Look how cute this one is! (I'm big on porches.)
stay-cation
This weekend is very rare. Why, you ask? Because we have absolutely NOTHING written on our (my) calendar. Nothing. Nada. The whole weekend is empty. So, we decided it's a Jen & Ryan weekend. For those of you new to this blog, a Jen & Ryan weekend is a weekend with just us. No friends, no family, no to-do lists, etc. Just us. Not that we don't love all of our friends and family, but sometimes it's good to just have quality time with the two of us. So. The only thing that's even on our radar for this weekend is renewing our lease (yes, we'll be living in our apartment for another year which I'm pretty excited about because I hate moving), playing the wii (which we need to borrow from my brother), and going to open houses just for fun. I'm feeling the "house itch" even though we ABSOLUTELY can't get one for quite some time. But, it's just fun to look sometimes. And, I'd like to get educated on the areas (good and bad), and see how Ryan and my tastes are. Also, I'm in need of a new project now that the wedding is over, so that's it!
Look how cute this one is! (I'm big on porches.)
Look how cute this one is! (I'm big on porches.)
the pink post
Get ready for a pink explosion! Here are pictures from Jen's very pink baby shower :)
the hostesses:
chocolate fountain with all the fixin's!
the spread... notice the roses in the baby bottles!
my strawberry and funfetti cupcakes
mother & daughter
me & allie
the mom-to-be! look how cute she is! :)
precious women supporting Jen
notice all the baby pictures of Jen everywhere!
two of my favorite people...
classic jen & ash picture! (with my lazy eye...oh well)
We had so much fun as hostesses! My life is complete now that I can upload all the pictures. Yeah... I'm that girl.
**And.... I HAD TO POST THESE!!! Funny pictures from Allie's wide-angle lense. So funny.
Stephie:
Yours truly:
Alibob:
Carol-bob:
Machen:
the original Momma Machen:
Signing off... ten four.
Announcing Open Signups, Expected Pricing, and two new APIs
Posted by Paul McDonald, App Engine Team
When we launched Google App Engine to 10,000 developers in early April, we were looking for feedback from the community. Since then, even though we've since expanded to 75,000 developers, the request we've heard most often has been to open up the preview release and give more people the chance to use it to deploy their apps to Google's scalable infrastructure. With more than 80,000 of you still waiting to use App Engine we're especially pleased today to announce that we are opening the flood gates--now anyone who wants to use App Engine can give it a try! So, if you haven't already, head over to our Admin Console and create your first application. Note: you'll need to verify your account with a mobile phone before doing so.
App Engine will always be free to get started, and we plan on enabling developers to purchase more computing resources sometime this year. Although we're not ready to offer this ability now, we've been asked by many developers to provide some insight into how we'll be pricing App Engine usage for applications that have exceeded the free quota of 500 MB of storage and around 5M pageviews per month. We'd like to be transparent about this, and have announced today that developers can expect to pay:
The image manipulation API enables developers to resize, rotate, flip, crop and enhance images using the same infrastructure used in Picasa Web Albums. With the images API you can perform common image related tasks like thumbnailing images via a simple interface. For more information about the images API, please see our documentation.
The Memcache API is a high-performance caching layer designed to make page rendering faster by reducing datastore queries and improving the performance of your application. The Memcache API was written by Brad Fitzpatrick, the same developer who created memcached, a caching layer that is used in some of the world's most popular web applications, and is compatible with memcached implementations. Please see our documentation for more information about the Memcache API.
These features and improvements were motivated by your feedback and participation in our development process. We're working hard to respond to all of your requests so please continue to share them with us!
When we launched Google App Engine to 10,000 developers in early April, we were looking for feedback from the community. Since then, even though we've since expanded to 75,000 developers, the request we've heard most often has been to open up the preview release and give more people the chance to use it to deploy their apps to Google's scalable infrastructure. With more than 80,000 of you still waiting to use App Engine we're especially pleased today to announce that we are opening the flood gates--now anyone who wants to use App Engine can give it a try! So, if you haven't already, head over to our Admin Console and create your first application. Note: you'll need to verify your account with a mobile phone before doing so.
App Engine will always be free to get started, and we plan on enabling developers to purchase more computing resources sometime this year. Although we're not ready to offer this ability now, we've been asked by many developers to provide some insight into how we'll be pricing App Engine usage for applications that have exceeded the free quota of 500 MB of storage and around 5M pageviews per month. We'd like to be transparent about this, and have announced today that developers can expect to pay:
- $0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
- $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
- $0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
- $0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth
The image manipulation API enables developers to resize, rotate, flip, crop and enhance images using the same infrastructure used in Picasa Web Albums. With the images API you can perform common image related tasks like thumbnailing images via a simple interface. For more information about the images API, please see our documentation.
The Memcache API is a high-performance caching layer designed to make page rendering faster by reducing datastore queries and improving the performance of your application. The Memcache API was written by Brad Fitzpatrick, the same developer who created memcached, a caching layer that is used in some of the world's most popular web applications, and is compatible with memcached implementations. Please see our documentation for more information about the Memcache API.
These features and improvements were motivated by your feedback and participation in our development process. We're working hard to respond to all of your requests so please continue to share them with us!
IMS 2008 Live Coverage from the Show Floor
The Microwave Journal editors, Pat Hindle and David Vye, will be blogging live from the IMS/MTT-S 2008 show floor from June 17-19. Get real time updates on happenings at the show in Atlanta and give us your thoughts and impressions.
We are expecting over 10,000 attendees this year. How successful do you think the show will be this year? What technical sessions are you looking forward to attending the most?
Pat
We are expecting over 10,000 attendees this year. How successful do you think the show will be this year? What technical sessions are you looking forward to attending the most?
Pat
the no picture post
Friday night, Ryan and I went on a super fun double date with Justin & Cathryn. We saw the new Indiana Jones movie which Ryan loved but I gave it a 3 out of 5 stars. I don't know... maybe Indy isn't for me. But it was good to see and hang out with Cat & Justin. :)
Saturday was the big shower for Machen! It started off a little weird though... As I was driving up to the Miller's house to start setting up a little early, I noticed fire trucks and cop cars right outside their house! Apparently a big SUV had gotten in a wreck and smashed into the brick fence just feet away from their house! Thankfully nobody was hurt, but how random to happen when we're having a big girlie shower in a couple hours. Anyway, the shower was so fun! We had awesome food, fun games, lots of PINK, and of course the amazing Jennifer Bush in all her pregnant glory :) Even after the shower was technically over, she and her mom stayed and talked with all of us for another 2 hours! So fun!
That night, I came home and just had a nice relaxing night in with my hubby. We just had a low-key dinner and watched the 2-hour Grey's Anatomy finale (don't even get me started on Callie & Hahn--ew!). For some reason, it was just nice to stay in and relax and have quality time together after a long (but fun) day.
On Sunday, I woke up with the sudden urge to completely clean every room in our apartment as well as do 5 loads of laundry. So.. when that urge hits, there's no stopping me. I get in "the zone" as Ryan calls it, and it's usually a multiple hour project. I totally organized/rearranged the stuff in our kitchen cabinets, our paperwork in the sun room, and our closet. Let me just tell you, AMAZING feeling to have a totally clean apartment.... not sure how long that's going to last, but still. Amazing.
That night, we met up with Dad, Dawn and Jon at La Hacienda Ranch (the same one as our rehearsal dinner!) and enjoyed a big dinner with dessert. Yum. Then we went over to their house and played with their dogs while we watched the Spurs/Laker game. Go Spurs! P.S. That's probably the last time you'll ever see that, so enjoy it while it lasts :) Gotta root for the Texas team...
Today was the girls' day out with Mom! We started out right with Starbucks, and then headed over to Linens N Things for a little shopping since I had a gift card. Then, we tried to get our nails done, but our nail place was closed--so sad! So we got lunch at Panera and decided to go to the Allen Outlet Mall for some retail therapy. First of all, who knew Memorial Day was such a popular day to go out shopping? Cuz, I sure didn't. This place was packed!!! And, it was hot outside, so we only made it to a few stores before we were ready for an air conditioned, less crowded place. So we ventured to Collin Creek Mall, hoping that it wouldn't be crowded. Alas, there were still a ton of people there. But, we had a good time walking around and enjoying the time we had together :) After that, we met up with my aunt Jeri to see Made of Honor. Such a cute movie!! All in all, it was a great day, and I always love the quality time I get with my mom.
So now, I'm NOT looking forward to starting the work week again, but duty calls. Hopefully I'll get my camera back soon so I can post some pictures (hint hint, Mom)!
How long does it take you to type?
We all know that typing on mobile phones can sometimes be a headache -- especially if the phone in question has a small 9-key keypad. On those kinds of devices, we estimate that it takes an average of 40 seconds and 41 key presses to enter a query. When it comes to key presses, that's more than double what it takes on other phones!
In an effort to help our mobile users, we studied the effect of incorporating a feature like Google Suggest on mobile phones with 9-key keypads. We found that these users respond favorably to query suggestions: Users who were shown suggestions while typing their query rated their overall enjoyment higher and perceived workload lower than users who were not shown suggestions. Users who were shown suggestions also reduced their overall key presses by half. Surprisingly, the time to enter a query for these users was not significantly less than the average time needed to enter queries for users who were not shown any suggestions.
You can find a more complete discussion of our results and findings in the PDF version of "Query Suggestions for Mobile Search: Understanding Usage Patterns." It was presented at the CHI-2008 conference last month. Also, we've incorporated Google Suggest on Google's iPhone interface, so try it out if you haven't already!
hodgepodge
hodge·podge n.
Well, that's about it. Ryan's 26th birthday is coming up in a couple weeks, so there will be some great things ahead! For now, things are slow but nice :)
Have a great weekend!
A mixture of dissimilar ingredients; a jumble.
• Ryan and I are kind of bummed about all of our favorite shows being gone for the summer... We're going to miss our Office, Grey's, Brothers & Sisters.... But, we ARE enjoying all of our HGTV and TLC shows like Jon & Kate Plus 8 (yes we BOTH like that show), House Hunters, and Property Virgins! Since it's going to be a while before we can get a house, we're just doing some "research" with our HGTV shows for now ;)
• Mom and I are going on a girls' day out on Monday since we're both off from work for Memorial Day! We used to do that a lot when I was growing up, so I'm really excited to enjoy a day alone with my mom and get mani/pedi's, see a chick flick and go shopping!
• Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I'm pretty excited that my best friends have started creating blogs due to my absolute obsession with reading them (and my constant nagging). Even if I technically created Steph's and she hasn't updated ONCE since then, I'm still happy for Ash & Machen in keeping up with their new ones! Yay for more blog friends!
• Speaking of Machen, her shower is this Saturday, and I'm so pumped for all the pink that will be there! (Not to mention that I'm super excited to see her again since she's moving to North Carolina soon!)
• Ryan and I are kind of bummed about all of our favorite shows being gone for the summer... We're going to miss our Office, Grey's, Brothers & Sisters.... But, we ARE enjoying all of our HGTV and TLC shows like Jon & Kate Plus 8 (yes we BOTH like that show), House Hunters, and Property Virgins! Since it's going to be a while before we can get a house, we're just doing some "research" with our HGTV shows for now ;)
• Mom and I are going on a girls' day out on Monday since we're both off from work for Memorial Day! We used to do that a lot when I was growing up, so I'm really excited to enjoy a day alone with my mom and get mani/pedi's, see a chick flick and go shopping!
• Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I'm pretty excited that my best friends have started creating blogs due to my absolute obsession with reading them (and my constant nagging). Even if I technically created Steph's and she hasn't updated ONCE since then, I'm still happy for Ash & Machen in keeping up with their new ones! Yay for more blog friends!
• Speaking of Machen, her shower is this Saturday, and I'm so pumped for all the pink that will be there! (Not to mention that I'm super excited to see her again since she's moving to North Carolina soon!)
Well, that's about it. Ryan's 26th birthday is coming up in a couple weeks, so there will be some great things ahead! For now, things are slow but nice :)
Have a great weekend!
San Francisco Hack-a-thon
On Friday, May 16th, we had our second Google App Engine Hack-a-thon at the Google offices in San Francisco. For 12 hours, developers coded, talked with the Google App Engine engineering team and each other, and filled up on Google snacks.
At the end of the day we had some great results:
- The beginnings of a distributed datastore helper library
- http://cp.appspot.com - An online shopping cart integrated with Google Checkout
- http://gawsh.appspot.com/ an application that helps generate workers compensation forms
- And lastly, http://fat-burn-challenge
.appspot.com/ an application to keep track of your running progress (for those of us who had too many snacks :)
Check out some pictures of the Hack-a-thon:
If you still haven't got a chance to meet the App Engine developers and build some apps with other App Engine developers, we will be holding some codelab sessions at Google I/O, our annual developer event on May 28th and 29th.
fun times
Mother's Day lunch at our apartment was super fun... I really felt like a grown up hosting a big thing like that for our parents. I never realized how much my mom went through for family meals... jeez! There's so much planning involved! I had to learn how to multi-task with all the side dishes to make sure they were all ready at the same time... not to mention cleaning!! We got to use a ton of fun wedding gifts for serving, and any time our apartment's clean is always a nice treat for a few days :)Scout was ALWAYS next to the oven because that's where the ham was... It was pretty funny... He never let that ham out of his sight. The mothers spent their time thumbing through all 800 of our wedding prints while the men watched Indiana Jones. All in all, it was a wonderfully relaxing Mother's Day lunch, and it definitely beat a long wait at a crowded restaurant. Next up on the hostessing gig: Jen Machen's "Joyfully Pink" baby shower this weekend! It's a mother/daughter shower, and the dress code is (you guessed it) PINK! So excited to hang out with my best friends and celebrate our little munchkin, Elizabeth Joy, coming soon! One of these days, I'll calm down, but for now I'm enjoying all of the fun parties and celebrations!
This weekend we mainly stayed in and laid low because I was feeling sick. I was SO not in the mood to be sick when it's so nice outside! But, on Friday we were able to meet the Priours for the Rangers/Astros game! We had a blast, and the Rangers won! They hit more home runs than I've ever seen in a live game, so it was really exciting. But, my love of ballpark food had to be curbed because of the price. Good-ness--$4.00 for a bottle of diet coke?! $11.00 for nachos?! We still had fun, and we always love hanging out with cool people :) P.S. I'm not doing a "peace" sign because I think I'm cool... It signified TWO months of marriage!
Til next time! Y'all have a great week! :)
wanna help?
As some of you may know, my grandmother, "Mimi" passed away a couple years ago after her 8 year battle with Leukemia. She had a love for traveling, holiday decorating, costume jewelry, and her family... She was an incredible matriarch to our family, and we miss her so much. But, she was a believer in the Lord, so we know we'll see her again someday. I bring this up because:My cousin, Stephani, is running in the Nike Women's Marathon in San Francisco as a member of The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's (LLS), but she needs to raise the money first. The main goal for all of this is to raise funds to help stop leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin lymphoma and myeloma from taking more lives. So, if any of you feel the urge, please help her out by making a donation (big or small). If you can't help monetarily, please consider praying for her that she gets all of the funds she needs to run the race.
Here's a picture of Matt (Steph's husband), Steph, and Mimi before she got sick.
We're so proud of her for doing this for Mimi! Here's the link to Steph's fundraising profile page if anyone would like to donate. Any little bit helps :)To learn more about Mimi's story, just go to my old blog and search "mimi". There are a bunch of pictures and some videos of here there too...
Thanks to all of you for your support!
clumsy.
So... I get banged up a lot. Whether it's stubbing my toe, tripping over my own feet, accidentally elbowing my husband--it seems like there may be something wrong with me! Sure, most people do those things once in a while, but for me, clumsiness is a way of life. An everyday occurrence. I have a constant supply of mysterious scratches and bruises, and Ryan even jokes that I need a 5-foot radius around me at all times in order to function properly. Maybe God just has a sense of humor and responds well to physical comedy (ala Jim Carrey). But, after the very scary incident that I experienced a WEEK before the wedding, I'm hoping that's the most dangerous it will ever get.
Ryan will just have to deal with me hitting him all the time. I promise it's not spousal abuse if it's accidental :)
Ryan will just have to deal with me hitting him all the time. I promise it's not spousal abuse if it's accidental :)
App Engine Launcher for Mac OS X
While I was writing scenario applications to test Google App Engine, I had the following idea: If BBEdit, Dreamweaver, CSSEdit, and TextMate were at a party, what kind of application would be welcomed to help with App Engine development? As silly as this sounds, it led me to think more about workflow. I used:
- a few applications for Python, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
- the command line to run applications and to view logs.
- a browser to test locally and to access the local developer console.
- the command line to deploy the application.
- a browser to view a live application's dashboard.
I began to think about how unfriendly command line interfaces can be, and how much repetitive typing I had been doing to test and deploy applications. With that said, I worked with John Grabowski of the Google Mac team and Brett Slatkin, an engineer on App Engine, on a 20% project to make Google App Engine Launcher for Mac OS X.
Now, App Engine Launcher is not a replacement for your code editor or your IDE. It improves your App Engine development experience by managing a list of your applications. With a few clicks you can run, browse, deploy, and view logs for your applications. It also has some added sugar thrown in like drag and drop, integration with your editor, and quick links to the local developer console and the live application dashboard.
Download it now. If it's missing a feature that you'd like to see (like scripting, a Windows or Linux version, human-level AI ;), let us know in the Discussion Group.
happy belated mother's day!
So, I know Mother's Day was technically a few days ago, but I wanted to devote this post to my mom and mom-in-love anyway. :)
First of all, when it comes to mothers-in-law, I think I am the most blessed girl in the entire world because I totally lucked out. Gail is one of the most caring women who has welcomed me into her family with open arms. She loves animals, gardening, chocolate, and she laughs until she cries. She's awesome, and I can't wait to spend more time with her for the next several decades :)
Secondly, my mom. Words can't express how much I love my mom because she's more than just family; she's one of my best friends. Mom is one of those people that everyone just wants to be around because she has such a loving spirit and a joyful heart. She treats everyone with the utmost respect and care, and she loves to be goofy. And, when you really get her tickled, she starts to squeak! Thanks, mom, for 24 amazing years of being your daughter!
So, happy belated mother's day to the world's best moms! You have know idea how much we love and appreciate you! Thanks for being so supportive and for loving us unconditionally... We are blessed to be your children! :)
MUCH love,
First of all, when it comes to mothers-in-law, I think I am the most blessed girl in the entire world because I totally lucked out. Gail is one of the most caring women who has welcomed me into her family with open arms. She loves animals, gardening, chocolate, and she laughs until she cries. She's awesome, and I can't wait to spend more time with her for the next several decades :)
Secondly, my mom. Words can't express how much I love my mom because she's more than just family; she's one of my best friends. Mom is one of those people that everyone just wants to be around because she has such a loving spirit and a joyful heart. She treats everyone with the utmost respect and care, and she loves to be goofy. And, when you really get her tickled, she starts to squeak! Thanks, mom, for 24 amazing years of being your daughter!
So, happy belated mother's day to the world's best moms! You have know idea how much we love and appreciate you! Thanks for being so supportive and for loving us unconditionally... We are blessed to be your children! :)
MUCH love,
Early Android Developer Challenge results
The Android team has announced the selection of the top 50 applications of the Android Developer Challenge. Each of the top 50 apps will receive $25,000 and is eligible to receive further recognition via ten $275,000 awards and ten $100,000 awards in the final judging round. A total of 1,788 total submissions were received.
While the team is working on a more detailed description of the top 50 apps, you can read a general summary of the apps on the Android Developer blog.
taste of addison
Last night, we went to the Taste of Addison which is a big food festival with fun concerts and carnival rides... we had a great time! We got some good Freebirds for dinner and some Melting Pot fondue for dessert--yum! As always, it was a blast hanging out with good friends out in the beautiful weather! P.S. We girls *heart* Gavin DeGraw :) The guys, not so much.
...and more pictures!
Yeah, we've been busy these last few weeks...(and who knew that blogger had a photo limit on their posts?) We have a very full & fun weekend ahead of us. Tonight we're meeting AEKK (Ash, Ellory, Kristin & Kekoa--for future reference) at the Taste of Addison, and we're seeing Switchfoot and Gavin DeGraw in concert! Tomorrow we've got Ryan's cousin and her husband driving through town, so hopefully we can hang out with them a little bit...and then we have Jeff's graduation party to attend! Congrats Jeff! Then on Sunday, it's Mother's Day so we're having my mom, my brother (who's home from college!), Gail & Dave over for lunch after church. Yay! More pictures to come! Haha.
Here are the rest of the pictures from the last couple weeks...starting with the cross raising at our new church location! What a beautiful thing to experience. To see more pictures from the church's website, click here.
singing "oh the wonderful cross"
waaay up high in the sky
getting put in place!
a new beginning!
And now, Machen's baby shower... What a fun & girlie time! We can't wait for baby Elizabeth Joy to grace us with her presence in only 2.5 months!
ya think she's having a girl?
so happy :)
sooo precious!
Carol, Steph, Machen, Allie & me
baby bump!
the two blonde baylor jens (and one's prego!)
Happy Mother's Day!! (almost!)
P.S. Last night, Ryan and I stayed up WAY too late watching our wedding DVD! It was so fun to relive that evening! I'll probably be watching it MANY more times in the coming years :) Have a fabulous weekend!
Here are the rest of the pictures from the last couple weeks...starting with the cross raising at our new church location! What a beautiful thing to experience. To see more pictures from the church's website, click here.
singing "oh the wonderful cross"
waaay up high in the sky
getting put in place!
a new beginning!And now, Machen's baby shower... What a fun & girlie time! We can't wait for baby Elizabeth Joy to grace us with her presence in only 2.5 months!
ya think she's having a girl? 
so happy :)
sooo precious!
Carol, Steph, Machen, Allie & me
baby bump!
the two blonde baylor jens (and one's prego!)
Happy Mother's Day!! (almost!)
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