A series of semi-connected Stories and Pictures
We’re experiencing some technical difficulties in our little corner of the blog world…so if you’ve gotten to my blog and were really looking for Jen’s blog (which you probably are!) the click here to get there.
And please bookmark this new address for Jen’s blog: http://allmyish.com/blog/
It will look like this if you get to the right place:
…mess with your wife’s blog.
See, I’m the nerd in the family. I like technology. I like hacking my way through some code and messing things up and then fixing them. This is mostly fun, until I get in too deep. Which happens more than I’d like to admit.
Today I set sail into dangerous waters…I started messing with Jen’s blog. I’m trying to migrate her blog from typepad to wordpress. I think that wordpress is superior and I’ve been using it for the past year. I think that it’s getting better and better and it’s…free software. Between the two of us we were spending close to $200 per year on our blogs. Not anymore.
But I got going too fast today and did some dumb techie thing (rerouted the domain name from the old blog to the new) before Jen had a chance to do what she needed to do…update her pictures on the new blog. So, because of this, I lived a few moments in fear of my life as all of Jen’s pictures on both blogs went missing. Oops. She was not pleased. I was frightened. Frightened that I’d be alone in a house with her if this didn’t get fixed and even more frightened that I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to undo what I had done…
Thankfully, I did. Jen smiled. My pulse went down to a normal level. And we’re harmoniously trying to do this in the right order. I think…
I’ve finally taken another step in my nerdom…I’ve added feedburner to my blog. I barely know what this is other than it helps me keep better track of whose blocking me…that’s blog stalking in case you were wondering.
So if you’ve subscribed to the old feed..all 2 of you…could you update to the feedburner one? It would really help me keep better track of you and ultimately try to market myself out to you more effectively.
If you’ve never seen a feed, and I don’t mean like when a guy feeds like a 1,000 hunting dogs at the same time, then click the little orange icon next to the words “Urban Idealist Posts” and see what happens. Your guess is as good as mine.
Thanks!
Back in the day…before the days of iPod touch, the iPhone, 1 billion gig iPods, Video iPods, Nanos, Photo iPods, even before the click wheel gosh darn it…there was the third generation iPod. This is when my wife gifted me into the world of portable mP3 players. And what a gift.
20 gigs
Four buttons
A high-contrast screen…no color.
A big scroll wheel…no buttons.
The size of a brick…a small brick that could fit into my pocket though…I mean, it is an Apple still.
About a year ago I was out on a jog (that may have been the last time I was out on a jog) and my beloved 3rd Gen iPod froze up. None of the four precious buttons were working and the ‘lock’ was stuck on. So I did what any intelligent man/beast would do; I hit it. Hard. Lots of times. So many times in fact that shattered the two-tone LCD screen. Jen was not pleased. Neither was I.
The good news? It still worked as an external hard drive…20 gigs of external hard drive might I add. It was renamed ‘The Transporter’ because my little white, four buttoned friend was only good for carrying around my digital data.
A few weeks ago I was hanging out with my friend Jeremy, somebody had told me that he used to fix old iPods so I asked him about it. He said it was easy and that if you were patient then you could maybe fix it…I was surprised that he didn’t say that if you hit it real hard, over and over, it might work.
I went on a sight called eBay…you may have heard about it. The last time I bought something on eBay was 1999 or 2000…Dave Matthews Storytellers full recording, it was such an old school recording that it sounded like there was a bunch of robots shouting at the dog track in the background…I digress.
Anyway, I found a new LCD screen on eBay and bought it. Well, I won it…16 dollars including shipping. I watched a video tutorial on the internet (thank ifixipodsfast.com guy) and took ‘The Transporter’ apart. I love this stuff…I love technology…even old school technology. That’s how much I love it. I put in the new screen. Popped some logic boards and batteries back into place (well one of each) and put the cover back on. I have to admit…the iPod wasn’t the only thing turned on when the Apple logo appeared and the hard disk fired up…joking…partly. I was giddy.
I then proceeded to do the ‘guess who fixed their iPod dance’. Maisie watched in wonder as I danced with my little white brick of music in hand. Jen was annoyed…but then excited that I wouldn’t be bugging her about buying a new iPod.
I gave ‘The Transporter’ a new name…’RePod’…to celebrate the life, the second coming, of my iPod. Join with me in celebrating. RePod is full of music and podcasts…ready to go out on another sweaty, overweight, out of shape, stumble-of-a-jog.
Facebook…seriously. I’ve had like 50 invites to be friends w/ people on facebook in the last few weeks…including my own daughter. It’s cool to see how many people for Christian Associates have joined the CA group. I hope that we can actually stay networked somehow through this thing.
However, I have my fears that facebook will become the same worthless ‘tool’ as myspace. I don’t know what to do about this…
This is a pretty cool site…and I’m stoked I look like a couple of super-models…awesome. And I look like ‘The Juice’ apparently…which was my nick-name for a short time in college.
My cool celebrity look-alike collage from MyHeritage.com. Get one for yourself.
Jen and I are both Mac people…for many reasons that won’t be discussed in this post! But Jen has a 12″ PowerBook with only a 30GB hard drive…it’s crazy that iPods can come almost three times that size…Jen’s hard drive was almost completely full and I just didn’t understand why. I had gone through the hard disk but never saw anything that stood out as a wast of space. I even convinced her to FINALLY delete her Deleted Items from her Entourage, but even after deleting nearly 1000 (not kidding) e-mails it barely made a dent.
So I went on to Mac Update and found a program called WhatSize…it’s free and does a fairly quick scan of the hard drive and lists all the computer files in order from biggest to smallest. After this it made it very easy to figure out the culprit on Jen’s computer. A 9 gig file that was a support file to an application she didn’t have anymore! Oops. Needless to say that after deleting this her computer had all the elbow room it needed! If you have a Mac this is a must have program.
Some of you may know that I am into photography. I have really enjoyed having not just one beautiful subject around the house, but two! When Jen’s sister came to Paris to visit I had her bring me a new lens for my camera. It’s one of the cheapest (both in make and price) Canon lenses…the 50mm 1.8f, but it takes beautiful pictures. Virtually every shot that I have from the past three weeks is with this lens and it by far surpasses the quality and sharpness I get in my other lenses.
Last night I was talking w/ my dad (who blogs here) on skype video and while we were on a break from our chat I went to grab the power chord for my computer. I was pulling it up off the ground and it caught the neck-strap of the camera which pulled the camera with lens attached onto the hardwood floor. When I heard the plastic pieces jingle across the floor I looked back to see two things: My camera wasn’t in pieces, but my lens was. My brand new, cheap, but excellent lens was in two pieces. You can imagine…I was not pleased. Thousand of beautiful pictures of my daughter and wife would never be realized through my new favorite lens.
I got back on the video with my dad and was having a hard time conversing because I was not happy and preoccupied with the two lens pieces in my hands. I am not a fix-it man because most things I fidget with aren’t fixed in the end. But God’s grace shown upon me this moment and I was able to put the lens back together! I really couldn’t believe it. And the even better part was it still worked when I put it back on the camera.
So here’s my quick review of the Canon 50mm 1.8f:
Amazing glass quality in a relatively cheap lens. Super sharp images (see below). Unfortunately, cheap also describes how it is made. But overall I would recommend this lens highly…if you can manage not to drop it. Also does really well in low light and the 50mm fixed length makes for greater use of creativity as there is no zooming…what you see is what you get.
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