RickScheibner.net

I’m traveling across the state to see Oldest Son compete in a track meet tomorrow. He’s 16 tomorrow, and I thought it would be cool to be down there for that. I’m leaving tonight after school to be with my wife who is in the area right now. Just a quick list of things to get ready:

• Oil change, check
• Fill-up ($77 worth–yes, I have to take the pick-up), check
• 512M iPod Shuffle filled with the latest podcasts from:
• Car Talk, check
• NPR News Summary, check
• NPR Story of the Day, check
• Practical Principals, check
• Most recent free Starbucks download, check
• Random selections from my music catalog to fill up the remaining space, check
• CD case, just in case the above isn’t enough, check
• Gum, check
• Car wash, but the neighborhood drive-through is down, so no check
• Overnight bag, check
• Digital camera fully charged with plenty of room on the disk for photos and vids of the meet, check
• Fully loaded Starbucks card that I received from an anonymous person this morning, check
• Fully charged laptop (I hope Ronald McDonald House has wi-fi), check
• Map to where I’m going, check
• Cell phone so my Twitter peeps can call me, check

Looks like I’m good to go. I’m using the Modify Timestamp feature in ScribeFire, and I’m setting it to auto-publish at 5pm PST. Let me know how it works.

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• Today is my dad’s 73rd birthday.  We had all 5 kids at home yesterday to celebrate.  It’s been a long time since all five of us were in the same place at the same time.  Happy Birthday dad!
• We took a family portrait with all 5 of us kids, and I’m working on editing it in the GIMP right now.  Good way to put those skills to use. 
• Got my Praxis for school administration out of the way yesterday.  I either bombed it or passed it easily, I’m not sure which yet.  I find out in a short 4 weeks.
• I’ve taken like 3 Airebornes today. Experiencing some weird, flu-like symptoms that come and go.  Didn’t make it to church this morning because of it. 
• Starting to make summer plans.  So far, we’ve got a sturgeon fishing trip on the docket, another trip to the coast, and a trip to Leavenworth, Washington.  And–are you sitting down for this?  Susan and I might actually get to go on a honeymoon at some point!
• Hometown native and former Oregon State University offensive guard Roy Schuening was selected in the fifth round by the St. Louis Rams this weekend, in the NFL draft.  Quite a bit lower than expected, but I have no doubt he’ll make a name for himself.  He started 50 consecutive games at OSU, a school record.  Durable with a capital “D”.  He’ll be blocking for another Oregon State guy, Steven Jackson. 
• That’s about it for now; I’m thinking about an early bed time tonight.

I saw this a while back, but then sort of forgot about it for a while until I found it again last night. Google Earth, as you know, is made up of several satellite images and merged together to form a single pictorial view of the earth. Sometimes, anomalies and just plain weird things pop up, just waiting for somebody with too much time on their hands to come along and say, “What the…?”

Luckily for us, a site called Map of Strange: Strange Things in Google Earth has come along to take all of that tedious searching for us. Click the link, then check out some of the goodies that have been posted: Crop circles, ghost ships, land writings, it’s all in there. There is also some fly-over pictures from National Geographic where, if you zoom in enough, you can see some interesting things taking place in Africa: Elephants in transit, a bazaar, and some caretakers giving their cows and camels a water break. Interesting stuff.

John has a great meme going on where we display what’s on our desktop.  My year-old Dell Inspiron laptop is my main machine these days, so I’ll show what’s going on there.  Here’s my desktop in all of it’s 1280×800 pixel glory:

The picture is me and my two boys, taken at Hat Rock State Park last July.  I did some tomfoolery with the GIMP to get the effect of the natural tones mixed in with the sepia background.  I keep a pretty clean desktop, so I don’t have a lot of icons on display.  From top to bottom, I’ve got Computer, Documents, Pictures, Videos, Trash, and a shortcut to my USB drive.  The real action takes place in the lower left hand corner of the screen, where I keep shortcuts to most of my apps on the taskbar:

After the Start menu button, from left to right:

• Show desktop
• That cool cascading thing that Vista does with open apps
• Google Docs uploader
• Dreamweaver 8
• Paint Shop Pro X (seldom used, not available any more)
• Picasa desktop
• The aforementioned GIMP (my main image editor these days)
• Google Earth
• Google Desktop (seldom used any more)
• iTunes (What did we ever do without it?)
• Latest and greatest release of Firefox
• Flock (I’m still using it; just not right now)
• MSN Messenger (still have a few peeps on there)
• Windows Live Writer blog editor (The Ferrari of desktop blog editors)
• Thunderbird (Mozilla’s answer to Outlook Express–I combine it with GMail to meet all of my e-mail needs)
• Evernote (Got my beta invite, now I just need to spend some time with it to figure it all out)

I’m tagging everybody for this.

Tag, you’re it. 

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