Photo of the Day 2008-01-31

While I try to learn to take better pictures, you'll have to realize that at photography, I stink out loud. Fortunately, Mrs. At Home has some cute babies, which makes up for a bit of my stink-out-loudedness.

2008-01-31 19:09 D50 ISO 1600 55mm f/5.6 1/6s

Complaint of the Day - 2008-01-30

After posting that photo, I can name a handful of things wrong with the shot. Since it was in the shot, I don't know if I can really correct it (without trying to Photoshop/butcher it).

• The shadow behind her is awful - it looks like an outline in a Peanuts cartoon. I shot this with a bit of flash to get the shadows off her face, but ended up casting a shadow behind her. How do I not do that?
• She's wearing glitter eyeliner - how do I bring that out? Again, I want to take good pictures, not make good pictures with Photoshop.
• Maybe the white balance was off more than I thought. Her skin is really pink, but the blouse isn't that gold at all in the photo.

It was beautiful daylight outside for shooting this. I just wonder how to shoot it without ruining it. I suppose that's why I'm shooting every day - to learn as I go.

Photo of the Day 2008-01-30

I've not been doing this yet, and I certainly need to start. Today, I got my rig back from repair, so I will try to start shooting every day and get something blog-worthy every day. They may not be the most interesting photos, but I'll try to get better.

This one is cheating a bit. Since it's church night, I didn't get back at my rig until 20:30, so the pictures from today are 1) all indoors, and 2) all lame.

I did the correction on this one today, so does that count? This is from the last set of pictures I took before the camera went to the factory. I shot this on the night of the father daughter dance with the 70/300mm lens when I discovered my kit lens was busted. Amazing how with the white balance out of wack, this still didn't turn out too bad. There's actually very little color adjustment to this at all. I need some coaching to find out how to get her eyes to come out a bit without cooling the whole photo too much - I like the balance over all, but would like her pretty blues to come off just a touch. The blouse is actually not white - it *is* a gold color, so to cool the white balance much more would be to change the real color of the blouse.

I'm also thinking I may change the blog background color to black because this looks so much better in Lightroom - of course, that's also probably because I'm looking at it in bazillions of colors in Lightroom that don't come out in a flimsy JPEG.

Anyhow, enough wishing. (And I know three of the four people who are reading this just fell asleep when all they were initially thinking was "gee - cute kid".)

2007-11-17 17:10 est D50 ISO 200 70mm f/4.0 1/100s

Self-Disclosure Meme

Okay, nobody asked me to do the Self-Disclosure Meme, but it looked fun, so here are seven bits about me you might not know (unless you're one of the four or so people who read this blog):

Online Habits
While I keep two blogs, a personal and professional blog, Google pretty much owns my life, and I'm a technologist, I don't do a lot of online things you would think. I don't have a Myspace account, or a Facebook profile. I'm undecided on whether it's more dangerous to have a profile, or not to and have somebody else hijack your identity. I don't play Second Life, and probably never will. In fact, I'm so far behind, I don't even have an account at Remember the Milk.

I don't click links in emails, and people I communicate with are shocked that I rarely open attachments. Email links are evil, and so are attachments.

Family
I'm the seventh of seven children. And in reality, the first five siblings are enough older than I that I spent most of my childhood as the second of two. Until high school, I would say I never really was very close at all to any of my siblings. I've grown closer to them as I've gotten older. I never knew many of my extended family very well, either. My siblings have had much closer relationships to my cousins, but maybe because we spent most of my life away from the midwest, I just never got to know them that well.

Mrs. At Home's family is quite the opposite. They get the entire extended family together for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day, Groundhog Day, Arbor Day, Halloween, All-Saints Day, Easter Day, Good Friday, Independence Day, Valentines Day, Secretary's Day, and every birthday of all those relatives. Our birthday budget easily eclipses our Christmas budget.

Remembering Things
I'm awful at remembering names. Unless I've spent substantial time with you or are somehow related to you, it's probable that I won't remember your name. And if I see you out of context (like, if I work with you, but see you at the grocery store), I won't remember your name or where I know you from.

However, I remember numbers. I've not lived in Texas for four years, and I still remember my Texas driver's license number. I remember the first phone number I had as a kid. I remember social security numbers, passport numbers, phone numbers, and strange formulas, patterns, and such.

Yet, I can't remember dates. I can only tell you the birthdays of four of my six siblings, and two of those only because they're this week, and they were born 364 days apart. I remember the month of the other two birthdays, and I know the month and the approximate date of my parents' birthdays. I don't know when their anniversary was. I easily remember the date of my own anniversary, but usually have to think for a second to remember the year. I remember Mrs. At Home's birthday, and generally have to think for a few seconds to pull up K and L's birthdays.

The dates are the one thing that actually keep me from scoring super high on autistic tests. Evidently, autistic tendencies are actually very common, and I show many of them (see my next factoid).

Phobias
I decided to use phobias here instead of fears. Fears would be legitimate things I fear, and I just don't feel like going into that right now. These are common situations I get into that I'm very uncomfortable with.

I'm claustrophobic. Not terribly, but noticeably. When I get on a crowded elevator, I tune out. I can't talk or listen. I don't get sick to my stomach, but every impulse in me is to run. If I can't put my arms out arms' distance from me, I get very frightened. I don't know why, but I do. I'm particularly frightened of large crowds of people, especially when many are talking.

I'm very scared of meeting new people. I've stopped going to a Tai Chi class because every week I had to meet a new person in the class. Mrs. At Home loves to go to parties and get to know new people. I go to parties and tend to gravitate to the people I already know there, generally Mrs. At Home.

I have every adult male's irrational (who knows - maybe it's rational) fear of circus clowns.

Authors
I hate to say "favorite authors", because that would imply that I read a lot. I generally read reference material.

The author I've read the most of, and one of the pastor's whose messages I've heard the most of (although I've only been to one of his sermons in person) is John Piper. Before my first trip to EA, Let the Nations Be Glad was required reading, and that started my interest in his writing. Since then, I've read several other of his books, and watched or listened to many, many of his sermons (be sure to check out the podcasts of the weekly message).

I also like some old dead guys like Jonathan Edwards and the Apostle Paul. Most living people don't write as well as the old dead ones did. Err...umm...they weren't dead when they were writing. And now, they're only dead in body. They're alive with Christ for sure.

And my first real theology book was Knowing God by J. I. Packer. I've probably given away four personal copies of that book. You'd think I would learn to buy one to keep and another to give away knowing I would have the opportunity to give it away.

Moving
A list of all the places I can remember that I've lived:

• Orrville, OH (until 2 1/2)
  
• Paris, TX (until 18)
• Commerce, TX (until 25)
• Greenville, TX (1 year)
• Garland, TX (1 year?)
• Rowlett, TX (6 years?)
• Matthews, NC (2 years)
• Charlotte, NC (2 years)

Music
Although I'm a computer geek now, I was a music major for much of college, and have a strange combination of musical tastes.

I grew up listening mostly to my older brothers' and sisters' and my parents' tastes in music, so I was surrounded by Barry Manilow, the Bee Gees, Neil Diamond, 40's big band, and Hooked on Classics (sorry Mom, but that junk has got to go). Strangely, I still like some of that stuff (but I'm not telling which).

I was a child of the 80's, and while I can probably sing along to a lot of 80's pop, I don't really care for it much. The first music I bought was late 80's - early 90's hair bands. Yes, I owned Slippery When Wet.

In college I was first exposed to Romantic music (about 1850's to 1900 or so). Not romantic as in little "r" with sappy live stories, but big "R" Romantic as in bipolar, massive orchestras. Wagner, Bruckner, and Mahler type Romantic. And about the same time, I became a big fan of 20th Century Neo-Classical Russian composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich. So if you ask if I like Classical music, I usually qualify it and say I love Romantic and 20th C. Neo-Classical, but not Classic or Baroque or Medieval. I can't stomach Mozart.

Lately, I've started to enjoy more fusion and other not-straight-up-jazz. XM 72 Beyond Jazz exposed me to a whole slew of artists in a whole slew of genres I didn't even know I liked. Now, I've listened to great acts like Club D'Elf.

And lastly, I like albums, not songs. I generally don't like to hear a single song out of context, because often artists write albums as a complete work. Some of the best albums I know are David Crowder Band's Illuminate and A Collision or (3 + 4 = 7), and A Miles Davis album I won't put the title to because this is a family-friendly site.

Stress Relief

Since I was so worked up that Mrs. At Home is an uber-maker and I'm not, I decided to give myself a bit of stress relief. I saw this recipe on Lifehacker yesterday, and decided to try it out myself. After a lot of work, they turned out pretty good.

Now, in making them, however, it only added to the very stress I was trying to relieve. See, Mrs. At Home had to teach me that you mix the wet ingredients in one bowl, and the dry in another, then slowly add the dry to the wet. I knew to keep them separate and add one slowly to the other, but I had it backwards (no wonder my gravy never turns out!). And then, Mrs. At Home had to teach me how to knead. To wit, Mrs. At Home was the one who bought the balloons, and it was her flour and cream of tartar I used. (The salt, water, and oil were mine - I can cook - just can't bake or make).

But once all was said and done, we worked out a lot of frustration just getting them stuffed. You'll definitely need a friend to help you - it takes two hands just to keep the balloon stretched while a friend rams dough into it. Then the last balloon, the one you don't cut the neck from, is really hard.

You can see in the picture the difference in size as we got better. The larger one is the last one we did. We learned by that point the next few tips:

• Just cut a little off the neck of the first three balloons - don't cut the whole neck of, just the collar.
• Go ahead and really press the dough down into that first balloon.
• When you get to the last balloon, turn it inside-out first, then pull it over the rest of them, using your new-found cramming skills to get it all pressed in past the neck.
  

Give Me Just a Moment

It's a sad, sad, sad day for me. See, several months ago, I found Makezine, and instantly decided "I want to be a maker!" Makezine has lots of links to people who make really uber cool things, and I want to be uber cool, too.

Before Makezine, I had also been looking at posts on Instructables, where people put together photo tutorials on how to do stuff - but the do is most often make. So I spent a couple of hours in the garage one night trying to make a duct tape wallet. I did a really sloppy job on the wallet, but it was still functional and still lasted me longer than any expensive wallet I had made.

And before that, I tried to do stuff solo. I wanted to start writing letters to the girls because we're so tied up in the computer that I didn't want to go home having left the girls only electronic messages, or having never told them in writing some really important things. And while they went away one weekend, I bought a nice box from a local craft store, and some stain, and some sandpaper. I spent hours in the garage sanding, staining, sanding, staining, and putting a nice felt bottom in the box. I gave the box to V with a first letter inside. Fortunately, V still has the box. Unfortunately, three years later, the stain still has not dried.

So, as you can see, I'm not cut out to be a maker. I spent the better part of yesterday working on some code for a class that I'm tag-teaching, and it's still not done. I mean, I'm never done with my code (I was Web 2.0 and Perpetual Beta before Google even dreamed of GMail!), but it's not even ready to present yet.

But Mrs. At Home spent only a few short hours this weekend and made these, and these, and this, and this. (The last two are contest worthy and have been entered in different contests.

And all that is after Mrs. At Home gave me for Christmas a very 1-UPped version of my duct tape wallet. In addition to actually being neat and not all sloppy like, it has a window for my ID (which I never could get right on mine), and a secret compartment for my SanDisk 2 GB Ultra II SD Plus USB Card. I use KeePass on my Windows machine at work and KeePassX on my Macs at home and the odd Linux desktop now and then. And so my wallet has a secret hiding place for my passwords so I can keep them in my wallet instead of on a keychain.

All this to say, I'm no maker, but Mrs. At Home certainly is. Please allow me to grieve for a moment....okay - moment over - on occasion, because she's an uber-maker, I get cool stuff out of it. (But I can't show you a picture of the wallet because that would be insecure-like if you knew my DL number, where I bank, and how much cash I carry, right?

Mrs. At Work

Yesterday, Mrs. At Home put on the Mrs. At Work hat. She borrowed a
friend's sewing machine, bought some fleece, and went to work
yesterday for K and L. The girls love them. I'm trying to train L to
remind people her mommy made them, but she's still convinced that they
came from the sewing machine.

To wit, she did all this while trying to keep the girls at bay, so I
could work on stuff for class. She's a gem!

Yes, You Can Microwave Eggs

I've only tried scrambling, and I sorely doubt you could make a good fried egg in the microwave, but I also bet you could poach an egg in the microwave, but it's actually probably quicker (and just as clean) to do on the stove. But for quick, easy-clean-up scrambled eggs, I vote for the microwave.

You don't have to, but you can butter the bottom and sides of a pyrex bowl, and then scramble the eggs with just a splash of water or a bit of milk. Whisk with a wire whisk and cover with a sheet of plastic wrap. Microwave for 1:30 at a time, stirring between cooks. It usually takes about 1 cycle per 2 eggs, so for 6 eggs, you're looking at 4:30.

And two tips for extra-crispy bacon. If you get the uber-thick sliced stuff, press all the slices into flour on both sides, and put it all on a deep cookie sheet. Bake at 350℉ for 20 minutes. Or if you're pan frying, as soon as it's thoroughly cooked, get it onto a paper towel and press another layer over it to soak up all the grease as quickly as possible.

And since we're on the topic of breakfast, the melt-in-your-mouth pancake recipe on Bisquick is very, very good. I won't give you the recipe here, so you're gonna' have to go buy some Bisquick of your own and try it out.

Learning I Like: Electronics 101 Snap Kit

RadioShack has always had really good kits for learning electronics. When I was a kid, I had something not terribly dis-similar from their Electronics Learning Lab. The kit I had didn't have the breadboard, but had all the spring locations, and banks for all the components, so the only loose pieces you dealt with were jumper wires to go between all the springs.

They don't have that kit anymore, but they have something even better. They have Electronics Snap-Kits, which have all the components soldered into plastic building blocks with connectors on each end that snap into the other components. Of course, as is typical for RadioShack, the documentation with them is excellent for learning electronics.

K and I got the 101 Kit some time ago, and then a local store was closing. When they closed, everything went to 50% off, so we picked up a 303 Kit then as well. The 101 is very basic, and includes 3 IC's, two resistors, a photoresistor, a relay, a pushbutton, a switch, a motor, an LED, a light bulb, and a speaker. The pieces all snap together very easily and the diagrams in the book are very, very clear. K is learning some very basic electronics (so basic that resistors don't reduce current, but they make things louder and softer), and she's having fun with it.

So if you have a 6 or 7 year old kid who you want to have the opportunity to become a maker, start them off with one of those.

A word of warning. I bought the 303 because it was heavily discounted. However, it's $100 if it's not on sale. If your kids are old and smart enough to read and understand all the projects in the 303 book, they're probably skilled enough with their hands to handle real components, so you can get them the much less expensive Learning Lab, which has documentation that's every bit as good, and since it's a standard breadboard, if it doesn't have a component you need (it has hundreds of resistors, capacitors, etc.), you can just get standard gauge through-hole components that will fit the breadboard. I use the Learning Lab as an easy way to wire up projects for my Arduino since I've not built a Proto Shield yet.

The 101, however, is worth every penny of the $35. If they're old enough to handle standard components but haven't dealt with very basic electronics, the Learning Lab moves very quickly, so you may want to help them with the first several projects regarding how to use a breadboard, complete circuits, etc., etc.

New Phone

iWould sound like a fanboy of the company that makes the phone if
iMentioned what kind of phone it was, so iWon't. But Mrs. At Home
bought me iLife 08 for my birthday, so iDecided it's time for me to
take more photos.

Well, my phone was taking blurry pictures, and iLike being able to
take a picture on the phone on the go and send it straight to the
blog. So iWent to the store where iGot my phone and explained my
problem. They asked if iHad backed up, which iHad, so they did a bit
if paperwork, and gave me a brand new phone, right there on the spot.
iLove that company, and that store.

Tech I Like: AppleTV

I have to make a promise not to make tech recommendations that are only good for geeks with pocket protectors or the few 1337 who actually know what 1337 means. (For those who are 1337 and happen to be reading, I'm leaving out the tech specs because you already know what those are).

The AppleTV is a remarkable little device. It's smaller than your DVD player or game console (probably), and is basically unobtrusive in looks. On the front, it has a single small LED to indicate that it's on, and it blinks if you're using the remote with it. It comes with a very simple Apple remote, the same kind that comes with all the new Mac's - Play/Pause button, Menu, Forward, Back, Up, Down. That's it. And it's enough.

The AppleTV syncs with your iTunes library, and you can specify what "stuff" on your iTunes library goes onto the AppleTV. For this to work, though, your AppleTV has to hook to the network. You can do this with a standard ethernet cable or with the built-in WiFi that probably works with your wireless network at home. When you pull it out of the box and turn it on, your iTunes library will see it automatically, and you'll have to enter a number into your iTunes to get the two to communicate.

So, if it's in your iTunes, it's on your AppleTV. This means movies, TV shows, music, and podcasts. You can either specify the "stuff" that gets put onto the AppleTV, or you can make the AppleTV connect back to your iTunes library. So if there's not enough space on the AppleTV for the last episode of Lost (it works like an iPod, so you can specify X number of unwatched, etc.), you can just watch it over the network.

So here's the main reason I love it. This is a picture of our media library shelf. Yes, the one you keep next to your TV in the big old entertainment center. You'll notice a handful of XBox 360, GameCube, and Wii games, but no DVD's and no CD's. We probably have about 100 or so DVD's, and probably close to 1,000 music CD's. But they're not in the living room, and they're not on top of the DVD player, or strewn across the entertainment center.

Once I got the AppleTV, it took me a couple of months to get all (the rest of) our music ripped into iTunes, and probably a couple of months more to get all our existing DVD's in. But now, when we buy a new movie or CD, before we've even used the media even once, it gets ripped and put into iTunes. I keep the media, so in case the RIAA comes and wants to get me for piracy, I can try to claim fair-use because I made a personal copy for backup purposes. If we get rid of CD's or DVD's, I'll get rid of all my copies on iTunes.

The beauty of all this is that K and Mrs. At Home can easily navigate the menus. And I did this in a reasonably "standard" way, not buy convincing the Budget Review Committee that I needed an XBox classic, then to crack it open and mod it, then they have to navigate some really complex system of FTP menus or something to try to watch a movie. (I'm a big fan of the XBMC, but only if I were single. Having a family automatically means that watching a movie cannot involve soldering or a less-than-polished interface).

Now, since you can't easily use iTunes to rip your DVD's to movies in iTunes, there's some additional work you have to go through for now. I've heard rumors that Apple is working on a way to enable you to rip your movies in iTunes (I think for a fee), but until then, you'd have to do some work that may be less than user-friendly for the average user. If you want details on what I use, contact me and I'll let you know what I did (it may or may not work for you). That being said, I'm the Commander in Chief of ripping, but the rest of the family can actually operate the AppleTV very easily.

A word of warning: "Fair Use" says that you can make a copy of your digital media for backup purposes. and the RIAA says it's okay to make digital copies of your music for personal use, but DVD's are encrypted, and the DMCA says it's illegal to break encryption used to prevent copyright infringement. So whether or not it's legal to make unencrypted copies of your own DVD's for your own personal use is largely in question right now. I doubt that the MPAA or the RIAA would come to your house and sue you to oblivion for making personal copies of your DVD's. They can do that if you're distributing it over the internet, and nobody really knows if they can or not for personal copies. I do this for personal copies, and can produce the original for any media they may find on my AppleTV. To my knowledge, nobody's tried this out in court yet.

5 (of 50) Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do

Now, Mrs. At Home will probably kill me for being almost completely in agreement with this guy. And my motives are probably somewhat different than his. He wants you to help your kids do some of these dangerous things so that they can be "empowered" to interact with their world.
I'm a big fan of ideas like this and The Dangerous Book for Boys, which really aren't new ideas, but reviving the way we used to be. Now, we try so very hard to protect our kids from objects and people who do "dangerous" things, but we're doing our kids more of a dis-service than anything.
Here are a whole bunch of reasons we should let our kids do dangerous things:

• Boys in particular have completely forgotten the male role in society. I hate that men dominate and oppress women, and it's largely because we've not trained men how to be men, who stand up for and protect and (when absolutely necessary) fight for their family.
• Devices have become more and more complex. And we see them as an abstraction of what they really are. However, they're made up of the same types of technology, and very, very few people understand how they work anymore. This is resulting in a problem where people know how to make complex things, but couldn't reproduce or maintain the simple things if they had to.
• Similarly to the previous point, specifically in the computer science field, 10 years ago, there was a statistic that something over 60% of COBOL (a dinosaur of a computer language) were within 10 years of retirement. Yet most of the major systems in the world (government, military, financial) operate on COBOL. Very few young people would be able to pick up and maintain these systems.
• The previous two items have helped to result in the "off-shoring of America" - many of our manufacturing and programming jobs are being sent to other countries because the jobs are still necessary, we just don't know how to do them. (Another major factor is that Americans keep demanding lower prices, yet we get paid much, much higher salaries).
• When kids don't play with knives or fire or spears, they don't know how to handle them when they're put into contact with them. I'm largely responsible around knives because I was exposed to them (well, not hidden from them) at an early age. But I never handled a real gun when I was a kid, so now when I see one, my response is more one of fear than a responsible respect for them. Being afraid is more dangerous than respecting them. And because we've probably sheltered our daughters too much, they're afraid of using the garbage disposal in the sink. They'll help with any part of cleaning, except for that.
  
• The best way to learn how to put a thing together is by taking it apart.
• The best way to learn how to protect a system is by breaking it or breaking into it.
  
• I played with knives, BB guns, and fire and repelled from large trees, swung from ropes into a creek, got hit in the head countless times by trees, baseballs, footballs, soccer balls, rocks, you name it, and I turned out okay, right? (Don't answer that).

So here's my cheer for letting your kids learn by tinkering and interacting with the world, and please bring your boys up to be boys.

About Prayer

This week I've been praying about...well....prayer. And Bethlehem Church's sermon this week was on prayer.

Listen to, watch, or read the sermon. You might want to keep it on your list of sermons to go back to.

I was first convicted about my own deficiency in prayer a couple of years ago when I read/listened to Jonathan Edwards' sermon on "Hypocrites Deficient in the Duty of Prayer" (I love Jonathan Edwards type titles!) Basically, Edwards tells the negative view - Christians who don't pray should often or earnestly should seriously inspect their faith - your prayer is evidence of your faith. Those with little faith pray little or for little things. Those with great faith know God is capable of great things and therefore pray for great things, and with great frequency.

Jesus tells a parable in Luke 11, that if you go to your friend's house at midnight and ask him for bread because you have another friend in your home and have nothing to give to him, even though it's midnight, your friend will answer because of your persistence. I'm shamefully bad about making a request only once and then tabling it. How little faith does that show in God? If He doesn't do what I wanted the first time, does that mean He's not able to do a thing? Or that He won't do a thing? So I'm trying to become better about praying for things persistently.

I'm also trying to get better at praying for much more magnificent things. I, sadly, pray these weak little prayers about "help me have a good day at work" (on my terms), or small things like that. And it's not that God doesn't want us to invite Him into every detail of our lives, but He's God - why don't we also (not instead, but also) ask Him for really huge things - like for the salvation of our family members, or our neighborhood, or our country, or that He'd begin a revival, or that He'd raise up large numbers of people who are radically different from the world like Jesus was?

I'm also bad at thanksgiving. When a prayer is answered, I seem to forget Who really did the work, worked the miracle, or changed my heart to truly understand what's best. I'm so bad about giving God the glory He deserves for the wonders He works in my life every day.

And of course, I've always been deficient in praise. I need to read the Psalms more, and be more prone to review His attributes and to praise Him for who He is, and how unfathomable His ways are, and how Holy he is, and to praise His splendor, and magnificence, and provision.

So pray for me to be better at praying. And I'll pray the same for you.