Author Archives: brad

The 2006 Mounvtille Garage Sales were today. Just like last year, Jen and I, along with some other members of our worship team, not to mention a few new friends, played alongside the praise band from St. Paul’s United Methodist Church.

And it rained.

We had just finished our sound check, when I felt a few drops on my head. Now, understand that my head is more sensitive to the rain than most, at least since I started shaving my head last August.

Click the image for a few more pictures.

So we pulled everything back a few feet in order to enjoy the modest protection afforded by the tarp hanging over and slightly behind us.

But anyway, we pressed on. And why not? We were set up, we had practiced, and we were among good friends.

And it turned out pretty well. We each did two sets, and the moment the fourth set ended, the sun came out in full force. Which was, you know, a little bit annoying.

But a good day, nonetheless.

A few days ago marked the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attack. Politics aren’t really my thing, so I don’t have a whole to say about it.

I will mention that September 11, 2001, was the day we got our dog Jack. We had been to the Lancaster Humane League the prior Saturday and found him there among his fellow canine inmates. The good folks at the Humane League asked us to return on Tuesday morning.

On Monday, September 10, I arranged to take the following morning off of work so that I could along with my wife and daughter to bring Jack home.

I woke up late on September 11 and ate a leisurely breakfast with my family, which was a special treat for me. While we ate, my father-in-law called and said that we should turn on the television to check out what was going on. He told us that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. We sat and watched while we finished our breakfast, unable to make sense of the situation.

We left the house shortly thereafter and went to the Humane League, where we picked up Jack. He was scrawny and dirty and seemed to have some bladder issues. But he was gentle and friendly, and neither he nor Grace feared the other. We took him for a short walk, and we all decided he was the dog for us. When we went back inside and did the paperwork, we watched on the small television behind the counter as the second tower collapsed. By now, we were hearing rumors of two more planes that had been hijacked.

On the ride home, we listened to the radio in disbelief as we heard about another plane hitting the Pentagon.

When we got home, Jack tried to run away for the first of many times. By that time, most of the local schools were dismissing their students. I called my boss to tell him I wouldn’t be in the rest of the day.

I remember that my grandparents stopped by with my aunt and uncle, and my father-in-law stopped by later. It seemed like people wanted to be around other people. I had always wondered about my parents’ ability to connect with other people of their generation simply by talking about where they were and what they were doing when they heard about President Kennedy being shot. Suddenly, I understood. This would be the day that defined and connected my generation.

Slate is hosting Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s extremely well done graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Report. It’s well worth checking out.

So we’re going to the beach for the weekend in a few weeks. Jen’s aunt and uncle co-own a beach house in Ocean City, New Jersey, so we after the rental season winds down, we usually get a free weekend in the fall. I think I’ve probably written about it before.

Anyway, this leaves us with what is becoming a common conundrum: what to do with the dog?

We used to call my mom’s neighbor, but she recently adopted Max, and Jack and Max kinda get along, but they’re not good buddies or anything, so that may not be a bad idea. We had a very nice girl from our church watch Jack over the summer, but she’s gone away to college.

But I digress.

Thinking about a dogsitter recently got me thinking about some of my own dogsitting experiences.

About thirteen or fourteen years ago, Jen and I were teaching fourth grade Sunday School at the church we were attending. One Sunday, The parents of one of our students asked me if I’d be willing to watch their house and take care of their dogs while they went away on a trip. I love dogs, and I knew they had a big Rottweiler (among some other pooches), so I agreed.

They lived in a big old house in the country, about a half an hour’s drive from my parent’s house (this was before I had moved out). I was kind of looking forward to a weekend of relative solitude out there by myself with just the dogs. So I packed up my Macintosh Classic (thinking about lugging that thing around like I used to makes me so glad to have a laptop now) and headed out to the country.

On Friday night, I settled in, made some dinner for myself, fed the dogs, and sat down at my computer for a couple hours. Two of the dogs were hunting dogs, and they lived outside (note: these were not my dogs and if you want to point out that pets belong inside, you won’t get an argument from me). But Tasha, the big Rottweiler, lived inside. She was a really cool dog. She was big and strong enough to treat me like a squeaky toy if she wanted to, but she was very gentle and playful.

Anyway, I eventually decided to get some sleep, probably some time after midnight. I stretched out on the couch in the living room, with Tasha on the floor next to me. As I started to drift off, I noticed Tasha moving. Having grown up with dogs, I figured she heard or saw something, and she went to check it out. She went to the back door, then to the front door, then to each window on the ground floor. Then she stared out one window for a few moments before lying back down.

About an hour later (sometimes it takes me a while to fall asleep), she did it again. Back door, front door, each window, staring out the window, then lying back down.

It took me until about the third or fourth time that she did this for me to realize that she wasn’t merely checking out a sound she heard. She was on patrol. She was the guard dog, and she apparently took her job quite seriously. I think that inside her big old doggie brain, I wasn’t there to take care of her. Not at all. You see, inside her big old doggie brain, she was there to take care of me.

Well, the PowerPoint/Keynote tip that I posted on Friday saved my butt this morning.

I’m currently in charge of A/V stuff (music, sound, video, computer) during my church’s Sunday morning services. Wherever I can, I use Keynote for the presentations. This morning, Luis was scheduled to spend a few minutes at the end of the service sharing about his recent missions trip to Peru. My pastor told me that Luis would have four or five pictures to share on the screen.

Luis showed up with a USB drive containing 55 pictures.

Now, this is a good thing. He had lots of great photos of the trip to share with the congregation. But I was left with only a few minutes to get 55 pictures into this morning’s Keynote file.

Using Friday’s tip, this was a breeze. Each of the 55 pictures was imported and placed onto its own slide in about 90 seconds. In fact, the only obstacle I ran into was trying stop one of the kids from making shadow puppets in front of the projector while I worked on it.

So in the end, Luis shared some really interesting pictures with us. It was very humbling to see the circumstances in which many Peruvians live. As Jen and I contemplate moving or renovating, it was striking to see homes with no roofs, or with walls made out of cardboard.

I hate PowerPoint. Really. I prefer to use Keynote whenever I can. But sometimes, I’m forced to use PowerPoint. Like today.

Recently, my boss asked me to prepare some charts based on our students’ PSSA scores. Easy enough. I spent a few hours wrestling with Excel and got some decent looking charts. Twenty-nine of them, in fact. I saved each one out to a PNG file (because I’m a snob and I like PNGs). So far, so good.

He also asked me to create a PowerPoint slide show, with each chart on a separate slide. Ewwww. That’s twenty-nine slides to make. Not difficult work, but very tedious. Create a slide, drag the picture in. Rinse and repeat. Twenty-nine times.

There has to be a better way.

Turns out, there is. If you have Keynote, that is.

Fire up Keynote and make a new, blank presentation. Grab your pictures in the Finder, and then drag them into the empty space beneath the slide thumbnails on the left. Keynote wil create a new slide, each containing one of your pictures, nicely centered on the slide. Nifty.

From there, I did a quick and painless “Export to PowerPoint” and I was good to go.

If anyone has any tips for doing something similar without involving Keynote, I’m all ears. It would be nice to have a more cross-platform solution than this, but this solved my problem for today.

By the way, for a chuckle, check out the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation. And for good measure, here’s a site dedicated to good presentations.

Some good things that have happened/are happening.

1. Tom and Audra are getting hitched. Congratulations! My prayer for you is to be as happy as Jen and I are.
2. Tangelo 1.5 Public Beta is out and the skins contest is underway.
3. I burned a CD in Ubuntu Linux. I know it sounds silly, but I can remember when getting a floppy disk to show up in Linux was cause for celebration. My PC dual boots between XP Home and Ubuntu Linux. I mostly keep it in XP so Grace can play her games and stuff. I installed Ubuntu mostly just to experiment; I don’t expect to use it as a main OS. Although, I must admit, it’s much better than I expected it to be.
4. Dan is moving to Portland. Honestly, I’m kinda sad about this, since I’ve come to value Dan tremendously as a friend, but I’m happy for him. He’s doing what he wants to do, and you have to respect that. Here’s hoping we find a good replacement for his position at work.
5. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m itching to start playing in a band again. Nothing definite yet, but some progress has been made on that front. Stay tuned.
6. I finally started work on my bug database (programming bugs, not insects) after talking and thinking about it for like two years. I’ve decided to call it Thrip, at least for now. A thrip is some kind of bug that likes citrus fruit.
7. Got a raise. Cha-ching!
8. The latest issue of RBDeveloper has my Kodiak article in it!
9. Jen and I watched three of the five original Planet of the Apes movies. Hugely entertaining. My bro-in-law taped all five when AMC ran its marathon a couple years back and lent me the tape. These are movies I’ve been meaning to watch for years, but I never got around to it. We still have to watch Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and then I think we’ll be ready to watch the remake Tim Burton made with Marky Mark in 2001. This all, of course, made me think of Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want To Get Off! (YouTube link) from The Simpsons.
10. New folks on Worship Team at church. I’m blessed to be surrounded by incredibly talented and humble people in ministry there. How I ended up leading this team I’ll never know, but I’m grateful to serve alongside such people.
11. I got to be in the dunk tank at our church picnic a couple weeks ago. That was a hoot, although I’m not sure whether to be flattered or offended at the number of people that lined up to take a shot at me.

I guess that’s about it for now. I’m trying to get back to regular updates…

No matter how tough, no matter how strong, every man becomes a total, sniveling wimp when there’s a stretched rubber band pointed at his face.

Excuse me while I stifle this yawn…

So Microsoft is prepping their own iPod killer now, eh? This should be interesting. There’s a good chance that Microsoft’s new device, rumored to be named Zune, will follow in the footsteps of other historical iPod killers.

But then again, this is Microsoft, with nearly limitless resources and an unrelenting desire to own every corner of every technology market. Will they succeed? Time will tell.

What’s certain is that the iPod appears to be a difficult thing to kill. Many have tried; none have succeeded. Even the word itself has become nearly synonymous with “portable electronic music device.” And the device itself has become something of an icon. Reuters: The world’s largest software maker faces an uphill climb in closing the gap on Apple’s iPod media player and iTunes Music Store, the runaway leaders in their respective areas. While Apple shouldn’t take this lead for granted, it does mean that Microsoft has its work cut out for it. Last time I checked, Apple owned something like 70% market share with the iPod/iTunes combination. The closest runner up is a distant second.

Related Slashdot discussion here.

Seems like as good a time as any to mention my favorite viral video, the one where Microsoft redesigns the iPod’s packing. You know, where they take Apple’s wonderfully and elegantly simple package and switch it around to become an absolute monstrosity. Click here to watch it. Rumor has it (althought I’ve never personally confirmed it) that this video was acutally made by someone internal to Microsoft, suggesting that at least someone somewhere within the world’s largest software company knows had badly their packaging stinks.

I suppose, in the end, I simply fail to understand why every portable electronic music device that’s announced is touted as the next possible iPod killer. Maybe, just maybe, the iPod is a great product. And maybe, just maybe, it’s not the list of specs and features that make it great. Maybe it’s the way it rests in your hand, or the way it fits into your pants pocket, or the way the click wheel seems to be an extension of your hand, or the way it works so seamlessly with iTunes. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because Apple knew what to leave out. There are surely lots of bells and whistles that Apple could have crammed into the iPod. But they didn’t. They kept it simple. Because most people simply want to play music. Microsoft? They’ll pack every conceivable feature into the Zune. It’ll play DVDs, make your coffee, wash your laundry, and fly you to the moon.

But it won’t be an iPod. That much is certain.

Updated: Joy of Tech sheds some light on the origin of the Zune name.

Updated again: Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk says Microsoft’s iPod killer is doomed from the start:

Microsoft’s new strategy, like many tech companies looking to break into a new market, is to offer new features you can’t get anywhere else. But, as Microsoft itself proved over the years, features alone don’t win technology wars. Having dominated the PC market with its Windows monopoly, Microsoft should know that cracking into a closed ecosystem is often a quixotic affair. Charging at a competitor whose products not only dominate but set the standard in quality is suicidal.

Reuters: A kangaroo is roaming the green hills of Ireland after escaping a circus near the picturesque port of Kinsale.

Circus staff launched a fruitless four-hour search following the escape Sunday… “He would be happy out there and he’ll have plenty of grass, plenty of water and plenty of sunshine,” Walsh told Reuters on Wednesday as Ireland basked in near record temperatures more typical of Sydney’s native Australia than Ireland’s temperate maritime climate.

Something very cool, brought to you by people who apparently need some sort of hobby: Human Space Invaders Recreation

Wow, that really must have taken a loooong time to film. But it’s even cooler than Irish kangaroos.

Via Gadgetopia.