Saturday, March 27, 2004

Haven't slept well all this week. Is it just me, or does everybody go on these binges when new stuff is going on, where you just lie in bed and look at the ceiling and think about them? I'm looking forward to having some exciting new tasks at work, but I suspect I will have to work to get them assigned to me officially. So I think about what how I should do them, and will people approve of them, and am I doing them the best way possible, and things like that.

I'm playing indoor soccer twice a week as well. I'm a lousy soccer player - never really played as a kid. At least the indoor season is coming to an end soon, and my shins will be thankful for that. But as I play more, and figure out how to do more things, I lie in bed and think about what I SHOULD be doing, and what I SHOULD have done last time I played. So I'm in bed usually around 11, and up around 3 or 4, with nothing to distract my attention until 5 when the news comes on the radio.

The soccer relevation that I had this week came from an experienced player who tried to show me how you make a cut as a forward, involving cutting to the inside of the defending player towards the middle area of the field. That's fine and I certainly see why you'd WANT to do that; the problem from my perspective is that if I get the ball in the right area, I certainly won't be able to do anything with it :) So I'm thinking what I need to do is get some practice in, stopping the ball, turning around with it, and taking a shot, all without losing it to the defender next to me. Unfortunately, in the pickup games I play in, we don't ever do anything like drills, it's all scrimmaging. I spent some time doing an Internet search to see if there were any classes available locally for adult beginners, but it appears we're a really left-out group. I'm thinking about asking an ace 16-year-old at church to do some workouts with me.

Saturday, March 13, 2004

Got my wife her first digital camera today, a Kodak DX4530. She's never that excited about going digital for anything, but I happened to mention a few weeks ago that Kodak was quitting making film cameras, and that freaked her out enough that she decided it was time to join the revolution :) She did all the research on it herself, and it seems like a really nice camera for non-professionals like us. I like that it was less than $400, and that it does 5MP. Once she goes digital for something, she's usually pretty happy with it - does most of her communication by email, and does some instant messaging too. The other day the cable modem went down, and she called the support people herself, waited 40 minutes on hold, and with their help managed to fix the problem - a loose cable going to the router - by herself. I was pretty impressed. Ask her to her face, though, and she'll tell you she's a confirmed Luddite.

Monday, March 08, 2004

Finally got back to working on the church web page. I'm far from an expert in FrontPage yet, so I set it up as its own site on my computer, which I intended to publish to a subdirectory of my site on my provider. FrontPage didn't like that at all! I tried to hack around it by putting the whole site into a single directory that represented the subdir, but apparently it was still not happy with things like the themes directory. It still doesn't look the same on my computer as it does on the web, but it's getting closer. On the agenda: A privacy policy, and ways to register multiple kids at once for Vacation Bible School.

I also agreed to take over data entry for the church address book. This might have been a mistake. They are using an old program named Day-Timer that is no longer supported, and I couldn't even get it to install on my laptop! So we'll be looking to upgrade sometime soon, I hope. It's interesting that what the church really needs is an IT guy. Don't think I can volunteer since I'm already stretched pretty thin, but it's looking like a pretty important step to me.