Photo of the Day

Here's another one of the keyboard photos. This one uses the negative art effect mode of Sony Mavica.

Downward Spiral

I haven't posted anything really controversial or political in a long time, if ever. But, after reading this article in the LA Times, I just had to post some thoughts.

Now, I'll begin by saying that I am against abortion. I am against all forms of abortion. I think it is wrong, and I think it is murder. So, if you are on the other side of the fence on this issue, beware, as I could, and probably will step on your toes.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, I want to comment on some things from this article:

A nurse has already given her a local anesthetic, Valium and a drug to dilate her cervix; Harrison prepares to inject Versed, a sedative, in her intravenous line. The drug will wipe out her memory of everything that happens during the 20 minutes she's in the operating room. It's so effective that patients who return for a follow-up exam often don't recognize Harrison.

I guess that helps to keep their conscience clear. I wonder if Harrison takes this drug as well?

"There's things wrong with abortion," she says. "But I want to have a good life. And provide a good life for my child." To keep this baby now, she says, when she's single, broke and about to start college, "would be unfair."

And to whom is this the most unfair? At least you can go on with your life. You can go on and make more mistakes. You can go on, and be successful. But what about this "mistake"? Can this "mistake" do that? So again, I ask, to whom is this the most unfair?

A high school volleyball player says she doesn't want to give up her body for nine months. "I realize just from the first three months how it changes everything," she says.

Now, we wouldn't want you to lose your figure just because you made a mistake and got pregnant, now would we? Oh no. That would be just terrible.

"I've been praying a lot and that's been a real source of strength for me. I really believe God has a plan for us all. I have a choice, and that's part of my plan."

And what about the plan He had for that child you just aborted? I guess we'll never know now. It's a shame that our nation has become so self-centered.

His first patient of the day, Sarah, 23, says it never occurred to her to use birth control, though she has been sexually active for six years. When she became pregnant this fall, Sarah, who works in real estate, was in the midst of planning her wedding. "I don't think my dress would have fit with a baby in there," she says.

Well now, if there was ever a reason for an abortion, this would be it -- HER DRESS WON'T FIT!

The last patient of the day, a 32-year-old college student named Stephanie, has had four abortions in the last 12 years. She keeps forgetting to take her birth control pills. Abortion "is a bummer," she says, "but no big stress."

This girt has had four abortions. Four! Now, many on the side of choice, will argue that the main reason that they favor abortion is not for a matter of convenience, but for the mother's safety. Now maybe you don't see it this way, but I think that having four abortions simply because she forgot her birth control pills (not that they are always effective, mind you) is simply ridiculous. It is this mentality that is bringing our country to ruin. These same people will see the violence that occurs in schools across the nation, and in our cities, and elsewhere, and will wonder, "Why do they do such things?" Well, I'll tell you! It's because no one values life! That's why!

Photo of the Day

I had some more fun tonight taking pictures. I shot some more keyboard shots like the one here, along with some other objects in the room. I used some other effects on the camera, in addition to the macro shot mode. For this one, I used the solarize effect. I also did some shots with the negative art effect. I'll post one of those tomorrow. These modes probably don't get the recognition that they should. Some would say that you can do the same thing post-processing. Some wonder why you would in the first place. I think that they can be used to get some very interesting effects. I used iPhoto to do some saturation, temperature, tint, and contrast adjustments.

Photo of the Day

I had a little fun this evening taking close-up shots of my Mac keyboard and mouse. Then, loading the photos in iPhoto, and tweaking color, saturation, contrast and sharpness on each. I think they turned out pretty good. This is one of several that I took. I am using it as my desktop background at the moment.

Tetris

I have started working on a new game -- Tetris. Yeah, I know. It's not a NEW game. But for me, on the Mac platform, it is new. I have written a Tetris clone in the past, while in college. It turned out rather well, and got great reviews from the guys in the dorm. It got to the point that there were high scores posted on my dorm room door every day. A dorm-wide competition broke out. The most amazing part was that one guy ACTUALLY completed the version of Tetris that I wrote. The amazing part? The last level SHOULD HAVE been impossible. Guess not. He left the closing screen up for me to see, so I would believe him. To this day, I have no idea how he managed to do it, but he did. Hopefully I will have a new version ready for the Mac before the end of the year.

Thanksgiving Week

A lot has happened this past week. I have been slacking from normal blogging activity, and have been concentrating on other things.

I started a new job this week. I really like it so far, and I am getting settled into things. It's a little different atmosphere from my last couple of jobs, but I am adjusting to it.

We had our first snow this week. The kids had a blast. They made snow angels, threw snowballs, and just ran around yelling and screaming and loving it!

Thanksgiving day was spent at my wife's parents, as it is every year. My folks live in Florida, and it's a little tough to get down there for Thanksgiving. We sat around, and just chatted mostly. Most of the conversation hinged around the next day's activities -- shopping on Black Friday.

Speaking of which, we got up around 4:00AM, and left for the mall at 4:30AM. We got there around 5:00AM, and stood in line for an hour. When it was time to go in, the tail end of the line tried to get ahead of us. Those in the front of line had nothing to do with that, though. There were even some old ladies (probably in their 70's) trying to skip line. Good grief! What have we become?

And, as I do every year, I put up our decorations outside, and inside the house. I think that they turned out pretty good. Every year, we seem to get a little more out. Gotta out-do the neighbors, I suppose.

Photo of the Day

I haven't been taking any photos the past few days, so for today's photo I went digging through my photo archives. This photos is one I took while we were at Disney World this past summer. Our favorite show there is Fantasmic at MGM studios. During the show they create a wall of water and use it as a screen to display some pretty cool animation. This is a picture taken during that show. It is quite a cool effect, but really must be experienced for the full effect.

Photo of the Day

This sculpture is on the wall of the foyer next to the cafeteria in the St. Albans High School.

Steve Jobs Announces 3 New iPods

In case you haven't heard, Steve Jobs announced 3 new iPods. Check it out!

Photo of the Day

Just an ordinary scene on the Kanawha River.

JavaScript UNIX

This has to be one of the coolest things on the web. It is a UNIX OS implementation written completely in JavaScript. I found this via a link over at oncee@blogspot. I had posted a link to a Super Mario Brothers clone some time ago that was written entirely in JavaScript, and I thought that was really cool. And it was, but I think that this is even cooler. Well, for us geeks it is.

Photo of the Day

Today's photo is of the statue of three flying men. It is located in front of the BB&T building on Summers Street in Charleston, WV.

Photo of the Day

I have been enjoying some sky photos from some other photo-bloggers out there as of late, so I thought I would share one I like that I took recently. It's amazing just how beautiful the sky can be, if we take the time to look up.

Photo of the Day

Just about all of the wonderful colors of fall have left our area. So, to preserver the memory, I present today's photo. This is another shot from the Ridenour Lake in Nitro, WV.

Kaboom

I have been dabbling for a little bit with TNT Basic. I used to do a little game programming some years back on my Amiga computer. It was so much fun, but since I have moved on from that platform to Linux, and now the Mac, I have been missing writing fun little games. So, when I stumbled on TNT Basic, I was thrilled!

To make a long story short, I recreated a very basic version of Kaboom. The graphics are not that great, terrible in fact. The game does play well, though, and is quite challenging. It should work on Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X.

Once you download the game, and un-stuffit, just drag the game to wherever you want. To quit the game at any time, press Q. To pause the game, press ESCAPE. While paused, you can take a screenshot, or you can minimize it to do other tasks. To start the game after it has loaded, simply click the mouse. The madbomber will start moving and dropping bombs. He drops 10 bombs per level. So on level one, he drops 10. On level two, he drops 20, and so on. When you catch all the bombs for a level, the madbomber will stop to give you a break. When you are ready for the next level, click the mouse button. If you happen to miss a bomb, and you will miss eventually, all the bombs explode, and you lose your bottom most bucket. Click the mouse button to begin again. The madbomber will slow down a little for you. When you have missed 3 bombs, the game is over. If you want to start a new game click the mouse button.

Download Kaboom

Enjoy!

Photo of the Day

Walking to my car after work a couple of days ago, I captured this shot of a plane coming in for a landing. Since there was very little color in the shot anyways, being an overcast day, I went ahead and converted the shot to black and white. It's a little grainy, but I think I like the effect.

Photo of the Day

This morning, I got to watch the birds start their migration south. It was quite a sight to see all of those birds flying overhead. There were thousands of them. The sky got kind of dark at times as they filled it. And they were noisy too. All of the birds chirping with one another as they went on their way. I don't know if anyone else out there got a chance to see them this morning, but it was incredible.

NASCAR Teams per Owner Cap for 2006

I heard the announcement that NASCAR has made a rule change for 2006 that an owner can have no more than 4 teams. They did this supposedly to help the situation with the mega-teams. Of course, the two main mega-teams, Rousch and Hendrick, are being grand-fathered in, and will have several years to comply with the rule.

Currently, each has 5 teams. Technically, they don't since any one owner doesn't have more than 2 teams. And if I understand correctly, the cap was two teams per owner previously. So, NASCAR has actually increased the limit. I don't see how this is going to change anything. I think they are going to force them to be in separate locations, but that does little to really affect the situation in my opinion. I don't see why they can't just enforce the current rule of two teams.

What's more annoying is that NASCAR are basically giving an indefinite time frame for the two offending teams to comply with the rule change. Talk about playing favorites. If NASCAR wants to improve its image with the fans with regards to enforcing rules, and being consistent with handing out penalties, then this rule change needs to be changed.

I heard a quote from Jack Rousch complaining that it was a direct attack on his teams, and that he was the only one going to be affected by the change. Hello, Jack! Have you forgot about Hendrick Motorsports? Besides, this really doesn't hurt either in any case. In fact, it makes it easier for them to have large mega-teams.

Photo of the Day

I captured this squirrel as it made its way across the power lines.

Some Good Music

I came across some good music by Y0UNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES while visiting ZeNeece's World. I have been taking the Shockwave Flash files, and converting them to MP3 using FFMPEGX, and then importing them into iTunes.

OS X 10.4.4 Before Christmas

It appears that us Mac geeks may be in for an early Christmas present this year. If past trends hold true, we should expect to see a 10.4.4 build of OS X on the update servers sometime before Christmas.

Checker Auto Parts 500

Today's NASCAR race was great! Some of the best racing we have had all year. The big news today though happened before the race. Kurt Busch was apparently pulled over for reckless driving Friday evening. Then, during the event, he was uncooperative, and would not submit to a field breathalizer test. The office apparently smelled alcohol on him, though Busch denies that the event is alcohol-related. When the sobriety test was administered at the office near the raceway, the equipment failed, which was probably a good thing for Busch.

I have never really liked Busch. He's probably one of the few drivers in NASCAR I don't like. Actually, he's probably the only one I don't like. He just seems to be arrogant, and in a bad way. Sometimes, arrogant can be funny, but in his case, he comes off as a spoiled brat. I just hope his brother Kyle doesn't turn out the same.

Roger Penske said in an interview that this would not affect Busch's career at Penske racing in 2006, but I have my doubts. They will keep a tight reign on that boy. No more late nights on the town for ol' Kurt. Well, not if he wants to keep his ride. He's already out for the rest of the year at Roush Racing. Jack Rousch is probably glad to hand this "problem child" off to someone else.

Lastly, I want to congratulate Kyle Busch on a great race. He did an awesome job on fending off Greg Biffle for the win.

Photo of the Day

Today's photo is one that I took through the glass in front of Boll Furniture in downtown Charleston. It's a statue of two frogs dancing. This statue has been for sale in Boll for a long time. Would anyone ever actually consider buying this thing? I mean, who in their right mind would want this thing? Well, there could one person, I suppose.

Why Open Source is Great

I have been using Flock for some time now as my browser of choice. The feature I love most is the integration with del.icio.us bookmarks. One thing that was slightly annoying was that it prompted to login to my del.icio.us account each time I started it up even though I had saved my username and password to the preferences. I believe that the developers chose to do it this since Flock allows for multiple del.icio.us accounts. That's a cool feature too, but I don't use it. So, I posted a question to this problem of mine, and got some feedback that they had been thinking on a way to handle this very problem. Well, I proposed a solution. And this evening, I download the latest hourly build of Flock, and it looks like they used my solution. Very cool!

Photo of the Day

I have been seeing a lot of ridiculous signs around town lately. Wouldn't just one of these signs be enough? Sometimes, you see these two signs together but not that close, and it makes a little more sense. But when they are right next to each other, it just seems a little bit much.

Photo of the Day

Here's another sky shot. This was taken earlier this week, near my house. I really like the deep red colors of this one.

Photo of the Day

This is outside of Blossom Dairy in Charleston, WV. This is a great place to eat. The food is excellent. If you want a table for lunch, though, get there early.

Photo of the Day

The sky this evening can be described in one word, Incredible!

Sleeping Positions Reveal Personality

While reading Adventures of a Domestic Engineer I came across this article on sleeping positions, and how they might reveal something about your personality. Based on the article, I sleep in the freefall position. And based on the description it gives for those who sleep in the freefall position, I think they are quite accurate. Interesting.

GVim Configuration Tip

I found a great article on setting up GVim on Mac OS X (should work on any version of GVim, actually), and I thought I would share it. I made a few minor changes to the settings to the version I found. GVim, by default uses a small font, and some default settings aren't that great. Below, is my configuration file, with comments above as to what each line does. You can copy the red text below straight into GVim, and save it to your home directory as .gvimrc and when you start GVim the next time, the settings will take effect.

" syntax highlighting on
syntax on

" auto indent
set ai

" show line numbers
set nu

" tabs should be four spaces
set ts=4

" do not put a cr at the end of the file. this will result in headers sent if you do web programming
set binary noeol

" highlighting search results is annoying
set nohlsearch

" show matching brackets
set showmatch

" make that backspace key work the way it should
set backspace=indent,eol,start

" OPTIONAL
" show whitespace at end of lines
highlight WhitespaceEOL ctermbg=lightgray guibg=lightgray
match WhitespaceEOL /s+$/

" make the last line where the status is two lines deep so you can see status always
set laststatus=2

" vi compatible is LAME
set nocompatible

" no bell, please
set vb

" a better font...
set gfn=Monaco:h12:a

" Windows users, use one of these instead...
" set gfn=Courier:h12
" set gfn=Lucida\ Console:h12

" set the screen width and height
win 80 40

Klik Here

I was just reading about a new package management system for Linux. I can hear those of you who have used Linux groan, "Yeah, right... Just what we need -- another package management system!" This one is different though. It takes an idea from Apple, AppDir, and brings it to the Linux platform. So, instead of download, and install. You just download it. Then it appears as one file, like the AppDir style on Mac OS X. You can move it around anywhere you like, and you can run it from there. There is no install. There is no compiling. Very nice idea. This is something that Linux has needed. Heck, Windows could use this idea too. Now, it's early in the going, but they have quite a nice repository of packages so far, and are continuing to grow. It has some limitations, but it has some promise.

Election Day Photo

For those of you who have an election day today, I thought I would give you guys an extra photo for the day... You're goin' to need it!

Photo of the Day

I had to fill up the tank with gas the other day, and while I was at the gas station, I noticed the colors of the trees, and the train, and just liked the combination.

Photo of the Day

This is another from my little outing to Ridenour Lake. This is a photo of the cemetery across from the lake. It's another example of the fall colors we have this year. Even though the colors have not been quite what they have in past years, it's still a good fall-color-year.

Photo of the Day

I took a lot of photos today. The fall colors were really great. This one was taken at Ridenour Lake in Nitro, WV. I think it gives a nice taste of the fall colors that we're having around this area.

Photo of the Day

I found this flower while walking to my car after work this afternoon. I sure do enjoy macro photography.

Mac OS X Dashboard Widget IDE

Apple might release an IDE for Dashboard Widget development. This would be absolutely awesome! Widgets are not that hard to create, but debugging them can be a real pain. Any help in that area would be a huge boon! My only question is when will this be released?

Convert ASF to DV on Mac OS X

I have been trying to determine a way to convert ASF format video files to something usable on my Mac for some time now. Today, I found a way that works well. It's a two step process, but only requires one application, FFMPEGX. FFMPEGX is a shareware front end to several UNIX utilities on Mac OS X. You can download all of the utilities for free and do it by hand if you like, but the front end that this application provides is well worth the $15 shareware fee. I haven't sent my money in yet, but I will be doing that in the next couple of days.

I purchased a Mustek DV 4500 sometime back, under the impression that it stored it's videos in MPEG-4 format, and that I would be able to import those into iMovie. Afterall, Apple states that iMovie supports MPEG-4. Well, both were true. The Mustek DV 4500 does indeed store its files in MPEG-4. And iMovie supports MPEG-4. The only problem? The two MPEG-4 formats are different. So, I was stuck with video I couldn't use. I found that I could play the video fine using MPlayerOSX, and so I knew I should be able to encode it to something else. Then I found FFMPEGX. So I dropped the ASF file onto the window, and FFMPEGX recognized it. Tried to convert it to several formats that I thought would be right, but didn't have much luck. So I went looking in the FFMPEGX forums. Then I found this. I needed to convert it to DivX. Ok, so that was a step in the right direction, but not where I wanted to go. I needed it in a format that iMovie supported, and DivX wasn't it.

I toyed around some, and thought, maybe I need to convert it from DivX to something else. So I tried the DV setting in FFMPEGX. It had failed when I tried it from ASF, but I thought I'd try. And it worked. But there was no sound. A little more reading, and I found I need to set it to use audio track 1, instead of the default audio track of 0. Did that, and I had sound. But most importantly, iMovie recognized it too! WooHoo!

So there you have it. Two steps from ASF to DV.

1. Convert ASF to DivX, making sure to select audio track 1.
2. Convert DivX to DV

Finally, I can use this camera again! It's a great little camera. Not super great quality, but for small simple stuff with the kids outside, it works just great! And it is easy to carry around since it is so small.

Thanks to the author of this great tool. Your registration fee will be on its way soon.

Photo of the Day

I pass this bridge every day on my way to work, and on my way home. I decided to get a shot of this as I drove by on my way home today. I really want to get a shot of this in the early morning with the sun behind it, and the fog on the river. It really looks incredible.

Open Trackbacks

Don Surber has open trackbacks today. He's done this a couple of times so far. I think he's trying to get in on the A&F marketing tactics. Anything for free publicity, right Don?

Photo of the Day

Apparently, it was a great day for boating. There were a lot of boats cruising up and down the river. Here's just one of the many that I watched from my office window.

Fragile, Do Not Bend

Today, at the office, I received the magazine pictured here. This was how it was delivered. I kid you not. Now, is it any wonder that so many prefer e-mail, and electronic delivery? I mean, come on, USPS... is it really that hard to deliver a magazine in one piece? Am I right Don, or am I right?

.NET Web Services on Windows 2003

The past couple of days have been enlightening. I discovered after much digging that a web service that we have which runs perfectly fine on a Windows 2000 server, would not work when running on Windows 2003 server. I would attempt to make a SOAP call to our web service, and I would get the following SOAP response:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
    <soap:Body>
        <soap:Fault>
            <faultcode>soap:Server</faultcode>
            <faultstring>Server was unable to process request. --&gt; File or assembly name ssowmn-3.dll, or one of its dependencies, was not found.</faultstring>
            <detail/>
        </soap:Fault>
    </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

It turns out that there are several things that can cause this, but the most prevalent is that the ASPNET user and the NETWORK SERVICE user need to have "modify" access to the Windows Temp directory. Basically, the problem is that when ASP.NET performs the serialization needed for the web service, it uses the temp directory. Thus, if it can't write to the directory, then it fails.

Choose This Day

A fellow blogger has a great post today that will make you stop and think. She discusses how her life was changed when she was 20, and she became one of the statistics -- an unwed single mother. She talks about the struggles that resulted, and how she was able to overcome them with the thought that she was doing everything for her new son, and not herself. But my favorite part of her story comes near the end.

I imagine that if we supported single mothers, helped them to find ways to go back to school, and worked to create a society in which dating was a more healthy, trust-based process to begin with, that we could reduce the abortion rate without ever marching in the first rally or passing the first law.

If we, particularly we in the church, would put this into practice more. What a difference could be made in the world. Thanks TS for sharing!

Photo of the Day

I really like Hummers. One day, I will be a proud Hummer owner. I don't care if the gas mileage is terrible. I don't care if you think they are ugly. They are big. Real big. Just what I need.

Graph Paper

Last night, I needed some graph paper. Now, we had some of this at one time, so I asked my wife, and she said, "Yeah, but the kids used all of it already to scribble on". Then, she said, "Why don't you just look it up on the internet and find some to print off? You can find anything on the internet." Now, I know why I love her! And for the rest of you who might need graph paper but don't want to go out and buy it, this site has some great PDF's of varying types of graph paper.

Photo of the Day

I found this sign nearly bent down to the sidewalk next to Kanawha Blvd between Hale Street and Capitol Street. I think they may need another sign. This one would read:

"Watch for sign when turning right onto Kanawha Blvd from Hale Street"

What do you think?