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I should be getting some good photos of the RV System in the coming week. Behind the scenes I’ll get the e-commerce stuff lines up and then, once the photos are posted and linked to, the doors will open for business.

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I don’t feel as if I’ve been doing you, my reader, justice.

I’m going to narrow my focus somewhat. I’m going to combine my blogs (5, technically speaking) into just three. I’m going to drop the tech blog and the beliefs blog, rolling their occasional posts into this blog. This blog, in turn, will become an extension from a static website. The existing links will work until further notice.

So:
| –> photo gallery
| –> e-commerce catalog (my art)
Static website | –> general blog (here, will include the tech and beliefs blogs)
| –> Michigan blog ( soon to get its own URL)
| –> organic gardening (stays where it is for the moment)

With plenty of links for hopping between them. (Of course!)

I am going to drop most of the advertising from the general interest blog. I’ll leave the adv. for my ISP. I think that they’ve given me good value and I’m confident that they’ll do the same for you. And I might continue with display ads “below the crease” if I can find some that pay better than adsense. I’m not satisfied with my income level from adsense. If I was counting on it for the groceries, I’d have died months ago.

The Michigan blog will get a reasonable level of advertising. I will certainly be looking for ads from Michigan-based family-oriented tourist destinations, sports outfitters, hospitality providers and car rental companies.

I do not consider a go-go bar a ‘family-oriented tourist destination’.

So … I’m off to Toledo for a weekend. I’ll see you when I get back.

Bill

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According to my logs, so far for the month of June 2008, I have had visitors from each of the following countries:

United States Netherlands Malaysia Australia European country (???) Canada Hong Kong Great Britain Germany Spain Norway France Austria Sweden Japan Portugal Brazil South Africa China Lithuania Denmark Singapore Chile  Belgium Estonia Bulgaria Latvia India Croatia Greece Taiwan Switzerland Italy Poland Mongolia Mexico

That’s 36 countries … or a little over 10% of the world. Not too bad. Not too bad. I notice that some of these countries ban my religion. That raises my level of responsibility. I’ll do what I can to pass along some spiritual food. Use the comment provision to make the communication a two-way street. I am only fluent in English, but if your language uses an alphabet that looks somewhat like English, I’ll find a way to read it.

I’d love to play “collect the flag” with you … do you have a friend in another nation you could steer this way at least once?

Once I say a heartfelt “Thank You”, (Maasha Danke, Muchas Gracias, Danke Shoen, Merci Beaucoup) what more can I say?

Seriously, what topics would you like me to tackle?

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I watched the young lad struggle with the grass clippers. They were too big for his hands, dull and it was too hot to be working in the sun. I stopped the mower, called him over to me and asked him if he was ready to take a break. Like any other seven year old, he was ready. So was I. That sun was tormenting us.

So we got into my pickup truck, rolled down the windows, buckled in and off we went to the corner gas station. We could see it from where we were, but it was just too hot to walk across the sea of concrete to get there.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the life of that seven year olds’ mother was taken in a drive-by shooting that may have been no more than a gang initiation. A senseless rite of passage for a senseless generation.
It takes more than a bullet to prove your manhood, punk. It takes a lifetime. My young friend is closer to being a man than you are.

I’ve seen photos of the young mother and her baby boy. They were in love in exactly the way you would want a young mother and her son to love each other. That joy for each other simply leaps out of the picture at you. That’s what that young scum bag brought to an end.

I can’t help but be angry — “deeply enraged” seems more precise, but even that is lacking. What I feel toward the offal that ended that goes beyond the power of words to express. The kid already didn’t have a dad. You took away his mother, too. Someday, you festering boil of a punk …

(Exodus 22:22-24) 22 “YOU people must not afflict any widow or fatherless boy. 23 If you should afflict him at all, then if he cries out to me at all, I shall unfailingly hear his outcry; 24 and my anger will indeed blaze, and I shall certainly kill YOU with the sword, and YOUR wives must become widows and YOUR sons fatherless boys.

Take a deep breath, old man. Start over. Take another breath. Release it slowly. Relax. It is life you must nurture; death can take care of itself. The kid who pulled the trigger will pay the price. The wages sin pays is death. In the end, there is no bargaining and no other outcome. Get back to your story.

So we, my young friend and I, wandered back toward the rear of the gas station and found a flavor of Gatorade we each liked from the cooler and a bag of some sort of salty snack to share. Pork rinds, I think. Maybe Pringles. It didn’t matter what, it just needed to be salty. We were sweating like leaky sponges. I’ve had whole body heat cramps. They can be pretty gruesome. So I pumped my young friend with electrolytes, liquid and salt. He didn’t know about that part. It all looked like free Gatorade and pork rinds to him.

It’s not often that you can find a real friend. Most folks can count the real friends they’ve had over the course of a lifetime on the fingers of one hand. Seldom do we have as many as two at the same time. A real friend is just that hard to find. One who will buy you Gatorade on a hot day is a real find. So is finding someone to share your Gatorade with.

The store was crowded but eventually the older man and the younger man took their place in the checkout line. The older man kept a wary eye for … for what? In this sea of dark faces, the older man was well aware that having a young brown-skinned boy with him was, to say the least, unusual. Glancing around, some faces were kindly. Some hard. Eye contact with the hard faces was brief and quick. Can’t show any fear. Mustn’t challenge. The kids parents wouldn’t mind him being there because they trusted their youngest with the old man. But the other customers were an unknown. The gas station is in a crusty section of town and has seen violence more than once before.

“Please, Father, let us pay for these rinds and live long enough to eat them.”

The line moved far too slowly for comfort.

In the end, the cashier counted out the change and the old man and the young boy walked back to the battered old pickup truck with the peeling paint and they drove uneventfully back to the lawn they were working on and found a shady place to eat the rinds, drink the Gatorade and talk man talk.

In most big cities the difference between ‘good neighborhood’ and ‘bad neighborhood’ can be little more than one side of a street or the other. Sometimes you’ll drive along and notice that the boarded up houses stop suddenly at an intersection. So we sat and ate our rinds in the shade of the good neighborhood, within site of the gas station where a young man was gunned down in broad daylight just a month previously, grateful that his assailant had not shown up on this hot day. That young man was the second to die there in only a year. That gas station is always busy. Most people just come for gas, smokes, a lottery ticket or a fudgesicle . Some come to die.

Until the last of the rinds disappeared from the bag, the old man kept that wary eye open for rear windows being rolled down.

It’s good to sit in the shade and talk man talk with your friend.

(James 1:27) 27 The form of worship that is clean and undefiled from the standpoint of our God and Father is this: to look after orphans and widows in their tribulation, and to keep oneself without spot from the world.

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As I look at these two photos, I am inspired to consider that the two probably had the same designer. After all, if a design works, it is normal for a human designer to work out variations of it and apply these variations to additional projects. Why not the designer of the universe?

Additionally, there is grist for a sci-fi book in here based on the possibility that the universe itself might be a cogitative being and all we can see are the nearest neurons. This would mean that we, the ‘highest’ life form are much, much further down the food chain than we thought. At most, it would appear that we have the ability to destroy a single neuron … the one we are sitting on. More likely, we will sicken it and a phage will come along to clean us out.

Care to comment? Follow the link below for a peek at the photos.

A Brain Cell is the Same as the Universe

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Pardon my abysmal Danish, if you will, but ‘do you remember’ (husker du?) when a CGA monitor was the hot thing in computers? Are you old enough to even know what a CGA monitor was?

I’ll be honest with you … I’m old enough to more than simply remember that time; I’m old enough to recall not having to wrestle with my word processor just to get a few simple ideas in place. I’m old enough to actually miss those days when I could type an entire article with my hands over the keyboard. In fact, there was no where else they needed to be.

Dark Room, by Jeff @ they.misled.us is the bomb!

Yeah! Let the good times roll!
This is “dark room”, a full-screen text editor with minimal bells and whistles but even fewer distractions from the job at hand — writing. Or, more specifically, composing. In use, it looks pretty much like a monochrome screen monitor from the bad old days … except for the much higher resolution available today. It’s easy on your eyes and easy on your mind.

Dark Room allows you to change the font, the font size, the background color and the font color and precious little else. So, with the font jacked up to Courier New and 20 pts, the background set to black and the font color set to a shade of pink that shows up really well against the black, I’m rockin’ & rollin’ with this review.

Just about the first thing I noticed is that it really flies. Despite running on Win XP, this program really moves. I used it to write the first draft of this review. Then I selected all the text with a CTRL+A two fingered salute and dropped in into Windows Live Writer with a hearty CTRL+V.

The second point that catches your eye is the lack of clutter. For some of you who cannot imagine leaving your fingers on the keyboard when using a computer, this will come as something of a cultural shock.There simply isn’t much need for a mouse as there is nothing for it to point to during the course of editing.

My needs are simple. I need to be able to create, edit, save and print. I do not need to mail merge a blog posting. I do not need to email from a text editor. If I need to surf to some distant land, I’ll open a stand-alone browser and do the job properly.

I like Dark Room. If you are serious about getting words from your mind and out through the tips of your fingers, I think you will like it too.

It probably won’t handle a large document. It doesn’t insert graphics, play audio or any of those other ‘gitchee gotcha’ things. But it’s pretty good at getting words down in a hurry.

Allow me to recommend it. Oh, and did I mention that it’s free?

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Just thought you’d want to know, you of PDA fame, that there is no reason to lose your RV’s anymore.

Although I am working on an even better system, let me tell you how a $20 bill could change your life forever.

If you already have Outlook from Microsoft, PhatNotes 5.2 is a shade under $20. If you don’t, then PhatNotes has to do more work on its own but it is still a very reasonable $40.00.

Here’s what you get:

A module for your PC, a matching module for your PDA (Pocket PC, SmartPhone, Tablet), easy connectivity using ActiveSync on XP or the built in synch on Vista.

But you also get something else … a perpetually sorted RV list in which the territory number is ordered in an ascending fashion and the house address is ordered in descending order. The HH name is also visible.

Here’s how I use the provided fields:

Category = Territory number (bonus! on the PDA, when collapsed, it gives a count of the number of RV’s in that territory)

Subject = 99999 Streetname (HH name) (Pub Name if not my call)

Body = details of placements, etc.

A typical entry resembles this entirely mythical one:

Category: 17

Subject: 12345 Somestreet (Vera Alldid) (Davison)

04/08 WT / AW / Teach (Grown kids) Next 04/13/08, Ch. 2

It is easy to create additional databases as the need arises. The whole process (after the first one) takes about 2 minutes.

To any of these, I can add an alarm with some standard repeats and exercise several sorting options. Nothing too exotic, but for my purposes, almost everything I need is present with little extraneous clutter.

One of life’s little truisms is that ‘one size’ doesn’t ‘fit all’. But PhatNotes makes giant strides in that direction. There is a 30 day free trial … so take a look and see if it might not work for you.

(PS … I have no economic interest in this post. I spent an evening searching for appropriate software and this is what I came up with. I’ve used it for about two weeks and it looks like ‘a keeper’ to me. If you know of better software for this purpose, please speak up before I send these guys money! )

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Just a tip to point you toward an excellent research resource. Project Gutenberg digitizes books that are in the public domain (either placed there intentionally or whose copyright has expired) and distributes them via the internet.

You can choose to donate a reasonable sum, but the material is provided at no particular cost to the user. I flip ‘em a fiver once a year just to keep the lights on.

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

While the principle goal of Project Gutenberg (PG) is to keep public domain publications from being lost to the reading public, the link below will help you create your own e-books.

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Help_on_Bibliographic_Record_Page#Plucker

If you are, perhaps an employer wanting to keep a single version of a product manual available to all your technicians or a publisher of some sort wanting to make your written material available in an additional format at a minimum cost to yourself, Plucker might serve your needs extremely well. To conserve space, PG does not include graphics in its files,  but you could.

I, for instance, read three magazines each month and it would be extremely handy if they were available in a form I could carry suspended from my belt in my PDA. This same publisher recently made the audio version available for download as MP3’s, so perhaps there is reason for me to hope regarding the text versions.

For more excellent resources, search on Google using the term “free books”. There are thousand and thousands available, many from authoritative sources such as government agencies and publicly funded schools. And don’t turn your nose up at international sources … information, after all, flies no flag.

http://www.e-book.com.au/freebooks.htm

http://www.free-books.org/

And, finally, a hand-compiled (cherry-picked but incomplete) list of resources for free e-books.

http://www.friedbeef.com/2007/04/09/best-places-to-get-free-books-the-ultimate-guide/

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Paul was writing under inspiration when he wrote those words that were “hard to understand”.

He, far the better writer who had the additional advantage of writing under inspiration through the holy spirit, found his words misunderstood in some cases and willfully twisted in others. The same has happened for many other portions of the Bible. So I am not surprised that my inelegant writing met with misunderstanding. Writing is an art and a craft and I have not mastered it yet. Words I wrote were, indeed, “hard to understand” through no fault of the reader.

So, I want to apologize to any who found offense in some of my previous writings. None was intended and essentially all of the previous postings have been deleted.

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I don’t even have a local copy.

I plan to re-vitalize and re-write the blog, following a much more clearly (and narrowly) defined choice of topics. I am hopeful that this adjustment will make this corner of the internet far more useful to you, the reader.

From time to time I will be looking at boxed and free software that makes short work of record-keeping for active Christians. I’ll show you how to create, for instance, a spreadsheet to track (your own) activity and graph your improvement. You choose the activities you want to track, I’ll show you how to track your progress from month to month and year to year.

I’ll try to outline how to do these things in a simple, direct, fashion using both proprietary software on Microsoft Windows and free software running on the Linux operating system.

I’ll publish an assortment of “Read the Bible in a Year” calendars along with some tips for using them.

I have a son who is a capable programmer. I’ve commissioned a couple programs from him that should make your Christian life easier and quicker to keep organized. He could use a few bucks, so I’m going to charge a nominal sum for the programs (all under $10 per license).

I also have begun development of some printed record-keeping material that you will find convenient to carry and useful to organizing your efforts. I plan to offer it for sale in pre-printed and bound form and also as *.pdf files that you can print for yourself to give the tools a fair trial or even to get you and your immediate family through a ‘tight spot’.

All in all, I think that there is much to look forward to here. I hope that you’ll look forward to it with me.

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