Went to Columbus, OH this week on a spur-of-the-moment thing - the Indiana University soccer team was playing an exhibition game before the Columbus Crew Major League Soccer opener, so we thought we'd drive over and see what it was like. We picked up my dad and stepmom on the way too. It started out pretty nice, fairly warm temperatures and bright sunshine, and we got to see IU beat Maryland in a goal in the last couple of minutes. But things went downhill fast - there was a two hour wait before the Crew game, the wind picked up, temperature dropped, it started to rain...a pretty miserable experience. My stepmom leaned over to me and said, "At least it's not hailing!" A good sport - she only came along since we all did. We bailed out at halftime - dropped off the 'rents at their house and got back to Bloomington at about two in the morning. It's kind of a bummer for Jesse - the two-year-old - since it really disrupts his schedule, but man, I love to do that sort of thing.

I joined Gasbuddy tonight. Driving between Indianapolis and Bloomington as much as I do, I think I can use it just as a personal record of gas prices even if no one else ever enters a thing.

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.

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.

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.

My wife is a deacon at our church. I wonder if that makes me a deaconess? The pastor's husband told her the other day that she was the best deacon they'd ever had. I believe it. She's very responsible, as well as being very giving. I can't imagine another two traits that would combine for good deacon-hood.

What do deacons do? I suppose the role is different from church to church. Our church divides the congregants into "families", so each deacon is responsible for a subset of the church. Our pastor, I think, has a tendency to take too much on herself, so it's important for the deacons to step up and take some of the burden off her shoulders. Cathy is very good at that.

Just so I don't forget, a link to my site. I started building my site with Trellix many years ago, and it was ok, but then I got a copy of M$ FrontPage. So that's what I use now, but there are still many remnants of Trellix floating around. I really ought to just yank it all out and start over.

I was also asked to do publicity for Vacation Bible School this year; what's the best way for a geek to do that? A web site!

Wow. A blog.

The first thing that strikes me, is that this must be the most narcissistic form of computer interaction since, well, ever. Back in the early 90's there were already public mailing lists floating around to join, and a lot of people would join a mailing list on, say, Indiana University basketball, and immediately send out a sixty line email on their life. As if we cared. We were only worried about Alan Henderson's knee.

But apparently enough people did, and do, that reading about someone else's life has become the big internet thing. It seems a lot like Reality TV, except with worse editing.

On the other hand, the only way to have something really excellent is to take the chance on having something really lousy. So here I am.

Now what?