Holy moley, one of our friends wrote a book

This is an official RingWorld shout out (holla!) to our friend Jaime Ryan who is now a published author. Jaime collaborated on a book with his work colleagues at IBM and the finished product will be ready for release soon (by soon, I mean February 2009).

The book, IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliance Handbook, is a coming of age story about a young SOA appliance growing up on the mean streets of San Diego. Mystery! Intrigue! Romance! Business-to-Business System Integration! Dynacaching! This book has it all! Spoiler Alert: ***tthe DataPower SOA Appliance has an evil twin brother!! ***

Anyway, mad props to Jaime and this homey's at IBM. Congrats on the book, let us know if your press junket or book signing tour brings you to Grand Rapids.

p.s. No, that is not a picture of Jaime on the cover. Jaime would never wear a pink tie... or a white lab coat.

Happy Birthday Matthew!!!

Man oh man, Matthew turns six today!! I can't believe it. I remember when he was just a little guy... now he's six years old. It's so cool to see him grow up, to now be able to talk with him about things, to watch as he learns and discovers, to see his little personality. Oh man, he's such cool dude.

He's in China right now but I think they're coming back any day now. I know my dad is excited to see them as it's been almost two months since they've been gone. I can't wait to talk to Matthew about all of the cool things he did and saw in China (my guess is that 80% of the conversation will be about his kite).

Anyway:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE MATTHEW!!!

We love you!
Kevin, Katherine, and Lyla

Blogging is hard!

Yes, I feel like a hypocrite. I know I chastise my blogging friends for not writing more... but in my defense, my friends are excellent writers and their blog entries make my pancreas, uh, wish it still functioned properly? (SEE, writing is NOT EASY!!)

Anyway, it's been 14 days since my last post and since then ringworld.blogspot.com has been visited 153 times by people in 14 different states!! Right now, Texas is in the lead as state with the most readers but I'm pretty sure that's because Emily checks for updates 3 or 4 times a day.

1.	Texas	47
2.	District of Columbia	25
3.	Michigan	22
4.	California	21
5.	Oregon	11
6.	Minnesota	7
7.	Utah	5
8.	Virginia	5
9.	Nevada	3
10.	Georgia	2
11.	Florida	2
12.	Tennessee	1
13.	New York	1
14.	North Carolina	1

Thanks Google Analytics!! Anyway, as you can all see, there currently aren't any international visitors. So I'm posing a challenge for all the global jet-setters who read this blog: reach out among your international networks and get someone in another country to visit ringworld.blogspot.com. The winner will be the person who contacts us via comments on this blog post and indicates how they are responsible for generating a page view from the most exotic country (as judged by Lyla who has only been to 6 US states). The prize? Uh... a extemporaneous poem, written by me (Kevin) and published on this blog. (Just to give you a taste, here's a poem that I'm suddenly feeling inspired to write about Katherine:

Katherine's hair is like the moon,
Shining far away from me.
I wonder if it, too, is made of cheese?

I'll probably get in trouble for that.

Anyway, I owe you pictures and stories about Lyla. It's hard because her development has really accelerated in the past two weeks and already I'm having a hard time keeping up. I promise I'll fill you in on the details soon.

Here's pictures:



And a video:

And I recommend you check out Jenny's latest blog post, it's funny:
http://hellodove.blogspot.com/2008/07/comic-con.html

Marveling at my little girl

*Cue Cats In The Cradle by Harry Chapin
It seems that just today Lyla has advanced developmentally in leaps and bounds. She's been more interactive, more attentive, more content, and more vocal over the past few days. But today she did three things that blew me away and brought a tear to my eye. (I know this is just PFS - Proud Father Syndrome, but three things all happening today made her seem so grown up and that just got to me.)

When I was feeding her peaches and apple sauce she grabbed the spoon and guided it into her own mouth. Wow. From what we've read that signals that she's starting to want to figure out how to feed herself. It was just neat, not too big.

The second thing was more impressive. I was sitting on the ground and letting Lyla sit on my crossed legs. I held my hands stationary in front of her and she proceeded to reach up and place her hands on each of mine (left on left, right on right). She then pulled herself up under her own power and stood up. It was awesome and she did it a number of times including twice starting from sitting flat on the ground.

The third was after bath time tonight she stood up again pulling herself up on my arm. She then turned and faced me, grabbed each of my thumbs in her opposite hand and walked about one foot towards me supporting herself (usually when she walks I provide counter force to steady her... not his time). In addition, she had this intense determination as she was walking. As if each step was a real triumph. When she finally did it (i.e. reached me) she had the most excited look on her face. She had done it!! It melted me. Big smile, teary eyes, visions of my little girl growing up into a young girl. I wish you could have been there to share it.