Monthly Archives: January 2008

Tweets for 15 Jan 2008

E-Mail Musings

My Twittering For the Past 24 Hours

  • @psmith553 Hope you have a safe drive and a good Dr visit. (15-Jan-08 08:15 am)

  • Getting the morning reading done. Lots of interesting items today. (15-Jan-08 08:16 am)

  • Big winds. Blowing snow. Heavy clouds emitting snow. A Winnie-the-Pooh Blustery day! (15-Jan-08 11:03 am)

  • Wondering why twitter4skype isn’t updating. Learned that twitter is doing some software updates. (15-Jan-08 12:43 pm)

  • Home from errands and a CES class. Very cold outside and I’m glad to be in for the evening. (15-Jan-08 06:19 pm)

  • Good night, twitterland. We’re headed for Logan, Utah early tomorrow morning to take my parents to the temple. (15-Jan-08 10:00 pm)

Tweets for 14 Jan 2008

E-Mail Musings

My Twittering For the Past 24 Hours

  • email and morning blogs done. Have decided I’m tired of semi-retirement. Anyone know who needs a seasoned IT professional? I’m in the ma … (14-Jan-08 08:19 am)

  • Driveway cleared once again. Maybe no more snow until Thursday? At least I’m getting a good dose of activity… (14-Jan-08 09:09 am)

  • Busy day. Submitted my resume to two places. Fixed a couple of bugs in my photoalbum. Ran some errands. Snow forecast for tonight. (14-Jan-08 05:58 pm)

  • Another day done. Having fun working with media rss feeds from yahoo. (14-Jan-08 10:12 pm)

Tweets for 13 Jan 2008

E-Mail Musings

My Twittering For the Past 24 Hours

  • Forecast: bright sun, warmer temps. Reality: fog, thick clouds, 2″ of snow so far. I’m off to church. (13-Jan-08 08:38 am)
  • In sacrament mtg … Will be speaking in abt twenty minutes. (13-Jan-08 10:52 am
  • Home from church. Thinking that @lauramoncur should do a rock star demo at the next geek dinner…. (13-Jan-08 01:01 pm)
  • Heavy into PHP programming. Not paying attention to much else. (13-Jan-08 07:00 pm)

Rescued … and We Need Another DVR

General

Yesterday was a day of being rescued by my wife. It started in the morning when I needed a book for a talk in Church the next day. I couldn’t find it so I asked her if we had the book. We did and she retrieved it from the bookcase from the shelf it was supposed to be on. I’m sure that I had looked there two or three times. That led me to sign up for LibraryThing and start entering our collection of books. So far that capability has worked pretty well.

As the Stake Sunday School President, each month I speak in a different Ward in the Stake as the companion to the scheduled High Counselor speaker. That usually happens on the third Sunday of the month, except this month the third Sunday is Stake Conference. I also teach the High Priest Group in our Ward on the second Sunday of each month. So that meant I was scheduled to teach in one Ward and talk in a different Ward. In my brain I had it figured out … Priesthood Meeting would be from 9 to 9:50 in our Ward, and Sacrament Meeting started at 10:50 in the other Ward. However, I had forgotten that our new meeting schedule for this year has Sacrament Meeting first … which meant that both activities I was scheduled for would be happening at the same time. Nina, however, had not forgotten. She asked me how I was going to do both things. I explained my logic … and got rescued once again when she reminded me of the new meeting schedule. I found a substitute to teach my class and stopped doing the lesson preparation.

Later that day, I saw the postman drive by without stopping to put mail in our mailbox. That is rather unusual since we always get mail (usually junk mail or bills). I told Nina that we didn’t have any mail and she was surprised. When I went out to do some errands, for some reason I stopped at the mailbox and it was full of mail! I don’t know when it came. The postal vehicle I saw must not have been our postwoman!

We have the Dish Network satellite system here … four satellite boxes feeding four TV’s (to be watched by two people … and we actually have six TVs in the house). One of the satellite boxes is a DVR (Digital Video Recorder). Nina records a lot of stuff on the DVR. The software on the DVR was recently updated, however, and it works differently. Nina had set it up to record Monk and the new software took that to mean to record every Monk episode that came on, including the myriad of reruns and repeats. I decided to DVR a new series that starts tonight The Sarah Conner Chronicles. That way I can check it out on my schedule and decide whether or not I’ll watch future episodes. In order to do that, I had to override a Monk that was being recorded at the same time. When I explained this to Nina, she said that I needed to get my own DVR … it would be a problem if I started recording stuff on her system! We had a good laugh.

But, it brings to mind an interesting point. When we only had a VCR, if something was to be recorded, I always had to set it up. It was simply a complicated procedure that Nina didn’t want to have to learn. And it was a fairly complicated process (I wonder what the VCR would have been like if Apple had designed it?). The DVR, however, is not complicated. Nina has no problem setting something up to be recorded, has claimed the machine as her own, and the hundred hours of video she can record can be easily consumed. Maybe I do need my own DVR!

Tweets for 12 Jan 2008

E-Mail Musings

My Twittering For the Past 24 Hours

  • Can’t find a book I know I have that I’d like to use for a talk tomorrow. It might be time for LibraryThing: http://www.librarything.com/ (12-Jan-08 08:39 am)

  • Wife showed me where the book was … in the bookcase, where it should be. Argh! (12-Jan-08 10:26 am)

  • Finished working on lesson. Now working on the talk … and finding a substitute teacher for the lesson. (12-Jan-08 12:44 pm)

  • At OfficeMax making copies. Machine not working right! (12-Jan-08 02:40 pm)

  • Finished getting the drifted snow off my driveway and walks. Weather is nice … maybe the driveway will get to bare concrete tomorrow? (12-Jan-08 04:06 pm)

  • The Packers / Green Bay football game is definitely being played in the Snow Bowl! Advantage: Packers. (12-Jan-08 04:50 pm)

  • Very impressed with Burton Group’s analysis of Scoble and Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/2ujajj (12-Jan-08 08:25 pm)

  • Out to the hot tub (no wind tonight!) … Couple of good football games today. (12-Jan-08 09:18 pm)

Tweets for 11 Jan 2008

E-Mail Musings

My Twittering For the Past 24 Hours

  • Updating maps on my Garmin GPS. Then I’ll work on swatting some coding bugs. (11-Jan-08 08:39 am)

  • Garmin’s tech support is rather screwed up! Their maps aren’t very accurate, either. They’re a good example of how NOT to do business. (11-Jan-08 09:43 am)

  • Finished weekly status conference call. Glad to be at home where I can do something else while paying partial attention to the call. (11-Jan-08 02:28 pm)

  • Running a couple of errands … Including venti hot chocolate! (11-Jan-08 04:07 pm)

  • Working on pictures for my blog and enjoying chocolate chip cookies with hot chocolate. Yum! (11-Jan-08 08:04 pm)

  • Finished a family blog post about our trip to Missouri this past week, put up pictures from the trip, and am now ready to end the day! (11-Jan-08 10:31 pm)

Home From Missouri (With Pictures In the Picture Album)

Computer Stuff, General

We arrived home about six p.m. on Wednesday, January 8th, 2008. We had a very good trip and I really enjoyed the time we spent with James, LeeAnn, their family, and LeeAnn’s parents. It was a full house! LeeAnn’s parents were put up in Shaundra’s bedroom. Nina and I were put up in James and LeeAnn’s bedroom. James, LeeAnn, and all the kids bedded down in the boys bedroom (I’m not sure how that worked … I’m also sure that James and LeeAnn were right ready to get back into their own bedroom!!). Somehow we all managed to get through the four nights with no major catastrophes. That in itself is goodness!

The primary purpose for being there was Shaundra’s baptism … which I’ve already written about on the blog. That was quite successful, although the water for the baptism was ice code. Shaundra walked in, was thoroughly dunked, and walked out without complaint. She’s was determined to be baptised! Fortunately, James did the ordinance very well and Shaundra only had to be immersed once.

The weather turned quite warm while we were there with temperatures approaching 70 degrees on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. When a cold front combined with unstable moist air from the Gulf of Mexico moved through on Monday evening and night, we got a very good dose of what it’s like to live in tornado country. I wouldn’t want to live there anyway, but if it happened, I’d definitely want a house with a basement … and with bedding and beds or cots down there because nights get very long when the severe weather sirens are going all night long. We left on Tuesday morning and James and family got to do it all again on Tuesday night.

We drove the fastest route possible out and back. That would be going east from Pocatello through Kemmerer, Wyoming to Green River, Wyoming, then I-80 east to Lincoln, Nebraska, cut across to I-29 just east of Lincoln in Iowa, then south to Kansas City, Route 71, then Route 7, and finally Route 13 to Springfield. It’s a full twenty-hour drive given good roads. Going out the roads (other than in western Wyoming) were dry and problem free. Coming back we had very messy roads through Kansas City up to the Iowa border. Nebraska’s roads were very good, but the drive from Cheyenne, Wyoming to Laramie (where we spent Tuesday night) took us through very high winds and severe drifting snow. On Wednesday we had several places on I-80 where high winds and drifting snow made travel difficult. West of Green River and on US-30 through Kemmerer to Montpelier, Idaho was extremely slick and dangerous. We were very happy that we had gotten as far as Laramie on Tuesday!

The drive on Wednesday was also pleasantly interrupted in Green River for about an hour when we stopped at my favorite brother’s place. Then we stopped later in Soda Springs to spend about an hour and a half with dad and mother. Dad has been working (somewhat unsuccessfully) on fixing an air compressor and had tipped it over to work on it. He couldn’t get it back upright, so Nina and I helped him do that. I also did a couple more things to their new computer to finish that installation. Then we drove the rest of the way to Pocatello, picked Bradica (the dog) up from the kennel, and finally arrived back home after a lot of driving and a lot of fun. I think we’ll be here in Pocatello for the next couple of months!

I’ve been working on the picture album software and have the new version working pretty well. I used that version to put up a set of pictures from the trip to Missouri, so visit the picture album to see these pictures. That’ll also show some of the work that I’ve been doing. The two big changes are the addition of a picture gallery for pictures that don’t really fit into a picture album sequence, and to add tagging to pictures. The main menu shows the pictures albums on the left, a link to the gallery on the top right, and a list of all the tags on the right. I’ve got about half of my pictures tagged and will get the rest tagged in the next few days (I hope). In putting up these pictures from Shaundra’s baptism I did notice a couple of issues with the new version that I’ll need to fix before making up some instructional video and making the new version available to the other folks that are using the software.

Tweets for 10 Jan 2008

E-Mail Musings

My Twittering For the Past 24 Hours

  • Going to run the snowblower and clean out the snow that came while we were gone to Missouri. Probaby a couple of packages under the snow … (10-Jan-08 07:42 am)

  • Driveway and sidewalks done. Forecast is for NO SNOW for the rest of the day. I’m pleased. (10-Jan-08 09:05 am)

  • Breakfast done. Caught up on computer stuff. Now to do a little programming. (10-Jan-08 09:30 am)

  • Programming … working on tags for the picture albums on my server. (10-Jan-08 02:57 pm)

  • On a conference call waiting for the other parties to join…. Some are ten minutes late! (10-Jan-08 03:38 pm)

  • Solved a programming problem. Took all afternoon to figure out why two arrays weren’t comparing to each other correctly. Whitespace….! (10-Jan-08 05:47 pm)

  • I think the programming is done. Initial testing looks OK. Now well see how the beta test goes… Good night! (10-Jan-08 10:39 pm)