The last couple of weeks have been crazy as I have documented in previous posts. This week is keeping the trend going strong. We had problem with the heat not working in the van on Friday. I told my wife to keep calm and not come up with ridiculous excuses to get a new vehicle. Yesterday I had to work from home since an A/C man was coming to check our heat pump system as something was not right. At 2:30pm my wife called me to tell me stream was pouring out from under the front of the van. That was odd since a friend had the weekend before "fixed" the van. At least he is a friend I can trust. When I arrived all of the kids were peacefully sitting in the van for the father-hero to show up. I checked the coolant since our friend had replaced the radiator and it was as dry as the desert. Fortunately, I had bought an extra jug of coolant an left it in the van a couple of weeks ago, so I poured what I had into the radiator. The nice thing about living in such a small town is that my mechanic friend's shop was less than a mile away! Then the A/C man said there was a problem with the humidifier as you are supposed to service them every year and it had not been done in the last 5 years. Wow, what else could go wrong?
Turns out a lot could, but only one other thing affected us the past weekend. We found out that our oldest son has been having all kinds of problems with his other three roommates. Two had been fired from their jobs and no one paid the utilities, so he paid for them all. He does not have enough money to pay for rent next month. He hates his job as he works long hours at Lonestar Steakhouse and gets few tips. Sounds like a fun life he has chosen! He called yesterday to tell us he quit his job, but thank goodness he found another job and started that one today at Walgreens.
So far all disasters have been diverted - we just keep loosing money in the meantime. Maybe we are building character to make us better people. At least I hope so.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Let's create a movie
For my sister's 50th birthday present, her boyfriend paid to have 380 photo slides, our dad took of us when we were kids, converted to photo CDs at the local CostCo in Virginia. She sent them to me by UPS so I could amuse myself, since I was not able to make it to see her last weekend. I had a wonderful thought that I should load them all on my laptop and create a single DVD movie. How hard could that be? When I had my Apple PowerBook laptop, it would have been so simple. Now I have a lowly Windows Vista laptop, which changes everything. I read once that Vista had made this easier, so I was about to find out in person.
About half of the slides were taken when my dad flipped the camera sideways. Not a problem, I thought, as it must be easy to just load then and rotate them in the default Windows Photo Gallery program that comes with Vista. Turns out you just load the first photo and page them the photos using the right arrow button and when you see one that needs to be rotated, you just click on the rotate arrow, when you click to see the next photo, the rotated one is automatically saved. This is very nice and easy as it should be. Once I had all of the images correctly oriented, I had to figure out how to make a movie.
Right at the top of same Windows Photo Gallery window, is an icon with a label next to it of "Make a Movie". How convenient. When I click on this link, I see Windows Movie Maker come up with a single photo in it. It must be easy to just add all of the images. I see a menu on the right hand side that has a section labeled "Edit" and under that section I see "Imported Media", but it is grayed out and I cannot click on it. I delete the single photo and it is still grayed out. Then I notice in the toolbar at the top is what I need the same "Import Media" and this one is clickable. Then we hit the part of Vista I like and hate all at the same time. The file explorer window comes up with the default path set to "<< Users > rick > Videos >". I go to the folder on my 2nd hard drive with all of the folders, and then multiple-select all of the JPG files and click on the Import button at the bottom. Now I see all of my photos in the middle of the window and thumbnails are automatically generated. I actually have all of my images loaded, so it must be easy to generate a movie now.
I have finally arrived at the fun part. I have used effects and transitions in many different graphical editors, like Adobe Photoshop. Under the same Edit section that I saw previously, now I see both "Effects" and "Transitions" listed. When I click on "Effects" I see a wonderful gallery that shows me all of the effects and when I select one a window on the right hand side shows me what the affect looks like in action. Very nice, but how do I use them? I see a small strip at the bottom of the window that is labeled "Storyboard". I drag a photo down on a film strip looking area and now I see my photo in the storyboard. Turns out there is a gray star in the photo thumbnail within the storyboard where you have to drag the selected effect. With transitions there are similar gallery images and those must be dragged onto the arrow icons between photo film strip thumbnails.
I must say that the overall user experience was really nice so far as I had constant feedback on what I was doing and Windows Movie Maker allowed me explore and try things out with undo that made sense. I clicked on "Titles and credits" and found even more fun things to play with as each title has animations attached to them as well. It is amazing at how easy it is to create professional looking movie affects.
So what is the problem? I have Windows Vista Basic, so it does not allow me to create a DVD. I was able to create a video CD with a WMV file, which works great, by clicking on the "Publish Movie" link in the toolbar. It brought up a dialog with "Recordable CD" listed as one of the options. I clicked on the link at the bottom, which said "How do I publish a movie?". In the help window that came up it had another link which said "To publish and burn a movie to a DVD", which is exactly what I wanted to do. When I open the link I see the bad news:
To publish and burn a movie to a DVD, you must have Windows DVD Maker, which is included in Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows Vista Home Premium.
I am sure there is a way but I am tired after trying all afternoon to find a way with freeware or shareware to do it. Too bad Microsoft wants to make me pay as I definitely don't feel like giving them any more money after today.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
don't get lonely
Yesterday in talking to a friend about his life outside of work, I learned that his father's recent death was more painful after his death, as he has had to deal with the crazy woman he was married to. This really reminded me of the story of my wife's grandfather, as there are many similarities. I remember the first time I met granddaddy's wife, who cannot be called grandmother as that name is way too regal for her. She was standing on the sidewalk outside their house next to a folding card table with maybe 25 items of garage sale junk on it. That was odd enough, but what made it really strange was the fact that a 75 year old wrinkly woman was there in a skimpy bikini. I began to wonder what kind of family I as getting involved with!
I used to help granddaddy by mowing his lawn and tending to his fairly large garden or anything else he needed me to do. When I became thirsty I had to go in the back screen door to the kitchen, find a clean glass and get a glass of water. The word "clean" should be emphasized as that was really hard to do. Every time I opened the cabinets I would see tons of cockroaches scurry off in all directions. I would hold the glass up to the outdoor window and normally it would be full of fingerprints. My lovely wife had mercy on me most days and would come by with a glass of water from our apartment for real refreshment. I also remember the visits we would try to have in the evenings after strict refusal to eat with them at their house for supper. We would sit in the living room and watch this women smoke at least 2 cigarettes at the same time and somethings 3 of them. The ashes would drop on the floor as she did her hoop rug, right next to the puddle feces. They had very dated white shag carpet, which had to have all kinds of nasty things we couldn't even see.
Granddaddy was the most pleasant elderly person I have ever met, and it was so hard for us to figure out why he would marry such a loony woman. My wife's father was the only child in the family and has told us many times how neat and super clean his mother kept the house. The explanation he gives is that his father became so lonely after loosing his wife of many years. With so many fine and upstanding eligible women in his church, his loneliness overwhelmed him and miss crazy woman just would not give up. Granddaddy was the dean of agriculture for 30 years at VaTech (many people know him indirectly as they named Dietrick dining hall after him and he was known affectionately as "Deet") and had accumulated some wealth so that was an appealing factor as well. She was a companion for many years, but I would not say a good one and looking back she definitely was the topic of many colorful stories. When granddaddy died, his wife was removed from the house and on cleaning up the house to sell, a large sized U-Haul truck had to be used to remove all of her garage-sale purchased clothes which filled the house, including the basement. Sometimes life is stranger than fiction. I am glad it is only past memories.
The moral of the story is don't be desperate and lonely as that is a bad combination.
I used to help granddaddy by mowing his lawn and tending to his fairly large garden or anything else he needed me to do. When I became thirsty I had to go in the back screen door to the kitchen, find a clean glass and get a glass of water. The word "clean" should be emphasized as that was really hard to do. Every time I opened the cabinets I would see tons of cockroaches scurry off in all directions. I would hold the glass up to the outdoor window and normally it would be full of fingerprints. My lovely wife had mercy on me most days and would come by with a glass of water from our apartment for real refreshment. I also remember the visits we would try to have in the evenings after strict refusal to eat with them at their house for supper. We would sit in the living room and watch this women smoke at least 2 cigarettes at the same time and somethings 3 of them. The ashes would drop on the floor as she did her hoop rug, right next to the puddle feces. They had very dated white shag carpet, which had to have all kinds of nasty things we couldn't even see.
Granddaddy was the most pleasant elderly person I have ever met, and it was so hard for us to figure out why he would marry such a loony woman. My wife's father was the only child in the family and has told us many times how neat and super clean his mother kept the house. The explanation he gives is that his father became so lonely after loosing his wife of many years. With so many fine and upstanding eligible women in his church, his loneliness overwhelmed him and miss crazy woman just would not give up. Granddaddy was the dean of agriculture for 30 years at VaTech (many people know him indirectly as they named Dietrick dining hall after him and he was known affectionately as "Deet") and had accumulated some wealth so that was an appealing factor as well. She was a companion for many years, but I would not say a good one and looking back she definitely was the topic of many colorful stories. When granddaddy died, his wife was removed from the house and on cleaning up the house to sell, a large sized U-Haul truck had to be used to remove all of her garage-sale purchased clothes which filled the house, including the basement. Sometimes life is stranger than fiction. I am glad it is only past memories.
The moral of the story is don't be desperate and lonely as that is a bad combination.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
not the week we planned
This weekend we had a great plan all setup. My mother was supposed to come from Arizona for my sister's 50th birthday. We were going to drive up to the motherland, beautiful Virginia, for a getaway weekend. Sometimes you just cannot plan for the chain of events that occur.
Last weekend I took our van to get the oil changed and in anticipation of the big weekend I wanted to be all set. I told the Meineke man that I had seen stains on the driveway and to make sure the leaks did not come from our van. When I checked back in with him after an hour, he showed me how the radiator had a crack in it. I asked for a quote on the work and he said $850. That was odd to me since a couple of years ago I had the radiator fixed in my son's car for $400. I immediately went to a good friend who has his own car mechanic shop and asked him to check it for me. He told me I was the first person to complain about the high price at Meineke and he would find out the cost and get back with me on Monday. Sure enough, he quoted a little over $400. Since I was taking off from work on Friday, we scheduled that day for van radiator overhaul knowing I would be all set for the weekend trip to Virginia. One other odd thing about radiators... In the good old days you could fix radiators by pouring a solution into them and it would clog the small leaks in no time. These days of advanced technology, radiators are plastic, which means if the crack you have to replace them. When you get a crack the cold to hot temperature changes make them fail even faster. Sounds like progress to me. Except for the fact that plastic is lighter, but then again our van gets 14 miles/gallon, so I am not sure that lighter radiator is helping.
On Tuesday night my mother called and said she saw the forecast for ice and snow and extremely low temperatures and cancelled her flight. Which was pretty disappointing, but she had a cold recently and was afraid the cold might trigger more sickness. Our well intended plans were starting to fall apart.
On Wednesday our dishwasher stopped working. We had this same thing happen a couple of years ago and when I tried to find someone to fix it, they all told me to forget it as the dishwashers are self contained and it was cheaper to buy a new one that fix an existing one. And guess what? The dishwasher is plastic! Two plastic failures in the same week. We let the completely full dishwasher sit, until Friday. I took off the water line to check to make sure the water was flowing, which it was, so it was indeed the motor inside the plastic housing. I turned off the hot water shutoff value and sat down to read the newspaper. My daughter came down to cook her morning eggs and yelled to me to come over as water was flowing on the kitchen floor. I opened the cabinets under the sink and saw a lake had formed, which I cleaned up quickly. I thought that was odd, but checked the hot water line and it was indeed off. I left the find a new water hose, just in case the one had a leak in it. The odd thing was the length from the hot water line to the dishwasher was 10 feet. They only make dishwasher cords in 4 and 6 foot lengths. It took 4 stores to find the connections I needed to get it to work with a 10 foot ice maker cord. When I got back my daughter again told me a flood was happening in the kitchen. I checked the hot water shutoff value again and this time being wiser, I turned on the sink faucet cold water and saw water pouring out of the hot water dishwasher connection, which was plastic of course, connected to a PVC plastic water line. The custom builder who built our house liked to make sure everything was custom built!
On Saturday morning we picked up our fixed van for the bargain price of $420 and thanks to our corrupt Meineke shop, my friend had made some money. Since snow and ice were in the weather forecast we put off our trip to Virginia for one more day. Now that we had a van we could go find a new dishwasher. My wife and I checked every store we could find as we typically like to buy scratch-n-dent or discontinued high ticket items. We found a high end model normally selling for $498 which was marked down to $298, which was cheaper than almost any other one we could find. We brought it home and when I tried to install it I found that the connectors I got the day before were not right. Off to my favorite home improvement store as there was a plumber who worked there who had always helped me in the past. He fixed me up and by 8:30pm last night I had the dishwasher working. The place we bought it said the really high end dishwashers are stainless steel and are very quiet, we chose the quiet plastic model because of cost!
This morning we woke up to my daughter vomiting, which she has continued for 3 hours. Sounds like that seals our Virginia plans. What sounded like such a good idea has not worked out and we are $750 poorer as well. What a week!
Last weekend I took our van to get the oil changed and in anticipation of the big weekend I wanted to be all set. I told the Meineke man that I had seen stains on the driveway and to make sure the leaks did not come from our van. When I checked back in with him after an hour, he showed me how the radiator had a crack in it. I asked for a quote on the work and he said $850. That was odd to me since a couple of years ago I had the radiator fixed in my son's car for $400. I immediately went to a good friend who has his own car mechanic shop and asked him to check it for me. He told me I was the first person to complain about the high price at Meineke and he would find out the cost and get back with me on Monday. Sure enough, he quoted a little over $400. Since I was taking off from work on Friday, we scheduled that day for van radiator overhaul knowing I would be all set for the weekend trip to Virginia. One other odd thing about radiators... In the good old days you could fix radiators by pouring a solution into them and it would clog the small leaks in no time. These days of advanced technology, radiators are plastic, which means if the crack you have to replace them. When you get a crack the cold to hot temperature changes make them fail even faster. Sounds like progress to me. Except for the fact that plastic is lighter, but then again our van gets 14 miles/gallon, so I am not sure that lighter radiator is helping.
On Tuesday night my mother called and said she saw the forecast for ice and snow and extremely low temperatures and cancelled her flight. Which was pretty disappointing, but she had a cold recently and was afraid the cold might trigger more sickness. Our well intended plans were starting to fall apart.
On Wednesday our dishwasher stopped working. We had this same thing happen a couple of years ago and when I tried to find someone to fix it, they all told me to forget it as the dishwashers are self contained and it was cheaper to buy a new one that fix an existing one. And guess what? The dishwasher is plastic! Two plastic failures in the same week. We let the completely full dishwasher sit, until Friday. I took off the water line to check to make sure the water was flowing, which it was, so it was indeed the motor inside the plastic housing. I turned off the hot water shutoff value and sat down to read the newspaper. My daughter came down to cook her morning eggs and yelled to me to come over as water was flowing on the kitchen floor. I opened the cabinets under the sink and saw a lake had formed, which I cleaned up quickly. I thought that was odd, but checked the hot water line and it was indeed off. I left the find a new water hose, just in case the one had a leak in it. The odd thing was the length from the hot water line to the dishwasher was 10 feet. They only make dishwasher cords in 4 and 6 foot lengths. It took 4 stores to find the connections I needed to get it to work with a 10 foot ice maker cord. When I got back my daughter again told me a flood was happening in the kitchen. I checked the hot water shutoff value again and this time being wiser, I turned on the sink faucet cold water and saw water pouring out of the hot water dishwasher connection, which was plastic of course, connected to a PVC plastic water line. The custom builder who built our house liked to make sure everything was custom built!
On Saturday morning we picked up our fixed van for the bargain price of $420 and thanks to our corrupt Meineke shop, my friend had made some money. Since snow and ice were in the weather forecast we put off our trip to Virginia for one more day. Now that we had a van we could go find a new dishwasher. My wife and I checked every store we could find as we typically like to buy scratch-n-dent or discontinued high ticket items. We found a high end model normally selling for $498 which was marked down to $298, which was cheaper than almost any other one we could find. We brought it home and when I tried to install it I found that the connectors I got the day before were not right. Off to my favorite home improvement store as there was a plumber who worked there who had always helped me in the past. He fixed me up and by 8:30pm last night I had the dishwasher working. The place we bought it said the really high end dishwashers are stainless steel and are very quiet, we chose the quiet plastic model because of cost!
This morning we woke up to my daughter vomiting, which she has continued for 3 hours. Sounds like that seals our Virginia plans. What sounded like such a good idea has not worked out and we are $750 poorer as well. What a week!
Sunday, January 13, 2008
food and family
It is almost impossible to get our whole family together at this stage in every one's lives, but for my wife's birthday we came close. Since my wife was born and grew up her whole life in South Korea, she really likes Asian food, so we went to P.F. Chang's. I had always heard that it was a very expensive Chinese restaurant, which it was, but the atmosphere was really great for such special occasions, plus I did not have to pay for the bill so it was even more special! My wife's parents, my wife's sister and a really good friend of theirs as well as our children were all present. My oldest son is currently a waiter at another lesser food establishment so he could appreciate the high cost which means high tips and even said he would like to work at a place this nice. This is the first event in the series of landmarks for this year and hopefully they will all be as nice as this one. The older you get, the more the events themselves are not the focal point, but who is present to share them with you and this is why this one was so special.
Speaking of my waiter son, he rode is the car with us and as we talked I realized how much he has become responsible in the last four months. Can I dare say matured? For me, the idea of becoming mature means taking the responsibility you have been given and using it wisely. I see in the American Heritage Dictionary they define maturity as "The state or quality of being fully grown or developed". I am not sure when I can say any of my kids are fully grown mentally, but he is definitely on the path to getting there. I think life should be about getting better with age and learning new things all along the way, so I guess I will never fully achieve this goal either, which is good. The other good thing about my son is that is he learning what he is not good at doing, which is just as important as knowing what you like to do. This for me also is maturing.
To end the day, our two youngest children huddled on the floor in our bedroom to watch a 2004 Bollywood movie called Bride & Prejudice with us. We had all four watched this together before and the kids liked the line "no life without wife" so they did not mind seeing it again. It was nice to have them watch it with us as who knows how many more times this will happen as it is not "cool" to watch Indian movies with your parents.
Speaking of my waiter son, he rode is the car with us and as we talked I realized how much he has become responsible in the last four months. Can I dare say matured? For me, the idea of becoming mature means taking the responsibility you have been given and using it wisely. I see in the American Heritage Dictionary they define maturity as "The state or quality of being fully grown or developed". I am not sure when I can say any of my kids are fully grown mentally, but he is definitely on the path to getting there. I think life should be about getting better with age and learning new things all along the way, so I guess I will never fully achieve this goal either, which is good. The other good thing about my son is that is he learning what he is not good at doing, which is just as important as knowing what you like to do. This for me also is maturing.
To end the day, our two youngest children huddled on the floor in our bedroom to watch a 2004 Bollywood movie called Bride & Prejudice with us. We had all four watched this together before and the kids liked the line "no life without wife" so they did not mind seeing it again. It was nice to have them watch it with us as who knows how many more times this will happen as it is not "cool" to watch Indian movies with your parents.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
music and teenagers
My teenagers often asked me if I like the music they are currently listening to on their iPods. The question comes up most of the time because they are into retro music that was popular 20-30 years ago. I am beginning to understand the truth behind the Indian school of thought that life is circular. Long hair was popular when I was a teenager and is now popular. Bell bottom jeans are starting to become the "in" thing again. Rock bands of the 70's and 80's are touring again and making tons of money doing it. We seem to be making the same mistakes over and over again!
To end 2007 I picked up a book we gave our teenage son who has rock star aspirations. It is such a shocking book of unbridled hedonism and self-pleasure which was the norm for rock-n-rollers of the 80's. My teenagers don't understand why I did not like Motley Crue, Black Sabbath or Blue Oyster Cult when I was their age. For me as a teenager these bands were just too weird as they were forcefully against anything Christian and went the other extreme to openly talk about satan. Not that I was in anyway following Christ or his teachings, it was just too odd for me. Then my teenagers ask about AC/DC, Led Zepplin, Guns-N-Roses, Metallica and such bands who the local red-necks around me enjoyed so clearly I could not listen to them. I went to the logical extreme and listened to bands no one in the whole area I lived in had even heard of, who were at the real edge of the culture. After reading this book, I see what sex, drugs and rock-n-roll can do to a person. Please do not read this book as it will send your system into a state of shock. Here are some quotes from this book:
The most amazing news for me is that Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx's girlfriend Vanity has since becoming a follower of Christ. It is such a huge transformation to go from immersed in drug addiction for so many years to what I see on her web site today. As opposed to the shocking web site Nikki Sixx still has but at least he claims to have left drugs and alcohol addictions behind. Sometimes I wonder whether people really believe in what they are doing, or they do it for affect to shock people and to make money. I can only make sure how I live.
To end 2007 I picked up a book we gave our teenage son who has rock star aspirations. It is such a shocking book of unbridled hedonism and self-pleasure which was the norm for rock-n-rollers of the 80's. My teenagers don't understand why I did not like Motley Crue, Black Sabbath or Blue Oyster Cult when I was their age. For me as a teenager these bands were just too weird as they were forcefully against anything Christian and went the other extreme to openly talk about satan. Not that I was in anyway following Christ or his teachings, it was just too odd for me. Then my teenagers ask about AC/DC, Led Zepplin, Guns-N-Roses, Metallica and such bands who the local red-necks around me enjoyed so clearly I could not listen to them. I went to the logical extreme and listened to bands no one in the whole area I lived in had even heard of, who were at the real edge of the culture. After reading this book, I see what sex, drugs and rock-n-roll can do to a person. Please do not read this book as it will send your system into a state of shock. Here are some quotes from this book:
- Why take a shower if you're only going to get dirty again?
- Why make your bed if you're only going to sleep in it again?
- I've never been to Eden but it's nice I hear tell, When I die I'll go to heaven 'cause I've done my time in hell
- Days like these I hate to leave my house. I can muster up a fake smile and be cordial, but deep inside I feel nobody really likes me... and worse...nobody understands me.
- I love playing our music but I can't take the monotony of playing the same set every night.
- Stood in front of the mirror today and all I could see was death.
- I dreamt my whole life of making music and I have every reason to be happy yet I can't be.
- In the mornings when I wake I can smell death on me. It's right around the corner and unless I get out I'm not gonna make it.
- Why did my mom always want to be with someone other than me?
- My life is loud. Everywhere I go, people are talking to me, but nothing is as loud as the screams in my head. They are far off, distant, and I can't make out the words...I have come to realize it's most likely the drugs.
- You gotta give it away to keep what you get.
- What I've learned in this life so far is to let the little things go as much as possible and try to swerve to miss the big things.
The most amazing news for me is that Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx's girlfriend Vanity has since becoming a follower of Christ. It is such a huge transformation to go from immersed in drug addiction for so many years to what I see on her web site today. As opposed to the shocking web site Nikki Sixx still has but at least he claims to have left drugs and alcohol addictions behind. Sometimes I wonder whether people really believe in what they are doing, or they do it for affect to shock people and to make money. I can only make sure how I live.
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