This is great news. I was having a conversation related to this the other week with my dad. He's refusing to sign up for yet another account with another service just to comment on blogs. He's not the only one getting sick of signing up for accounts for everything.

OpenID is a portable username and password you can use across multiple sites. If you have an account on AOL/AIM account, livejournal account, or a variety of other services, you have an OpenID. What that means is you can use this to log onto other sites. More and more sites are implementing OpenID which is great for those of us sick of registering for so many usernames and passwords for so many different sites.

On the Blogger Blog they have a post describing how to enable OpenID Commenting and how to post comments so I'm not going to repeat that here. But this is my personal plea to everyone I know using blogger for their blog (that's a lot of you), please, please, please go and update your setting and change who can comment on your blog to "Registered Users - includes OpenID."

Happy New Year! As we begin 2008 and everyone is making resolutions, I've decided to take a look back at 2007.

1. 

   Mark and Kim's Wedding

   January 2007 we were in Columbus for my cousin Mark's wedding. Mark and Kim had a beautiful wedding and it was great getting to hang out with family members.

2. 

   Trip to Disney

   In February Chris had to go down to Orlando to support the Women in Aviation Conference. I joined him after the conference for a long weekend. We visited Epcot and the Animal Kingdom and had an excellent meal at Jiko.

3. 

   Web 2.0 Expo

   My first trip to San Francisco was for the Web 2.0 Expo. I went out with some of my colleagues and had the opportunity to see some sights and learn a few things about Web 2.0 (although I think I learned more about my colleagues).

4. 

   Work

   Well, this is the first year in a long time I haven't looked for a job or not been happy with my job. I did change positions, but not companies. I had the opportunity to work on a bunch of cool projects with a bunch of cool people, including my first ruby on rails project, CircaVie.

5. 

   Agility

   Cisco and Berkley continued to take agility classes and even managed to get a ribbon or two. I joined the TAG club and had two long weekends (one in May and one in August) helping with their trials - both which were very successful.

6. 

   BarCampDC

   One of the many tech events I attended this year was BarCamp DC. I also have gotten involved with the DC tech community in attending Refresh DC meetings, semi-regularly. I'm hoping to be more involved in the coming year and am starting off the year attending WidgetDevCamp this month.

7. 

   Alaska

   As if I haven't talked about it enough. We had a once in a lifetime vacation to Alaska with both my parents and Chris' parents. If you haven't heard about our Alaska trip, search this blog, look at the photos on flickr, or ask us.

8. Uncle Eddie and Auntie Marianne

   The end of the year we had the opportunity to hang out again with extended family, but unfortunately it was for less happy reasons. We lost two family members between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They will be missed greatly.

9. 

   Babies

   The last big event of the year was the birth of our friends Kelly and Matt's baby girl. Many of my friends had children this year and I'm looking forward to watching them grow.

Before Christmas we lost my Aunt Marianne unexpectedly. She is the first of my mom's siblings to go.

My aunt was a unique person. She was a nurse, she loved to travel, she loved her family and friends.

I have quite a few memories of my aunt. We stayed with her on numerous visits to Cleveland from probably when I was in junior high (or maybe even earlier) though college. I used to get hand-me down clothes from her. When I was in high school, she got on my case about my messy room when we were emptying my closet so that my Uncle Al could lay new carpet. She took care of me the morning after my wedding when the excitement from the day before and the nerves of traveling got to me. We had a really great conversation that day, I wish I remembered more of it.

I had the opportunity to stay with her a few weeks prior when I was in Cleveland for my Uncle Eddie's funeral. My aunt told me while we were waiting to go to the funeral, "you know Kel, God takes you in your most perfect moment." I guess it was her most perfect moment.

Rest in peace, Aunt Marianne.

And Happy Holidays to everyone.

We had a relaxing Christmas Eve -- having pasta for dinner, watching a movie, and giving the dogs Frosty Paws to celebrate Cisco's birthday.

Christmas day we headed to West Virginia to celebrate with my parents after opening our presents at home. Along with the typical presents opening and meal eating, we also disassembled a 10 year old Apple Pro Keyboard and put it through the dishwasher and solved other computer issues.

The Alaska Book was a huge hit with everyone. Yay!

Life always gets so busy this time of year. So I figured I'd give a quick update of what's been going on around here.

December started with a quick visit from Chris' parents and me off to Cleveland for a final goodbye to my Uncle Ed. The rest of the month has been a bit of a blur.

Some of the highlights include Chris getting a new car (yes, I finally caved, but the threat of expensive repair bills looming overhead got to me), Missy and PJ's annual holiday potluck, unexpectedly running into Missy and PJ the following weekend at the holiday party of one of Chris' boss,' and finally getting ornaments on the tree. On the work front I've been busy working on a new project, learning more Ruby on Rails, and crashing my own holiday party (going as Tony's guest since I didn't RSVP myself).

On a sad note, my Aunt Marianne died unexpectedly this weekend. Last I heard funeral arrangements were still being made, but I may be headed back up to Cleveland later this week.

My Uncle Ed died yesterday. He was one of my favorite uncles (although they're all favorites for different reasons).

I have lots of memories of my Uncle Ed. He and my Aunt Bernie were the ones that visited us the most growing up. My uncle always knew where he was going and how to get there. He always treated everyone with great kindness and respect. He was very proud of his Slovak heritage and was one of the few people that would tell me how to say things in Slovak (I wish I had payed more attention). I can attribute my love of muenster cheese to him as well.

One of my favorite memories of Uncle Ed was when I was in grade school. Mom and Dad dropped us off in Cleveland and headed to Hawaii. We spent a week exploring Cleveland with my Uncle. Walking around parks and along the shores of Lake Erie with him. We were never in a hurry as we wandered and we had plenty of time to take in the scenery.

My Aunt and Uncle had been married for just over 53 years. They have three children and three grandchildren who mean the world to them. I know he's in a better place. But there's a bunch of us back here that will miss him greatly. I love you Uncle Ed.

We now have three brackets from Restoration Hardware. We were charged a different price for each of these three brackets. Long story short, we should be getting credit for one bracket which we don't need/didn't order and shipping refunded on the other completing the set we needed.

In the process of all of this I logged into my Citibank Credit Card account to see if we had been refunded the shipping we were told we were being refunded last week. (We hadn't been.) However, I was greeted with a nice red, bold message "A review of this account has shown recent high- risk activity. Please contact our Customer Service Unit ..."

Uh Oh, that can't be good. Now every time we buy a computer, we get home and there is a message on the answering machine from Discover wanting to verify we made the purchase. Yes, slightly annoying, but we don't use our Discover Card that much and a computer is a fairly large purchase so I'm willing to deal with that. I'm curious about my high-risk activity message, but thinking it can't be that serious since they didn't call. I decide to search the web for my message before calling, and find a couple of blog posts which lead me to believe, it's nothing major. I call Citibank. The high-risk activity was apparently two $22.00 charges from Dave & Busters last night. Awesome.

We had met up with Patrick and his wife Marsha last night. Chris (and I) had worked with Patrick back at ORBCOMM and hadn't seen them since our wedding and who knows when before that. It was nice having the opportunity to catch up. Hopefully it won't be another three years before we see them again.

I've done a couple of birth announcements this summer. Julia:

Lily's mom saw the birth announcement I had done for Lilly and asked me to do one similiar for her Lily who was due a few months later.

I'm joining the crowd a little bit late and turning this blog Pink for October.

Why pink? And why October? October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Websites are turning pink for the month to call attention to and get people talking about the issue.

What can you do?

• Turn your website or blog pink for the month. Or add a badge.
• Make a donation towards supporting breast cancer research
• Learn about and/or help spread the word about breast cancer and how it affects thousands of women each year.
• Find other unique ways to get involved. (Right now posting a picture on Flickr can get a dollar donation to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure.)

All the pictures are up from Alaska. The really don't do it justice. Chris looked at them and basically said they sucked in comparison to what we saw. There is nothing like being there and seeing it with your own eyes.

The photos can be found at:

• My 101 favorite photos
• All 577 photos I decided to upload to Flickr
• A more organized collection of all the photos

We're back! I'm still trying to get off of Alaska time and get my thoughts and photos in order. I'll be slowly going through my pictures and getting them uploaded over the next week or so (I took way too many pictures). I'll let you know when they're all up. In the meantime, I've started a timeline on CircaVie and have added some of the video snipets I took with my camera. I'll continue to add pictures and links to slide shows as they become available as another way to document our vacation.

I got tagged by Kerry in blog tag. What is it? I have to tell you 8 things that you don't know about me - and then I tag 8 different bloggers and they do the same!!

8 Random things you may not know about me

1. My first computer was a hand me down TRS-80 when I was like 8 or 9.
2. I broke my ankle playing softball and my finger playing soccer growing up -- both required screws to put me back together.
3. My first "design gig" was doing band programs in 6th grade. (Thanks dad.)
4. I got through an engineering program using macs before macs were cool. (68040 processors anyone?)
5. My dogs have been in training for over five years and don't know how to shake or rollover (they do however know right and left).
6. I have worked with my husband (who recently told me he isn't mentioned here enough) at four different companies.
7. My first cell phone plan was $14.99/month for 15 minutes. I still talk on the phone like it costs me $1/minute. I'm trying to get over that.
8. I have many irrational fears including public speaking, falling downstairs, and fish.

Now I'm tagging my dad, my mom (yup, you need to update your blog), Kate, Megan, Laura, Tony, Bill, and Jeff. Your turn.

Summer is over. It's back to snarrled traffic tomorrow. But yay for a short week. We had a nice relaxing Labor Day weekend. This weekend and last have been pretty low key, which has been nice after the craziness of most of August. I got a chance to hang out and go shopping with my friend Sara on Saturday, and today I had coffee with my friend Kelly. Today finished with dinner with my parents at Casa G's and laundry.

There is a new technology network in DC launched by Justin Thorp. If you're in the DC area and interested in web and technology, I highly suggest checking out the DC Technology Network. The fine folks that brought us the super-fantastic BarCamp DC are involved, so I'm sure we'll see great stuff out of this group in the near future.

I've been playing with Tangerine! for creating new play lists for my iPod/iTunes library. Tangerine! Analyzies the beats per minute and intensity of the beat of music in your iTunes library and then based on a set of criteria you define, it'll create playlists for you. I've been enjoying the playlists that it created — something I never get around to doing myself.

I purchased some photographs of Cisco from an agility trial he ran in. I hate doing it but, since you're running with your dogs, it's kind of hard to take pictures of them yourself. They arrived today and I'm a bit disappointed. Not only is there significant pixelation around Cisco's feathers, but the photographer's logo is on them (nothing about this is mentioned on the website), a sticker appears on the back of them stating copyright all rights reserved, and there is a sticker on the packaging stating they're copyrighted, and any unauthorized reproduction of these photos is punishable under the copyright laws of the US. Ok, I get it.

I have in the past posted photos of Cisco and Berkley I've purchased from trial photographers on this blog. Sorry, readers you'll have to find me in person to see these. I've also been able to buy the digital images from other agility photographers (yes, there actually are people who specialize in this area of photography). I've given these photographers credit when I post pics from them. I did e-mail this photographer a while back and ask if I could purchase digital images (I have this idea of creating a digital photo book of their agility careers once they retire), I never got a response back.

I understand the right of photographers to copyright their work. I understand that they need to make a living.

By paying for the image, I would like the ability to do the following:

• Display the image in my home -- either frame on in a photo album, sans logo or other watermark.
• Show off my dogs on my blog or personal website giving credit to the photographer (hey free advertising for them!)
• The ability to use the photos for my own personal use -- like the photobook I talked about earlier.

I wouldn't expect to be able to without prior approval from the photographer:

• Duplicate and distribute for commercial or promotional use
• Allow to be published in a magazine or other publication
• Sell copies of or any work derived from said photo
• Used in part of a design (either print or web based)

So for anyone that's still reading, I know the line between the sides is a bit blurred, but what are your thoughts? What should the expecations of the photographer be and what are fair expecations of those that purchase the image?

This past weekend was TAG's August trial at the Dulles Sportsplex in Sterling. It was a long weekend that started Friday night with set-up. We couldn't get into one of the rings until 10:45 for set-up which meant we didn't get done until 11:30 or so. I got home shortly after midnight and crashed.

Saturday was an early morning with the alarm going off about 5:30. Cisco and I headed out early that morning and didn't get back until close to midnight again. TAG had around 1100 runs on Saturday between the two rings with the last dog running around 9pm. Cisco was supposed to run in 5 classes, but I pulled him from his last run. He didn't qualify in any of his runs, but I can't complain. He was clean in steeplechase, but over time. I still need to figure out what makes him pokey at times. Cisco did get a massage towards the end of the day. Kim didn't find any soreness or tenderness and she said he has killer hamstrings.

We were back at it 6am Sunday. Sunday's standard run started out slow with Cisco barely getting on the dog walk and blowing off the teeter. After that things picked up. We qualified in advanced gamblers our first time out. And completed our last leg towards on starters jumpers title with probably our faster run of the weekend. I also had my first taste of running a border collie in agility when I got to run a very sweet girl Jossie. Turns out my run with Jossie got her a very pretty green ribbon (her Agility Dog title). Yay! Jossie! We finished clean up about 8pm Sunday night. It was a long, but rewarding weekend. But I'm so glad I don't have to work another trial until May.

This was the first show we used MAD agility equipment for. Major props to Jen and Mark for their hardwork and help this weekend. They were a pleasure to work with.