Saturday, January 22, 2011

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Happy Birthday, Selah!


It's your birthday, sweet girl... three years ago today we first held you in our arms. Your daddy says that you were the model child since Day 1, arriving at a very reasonable 8:30 PM and allowing us all to be in bed before midnight. We all know that three years later, he's still wrapped around your little fingers!


You're a delight. A joy. An amazing child with such a cheerful and helpful disposition. Your smile brings a smile to every face around while your laugh is just positively infatuating. Your feet are never still but your hugs and love are generously given. Like I already said, you are a delight!


We pray that your passion for life will grow and deepen into a never-swaying passion for the Creator of life! He loves you so much and delighted in creating you... and we are ever so thankful that He delighted in giving you to us, too! We pray for wisdom in raising you and we trust in His goodness for directing your path. We love you so much, and we are so thankful that we have such a good God -- we entrust you to Him!


Happy, happy birthday, sweet Selah!


(Guest appearance by Swiper)


Sunday, January 2, 2011

Diapers and Robots


What do diapers and robots have in common? According to Wired, the answer is Diapers.com:
Diapers.com warehouses are a bit of a jumble. Boxes of pacifiers sit above crates of onesies, which rest next to cartons of baby food. In a seeming abdication of logic, similar items are placed across the room from one another. A person trying to figure out how the products were shelved could well conclude that no form of intelligence—except maybe a random number generator—had a hand in determining what went where.

But the warehouses aren’t meant to be understood by humans; they were built for bots. Every day, hundreds of robots course nimbly through the aisles, instantly identifying items and delivering them to flesh-and-blood packers on the periphery. Instead of organizing the warehouse as a human might—by placing like products next to one another, for instance—Diapers.com’s robots stick the items in various aisles throughout the facility. Then, to fill an order, the first available robot simply finds the closest requested item. The storeroom is an ever-shifting mass that adjusts to constantly changing data, like the size and popularity of merchandise, the geography of the warehouse, and the location of each robot. Set up by Kiva Systems, which has outfitted similar facilities for Gap, Staples, and Office Depot, the system can deliver items to packers at the rate of one every six seconds.
In related news, Amazon.com recently purchased Diapers.com. So far this development has been a very good thing for us. After Christina signed me up as an Amazon mom, we were able to order pull-ups for less than Costco prices with free delivery right to our front door.

One final note on robots...Mikey is really, really into robots right now. So if any of you have any spare robots that you're not using, feel free to send them our way.