Out With the Old

I resisted as long as I could, but I finally had to update this blog to use the "new" Blogger templates to take advantage of a number of newer Blogger features introduced in the past few years. I'd miss the old look less if the theme editor here had enough options so I didn't have to edit the template manually and add CSS to get what I want, but I already had to dig into it to fix page titles. Except for this blog, I've pretty much moved on to Wordpress where plugins can handle all the stuff I want without having to hack up Blogger templates. I'm still not happy with this background image, but it'll probably be here for years.

Busy Year

I couldn't let 2012 come to an end without a single blog post here. I have almost a dozen draft posts from this year sitting around with about a paragraph done, so maybe some of those will make it onto this blog. But this has been a busy, hectic year.

The biggest thing for me this year has been building Thinkamingo - our new educational app development company. We grew the company from zero to a viable business in 2012. In the process, I've learned iOS development and a whole lot about app marketing. In the past year I've shipped 12 iOS apps (though our 5 sports card apps share a lot of code), 2 Android apps, and 1 Windows Phone app. Not every app has been a success but some have far exceeded my expectations. Our apps have appeared on high profile blogs and even on Boing Boing and NPR - both thanks to Make's Mark Frauenfelder. Not a bad first year. We look forward to really growing the business in 2013 and someday being able to share more of our numbers and growth story.

Another big thing in 2012 has been mentoring and coaching my daughter's FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics team, Team Brick Buddies. They're a small team made up of mostly middle school students competing against a lot of high school teams. They did very well in the rookie season, making it to the state championship.  They are now mid-way through their second season and already planning for the state championship. They're also building up quite a trophy shelf by winning one tournament last season and winning a judged award at every single event they've been to. To cap it off, they won "most popular exhibit" at the TBTF coolTech 2012. They've also competed in MoonBots for two seasons and we've had a great time getting to know the Orlando area Google Lunar XPrize competitor, Omega Envoy. It's been a lot of work (and driving) but it pays off when I listen to what people say after meeting the kids and hearing them present what they're doing. In 2013 I'm expecting to return to FIRST LEGO League as our son and his friends should finally be old enough to compete. 

2012 has also seen a lot of Cub Scout activities. Though I've had to decline so many opportunities to volunteer (in scouts and other places) to work on our business, we've been busy camping, working on achievements and belt loops, and trying to win at Pinewood Derby.

This fall, I took a train trip to Williamsburg / Jamestown with my mom and my son. I haven't ever really travelled by train except for a few quick trips from Princeton to Manhattan. Train travel is ... different. It was nice having plenty of space, weird not going through security at all, frustrating to sit motionless for hours, and ultimately exhausting to spend 22+ hours on the train each way. The particular train didn't have wifi (some do) and we lost cell coverage quite a bit. It did have electricity and I packed plenty of movies, ebooks, and music for the trip. Williamsburg and Jamestown were good to see and a reminder that one of our goals is to get travelling while the kids are old enough and young enough to appreciate the things we visit. We have to get busy though.

Tampa had its first Mini Maker Faire in 2012 and there are at least two local makerspace efforts in the works. I would love to see at least one get started. I did get two Raspberry Pi boards and a STM32 board to play with some electronics but haven't done much yet.

On the gadget front, I also picked up a Nexus 7 tablet. I've had an Android phone before and the kids have Kindle Fires so I wasn't new to Android, but the Nexus 7 is a real game-changer. Much faster than the old phones I had, big enough to really read on, small enough to carry almost everywhere, cheap enough to not worry too much about breaking, etc. It's become the device I use the most (other than my laptop) even being wifi-only.

I've done almost nothing on most of my hobbies in 2012. I barely touched amateur radio. I don't think I took any serious non-snapshot photos or did any artwork outside of some Thinkamingo projects. I did play quite a bit of Team Fortress 2, which has finally replaced Quake III Arena / GTA as the video game I use to blow off stress. In 2013 it would be great to replace that with actually getting back on the bike and putting in some real miles.

So that's a short version of my 2012. Hopefully I'll post again before 12 months pass.

I Have a Blog?

So I touched my blog for what appears to be the first time in 18 months. I had a few draft posts sitting around that I pushed out, including one from December of 2009 apologizing for not blogging lately. (It's only three posts below this one.) The same reasons still apply and then some. My short thoughts and interesting links show up on Twitter and/or Facebook or sometimes my Google Reader feed. Anything much longer tends to just get filed away for later, never to be seen again.

We've been busy.

Work keeps kicking into higher gears - but in a good way. Among a lot of other things, in the past year we've hosted two technical conferences here in Tampa with many of our developers and other technical staff from around the world. We were also acquired earlier this year.

Our First LEGO League team TechnoForce had a very successful run over two seasons. We made it to the second round (regionals) in our second year, but didn't make it to the state level. I really need to write up a couple of posts about all the lessons we've learned along the way. Unfortunately, TechnoForce has now dissolved as a team and we'll be focusing our efforts on other things. We may be returning to First LEGO League though, especially as our son gets old enough for it.

We joined Cub Scouts - Lutz Pack 86 - and had a very active first year. Lots of group camping, Pinewood Derby, and other activities. I have a couple blog posts in mind about what we've learned as parents new to the Cub Scouts.

For Van Dyke Church's annual Sports Camp last summer (2010), I coached chess. Despite considering coaching soccer or football a couple times, I've always wound up doing non-sports activities for kids that just don't want to (or can't) do a sport. I've done robotics and science olympiad before, but chess was the most like a sport so far. I got to teach almost all of the kids something and they still wanted to play even at the end of the camp. I wrote a few related posts over on Gifted Homeschooling about teaching chess. This summer I'll be coaching a LEGO engineering activity.

We helped host TEDxYouth@TampaBay. I mostly handled video. It was a little rough but I learned a lot in a hurry about producing live and recorded video. You can see all of our speakers on this YouTube list.

We continue to homeschool. This is our first year using Florida Virtual School which has been a different sort of challenge - less burden on us to teach but a whole lot of supervising a student that doesn't want to follow someone else's schedule. We continue to be active in our homeschool co-op, THINK Day.

I also finally picked up a more serious camera - a Canon T2i. I'm still learning a lot about making it work right - shooting a lot with the 50mm 1.4 lens - which absolutely blows me away with it's ability to gobble up available light and turn out a reasonable photograph. I'm now always quite behind in processing photos from different events with the kids (I often shoot over a thousand photos a weekend), but someday I'll get back to updating my Flickr account with some good shots.

Removed Adsense

I removed Google Adsense ads from this blog. They didn't perform at all anyways, but Google was usually confused about what this blog is about so I'd get almost random ads.

The ads that put me over the edge were all the Vietnamese "dating" site ads that appeared on my post about Kim Phuc. As funny as it was to see a "Meet hot Vietnamese girls" ad there, it just wasn't right. So I ripped them out.