My iPod Mini

I tend to move around during the day and rarely have time to sit and read, plan lessons, or reflect on a lesson. Before classes begin, nutrition and lunch are the few times I'm able to sit down and relax at my desk. Otherwise, there are boring meetings, needless walking back and forth between buildings, and also a minimum three hour commute in which my brain is fairly inactive.

The wasted hours simply drift away during the day and it is annoying. There was a time in my life that I read one book per day. It didn't matter what the material was, I wanted to read. Those days have been gone for several years now but it would be nice to read a book a day again. Only I'm used to reading things online. More important, it would be dangerous to read while driving (smile).

The Apple iPod Mini is a small pocket-size device that includes 4 GB storage for mp3 files. While the $249 price tag may cause sticker shock for some, the product suggested a solution to many of my wasted hours. No, I'm not talking about listening to music but rather audio books.

The software included on the CD installed on the Tatung Tablet PC and desktop without a problem. However, the USB connection didn't work on my desktop and so all of the synching must be done via the Tablet PC. This is because a high speed USB 2.0 connection is required.

I purchased two audio books today. The first was on history, "Don't Know Much about History" and "Goals." I've been listening to both books today. In fact, I stretched an extension cord into the hallway, setup the Tablet PC, and used a headset to listen to the audio while in the tub. It was extremely relaxing. Other times today, I've been listening to the audio books on the iPod Mini while working on different websites.

The iPod Mini fits well in my pocket but I cannot stand the ear pieces included with the unit. They hurt my ears. Maybe I just don't know how to get them to fit comfortably but a regular headset is much nicer.

Synching mp3s on my iPod Mini was a simple plug of the USB cable. Warning messages suggested not disconnecting the unit while synching. Other helpful messages explained when transferring of files were completed. I simply watched the screens for helpful hints.

I did hesitate a few times on navigating through the menu system on the iPod Mini. Rolling my thumb over the white pad was the easiest method. Turning the unit on was done by simply pressing the Menu button and turning it off was achieved by holding down the end arrow.

For me, the iPod Mini has been a great purchase. It has allowed me to regain some of my lost hours just today. I'm looking forward to seeing how it works during the daily commute.

Saturn Images

Very nice images may be seen here.

WebcamNotes Alpha

Norah Jones Chat Site

The growth on Birdie's Hilary Duff Chat Site has been wonderful to watch. She is really enjoying the time to just post, chat, and moderate. And it's been fun to see her debate on how to move and merge threads.

In response, I thought maybe my favorite singer deserved a website. Why should Birdie have all the fun? Therefore, I opened Norah Jones Chat. Actually, a few of you knew that this was happening because you emailed me when the site link was placed in the right margin last night. In fact, 11 people jumped on before there was even content.

Yikes. It's time to get working on the site.

Scientists watch black hole rip a star apart

Absolutely fascinating !

Full Story

Fun with Videos

Stupid Videos is a fun place to waste time and bandwidth. My personal favorite is nmber 681. Of course, number 19 ranks right up there on the hit parade.

Hilary Duff Site beats Disney

Gloat. Gloat.

Birdie's Hilary Duff Chat site beats Disney on the google search engine whenever the search term "Hilary Duff Chat" is used.

Congratulations Birdie. Oh, and yeah .. this journal hits number one.

hair dryers, coffee makers and electric blankets

Oh my. A new study by University of Washington researchers will be published in Environmental Health Perspectives. This study suggests magnetic fields will damage brain-cell DNA. Apparently exposure to a 60-hertz field for 24 hours broke brain-cell DNA strands in rats.

Hopefully you do not feel like a rat.

Feeling Rather Stupid

Yesterday was simply a rotten day. Nothing I was doing was working and matters kept getting worse until I finally just went to bed.

There was a time when my heart simply sank because my grandma's ring was gone from my pocket. There was a time the day dragged as I was going from classroom to classroom on a set of observations -- and it was tiring hearing teachers give students a bad time. It was painful when the journals were disappearing because the server didn't have enough space. Hours were spent on a banner for whatisnew.com and nothing was flowing from my brain.

So, I went to bed.

And upon waking, none of the sites were working. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. This was definitely an empty stomach churning greeting for the morning.

When the server ran out of space on the hard drive last night, I didn't take the time to completely investigate the problem. Instead, I removed several domains and didn't think about how Apache was going to handle it. At midnight, the server was restarted and Apache complained. This meant the pages weren't being served.

It was a stupid move on my part. I simply could have clicked in Plesk to remove the domains from the server and all would have worked BUT NO ... I had to ssh and delete the files.

Apache has now been restarted and all is well. The hard drive space turned out to be a backup folder with a size of 46 GB. This was deleted and now the server is happy.

My smile will return after I shake off feeling so stupid.

Newspaper Article

Grandma Heiny loved to cook. It was her way of serving her family with love and gifts from her heart. While looking through her jewelery, there was a short clipping taken from an August 1982 newspaper.

SPOT watches

I really do want one. I'd have purchased one in a heartbeat while I was in Las Vegas in January for CES. It just wasn't convenient to get one immediately and I didn't want to take the time to run around to find one. But I still want one.

Last night I was talking to Peter who has a blog titled Spotlight on SPOT. He suggested a few different models and then asked the all important question. Is there coverage?

Palmdale definitely does not have coverage. Worse, Hamilton High School appears to be on the edge of the coverage map. Driving down the 405 would be spotty at best with most of the time being off line.

Drats. I really do want one. But maybe it would be best if the coverage was better first. Pout.

Parenting Questions

There are times that my skills as a parent appear to be non-existent. It can be frustrating, intimidating, and draining when a child is being raised in a split-household, such as my two daughters. I feel for them because it must be horrible to travel between two homes with different rules, clothes, and ideals.

Lately, the shared parenting plan between their mother and I is not going well. The oldest has been unavailable seven times in the last three months. Other events were planned by the mother which directly interfered with any scheduling for me. This is very disturbing because the mother has used countless excuses. It's very sad.

However draining the past few months have been on my own dreams, I realized that I'm not alone. Others are trying to manage or have managed shared custody. In addition, I've been holding in my story for 12 years. Only a select few know the stories of torture behind my marriage, the separation, the dissolution, the court battles, and even the arguments over schooling plans.

My father gave the best advice when he said to focus on building. It's important to be constructive when others around you are being destructive. Therefore, I've taken my computer interests, my webpage building experiences, and built a highly personal site - designed to purge my story from my mind.

Maybe others will benefit by knowing that there are men who really want to be with their children. There are men who want nothing more than to see their children play basketball, tennis, race bikes, read books, write novels, and above all laugh. There are men, though, trapped by a system of family laws which identify and tag them as slackers and thereby cause them great pain.

My story is now being written on www.parentingquestions.com. Hopefully you do not have a similar set of stories. But if you do, then you are not alone.

Beatles tune comes to mind for Baby Bush

I was reading the article published in the Washington Post when I came across this paragraph and stopped short of falling off my chair. Bush has lately found many of his rationales for the war in Iraq being challenged. Just as Kay has undermined the WMD rationale, a report published by the Army War College challenged the notion that the war in Iraq was part of the overall war on terrorism, while the group Human Rights Watch has disputed Bush's notion that the Iraq war was a humanitarian mission. Vice President Cheney has implicitly acknowledged that the Iraq war has not spurred peace in the Middle East, saying peace is not possible while Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat remains in power.

Oh - so now we are going to blame someone else. It's Yasser Arafat's fault now. How mature. Mr. Bush needs to grow up and wipe the snot dripping out of his nose. It's time to get off the non-sense and get our troops home. Let it be.

Commercials

KHD is having a great time . Meanwhile, I've been watching the football score using www.gamechannel.com ...

MiniDV GR-D90U

After waiting a bit to think about the difficulties with hooking up the JVC GR-D90U camera to my PC, I realize that I was making it way too difficult. I kept attempting to install USB Mass Storage Drivers rather than just looking to see if the removable drive was present.

In case you make the same error. Here are some directions.

Open the folder that contains the desired still images.
● Select the folder of the still images copied to the PC and
click [Open].
● When loading images from a memory card, select the
folder in the [DCIM] folder within [Removable Disk] and
click [Open].
The still image files appear in the window.

Once I was able to import the image into the Digital Photo Navigator software, it was just a matter of saving it and then opening it into Adobe Photoshop. Just for the heck of it, I blurred the image and changed the file size, emphasizing the tablet pc and windows.