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Dave Barry. “Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face.” [Quotes of the Day]

Samuel Johnson. “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” [Quotes of the Day]

Katharine Whitehorn. “The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any.” [Quotes of the Day]

Joe Ancis. “The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.” [Quotes of the Day]

Here are four quotes that appeared on the same day. The first one appeals to my sense of danger in one of my favorite sports. The second quote aptly describes my dilema in writing. Writing is hard work if you want it to be read. The third quote highlights an important fact about how children learn about money. Children without money seem to learn their “life lessons” so much easier. Most kids with money just don't get it until life kicks them in the butt with a bitter life lesson. Some kids grow up and never get it despite a multitude of “life lessons” heaped on them. To me the last quote speaks about the problem we face in talking about our dysfunctional families. We are hurt by our family strangeness. It makes some family members very embarassed and lonely. The solution is to share these problems with a close friend. There lies the problem. You need a friend who won't run away screaming as you describe your family problems. My slightly abridged version of the quote is, “The only normal families are the ones you don't know very well.”

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Windows Media 9 vs. RealMedia 8

There are a lot of ways a person can make a musical photo slideshow. My choice of bundling the photos into a media file with the music is primarily the result of the success of Microsoft and Real to encode the data into a file size I consider to be reasonable for today's users. I consider both Microsoft and Real versions to be equivalent in quality so the overall winner is Microsoft based on the smaller file size. I was kind of surprised to find out that Pinnacle Studio was the best way for me to create the file. I will not tell you how much I surfed the web trying to find a solution that Pinnacle already could do. I am running version 7 so I was surprised when I looked at the file and found that it had encoded with the Microsoft's version 9 encoder and Real version 8 encoder.

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Amor Retos' Offspring Slideshow.

Microsoft Plus! Digital Media EditionHere is a Windows Media photo slideshow set to music of Amor Reto's offspring(909 KB). It's a fun little piece that did not take me too long to create. The RealMedia version came in at a hefty 2.2MB.

This all started when I was websurfing yesterday I found a found a website with a photo slideshow set to music. It was cute and I wondered how hard it would be for me to do the same thing. I did alot of research before I realized that I already had all of the tools I needed, Pinnacle Studio. If you do not have something like Studio a really cool and inexpensive too is Plus! Photo Story. You can order Microsoft Plus! a little cheaper from Amazon.

[Legacy Farm Ltd.]

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Is DHTML Dead?. Cross-browser incompatibilities, insufficient power, and the march of technology have relegated DHTML to a small—and shrinking—niche. By [email protected] (A. Russell Jones). [DevX: Latest Published Articles]

Browser Navigation is a pain in the butt! You probably should not use DHTML because of browser captibilities. Some people turn off javascript. This forces you back to the navigation scheme we use for blind people. I am trying get myself up to fixing our website for Netscape 4. It used to work but I think I should of paid more attention to how I used css.

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What I'm reading!

It seems kind of funny how my reading preferences have changed over the last couple of years. For many years I was a prolific reader of the Wall Street Journal, technical magazines, and the internet. In the last couple of years I have become an avid book reader. I read several popular titles each year but many of the books are about Christianity. My style of reading has changed, too.  I used to try and finish reading a book before starting with another.  Of the five books I am reading right now, my favorites are: The Message by Eugene Peterson and The Journey of Desire by John Eldredge. The The Message tells the stories in the Bible in contemporary language. It makes the Bible more entertaining and sometimes we can glean more relevance from this interpretation that we might have overlooked in one of the standard versions. The Journey of Desire is an almost hypnotic voyage to core of our beliefs about who we are and what are our hopes. He quotes C. S. Lewis who summed it up: “We can only hope for what we desire”. The closer we get to understanding our desires, the closer we are to understanding ourselves and our actions. 

cover cover

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Marriage Problems

My wife came back from her trip to Maryland with her horses. Despite the lull we are still in the battle for our marriage. The issues we are confronting have caused me a lot of soul searching. I am beginning to wonder whether I truly understand my desires or what is pushing me to confront our problems. I know it started as a financial problem but I wonder if I might have spiritual problems with our relationship. The recent escalation of warfare started when I questioned and then overruled my wife's “business” decision to donate our stallion to Virginia Tech. She had finally given up on him as a riding horse and wanted to get him out of her sight. Since our stallion is one of our better business opportunities over the next couple of years and we are not independently wealthy, I felt obligated to overrule her. She had made several bonehead decisions over the last two years but this one was the worse. We cannot afford to be this stupid! I allowed my wife to make almost all of the previous business decisions since I was unwilling to fight her over them and now I wallow in my guilt. I envisioned her getting smarter about business as we went along. Unfortunately the time has run out and we have to be smarter with what is left of our money. As I wandered through this mess I found myself seeking answers from God, the Bible, my friends, my mother-in-law, and myself. My mother-in-law has been quite helpful since she has major problems with both daughters. My mother-in-law and her daughters cannot stand to be in the same room together. Each daughter believes if their mother would give them more stuff their problems would go away. Each daughter is selfish and self-centered. My mother-in-law contributed to the problem by trying to give the daughters everything they needed. Surprise, it didn't satisfy them and they want more. There is no sense of gratitude. It is their entitlement. I do not think that God intended for these three women to go to their graves hating each other so something has to change. I am pretty sure that God has a very small role for me in helping them to change them. I must be firm in fixing my small part of the problem. I wish God were hurry up and get to work. I will probably continue to search the Bible for ideas since this problem is as old as time. I wish I could be more confident that I will see a solution to this problem. A little clarity would be so nice! Reluctantly I have learned to trust in God's plan.  It is easy to say, “Trust in God” but so much harder to do when your marriage is on the verge of collapse. I pray for those three women every night. I pray that God will open those women's hearts to love each other for who they are. I pray that God will establish new priorities in their lives and a new sense of gratitude for what they already have. I pray that God will help me love my wife more fully than I have in years. I want to jettison the old baggage that is messing up our marriage. This is a tall order but my God is a big God!

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Habitat for Humanity

I spent a couple of hours reading various Habitat for Humanity documents from their partnernet site and composing emails. I am somewhat involved in purchasing and I found some updated order forms for national partnership contributions. I am also somewhat involved in a project to convert from Peachtree to Quickbooks. I have a particular interest in Quickbooks for Non-Profits. The customized version has custom reports and highly encourages you to use their account codes since they feed directly into the annual tax report, Form 990.  Since we probably want to load some historical data it would be best if we matched up the existing chart of accounts to the version used in Quickbooks for Non-Profits. So I ordered a trial copy of the Non-Profit version. This should be interesting.

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NT Backup for SBS

Today I created scripts to backup the SBS server. This task is a relatively low priority for me because the lack of backups affect only one person, me! Tape drives and tapes are relatively expensive. IMHO I think tape backups will soon be obsolete. Since the announcements that SBS2003 would automatically setup backup for new server installs I decided to get myself familar with NTBACKUP. I looked at several alternatives but decided to use the procedure described by Mariëtte Knap in her article, How to backup your SBS 2000 server. I had two problems, the parameters for the Ntbackup and the smtp pickup location used by Exchange. The parameters in the downloaded file were for tape backups and I was performing disk backups. The vbs I downloaded had the correct pickup directory for smtp mail but the comments implied I needed to change it. I expect my mirrored disks will save me from disk failures. I expect the daily backup will used as the last resort  to save me from my installation errors.

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Spam Management

I have previously described how I manage spam. Today I finally got around to updating the filters in Mailwasher Pro. My old filters did not transfer when I upgraded from the shareware to the commercial version. The Mailwasher website had new instructions for importing filters and a new filters file. I am now getting a much higher spam identification rate. This is important for my yahoo mail id since I have had it for so long and I do not want to give it up because I am getting so much spam.

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Jedit – Revisited

I continue to use Jedit for various tasks. It is okay for most of the tasks without the licensing headache. Today I decided to improve the RSS for Legacy Farm using XSLT. It was really nice that Jedit support both XSLT, XML, and HTMLTidy. I cannot say I started this mini-project with a firm objective. I just wanted to make the News page easier to keep current and I thought RSS should be able to do it. I was not interested in rebuilding the site using blogger software. I just wanted to modify one or two pages in the site. I prefer copy&paste over fancy and frequently buggy automation.

My choice of Jedit was partly out of curiosity. It said it had XSLT working so I decided to give it a try. I found a XSL stylesheet that should transform a RSS file into html.  I ran into a variety of problems. The XSLT part barfed when I asked it to disable-output-escaping on the desciption section. The plugin was smart! It told me it was old and needed to be updated. It also told me that I needed to update my old verions of xerces/xalan.  After some fiddling I got it to work. With a little more work on the xsl file, I got it to generate valid XHTML. Another annoyance was inputing dates. So I played with Beanshell macros until I created a macro that would insert the current date in the format I wanted. I created another macro to convert the html in the description into valid “escaped html” that RSS v2 likes and another that creat a new item in the RSS file.

So here is how it works right now. Its not pretty or efficient but it is interesting. A little tweaking will probably make it quite usable.

  1. Create news item web page in Dreamweaver. This just happens to be wyswing html editor I like. Any web editor should do.
  2. Copy the Html in the body over to a new buffer in jedit run Htmtidy on it to clean it up for xhtml. Copy&paste the cleaned up code back to Dreamweaver and into the description of a new item in the rss file.
  3. Update the pubdate field in both Dreamweaver and the RSS.
  4. Run the escape_html macro to fix the description field.
  5. Use XSL to create a new news summary web page from the RSS. Copy the html over to the news index page.
  6. We have now changed three files, rss.xml, news index, and the item news pages. We can use Dreamweaver to upload the files and your favorite validators to validate the html and rss.
  7. Fix the problems.