jkslade.net

I’m trying something new, starting this week. A weekly post for family happenings, intended for family and friends. Of course one of the goals is to include photos… I’ll be experimenting with the best way to make that work, so patience please.

Caleb had his first Pinewood Derby this week. We both enjoyed the process of creating the car. It didn’t place, but it was “a sweet ride”. Caleb’s been working hard and really enjoying soccer, as usual. The team is undefeated the last two seasons.

We were finally able to have the party for Trent’s 6th birthday — he was sick the day we had previously scheduled it. The kids enjoyed commando-style face painting, an ‘obstacle course’ with water balloons and squirt guns, and getting custom photo id badges. I’m enjoying my new camera

Kim had her first pre-natal care appointment this week for baby number 4 — as near as we can tell, it’s a turtle. The ‘official’ due date is around Thanksgiving, which should put us in Israel if all goes according to plan. We were told this week to expect visas around July 25th… hopefully it will be sooner, but we’ll see. We are still waiting final approval of the cost estimate, so it is still possible that this won’t even happen. So please pray for us that we get to go!

Jeffrey Thomas
forgiveness - who is it hurting more to say “I can never forgive them”
Marcus Antonius: how much more do we suffer for our anger than the harm actually done to us.
Story of his own brothers hit by a drunk driver: example of forgiveness by his father.

President McClure
• Recent Boundary Changes
Sacrifice and selflessness may bring about greater peace & happiness - if not for yourselves, but then for others.
The children of Israel dealt with the ultimate misery in boundary changes. ‘Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians’ (Exodus …..) The israelites saw only hardship. The Lord saw deliverance and growth.
• Youth
Common mutual activity night.
We will always have the work of redemption. But we must get better at the work of prevention. It is better to prepare and prevent than to repair and repent.
If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll continue to get the same results - except that as the world worsens, we’ll lose more and more ground.
Youth must understand the real reason for obedience: because he loves us, and because we love Him. eg we must do all we can to protect from internet pornography - filters, passwords, etc. But eventually Johnny will be in a situation where he must decide - alone with a computer and an internet connection.
Goal is that children will become trully converted while they are still with us. Then they will have power from what they are, not only what they know.
“Our youth will be saved when we have sufficient work for them to do. Until then, they will remain self-centered and distracted from sacred things.”
• Missionary work
Exercise our faith - why should Naman have believed that washing seven times in the Jordan would cleanse him? We need the faith to act, to invite - to do the many things that may not make sense or be obvious.

http://www.ridethesnowies.com/index.cfm

This sounds like fun, for when the boys get a little bit older. Close to home, too.

I use IMAP to read mail off my debian (ubuntu) fileserver. When the SSL cert expires, I get annoying warnings, which can be fixed by renewing the SSL cert — Thanks to n8 foo for the tip:

cd /etc/ssl/certs
openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -out imapd.pem -keyout imapd.pem -days 365
Another link from n8:

http://www.knowplace.org/pages/howtos/linux_imapd_with_ssl_howto.php
				

wards need ~300 members to form. Some existing wards have dropped around 250

Big growth in Wellington. Establishment of church in Wellington down the road.

incorrect assumption of 5 year term for Bishops. Pres Hinckley: “why do we keep releasing bishops just because he hits a five year mark?”

Mutual Night
Change in demographics in church. Smaller families, less youth. Used to be common to have ~80 youth per ward. Only ~150 youth in the stake.

Hold mutual for all youth on single night. Need youth to be together in larger numbers. Most wards don’t have enough youth. Also need more family time.

Mutual night is wednesday. Enrichment is tuesday.

“Change is scary and hard” We see what we’re giving up, but not what good will come. “Don’t be a pickle-sucker”.

Boundary Changes
Harmony discontinued. Others adjusted.

Riverside Ward now Wellington (north from Vine)
Terry Lake Ward - the dogleg
Parkwood west to college, prospect to college
Timberline east to college, horsetooth to harmony

Richard Robinson is bishop of CLP

I was listening to the Americon Freedom Network (AM 1360 here in Northern Colorado)… a bit right-wing for me most of the time, but I flipped to it tonight and heard some interesting things.

Guest on the show (Patriot Radio News Hour) was Lindsey Williams, author of The Energy Non-Crisis. He says he predicted $3/gallon gasoline not long ago, and is now predicting $5/gallon gas in the ‘very near future’. A lot of the show focused on the impact this would have on food production.

He claims talks with a group of farmers in Springfield, Colorado, that said if oil prices keep increasing as it has been, they won’t even bother to plant their crops — there will be no possibility of a profit. Lindsey Williams claims that there will be food shortages at the grocery stores within a year and a half (say end of 2007).

“The world’s economy is oil” He spent some time on the topic of oil and the dollar, and our trade deficit in general. Other countries no longer want to handle oil purchases in dollars, because it is losing its value internationally. Other trading partners are getting lots of our dollars, need to put that somewhere. According to Lindsey Williams, a lot of that money comes back to the US not in office buildings and factories, but in farms, food-producing interests, etc — foreign countries such as China are taking control over our ability to produce food, and will be in a position to exert tremendous control over us. “Doesn’t matter how much everyelse costs — if you don’t have food, you ain’t going anywhere”

Of course he ends the show by advertising his books and DVD’s, etc… (”The farmers said ‘beg the people to watch your DVDs’” It’s all interesting to think about, and no doubt there’s plenty of truth in there. Nothing wrong with him wanting to earn a profit as well, but just struck me as cheap.

Anyway, what to do about it? The only real solution is to do what I already know is right: prepare in terms of food storage, clothing, finances, etc. Try to lesson dependence on the american / world economy — can’t really unplug, but I can insulate myself from small fluctuations, and be in a good position to deal well with major events. I’m working on most of these things already, but one thing I really need to do is diversify investments. I should learn about buying precious metals (gold, silver mostly).

Philosophy Talk

Someone else mentioned this, and I took a look at their archive of past topics — looks like lots of interesting info there… plus I’m a Stanford alum, so of course it’s good :)Â It’s now on my LearnSomething page as well.

As part of my PhotoShop Elements access effort, I found an existing script that does a lot of what I’m looking for: album2gallery.pl

This will definitely be useful for the examples, saving me time to figure out all the queries I need. I started documenting the database schema, haven’t really written much of my extraction script yet.

One thing that I am struggling to figure out, and the album2gallery.pl doesn’t seem to help… I want to know which photos are part of a stack or a version set, and only extract the image that is the top of the stack or version set. If anyone figures that out, that would be excellent to know.

I want to export some of the info from my Photoshop Elements 3 (PSE3) catalog (which is just a MS Access db) via script, so I can generate web pages, etc.

Looks like the easiest way to do this is via perl, using DBI and DBD::ODBC. I am using perl under cygwin, and I easily installed DBI and DBD::ODBC using CPAN:

% perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan> install DBI
....

cpan> install DBD::ODBC
....

With this in place, I wrote just a little test script to check that it works:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use DBI;

my $dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:ODBC:PSA', '', '');

printf "dbh = $dbh\n";

my $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT fImageId, fMediaFullPath FROM ImageTable");
$sth->execute();

my @row;
while ( @row = $sth->fetchrow_array ) {
print "@row\n";

}

PSE3 seems to set up the DSN as ‘PSA’ by default, with no username / password requirements — not good for security, but oh well. I was also surprised to find that this works with PSE3 running or not running — that’s something to look into further… what about other catalogs and such?

Anyway, that’s just a start. Need to understand the DB schema lots better. Eventually I’d like to get to something where, for example, I continually update a collection in PSE3 named ‘flickr’, and then a script that runs nightly to sync my ‘flickr’ collection (including captions, etc) to flickr.com, so I have one place where I’m managing that. Will I ever need to go back the other way (flickr.com into PSE3)? That would probably complicate things.