Author Archives: Derek

Finally, some pictures from 2010

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Between the weeks we spent getting the house ready to put on the market, some work travel, and a bunch of kids activities, the first two months of the year have just flown by.

I’ve been working on getting some pictures put together but stuff just keeps getting the way so it’s taken quite a while. Today I finished up three pages of stuff.

At the beginning of February I got to travel to Germany for work to visit with one of our software vendors. We stayed in Heidelberg but really didn’t have time to go sight-seeing since we arrived Monday afternoon and left on Friday morning. For the afternoon we didn’t have meetings we took a bit of a walking tour of Heidelberg and visited the old castle.

After arriving back from Germany Jen picked me up at the airport and we drove to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. We haven’t been for a couple of years and the timing worked out for us since we had just put the house on the market and wanted to get out for a couple of days while people were going through it.

Any finally, Caroline just had her first birthday this week. I can’t believe it. It seems like just the other day we were in the hospital with her. She wasn’t all that impressed with the cake and just ended up mashing it into her high chair tray.

Here are all the pictures

Christmas Pictures

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It’s only taken me a month but I’ve finally found the time to get the Christmas pictures together. It’s been crazy busy around here the last month and I just haven’t had time to sit down and look at the pictures we took.

I was even getting the pictures together from January and it turns out I’ve only taken about 30 or 40 this month and don’t really have anything to put together for this month.

2009 Year in Numbers – Part 2 – Everything Else

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Continuing along with my ocd 2009 year in numbers moving on to the year in swimming.

In 2008 I went 290,000 yards, 162 miles, and this year I set myself a goal of going at least 200 miles. I didn’t want to set the goal too much higher then 2008 since I knew that at the end of February we would be having Caroline and I wouldn’t be in the pool to much after that.

Things went much better then anticipated and I managed to go 387,000 yards, 240 miles.

Swim Yards

January and February were really strong months and as expected after Caroline was born I didn’t get in the pool for over a month. Then things picked up again and in July I managed to post an all time high of 32.9 miles. October through December were pretty slow months starting with a week off for Amanda and Ben’s wedding, then I got sick in November, and finally the holidays in December.

In addition to keeping track of yards swam I also kept track of hours in the pool. I swam for a total of 112.5 hours or 4.69 days. Holy cow that’s a lot of hours in the pool. If your doing that math that works out my average swimming speed of 2.14 miles per hour.

The other thing I kept track of was the break out of swim vs kick, vs pull.

Swim, Kick, Pull, Breakout

Obviously the swim is going make up the majority of the yards but I was surprised by the 46,000 yards kick. You can see that I’m not a real big fan of drill since it barely registers on the graph.

Other numbers for the year.

  • Netflix movies – We rented 52 movies this year. Certainly no record based on how many I hear other folks go through but that works out to one a week which isn’t too shabby.
  • Jen drives about 1,400 miles a month, and since I’m now working much closer to the house I only drive about 650 miles a month.

2009 Year in Numbers – Part 1 – mfdc statistics

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I’ve always loved keeping track of totally useless numbers and statistics so here is installment one of the 2009 year in numbers, mfdc statistics.

Last year was a record year for web site traffic with 117,263 hits. Compare that to 2008 were it was only 79,870 hits.

By month it broke out like:

It was on a steadily increase right from January through July when then things just fell off a cliff. I’m not exactly sure what happened there but it picked up again in October and then went right back into the toilet to end the year. I can understand the December numbers since there were really no web page updates or blog entries to speak of so the site got a little stale.

If remember last years summary I was giving my Canadian friends a hard time since I had more people from France, Poland, and Mexico visiting the site then from Canada and I’m glad to say that this year you didn’t let any other countries beat you. Unfortunately it wasn’t a matter of you beating anyone else but rather a rather large drop in the amount of traffic from every other international country.

Last year Canada accounted for 744 hits but this year it was only 364. I’m not sure what caused the huge drop in international visitors other then it’s possible that they are not being correctly accounted for. Last year there were 5,466 hits that couldn’t be attributed to a specific country or domain and this year that number was 11,098 so I have to believe that somewhere in this number here were countries not being accounted for correctly.

This year I added Google Analytics to the site which helped me track how people actually find there way to mfdc. Like I would expect the vast majority of visitors are coming directly to the site either by bookmark or just typing in the web address and most of those people or repeat viewers. This really isn’t surprising since the audience is really family and friends and since I don’t allow search engines to index any of the main site it limits what your going to find using a search engine.

None the less there are still what I would consider a large number of people who get to the site by coming from other locations like:

  1. blogger.com
  2. facebook.com
  3. google.com
  4. images.google.com
  5. twitter.com
  6. images.google.ca
  7. notebooks-brazil.blogspot.com. (Beats me. When I saw this a couple of months back I tried to hunt it down but couldn’t find anything.)
  8. images.google.co-uk

The other interesting thing is look at the search terms that people typed into a search engine that lead them to the site. As you would expect “mceachern family” and variations of peoples names with “mceachern” show up frequently but here’s a couple others exactly as they were typed into search engines that sent people to the blog

  1. alex matisse
  2. don’t forget your lunch box
  3. antique bobsleds
  4. sesame place secrets
  5. sesame princeton
  6. abe’s log cabin
  7. canada trip family pictures
  8. rhyming words with hiatus
  9. pictures: “hello. anyone home?”
  10. pictures of you, pictures of me.
  11. picasso baseball pictures
  12. zee zed canada

Some of these I can tell exactly where they ended up but others make absolutely no sense. I mean really, picasso baseball pictures, rhyming words with hiatus?

And now for the mfdc Top 5 most popular pages of the year, drum roll please…

  1. Caroline’s first pictures (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/caragrace/index.html) Was anyone surprise by this?
  2. Alex’s 7th Birthday Party (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/alexparty/index.html)
  3. Caroline’s 2nd set of pictures (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/caroline/index.html)
  4. Amanda and Ben’s Wedding (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/amandawedding/index.html)
  5. Andrew’s 4th Birthday (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/andrewparty/index.html)

Beauty Is…

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Every October or so the PTA at Alex’s school runs an art contest where students create a piece of artwork related to some theme. This year the theme was “Beauty Is…”, last year it was something like “Wow!”. They can choose from composing a song, choreographing a dance, painting, multimedia presentation, drawing, photograph, and the list goes on. Each year Alex has decided to do the photography and frankly I much prefer that since its much easier option then the other choices.

We went down to the Dallas Arboretum because they have a big Halloween setup each year and we figured that it should be easy to find something related to the “beauty is” theme there.

We got there, gave him the camera, and told him to go ahead and take as many pictures as he wanted that he thought related to the theme. About 60 seconds later I find he’s wandered off the path and has found his first picture….

Alex taking picture of a Mercedes

Very nice. Not exactly what I think the contest promoters had in mind.

He eventually decided on the picture of the koi pond since the white fish had a red mark that look exactly like a question mark.

Alex's picture of a koi pond

We heard this week that he received an honorable mention.

Andrew is really into taking pictures and for being only four years old he seems to have quite the eye. This is one that he took of the pumpkins and gourds that were on display.

Pumpkins and Gourds

I Would Really Appreciate That

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On our recent trip to New Orleans we stopped at a Cracker Barrel restaurant for lunch since it’s the kind of place that we can sit down and spend some time off the road and it gives Caroline a chance to stretch her legs and a place for us to easily feed her.

If your familiar with Cracker Barrel restaurants you know that to get to the eating area you have to walk through the “Old Country Store”. Before going in we always have the discussion with the boys that we are here for food, not toys, so just forget about it. You can look but that’s it. Andrew has a little problem with this and he’s always trying to angle for something.

After eating lunch we were walking around the store and the boys were looking at stuff and Alex started in with the whining. “I want a toy,” “I really wish I could just have this” holding up something or other. Of course we weren’t moved by this and were slightly annoyed but then we came across a bunch of the Invisible Ink activity books. They would be perfect for working on during the rest of the drive.

Jen showed Alex a couple of the them and even offered to get him one if he wanted. He got a really long face and complained some more how he wanted to get a toy instead so Jen told him that if he wasn’t going to appreciate the book then we didn’t have to get anything.

The whole time this was going on Andrew was watching and looking at some toys of his own. He picked up an old fashioned battery powered metal horse racing set and walked over to Jen and said,

“Mom, I would really appreciate this if you got it for me.”

I give him a perfect 10 for style points but he still didn’t get the horse racing set.

Happy (Post) Halloween

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As we have for the last couple of years we went over to a friends house for Halloween and we all went trick-or-treating through the neighbourhood.

Jen worked her magic again this year and got the boys and Caroline dressed up. Andrew started the ball rolling about a month back and said that he wanted to be Teddy Roosevelt from “Night at the Museum.” Alex kind of waffled back and forth for a while but in the end decided he wanted to be a Astronaut. Jen decided to keep the Night at the Museum theme going and dressed Caroline up as a little Sacajawea and I got to be Larry Daley, night watchman.

Us, dressed up as Night at the Museum Characters

Amanda & Ben Wedding – New Orleans Trip

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I feel like I’m way behind everyone else in getting pictures posted from Amanda and Ben’s wedding. Sunday morning after the wedding I woke up, was tooling around online and facebook informed me that “Ben” was tagged in a photo from his wedding the night before. I think we’ve received at least two other notifications from other people about their online albums of pictures. I can’t keep up anymore, I’m getting old.

It was a great trip to New Orleans. The boys got to go to the Zoo with Grandpa Bob, I took them to the Aquarium with my Mom, Peter, and good family friends Roy, Rhonda, and Marissa. And then of course there was the wedding to go to as well. On Sunday Bob, Ryan, Alex, and I went to the Saints-Giants game to top off the weekend. I could have probably used a day or so off after coming home just to recuperate.

I’ve finished with the pictures and finally got around to posting them. There are 6 pages broken out by event so some of the pages are a little larger then normal.

Take me to the wedding pictures