stop your feets

Dog walking Bill, Daisy and Spike with Hanna, Jordi and Dora today at Fort Funston.. beautiful weather. Dora walked for at least 2/3 of the walk.. the rest was mostly in "uppie" position which is way my back needs to get stronger (if not for the baby alone).
At some point Dora walked a little behind us and shouted: "Wait.. Mommie wait for me! Stop your feets!" ... I think the language learning phase is one of the most precious times with kids (at least for me as a wannabe linguist)...

X-mas greeeat successsss for all of us!

Such a nice evening last night..
tons of big and small gifts for Dora under a nice mellow and humble christmas tree...

Dora got not only a new Ballerina dress (pink!) but also her favorite favorite favorite princess dress (pink!)...

For my part I am happy and relieved that all the geeky toys I got her are things she actually enjoys.. (got them all at the infamous ingenious thinkgeek.com )
And that's why I can only recommend these highly: Apparently they are great for 3+ year olds already:

• Bilibos: she got a big bilibo and a mini bilibo
  (both in pink.. another mini one in orange she apparently "saves for my baby brother")
  
  
• Ball of Whacks: such a blast for both of us! Pretty easy to use for her to make it a ball .. and a loddaloddalodda fun for Daddy too :)
• A magic wand: Every princess needs a magic wand! This geeky levitation stick actually works fairly easy, comes with a nice little butterfly for Dora to start it.. and she actually learns to fly it fairly fast ... I'm impressed each time to see how fast she actually learns stuff..
• Sporks: As she loves her IKEA plastic colored spoons, forks and knifes I thought she's old enough to learn that categories such as spoons, forks and knifes are not distinct... hence the one-in-all
  
• Squishy bowls: ... yes they are actually shot glasses .. oh well.. she can't start early enough I guess.. no, but she loves pink and red and a small drinking bowl that can be squished seems just the right thing for her..
• The Mon-keys (I got them mostly for the bad pun but also to tell keys apart in my key set) were a greeat successs .. Dora got the pink one and now she practices daily to open all kinds of doors with her key..
  

Finally we also got a Wii (with the obligatory Sports which is fun.. Dora plays it much better than I had ever imagined.. we're still waiting for a "Go, Diego, Go" game though that should be a little better suited for her..

Ok.. enough posting.. Dora just tells me about a 'blues clues' story on noggin... gotta catch that one..

Puppet Theatre in SF

I still need to check this out... looks like a nice thing for Dora..

http://www.fairytaletheater.org/

The year 2008 in photographs

just a wonderful series of the picture of the year 2008...

part 1
part 2
part 3


some very graphic.. but thats how life is I guess...

Getting stated with OSGi and eclipse automated builds (PDE)

finally started to work on automating our OSGi based plugins/bundles ...

Main goal is to have some automated build that builds our OSGi bundles against a defined target platform.. as we don't use any eclipse specific stuff (apart from equinox) I figured we can (ab)use eclipse's pde to do the work..
not sure whether that's gonna work in the long run but its worth a shot..

Came across some nice 3 part series as a good introduction to OSGi and Spring DM:
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2008/jw-03-osgi1.html
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-04-2008/jw-04-osgi2.html
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-06-2008/jw-06-osgi3.html


for more hands on to start my own ant-based build (using eclipse's pde for now) I stumbled across:
http://knol.google.com/k/luk-zapletal/automating-eclipse-pde-build/1as80wv4bdzca/4#Build_project
(first time I ever actually checked out a 'knol')

doesn't seem to be too difficult..

but then again, I am just starting on it..

allright... lets give this whole blog thing one more shot

bravo.. most likely you ended up at an abandoned blog..

lets see how long I can keep up with this..