February 22 & 23, 1998 was an eventful night in Central Florida. I was in my Junior year at Florida Christian College (map) and I was preparing to start working on a paper due the next morning. It was the second nasty storm of the month, we had spent Groundhog day without power just a few weeks earlier. One of my roommates mentioned that there must be a train nearby and my training from years of tornado drills in southern Indiana kicked in and I rushed everyone into the bathroom. 2 minutes later the awkwardness became overwhelming and we went back out.
That night, several tornadoes cut through central Florida. One of them went through the sports complex across the road where it killed someone who was working on the fair equipment they were trying to get out due to the storm. It crossed the road and destroyed the Ponderosa RV Park (map). It shut down the turnpike and destroyed a traceable line of homes for another mile. In the words of one student quoted by a local newspaper, “Dude, it was massive.”
Due to a lack of resources to support all the displaced students (although about 15 of us stayed a night with Prof. Bundy), I came up to Jacksonville with my future wife, my roommate, and his future wife (my future wife’s roommate) and stayed a week up here with my family. While we were gone there were many funerals and President Bill Clinton gave a speech at the RV park. After our return we helped out where we could. I helped to dig through the remains of the RVs and trailers of victims to recover mementos for the families. They were water soaked piles of rubbish, but we found photo albums and other personal items with a lot of meaning.
I did pocket one item while serving, and I have it setting on my desk today in a small frame. This portion of a shredded Bible has been a reminder for me over the past decade that when it comes down to it, the greatest thing we can do for God is to care for his beloved people even if nobody witnesses it other than God.
So, I decided to watch the lunar eclipse on Wednesday night. I used my Casio Exilim EX-277, a 6in. tripod, and my car to take pictures. So, while I stood out in my driveway looking like an idiot for several hours I did get some pictures. The pictures aren’t great, but it was fun to watch (I rarely get a chance to watch lunar eclipses).
First Problem: Lots of clouds and light pollution. We do indeed have sodium lights around the neighborhood. This was taken with night settings at 9:30PM.
White balancing made it look a little better, but my camera does not have cloud balancing.
As the night went on it did clear up a bit. These pictures are of the moon coming out of the shadow around 11:30PM and the only thing I can blame the bad images on are the camera and my skills.
I am writing this while I am trying to remember what I was doing before the last 4 interruptions.
Right now I am considering plans for an audio DVR type thing to constantly record audio in my office. Then I need to get into the habit of talking to myself. Once a distracting phone call is over I can then rewind to hear what I was mumbling before I answered the phone.
Last week we had a conference call which I recorded with my mp3 player. The 5 minutes at the end of the recording was filled with the sounds of cell phones, desk phones, email dings, equipment alarms (minor power issue caused UPS backups to briefly activate), and someone at the door.
3 hours later . . . CD duplicator fixed, scheduling issues handled, bleachers in gym taken care of, kitchen stovetop hastily reassembled, and a brief discussion on why gumballs should not be used are decorations.
Where was I again?
That is a picture taken just before midnight on September 24, 2004. Just a few minutes after birth. In some ways that seems a lifetime ago and in others just like it was very very recent.
I have been digging through pictures from the month surrounding her birth. Hurricane Ivan causing devastation around our home and causing us to evacuate to Jacksonville where we were closer to family, my 13 year old dog dieing just a few weeks before she was born, pictures of her in front of the television as SpaceShipOne was in flight to win the X-Prize, President Bush visiting Niceville, the walls outside our windows at St. Vincent’s Medical Center shredded and the St. Johns River flooded from hurricane Jeanne, the possible last pictures of the interior of our boarded up house taken with the possibility of never seeing it in one piece again, every member of the family carrying around a little tiny girl.
All of that at a little girl who is still amazingly sweet and wonderful as she turns 3.
In college I purchased Quickverse 4 Deluxe with a couple Bibles and commentaries (which I still have). This was a great help with my term papers and homework, I started quoting the Bible a whole lot more with cut & paste.
After graduation I purchased Version 5 Enhanced with many more books, and I used this more as I started preaching. Unfortunately version 5 does not work with XP, but so long as it was only my laptop running XP I was just fine.
So when I moved my primary desktop from 98SE to XP in 2004 I had to upgrade to version 8. The problem was that I just purchased the standard version and I couldn’t get it to recognize my large collection of older books (including the NIV). This meant that I was using my old computer for sermon writing until I could get it figured out.
After a few hours of digging I discovered how to manually add my collections into Q8 again and how to manually manage the library.xml file to adapt everything to my own preferences.
In late 2005 I reinstalled my OS from scratch to do some changes on my system and I archived my old installation. Nearly 2 years later I have reinstalled Q8 (plus the 8.0.4 update) and just went through a bit of a headache to reintegrate my previous changes. My Library is once again sanely organized and named, and all my books are there. I did forget to backup the QVProfiles folder from the “Application Data” folder in Documents & Settings, but I didn’t lose much there.
All of this because I start teaching a Bible Study tomorrow night and need quick reference again.
I finally got tired of it. I know, maybe I am just a cranky geek (maybe I should contact Dvorak), but I just got fed up with Snap.com.
They are the ones who provide a service in which mousing over a link will bring up an image of the page being linked. It used to just be obnoxious advertisements that did this now people are sticking it into their WordPress blogs. And this is wrong. I’ll give reasons:
- Pop-ups are annoying. Especially unexpected and unnecessary pop-ups.
- Someone visiting your site should not have to be constantly worried about where they are moving the mouse. Popups like that just get in the way and cause aggravation.
- If I want to see what a site looks like I will click on the link. The small image that Snap provides shows me nothing about the content. I am just not interested.
- This skews people’s traffic stats. It is just like that evil prefetching that the FasterFox plug-in is capable of doing. I don’t want to constantly be serving pages to Snap jsut to have it show up as an image somewhere.
I do have some advise for those who are sick of it as well. I just used my hosts file to block the domain that serves the activating javascript. For Windows XP go to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts and add the following line:
0.0.0.0 spa.snap.com
And for all you web masters I say “Don’t be that guy.” Really, don’t be him.
I have ordered three items that I am greatly anticipating right now. An mp3 player from Woot.com being shipped via Fed Ex and expected to arrive on the 21st, a laptop from Dell being shipped via DHL and expected to arrive on the 20th, and a 320GB Seagate external drive from TigerDirect via UPS and expected on the 23rd.
Any one of them could show up a little early, so I have all three tracking pages open and I have trouble not hitting refresh every few hours just to see where the item currently is. Does that make me a sick individual?
I hope someone else out there empathizes with my condition. I really want the mp3 player tomorrow but it is out in Irving, TX; the Laptop is in Orlando, FL so I may have it tomorrow; and the $120 Drive (shipped and all) is up in Hodgkins, Illinois. I love getting good prices online, but I am too impatient to be as cheap as I am. All items ordered with slow shipping.