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mapsedgeQuote for the day:
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It was a heavy snow, the kind that falls in palm-sized clumps and makes a solid white wall of your chain-link fence. Six inches of the stuff that was mostly gone by last night. I always wanted to know what would happen if you got deep snow one day and warm temperatures the next, and now I do.
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This weekend offered up some major stress for me. Well, at least Sunday did. Saturday, I puttered around the house; a little drywall here, under-cabinet lights there, a bit of cleanup everywhere.
I don't believe that if the church doors are open, you should be there. You wouldn't have known that if you'd seen me Sunday.
Sunday, I had a skit at church for both upstairs morning services - which meant getting my buried vehicle unburied by 7:00 so I could be to church by 7:30 (thankfully, most of that had been done Saturday evening.) With a two hour lull in between services, I had plenty of time to kill and nothing to kill it with; could have picked a Sunday school class and sat in, but I hate joining in the middle of anything, and besides, me + classroom is not a good combo.
Sunday afternoon into evening I videotaped a ... hmm, not sure what to call it. A seminar? A meeting? About a hundred people gathered in the Family Life Center at church to listen for three hours to an outside consultant who specializes in revitalizing churches. This was the introductory session to what is a much larger process. Keep your focus; do what you say you'll do; meet people where they are - lead people to Christ, don't drag them; have a plan; remember why you joined in the first place. It looks like a good idea for a church that needs it, and in this day and age, most do.
One stressor was recording the audio - it came off the board too hot, for starters, which I didn't find out about until it was all done; the waveform doesn't look that bad, but a few places it will modulate badly, I'm sure.
Keeping the speaker in frame was the other stressor. The dude was all over the place, and keeping him in frame - even in 16:9 widescreen - for three hours was really taxing. My knees and back are killing me today.
Have you ever videotaped anything for three hours? You get something akin to highway hypnosis - the eyes stop focusing, the mind wanders, the alpha waves start creeping in. It's freaky. A larger monitor would help, but that's a few dollars down the road.
Tonight, unless something else comes up, I'll start the post process, with an eye to having a completed DVD for the pastor by next weekend.
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Audacity will record audio for three hours, but it won't save it. Not in one three hour block. It created 3,299 temporary objects that it then had to put together in one audio file and it just refused. Or Windows refused. Somewhere along the line, somebody blew chunks and started throwing read/write errors on the drive (350gb with 320gb free, so plenty of room.) "Delayed write error." A phrase I've come to hate.
I'll give Audacity this, though: disconnected from the drive - someone killed power to my outlet while we were cleaning up in the FLC - once I got everything home and reconnected, it re"found" the temp files and reconstructed the audio. I then saved it in fifteen minute segments. Took a while, but got it done.
What I'd really like to find is an audio recorder that works like video capture: after every X minutes or Y megabytes, save a completed file. That way, if something goes wrong in the process, you still have what was saved along the way. Maybe Audacity does that and I just haven't found that option. Maybe I need to shop a bit.
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As of today, the family is mostly healthy. Jami keeps blowing eardrums, so he's got to have another set of tubes. That's April, right in the middle of insurance renewal month. I anticipate a general shakeup this year because of the economy, but I refuse to worry about that just now. Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof, and all that.
The house needs a new front porch. I was able to move the top step with one hand, and the slab has some definite hills and valleys in the concrete.
No problem, I can build porches. My concern is the removal of the old one: it's a concrete slab on a cinder block box, and the gas meter is only twelve inches away. It's going to be a delicate demolition, one that will take place in very small pieces.
I'll be posting when the porch building process begins. I can certainly use the help of any hammer-swingin' friend who wants to help out.
Using Linux gives me a satisfying sense of “sticking it to the man,” although at times I get the feeling that the person I’m sticking it to ends up being me.
Amen, bro. My Linux box stopped connecting to the network this weekend, and I have no idea how to begin to fix it.--------------------
It was a heavy snow, the kind that falls in palm-sized clumps and makes a solid white wall of your chain-link fence. Six inches of the stuff that was mostly gone by last night. I always wanted to know what would happen if you got deep snow one day and warm temperatures the next, and now I do.
--------------------
This weekend offered up some major stress for me. Well, at least Sunday did. Saturday, I puttered around the house; a little drywall here, under-cabinet lights there, a bit of cleanup everywhere.
I don't believe that if the church doors are open, you should be there. You wouldn't have known that if you'd seen me Sunday.
Sunday, I had a skit at church for both upstairs morning services - which meant getting my buried vehicle unburied by 7:00 so I could be to church by 7:30 (thankfully, most of that had been done Saturday evening.) With a two hour lull in between services, I had plenty of time to kill and nothing to kill it with; could have picked a Sunday school class and sat in, but I hate joining in the middle of anything, and besides, me + classroom is not a good combo.
Sunday afternoon into evening I videotaped a ... hmm, not sure what to call it. A seminar? A meeting? About a hundred people gathered in the Family Life Center at church to listen for three hours to an outside consultant who specializes in revitalizing churches. This was the introductory session to what is a much larger process. Keep your focus; do what you say you'll do; meet people where they are - lead people to Christ, don't drag them; have a plan; remember why you joined in the first place. It looks like a good idea for a church that needs it, and in this day and age, most do.
One stressor was recording the audio - it came off the board too hot, for starters, which I didn't find out about until it was all done; the waveform doesn't look that bad, but a few places it will modulate badly, I'm sure.
Keeping the speaker in frame was the other stressor. The dude was all over the place, and keeping him in frame - even in 16:9 widescreen - for three hours was really taxing. My knees and back are killing me today.
Have you ever videotaped anything for three hours? You get something akin to highway hypnosis - the eyes stop focusing, the mind wanders, the alpha waves start creeping in. It's freaky. A larger monitor would help, but that's a few dollars down the road.
Tonight, unless something else comes up, I'll start the post process, with an eye to having a completed DVD for the pastor by next weekend.
--------------------
Audacity will record audio for three hours, but it won't save it. Not in one three hour block. It created 3,299 temporary objects that it then had to put together in one audio file and it just refused. Or Windows refused. Somewhere along the line, somebody blew chunks and started throwing read/write errors on the drive (350gb with 320gb free, so plenty of room.) "Delayed write error." A phrase I've come to hate.
I'll give Audacity this, though: disconnected from the drive - someone killed power to my outlet while we were cleaning up in the FLC - once I got everything home and reconnected, it re"found" the temp files and reconstructed the audio. I then saved it in fifteen minute segments. Took a while, but got it done.
What I'd really like to find is an audio recorder that works like video capture: after every X minutes or Y megabytes, save a completed file. That way, if something goes wrong in the process, you still have what was saved along the way. Maybe Audacity does that and I just haven't found that option. Maybe I need to shop a bit.
--------------------
As of today, the family is mostly healthy. Jami keeps blowing eardrums, so he's got to have another set of tubes. That's April, right in the middle of insurance renewal month. I anticipate a general shakeup this year because of the economy, but I refuse to worry about that just now. Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof, and all that.
The house needs a new front porch. I was able to move the top step with one hand, and the slab has some definite hills and valleys in the concrete.
No problem, I can build porches. My concern is the removal of the old one: it's a concrete slab on a cinder block box, and the gas meter is only twelve inches away. It's going to be a delicate demolition, one that will take place in very small pieces.
I'll be posting when the porch building process begins. I can certainly use the help of any hammer-swingin' friend who wants to help out.