Bam!

Most of my family got together today, rather than tomorrow, since the work week resumes on Wednesday. We had a great party, but best of all, we planned to shoot off just enough fireworks that I reached the final stretch right as the wind picked up and it started to look threatening outside.

And I planned the whole thing last night! Not bad, huh?

More Fireworks Fun

I actually bought fireworks tonight. I've been collecting information on fireworks in a more organized fashion over the last two years, so maybe I'll actually start up that fireworks web site I always talk about. If I did it now, it'd be really polished by next fourth… as if I need another job to do.

Finding Fireworks for the Fourth

I've talked about favorite fireworks in posts from last year and 2003 (I seemed to skip any such mention in 2004, when I only talked about the loss of fireworks), so to start off my discussion of fireworks this year, I would like to talk about favorite firework retailers instead. Since I sometimes get St. Louis/St. Charles residents reading my blog, I encourage you to consider patronizing these fireworks tents as you shop for the fourth of July (note: in this area, fireworks are sold in tents, save for a few permanent retailers that appear outside of St. Charles county).

• Fireworks City on Fifth St. (between QuikTrip and the abandoned Philips 66, a bit beyond several other Fireworks City tents that are closer to I-70). I don't like Fireworks City in general but I make an exception for this particular, smaller Fireworks City tent. The owner or manager of it is a genuinely nice guy who remembers me, and many of his customers from year to year. That he remembers me is surprising: they have not been the cheapest or largest tent in the past, so I haven't always bought that much from him, but that doesn't seem to matter. They have some neat fireworks — such as Pop Goes the Fountain, Nuclear Meltdown and the Reloadable Fountain — that are hard to find elsewhere, so I do buy those kinds of things there. Notably, this tent was cheaper than other tents on some items that I had looked at over the past week, which made it even better this year. Even before I realized that, I had resolved to purchase more from him this year just because he deserves the business. The fact that he has unique stuff helps in that regard.
• Bubba Fireworks (next to Citgo on the service road of I-70 in Cave Springs, beyond DAD'S and President's fireworks tents). This is a new tent with a very helpful, enthusiastic owner. Part of the key to finding good, new fireworks is helpful workers at the tent (since it is not feasible to try everything), and the lady who owns this particular tent seemed to genuinely love the fireworks she recommended. While she favored larger ones, they weren't excessive, and the tent featured some nice, smaller fireworks.
• Mr. Whalen's Fireworks (Mid Rivers Mall Drive, beyond the community college, noticeable by all the military branches' flags flying on the tent) was reasonably helpful at pointing out fireworks and pushed finding better values over bigger price tags. Notably they were one of only two tents that had Just Another Stinkin' Fountain (JASF), and they had it for only $7.00, a real bargain.
• TNT (Rte. 94 in the Walgreen's parking lot across the street from St. John's UCC) offered a better selection than the other TNT tent I've been to this year. The gentleman who was managing that tent was very good at recommending fireworks that were reasonably safe in subdivisions and was very into pointing out fireworks that had vivid, unique colors.

There are lots of other good ones, but consider checking these ones out this year.

Whoops!

Mark pointed out to me that I had disabled comments on new posts — not something I intended to do. If you tried to comment in the last day or so and found yourself unable to, please try again.

I'm sorry about that! I should be more thorough in checking my code. Sheesh.

All the Pomp, Most of the Circumstance

I've been behind on blogging about what I've been up to, so let's go back to May for a second. Because of some complications, I'll be finishing up my BA in December rather than in time for the traditional May graduation. The problem is, at least at LU, there is no ceremony in December. To remedy that, the powers that be allow December graduates to “walk” in May, which I did on May 20.

It was a nice enough experience, complete with all kinds of cord-y and tassle-y goodness. Unwittingly, I ended up being especially “colorful” at the Baccalaureate ceremony the night prior to the commencement. Due to low attendance to the Baccalaureate, the administration merged that ceremony with the graduate student commencement. Apparently, virtually all of the undergrads thought it was only a graduate ceremony, so only two undergraduates — myself being one — showed up. Unlike the undergraduate programs, the graduate programs do not offer much in the way of cords for honors, so here I was with my cords and double tassel (representing two majors) in the midst of a bunch of people in just black with one tassel. Everyone kept asking me exactly what I had done to get all the colorful garb. One group actually picked a leader to come over and query me about it. “I'm an undergrad.” That pretty much took care of the curiosity. I blended in a bit better the next morning in the undergrad commencement.

The truly priceless moment, however, was when my one professor saw me. The program called for all of the graduate students to march in with the faculty applauding them, followed immediately behind by undergraduates. As one of just two undergrads at the Baccalaureate, my one professor did not realize why I was there when he saw me (several others knew I was going to be there and so they weren't surprised). His eyes grew very large and he said “You're getting a masters degree!?!?” Given that he was just a week away from receiving his Ph.D., I'm sure he was concerned if I was already finishing my masters while taking undergrad classes I might try to beat him on my dissertation too.

Ah, what fun. Probably the best part was seeing my professors in their academic regalia. My mother nabbed a number of pictures that have various professors in them, which will make for a nice keepsake in the years to come.

At first, I was going to title this “All the Pomp, None of the Circumstance,” but that isn't quite true. I've completed one hour more than required to graduate (129 of 128), but if I called it quits now I'd have only my religion major. Next semester I will complete my English major and Philosophy minor. I think those additions are well worth the extra six months.

IN OTHER NEWS, I completed my application to Covenant Theological Seminary this week. Hopefully they'll accept me, although I am working on some alternative applications in case things don't work out in that direction. Once the application becomes available for a January start date, I'll be applying to Princeton Theological Seminary and I am also considering applying to St. Louis University's Philosophy of Religion program. Both PTS and SLU have five year Ph.D.-track programs that seem appealing. We'll see how that goes; a lot of the decision will be driven by what kind of financial arrangements the schools offer.

Moving On

I completed the DVD a few days ago after exporting the video to DV from MPEG-4 within iMovie itself. I don't think I'll be doing any more direct MPEG-4 editing any more: DV just seems to work better. So now I can move on to bigger and better things.

To those of you nasty enough to spam blogs, I am now continuing the fight against you. Per the request of Ed, SAFARI can now block commenting on old posts, and we're not afraid to use it. Be scared, spammers, we will win. Ok, that was a bit over dramatic, wasn't it?

I have so many things I need to do and I'm not getting them done, but I thought I should at least check in. Happy Thursday!

DVD Blues

After some friends came to visit St. Louis in the first part of June, I decided to construct a DVD of photos and videos taken from their trip. This isn't something unusual for me to do, only they stayed for long enough I got a lot of photos and a lot of video, much of which was worth including. I made an hour long DVD in iMovie, spliced together appropriate music bits from iTunes and presto — almost.

It seems that somewhere in the soundtrack there is something that is corrupted. Not to the extend that keeps me from previewing the movie, but bad enough that it causes iDVD to freeze when it tries to encode the audio to the MPEG-2 for the DVD. Worse, at three or four hours a shot to try encoding before it freezes at the very end, this isn't something I can easily locate. I thought perhaps it was my PowerMac, so I burnt a CD with the 4 GB of movie data and put it in my PowerBook and set that system to work. After rendering for five or so hours, it too failed.

Presently I'm trying a last ditch effort: iMovie creates a “reference” QuickTime file, as I understand it, a patchwork of links to the bits included in the iMovie Project playable in QuickTime. This is the file that iDVD receives to encode. This file, for my project, happens to be in MPEG-4 format (H.264). I fed this file into MPEG Streamclip, a program for converting and exporting MPEG files and set it to work at 1:45 p.m. yesterday to the task of creating a real MPEG-4 file out of the reference file. As of 12:22 a.m. today, I am now at 94%. I just hope it works.

I am obsessed — I've essentially given up most access to my computers for the last two days to let them render and encode, despite needing them for other things, because I've come too far not to see this movie burn. It just has to! So, here I sit, waiting.

I hope it works.

Rebecca St. James Finally Managed It...

I've listened to her music a number of times and never had anything really hit me as something I liked. As I was riding back in my mom's car from the dealer where we dropped my car off for body work (needed from when I was rear ended), “You are Loved” played on XM Radio's the Message. It now has the questionably good distinction of being the latest song to wedge itself into my head.

I finally like a song by Rebecca St. James. I might have to look over her music again.

We were younger then, you and me, full of dreams, weren’t we?
I went my way, you went yours, where did you go, dear?
Someone said you had left the life we lived together then
This is my way of reaching out ‘cause I remember…

This is what I want to say to you
If I had one chance to speak to your heart
You are loved
More than you could ever know
This is what I want to say to you
If I had one chance to tell you something
You are loved
More than you can imagine
Imagine

If I told you would you believe, the narrow road, I did not leave
If I told you would you understand that I’ve found truth
Are you jaded? Are you hurting now? How I wish that I could tell
Where your heart’s at…can you see? Mine has found – home

Not sure if I’ve, made it clear enough
It’s not my love I sing about
Everybody asks, “Is God good?”
I believe, He is
In fact I know, He is

SAFARI 2 Road Map

• Implement per post comment_disabled flag. (I promise this to Ed a long time ago.)
• Create query string option to use alternate themes (e.g. for optional front pages that don't look blog-like.)
• Implement metadata editor allowing editing of any standard metadata as well as addition of unlimited custom metadata.
• Allow data to be limited based on any metadata, not just category.
• Streamline category/metadata selection mode to use MySQL sub-queries.
• Rework search engine from SAFARI 1.x flat file database support to SAFARI 2.x SQL database system.

Launch of the new, reworked Open for Business.

• Implement user-end of multi-level threaded commenting.
• Finish auto-caching spider for high traffic readiness.
• User registration tied to e-mail address verification.
• User-only comment posting restriction mode.

This will make SAFARI 2 functionally complete.

• Rework inefficient subroutines, removing 1.x legacy code.
• Verify SQL injection protection.
• Decide on and reveal new name (too much confusion with Apple Safari web browser, even though SAFARI the CMS was first.)

Ribs You've Gotta Try and the Store With 'Em

I'm normally not a big proponent of ribs. I like barbecue ribs just fine, but they're messy and usually provide very little meat for the effort. Give me a pork steak and be done with it already. But, Aldi — yes the Aldi, the little grocery store with private label “cheap brands” — has rib meat already removed from the bones in their frozen meats section that is better than any ribs I've ever tasted before. They're marinated in a healthy pool of hickory barbecue sauce of excellent quality, ready to be placed in the oven and served in about an hour or two. The meat has a robust barbecue flavor and is extremely tender. I had some tonight and just writing about it makes me hungry for more.

When the aforementioned friends of the family came into town, my mother made a batch of these ribs and they were a humongous hit. In fact, the couple that was visiting us had previously had a bad experience with Aldi, but this convinced them that maybe the Stock-up Store wasn't so bad after all. If you have an Aldi in your area, you really should try to find some of these ribs before they go away — they're only here for the season. You'll find them right by the steaks in the freezer case.

And, while I'm on the subject, let me count the ways that I love Aldi. Sure, it has rock bottom prices, but it also has some of the best quality products anywhere. Period. If you've avoided Aldi because of their reputation as a “cheap place,” you ought to give them a chance. Every Aldi private label product is backed by an amazing “double guarantee” — if you aren't satisfied, they'll refund your money and give you a replacement of whatever you returned. Once we got a bad package of swiss cheese for example, and walked out of the store with a new package and a refund in hand. Aldi also gets special buys of normal brands, but often, Aldi's products taste better and are more consistent.

Their Grandessa premium line includes scrumptious pies, for example, that best not only other grocery stores, but also often some of my favorite restaurants (their chocolate silk is the best chocolate silk, bar none). They also have other premium products, like energy drinks; Aldi's Red Thunder has a very good, fruity taste and rings in at four cans for $2 at the moment (on sale) and normally just $3. Compare that to just one or two cans of Red Bull or some of the other popular drinks.

To top it off, you'll find special buys of computers, camcorders, scanners, printers, shoes, pools, furniture, and — at the moment — even car wax and fishing poles.