Watch D.O.G.S.

Yesterday for the third year in a row I was a Watch Dog at my sons elementary school.

If you never heard of this program I encourage you to check out their web site. Watch D.O.G.S. (Dads Of Great Students) is an organization that was started by Jim Moore in response to the 1998 middle school shooting in Jonesboro, AR. It’s an initiative of the National Center for Fathering and the program goal is:

To help every school in America be positively influenced by the committed involvement of fathers and father figures in lives of their children and students.

As always the administration at my sons school was great. They had my schedule for the day waiting at the front desk when I arrived in the morning. The day was full of attending classes and helping students with various tasks. Everything from reading, spelling test and helping special needs students with getting paper that needed recycling. I also helped in the cafeteria during lunch hour.

I make sure that my Watch Dogs day is on the same day as my sons birthday. That way I know what day I’m suppose to be there and my son loves having his “pappa” there that day. They make sure you have at least part of your day in your child’s class room.

It is very fulfilling to take a day and do this every year. Everybody at the school are so appreciative to you all day. The students, teachers and other personnel at the school love you being there, and they tell you all day.

I encourage you to try this out. Talk to your kids school administration to influence them to add this program if they don’t already have it. I promise, it’s worth it.

After CU I flew over to Västerås, Sweden to visit my family over there. 5 days of visiting with my father and mother and siblings was just great. In only a few days I managed to eat both moose, Swedish craw fish and Swedish roe deer. All superbly prepared by my sister and sister-in-law. The chanterelle sauce that we had with the roe deer was unbelievable.

Monday evening I left Sweden and flew back to London where Carl Tyler picked my up at the airport and I got to spend a couple of nights with his parents outside London. Tuesday we went to Oxford where we walked around for a few hours looking at the old universities there. Very nice. Thank you Carl (and Carl’s parents) for a couple of wonderful days.

It is great to be out on these speaker engagements and visit friends you only see a few times a year but boy is it nice to back home with family again.

Here at SNAPPS I’ve been extremely busy preparing for my sessions at Lotusphere. I’ve already posted about them here. If you have a chance to attend Lotusphere this year, and are using Domino, I think this will be the most exciting one in years. If you see me in the halls, come up and introduce yourself. I love meeting new people.

December ended very hectic with my youngest son Erik’s first birthday and later Christmas with in-laws visiting. A great time with family and lots of great food.

I know a lot of you are waiting for my update of the Dojo Calendar to work with the Dojo Toolkit 1.0 and beyond. I’m working hard to have it out there for you soon. I’ve been very busy with “real” work, but I have a working copy so all I can say is soon.

Speaking of the Dojo Calendar. I have decided to make it work with dojo.data. To make the calendar get information from many different resources is important and the Dojo data stores make that more convenient using the same API no matter what the source is.

I hope I see you at Lotusphere.

First there is Collaboration University for Lotus Notes & Domino in both Kansas City, September 10-12, and in London, September 19-21. On the 22nd Troy Reimer and I travel to Sweden for a couple of days of vacation but also to speak at g33k on the 24th. Ekakan is the host once again for this “Geek Meet”. I know we will have lots of fun there and nice to meet some Swedes I haven’t seen in a long time, or never. It will also be fun to show of Stockholm and Västerås to Troy since he has never been to Sweden. We are spending all day in Stockholm that Monday and I’m thinking that the Wasa museum, Gamla Stan (Old Town) and Skansen will be a great day. If you have any other suggestions please feel free to comment below.

On the 26th and 27th I travel back, first to London then back to Kansas City. Home for 2 days and I’m off to Miami on the 29th for the Advisor Summit. Back home on the 4th of October and there was all September and the beginning of October gone.

See you there.

It was great to visit with my family in Sweden. I stayed most of the time at my sister’s, but also a couple of nights at my brothers house. I’m coming back in September and my dad said if I didn’t stop running in and out like this he had to install saloon doors on the house.

It was however very nice to come back to my family here. Two weeks is way too long to be apart from your family. Beth, Jakob, Emma and Erik all waited at the airport and gave me lots of hugs and kisses.

If you don’t see any new postings here for the next couple of weeks you know why.

When you say Nothing at all – Alison Krauss

Happy National Day Sweden

Today, my son Erik turns 12 weeks old. Erik is growing and is already close to 17 lbs (37 kg). Everybody in the Krantz family are doing just great, after a couple of weeks of stomach flu and what not. I don’t have a more recent picture of Erik on my laptop, so this one will due. Our home computer crashed a week ago but new motherboard, CPU and 320 Gb hard drive arrive from Newegg today. The picture is taken just moments after he was born on the 15th of December, 2006.

Have a great weekend everybody.