It's been a long time. How have you been? Did you have a nice summer? Do I need to open with the apology "I've been busy?" Well, I have although I should have written sometime last week, but I really needed to decompress from the daily responsibilities that kept me so busy over the last month. My absence can be most directly attributed to a project that I was doing for my church. To celebrate our 1st Anniversary, I was asked if I wanted to put together a slide show for anniversary service. I was a little reticent at first, because I knew it would be a big undertaking and I didn't really know much about power point. Plus, I thought that there might be others that already knew power point and had done a multimedia sort of project in their work lives. I don't know why I was chosen, but I imagine that at least one reason for it, was that I was single and might have the time to take it on. On that point, they were correct.

    All in all, the slide show ended up being 517 slides, 86 MB's in size, 14 minutes long, and included 4 songs. The performance date was September 8th and we played it at the end of the service on a digital projector onto a large screen. Because of the size of the presentation it actually hitched during the performance. No one really knew or cared, but as the creator of it, I was a little annoyed that it didn't go perfect. That feeling soon passed because all in all, the presentation wasn't a reflection on me, it was 517 slides of pictures of the people in the church. That carried the day much more than I could. Still, as an "Artist" I was particularly pleased to create a sequence in the beginning of the presentation. Several weeks before the presentation was due, I asked one of our resident photographers to set up a camera and to take a picture of the sanctuary when it was completely empty. Since we're a new church, we actually meet in an elementary school and have to set up new each week. Our photographer set up the tripod on top of a step ladder so that you kind of got a bird's eye view of the setup and the first half of the service. All in all he took 150 pictures over the space of about 3 hours. I sequenced them at half second intervals and it came across as a stop motion animation feature. All of my experience with photo editing really came in handy for this whole thing and the response has been wonderful. It was quite rewarding, but I'm glad that I'm done with it. If you're ever in the neighborhood, I can show it to you. As an added bonus, my parents were in town to see it, so that was kind of cool. The day before the presentation was due, I was still working on the song editing, which required me to find a cheap (free) wav editor. I was able to download Gold Wave and racked up a little less than a dollar's worth of edits. All I really needed to do was to fade out one song, while another song was starting, so that it didn't hitch the audio.

    I carved out the Saturday before the presentation was due, to work on the final editing process and my work was delayed by an unfortunate car accident. My parents we're on their way up to my brother's house to spend the morning with them when I guy in my neighborhood pulled out into the intersection in front of them. My parents T-boned him. Fortunately everyone walked away from the accident, but my parents car may be totaled. They haven't made the final determination yet, and they are currently driving a rental. I wasn't upset that I lost time, but I do realize now that moments like that put things into perspective. Some things are more important than my precious time. One last thing about the presentation. I'm about to learn something about getting licensing permission for songs. We'd like to distribute the presentation to families in the congregation, but we need permission to distribute them on CD. Because power point doesn't embed the songs into the presentation, people will have copies of the wav files on disc. So, it's our legal responsibility to get the permission prior to distribution. So, I'm going to have to contact Universal Music. Lovely. I hope it's not going to be expensive. We shall see.

    I'm getting ready to head to Florida in October for a mini vacation in which I'll see my grandmother and my friend V. V came down here last month, but because of our busy schedules, I couldn't really make the time. It also seemed less imperative to make the time when I was going to see her in a month anyway. A half hour of Northern Virginia traffic seems so prohibitive sometimes. After that trip, I head right back out of town to St. Louis. It will be my first time in that fair city. I'm sort of coveting my free time now, because October is going to be a brutal month for travel.

    Today, I bought an additional 256 MB of RAM for my computer. While I was working on the presentation, I had some memory low errors. I haven't installed it yet, but will after I post this up there.

    September 11th came and went this year with a lot less fanfare. Surprisingly, I didn't really feel it. I don't have a TV (per se) so I didn't see any of the replays or the heroic stories played out. I was in my car on my way to work when they observed a moment of silence and that was sobering, but the rest of the day was just another day. I see a lot of tributes to the heroes, which is a good thing, but I'm a little distressed that we aren't a little angrier about it. Someone suggested that unlike World War II, when we had Japan and Germany as enemies, we don't have a bad guy to demonize. Even the bad guys get our consideration and protection. Law enforcement is not supposed to profile, and airports are searching old ladies to make sure that they aren't terrorists. I know that this may seem insensitive, but I don't really have much affinity for young middle eastern men, nor any male from the ages of 18 - 23. I didn't trust them (men) when I was that age. Too easily prone to emotional forces for my tastes. I'm not exempt from that characterization, I was that age and I had my moments of anger and irrationality. BTW, I must applaud the Arab-American community in Lackawanna, NY. They were the ones that tipped off the FBI that some of the locals might be involved in something less than kosher. I think that if the Arab world, outside of America were a little more outspoken against those who would bring violence, we would have a lot less debate about whether Islam is the problem. I would hope that the Christian community would be rooting out law breakers and murderers instead of trying to apologize for them. Abortion clinic bombers are reprehensible to me, the least of which is that their actions defeat their agenda. I'm pretty sure that most Christian churches in America denounce that sort of behavior and don't provide material to criminals. The world's a funny place, isn't it.

    The pets are doing fine. Fritz is on a roll with not destructing my house or my property. I've been trying to give him a little more freedom by leaving him out of the crate when I leave the house for a couple of hours.

    U2 have released their new single to the radio. It's entitled Electrical Storm and it kind of grows on you. It's not a classic U2 song, in that I can't forsee them playing it in 10 years, but it's decent enough to add to their Best Of album that is coming out soon. I'm eagerly awaiting Peter Gabriel's new album which comes out next week. It's entitled "Up". Which follows the albums "US" and "So". Peter Gabriel has always put together elaborate music, but not album titles. He refused to name his first 3 albums, and attempted to leave his 4th album untitled, but they forced him to name it. He titled it "Security". If you think that's an artist being too arty. I present "Prince". Peter Gabriel is normal in comparison. This is the first new album in about 10 years. Although he has done some other soundtrack work over that span. I'm currently listening to Cold Play's new album "A Rush of Blood To The Head." These are the same blokes who gave us last year's "Yellow" which was just great. This new one goes down very easily.