The Wedemeyer Family

I was born 27 years ago!

One day over lunch, I mentioned to one of the attorneys, who is also on the city council, that the U.S. should promote bicycle border crossings, maybe even with a bike lane. Several advantages: ease inspection for contraband/smuggled persons; help the environment; ease traffic congestion. Many people cross the congested, narrow two-lane bridge on bike, almost skimming the cars, and then they skip to the front of the waiting cars.

The attorney chuckled and told me about a Mexican “corrido” (folk song), that covers bicycle border crossers. According to the lyrics, there was once a man that always crossed the border on a bike and Customs always stopped and inspected him, but never found any contraband. Customs was highly suspicious of the man and they would check the bike frame and the wheels, but they could never find anything.

Finally one day, the customs agent told the man, “We know you are a smuggler, but we can’t figure out how you do it. If you tell us your secret, we will not arrest you and we’ll let you go free, we promise.”

The man replied, “I smuggle bicycles…”

I haven’t been posting much lately, but that’s because all my spare time is being spent working on my secret project.

Every computer programmer’s dream is to take a neat program and turn it into a million dollars. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and eBay are our inspiration. We’re all just waiting for the lightbulb to come on for our million dollar idea.

Luckily, with Sarah’s help, I had a great idea. Basically, it’s a social-networking site for Dungeons and Dragons players that will help them connect and manage their D&D games.

To keep track of my progress, take a look at The Obsidian Portal. This is the site that I’m working on. I hope to be recruiting beta-testers very soon. After a month or so of testing to make sure it’s stable, I’ll try to go live with it. At that point, I’ll get to see if I’ve got something valuable, or if I’ll just crash and burn.

So, that’s where I’m spending all my time and why I’m so quiet here lately. Perhaps I’ll try to document some of my progress here. It probably won’t make exciting reading, but it should be a nice glimpse into the world of a computer programmer on his own trying to make it to the big time.

Entering and leaving Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico:

A view from the international bridge in the morning. I walked across the bridge everyday to work in Eagle Pass. The Border Patrol were often parked in their flat-bottom air boats near the carrizo (tall grass) on the U.S. bank (left). On this morning, they were not present.

We visited Ale’s Uncle Dario in San Juan de Sabinas in early August 2006. San Juan de Sabinas is an “ejido,” a traditional Mexican farming collective. It is about two hours south of Piedras Negras. Dario lives in an adobe house on a large lot in town. Jacobo loves running around on the dusty lot with the beagle puppies, chickens, old implements and nopales cacti. Dario has a 10 acre “parcela” outside of town on which he grows two crops of corn per year. He uses a horse and plow, and harvests by hand. He shucks the ears by hand and uses a steel grinder to de-kernel the ears. He sells his harvest to rancheros and other “ejiditarios” with livestock. He always saves some kernels as seed for the next planting.

We spent a lazy Sunday afternoon with Dario, watching the sun set over the mountains to the west. We bought two kilos of fresh steak from the corner store, chopped it up and fried it with sliced onions to make some tacos. Dario had some tomatoes, chilis and cilantro with which he ground a fresh salsa. He warmed up some homemade corn tortillas on the “comal” hotplate. The tacos were excellent. We relaxed under the stars for a while until we left around midnight. We arrived in Piedras Negras about two in the morning and I went to work the next day.

I just wanted to let you all know about a terrific new drug I’ve discovered…Wellbutrin! Ahem, oh wait, no that was the message I was going to post to several other blogs.

Actually I wanted to officially sign in on wedemeyers.net and apologize to everyone we haven’t contacted in a long time. I wish I could say we’d be better about that in the near future, but I can’t.

Elesa is due in four weeks, but since Iris was born five weeks early, we are ready any time.

Iris is wonderful, pure joy. We love being her parents.

If you look at the sidebar, you’ll see that I have added a calendar and list of events. I was hoping to use this to track important dates such as birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, and such.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to set up recurring dates (yet), so the birthdays and anniversaries will not auto-reset each year. However, it’s still pretty useful, I think.

To add an event to the calendar is as easy as writing a blog posting. However, you’ll need to use the advanced editing controls to access the timestamp. Set the timestamp to the date and time of the event you wish to add. Then, make sure that the Events category is selected in the category box (to the right of the edit post box). That’s it! It should show up on the calendar and event list after that.

If you have any problems, here are a few things to check:

• Did you set the wrong date? That’s fine, just edit the post, click on “edit timestamp”, and select the correct date.
• Did you set the date in the past? If so, it won’t show up on the calendar in the future, obviously. Edit the date as stated previously.
• Did you select the Events category? If the event is on the front-page of the blog, but not the calendar, this is the most likely culprit.
• Is the event displaying on the blog and you don’t want it to? This means it probably is categorized under something in addition to Events (or a sub-category of Events). In this case, edit the post, deselect the other categories, and save it.
• Is the event on the calendar but not the list of events? This is OK. The list will only show the nearest 5 events in the future.

In any case, as always, just remember that almost everything is reversible. So, if you get hopelessly lost, let me know and I’ll try to get you back on track.

In case anyone cares, the software powering the calendar is EventCalendar 3.0