being productive

Last night Becky was gone to a baby shower at the church, and so after I put Laura to bed around 7 I had a couple of hours to myself. As tempting as it was to sit down and watch Month Python & the Holy Grail (which Becky hates and I haven’t watched in a long time), I decided to get some useful stuff done.

Who’d believe how much you can get done in 90 minutes? I got the dishes done, got most of our income tax stuff figured out (thanks to TurboTax… now we’re just waiting for my W2 and we can file), and got stuff coordinated for worship team this weekend. And I still had time to turn on a movie that was on the Tivo that I thought I might like. It ended up being kinda boring, so I ignored it.

Tonight I have free again. I think I’ll do some playing with Photoshop and maybe we’ll watch some movie we can agree upon. Either that or we’ll start watching the American Idol auditions… that should be good for a laugh or two.

Oh, I should also add a comment about a new TV show we watched last night - it’s called Hustle and it airs on AMC. It’s produced by the BBC, and the best way to describe it is as Ocean’s 11 in a one-hour show. I’m looking forward to seeing a few more episodes… the first one was pretty good.

BookJournal: Fortunes of War

Fortunes of War is a recent title from Stephen Coonts. It is in many respects a standard military adventure novel, but it is based on an interesting premise. What if a newly militarized Japan tried to seize Siberia from a weakened Russia? How would the world respond? What might happen?

From there the action is good enough to make it a decent read. The story focuses on two fighter pilots, one American, one Japanese, who are friends but end up fighting on opposite sides. The story almost wraps up a little too quickly and neatly; I was left wishing for something a little less formulaic.

Now, maybe I’m a hard audience to please; Red Storm Rising has always been my benchmark of a good war novel. Sure, it’s long, and has a gazillion plot threads, and is (like all of Tom Clancy’s stuff) overly technical, but that’s the way I like ’em. As much as I wish Clancy and/or Bond’s writing schedule would accelerate a bit, I’ll take their epics over the consistent (but formulaic) offerings from Coonts any day.

FeedLounge!

The long-awaited FeedLounge finally opened for public signups yesterday. For those of you not familiar, FeedLounge is a web-based RSS aggregator/feed reader. As a sometime-user of Google Reader and a sometime-user of Bloglines, and never very happy with either, I was excited to hear that this product might be what I was looking for. Geof has been alpha-testing for a while and has sung its praises far and wide, so I was all primed and ready to sign up yesterday.

Having been a FeedLounge subscriber for all of twelve hours now, I can say this: I am not disappointed. FeedLounge has an amazing user interface, good enough that though it’s just a web page, it tempts you to think that you’re running a separate application. It allows for feed tagging, tagging and flagging of individual posts, and, what may be one of my favorite features already, direct links to subscribe to comments for blog posts that provide you that capability. Fantastic!

FeedLounge won’t be for everyone. If you’re only subscribing to a dozen or so blogs, just use bloglines or something similar. Also, FeedLounge is a subscription service; $5/month or $50/year. Well worth it, IMO, but that’s your judgement to make. But for people like me who are subscribed to hundreds of feeds and want to be able to get at them from anywhere, FeedLounge is a great way to go.

iTunes meme

Geof did this, and it looked like fun.

Open iTunes to answer the following:

Total number of tracks: 4,336.

Sort by song title:

  • First Song: ” ‘Round Midnight”, Miles Davis, Best of Miles Davis
  • Last Song: “Zoo Station”, U2, Achtung Baby

scary note: these are the same two songs (save for the artist on ‘Round Midnight) as Geof had…

Sort by time:

  • Shortest Song: “One Last ‘Woo-Hoo!’ for the Pullman”, 0:06, Sufjan Stevens, Illinois
  • Longest Song: “Hansel And Gretel And Ted And Alice/An opera in one unnatural act”, 24:40, P.D.Q. Bach, The Intimate P.D.Q. Bach

Sort by album:

  • First Song: “Concerto in D-Minor for Two Violins: 1 - Vivace”, Itzhak Perlman & Isaac Stern, “Double” Concerto for Two Violins
  • Last Song: “Happiness”, 1999 Broadway Revival Recording, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown

Top 10 Most Played Songs:

  1. “The Far Country”, 20 plays, Andrew Peterson, The Far Country
  2. “The Havens Grey”, 18 plays, ibid. T3. “Canaan Bound”, 17 plays, Andrew Peterson, Love and Thunder T3. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, 17 plays, Bob Dylan, The Essential Bob Dylan T3. “Say”, 17 plays, Sleeping At Last, Ghosts
  3. “Lay Me Down”, 16 plays, Andrew Peterson, The Far Country
  4. “The Queen of Iowa”, 14 plays, ibid. T8. “Fields Of Gold”, 13 plays, Eva Cassidy, Live at Blues Alley T8. “I Get a Kick out of You”, 13 plays, Jamie Cullum, Twentysomething. T8. “Lonely People”, 13 plays, Jars Of Clay, Who We Are Instead.

First five songs that come up on Party Shuffle:

This doesn’t really work since Party Shuffle doesn’t pick up the stuff on my iPod, and I don’t have much of anything left stored in my library.

Search for: “sex”, how many songs come up?: zero. “love”, how many songs come up?: 336. “you”, how many songs come up?: 564. “death”, how many songs come up?: Six. “hate”, how many songs come up?: Two. “wish” how many songs come up?: Eleven.

US Cellular outage in Eastern Iowa

I woke up this morning to find that I had very limited, analog cellular service. US Cellular has usually been reliable, so I was a bit suprised. I checked with a few coworkers and found that they had the same problem.

Digital service was restored around 10:30 this morning, but I still didn’t have any luck calling out. I walked past a US Cellular office on my way to lunch around noon, and they reported that they had some electrical problems and that most of the towers in eastern Iowa were problematic. As of that hour, apparently inbound service was working, but outbound was still disabled.

As of a few minutes ago (1:20 PM) outbound calling appears to be working again. Specialized calling (for instance, #BAL to get your minutes balance) was still kicking you off to the analog network. Hopefully they’ll have it up again soon.

too many rebates

I’ve probably sent in more rebate forms in the last two months than I had in my entire previous 28 years of life. It’s starting to drive me nuts.

It starts out innocently enough - a $10 rebate on a spindle of blank CDs. Then all of a sudden it goes nuts on you. $30 on a wireless router. $20 on a wireless network adapter. $60 on Adobe Photoshop Elements. $80 on a new hard drive for the Tivo. $60 on contact lenses. It seems like it’ll never stop.

Then we bought a new washing machine. I have 3 forms just for it! One to rebate the $50 delivery cost. One for $100 back from Alliant Energy since it’s an Energy Star washer. And then one for a $75 gift card from Home Depot for some promotion they were running. What a pain.

I understand why manufacturers offer rebates; they give an incentive to the shopper (“I pay $100 now, but it’s only $40 after the rebates!”) while at the same time they’re betting that a many folks won’t file the rebates on time or correctly (or at all), thus sticking the buyer with the full price. I’ve even fallen for it before; when I bought my Dell laptop back in the fall, it had a $100 Dell rebate that had to be filed within 28 days after the computer was shipped. I remembered it on day 29. There was much unhappiness that day.

Rebates do offer a few rays of sunshine, though; months from now when I’ve totally forgotten about the $80 hard drive rebate and my budget has absorbed the full cost, I’ll get an unexpected check in the mail. That’s always fun… and a good excuse to go out for dinner or something. See, maybe these rebates don’t save me any money at all…

Weekend update Jan 2006

Well I’ve been a slacker lately as far as meaningful posts go… don’t know how this one will rate.

We had a nice weekend. Stayed home Friday night and crashed. Laura wasn’t feeling too good Friday night; she started coughing and got herself so worked up that then she threw up. I don’t know if, as a parent, you ever totally get used to being vomited on; however, I’m certainly getting practice at it, if not totally comfortable with it. :-) She finally got to sleep and slept well, though, so that’s a blessing.

Played church league basketball Saturday and won in double overtime. We were playing a team we totally had overmatched, so we played easy, slacked off. Of course that meant that when it was time to close it out and play seriously, we weren’t ready to do so… so we ended up in 2OT. At least we won… it’s only our second win of the year.

Got a new washing machine delivered on Saturday, too. Our old one was starting to die, and we have intermittent problems with water backup on the drain pipe for the washer. We got a new front-loader that uses only half the water that the old one did. It’s also amazingly quiet. I think it’ll prove to be a good investment.

Sunday we had a pleasant surprise - my mom stopped by on her way home from Omaha. She had been there on sad business (her step-brother is dying), but it was good to get to see her anyway. We took her out for a late lunch and had some yummy mexican food that I had been craving for a while… I know, now I sound like the pregnant one. ;-) After mom took off, we crashed, watched the Bears get beat in the playoffs, and audited giving receipts so I can get them sent out this week.

Now it’s Monday and I’m back at work, reviewing TSO deviations and waiting for the FeedLounge beta to go public so I can sign up. That’ll probably be worth another blog post in itself. :-)

making things

Occasionally when I walk through our building here at work to get to the cafeteria, I walk past some work areas where we have people making things. They probably have a fancy word for it, fabrication or some such. But it is cool. This one little work area I walk past, they have 4 or 5 pegboards full of some sort of little tool bits. I don’t know what they are - they may be cutting bits or burning bits or something I’ve never seen before. But there’s hundreds of them, all hanging there neatly organized and ready to use. And there on the benches are pieces of plastic and metal that people are working on. Cutting, shaping, joining.

My job is much more abstract. I write software. That means I sit and type things into a computer, and trust the computer to translate those words into more abstract code. When you get down to it, this stuff is just little 0s and 1s encoded as magnetic fields on a computer disk. Then I go down to the lab, and squirt those little magnetic fields into a very expensive piece of computing equipment, which causes pictures to come up on a screen once we squirt some more data (electrical impulses) into the back of the equipment. It’s fantastic. It’s complex. At times, it’s very cool - we can accomplish very complicated things very quickly and efficiently. But at times, it feels a bit empty; there’s nothing real solid I can point to at the end of the day and say “I made that”. The constant abstraction makes it that much more meaningful for me to walk the halls and see real things being made.

I don’t know what it is about the way we’re wired, but I, for one, occasionally need to see, feel, hold real stuff. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m a big geek, I love technology, I could explain our flight displays to you from the processor and hardware all the way up through the application software, and every level in between. But there are times when I just need to get my hands on something real. We bought a new washing machine last night, and I need to build a pedestal for it. Maybe this weekend I can go out and do some building myself.

getting things done

No, Geof, I haven’t read the book, and this isn’t about the book. However, it has been nice lately to get some things done.

I’ve had the Noelridge Park Church website sitting incomplete for several months now. I just needed to get some photos taken, but had never gotten it done. I got the pictures taken and sent them in on Monday. Soon we will be updated and ready to go. Phew!

In addition, tonight I will be getting things scheduled such that I have the first of what will be regular weeks off from leading the worship team. I need the break. I’m very thankful to the Lord for bringing in other musicians who can share the load.

There have been a bunch of other little things recently that haven’t been big notable items, but just things that have been on the waiting list for a while and now are getting completed. It’s a good feeling. It’s also probably timely; come the beginning of March I’ll have other things to keep me busy. :-)

BookJournal: Stranger in a Strange Land

Stranger in a Strange LandI was on the prowl for some sci-fi to read last time I was at the library. They are courteous enough to have the sci-fi genre split out into its own section, so browsing the shelves is a fairly straightforward means of finding some new sci-fi to read. (I will confess to scratching my head at the inclusion of the whole Left Behind series in the sci-fi section, but that’s neither here nor there.) My browsing led me to Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, with cover boasting that it was “original and un-cut for the first time”. I skimmed the flyleaf and it seemed like I might possibly be interested in the story, so I borrowed the book and brought it home.

Stranger in a Strange Land seemed to me to be two different stories, only tangentially related. The first story, nearly the first half of the book, concerns Michael, the Man from Mars; he is the child of two human Martian explorers. They died when he was a small child and then he was raised by Martians. As the story begins Michael has just returned to earth and must deal with an unfamiliar world filled with people looking to take advantage of him. It’s a fairly imaginative fish-out-of-water story.

The second half of the book departs from this exploration into a treatise on the 1960’s hippie ideals of uninhibited carnality, free love and open marriage. Michael (who possesses amazing cosmic powers, thanks to his understanding of the Martian language and Martian mind techniques) founds a “church” which is a multi-level scheme; novitiates are presented with a study of Martian and the mind techniques; it’s not until they reached the highest levels of the organization that they were brought into the sexual free-for-all. In the end, they are persecuted, they scatter to spread their “church” abroad, and Michael *poofs* himself back to Mars.

I was ready to put down the book about halfway through the second section; the story takes a turn for the worse at that point. It appears to me that Mr. Heinlein wanted to write his hippie treatise, and found that it was easiest to do in the guise of other-worldly values. Enter enlightened Martians telling us that the answer to all our troubles is a lot of free sex and some cool cosmic powers… ugh. Oh well, on to the next book.