I’ve been at my job one year now! People always ask how work is going and I never really have blogged about work because it’s really not the smartest thing to do. I do like my job, though, and that’s saying a lot considering I liked my last job and was sad to leave it. If you want to take a cool virtual tour of where I work and see an example research lab like the one I work in (all the labs on each floor are combined in one room and the benches go in forever!) go here. My co-worker and I discovered the tour on the HCI homepage the other day and spent a good ten minutes virtually touring a building that we were physically in and could tour in reality any time we want. Somehow it just seemed cooler seeing it virtually.

Rhett got a little fishing pole for his birthday because he’s wanted one for a while. Because of that, now Ryan, Devon and Cody (Rhett’s uncle on Aubrey’s side) have also gotten fishing poles so they can go fishing with him. They really didn’t need much of an excuse. Anyway, the boys have gone fishing a couple times this weekend. The first trip was to a reservoir near Ryan and Aubrey’s house. It was probably the most manmade looking reservoir I’ve ever seen. The whole thing was a cement pit with sloped sides. It is supposedly stocked with trout every week but no one had much luck catching anything.

We were planning on camping there with Ryan and Aubrey’s family until Devon discovered that the cement covered by water is actually pretty slippery and steep. I’d say he fell in, but a more accurate description would be that he slid in, since he never actually fell and really just stepped into a slippery spot where it was impossible to get back up. Still, we all watched him go down in slow motion until we realized he couldn’t stop and then I ran down to the edge of the water like a crazy woman to help him up because in my mind he was going straight for the bottom and wouldn’t ever return. We certainly weren’t boy scout campers because we were not prepared for an event of that sort and went back home because we didn’t have extra dry clothes for Devon.

Today the boys went fishing again (Devon found it fitting to wear his Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food t-shirt today) at a little pond near our house. Cody caught a couple fish and let Rhett reel one in which made his day. He was a little bit energetic with it on the hook and the poor fish probably has a headache from being whacked into some rocks a couple times but is was alive enough to swim away at least.

It’s baseball season again, and time for more Bees games. We went to a game last night with some friends from Neumont on the perfect summer night – about 60 degrees with a sharp breeze and intermittent rain. Yeah, so maybe it wasn’t the best of conditions, but we already had the tickets and fortunately we have a tough group of friends. Luckily we got a cozy(ish) spot under the upper deck and stayed dry, and $1 hot dogs helped keep us warm.

One thing I didn’t know about Utah until I had lived here during the summer was that nearly every city seems to have a week-long celebration where there are things like rodeos, parades, face painting, food vendors, fireworks and races. The celebrations are staggered throughout the summer, and each city has a different name for them. Pleasant Grove, where we live, has Strawberry Days this week. Spanish Fork, where Ryan and Aubrey live, has Fiesta days at the end of July. Provo has the Freedom Festival over the 4th of July and the list goes on. I wouldn’t say it’s the celebrations themselves that make Utah a great place to live, although they have some fun things for families, but it’s really the sense of community that I enjoy. Utahns on a whole are actively involved in their neighborhoods and communities. They tend to be a civic-minded people that don’t concentrate all their attention on themselves and their own homes. In fact, Utah is the top in the nation for volunteer rates, number of hours per volunteer and volunteer retention – and has been for the past three years. It leads the nation in volunteering for every single age group. It’s definitely an impressive thing to live in a community where you actively have to search for volunteer opportunities. I think a strong sense of community makes Utah a great place to live.

Rhett really liked watching the video of the robot pushing the cans around, so we brought the actual robot over to Ryan and Aubrey’s today to show him it in real life. Devon programmed it to just drive around and turn if it saw something within a foot or so in front of it, so Rhett was entertained for a good half and hour following it around and putting his hand in front of the sensors to make it turn for him. He was pretty sad to see it go, and afterward this is what he told Ryan:

I personally like that he not only wanted a robot, but wanted a black computer like Devon’s to control it. The kid’s pretty smart.

Devon’s class that uses the Lego Mindstorm kits had a final project where they had to program and build robots that would do the following requirements:

1. Clear all cans out of a circle, as quickly as possible

2. Stop in two minutes if the circle is not clear

3. Display the elapsed time when the robot stops

4. Turn on a light (or register something on the display) when the robot is in contact with a can

5. Make a signal when the circle is clear

6. Display the amount of time required to clear the circle

Here’s a video of Devon’s finished robot in action.

The screen at the end says “Circle cleared. Time: 0 mins 35 secs”

I’m hoping that now he can program it to seek out dirty clothes that have been left on the floor and push them down to the washer.

Devon and I spent Memorial Day weekend in Las Vegas, which was a lot of fun. We’ll post pictures when we get them all together. The reason I mention it, though, is that being there reminded me of another reason that Utah is great, and that is that it’s family friendly.

I’ve never lived in a place with so much geared toward families. Restaurants have “family night” deals where kids eat cheap, grocery stores have fleets of children sized carts, there are dinosaur museums, zoos and tumbling gyms all over the place, and there are even dentist offices with video games and movies that specialize in treating children. It would only make sense that the state with the highest birth rate would have businesses that cater to children, but it doesn’t make it any less great for the families who live here.