Saturday morning, I will be embarking with Tanya and Sterling on a nine hour drive to Gatlingburg, Tennessee. I am super excited! Since we won’t fly anywhere with Sterling since he is so young, we traded our timeshare for Tennessee again. We are staying at the Westgate Smoky Mountain Resort and they recently opened up their new indoor waterpark! Incidentally, we stayed here a year and a half ago, except this time I promise not to bring my wife back pregnant!

I have a list of must do’s for this trip:

-get donuts at breakfast time from the Donut Friar’s

-buy some taffy

-go to cooters and eat at least once

-cook steaks on the grill

-take some quality pictures

-order the french toast royale from some log cabin pancake joint in town

-eat ribs

I just realized all my to do’s minus one involve eating…any suggestions?

Note: the Water Park is Wild Bear Falls

I am starting something new at work today, that involves sorting a collection of objects visually through Drag and Drop functionality. Normally, to do this, it takes A LOT of javascript, but luckily I found this on Code Project. It is a puzzle control that uses AJAX to let you make a simple drag and drop puzzle of any picture you give it…I tried it out, and I think it might hwlp me move forward with the project I am working on. Wish me luck!

A Rube Goldberg machine is a heavily over-engineered contraption or process that accomplishes something simple.  A good example is in Goonies when Chunk has to do the truffle shuffle, and the Goonies set off the weird process that opens the gate for him.  More recently Purdue won this year’s Rube Goldberg contest by  making a burger in over 150 steps.  I have always loved watching these things and one of my favorite games as a kid was “Mouse Trap”

iPhone Link

Honda Commercial with almost no CGI and almost pure Rube Goldberg

 

Bill Gates says the next version of Windows could be here within a year!  Yeah right, I know Vista hasn’t been selling like he hoped, but to promise a new version so soon, when you know it will take another three years, gimme a break!

Since this is my first post to my new blog, I should catch everybody up.  The past three years of my life have definitely been the most eventful.  In 2005, I graduated college and started my career as a software developer.  In 2006, I got married to my beautiful wife Tanya, and in 2007 we had our first child Sterling River Noe, a beautiful 8lb baby boy.  Since his birth I grew a four month beard for whiskerino, and I even changed jobs, working closer to home in Norfolk.

With that said, the past week has probably been the toughest.  Last Monday night, Sterling started wheezing and coughing pretty badly, so we took him to the Emergency room.  Within a couple hours, he started to seem better, and they sent us home.  It was a sleepless night for my wife, and the next day, he started to get much worse, running a fever and pulling for breath. We made an appointment with our Pediatrician and I took him there Tuesday afternoon.  Almost immediately, they started him on a breathing treatment, and told me they were going to call the paramedics.  My heart dropped, but I knew it was for the best.  

The paramedics showed up, put him on oxygen and loaded him into the ambulance.  We were rushed to the closest hospital and my wife and her parents showed up soon after that.  They continued monitoring him and once he was stable they transported us in another ambulance to CHKD in Norfolk.  By 3:30 am he was finally admitted to a room where my brave little boy spent the next three days.  We pretty much setup shop in his room where we were awoken every three hours for something else, whether it was a breathing treatment or a new iv or to take his blood at four in the morning.

 On the night before the last day of his stay,  I started to get sick.  Stuffy nose, head cold from hell and really sore throat.  As soon as this happened, I was put on quarantine.  I went home to stay with the dogs, and my wife and son later went back to her parents house where they have stayed all weekend. So while I am excited he is out of the hospital, I am really bummed I haven’t seen him in four days.  

So while the rest of my family is out of the house, I decided to start this blog:  Here are some pictures from the scary adventure: