12 Witnesses

Here are a few pics, previously unpublished, from my hike in Red Rock Canyon.  If you like these, you can see them and others on my photoblog.

I hope you like these.  This hike is a nice little state park near Hinton, OK, just off I-40, about an hour West of Oklahoma City.  Check it out, if you get the chance.

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Sorry, no patriotic pictures of flags, kids or picnics.  Not even fireworks.

Some of you have noted that I was having trouble with my laptop over the last couple of weeks.  Turns out, the motherboard fried.  I took it in to a local Nerd Herd to confirm the suspicions and found out that, as expected, all was without hope.

I had backed up my information on an external hard drive I had purchased for our home, so there was no loss of data.  Just the grind of having to restore everything from a backup.

With the added pain of a whole new system. 

Yep.  I’ve done it.  I went over to the “dark side.”

Yours truly is now sporting a brand new Macbook Black.  No, not the Pro Series laptops, but I’m happy with the one I have.  I know some are getting those high end laptops, but I have no idea how they have the money for it.  Here’s a picture of the glowing white Apple on the back in the darkness of my home office as I take a break from working on my sermon.

I haven’t completely grasped the organizational structure, but they tell me it makes more sense when you do “get it.”  I pray I “get it” soon.

I will say, though, that it is fast.  Much faster than my old XP machine and light years ahead of my wife’s Vista machine.  Yikes.  That looks like a complete waste of money now.  She waits and waits for it to do ANYTHING, but this Macbook just flies through whatever you tell it to do.

Also, shutting down and booting up is AWESOME.  It’s almost NO TIME!

I still have to convert my iPod over to mac sync now.  I have no idea how well that will go, but I hope it goes as easily and quickly as importing all of my music from the external hard drive into iTunes.  Drag, drop and wait 20 mins to convert tons of audio, video and everything else.  Done.

Oh.  And it is light.  It’s not the “Macbook Air,” but it is probably half the weight of my former laptop.

Finally, thanks to the advice of David Phillips, we got the extended warranty, which takes the 1 yr hardware and 90 phone support to 3 years each.  David said that you should always do this with a laptop, because the manufacturers don’t allow you to simply buy and replace broken parts.  If you break something, particularly something important, you have to send it in.  Pretty soon, it is cheaper to simply buy a new computer.

Of course, that is how we got to where we are now, so we learned our lesson.

I’ve set up Firefox already and imported all my bookmarks with the Foxmarks Add-On.  It syncs your bookmarks, personal structure and all, to the net and allows you to log on and bring them to another computer using Firefox.

Final thing:  The whole “it just works” thing that mac users always throw around to pc users when their stuff is grinding and glitching…  they don’t seem to be lying.

There you have it, boys and girls.  Another one goes over…

As for the foto, I know it’s not much, but it is my first effort with the mac and using iPhoto with my Canon DSLR.  I like the program.  It looks promising.  I’ll reserve judgement to see if it is as good as Adobe Lightroom, which is what I have been using.

You can check out my pre-Mac pics at the ol’ photoblog.

I’m at a family reunion at Heber Springs, AR. If you are looking for a good getaway, you should check out Lindsey’s Resort. They are a Christian family with a family run environment on the Little Red River, which is fed out of a dam, making the water temperature about 50 degrees. Native fish can’t really thrive in that cold temperature, so they stock the river with Rainbow Trout, and it’s good.

Anyway, here are some pictures from this morning. If you like these, you can check out my photoblog for more.

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I went to my in-laws to pick up my kids and we’re heading back for VBS which kicks of tomorrow (Saturday). My Deacon Chair and my accountability partner both told me I needed to take a break, so I stopped over night in OKC for a night of solitude. I went to the movies. Today, I stopped at Red Rock Canyon State Park near Hinton, OK and took a hike. I also took my camera. Here are a few of the pictures I took.

I thought I’d pull out a few more pictures from our trip to Vietnam that were in the Photoblog, but didn’t make it to the main site. Just in case you didn’t make it over there when we were overseas.

First a message left on a swing at an orphanage in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Then another picture of the night train from Hanoi to Sapa, Vietnam. This one shows the contrast between the light in the train - the more blue, tungsten light - and the amber light that created an almost surreal atmosphere in the train yard.

Here’s the open market that Sapa is known for with all kinds of interesting things.

Here’s something interesting that you might find at the market: Marinating Chicken Feet. Yummy.

And finally, a stairway out of the market place to one of the main streets in Sapa.

So I thought I’d show you a few pictures from Vietnam that I had never uploaded before. Weird thing is, they are some of my favorites.

If you like ‘em and want to see more, then check out the photoblog.

At the top of this building is the City View Cafe in one of the night time hotspots in Hanoi, Vietnam.

This is the view at night from the balcony of the City View Cafe atop that building.

Standing in the middle of a swarm of traffic in that intersection, I caught this young boy crossing the street.

Finally, this is the Night Train to Sapa that I mentioned before, but never did get a picture up capturing the amber awesomeness of this transportation staple in Vietnam.

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Here are a couple of links to free things on the internet that can help you.

You Send It - This is a site that will allow you to upload large files that you can’t send through email.  The free version will give you one file at a time at 100 MB.  If you pay, you can upload many files at a time and at larger capacities.

Stockvault - This is a website with free stock photos that you might use as power point sermon illustrations, etc.

Hope you like them.

This is a post of a few more artistic images that I took at Bonnie’s Graduation, but it is using the the NextGen Gallery plugin, with which I am experimenting. It is highly rated, but this is my first time using it, so I’ll have to write again later to let you know how it is.

Also, it came with slideshow and gallery link widgets to put in the sidebars, but I’ve opted not to include them in order to keep the load time down.

‘Nuff talk. Here’s the gallery:

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[update]

Well, I couldn’t resist the slideshow widget, which is not a very big load and doesn’t slow the rest of the site down. I really like the plugin. It is highly configurable and works tons better than the gallery that comes with Wordpress 2.5. The slideshow will continue to pick up all photos I put up from now on. 5 Stars.

Just a couple of pictures celebrating my lovely bride’s Grajimication with a Master of Education Administration.

You can check out some other pictures at my Photoblog.

So, I missed Phriday foto yesterday and today, between working on the power point for my sermon and playing frisbee with my daughter, I thought I would check out this new Web Browser, Flock. I am very interested.

I know, I know. I just got everyone to switch to Firefox!

True enough, but Flock is actually made by the folks that made Firefox, so I though I would check it out. The thing about Flock is that it is made for Social networking. Your Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Photobucket, Magnolia… yes even Twitter… automatically plugs in to the sidebar application in Flock, so you the browser automatically interacts with whatever you are browsing.

It has a media tool bar, a feed reader and some other interesting gadgets I am exploring.

This post is a test of the blog post interaction. I have several ways to post what I am looking at from Flock. This is a picture I took in Vietnam of some future Soccer stars. The downside is that, although it allows tags, it does not post the tags to wordpress but embeds them in the post, it does not allow for me to post in a category you can choose only one category as you get ready to post or do any of the other SEO stuff I have been stressing lately. That means I’ll have to go back in the admin panel and fix it after it is published.

It does have a save draft function, but I am unsure if it saves it in Flock or to my blog. I’ll try and see… Nope. Save it to Flock, so I have to publish it and then rework the backside for Search Engines.

Also, since this is a picture from my flickr account, flickr will get the link rather than when I host it on my own server.

Nevertheless, while blogging from Flock may not be ideal, social networking through Flock seems promising. I have added all of my flickr contacts to “favorites” in the media bar, and when they post new pics, it will let me know with an orange media button and I can click it and surf.

Oh, it also has an rss feed button that will find the feed of whatever site you are in and let you click it to subscribe. The drawback is that you must subscribe in Flock rather than Bloglines, Google Reader, or whatever else you are using. I think this is true. I’ll look for a way to change the subscription default.

Anyway, check it out. You might like it.

Tags: foto, pic, picture, vietnam, soccer