Awake

Christmas photos posted

Head on over to the Christmas 2005 album and check out Kylia's new adorable goofy grin pose, some of my crochet creations and well of course, the family. ;-)

Good times. I hope your Christmas was full of joy as well.

This Week's Distractions...Err, I mean, Awesome Fun Links!!!

Selected links, articles, and tidbits from my Bloglines clippings and my del.icio.us postings...(and did I mention hours of good clean entertaining fun?!)

For Ranting:

• I've enjoyed reading Naomi Klein's books in the past (No Logo, Fences and Windows). She writes occasionally for the Guardian; here's her latest comment: The US has used torture for decades. All that's new is the openness about it
• WorldChanging: Update: Inuit Defend Their Right To Be Cold | Emily Gertz

For Entertaining:

• Wicked Awesome Christmas Lights Video
• Asian Backstreet Boys Lip Sync Videos: I want it that way (but wait there's more!)
• Orsinal: Morning Sunshine - Games—Cute games with great music done in Flash. My niece loves these...even though she can't really play them.
• And yes, ladies and gentlemen, let us not forget the annually recommended Toboggan Jump! Game!!! Will YOU get burned by the ring of fire??! Hours of late-night entertainment await.
• Superman Returns Trailer
• Cute Overload! — the cutest pictures you'll ever see...EVAR! (And if you see cuter ones, then submit them to their site!)

For Learning...

• Ruby on Rails 1.0
• How to Install Apple's Front Row
• Creating a Tag Cloud in Movable Type (PHP) (What's a tag cloud?)
• The StitchGuide (Yep, I'm crocheting A LOT...must. learn. more. stiches!
• Make a cool spiky star ornament (scanned from a 1958 Better Homes & Gardens article!)

That's more than enough for now. I hope you enjoyed this little peek into my little distraction-waiting-to-happen, also known as, "my brain."

Satire: Rest of U2 Perfectly Fine With Africans Starving

In honor of not attending the U2 concert in Portland last night (let alone anywhere on the West Coast), here's an amusing piece of satire from The Onion on how the rest of the band feels about Bono's social views.

Rest Of U2 Perfectly Fine With Africans Starving | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Remote Access Apps for Mac

Ah the wonderful world of tech support for mom and dad. They've just switched to a mac and are, shall we say, grudgingly scaling the learning curve. In the meantime, I'm checking out remote access apps so that when they call me on the weekends I can just fire up my powerbook, connect to their display, and provide a real-time visual of how to do whatever task or fix whatever's broken. I'm finding this handy list of mac software for remote access very...well...handy.

convert video for the ipod

Taking advantage of unlimited weekend minutes, my brother Seth and I were discussing DVD sharing yesterday. I have been wanting to get an electronic database of our family's books and DVDs going so that we could "check out" each other's stuff while keeping track of it at the same time. (I'm thinking Delicious Library could do the trick.) Seth countered with the suggestion of creating a "Himes Family Video Server" where we could rip our DVDs into MPEG4 and share them using iTunes, perhaps in a similiar fashion as "Share My iTunes Library" works. He then wondered about storing MPEG4s of DVDs on a Video iPod (which you can then share on TV, as I mentioned last month). We agreed that since one can already rip a DVD to MPEG4 then you could certainly store and view it on a Video iPod. I think we were right. Here's an article I found today on how to do it:

Playlist: Convert video for the iPod

We'll file this away 'til next Christmas, which is when we want to wait before asking for a Video iPod. We figure by then it'll be cooler than EVAR! But here's to the early adopters anyway.

;-)

Ambience in Bloom, Contrast Remix

The Love Seat

Continuing this little series on "pictures I promised to send to Leah regarding my ongoing living room redesign"...The Purple Love Seat. I love the love seat.

My new purple arm chair

For my birthday and Christmas, Mom and Dad and Grandpa got me a new-to-me loveseat and arm chair. A brilliant find 15 minutes before closing on my birthday at Consignment Northwest in Beaverton. The Mad Hatter meets Amber and they lived happily ever after. ;-)

O Christmas Tree

Weekly Bouquet

Here's my bouquet of the week...

Ambience in Bloom

Adventures in Cross-Cultural Children's Ministry

I'm a AWANA Club leader in the TNT (Truth 'n' Training) club (3-5th graders) at Village. My two primary responsibilities are to the Red Team at during the girls' game time and to a group of 4th grade girls at handbook time. Our church has about 250 Korean families and consequently there are quite a few Korean kids at club. Most of the Korean girls have ended up with me. On the Red Team I have 4 Korean girls, 1 (East) Indian and 2-3 white girls. Last night one of the other teams needed another person so the game leader came over and asked me for a volunteer defector. Eujene, Claudia, Erica, and Megan all huddled together and said, "You can't break us up! We're the Koreans!" I sent Esther instead, (the Indian girl), but even she wouldn't go without a bribe. ;)

Most of the Korean girls speak Korean and English fluently but this year we have one girl, Erica, who is just learning English. She is learning quickly and recites Bible verses with amazing precision, but often I employ one of the other Korean girls (usually Debbie or Claudia) to help explain a word or a concept.

Case in point: In a handbook section Erica was completing, in addition to reciting verses, there are questions designed to clarify words and concepts contained in the section's memory verse(s). Inevitably one of the answers is simply/profoundly "Jesus" but the other question usually tests a vocab word. In this case question was "What does it mean to be punished?" referring to the Biblical concept of Jesus taking the punishment of our sins upon himself. So I implored Debbie to explain the concept of punishment to Erica. A tall order for a 4th grader indeed.

Debbie did some explaining in Korean but Erica still had a blank look on her face. Debbie said she was using the word for "getting in trouble" for punishment and asked if that was right. I thought for a moment. I considered my audience. I considered skills of my 10 year old translator. I considered the meaning of the concept and I replied, "Yes. Say, 'We get in trouble for our sins but Jesus got in trouble for our sins instead.'" I reflected for a moment on my instruction as Debbie translated what I said and Erica's head began bobbing up and down in understanding. Yeah, I would say getting flogged, beaten, and crucified "trouble." I'd call it Trouble with a capital "T"!

Clippings Roundup

I've (finally) started using Bloglines to read/scan/skim updated blogs, zines, newspapers, etc. and one of the features is "Save to Clippings Folder". I've been meaning to post these as I go, but what a surprise, this task has been neglected. So here goes:

Techy stuff

• 43folders: Three OS X Timers— alarm clocks and timers that run on a Mac
• del.icio.us'd by vj (my office mate), PDX Super Crafty: Getting your creative business off the ground—applies to crafty-creatives not necessarily movie-making-creatives, interesting ideas though
• Posted on Macromedia Consulting Weblogs, a mashup of Yahoo! Maps Beta and some Webcams of the programmer's favorite skiing spots—mashup is the buzzword for creating something unique out of two or more existing (usually) digital things.
• Here's another Yahoo! Maps Beta Video mashup [Macromedia Weblog entry]
• Yet another Yahoo Maps! Beta mashup: Ivan Todorov of BLITZ | Blog: My Daily Traffic Report (as of this post, site took a while to load)
• If you want to dive in to developing a Flash app using the Yahoo! Maps Beta API, here's a simple example of how to do so. (Saving this for a snowy day...)
• Discussion of Safari CPU hogging issue, via MacInTouch
• Discussion of router problems, via MacInTouch
• Beta: Interrogate 0.7—a visual MySQL database manager for OS X, freeware. I'm using CocoaMySQL and I like it, but it seldom hurts to try something new
• For the iTunes glutton in all of us: Switch between two iTunes Libraries, via Mac OS X Hints dot com
• Via LifeHacker.com: Micro Persuasion: Ten ways to use Bloglines
• Also via LifeHacker, a nod to Atomic Learning's free online video tutorials for Tiger (OS X 10.4), Taming the Tiger: An Orientation to Mac OS X 10.4—mmmm video tutorials. I'm going to start producing these after the New Year. I've got my Snapz Pro, I'm wishing for a Logitech Desktop Microphone, and I've got Movable Type and Mac tutorial ideas aplenty to share...
• "Computer, What Day Is It?" Just discovered Tiger's voice command utility Speech. Very entertaining. Oh. And useful. Probably. ;-)
• Geek to Live: How to fix Mom and Dad's computer
• try ruby in your browser—ruby is a programming language I'm highly desirous to learn

Around the world

• BBC: Women resist 'honour' marriages—Five women from the same family in Pakistan's Punjab province have refused to be "united" with their prospective husbands as ordered by tribal elders.
• BBC: Girls Still Miss Out on Schooling—New figures show the UN has fallen well short of its target of getting as many girls educated as boys. (Maybe that's because it's a ginormous problem that needs widespread attention and coordinated strategy.)
• BBC: US firm to fight Somali pirates— I just thought it was somewhat ironic that there seems to be a comedic renaissance of pirate culture afoot in Internet-Land and here on the BBC is a story of US firm who's managed to score a contract for fighting pirates off the coast of Somalia. Who knew?

Fun(ny)

• Homestar Runner: Download All Our Playsets and Toys! ("cheap as free")—what will they think of next? I've only recently claimed victory over my random.bat Button Addiction

• Flickr Pool: MLK Blvd's around the world—who'll add photos of P-town's MLK Blvd.? (more about the project here)
• via Drawn!: animated shorts done in watercolor! La Papillon
• Of course you already knew that the third installment of X-Men is coming May 06: X3 Announcement Teaser, X3 Official Website

Thus endeth the linking extravaganza. Until next time, adieu and farewell.

Good Idea: Community Center in Apartment Complex

Spotted this excellent notion in today's Oregonian, (Dec. 7, 2005, page B3):
(click picture to enlarge if you have a fast Internet connection or a lot of patience; if not, captioned text is typed out below)

Building Community

Hawo Ali builds a tower of Legos on Tuesday in a community room at Beaverton's Fir Crest Manor Apartments. The staff from Firm Grove Elementary School donated videos, games, toys, and books to the recently refurbished community room. The apartment complex, across the street from the school, is home to roughly 75 children under the age of 12, most of whom are recent Somali immigrants. Companies including Intel, Comcast, and Fred Meyer donated computers, Internet service and playground equipment to the project.

Olivia Bucks, The Oregonian

I have a similar idea, but on a smaller scale for the apartment complex where I tutor Ruth (not her real name), who is also an immigrant from Somalia on refugee status. The complex is only 2 buildings, so my thought is to convert one of the apartment units into a community center for the 10-20 kids who live there. But where to get the money...

Pearl Harbor Day

Just wished my Grandpa Doug "Happy" Pearl Harbor Day. "Happy" pronounced in a deliberate tongue-in-cheek tone. Yeah, it was the opposite of "Happy" but I didn't know how else to put it.

Grandpa Doug says that he was at a USO in Illinois when a guy ran up the stairs and declared, "They've bombed Pearl Harbor" to which Grandpa replies in the retelling, "There goes my Christmas." And indeed, four Christmases would be spent in WWII's Pacific Theatre instead of at home.

30

It's here.

No more twenty-something.
No more in-between stage.
No more excuses.
No more drifting.

Here's to Directed Steps.
Here's to Deliberate Choices.
Here's to Focus.
Here's to Knowing the Question.
Here's to More Playtime.
Here's to Discovering Vocation.
Here's to Finding The One.
Here's to Growing in Grace.
Here's to Being Closer to Jesus' Age in Ministry.

Here's to The Thirty-Somethings.