Tara and I tried to make it out to the Apple orchard near Stillwater, MN with the neighbors Ron, JJ, and Alla (sp?). Ashby, after visiting the Como Park Zoo the day before, had some terrible nightmares the night before, we think she was freaked out by the gorillas; so, she wasn’t up for the orchard, but later that day we visited the Coon Rapids Dam on the Mississippi river. It was pretty cool. The dam is actually these big inflated tubes that they deflate or inflate to facilitate water flow.

We headed out to the Como Zoo today. Ashby had a blast. I can’t believe how nice that place is and it’s essentially free! I’m not a fan of zoos, but they have a wonderful children’s amusement park with rides, some really nice children’s rides in fact. Not that Ashby is old enough to enjoy them. Anyway, check out Ashby’s little mushroom outfit. It’s awesome! Mushrooms good…Notice her hat even has little mushrooms hanging off it. We were stopped by four distinct women who wouldn’t stop talking about how damn cute Ashby is. Gerber baby…baby.

American Idol for entrepreneurs, here I go.

Tara, Ashby and I visited the Minnesota Historical Society today. It was really nice. Ashby really enjoyed being outside of the museum with a view of the state capitol, cathedral, and downtown. They had this wonderful exhibit titled: Open House: If These Walls Could Talk, which features a house there in St. Paul that was built in 1888 and has had 50 families reside in it. It was super cool! The first family was a German family, then Italians, then a mix, and now it’s inhabited by Hmong families. Quite a story.

There was a feature story about MindTouch on the front page of the business section in the Pioneer Press. MindTouch has had some incredible press in TechCrunch, Wired, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Information Week, and more. What makes this article so great is the . One of my typical “two thumbs up” shots with a huge shit-eating-grin. Hysterically funny; especially for the front page of the business section!

Ashby signed dog. Her first sign. She patted her leg to sign dog while at her grandparents house (Tommy and Brenda) when she saw ChaChi, their Yorkshire Terrier. I was in San Diego at the time for MindTouch and missed it, but Tara called me and told me the news.

My dad and Sally came into town ealier in the week. On the flight up they read about the Mill City Museum and suggested we stop by. Great suggestion. It gave me a chance to visit the new Guthrie Theater too. The museum was alright. It was interesting to learn the significance and history of St. Anthony Falls. What was really great was the observation point and finally seeing the interior of the new Guthrie. Ashby seemed to really enjoy herself too.

OpenGarden.org launched at OSCON 2006 in Portland Oregon. For some video, view the Port25 interview of Steve and me.

I also had the opportunity to meet Monty Widenius (below), co-founder of MySQL, what a great guy. He attended our MindTouch OpenGarden launch party.

On Wednesday at OSCON (booth 911), MindTouch is releasing DekiWiki – a MediaWiki fork which delivers a highly extensible, scalable and interoperable wiki. MindTouch DekiWiki is being released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), with libraries under LGPL. Built on MindTouch’s Dream framework, it is a service oriented architecture (SOA) that allows distribution of both data and _behavior_ across any device and platform, employs AJAX extensively to enrich the user experience, stores in XML, with Apache’s Lucene for search indexing. DekiWiki affords flexibility in the creation of highly distributed composite applications as well as providing an unmatched off-the-shelf collaborative space for business and organizations of all sizes. Stay tuned to www.opengarden.org for more details…

Look at the app, dig into the code, and see for yourself why this is going to cause fireworks.

I just discovered this, but I have to say, I’m a huge fan of Kill -9.