relaxing weekend

Friday was one of the worst days I have had at work in a long time. It seemed like everything I touched failed to work correctly. I tried to fix one problem and and would cause another. My co-worker was on vacation and obviously could not provide me with the wisdom I needed to solve the many problems I was causing. I was very frustrated by the time I got home. Plus I was running out of options in finding an audio engineer for the upcoming Aradhna concert. At least when I got home and checked my personal email account, I found a couple of people offered to help with the sound, so by the end of the day I had good news to make me feel better about my bad day at work.


Just last weekend it was snowing and was under 20 degrees, but this weekend the temperatures rose to 80 degrees. That was quite the 60 degree temperature difference in just a few days time. That meant it was time to get outside and mess around. I cleaned up the garage to celebrate the warm weather and then washed both of our vehicles. Not too exciting, but then the big event came on Sunday afternoon. I finally took the time to mount the painting of the children on our living room ceiling. We put it on a wall so the kids would not have to see it all of the time but my wife and I could look at it as often as we wanted to. Since it is so large we did not want it to be in our faces all of the time. It looks very nice up around 10 feet from the floor on the wall I filled in. I took a photo of the painting on the wall with our new $17 Logitech webcam which we used to talk using Skype with our son in Korea last night.

This is the meaning of the words on the painting:

Prema milana ko nai-na tarase
The eyes long to be united in love
Ghaayala mana tori nagari aawata
Wounded hearts come to your city
Saba eka chana mei swaagata paawata
All, in an instant, find welcome

Google Chrome vs. Safari 4

I have been using Google Chrome at home and at work since it was released. Today I tried using Safari 4 for the first time. I really like the Google Chrome "most visited" page as I can see what the page looked like last time I visited it. Plus it remembers the most frequently visited pages. The challenge in Safari 4 was customizing their "top sites" to have the same site I had in Google Chrome. It was definitely hard but I finally accomplished it. Two of the web sites I added will not generate previews, one of them being Bank of America's site, which I find really odd. CSS 3 is the secret behind both of these web browsers. Webkit is used in both of these web browsers as well as used within Flex/AIR. The thing I have always liked about Safari is the built-in RSS reader available in the menu bar. Nice to see iTunes CoverFlow being used for Bookmarks. At least they have a new style carousel for the "top sites" page that just looks too cool. You can make a tab become a separate window but I could not find a way to re-attach it. I find Google Chrome annoying on how easy it is to make a tab become an extra window but at least they have an easy way to just drag the window back as a tab. Somehow several times a day accidentally detach a Google Chrome tab as a new window. I am glad I don't have this problem with Safari 4. I have had Safari installed on Windows for a long time but only used it to double check browser compatibility as I found the fonts looked really odd on Windows. I found the CSS checker interesting as it shows how lacking IE and Firefox are and how far they have yet to go to catch up. For now I am a Safari 4 convert.

Kwangju, South Korea

This is a blog about the place in South Korea where my wife grew up. Her maiden name is Dietrick:

Kwangju, South Korea

This is the house where my wife grew up:

Valentine's weekend

The last two days seemed like a long weekend, but in this case it was a good thing. At lunch time yesterday as I was talking to a friend I have known for almost 30 years, the mail woman rang the doorbell. I initially ignored her as I was on the phone and I thought someone else would get the door. Then she knock on the door leading to the garage in desperation. I walked out the front door and found her in the garage. She said I had to sign so she was determined to find me. She had the painting of the family as it arrived from India on Valentine's Day! I handed it to my wife and on opening it we noticed the painted was folded and had creases in it, which was the only thing wrong with it. Everyone had to make comments about it as they all saw the canvas laying on the floor. This morning I searched on the web to figure out how to re-stretch the oil painting to fix the creases. I found a useful video by artist Michael Bell which was on this wikiHow site. I found a couple of sites that sold canvas stretchers, which are really specialized pieces of wood. Then I found this site that explains how to make your own. My middle son and I followed these and now we have a stretched canvas, which is still creased, but at least it is mounted properly.



Yesterday afternoon my wife and I went to see Billu Barber for our anniversary entertainment. Since it had Shah Rukh Khan, we expected to be entertained. We have recently had no such things happening as we watched rental Indian movies. The new ones coming out are just not that good. This one on the other hand had us laughing like crazy near the middle and crying at the end only like King Khan can do. Plus it had a a couple of great points. Billu was very poor and felt ashamed to bother the famous movie star who was his childhood friend. Everyone else wanted to take advantage of them both. Billu's family had to decide if it really matter whether they met the famous movie star when they would always have their father. As usual I would much rather see a movie with a point than just be entertained. I feel like I did not waste my time every time we leave the Indian movie theater. I cannot say the same for other movies.

Aradhna @ Raleigh

book moved

This blog uses Blogger, so I decided today to use WordPress for my book blog: 50 year adventure

full Army day

Yesterday was an interesting day. It was not good and it was not bad, just interesting. I seldom get angry, but that is how I started my day off. On the final day before our oldest son was to leave for South Korea with the Army, at 9am I was wondering why he was not home. The week since we brought him back from Ft. Jackson in Columbia, SC was not the best of weeks. When we arrived after lunch last Thursday, he was home only until the evening when he newly acquired "girlfriend" picked him up in front of our house. She did not come in but parked by the mailbox out of view of the front of the house and call him by cell phone to come out to leave. On Saturday he returned to our house for a little over an hour before he took off again with the same girl for East Carolina University (ECU), where she attends. He returned home on Tuesday afternoon and said a hand full of words all day long to his mother and only mumbled a couple of words to me that evening. He looked and acted exhausted. He packed all day Wednesday and on Thursday night left again with the same girl. We hardly saw him all week and when we did he was not happy at all. His siblings also wondered where he was as they wanted to see him. My wife drove all the way to pick him up on Friday night but he said he wanted to say longer. Last that night he called us to say he had a great meal with his girl friend and her parents, which was not what my wife wanted to hear. I don't know what we expected but it was not that kind of week with our son before he left for South Korea. So when he called at 9:30am yesterday wanting a ride because his friends would not bring him home, that did not make me feel all warm and fuzzy. When we reached the apartment where he was staying with his long time bud, I decided it was time to get angry, which is something I almost never do. Probably not the best time to do so, but I had to preach to him the importance of family over supposed "friends". Who is there for him when he needs help or money? Family not his friends. Who picks him up all of the time when he don't feel like it? Family not his friends. Who forgives him always? Family. After ranting for 30 minutes I have no idea if any of it sank in. What I really didn't like was that this was the same thing we had been doing for years with him and the change I thought I had seen when he first joined the Army was gone and he had reverted to bad habits in a moments notice. Am I perfect? No. Is my wife perfect? No. That had nothing to do with it.

By the time we got home I felt emotionally exhausted and we all let him pack and get ready instead of spending time with him. My wife did not tell him that her parents had canceled their trip to our house to take him out to eat the day before and had considered driving up yesterday. They were excited as he was being stationed in the country they spent 25 years of their life. At 1pm when he asked me to help him start and file his taxes, what did I do? Because he is part of our family, of course I helped him. We sat down and completed his taxes using TurboTax in around 1 and 1/2 hours. We left the house at 3pm with hugs from his siblings. He wanted one last Cook Out hamburger, so we stopped along the way. As we drove out of the parking lot, he looked in the bag and found they gave him a BLT instead. It is hard getting in and out of that location, but he drove around and went back into the slowest line - of course. It was 3:45pm and I was getting a bit worried about the flight which was to take off in our hour. Since it was Saturday I did not have to think about heavy traffic, so I drove as fast as I could and we parked in the nearly vacant lot to the new terminal at RDU. At 4pm we were at the ticket counter with a very helpful woman as there was no line at all. Since we were the parents of our military son, we got special passes to go through security to wait with him at the gate. After 20 minutes he boarded and we were off. It was more of a relief than a tear jerking affair, which is not the way we envisioned our parting. He was after all leaving to go to the place where his mother and my wife grew up her whole life. My wife stayed up late thinking he would call her from LA airport before taking off in Korean Air, but the call never came. I was just glad to go to bed as I was tired from our emotional day. It did not help that our youngest son woke me up at 3am, but that is a whole different story not worth talking about.