Nope, No Pastor Dean Blog Yet...

Whelp, here I am blogging and chatting with my pastor at the same time.

The "No news is good news" moment of the day is here and gone - Dean is waaaaay too busy to start his blog up yet. I mean, only a wedding, a birthday, and his mother in town for him to attend to... I know he can multi-task, but I'll give him a pass for the time being. He did mention that he could make his first blog post in the recovery stage of this week.

Dean, I'm holding your feet to the fire on that one... ;)

And as far as the pictures and organization/posting? I finished up organizing and captioning all of the pictures in Picasa that I had previously organized under Photoshop Album. Now I just need to figure out the best way for publishing those...

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And in Other News...

Oh yeah. The other reason that I'm re-starting the blog: I've started helping my church with a website and I've encouraged our pastor - Dean Wood - to start a blog there. I didn't think it would be very nice of me to be pushing him toward blogging unless I maintained one as well.

If I'm successful in encouraging him, I'll be sure to link his blog from here.

Which reminds me, I need to link the church's website from here too!

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Blog & Picture Update in Progress

It's been a long time. A really long time.

To tell you the truth, one of the reasons I stopped blogging was the time factor. I really only wanted to use this blog as a place to put my latest thoughts and pictures online. Thoughts = easy (I type at a decent rate). Pictures = unbelievably hard - especially in terms of time. And that time became an issue due to the way I stored and organized pictures locally on my laptop - with Adobe Photoshop Album. I loved the organization that Photoshop Album enforced with my pictures, but I hated to do the actual organization. Furthermore, using Photoshop Album meant that I went through the following process just to post any image:

To post a picture, I would first take the original picture, rename it to something that made sense, clean it up (remove artifacts, crop the image, or just remove red eye), then make a thumbnail of the cleaned up picture, edit the appropriate .html file that it would be linked to, upload the image, upload the thumbnail, and finally upload the .html file. I would then post something in the blog about the picture(s). LOTS of work. After a while, I had more pictures than I could ever possibly sort through, not to mention do the above to publish.

So what has happened between that last post (June 27, 2005????) and now?

For one thing, the way I am starting to organize photos (and re-organize the older photos) has changed dramatically. The biggest reason for this change? Google Picasa. Picasa is so easy to use and does everything that I was doing manually - AUTOMATICALLY! The only part of the process that requires any kind of thought process for me is the naming of the pictures. I can do that easily and it doesn't take that much time either.

If you'll bear with me (for the next couple of weeks I presume), I'll be re-publishing my old photos, and blogging! and publishing newer images.

Stay Tuned!

As a teaser, you can check out the following Picasa generated albums:

• GBC Easter Egg Hunt


• Safety Posters

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Aquarium Update

Whoa! Has it really been that long since I posted here??

Uggh. Oh well. I ended up performing a water change at the office with Python Products "Clean and Fill No Spill" device - which I purchased from Drs. Foster Smith. Since I hadn't performed a water change or cleaned up my aquarium for quite a while, I decided I'd better perform some maintenance at home too.

The problem is that the water/tank was so nasty - and took so much time - that I pretty much was limited to cleaning the gravel and pulling out water, and then using the same product to fill the tank back up. All of that means that tomorrow I'll get a chance to do some aquascaping (removing some partially dead / dying Amazon Swords plants, separating up the Java Fern, and moving around some of the Java Moss, etc.)

I should also state that the Killifish are still alive, as is the Japonica shrimp. However, the last Japanese Trapdoor snail passed a while back.

I will also mention that I am planning a HUGE picture update (mostly of Christian) and will be reworking the existing pictures links.

Byron

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Pictures from Christian's First Haircut

Christian got his first haircut yesterday.  I will be posting some of those pictures here as soon as humanly possible...  (As always, the full set of those pictures will be available in the Pictures of Christian link to the right)

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One "Dadda" Memory

What a morning! Today something happened that I will always remember.

I usually sleep on my stomach, and sleep with my head facing toward the inside of the bed. In between 7:30 to 8:00 in the morning, Christian wakes up and Christy either gets up with him or brings him to our bed. This morning, when Christy brought Christian to our bed, he climbed over to me, laid his head on the side of my arm, looked right at me, and said "Dadda".

Of course, Christy was instantly jealous. :)

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Long Time, No Blog

Has it really been that long since I posted anything? Wow. I never got caught up - in fact, I think I feel further behind. Regardless, I'm going to give this a go again...



Stay tuned!

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