Category Archives: General

Stuff I haven’t put elsewhere… yet!

A Three-Legged Dog

Molly and Beck went to Illinois today to attempt completing her Rally Novice title. Beck was quite nervous, as she hadn’t gotten a lot of practice in with Molly. However….

She completed her third leg! Not only that, she took first place in her classification. I’m thrilled for them both, and really pleased Beck put a title on Molly. She’s been wanting to do that for a while, and I know she’s happy that she was able to do that with Molly.

Tomorrow, they go again to Illinois to run the course. This time though, there’s no pressure, and they can just enjoy themselves!

Two-Legged Dog

This weekend, Becky and Molly went for their first Rally Competition, held in Sullivan MO. I wasn’t there, but I am told that both canine and human did well, and came back with spoils from their campaign.

On Saturday, Molly scored an 84, and took second place. On Sunday, there was more competition, and despite Molly scoring 89 (which would’ve been first place on Saturday), she took fourth. The good news is that those scores are good enough to give her two legs of the three required for a Rally Novice title.

Beck’s really been wanting to do this with Molly, and I’m just thrilled that they pulled this off!

Returned

On June 10th, I wrote about our pastor’s trip to Kenya, and the theft of a backpack containing a number of replaceable things — laptop, money, passport — and the Bible Charles had been preaching from for decades. Years and years of notes were lost. Or so we all thought.

Charles and a group from the church were planning a second trip to Kenya, planning to leave just a couple of weeks ago. A few days before the trip, Charles got a call from Kenya, telling him that his Bible had been recovered! On Tuesday, in a village in Kenya, Charles was reunited with what he called “the other half of his brain” when two officials, appropriately named Esther and Moses, returned it to him. Today, he preached again to us from that Bible, and you could see the joy in his face to have the notes collected in his ministry back with him.

What a tremendous story. I just can’t help but wonder about the journey that his Bible took, and if perhaps, it touched some lives along the way.

Podcasts

I’ve got a gazillion other things to write about tonight, and I’ll probably get ’round to them before the night’s out, but I wanted to first write about podcasts.

Now, I’m (at times, and arguably) one of the sharper crayons in the box — not as sharp as that crazy crayon that’s been rotated incessantly inside the whirl-o-matic-o-sharpening on the back of the 64-pack, but not as dull as that crayon that practically requires a roach clip to be colored with in any meaningful fashion. But tonight, my ascent up Podcast Hill was more a downward spiral into Podcast Hell.

I’ve been wanting to take the audio tour material from my show at Framations, and turn it into a podcast. No real reason for doing that, other than the cool factor.

My first inclination was to use Garage Band, a part of iLife on my Mac. And while that looked reasonably easy, I had all kinds of trouble importing the sound files. I finally got them in, finished creating the silly podcast, only to find out….. my iPod won’t play it. It’ll start playing it, but the audio will die, the podcast continues on, and eventually the audio comes back for the next image. Weird.

Then I tried iMovie HD, which was a horrible tool for syncing audio tracks to still images. I don’t know what the deal was there, but that was just about the most frustrating thing I’ve tried on my Mac. I mean, I thought this podcast stuff was easy on a Mac….?

The final solution? Take my iMovie piece, export it as a QuickTime movie, then in QuickTime, export it as an iPod file. That seems to be working.

So now, should you care to take a listen, you can find the podcast for the show here. It’s an m4v file, so you’ll need to pull it to your desktop (for iTunes) or iPod before playing it. If you want to just watch the QuickTime version, it’s here.

Enjoy!

Hydrogen Hydroxide Update

The plumber came last night, and it was a “good news, bad news” event. The bad news was that we do indeed have a leak in the ceiling over Beck’s office. The good news is that the only time it leaks is when the outside faucet is turned on. We can control that, so we didn’t have to shut off the water to the house, and we’re in control of our leaking destiny.

He’ll be back by tonight to fix it — didn’t have the right parts with him — and that’s a good thing. However, the scope of the damage is not yet known. There’s some damage in the ceiling, wall and baseboard right at the point of the leak, but I don’t know if there’s any additional damage we need to look at.

So what caused this? Well, the current theory is that the loss of power during the dead of our winter ice storm is the most likely culprit. I cover the outside faucets with a nice styrofoam insulating cup, but when the temperature dipped so low both inside and outside… well, it seems that those temperatures could have caused the initial break in the pipe.

Tonight, we’ll sleep to the sound of a rented dehumidifier running downstairs, and hopefully have Becky’s office functional tonight, and back to normal in a week or two.

I’m still left with some questions about long-term archival storage of images and media, but that’s a topic for a different day! 🙂

I Have Seen the Enemy, and It Is Dihydrogen Monoxide

Last night, Becky and I discovered that her office had begun to take on Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO). Yes, there was water seeping through the wall. In fact, there has been enough of it to seep out of her room and into the den.

I love water. I like playing in it, and I love photographing it, but water is the enemy of everything I do in my office (which has not yet been affected, thankfully). I have computer systems there, our networking infrastructure, and most importantly, a lifetime of irreplaceable images on slides, filmstrips and prints. I don’t have any real worries over the digital stuff I’ve shot over the last five years or so — there’s plenty of backup copies around… I’m just a bit paranoid about hard drive crashes! The rest of the stuff, though, only exists in one place, is utterly susceptible to water damage, and is impossible to replace.

Needless to say, I got into a bit of tizzie last night, elevating everything I could off my office floor, just in the case the pipe leak (current suspect) expanded.

But it really brings up a bigger question for me, and that is how to safely store a vast amount of images — slides, strips and flats. They need to be safe from water, humidity, and dust, but also be accessible. I’ve been working on scanning these images, and I think I’ll eventually get finished with that project, despite the enormous amount of time it takes to do it right. That’ll help, but that doesn’t preserve the originals.

Once I get my preparation for next month’s show done, I believe I’ll be turning my attention to storage and retention, and ensuring that I’m ready… just in case!

Monkey Suits

So I’m sitting here at lunch, at St. Louis Bread Company (Panera Bread to the rest of the world), and I’m sparked to write by what I hear and see. I don’t often get out and mingle in this kind of setting, so it’s a little exercise of people watching for lunch for me.

(BTW, a ding for Bread Co. While I was able to connect to their wireless network, I was unable to send any data through it. Kinda acted like there was no dns. Bummer. Good thing I carry my little Sprint Wireless Broadband module!)

So, behind me is a suit on a cell who was neck deep in a conversation when I sat down. He’s talking about the folks he works with, problems with his company, and the software tools they use in their environment. And he’s loud. Everyone in this part of the seating area definitely knows his business. Why would you do that? I mean, if he had a competitor here, they’d be juiced full of info on this guy’s business.

There’s folks reading newspapers and mags. Surprisingly, there’s even students doing work — didn’t know school was in right now. And of course, there’s loads of folks here just to meet and greet each other, mostly off work from looking at their mode of dress. (Jealous, I am!) Overall though, aside from the suit behind me, it’s a reasonable noise level, and somewhere I could play on my Mac for an hour or so.

A pretty nice little setup, and one I could get used to for lunches!

Mission Fields

Our pastor just got back from a mission trip to Kenya. Charles is strongly convicted about hitting the mission fields, and believes his God-given charge in life is to start 1000 churches. His life and our church are really oriented toward doing just that. I’ve never been at a church that had so much direct involvement with mission activities. I think almost every church donates money to help fuel mission work around the world, but ours actively sends teams of folks many times a year. I’d bet there’s no fewer than eight trips a year consisting entirely of members of our congregation going to Africa, Eastern Europe and South America, along with treks to the cities of our country. In fact, there’s a strong influence of mission work in the older kids’ summer church work.

So Charles was telling some of the stories today about the trip to Kenya. At some point late in the trip, his backpack was stolen from the hotel lobby, and he started telling us what was in the bag, and with every item, the congregation collectively gasped: passport, cash, camera, laptop. And the last thing he mentioned was his Bible. This is the book from which he’s preached for 30 years, and was filled with notes and reflections from that long walk as a minister.

All the rest is replaceable — although getting a new passport in time to make the flight was a challenge — but that single Book is priceless. The Book itself can even be replaced, but the Charles-added portions can’t be re-created easily. After church, Becky and I both mentioned that the best thing that could happen is that that Bible get in the hands of someone open to the messages inside, and that Charles’ notes and lessons could touch one life, and then many others from there. I’m sure he’d say that would be worth the loss.

Kids Make You Sick!

After a weekend at Lake of the Ozarks, Beck and I have both come down with some kind of nasty stuff. Beck’s seems like strep, and mine is kinda flu-like. Blecch. She’s been off work for two days, and I came home sick today. Not good…

We had a great time at the lake, and it was terrific to spend the long weekend with our pals, despite the heavy rains of the weekend, and the big storms on Friday. At least I got into the pool for a few hours on Friday!

Memorial Day

Today is Memorial Day — a remembrance of those who have fallen, and of those who serve or have served in the service of our country. Aside from the sales, BBQs, and auto racing that comes with this weekend, we should all take a moment to pause and remember those who’ve made those sales, BBQs and auto racing a reality of the freedom we enjoy here.

Yesterday in church, Charles had all the veterans in the pews stand, and receive the applause of the remainder of the congregation. While I mention my time in the Air Force — usually spinning yarns about my time there — I don’t really think of myself as a veteran the way I perceive the word. I was on that caretaker shift, in that long spell (relatively speaking) between the end of Vietnam and the beginning of the first Gulf War. I served during the Cold War, part of the mutually assured destruction tenet. And, of us who served then, who could’ve believed that the world could’ve gotten so safe, seeing the USSR dissolve and the nuclear terror I’d had nightmares about since I was a teen all but disappear overnight.

And who would’ve thought that out of the giddy era, the world would change in an instant, and we would find ourselves and our country in a constant effort of war, almost 1984-esque in its scope of effort, secrecy and intrusion. A war with no real end in sight, no tangible endgame, and no way out.

So, yes, I’m still uncomfortable when asked to stand in church as a veteran, not because I’m ashamed of my time — I’d like to think that the time I spent minding the store helped lay the foundation for a decade of truly golden times — but because I don’t think my time means as much as those who served before me and those who are serving now. They are the heroes, putting life and limb on the line so some yahoo in middle of the country can pound on his keyboard on a Monday away from work.

I salute them.