Look, I’m a Christian; a Christian with obstacles to faith; obstacles to belief, but a Christian none-the-less. Right now I’m watching a series by Andy Stanley of Northpoint Community Church titled “It’s Personal”. It has really impacted me and where I am in my faith journey right now. In light of everything that has gone on with us and our new baby, this is impacting me where I am. I challenge you to watch this series. Start with the first one, then when you’re ready watch the rest. They’re about 45 minutes a piece so you prolly won’t do it all in one sitting, but I challenge you to check them out. Below is a link to where you can find all of his messages. The first in the “It’s Personal” series is titled “A New Approach”. Start with it and follow the next three. Even with my obstacles, God made himself entirely too personal for me to deny him.
Yes I’m back at work and the blog posts have slowed down a bit. Really, I’m trying to think of something interesting to blog about in the vicious routine I’ve got going on. You don’t want to hear about my Mac again…or how I get giddy with posts like this one where folks are terming it “upgrading” back to XP, which is what I’ve done on my other laptop, and my friends laptop and another desktop coming up. We decorated our Christmas tree last night, that was kind of exciting. It’s 6 feet tall and it took us all of maybe 10 minutes.
So maybe I’m living vicariously through the web right now. That’s okay cause I stumble across cool things like this.
I picked this video link up from DaringFireball. This is a 20 minute video of a talk by Barry Schwartz on the impact of the freedom of choice. I gotta say it resonated pretty well. Take a look at it and let me know what you think.
Oh do the new Mac commercials make me giggle…and oh do they hit home. Well I’ve pretty much been solely using my Mac for the last couple of weeks and I haven’t been on our Dell 9300 laptop at all, which has Vista Ultimate installed. I’ve had several little nagging BSOD’s (blue screens of death for the non-tech) and just random little annoyances. This morning the Dell was sitting in the kitchen so I figured what the heck. Then I noticed that Vista isn’t detecting a battery. Well, a battery is in there and if I unplug the AC the computer stays on, so ‘splain that one to me Bill. You know what, I’ve been contemplating it for a while and this was the last little annoyance. Hasta la Vista, I’m heading back to XP on our home computer. Boy do I love my Mac.
Okay sometimes I’m late when it comes to stuff on Youtube. For some reason I just don’t surf there that much and the only time I find something good is when it’s linked by someone else. Case in point, thanks TerribleSpeller for leading me to the deliciousness of Chocolate Rain and consequently Cherry Chocolate Rain by Tay Zonday.
When i compose a song I typically try to introduce a varied structure. Say something like:
Verse
Lift
Chorus
Verse
Bridge
Turn
Lift
Chorus
Outro
Something like that
As the video below shows…I don’t need to worry about that. Just a full five minutes of “Chocolate Rain” does the trick. As demonstrated by the follow up video promoting Dr. Pepper. Video embedded below for those on RSS
This guy shows that lip gloss and a catchy lyric can take you from nerd to nashty over night. I’m hooked to…. Cho-c’late Rain….. Cherry Choclate Rain….
Arrived…3:15pm…tired…8+ hours on the road each of the past two days…got up at 4:15am this morning…a frickin’ huge stack of mail…a clean house, mmmmmmm…tired…need a shower…and a haircut…follow up on hospital bills tomorrow…tired…
Well we had our follow up visit this morning with the cardiologist at CHOP to check Elliot out after his surgery and give us clearance to head home. She was pleased with how well he’s doing and how good he looks and gave us our walking papers. We skidaddled back to the Ronnie McDonnie and decided to hit the road back to Georgia. Approximately 8.376 hours later we pulled into the Holiday Inn Express in Durham, NC. Google Maps had the drive clocked at 6 hours and 40 minutes. Yeah, that mighta been right, but apparently it’s not smart to drive anywhere on the entire eastern seaboard between the hours of 4pm and 7pm. I updated Google maps with the following info that I thought might be helpful for anyone trying to drive south from Baltimore to Richmond.
EDIT: I realize that I could’ve come up with 100 more entertaining quips than “Stupid Traffic”, but “Stupid Traffic” it was, so “Stupid Traffic” it is.
The last few days have been loads of fun. We were discharged from the hospital in Philadelphia on Thursday evening to the Ronald McDonald House. About 2 am Elliot woke up wretching, running a fever and producing some seriously nasty diapers. Apparently he caught some kind of virus in the hospital and brought it home. He started doing better on Friday, with his temp returning to normal levels and diapers getting back to normal.
Well, by Friday night Sunette had it, and it was not pretty. She’s still dealing with some of the lingering effects. By 5 am this morning I picked it up. My version wasn’t as explosive, but it didn’t feel any better. There is nothing like being cooped up in a hotel room with three sick people. Especially when it’s a disaster zone and we all look like this.
Okay, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, which means, maybe 6 of you, you know that I’m a tech geek. You also probably know that I just moved from a Dell 9300, which I was constantly tweaking, to a Macbook Pro, which I’ve constantly been tweaking whilst being at the hospital here in Philadelphia. I’ve changed a number of things to personalize this Mac; falling in absolute love with Candybar 3; loading BootCamp and a Windows XP partition for gaming, etc. I must be able to play CounterStrike on the road.
One of the things that has continued to irk me is the startup sound. I don’t like startup sounds, not in XP not on a Mac. So after some searching I found a link to StartupSound.prefpane, a simple Preferences plug-in that lets you control your startup sound volume or mute it all together.
While doing this I was reminded of a YouTube clip I saw a while back which took my feelings about startup sounds and added a big exclamation point. This video cracks me up everytime.
Oh yeah, and thanks to Dave2 and Jason for their suggestion of MarsEdit in the previous post. I used it for this current post and it was stupid easy and intuitive. THANKS!!
My in ears r on their last legs. Anyone want to donate some @UltimateEars to a po musician? http://twitpic.com/2lkc2k 2010/09/05
It's Wed and I scooted to ATL to see S and E-e for the evening. Gonna grab Indian for dinner and get my tank full o' hugs and kisses. 2010/08/25
mmmkay, I'm in Denver, work finished, it's 85 and sunny. What do I do for the rest of the afternoon? Rockies aren't playing. thoughts? 2010/08/18
JP’s CD
Step right up and get a copy of my CD. I produced this project a few years ago and am just now making it available on my blog. Timely, I know. It's acoustic based folk-pop with a positive vibe. The CD's are priced at only $5 plus $3 shipping. Go ahead and pick one up for yourself and 500 of your closest friends.
