Yes, at the ripe old age of 3 months old, Ben went to visit his Great Grandmom in Arizona!  We  were pretty nervous about flying with the little guy but he was great during our flights.  Although on the way home, as I carried him onto the plane in the Baby Bjorn he spit up all over my chest.  Thanks!  Then when we got settled on the plane I was holding him and he spit up all over my lap!  He got me twice in 10 minutes!!  Anyway, the trip was great and Ben and his Great Grandmom had a fantastic time.  He also got to meet his Great Aunt Naomi and Great Uncle Mark.  I think they all had fun.  Ben's "firsts" for the trip include flying, sleeping in a hotel, swimming in a pool, and more.  He even went to his first Zoo.  Of course, he could care less about the animals at his age. 

In addition Ben has been working at improving some of his skills.  These days he love to play with his feet and he's starting to use his fingers more.  He's sitting up well (with a little help) and he's trying to roll over.  He's hasn't mastered it yet, but he's getting there.  The first time he did it no one saw.  He was playing on his "play gym" and Rebecca turned to him and noticed that he had flipped from his back to his front!  He's done it a few other times but each with a bit of a nudge!  He loves to sleep on his side now.  When you lay him down on his back, he just flips himself right onto his side to sleep, it is really cute.  The down side is that due to all of his new abilities, Ben is no longer allowed to be swaddled in the blanket for sleeping.  He still sleeps pretty well but he tends to wake up more at night.

Here's some more great pictures:

Last week I had a chance to spend a whole day with Ben.  Unfortunately, my wife's grandfather passed away (more on that in a future post).  The funeral was in Arizona and since several of the family members out there had some kind of virus, we were advised not to bring Ben.  So the only option was for Rebecca to fly out and back without us.  Rebecca left at around 5 am on Tuesday and took the red-eye back that night, getting home at 9 am Wednesday morning!  I had never spent that much time alone with Ben.  As a matter of fact, neither had Rebecca.  She's alone with him a lot while I am at work but I'm there at night to help out.  Well Ben and I made it through the day but we were sure glad to see mom when she got back!

I spent the entire day in the 3 hour feeding cycle.  This kid eats all the time!  But we had an eventful day as I was determined to not be stuck at the house all day.  We ran a few errands, went for a long walk and generally had fun.  Ben's really cool these days because he loves to smile and "play around".  Now if I stick my tongue out at him, he'll stick his back at me.  That has got to be the greatest thing I have ever seen.  Of course, he does have his moments when he is irritable.  Usually a burp or a diaper change does the trick.  But sometimes he is just cranky which, I admit, can make me cranky too.  Sometimes he'll just cry or grunt or kick his legs around and slam them down onto the bed, crib, floor, or whatever he is lying on.  That got me thinking about what goes through his head.  I was wondering, what happens when a baby has an itch?  You know how it is when you have an itch, you just have to scratch it.  But he's only 10 weeks old, he can't scratch an itch (or do anything else for that matter).  So maybe that is why he is crying? Maybe that is why he kicks his legs around?  I mean, at his age, an itch might feel like something on his leg and he's trying to shake it off. Anyway, that is just one example of the kind of stuff I think about. 

I have a heightened respect for my wife who stays home with Ben.  I say "heightened" as opposed to "new" because I always knew it was a tough, sometimes stressful or irritating job to be with a baby all day long.  Of course it is fun too.  But she seems to get a lot of stuff done in addition to taking great care of little Benny.  I had a hard time getting out the door and back in time to feed him.  I guess you get better at it when you do it all the time.  I was pretty tired that night, but I still had a few feedings to go and I had never done the 3 am feeding at all.  Plus, I don't have breasts ready to go when Ben is hungry.  I've got to have bottles ready just when he wants them. 

In the end it was a tiring but fun day and I was glad that I got to have the experience of taking care of my boy for that long a period.  I think a lot of dads don't get that experience because breast feeding mom can't usually be away that long.  By the way, we were lucky we followed the advice of experts and kept a supply of milk around for emergencies!

OK, here are some recent pics of Benny...

Philly.Net is hosting yet another Code Camp in May.  Thanks to DeVry University in Fort Washington, we'll be back at their excellent facility.  People really enjoyed the last one we had there in January.

So what's going on for Code Camp now?

Steve is organizing the speaker/session list.  Bill sent out the "call for speakers" a while ago and the track leads are working with Steve to line it all up.  We'll have 40 sessions this time.  We could easily do 50 again, but we all felt the day was a little long in January so we dropped a session.  But we'll still have the variety of tracks including asp.net, SQL Server, Alt.Net, and more.

As usual, I'm working with the Partners.  We are very fortunate again that a great group of companies have stepped up to help.

Our Platinum Partners:

DeVry University	Microsoft

Our Gold Partners:

HostMySite	Micro Endeavors
Perficient	RDA

Our Silver Partners:

Neudesic	Ted Pattison Group
Telerik

Want to know about what prizes we'll be giving out at the end of the day?  I'll post that soon!

OK life has officially changed.  Today Rebecca and I went shopping at BJ's, a "Big Box" store near us.  Ben was great through the whole thing.  Maybe that wasn't such a good thing.  Had he cried, we might have left in a hurry and I'd have been able to keep my shirt.  Instead, we took our time and I spent $350!  Ouch.  I have a feeling we saved a lot of money though, some of the deals seemed pretty good.  What's next, a mini-van?

For the first few weeks of Ben's life, we swaddled him at bed time.  He seemed to enjoy it (most of the time).  If you aren't familiar with the term, swaddling is pretty much wrapping the baby in a special blanket so they feel safe and secure.  Anyway when Ben was younger (now he is old, 7 weeks!) he started fussing and usually found a way to wiggle his arms out of the swaddle.  Then we swaddled him with his arms out.  But eventually we gave up because the whole thing seemed to stress him out.

The other day a friend suggested we try it again since her baby seemed to love it.  My sister is a big fan of it too.  So we gave it a try.  At bed time we bundled the little guy up and put him into his basinet.  Well much to our surprise, this kid slept for 5 hours! For the past few weeks the best we got was 3 - 3.5 hours at a time.  That is a pretty big difference!  At one point, when Ben had been asleep for about 4 hours Rebecca woke me up.  "Do you think Ben is OK?  He hasn't woken up yet."  Keep in mind, Ben sleeps 2 feet from Rebecca's side of the bed, so it was clear that he was OK.  So she basically woke me up to tell me that Ben was still asleep.  In the morning, my wife was still worried that he didn't like it, she felt bad wrapping him up.  I said, "he slept for 5 hours and didn't make a peep - no crying or anything!"  I'm no baby expert, but to me it sounds like he enjoyed being swaddled.  Plus, Ben is not the shy and silent type.  If he were unhappy, he would have let us know.  Last night was the second night in a row that we tried it.  He actually sleep for almost 6 hours!  Do you think we'll try it again tonight?

While I am here, I might was well include a few recent pictures...

Call me vain.  Seriously, go ahead.  Like most people, I look in a mirror when I walk past it.  I guess I am vain when it comes to blogging too.  I really enjoy blogging - writing whatever comes to mind for "people" to read.  But I like to know that there actually are people reading it.  If not, what's the point?  My blog runs on DasBlog, a pretty cool, free blogging engine.  It provides me some cool analytics, out of that box, that tell me how many hits my blog gets and more information.  And yes, I check it often.  I love to know how many hits I get. 

One of my favorite things to do is see the information that I get from search engines.  If someone came to my blog via Google or Live Search, I can see what search criteria they used.  So in the image on the left, I can see that people found my blog for a variety of reasons.  Among other things I can see that some people were searching for me or my blog, someone was looking for information about some National Parks I visited (Bryce and Zion), someone was looking for information about LINQ, and someone was looking for information on my friend Travis.  Also I see that my blog post I Hate Trusted Installer is still popular! 

Well I thought that was cool until I discovered Google Analytics!  Google Analytics is also free and is completely insane.  It gives me tons of information about who reads my blog and now I am addicted to it.  The only problem I have with Google Analytics is that it only gets updated once a day!  With my DasBlog activity information it is updated continually.  Oh well.

So here is what I see with Google Analytics...

This map view is awesome.  It may be tough to tell in this screen shot but it shows a map of the world.  If I get a hit from someone in any country, it turns green.  The darker colors of green have the most hits.  So obviously I get hits from the US, but I also get traffic from India, the UK, Canada, not to mention Romania, Thailand, Spain, Argentina, Lithuania, Belgium, Taiwan and many more!  How cool is that?

I can even "drill down" and see where my traffic is coming from in a specific area, like this map of Pennsylvania.  These maps are really cool but there is much more.  I can see how long people stay on my blog, what posts are popular, what browsers they use and a whole bunch of other information including the same kind of search engine "key word" information described above.  But so far, you identity is safe.  I can't seem to figure out exactly who is reading my blog.  I can't even seem to correlate data between reports, but I there must be a way to do so.  So as for now, I may be able to see what town one of my readers came from, but I can't figure out which pages the reader read.

By the way, Google Analytics is totally easy to include on your pages.  In my case, I just added the script that Google gave me into my dasBlog template: homeTemplate.blogtemplate.  That's all.

I've been working at Orbius since Oct. 1 helping the team to develop a new social media platform.  If you follow any of the news stories lately in the social networking arena, you've seen several problems being talked about.  The first is that there are lots of governance problems with the current state of social networking.  You've heard a lot of stories about people's photos and information being seen by the "wrong" people. For example, my wife works for a school district and a few months ago the superintendent asked all of the teachers to remove their profiles from several popular sites because the kids in the schools were looking at pictures of the teachers at parties, etc.  That's just one example.  The other issue that seems popular these days is that brand marketers are trying to figure out how to get into he social game.  There are lots of individuals using these social networking sites but companies can't figure out how to make it work for them.  It's because of issues like that that Orbius was created.

Here are a few reasons why Orbius stands out:

• Orbius is different from other players in the market because it is specifically designed to support not just individuals but groups - companies, brand marketers, clubs, and organizations.  We call these community sites Orbs.   It's really easy to create an Orb, apply themes, configure security and start communicating with groups of people.
• Orbius is designed to support multiple Profiles.  For instance, I have a public profile that everyone can see.  I also have a Family Profile, a Friends Profile,  and a Professional profile.  I can decide who get's to see any of my personal information.  For instance, in my Professional Profile I have my resume, links to technology sites and blogs that I like, etc.  In my Family profile I can keep family photos and a calendar that keeps track of where we'll be for different holidays, etc.  In my Friends profile I share pictures with Friends and I have a comment wall so we can joke around.  But these Profiles would be useless if I couldn't control who had access to each of them.  With Orbius it is really easy to organize my connections into various groups and then allow them access to whichever profiles I want!
• Orbius offers a unique way to join communities and "hide" your identity through Personas.  While this may not be useful in all situations, in many communities members share sensitive information about themselves (medical information for example).  In these Orbs, members can safely discuss important issues because the other community members will never know their real identity.
• Orbius provides a simple dashboard view of changes and updates to all of the communities you belong to.  In addition, all messages among Orbius users come through a central inbox, even if the communication is from different Orbs.
• By the way, Orbius is free to use.  Anyone can set up Orbs and/or Profiles.  However, companies who wish to take advantage of extra features including advanced themes, removal of advertising, custom applications and more can do so with a Premium, Corporate, or Enterprise Level Edition of Orbius.

Here is a list of some of the features we support.  Most of these can be added to Orbs or Profiles!

• Blogging
• Image Gallery
• Calendar with Events and RSVP
• Comment Wall
• Polls
• Discussion Forum
• Content Library
• Ask an Expert
• Fan Club
• RSS Feeds
• and much more!

There's a whole lot more to it than this, but I thought this would give you an idea of what we are up to.  Want to take a sneak peak at Orbius?  Send me an email and I'll add you to our Preview List (unless we fill up to quick).

I'll be posting more information about Orbius soon.  Meanwhile, here are a few screen shots from Orbius (click to enlarge them):

• Here is my Public Profile.  Note that since no one is logged in, only my Public Profile is seen.  You can see that in my Public Profile I have a Home Page, Connections, Pictures, Blog and more.

• Here are my Additional Profiles.  This time my wife is logged in.  You can see I've given her permission to see all 4 of my Profiles.  Also, you can see my photo gallery and calendar in my Family Profile.

• The last thing I'll show today is a screen shot of an Orb.  This is the start of what will be the Philly.Net Orb.  You can see that within this community we have a Calendar (named Meetings and Events) a Members list, a Discussion Forum, Document Library, Newsletter, and other pages.  I'll go into more detail on those features soon.

Ok this post isn't so much about Ben as it is about Rebecca and I, and our life with Ben.  Sure, I am a naive, first time dad.  I didn't exactly know what to expect after we brought our son home from the hospital.  Well, he's almost 6 weeks old and I am starting to figure it out.  The biggest challenge so far seems to be time management.  I can't believe how much time this guy takes up.  Anyway, on to the point of this post...

I've always heard that when people have a baby, their friends send over dinners for them.  I thought that seemed nice enough, but hardly all that big a deal.  I figured that when we came home with Ben we'd be sitting around a lot (since he can't to much) and we'd have time to cook.  Also I thought, that the gift of food thing must be great for families where "dad" can't cook.  In my case, I can cook, and love to.  So I wouldn't mind making dinner each night for Rebecca since she'd be busy feeding Ben.  WRONG!!!!  Wow was I wrong.  And luckily, my friends and family knew better.  They sent over food.  Lots of food.  Not only was I too busy to cook for the first few weeks, but I was just too exhausted to do it.  One little child can be completely draining.  So these meals are a very kind gift and I am thankful to everyone who helped us out.  If you are in a position to bring dinner to a new family, please please please do it.  They will love you for it.  In addition, my advice to any expecting parent - cook in advance and freeze food.  We froze chicken cutlets, meatloaf, soup, and more.  Combine that with all of the great meals our friends sent over and we didn't cook a meal for the first 3 weeks.  And we had a few in week 4 too!  I'm not kidding.  Rebecca and I realized that, except for picking up some essentials like milk, we didn't go shopping for a month!

THANKS to all of our friends for the help and support.  Also, here's a picture of us with Ben - he's one month old here.

For those of you who were at the last Philly.Net meeting, Marc promised you his slides.  So here they are.  Enjoy.

Marc gave me two power point decks.  Interestingly, the 2007 version is much smaller.  I've noticed that with other presentations too.  They must have done something cool to keep the files smaller in the newer version...neat.

Mix Summary for Power Point 2003 (.ppt) 

Mix Summary for Power Point 2007 (.pptx)

You really need to take a minute to watch these two videos.  This guy is a genius.  Johnny Lee takes a Wii remote and uses the existing technology to do some amazing things.  In the first video, he creates an interactive white board for a fraction of the cost of the real thing.  In the second video, he creates a head tracking system that gives an incredible 3D effect.  I wish I was this smart!

On Saturday, Feb 16th, at around 4:30 am Rebecca woke me up.  While she told me that "something was going on", she also told me that we shouldn't get too excited.  This could pass and it could easily be another week before child birth.  A half hour later she told me she was hungry.  I got her some snacks and after a few minutes she decided that this wasn't hunger pains, she was having some minor contractions/cramps.  Still, we knew this could this could pass. 

Before long, the small contractions seemed to be at a regular pace, maybe 12 minutes apart and we figured that, just in case, we should get a suitcase together.  We knew that the longer we stayed home, the happier Rebecca and I would be.  Sometime around 6:30 (I think), we called the Dr's office.  As expected, they told us to relax at home.

I took this picture of Rebecca around 7:30 am.  She was acting pretty funny and decided that she needed to clean and vacuum the house before we left!  At this point her contractions were around 5 minutes apart!  Another call to the doctor.  Since we live only 5 minutes from the hospital, she told us that we could come in if we want, or stay home for a while longer.  Eventually we left and around 8:30 we got to Bryn Mawr Hospital.

Upon arrival, we met our delivery nurse, Karyn.  She also introduced us to Carissa, a student nurse who would help out for the day.  Karyn checked out Rebecca and warned us that we could be there a while, she was only 1.5 centimeters dilated.  We immediately questioned if we came in too early.  Around an hour later, Rebecca was really starting to complain about the pain.  The nurses and I calmed her and kept her on track.  But even the nurse was getting concerned about Rebecca's pain level.  During the next examination, Karyn's face lit up and she said (I am paraphrasing) "No wonder you are in so much pain, you are 7.5 centimeters dilated!"  That was an unexpected change in about 1 hour!  At that point, things got pretty busy and exciting.  Rebecca's contractions got pretty intense but she was really strong and I was very impressed.  Pretty soon Karyn informed us that it was "now or never" for the epidural.  One or two contractions later and the decision was obvious to us!  "Bring on the epidural" (I won't repeat what Rebecca really said!).  I have to say that I think the epidural was a good idea.  Things really calmed down after that and in about an hour, Dr Craparo brought  Benjamin Harry Schwam into the world. 

It was a pretty fast delivery (we were at the hospital at 8:30 and he was born at 12:22) and we had a great experience.  I can't say enough good   things about our team.  They were very helpful and caring.  Karyn took care of Rebecca all morning.  She is an awesome nurse and we are very thankful to her.  Carissa told us that Benjamin was the first baby she ever saw delivered naturally.  No matter how many deliveries she takes part in after this, we know that Ben will always be her first.  The doctor is kind of like a closer in baseball.  The nurses play the whole game and in the last inning the doctor comes in to win the game.  Don't get me wrong, Dr. Craparo was terrific and did a great job. she is very warm, skilled and confident and that is very reassuring to expecting parents.  We owe them all our gratitude...THANKS!

It's hard to believe that little Ben is 3 weeks old today!  I don't know if this is cool, but I'm going to quote myself (someone has too!).  Years ago I wrote a song for my friends called The Good Times.  The last verse is as follows:

Sometimes it seems like years since the first day we met.
Years full of memories we never will forget.
Sometimes it’s like I just met you yesterday.
But time goes by so fast we better not let it slip away.

I think of that verse a lot, including now.  Ben is so tiny, he's just a little guy at the beginning of his life.   But sometimes it seems like he's been with us forever.  Already he just feels like a regular member of the family. 

Ben's a pretty cool kid, if I do say so myself.  I think he cries a lot, but from what I have heard from other people, we are pretty lucky.  He actually sleeps a lot too.  Unfortunately, he is still a little confused and wants to party all night and sleep all day. We are working on that.  Since he arrived, he's had lots of visitors and many friends and family have sent gifts and warm wishes.  I find the expressions of love from so many people very touching.  It's a great feeling to know that so many people care. 

I am really surprised (yes, I was warned) about how little time I have to get things accomplished these days.  I really expected to have more "down time" when I could do day to day things and keep up with my blogging.  But I find that mostly during the down time, I just want to take a nap.  This little 7 lb guy can really drain you!

In the next few blog posts, I'll be sharing photos and stories about Ben.