Wedding Ring

In 2003 I was getting ready to head home. To my horror, when I reached for the steering wheel my wedding ring came off, hit the dash, and went down a vent. I shined a flashlight down the vent, but no ring.

Fast forward 5 years.

My wife started to strongly encourage me to get the ring back. I started doing some research on the Internet. It felt good to confirm I wasn't the first to lose a ring down a vent. There was advice about lowering a magnet down the hole (which doesn't make sense for mine, the ring is gold and silver which aren't magnetic). There was also advice about using a grabbing-snake like tool that you can buy from Sears, taking the blower off the motor and reaching through the venting from the backside, and finally taking off the entire dash.

It appears the only suggestion people had success with was taking off the dash. I knew however this would be the most work so I went ahead and tried the other suggestions first (including taking the blower off the motor). When I didn't have any success, I decided to bite the bullet and get working on the dashboard (and center console, thanks to how BMW designed the interior).

After a couple of hours I got the dash off - however I was dismayed to see the main vent tank was still difficult to get into (it was better than before however). Laura and I shined a flash light in the tank, desperately hoping all of the prior effort would pay off. Fortunately Laura caught a glimpse of gold in the light! We then spent about 20 minutes fishing in the tank using the Sears snake-grabby thing, after a couple of close calls we managed to pull the ring up!

So, the story ends on a happy note, after 5 years the wedding ring is back on my finger. Err... maybe that's not such a happy note?

Don't let the bed bugs bite

I just got back from India. Flight was great, it's the first time I've flown business class - the seats can lay almost flat so sleeping was not a problem. I also got to relax in the "special invite only" lounge where they had free beer, wine, soda, juices, etc, plus snacks to eat.



I arrived in Hyderabad, India at 2am in their new airport - it has only been open for a week. Their previous airport was in the middle of the city, and supposedly was very dirty and rundown.



The hotel I stayed at, Novotel, was very clean and nice - it was built about a year ago. Unfortunately some previous visitor left behind bed bugs. The critters nibbled on me that first night, after that I slept with the light on for discouragement.

The Microsoft buildings are located in Hitech City (a suburb of Hyderabad). This city hosts the IT big boys of India, like Infosys, Wipro, etc. We took a break during work to play a friendly game of Cricket, which reminded me somewhat of baseball.

I also took a couple of touristy jaunts to check out some of the historical buildings, including Golkonda fort. This ruined city was once the location where diamonds were mined, cut and sold, including famous stones like the Hope Diamond.





Some pictures I took at the top of Charminar. You can see the yellow cabs below, India is very populated and motorcycles with 3-4 people holding on were not uncommon. It was also normal to see cows, goats, chickens, freely roaming the streets same as the vehicles.







What struck me most about the landscape, besides the abundance of poor people, were the giant rocks everywhere. People would often paint advertising signs on them, a natural billboard.

McDonald's Walk-Up Window

Copenhagen has a nice walking street running through its center. Laura and I find it pretty funny that McDonald's has a "walk-up window" to purchase your food instead of the normal "drive-up window".

bush hid the facts

An interesting email about notepad is making it's way around cyberspace lately. Try this out:

1 - open notepad
2 - type in "bush hid the facts" (all lower case, no quotes)
3 - save the file to whatever name and location you want
4 - close notepad
5 - now open the file you saved in step 3 (you can double click the file or use notepad's file->open menu item)

The result? A bunch of squares like the following - is it a software easter egg or simply a bug?

Corina's Shiner

Corina is the proud owner of her first shiner - she climbed into a card board box and was playing around, when she attempted to get out it fell over and her face hit the corner of a chair. It quickly turned black and blue. In this picture it's somewhat hard to tell how big of an area that was brusied, that's where converting it into a negative image can somewhat help (a negative image is a tonal inversion of a positive image, in which light areas appear dark and vice versa). You can see a splotch on the cheek of the negative which is the bruised area.

Genetic hearing loss?

It looks more and more likely that our family suffers from genetic hearing loss. Doctor's have closely monitored Sabrina's hearing for some time after it was discovered that she suffered hearing loss just like her dad and grandma (foster). At her most recent visit it was determined that the loss was great enough that it warranted a hearing aid, so they took a mold of her ear and we pick it up on April 12th.

Overall, that's bad news. The good news however was that it was caught early and the Danish government pays for the hearing aid. It was also kind of neat that Sabrina got to choose from a lot of different colors, she chose a silver hearing aid (shell that goes behind the ear) and the ear piece itself is red with silver flecks.

Latest updates

We're heading back to Redmond, I've accepted a Test Architect position in the marketing group at Microsoft. To kill the time until the big move we've been doing some fun things like:

Last weekend for St. Patrick's day Laura and I participated in a 3-legged race across Copenhagen. Along the way we had to visit six designated bars and drink 1/2 pint of beer at each one of them. We were team 115!

Sabrina enjoyed bopping to tunes from the 50s and 60s with her Girl Scouts troop!



We visited a Guiness World Records museum, here is Sabrina standing next to a life-size statue of the world's tallest man.



The kids partied for the Fastelavn holiday.



And Corina relaxed by propping her feet up and downing a cold one (milk of course!)



And last but not least, we bribed the trash man. They're only supposed to take trash that goes up to the printed line on the the bag, however rumor had it that if you left two beers on top of the overflowing trash they would take it. Don't leave beer and they'll pull out the excess trash and leave it by the dumpster (and yes this did happen to us previously). So, how did our little bribe work? Did the hard working trash man accept our smooth tasting beverage? Yes! (BTW, tak means thanks in Danish).