Today we were finally able to go and have Kylie’s 7 year and family pictures taken. We typically like to have these done closer to her birthday so we have an annual timeline of her, and us, growing up. However this year we had a few issues getting the time lined up with the photographer, mainly because we were hoping to use Tiffany’s friend Sara take the pictures but the timing just wasn’t working. So we went back to Sear’s Portrait Studio and had these lovely pictures taken. I have always been happy with the way their pictures come out, but we were hoping to do some on location shots, these will have to be arranged for later I guess.
Category Archives: Site Info
Peregrine Falcon Rescue
Today Kylie, Melissa and I had a very strange, and probably rare, experience. We got to help rescue an injured Peregrine Falcon. We were on our way to Target to get Kylie anew bathing suit, and as we passed the car wash next to Meijer Daddy saw the Falcon standing under a tree. After turning around and going back we were realized that the Falcon was injured. There was another lady there who said she had already called the humane society and was waiting for their emergency animal pick up, so we went on to Target. While we were there Daddy made a few phone calls to track down other possible places for the falcon to go, but none were available. When we left to back home the falcon was still there and other people had gathered as well. This time when we pulled in we found out that the emergency pick-up personnel from the humane society was not going to be able to come for the falcon as they were dealing with another issue elsewhere. They suggested that if someone could get a blanket over the falcon and gently wrap it, that we could then put the raptor in a box and bring it to the humane society. Other people were currently trying to get the falcon, but all they had was a T-shirt, and that’s when Daddy remembered that we have a blanket in the truck. After getting the blanket, and working in coordination with the two other people who were trying to get the falcon, Daddy was able to get behind the falcon and drape the blanket over it and then gentle hold and wrap it, pick it up and place it in a box. We then followed some other helpers to the humane society. When we got there we gave the falcon to their emergency unit, but they came back out a few minutes later and told us they were not going to be able to save the falcon; it’s wing was badly broken and it’s one claw was badly mangled, unfortunately that had to euthanize the falcon. Even though there was a sad ending for the falcon, we all felt really good that we at least tried to help the bird. We were able to take a few pictures of the injured falcon, also a video of us catching the falcon.
Yearly Portraits
New Videos
I just finished adding three new videos to the site. Two are of Kylie practicing drills with her teammates on the first day of soccer, and the third one is of Kylie’s reaction at seeing her newly painted bedroom at Mommy’s house for the first time. They can both be found on the video page with all the others.
Up and Running
I finally got the web server back up and running on a full time basis. I still need to work on upgrading the kernel so there may be some periodic outages as I try to perform a very long overdue upgrade. I have been having problems with it for quit a while now though, so it may be time to ask for some help from a few friends.
Murphy’s Law
Well, as Murphy would have it, it’s not the power supply that died on the web server which leads me to believe it is something on the motherboard. Luckily I will be able to return the one that i bought and get some of the money back, less a re-stocking fee and shipping of course. I have taken down my file server so that I can use it’s hardware to bring the web server back on line. I think this little fiasco has a small silver lining. Instead of replacing the motherboard I am going to replace the file server with a NAS solution, specifically the Western Digital My Book World Edition II, which has 2TB of storage capacity. I’ll configure it with RAID1 which will mirror the drives and give me 1TB of storage (with a second copy) which is still almost 10x greater than what my current file server has. The old file server will continue to act as the web server until further opportunity presents itself to move it to better hardware.
Webserver’s Dead
After all this time, the web server has finally taken a pretty heavy hit. While the box is technically up and running the system is inaccessible and the hard drive doesn’t seem to be spinning. However, when I place the drive in an external bay it spins up so i know it’s not the drive. I think it might be that the power supply is no longer pushing enough power to spin everything up. It’s a long shot, but my other option is that it’s something on the motherboard. Seeing as power supplies are cheaper than motherboards, I am going to attempt that route first. Keeping my fingers crossed.
LifeStream Moves
As I thought might happen, I changed my mind and decided to move LifeStream to its own page, so as not to clutter the front blog page. While I like the idea of having my daily information for future reference and such, I have decided I do not like the daily posts filling the front page. Now the posts are on there own page, which can be found along the top navigation links. This page will now be my central repository for my life stream, and with this option it gets update throughout the day, instead of just once a day with the digest. I definitely like this configuration better, and seeing as the page has the information from the last few days, I have decided to delete the previous LifeStream digest posts..
LifeStream goes Live
I just implemented LifeStream, an application plug in that will aggregate my online activities and display them on the blog. This is based on my user name and account information for various online sites that I use, such as Digg. For a while now I have been looking for a way to gather my information in one central place and now I can (as soon as I get everything fed into the plug in that is). As of now I am linked into my Delicious, Digg, YouTube, Flickr, and Hulu accounts. Should I ever actually get an Xbox 360 I can also link into my Xbox Live account. I am also working on linking in with my Google Reader account, but am currently experiencing an issue which I hope to resolve soon. What this allows is for me to have one location where I can see what I have done each day, if that is add a bookmark to Delicious or like and article on Digg, I can see it here for later use, and share my findings and viewings with others, if anyone else is interested of course. As of now the plug in will create a daily post with all my activity, this may change in the future.
A New Gallery
I installed a new version of Gallery today, and though I am still working on the configuration, I think I like the new set up. The new version has comments enabled, so people can leave comments on pictures if they’d like (depending how this goes I may disable this feature in the future). There is also a new sidebar (that auto hides) which features a random photo (which changes every time the user views a new picture or page), it also has links to other pictures in the current album, and options to leave comments and view slide shows. This version of Gallery and the theme being used also allows for a thumbnail view for navigating the album (there are 20 thumbnails at a time). At current all the dates are wrong on individual image pages, and I am not sure if I am going to log in and fix this as there are over 8000 items in the gallery. I will continue to play with the new settings, but all the photos imported over from the old gallery without any issues. This new version is database driven, so load times seem a little faster for the larger albums and a little slower for the smaller ones, which is normal, but overall this one does have better performance than the old. I am pretty happy with my decision to upgrade to this version so far.