Tomorrow, Tomorrow

Tomorrow, I will be going to the Kirkwood Civic Center for something rather fun. Charlie Brennan, of KMOX radio St. Louis (AM 1120, which can be heard around most of the country when conditions are right at night), will be broadcasting live there and a local pancake place, Chris's Pancakes, will be providing breakfast as well.

CSPAN is coming to St. Louis and you are invited! CSPAN will tape a broadcast of KMOX's “The Morning Meeting” with Charles Brennan on June 9, 2004 from 9 to 11 a.m. The program will originate from the Kirkwood Civic Center in Kirkwoood, MO. The featured guest will be bestselling author Bill Sammon of Fox News and the Washington Times. Please join us by calling 314-444-1842. Admission is free. Food provided by Chirs' Pancakes and Dining.

I'll let y'all know how it goes.

A Year of Mac

It dawned on me the other day that I ordered my first modern Mac, the Ruby iMac G3/400, off of eBay one year ago yesterday (June 5). Over the last year I have had the enjoyable pleasure of getting to know another UNIX-like operating system, and I must admit, I've really come to like it.

The Ruby iMac is a neat machine, certainly it was a bargain for $999 in 2000 when it was new, considering that even then it came standard with Firewire, a NIC, 128 megs of ram, a 12 gig hard disk, a slot loading CD drive, Harmon-Kardon built-in speakers, and a 15” CRT monitor. While the eMac offers a much more modern replacement for the old iMac G3, its white case opaque with super larger tray loading DVD drive door just doesn't seem as bold and exciting as the system that is often said to have saved Apple. While design doesn't make a system, it can make it more interesting.

This particular model was a later iMac, sometimes referred to as an iMac DV, although the DV title was dropped by that time (partially, I suspect, since it didn't have a DVD drive). It is referred to unofficially as the Indigo series and officially as the “iMac (Summer 2000).” You can read more about it here.

It's kind of a shame that the colorful computer trend died off. The iMac was really a fun concept and even today the Ruby iMac looks almost more like a piece of modern art than simply a computer.

Wow

I knew the National Council of Churches was an extremely liberal group that has been promoting ecumenism with non-Christian religions to the point of minimizing the necessity of Christ, but I still was surprised to see just who one of their member groups is. I thought all of their members were the (fading) mainline denominations like the UCC (my old denomination, ABC and PCUSA… but they have the Amercian Swedenborgians in there too! Mary Baker Eddy would probably be hurt that they didn't want a few scientists to go along with the mystics.

Nothing like adding a weird sect/cult to your group to help in the credibility department! Yes sir! That's sort of like the other thing the NCC seems to be up to: spamming my e-mail box. They subscribed my webadmin address from my church to their daily newsletter without my requesting it.

Color Me Skeptical About This...

What Color is Your Brain?
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Thanks go to Kevin.

QOTW #5: Tea and Coffee

Assuming you like at least one of them, which is your favorite tea or coffee? What kind?

Personally, I really enjoy both, but I'd probably miss coffee the most if I had to give one up. Plain, old black coffee (or with a little cream) would be the variety I would probably hate giving up the most, although I also enjoy a Latte from Starbucks or an I.C. Mocha from St. Louis Bread Co. (a.k.a. Panera Bread) as well as various other varieties.

On the other hand, at dinner, at a restaurant, I will usually order iced tea. No sugar and no lemon. Despite my preference for plain old tea, I usually prefer tea with sugar and lemon if it is bottled tea (unless it is really good bottled tea, such as the unsweetened Nestea I finished a little while ago). Arizona Tea Co. has a good bottled sweetened tea. I also occasionally enjoy peach or lemon tea, such as that offered by Lipton (either bottled or mix) or Snapple. But overall, I'd rather have plain old tea.

In fact, if I had the opportunity to drink as much tea or coffee, and those where the only two things I could drink, I'd probably drink more tea than coffee. Yet, I'd miss coffee more, weird, huh?

Ozark Photo #1

Christopher asked about when I was going to post some photos. Well, I haven't really picked out my favorites yet, but I thought I should post at least one, considering how much I've talked about them.

This is Lake Taneycomo during the afternoon, not too far from Table Rock Dam. I'm standing at the bottom of an Army Corp of Engineers boat ramp taking the picture. It was really pretty hot that day, so the fog seems to be caused by the really cold water of Lake Taneycomo (it comes from the bottom of Table Rock, more than 250 ft. below the surface) reacting with that hot air to create a refreshingly cool fog.

Weather or Not

The Ozarks last week were delightful. And the weather was nearly perfect — there were a few rain drops on the last day, but otherwise it was really great weather for a trip. Unlike, the case in St. Louis, as Pressed has attested to. I did run into some of that weather on the way back on Thursday night, getting caught in a storm bad enough that most people were taking cover at the gas stations along the road (the only shelter in the area).

Today, we had another bad storm pass through the area. Whereas the worst had passed north or south of St. Charles/St. Peters the last few times, leaving St. Louis and outer St. Charles county with the hail and such, this time we weren't so fortunate. This one took out a nice sized chunk of several trees in the neighborhood and also gave us a dose of pea sized hail. Nothing like the stuff from last April, but still hail all the same. Fortunately, that did not put a damper on the family barbecue, which was inside anyway.

Photomania on Memorial Day Weekend

1,227. That's the number of photos from my Ozark trip. 997 of those were taken by me, the remainder were taken by my mother who also was on the trip (originally, a close family friend was going to come to, but she couldn't come due to a brief hospitalization — thus why the trip was delayed for a few days). I'll take my photos and combine them with the ones I got off the cards I borrowed from my mother to create a slideshow, perhaps in DVD format, of the whole trip. I did that for our Christmas trip, although I've never actually burned it to the DVD… I need to do that.

The new photo card reader did a good job of downloading the photos. Even thought I took some time browsing through the photos, I got done in plenty of time to get to the family memorial day barbecue dinner. That was a lot of fun too — we had very nice BBQ burgers marinated in Sweet Baby Rays Award Winning BBQ sauce and Maull's Sweet-n-Spicy BBQ sauce, pea salad (which was surprisingly good despite my normal dislike of peas), a berry jell-o salad, beans, and chips. Plus some delicious deserts, which always helps.

Afterward, the remaining family members — myself, my cousins and my parents (my uncle left after dinner) — sat down and tried out “Cranium.” That was pretty fun, it certainly is a game that provides ample opportunity for laughs. Probably the most humorous parts where when someone was blatantly ignoring the rules. For instance… well, you'd just have to be there.

All in all a great day. Did any of y'all do anything special for the holiday, or are you waiting until tomorrow?

Apology

I should apologize for whining in my one post yesterday. I realize it really isn't that big of deal. I suspect it wouldn't have seemed nearly as bad if it had not been the first thing I saw when I opened my e-mail after returning from my trip. I am still sad to see the way it happened as well as the realization that this brings to an end my ability to help in an area I've spent a lot of time in, but it isn't life or death or anything like that. It really isn't even the worst thing I'm facing, so I don't know why I made such a big deal about it.

At any rate, I'm sorry. I should have handled that better.

Memory Card Reader

Well, if you take over 500 pictures on a vacation, it is helpful to have an easy way to transfer them onto your computer. I have a memory card reader built into my HP PSC 2210 printer/copier/scanner, but it is only USB 1.1 and it is hooked up to my GNU/Linux box which (even when I have supermount or automount set up) has always required me to manually mount and unmount each card as root. A big pain!

So, I decided to buy a second card reader, this one for my Mac. I got a Lexar USB “Hi-Speed” (f/k/a USB 2.0) Multi-Card Reader for $30 at CompUSA. It supports pretty much any card presently available, including memory sticks and SD cards. The USB 2.0 functionality should be a big help in getting the photos downloaded at something resembling a decent speed, and it will allow me to place them in a iPhoto album and burn them to DVD without a lot of hassle.

Perhaps I'll give the drive a spin tomorrow.