New Poll Added.

Well, my curiosity has gotten the best of me. My wife has been blogging for a couple of weeks now. She's way better than I am at keeping it up. I guess she's a bit more interesting than I am. In any case, I just put up a poll to check on who is actually reading this blog. Feel free to vote if you want. I guess its more motivation for me to keep it up frequently if I know that people are reading it.

In other news, now that August is here, I'm bracing for my life to turn upside down. A new baby is about due, which will bring our total of young 'uns to 2. For those who don't know, babies are evil. They take away your sleep, spit up on you a lot, cry and scream at you, and then poop and pee themselves and make YOU clean it up. Then when you just can't take it anymore, they crack a little smile or make a little twitch and grab your finger with their tiny little hands and make a coo noise. At that point you're toast. Well, this is coming to our house. I'm also entering into one of the busiest seasons of my professional career with organizing and managing the technology in a brand new school. Its going to be one crazy month of August. If you don't hear anything at all from me soon, check the insane asylum.

Tags are here.

I finally got a clue and started tagging my posts a little bit. I can't imagine that anyone cares, but I figured that it would be good to tag the posts for sorting or browsing later. I'm always one who likes to be organized. Anyways, if you like tagged posts, then I did you a favor today.

Thoughts from Clive Staples, Part 1

I've been reading a lot of books this summer over various topics of interest. The problem never seems to be, "Should I read this book?", rather, "Which book should I read now?". My issue is that I see 3 or 4 different books that I want to read and then get them all. I then strategically place them all over the house in various places where I might have some spare time to pick them up and read a few pages (yes, like the bathrooms). This becomes a problem because I now find myself reading only small portions from one book rather than large portions of a whole book. So I never get anything finished. Anyways, sorry for the rant.

I was reading The Screwtape Letters today when I came to this explanation of Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood concerning what he wants the human to believe humility is. I found this very convicting for myself and just wanted to share:

"You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character...By this method millions of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. An since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible." pgs 70-71

Ouch.

How to ruin the moment

So I decided to take my 2 year-old to the mall the other day to play in the play area and enjoy an Annie Anne's Soft pretzel (mmm, yummy!). One of the things that she enjoys doing is going to where the coin-operated rides are and pretending that they actually are real vehicles, or horses, or whatever. Now I'm sure that everybody remembers these types of "rides". They usually are parked outside of your favorite department store. Your mom or dad would sit you on it and drop in a quarter (nowadays it's between 50 cents and a dollar..yikes!) and the machine would move up and down or back and forth and play music or make noise for like 3 minutes and then stop. For the most part, a terrible waste of money. Meg and I have resolved not to waste our money on things like this in order to teach our children the value of money, as well as to save it for yummy soft pretzels.

Anyways, so we're at the mall and Audrey is playing merrily on the rides, role-playing between and astronaut or a bus driver (depending on which ride she is on), when some woman with her 0.5 year old comes over and drops in 50 cents into the machine so that her toddler can sit there in a trance, drool, and then eventually cry and try to get out of the thing. What ruins the moment for me is that, all of the sudden that parent has just created a situation for my daughter and I. She inadvertently "unlocked" the knowledge that money could be grossly wasted on these "rides", and that eternal happiness could be achieved at the price of 50 cents. I now need to convince my 2 year old that she doesn't need to slowly go back and forth for 3 minutes to the sounds of Old MacDonald playing over and over again for 50 cents. It took about 5 minutes to explain this to her, but thankfully she dropped the topic and went on to her new position as a train conductor.

What a Camera Can't Do

_{My Canon Powershot S2 IS}

So I was on my summer vacation with my family and a good friend who enjoys photography like me. We decided to go out and shoot shots at the beach during the evening hours just to practice some low-light photography and see if we can find some interesting compositions.

My friend utilizes a Nikon D70, which is a DSLR camera with some pretty nice features. I'd compare it with a Canon EOS Rebel XT or something along those lines. My camera: Canon Powershot S2 IS...NOT a DSLR, so pretty limited. I didn't think this way at the time. When I had purchased my camera, the idea was to get a camera with good quality, virtually no shutter lag, and lots of room to learn photography and advanced settings. We didn't want something that was "too complex" until we felt that we felt that we've learned more about the more advanced facets of photography. The camera was not disappointing. It has a nice 12x zoom which comes to about 435mm (cropped) 35mm equivalent plus many manual settings and such. Prior to the trip, I believed that, other than the possibility of purchasing different lenses, there wasn't much I was missing. With my ongoing learning of digital photography, I was elated to find that so far, I've been able to apply much of what I've been learning on this camera.

However, then we started shooting. I made some manual adjustments to find that my aperture only closes down as far as F8. This could be very limiting for me in circumstances where I'd like a little more DOF (Depth-of-Field) in my shots. It also limits me when playing with slower shutter speeds. Speaking of which, I can only slow down my shutter to 15 second exposures with no bulb-mode option or anything similar. This clearly took the fun out of my night-shooting. Not that a 15 second exposure is extremely limiting, but it certainly hurts when I'm trying to get shots of lightning or make star-trails. No fun.

However, there was a feature on my camera that I wish that DSLRs would have, and that is the adjustable lcd screen. Because of the flexibility of my screen, I could get some really cool shots without having to contort my body into yoga-like positions. In any event, for a point-and-shoot camera that was half the cost of an entry-level DSLR, I think it holds it own. On the other side, I hate the thought of, with my new knowledge and desire to explore in photography, having a camera that prevents me from exploring other creative options. I suppose that mastering the stuff I can now do will allow me to get the most out of this camera until the time when I can move up to DSLR joy.

Summer Vacation

We just returned from a week at Bethany Beach in Delaware. It was a really good time. We went down with our friends Chadd and Cheryl Caldwell, co-workers of mine at Hershey Christian. Chadd and I are avid photographers and event went as crazy as getting up at 5am one morning to get some photos of the sunrise. Towards the end of the week we were joined by the rest of Megan's immediate family for a birthday celebration for her mom. The whole week seems like a blur now, but here are some of the highlights of the hundreds of photos we took on the trip.

http://picasaweb.google.com/abjurina/BethanyBeach2007