Damion:
Let's start this months news with the fish tank. Alfonso brought us a huge starfish that seems to be right at home in the tank. We designed a quick van wrap for him to help his business with advertising his services. Hope it helps. He's great with the tank service. No dead fish lately.

Last month I mentioned we were working on an online slot car game for a friend of ours. It's almost done and ironically enough, we picked up a new client last week that is a company named Racemasters. They distribute a series of slot car tracks for a company called AFX. We're helping redesign their packaging. Pix posted on Facebook and this site next month.

I got a bike trailer for Ryan and we've just been waiting for a sunny weekend day to go for a spin. Looks like another rainy weekend coming up though. Hopefully I can get a break where the sun comes out and I can take him for a spin thru the neighborhood.

Last month I beat the great Jim Facciuto at golf not once, but twice. I'm not ready for the PGA tour but I think I may start betting money with him next game. Hopefully, he's not setting me up.

I also bought a used MacBook Pro on Craigs List and got my old laptop screen fixed. I got a new hard drive for free but that's a whole another story...
-Damion

Kenny:
I started off my February off with a bang. I drove up to Mammoth after work on a rainy Friday night. And yep, it was pouring down pretty hard, and that means I'd be driving up in a snow storm as well. After leaving Orange County at 8PM, I finally arrived in Mammoth at 2AM. The drive was well worth the fresh pow and tree runs all weekend long. All this despite my cracked rib, and tail bone from a bad fall off a dirt bike 2 weeks before. Ahhh... the lengths I go to for snowboarding on fresh pow!

Lately I've been doing some house hunting. It's simultaneously exciting and discouraging. I'm just looking for a small little place to call my own. Well.. and possibly sharing with a roommate. Damion doesn't pay me enough to afford a mortgage on my own. hint hint! Other than that, I just bought a plug-n-play Deer Hunter Hero game that I keep at the office. If there was any down time for these guys, they are welcome to plug in the game in our front lobby, and practice shoot'en deer. Minus the chewing tobacco, NASCAR hat, and camo. I apologize if this might offend any of our fury friend lovers and vegetarian friends and family. Besides, it's just a game!

Colin:
It's been a weird month with the weather and all. My strawberry plants don't know if it's spring or still winter, so they're making half-assed berries. They look retarded, but they still taste okay. I got a great recipe for Chicago deep dish pizza from Cook's Illustrated. I think it's the greatest food I've ever made.

My girlfriend and I went to downtown Pomona for the monthly artwalk. The artwork wasn't too extraordinary, but as we were walking up the street I noticed a McCain - Palin sign hanging on a building. It seemed weird since the election was over a year ago. Then we saw an Obama sign and a huge spotlight on the other side of the street. Looks like they were filming a movie about the election. We even saw the actor playing Obama hanging out by a catering table. We couldn't help but laugh about it!

We took another day trip out to Prado Regional Park which is essentially a huge swamp. The view was nice though across the glowing, green grass on the hills. We noticed a great blue heron perched in a nest on top of tree. Then another, and then about ten more. Evidently this area is an important nesting area for the regional waterfowl, and a home to many wild animals. Let's keep it clean folks!

Kyle:
This month started out with an impromptu weekend road trip up to San Francisco. The mission of the trip was to get some clam chowder in a bread bowl and oh man, the several hundred mile trip was worth it, there is nothing on this earth that can warm you up like clam chowder in a bread bowl on the Santa Cruz pier. Along the way my girlfriend and I spent the day in downtown, checking out all the shops along Main Street and the home of the Banana Slugs, UCSC. We spent the night in a campground just south of the city. Finally we made our way up to a friend’s house in S.F., played some hacky sack in Delores Park, walked around checked out some super cool bike shops, which inspired me to get a new frame, a Soma Double Cross DC which I should have built up by the end of March.

Steve:
I've been working (as time allows) on a couple of personal projects, such as a project task tracker which I hope to eventually add multi-user features to, and a FTP analysis engine in C#. Both are less than feature complete at the moment, but I still use them in day to day operations here at the office.

The FTP analysis engine (called FTPspector) is a simple program that will let me log into a FTP and get a parse-able recursive file listing output to a file. From this file, I can extract user/group and permission information and determine file creation times. There are two primary usage scenarios: Firstmost, It's great to have a fingerprint of a site hierarchy before and after and be able to pipe them into a Diff tool (like Winmerge) to quickly determine which files on a site have been modified/added/deleted, and when. This is especially invaluable when a site is compromised and a scorched-earth approach is off the table. The other use is for when a site needs to be transferred, no shell is available and permissions need to be correct. I have the ability to parse out the permissions of the file hierarchy and reconstitute them over FTP after storing the files in a permission-agnostic system (e.g. Windows).

As far as version control goes, after using subversion and TortoiseSVN for my personal and synchronized projects for a while, I decided to give Mercurial a try after reading Joel Spolsky's intro to it over at http://hginit.com. Flash files running off a network drive seem to have problems, but I expect that is more of an issue with CS4's nonstandard mapped drive I/O - I haven't had a problem with anything else. Merging and branching are made a lot easier, and it's really a lot easier to create repositories. Hopefully I can convince the office to use it for the next mega-project (if there's a nice GUI for Mac, that is)

Billi:
February was a blur of constant questioning "are we crazy for doing this?". For my little family (four members strong), it was a non-stop month full of travel, hosting company and putting on 4-year-old birthday party. I think we were able to visit with every member of our extended family this month. I'm proud to say we've made it to March barely bruised. On our trip to Florida I was happy to have my iphone with me and was able to answer some important emails while still enjoying time on the beach with my kids. love that!

I recently put shelves up in my office and am finally ready to organize. I'm looking at them now and they're still empty, but by next "monthly news" I am certain they will be neatly full of everything I need within reach and my collective 'piles' will be gone. "who's with me?"

I'm ready for Spring.

In case any of you are wondering "should I serve beer at a 4 year-old's party?" the answer is yes! It was the first beverage we ran out of.

Rick:
Added to my art collection this month with the completion of "Sticky Fingers" a 48" x 48" mixed media on canvas.
It's looking like geckos will be the spring line-up, with a couple other left turns thrown in to keep my wife off balance.
Thanks to all the rain I have had to pull weeds more than I would like, I think like, pulling weeds, honey do's, garbage cans,
and many other distracting projects is the culprit of bad golf scores on the weekend. Like many of you out there I too feel with just a little more focus and diverting more of my family budget to golf practice I could turn pro next week for sure....... oh what !! Hey Damion.. What's that ?? Get Back To WORK!!

--Rick