Jack's 1st Birthday

We celebrated Jack's first birthday this past weekend and as promised here's the video(s) of his first cupcale.  Sorry it took so long - I now have intimate knowledge of YouTube's usage policies.

Carlos' First Wrestling Match

Carlos had his first wrestling match on Saturday and I must say - it was awesome!  I know nothing about wrestling; it's one of the few mainstream sports that I have no experience with.  But that didn't stop me from cheering loudly, using a lot of generic encouragements such as "come on", "don't give up", and "stick with it".  I plan to do a little research so I can at least understand a bit about what's happening.

I was incredably impressed with the amount of dedication shown by these young kids.  Weigh-in was at 7:30 AM and some kids had to do sprints in the gym wearing several winter jackets to drop a few ounces and make weight.  It was obvious during Carlos' match that he had a number of weapons at his disposal, and throughout his 5 matches I could see improvement - he was learning and adapting as the day progressed.  It is amazing how much he has learned in such a short amount of time.  I am now a big fan of wrestling.

Here's one of Carlos' matches against the toughest kid at the tournament.  It ended in an L, but it was a very exciting and competitive match.  I was very proud of his performance (sorry about the poor quality - I only had my BlackBerry with me).

Around 6 PM the main part of the tournament was wrapping up and they were getting ready to progress onto the finals.  Prior to doing so, they decided to announce the raffle winners.  Well the kids have the attention spans of kids and started going ballistic as they were getting the mic setup.  It was as I'd imagine a "Ballroom Blitz" video if there was ever one made - they were all wrestling and going nuts.  The lady announcing the raffle asked for silence two or three times, gave up, and started screaming at the top of her lungs "shut up" through a microphone that sounded like she was 2000 leagues under the sea.  I was dieing laughing and managed to tape part of it, where you can hear her yelling shut up and trying to announce the winners.  I think you probably had to be there, but who knows:

Jack's Walking

Soon after I left for my trip, Jack started walking.  Here's a quick clip that Carrie and Carlos caught:

He's now walking several steps at once, able to traverse the kitchen and living room in one trip!

I've Been Tagged (I/ITSEC 08)

Well I've been tagged, and sadly the 4th picture in my 4th folder is a boring Visio drawing.  So I renamed a few folders and photos (not kidding) to make this the 4th picture in my 4th folder:

What a coincidence, its a picture from the I/ITSEC conference I attended last week!  That's our entire company minus about 2 people from the San Franciso office and about 5 from the Madrid office.  In case you were confused by the picture, no we are not a freelance modeling agency, we do software stuff (perhaps the Transformers jacket worn by one of our engineers keyed you off).  

The conference went well; we had a lot of traffic in our booth:

Notice the 30" Mac monitors Mike (2560x1600 resolution on each - drool)?  

We also did a good bit of goofing around including several successful Rick Rolls.  For those of you who are not in the know; Rickrolling is where you send someone an email with a link to say some photos that you've posted on Snapfish, but the link really sends them to this awful 1987 video for Rick Asley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" video:

 

Consider yourself warned!

Well Jack's bithday video is uploading to YouTube as we speak along with Carlos' wrestling video so more posts to come!