Wisdom Teeth

Liz had her wisdom teeth taken out Saturday. She spent a lot of the weekend medicated, but is much better now. However, she's quite swollen. Unfortunately, she won't let me take a picture of her to post here on the blog.

I've been fighting with one of the church computers. All the wards in the stake received new Dell computers a couple of years ago. One of them has been getting really slow to run. It takes up to 10 minutes just to boot. So, I've spent a couple of mornings on the phone with Dell. They've had us replace the hard drive and are now sending some new RAM. But that is not going to solve the problem which I believe is a motherboard and/or CPU failure. Dell keeps wanting to replace minor parts when they need to replace the entire machine.
Don't you just love tech support people who think they know it all but are just following a flow chart of responses?

Film Strip Sample - The Way of the Bird

As promised earlier - here is a short sample of the conversion I did to a film strip for LaRue. It is a Quicktime file and will take a few minutes to load.

The Way of the Bird

(click to play or right-click and save)

What We've Been Up To

I've been converting some old school film strips for LaRue. You remember those - the "advance to the next slide at the beep" films from school.
I've had to cut them into 8 frame sections and then scan them into a graphics program to be tweaked and saved as individual jpg's. Then I record the sound (usually from cassette ot LP) into the computer.
Then using Adobe Premiere Pro I insert the sound file and line up the images to time with the beeps in the soundtrack.
Finally, burn the project to DVD. I'm going to run the DVD's onto videotape for LaRue to use in her class.
It's a fun project, but quite time intensive.
If I can, I'll put a small video clip online.

Liz has been working hard with her college classes. A couple of her classes require a lot of reading. But she recently got 90% on one of her exams. A couple of her classes are over the internet. One is a satellite feed from the main campus in Logan. And one alternates between the Vernal and Roosevelt campus.

Robin, Emily, Brighton and Kjerstine came to visit this last weekend.

I'll try to update with more later.

John's in the Newspaper

One of our area weekly newspapers did an article on the dispatch center. They also have a website. It's the Uintah Basin Standard. On their main page click on Feature. Then click ABILITY TO MULTI-TASK IS A MUST for the story.
There is also an editorial about dispatch. On the main menu click Opinion and then Editorial.

John on a Podcast

One of the podcasts I really like is a program by two guys in England called Top of the Pods.

I recorded a short comment and emailed it to them. They played my comment recently on one of their shows. I have included the part with that comment. It runs 49 seconds. Click this link to listen (or right-click to save-as): John on Top of the Pods

For a brief explanation of podcasts check out the link under Bailey Acres Extras. Or, click What is a Podcast?