New camera

New camera came today. It’s tiny–the size of a deck of cards! That’s not what I’m most geeked about, though. It’s waterproof to 10′–I can’t wait to get some cool underwater pictures of the kids swimming!

It’s also going to be nice on the monthly hikes. I was a little worried about taking Amy’s camera out in the woods. I’d be so busted if something happened to that thing. This new camera, in addition to being waterproof, is shockproof for drops up to 5′. That came in handy when it fell off the counter when I unpacked it. 🙂

The Dyson phenomenon

We got a Dyson vacuum about a month ago. Got it off Craigslist, brand new, for about $100 off of retail. I love it. Amy’s okay with it, though I think she’s more convinced about it than she was when I was jonesing for it.

Matt just visited Brandon and says they’ve got a Dyson, too. And it sounds like a similar situation. Husband has gadget lust and wife is skeptical. I wonder how much of Dyson’s sales are generated from husband gadget lust?

More mapping fun

UPDATE: I found my Mac solution! Here’s the resultant Google Earth file of the hike (kmz). It has everything embedded in one file: images with titles and comments, GPS track and topo overlay. Very cool. I think this is the final tech piece I needed for the blog post. Tomorrow I’ll make a track around town, or on campus, and take pictures, then do this again and post it to Slacker Manager.

I ran into loc.alize.us a while ago, but didn’t really understand it. Now that I’ve been messing around with geotagging photos, it makes a lot more sense. Here’s the recent King’s Mountain hike.

I’m trying to find the easiest way, with both a Mac and a Windows machine, to geotag photos and embed them into Google Earth KMZ files. There’s a PC app called Robogeo that does exactly what I’m looking for. But it’s a PC app. I’ll be trying it out, but I also want to find a similar app for a Mac. No luck so far.

I’m trying to find this stuff out because I think there’s a really good Slacker Manager post in there. Imagine you were traveling and you wanted to let your colleagues know about the good restaurant/pub/hotel/museum/whatever that you found in a given city. You’ve got your GPS recording your track and you take pictures of the places you like. You combine the lat/long from the GPS track with your images and you throw it all into a Google Earth file that you’re able to email around or stick on a webserver somewhere. That’s pretty cool, and pretty useful.

New look

Should be pretty self-evident, but I migrated the blog from WordPress 1.2 to version 2.0.4. Messing around with themes tonight, and I like this one. Think I’ll leave it for a while.

On the Amish

I’ve got to say that since I’ve become a dad, my heart has gotten a whole lot softer. Especially towards parents and their love for their children. The recent news of the murders of Amish schoolgirls in Pennsylvania has made my eyes well up on more than one occasion. I am utterly humbled by the Amish response toward the family of their attacker. As a group, they sure seem to come about as close to living as Jesus would have us live as might be possible.

Ben Witherington has a good post that reflects on the nature of forgiveness.

Since the Amish carry no insurance, the expenses for the surviving injured girls will be steep. You can help by contributing here.

Another clip

Tru and I went down to the park this afternoon. Kinda crowded so Tru got a little frustrated, but was a good sport. I got a couple of nice shots of him rolling in a larger section. Much, much shorter than the last clip. Enjoy.

Tru the shredder

Tru’s been working on his skateboarding skills. We’ve been down to the skatepark a lot lately, and he won’t stop talking about it. He’s doing okay, I guess. He can stand on the board and push with one foot. His fakie is just as strong as regular. Today he started putting weight on the tail and learning how to kick turn a little bit. That was without coaching from me–I didn’t think he was ready for it, but he just started trying it out.

He’s also turning into a minor celebrity down at the park. The other day there were a bunch of middle school boys who were just fascinated by Truman. Wanted to know his name, what kind of board he rocked, how old he was, etc. As they left the park that day, they hollered, “See you later, Truman!” Yesterday some of the same kids arrived at the park. One of them spied Tru and hollered to his friend, “Jake, Truman’s here! Truman’s here!” Pretty funny…

I’m pretty sure that by the end of the summer Truman will be better than me.