Sam enjoying the Old Town Court House fountain before dinner. More soon... 

Momma, Dylan, Sam and I went down to Old Town for dinner and to see the LST (Landing Ship Tank) 325 that was in harbor today. This is one of the very last LST's that assaulted Omaha Beach in WWII still floating. It was part of the Greek Navy for the last 40 years but was recently sent back to the US, restored and making the east coast tour this summer.

Here are the losers of the 10th annual Irish Open, played at Poolesville today. Jud and I spanked the young twosome by three holes even with a hard charge at the end. Better luck next year boys.... 

The boys got bubble mowers yesterday before we went to Wendy's Memorial Day party. Wendy lives accross the street and has a new fountain in the back yard. Sam and Dylan figured it was more of a baby pool and got soaked. We went to the pool today but the water was a little chilly for Mommy and Papa to get in. The boys loved it. I'm going to put a bunch of shots up from this weekend in my flickr account. You can access it by going to www.durpenters.org and clicking on one of the pictures on the right side of the site. More soon..

Haircut

Sam

Haircut

Dylan

Happy hour

Fado

So I'm back from WSJ conference in Carlsbad and pretty recovered from the 6am flight I had yesterday. I definately feel refreshed with ideas on how to continue moving AARP toward the future of digital publishing and service. Lots of great information and innovative thought. Scott McNealy talked about how he felt that the computer of the future will be a thin client (nothing more than a screen, keyboard, radio) and the network itself will have the power. This would mean small light weight devices with universal, super fast network connections with unlimited storage and shared applications. While Negroponte is saying each computer in the world will be a client and a server making up a "mesh" network. It'll be fun to see who's right. 

The grounds of the Four Seasons. 

On my way home

I'm on the plane at 6am California time and really tired. The conference was great and I met a bunch good people. Barry Diller was very entertaining and insightful yesterday as he talked about the companies he buys and how he determines value. I think the big theme of the three days was that technology is finally causing big changes in the mainstream media businesses and dis-intemediation is give consumers more options and the traditional media companies heartburn.

Still lots of hurdles to "being digital" to steal negroponte's book title but its getting closer.

I haven't had much luck uploading photos to the blog this week. I think it was a bandwidth issue at the hotel. The Four Seasons is a great property but I have to dig them on the broadband internet issue.

More soon

Mark Carpenter
General Manager and Director
Web Strategy and Operations
www.aarp.org
--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld (www.BlackBerry.net)

Session on Blogging

This morning we had a lively discussion on bloggin with Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette), Mena Trott (Six Apart), and Dan Gillmor (Grassroots Media). Great discussion about how blogs are a great alternative to main stream media while some in the audience felt they were mostly a irresponsible echo chamber.

I thing the truth is that good journalism is drowned out by all the noise on the Internet. Their seems to be a battle going on between the traditional media outlets and the low barrier to entry blog space.

Mena noted that their has been an explosion of blogging but while their are some big, well read blogs, the average blog has six readers, just like mine.

They talked a little about pod casting and all agreed that it is probably not going to take off. Video blogging could turn everyone into John Daily or Walter Cronkite down the road. The covergence of huge amounts of open bandwith, cheap technology and disatisfaction in traditional media is causing big problems for the big media guys.

More soon.

Mark Carpenter
General Manager and Director
Web Strategy and Operations
www.aarp.org
--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld (www.BlackBerry.net)

Here's Bill Gates at the reception for D3. He was very nice and acknowledged that he will soon be joining AARP. I guess the tech industry has come of age. While Bill may be the richest man in the world, Steve Jobs is still more interesting. He was interviewed by Walt Mossberg at dinner tonight and had some facinating things to say about digital convergence as if it wasn't even and issue to him. Basically, he was saying that the future is was apon us, it just hasn't been uniformly distributed. Really good stuff. Bill is being interviewed at 8am so I must go to bed.. I met up with Ellen Levy from Stanford's Media X group at the after hours party tonight and talked about all the great innovative things going on with AARP right now. Things are looking up... More soon. 

Flying toward the setting sun made this engine look all glowing. Below is New Mexico or West Texas. Beautiful weather out here. Nicole and the boys need to come next year. 

Inside all day

Wrestling

We went out to celebrate the aarp.org site launch at the ESPN Zone, down the street from AARP. Good times all around and this is the last of the crew to toast this huge accomplishment. We had roughly 45 WSO'ers and other special client and associated guests. A much needed break from all the hard work the staff has been doing to launch this thing. More soon....

Metro

Going home

Here I am with my brother and cousins in the mid 70's sometime. I don't know why we are posing in grasslands and what the heck I'm doing. It kind of looks like a 70's rock band album cover. Rock on... 

In case I run out of time tonight, I wanted to get this post up with the link to the photos from yesterday. http://www.durpenters.org/Day%20at%20the%20Races%20-%20Potomac%20Hunt%20Club/index.html

Some good shots of the boys, Nicole and some old familiar faces and some not so familiar ones. It was a good day but we got all tired out chasing the boys around the field for 4 hours. We didn't have much time to catch up with our friends but hey, they were chasing their own kids.

More Soon....

Super hot.. 

Ok, here's an important reason why you should never pick your nose in public. That's me on the left in this newly discovered photo from my uncle Tom's collection. My cousin Tony recently took a bunch of his slides and had them digitized for all to enjoy. Joining me on the steps are my Mom, my brother Jeff and sister Rachel as well as Grandma Mae. Going to the races today. More soon....

Crystal light

Cool light

Tallula

Happy birthday

In case I can't get a post in tonight, here goes. We had cake and champagne with the boys for Nicole's birthday. Her and I are going out for dinner now and Linda and Gil are going to watch the boys. It just rained really hard so I hope that's done with since we will have to walk a little to get to dinner. Boys are wearing the new baseball pajama's Aunt Elaine set this week. Very fasionable. Maybe a cameraphone picture later but I should have some good shots later tomorrow afternoon.

Later...

Post wdi

@ the chop

Volunteering at the Carpenter's Shelter was nice this morning. We had a great crew from AARP and finished everything they asked us to do by around noon. I'm back in the office trying to help as we continue to roll out the new site. Lots of little details everyone is working on but the crew is pretty pleased we have finally finished it. Linda and Gil are in town for Nicole's birthday and will be watching the boys on Saturday night so we can go out. We are also suppose to go to a steeplechase this weekend and that should be a good picture taking opportunity. The boys and horses, good stuff..

More soon...

Volunteer day

Day of service

It's alive! Yes, 17 months of work from our agency, staff, consultants and me to launch the new and improved www.aarp.org . This is a whole new beast from the CMS, design to the navigation. We still have work to do and things to add but it's up and out there for people to use. My team had a crap load of problems to overcome getting this out the door and I've never been prouder of them for sticking to it through all the complicated issues and obstacles. They rock!

Last night was a beautiful night for a ball game. The twins pulled out back to back homers in the 10th inning to beat the O's 6-4. Modean picked up some nice complimentary club level seats and he, Patty, Jud, Whitey, Carol and I watched from this vantage point. Tomorrow is AARP's Day of Service so Nicole and I will be schleping stuff at the Carpenter's Shelter in Old Town Alexandria. It's nice they named it after me. More soon... 

More Pictures from Sunday

Kumie got some nice shots from Sunday too. In fact, she seems to have quite an eye for the boys. Take a look at them and I’ll add a link to durpenters.org when I get a chance.

http://www.tighttrousers.com/gallery/WRP/

More soon….

We had a really nice day on Sunday with the boys and Joseph and Kumie. We spent almost 4 hours at Wheaton Park in Silver Spring Maryland right near where little Kumie grew up. The park had a merry go round (up and down horse), Choo Choo Train, botanical garden and a huge play area with all sorts of slides, swings and climbing apparatus.

The weather was perfect and I think the day qualified for what Mary Carpenter calls a “Golden Afternoon”. She was showing me some pictures of her and Ollie a while back and explained how the day felt. You get one of those every once in a while and it’s great to have it in pictures. I’ve posted about 35 of the shots on http://www.durpenters.org/ .

You should be able to get there directly with this link.

http://www.durpenters.org/Mothers%20Day%202005/

If not, use the main one above. More soon.......

Sam and Dylan with the flowers they got mama on Friday. I guess Blanca actually got them but the card was from the boys. More soon. 

Tee time

Golf at 6:30 am

Sending a message.

Blackberry sam

Some people were interested in how the water proofing work in the basement went. Well, it appears to be working after a big mess. The crew came a couple weeks ago and in two days dug a trench all the way around the basement wall about two feet deep, installed gravel and pipe leading to two sump pumps on either side of the utility room. To do this, they also had to cut up the wall about 2 feet and cut through room walls. Needless to say, it's still a mess down there but we are talking to contractors now and are planning on adding a shower to the bathroom, fix and paint the walls, install a new floor and build a storage closet. Then we will get some new furniture and turn it into a giant kids room. I hope it's all done by August.  

The post below was sent with my camera phone last Wednesday night. I was in a cab going to the hotel from the Rainbow room. I have no idea why it took 5 days to show up on the blog. Lost in the cyberspace somewhere. Where do images go when sent but not received? Did it circle the globe hitting thousands of web servers looking for the right place to land? I don't know and it's just a average image anyway. Good night...

Another cab

Going home

Dylan did not sleep last night and kicked me in the back for about two hours because he wouldn't stay in his bed. In fact, both Sam and Dylan were in bed with us by this morning. Here's Dylan with bed head waking up as if nothing happened. More soon. 

Sammy playing on my golf clubs when I got home today. Dylan and Sam both enjoyed riding my rolling luggage after I got out of the Taxi Car.. Linda was just leaving to have dinner with Kathy so we all played outside for a while before Grandma left. It was very nice of her to stay this week and we'll see her again in a couple. 

Leaving Las Vegas

Ok, it's 7am and I'm at the airport sitting at a bar eating a little breakfast. Two older, already tanked guys sit down next to me and ask the bartender to filll their flasks for the flight. She explains that a shots are like 7 bucks and filling two flasks will be a little pricey. Now I happen to know that drinks on the plane are 5 bucks so this clearly does not make sense. They end up buying 10 shots a piece but are too unstable to pour the shots into the flasks from the plasic cup the bartender pours the vodka into. The bartender does this for them and then they order two double shot bloody mary's. This is an example of bad decision making that Las Vegas thrives on. They are going to have a nice flight. I hope to god they aren't going to DC.

Saw Bon Jovi last night at the Hard Rock Hotel. I forgot that they have some really good songs and they played them extremely well. It was a breath of fresh air after seeing Big Elvis the day before.

Can't wait to get home.

More soon....

Mark Carpenter
General Manager and Director
Web Strategy and Operations
www.aarp.org
--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld (www.BlackBerry.net)

Bon jovi

@ the hard rock