The Boss'

I’m having some issues posting photos to my blog via FTP, so consider this post part of the trouble shooting process.

So, this is really confusing. For some reason, when I post from Windows Live Writer, the images that I include in the post are not viewable. They are actually copied correctly to the site via FTP, but the link to the image appears broken. The image link is accurate though, so I don’t understand why the images won’t display. One suspicious little nugget of information is that when I view the site via my web hosts control panel, I don’t see the image folder that was created when the post was published. For example, for this post, the image above is copied to…

public_html/Images/FTPd_A8E0/IMG_5034_Thumb2.jpg.

Well, I can see that it is copied there using an FTP client, like SmartFTP on my PC, or Transmit on my MacBook. When I view the Images folder via the web hosts control panel, I don’t see the folder. It may be an issue of permissions, but that stuff has always been a bit of a mystery to me.

For those of you viewing this blog with a feed reader, this is going to get ugly…real ugly.

I just wanted to take a minute to post some photos from this year’s Christmas celebrations. I put up a seperate gallery of our family Christmas photos, taken Christmas eve, and I also added a number of photos to the existing “Random Family Photos” gallery. Enjoy!

I’ve got some time off between the holidays. I’ve got a long list of topics that I’d like to write about…we’ll see what actually gets done.

Here’s a little video clip that we grabbed of Ben reciting part of Luke 2 during our church Christmas program. It was the only clip that we were able to get…sorry Emma!

Incidentally, the video was originally taken with the camera turned sideways 90 degrees. (Has that ever happened to you…It’s frustrating) I was stumped, at first, about how to resolve this issue of orientation. I thought that our little video clip was ruined. Windows Movie Maker, however, provides a simple fix. Under ‘Video Effects’, there is an effect called ‘Rotate 90 Degrees’. Easy as that. I think that the aspect ratio gets a little goofed up, but it beats having to turn your monitor sideways to view the video. Enjoy.

From Random Family…

This is what running headlong into a wall will get you. This was Grace the other day…Ben did a great job of helping me put the pieces back together. The image above links to an album with more photos of the damage. It looks a lot worse than it actually was. By the time we got all of the blood and matted hair out of the way, we discovered a cut about 1/2″ long. Nothing worth going to the ER over. She recovered very quickly, and was running around again within the hour.

Being a regular listener of both TWIT, and Windows Weekly, I’m hit with a barrage of advertisements for Audible.com, the primary sponsor of both of these programs. Audible.com is a service offering audio books available for purchase online. Their catalog of books is impressive, and their prices are reasonable, so I took the plunge and signed up.

That’s when the trouble started.

In order to listen to the books that you’ve paid for, you’re forced to install the Audible Manager, a piece of truly awful software used to playback and manage your purchases. Why is it so awful? For one thing, it’s green. Yeah. Green.

At first I thought that my monitor cable had worked itself loose, but that was not the case. No mistake. The UI is green.

Okay, the green UI is really bad, but if it does just one thing correctly, I can forgive it’s awful appearance. That one thing, or course, is to play the audio book that I just bought. It turns out, it’s not especially adept at that either. I’m running this crapware application on my primary development machine at work, so it’s a beast. Plenty good for running the latest software development applications. The Audible Manager, however, is more than it can handle. Usually throughout the course of a two hour listening session, I’ll be forced to shut down the application using the Task Manager two or three times, after the application suddenly goes quiet. There is no user interaction to precipitate this problem. I can have it running in the background while I work in Visual Studio, when suddenly…silence. When the application mysteriously bombs out like this, it is unable to bookmark your current position in the book, so when you open the manager to resume listening, you have to find where you left off the hard way.

There are times when the English language is inadequate. When describing the love of a parent for a child, or the colors of a sunset, or…take your pick. This is one of those times. Words cannot express my disappointment with the Audible.com experience. I want to like this service. I’m a reader…I love books. There are so many titles that I would like to listen to. But the Audible Manager, whose sole reason for being is to play back my audio book, has ruined it for me. The chronic playback issues and the green UI are impossible to overlook.

I’m afraid I will be forced to cancel my subscription.

Wireless broadband has come to the farm! WhooHoo!

Now the job ahead of me will be to get a cat5 cable run from my workshop, where the receiver is, to my house, where all of my internet hungry devices are. Just for kicks I put my wireless router in the shop and I was surprised to find that I can pick up the signal  in the corner of the house that is closest to the shop. The signal isn’t great, but it’s better than nothing. That doesn’t help my desktop situation as it doesn’t have a wireless ethernet card, and it’s not located in that corner of the house, but it does mean that I can get online with my MacBook if I sit in the right spot. I found a guy with 1000′ of cat5 cable for sale on Craigslist for $50, so that’s the route that I’m going. I’m hoping to pick that up tonight or tomorrow.

It’s been another week of spotty sleep with baby Jack. We’re still struggling to find the right combination of feeding schedule, sleeping accommodations, and other factors, to get Jack to sleep longer at night. This too shall pass…that’s what we keep telling ourselves…this too shall pass.

Then there’s this book I’m reading. Has anyone else read Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal? Yikes. There’s poop in the meat…let’s leave it at that.

Is it Friday already? How can that be? Time certainly marches on, as they say.

First, I promise that new pictures of Jack are coming soon. Not having high-speed access at home has been hindering my ability to upload photos in a timely fashion. I manage all of our family photos in Picasa, on my PC. To upload them to the web, I grab them from the PC via my wireless network and put them into iPhoto on my MacBook. From there, I take my MacBook to the office and I use the PicasaWebUploader to dump the photos into a Picasa Web Album. Easy as falling off a log, huh?

Good news, though. I may have found a solution to my slow speed woes. Yesterday I met with an installer at the house to determine if I’m a candidate for high speed wireless. He says it will work…in my barn. Yeah, that’s the catch. Wireless internet is very directional, and my house is surrounded by trees, so I can’t put the antenna on the house. My barn/workshop, however, is in the clear, so I’m going to have the antenna installed there. Then it will be up to me to get the signal to the house. I’m kicking around my options as far as that goes. I’d like to get Cat5 from the barn to the house, just for the sake of reliability and speed. There are large power wires (unused) that are pulled underground between the house and shop right now, so I thought about trying to use one of those as a pull wire to get my Cat5 through. I gave it a pretty good pull yesterday, though, and I can’t budge it. I don’t know how they were pulled between the two originally, but I’m sure it involved some sort of directional boring equipment.

This service will not be cheap. There’s a two year contract and a bunch of other down sides, but we’re just going nuts out here not being connected. Lindy isn’t checking her email. She doesn’t shop online because it’s just painfully slow. I can’t jump on HowStuffWorks.com to answer all the questions that my kids are constantly asking. I can’t connect to work at all via the VPN because the connection is so poor. So, we stand to benefit in a number of ways if we can get this sorted out. I don’t spend anything on cable or satellite, so I don’t feel too bad having to spend a little bit on the internet thing.

Speaking of TV, should I even have one? I heard someone speaking the other day about a survey they had done of their newsletter’s subscribers. This newsletter was for Christian home schooling moms and dads… a pretty conservative crowd. One result of the survey was that only 16% of respondents had successful daily devotions if a TV were present in the home. Ouch. We don’t watch much TV at our house…several days will go by without turning it on. However, we see in ourselves, and in our kids, that we want to watch TV. It’s this wanting that I don’t like. If we want something, if we really desire something… should it be the entertainment available via the TV?

I didn’t mean to go into a whole thing on TV there. It just sort of happened.

In other news, Jack is doing great…and by great I mean that he’s driving us nuts. He’s eating good and gaining weight, so we thank God for that. However, he’s still stuck on the eating-every-3-hours schedule, round the clock. Often that means feeding him at 9:30, then again at 12:30, 3:30, 6:30… I take at least one feeding every night…usually whichever one Lindy likes the least. That 12:30 one is a bugger because you’re just starting to get into a nice deep sleep. The 3:30 isn’t that great either because, well, because it’s the middle of the friggin’ night. On the upside, PBS HD has some really great programming on at that hour. Beautiful travel programs and that sort of thing.

Jack is awesome though, in spite of any minor annoyances, and we thank God for every minute with him. We’re planning to have him baptized on January 13th at 10am at Holland Heights CRC. The scripture that we chose for his baptism is found in Psalm 119:9-16.

How can those who are young keep their way pure? By living according to your word.

I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands.

I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.

Praise be to you, Lord; teach me your decrees.

With my lips I recount all the laws that come from your mouth.

I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in great riches.

I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways.

I delight in your decrees; I will not neglect your word.

We like this passage because of it’s emphasis on obedience to God’s Word, and hiding it in our hearts. We’ve been memorizing scripture as a family for a while now, and this verse just seems to ‘fit’ for us. It’s something for us to aspire to, anyway.