Brenna and Bradie2 
We’re truly loving living in Georgia now. The weather and our big nice house makes it much easier for sure. I’ve always wanted to live at the beach, and the perks of working for Jekyll Island make it even better. These pics were taken at our little water park where we get to go to for free so we go almost ever weekend. It’s better than having a pool. Brad is also teaching Brenna to surf as I’m sure most of you have seen the video.
We are also enjoying having visitors and hope to have lots more so whoever is reading this, plan to come have your beach vacation at our house soon. Dad and Judy are coming this weekend for the 4th. PJ is coming too. Todd may come but we won’t know until the last minute.
We enjoyed Mom and Dave’s visit a couple weeks ago, and Brad’s family about a month ago.
The kids are growing fast, and seem to actually be starting to maybe listen a little. Brenna is really funny lately. She actually told me she liked my Gap jeans and said she wanted some. She’s not even 4!!! So I, of course, went on ebay and bid on some size 4t GAP jeans!—geez. I’m in for some bad years. We had 400 cheerleaders in the convention center where I work this week and I had some flash forward 
moments that were pretty scary. My girls are going to be annoy me in mass amounts I’m sure. Bradie is still so super cute but is the devil in the disguise. She loves to throw books and toys at you, and is learning to manipulate you but is still so cute she’s tough to say no to.
They had to switch day cares recently and of course Mom was the most traumatized. The day care where they were that I loved, told us they were closing so I scrambled to find another spot for them only to be told 3 days later that they were not closing. I decided not to chance it, and moved them anyway. So far I’m not super impressed with the teachers at the new place but the kids seem to like and and Brenna even says she likes it better. I guess I have to go by what they say. Brenna can write her name and count to 50. Bradie is learning to say more and more words every day. I think I need to work with her on her letters, so her 2nd birthday present will be a phonics something or other. I can definitely tell the difference in not being at home with her like I was with Brenna. Ah the guilt of the working Mom!
I do continue to love my job. They are super flexible. In fact, I’m working from home tomorrow. I miss being with my kids but I know I made the right decision to go back to work. I tried to work with Brenna on the computer the other night and had no patience with her whatsoever. I just hope I’m paying the folks at school enough to teach her the right stuff! They do have computers at the daycare. Mayby daddy can do it. I do wonder if that means that I shouldn’t have had kids but I think maybe my gifts to my kids will come later. At least I hope so. 
I hope everyone keeps in touch and can plan a trip. We’re not sure when we’ll plan to come back home any time soon. We love and miss you all. 
More Jekyll Island Bike Riding Pics. That is really alot of fun. We do that quite a bit.
We made a potty-stop and took a break to look at the beach 
on our ride. I never get tired of that view!
Here’s the house Bill is building in our neighborhood. I think it’s the prettiest one in the neighborhood. He’s still not sure if he’s going to move in or sell.
I tricked the girls into cleaning the shower. Isn’t that a fun game to play?
Here’s Brenna in her Mulan dress Aunt Cheryl, Grandad and Aunt Christa gave her. She’s such a princess, and thanks to them, she has EVERY princess dress made (some of them, she has 2 or 3).
Click on the picture to see it bigger
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Our first trip to the beach for Summer ’08. Minus Daddy. He was in Raleigh taking care of our rental house. Cousin Emily came along to help. We found 5 sand dollars (that we set free–we don’t like to kill them). We had a long walk and we swam a little. It was pretty cold. The girls were sooooo good. Preparing them for leaving and staying together makes such a difference! If they know what they’re supposed to do when something happens (like leaving or being told ‘that’s too far’), they are prepared to react. Thanks Dr. Phil!
10 Predictions for Web Development in 2011
Originally posted on Mashable.com by Jolie O’Dell
As a class, developers have had a fantastic year in 2010.
We’ve made headlines, grabbed the limelight, been vilified and glorified beyond all reason and gotten paid pretty nicely along the way. And the bubble of consumer web apps just continues to swell, so there are no signs (yet) that 2011 will bring anything short of grandeur for the web and mobile development communities.
Looking ahead to what the coming year might hold, there are a few sure bets and a few speculations we’d like to offer. Some are, as noted, almost certainly bound to come true. Others are more along the lines of hopes and prayers than hard-and-fast predictions we’d stake money on.
With that in mind, here are 10 things we think the world of hacking will hold in 2011.
1. There Will Be a Need to Understand and Optimize for All Form Factors
Even the most brainless of “social media gurus” could tell you this one. With the surging popularity and newfound accessibility and affordability of smartphones — thanks in large part to the growth of the Android platform — we’ve had to optimize for the mobile web and learn about mobile applications a lot in the past year in particular.
Now, as tablets begin to creep into the market, we’re having to craft new experiences for those, as well. We’re constantly forced to consider form factor when creating new sites and apps. Will it run Flash? What about screen resolution? Font size?
Almost every developer worth his or her salt will have to become increasingly adept at developing for the myriad form factors set to dominate the gadget market in 2011.
2. There Will Be Breakout, Cross-Platform Mobile Development Tools
With all the mobile growth that’s been occurring, especially given the current state of the iOS/Android market shares, the time has never been riper for a great mobile framework, SDK or IDE to enter the arena.
Hopefully, sometime in 2011, we’ll see a new group of flexible and robust tools that can facilitate app development for any number of operating systems — including tablet-specific or forked OSes. We’re talking more than WYSIWYG, DIY app-builders and more than iPhone-to-Android porting tools; we want to see serious, mobile-centric power tools in 2011.
3. Investment in Cloud-Based, Collaborative Development Tools
We’ve seen some interesting starts in community-based, online coding. There are a few collaborative code editing apps, some of them with real-time capabilities.
We’re looking forward to seeing more and better apps for cloud-based, collaborative coding in 2011 — something like a better Wave, created specifically with hackers in mind. This will allow for better and faster work to be generated by an increasingly decentralized hacker community. It’ll also pave the way for improved on-the-job learning and open-source hacking.
4. WYSIWYG Tools Get Better and Grow
While WYSIWYG tools of the past — and, who are we kidding, the present — often lead to spaghetti code of the ugliest variety, we just keep seeing more and more of them.
We’re going out on a limb and predicting (or hoping) that WYSIWYG and split-screen (WYSIWYG and code) developer tools become more sophisticated. Whether they get better or not, they’re definitely going to continue to proliferate, especially for the novice coder and the DIY non-coder markets. Still, we’re being told the code on the other side of the GUIs is getting better all the time.
Who knows? 2011 could be the year WYSIWYGs stop sucking.
5. We’ll Keep Building “Touchable,” App-like UIs
All that stuff we said earlier about form factors kind of applies here, too, but in reverse. Your sites will have to look better on mobile devices and tablets, yes; but also, they’ll continue to natively look and feel more like mobile and tablet apps.
Some folks, a couple of Mashable staffers included, aren’t happy about the app-itization of the entire Internet. Call us old-fashioned, but we like our websites to be websites and our mobile apps to be mobile apps.
The average consumer, however, seems to delight in the shiny, touchable, magazine-like interfaces taking over the iPad and similar devices. Expect to be asked to make more and more app-like sites in 2011.
6. There Will Be a Higher Standard for Web and Mobile Security
The past year has been a bit of a horror show when it comes to web security. There have been a handful of high-profile hacks that exposed user data to the world; there was also much confusion on the user’s side of the screen as to how security works on a personal level.
We predict — nay, we dream — that in 2011, developers of consumer-facing apps will be extra careful with things like data encryption, user privacy controls and other security issues.
7. Third-Party App Development Will Plateau
Building a Facebook app or a Twitter app was all the rage in 2009, but something shifted in 2010, right around the time of Twitter’s Chirp developer conference: Developers found out that building on someone else’s platform was a good way to set yourself up for failure, especially when the platform decides to shift direction, change its APIs, acquire a competitor, or simply change its terms of use.
We predict that developing these kinds of apps will plateau and even taper off in 2011. The web is glutted with third-party social media tools; many devs are beginning to realize there’s more money and more interesting challenges elsewhere. In the end, social networks will be more interesting to advertisers large and small than to independent and third-party developers.
8. Ruby Will Get Some Cool Optimizations and Tools
We’ve seen lots of cool tricks and optimization tweaks around Python and PHP; 2011, however, will be the year for better Ruby tools.
The Ruby language is becoming extremely popular in developing consumer-facing web apps, and we’re sure to see some big-name companies release open-source tools and even improvements to the Ruby core — think along the lines of what Facebook did last year with HipHop or Google’s Unladen Swallow project.
9. NoSQL Technologies Will Stake Their Ground
We’ve seen and heard interesting things from the NoSQL corners of the web this year… and by “interesting,” we don’t necessarily mean “good.”
NoSQL technologies have had some high-profile hiccups this year (remember that MongoDB/Foursquare disaster?), but we’ve been assured that what doesn’t kill NoSQL only makes it stronger and more stable.
That being said, we’re not predicting the demise of MySQL any time soon. As one astute Twitter friend wrote, “Relational databases have their place, as do NoSQL solutions. To blindly choose one over the other is shortsighted.”
10. Open-Source Software Will See Unprecedented Growth
Open-sourcing interesting or unused tech is a trend we like to see from companies like Google and Facebook. In fact, we hope to see even more open-source contributions from proprietary software giants in 2011.
It’s not just the big players who are writing great open-source code. We know a lot of web startups are working on internal tools that’ll also be open-sourced in 2011. There are more youngsters (and not-so-youngsters) joining the ranks of hackers every year; many of them are being encouraged by sites like this one to make valuable contributions to the open-source community.
We predict more awesome open-source software than ever in 2011. Will it be a victory by Stallman’s standards? Probably not, as it won’t be exclusive of proprietary software creation, sale and licensing. But the trend toward more FOSS is a good one, and one that we’ll continue to report on in the year to come.
9 Free Resources for Learning Photoshop
If, like most people, you haven’t “layered” since last winter and only “merge” at speeds of 60 mph and over, getting accustomed to the lingo and layout of Photoshop can be daunting. These nine free resources are good places to learn how to lasso, dodge, burn, paint, filter or do whatever else you need to in order to accomplish your desired photo editing task.
If we didn’t mention your favorite Photoshop tutorial, add it in the comments below and let us know how it helped you in your design endeavors.
1. Adobe Tutorials
For a thorough introduction to the basics of Photoshop, starting at the source might be your best bet. Adobe provides tutorial videos that include everything from basic tool tours to step-by-step instructions on how to create a panorama. The commentary is a little vanilla, but it gets the job done.
2. You Suck at Photoshop
Mix together a healthy amount of sarcasm, a handful of cuss words, a narrator apparently bitter about a recent divorce, and Adobe’s tutorials, and you get the more entertaining and appropriately named Photoshop guide: You Suck at Photoshop. Using creative examples (like how to Photoshop a “treacherous commitment band” wedding ring out of a photo), Donnie Hoyle gives step-by-step instructions for practical Photoshop tricks.
3. YouTube
If there’s a Photoshop feat you’re hoping to conquer, chances are there is a YouTube video that can help you. These ten videos will get you started.
4. Toolkit Tutorial
Photoshop icons can be mystifying to the uninitiated, but it’s much easier to figure out how to work in Photoshop if you start with an awareness of its basic tools. This tutorial teaches you what all those little Photoshop graphics mean and when to use each tool.
5. Keyboard Shortcut Cheat Sheet
Learning the keyboard shortcuts for the most frequent operations will save your time and your wrists. Print out a cheat sheet to keep by your computer for easy reference as you memorize.
6. Photoshop Forums
Sometimes it’s best to ask. If you have a question about Photoshop, find it in an existing thread or create your own on this forum.
7. Special Effect Tutorials
Bored with cropping and color correction? Jump into dramatic layouts and artistic effects — like “How to create a space girl photo manipulation” — on this site.
8. Free Brush Roundup
Like painters, Photoshop geeks choose different brushes to create different effects on photos. Brushes determine the shape of the line that the paint brush tool and eraser create. Experiment with the free brushes that are rounded up on this site. This tutorial will teach you how to install them, and this tutorial will help you “brush up” on potential designs using brushes.
9. Troubleshooting Photoshop for Dummies
Like most large programs, Photoshop occasionally freezes, freaks out or otherwise ignores what you want it to do. Follow the steps in this free troubleshooting guide to fix the problem or to bail by shutting the program down.
These nine resources should have you on your way to being a Photoshop pro. Let us know which Photoshop tutorials and resources you recommend in the comments below.
A Week of Smiley Faces!!!
Ever seen a face so proud?? This is Brenna after her first FULL week of smiley faces (after several weeks of a few sad faces). This is their discipline system in kindergarten. If they get in trouble, they get a sad face. If they get 5 in a row, they get to go in the treasure box at the end of the week. This week, Brenna got to go to Target to get whatever she wanted. She got Barbie Island Princess!
She worked really hard to get these smiley faces. She is trying to learn that when the teacher tells her one time to stop doing something, she has to stop. She is also supposed to stop and think before she does something (like push another kid!) This is very hard for Brenna ; )
