out a stuffed animal to replace them and took him to the Build-A-Bear Workshop where Charlie was born.

Now, before you ooo and aaaah over Charlie, take a moment and consider the plight of the Panda. Poor Charlie has been thrown up on 4 times already, has been dropped in the mud once and has been washed so many times that the fur covering his nose is almost completely gone. I assure you, if most Pandas are treated as roughly as Charlie is, I can understand why they are endangered.

Despite all of that, however, Charlie is well loved and has become a permanent attachment to our retinue.

I hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas (or a wonderful Christmahanakwanza, as the case may be) and that you all have a happy New Year!

A Little Ditty for You!

Dalynn, the boys and I recently went to a nifty little studio to record a holiday dance. I hope you'll agree with me that we're all very impressive dancers. It's a bit of a disco medley of some Christmas songs. I do hope that you enjoy our hard work for you all in this holiday season.

Merry Christmas!

Turkey Day and a Van

Well, turkey day has come and gone, and we had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We went to our friend Anthony's mother's house for Thanksgiving day. It was a wonderful time, and we really enjoyed it.

The food was incredible, especially the collards and the pound cake. Anthony also smoked a good turkey, my first smoked turkey, in fact. We all ate til we were stuffed and then took a goodly amount home, to boot! There were about 30 or so people there, with at least half being kids. Cole and Logan had a great time playing with all of Anthony's nieces, nephews and cousins. Cole was particularly enamored with Ms. Watkins macaroni and cheese! We took more of that home than anything else.

I also have to say that Anthony's nieces, nephews and cousins were some of the best behaved children I have ever met. There was one boy, Zack, who was about 5 or 6. He went out of his way to share toys with Cole and made sure that Cole always had an appropriately timed turn when they were sharing the same toy. I don't know that I've ever seen that particular fairness out of a child that young. He was also very affectionate, giving Cole many hugs!

I'd just like to say thank you to Ms. Watkins and all of her family and neighbors that allowed us to spend such a wonderful Thanksgiving with them. It was truly a treat!

In other big news the great van hunt is over! We bought a Honda Odyssey which is a wonderful van. It's the type of van that we wanted and we got a great deal on it. The only feature that it lacked was a DVD system in it, so we had an after-market one installed. It drives like a car, is roomy and holds everything we can put in it, seats 8 (with a seat in the middle of the middle row that you can pull out and store elsewhere) and was big enough that we could carry our Christmas tree home in it!

We traded in the Camry, so as to not have 2 car payments, which we thought was the wisest course of action. We had no desire to be car poor! So, pray that the Malibu holds out for another few years (or even another decade).

I have to say that the DVD system was well worth it. We got to use it on the trip to Ms. Watkins, which was about a 30 to 45 minute drive to Portsmouth. The boys both get a pair of headphones to wear and they were quiet as mouses. We can play the sound through the car stereo (via a built-in FM transmitter in the DVD player) if we wish, but with both boys doing so well with the headphones, and with it allowing Dalynn and I to talk while the boys are watching quietly, I don't know that we'll play it over the stereo much.

We're also, as I alluded to, set up for Christmas. It was particularly important to us to do it as early as possible this year because we never got to do it last year, what with being in the hospital the whole month of December. So, we did it the weekend after Thanksgiving. We got the tree on Friday and were finished decorating by the end of the weekend.

The only down side to things recently is that we've all been a little sick, though Cole isn't running fevers so we're hospital safe. All we really need right now is for Cole's cough to clear up and we'll all be much better.

If I don't get a chance to say it before Christmas, Merry Christmas to you all!

We Need a Map to Talk to Each Other

In a conversation I was having today the question about how two gadgets would communicate with each other came up. Initially, I was thinking that two gadgets would talk through an intermediary gadget which would convert the output of one gadget into the input for the second gadget.

There are a couple major problems with this approach:

1. Anytime you added a gadget you would possibly have to write a whole slew of interpreter gadgets for the gadgets you wanted to give input to or take input from. At a minimum, every gadget would require at least one interpreter gadget.
2. The whole gadget as a web service concept breaks down when you start talking about interpreter gadgets. They do not need to reside on the web, they need to reside on the platform. Should you have a platform based gadget? Is that really worthwhile or does it break the nice clean system we've conceptualized?

In the midst of the conversation the idea of being able to do mash-ups was discussed, and this spurred me into a new area of thought regarding how gadgets could talk. Mash-ups always make me think of PopFly. If you've never played with PopFly, I highly recommend it. It's one of the coolest things to come out of Microsoft since Surface.

In PopFly, you capture two (or more) web service endpoints and then you map the fields in the endpoints together. This allows you to create dynamic mash-ups on the fly, among other things. So, let's say that I have a web service that gives me a weather report for a list of locations and I have a mapping web service (like Google Earth). I can map the location info from the weather report list onto the mapping service and create a series of push-pins on the map that will show you the weather report when you mouse over them. It's pretty nifty and very simple to use.

Why not use the mapping between web services concept for our platform?

It's a much more elegant solution. It has several advantages over the other approach I mentioned:

1. A mapping is much easier to generate than a complete gadget. What's more, if done right, it could be done in a UI! PopFly has demonstrated this very well.
   
2. The platform would only have to remember a mapping (which could be done in XML quite easily) for any communication between gadgets. That eliminates the problem of having platform-bound gadgets.
3. The mappings could be based off of the WSDLs that the web services publish. This would allow a direct mapping from the output of one gadget to the input of another. No intermediary step is needed.

I have to say, I'm quite enamored of the idea. I think that the first step is going to be creating a set of gadgets that are supposed to talk. I've already created the first gadget (a charting gadget). I can create a simple gadget that spits out a set of variables and then try to map that onto the chart gadget. I'll have to dig around the net a bit to see if I can come up with some good examples of the best way of mapping web services together.

I shall post my progress here!