Matt & Megan

These pictures are courtesy of the beautiful, talented Amy Dover. She did such a good job! These aren't even proofed yet and they still look great. Thanks Amy, we love you!

Garret Family

Jim & Freida

Standing (Matt, Megan, Aaron, Freida, Jim, Devin)
Sitting (EmmaLee, Kiersten, Chase, Nathan, Reece, Shana, Rebecca)

Kiersten, Megan, Shana

The Boys

Nieces & Nephews

Nathan

Rebecca

EmmaLee

The Babysitter's Club

Matt and I had the pleasure of babysitting Olivia on Friday, while mom and dad enjoyed their last weekend of having only one child! This girl is a hoot! She would run down the hall and yell, "MATT!", wait for him to chase her, then run behind a bedroom door and shut it just as Matt would catch up with her. She loved it! And of course Matt had to do it five hundred times before Olivia grew bored of it. Then we danced to this funny CD that Amy and Mike had. Then I HAD to play with her hair so we gave her a cool fohawk!(f.y.i- a fohawk is like a mohawk but just in the front, as opposed to all the way down the head) And yes those are goldfish in her mouth. Needless to say it was a really fun night!

Icicle Heaven

Due to the cold front, we had these beautifully hazardous icicles on the house. They were huge!! Luckily they melted before anybody got their eye gouged out!

eBusiness Wikipedia

Yesterday I contributed to my a wikipedia for the first time ever, the eBusiness Center Wiki. The pages that I contributed were:

• Web Portals
• Online Communities
• Online Auctions
  

It takes a lot of time to publish a relatively small amount of data. Don't wait until the deadline to finish your research.

Information Integration

In the rapidly changing business world of today, the importance of information has increased the need for better information management tools. Almost all major companies are driven by information, including Google, Amazon and Wal-Mart. Whoever controls the information, has the power. So it is not surprising that IBM has come out with their Websphere Information Integration platform and their Information Management software. The articles contain a brief overview of how the process works, but I would like to see a company that has information problems and see how bringing in the IBM information server would change things. I think every company is in need of controlling their information more efficiently. This is the Information Age and Information is power.

Web Services

Since my family also reads all of the posts for my class, I though I would start off with the definition of web services. A service provided by a website that can be accessed by anyone as long as they know how use the proper protocols to obtain the service. I was excited when we started talking about them in class, because my friend Nate Skousen and I were starting to develop a website that used Google's web service, Google Maps. The website address is www.ldstemplemaps.com. We want to make it the first stop for people trying to obtain information about LDS temples and we want to eventually expand to LDS places. It took us about two hours total to setup everything up. Web services are changing the web. It's so easy to do something like this with anything. I was thinking it would be a lot of fun for a family website. People could add anything they wanted to the map, simply by putting in a name, picture and address. You could create a personal Anderton family map with our own memory places. Hope that wasn't too technical family!

I wanted to show everyone my darling new purse that Laurel got me for Christmas. I love it! I seriously use it all the time (as you can see by the wonderful disorder of its contents.Everything just shoved in, just the way I like it!) Thanks Laurel!

Web Analytics and YouTube

Here is a list of some of my favorite web analytics websites:

• Google Analytics
• Google Trends

I love Google. I'm hoping for a google fantasy football website. I think if anybody can do it well, Google can. The articles that we read for class were insightful. It's an extremely efficient way to drive tons of traffic to your website. All you have to do is to get people to like your video. It made me think of another way of marketing your website. My grandma loves to forward messages to all her friends and family. If you have a cool website that you want to get out there, a few well-connected forwards and you could be reaching thousands of individuals, obviously based upon the excellence of your website. If your website isn't cool, no one is going to want to forward it.

While trying to unplug his computer from the outlet in our tiny kitchen, Matt accidently knocked over an entire jar of candle wax I had on a candle warmer onto the floor. Hence the cringing look on my face as I scrape it off the floor with a butter knife. I never knew wax could dry so fast!

You can't see it very well in th picture, but the wax is everywhere! There is still some stuck to the floor, and I often find myself sliding into the kitchen in the morning! (Note the extremely attractive 70's linoleum)

UHF

I still remember going to the theater with Jon, Mark and I think Eric, to watch UHF. It was in the late 80's. What a classic movie! I wanted to get a post on here so our kissing picture would finally get off the front page. I love all of your comments that you post and would encourage everyone to post them. I've heard Mark is stingy with his comments. Megan is working on her food ingredients notebook for her nutrition class and cracking the chemistry puzzle. Ugh, good luck.

How did this one get in here?

Beautiful Meggy

Family Reunion 2006

Nathan and Emmalee

Silly Reece (Megan's brother)

An Olivia shot that Amy doesn't have, ha!

Ella, Will and Megan being goofy.

Auntie Megan with Emmalee

Christmas Morning!

Megan's First Turkey Gobble, gobble, gobble!

Announcing Leta and Nate Shepherd

Expectations for the Course

I used to work at a search-engine optimization company, so I think I have the SEO down pretty well. Now onto the web analytics! My brother-in-law and I have a website, www.portableheavydutyaircleaners.com. Web analytics will be highly useful for us because we have no idea where we're getting our traffic from and where they are going. I expect to be able to increase our conversion rate over this semester and have lots of fun in the Omniture Web Analytics Competition.

ISYS 532

When I hear the words enterprise application integration or information architecture, I don't think it has quite the same buzz factor as say AJAX or web analytics. I want to have this course bring to life these words and make them exciting for me. How can I use them in my daily work? Why should they be important to me? Based upon the first two days, I think we're on our way to that goal. My information architecture knowledge is limited and I want to come out of this class being able to design an enterprise information infrastructure.

I started out programming in Java. Recently, I started a new job, which has allowed me to learn PHP and lots of javascript. I also had a chance to program an AJAX application, which was really fun. This summer I had the chance to work on the Wal-Mart Windows Server Engineering Team, administering over 25,000 windows servers. The first day I was installing $2,000 fiber-optic network cards, never having even opened a server before. I was nervous!

Astoria Barge

We're practicing downloading pictures.

Amazing Race Portland

Exclusive footage...Yuck! Dad, did you try these?

The World's Smallest Park

The first post

Well here we go! This is my first blogging post ever. I have to blog for several of my classes this semester, forcing me to finally give into the blogging pressure. Hopefully, I'll not only be able to blog for my classes, but also use it as a family blog. I love all of the things you can do with this blogging software. Mom: In blogger you can restrict who has access to your account and it's free and much easier to use. I suggest switching.