A place to store my thoughts until I figure out what to do with them.
Have you seen the Kiwi! video yet?
It was done as a Master’s Thesis. And to think my thesis will just be a very long paper on some subject that has already been beat like a dead horse.
And you were always taught that Kiwi could not fly. I guess those which the scientists had studied just weren’t resourceful enough.
I have been continuing on my regular exercise and eating program. Basically I exercise 4 to 6 days a week and eat whatever sounds good. Probably could do a bit better on the diet than I do, but I don’t really eat that poorly.
This week I have gained almost 10 lbs in one week! Today was the first day that my weight was the same as the day before. Previous to this I had gained at least a pound a day for several days in a row. I thought that the batteries in the scale must be at fault, but my wife has been using the scale and has not seen any change in its behavior.
I did my normal Tae-Bo workout this morning and then this evening I ran for an hour. Hopefully that will help me see some drop in weight. I am not really starving myself trying to get to a certain number, but you would think with all the work I put into this I could at least maintain my weight instead of gaining back several months worth of losses in just a week.
Today I was teaching about John the Baptist in Sunday School class at the Deaf church. He is not the John who wrote the book of John nor First, Second and Third John or the book of The Revelation. John, the author, is the one we refer to as Saint John.
John the Baptist however was a cousin to Jesus and was his “forerunner.” He went around preaching that Jesus was coming. John attracted some attention. The Bible says that he dressed in camel skins and ate locusts and wild honey.
The insect that the Bible calls locusts are what I called grasshoppers when I was growing up. I think that is pretty common in the US. Wikipedia has a pretty good article about locusts and shows that they are capable of the destruction of “biblical proportions” that has been attributed to them.
In Spanish the word for locusts (or grasshopper) is langosta. If you are up on your seafood in various languages, you will know that langosta is lobster as well. I did my best to describe lobsters for them. Though they are teens and fairly well educated, they are Deaf and do not know all the names of animals that do not affect their lives regularly. After my great description of a lobster and they knew what I was talking about, I asked them if they liked lobster / langosta. Basically…no. It was “OK,” but nothing too exciting for them.
I then told them that what John the Baptist was eating was not lobster anyway. He was eating an insect by the name langosta. They did not know what it could be. So, I pulled out some pictures that I had of grasshoppers. They got excited. One blurted out (in signs), “Oh! Those are really good. Especially with chocolate!” They not only knew what they were, but could tell how best to eat them!
After we were done being grossed out and amused by their excitement I said that John probably did not eat them with chocolate. But the Bible does say that he ate wild honey. So perhaps he dipped his grasshoppers in the honey instead.
Just because we don’t understand something that the Bible says, does not make it untrue or unbelievable. Maybe from our perspective we cannot wrap our heads around it, but it may just be a matter of experiencing a new culture to get an understanding.
Episode 3 is out! I am excited about this one. Not that I was not excited about the others, but this one was actually the first one I recorded. Shane and I have been friends for about 6 years and I knew he would step up to the plate to help me get my feet wet and get this started.
The hard part about this episode was that to keep within my 15 minute goal, I had to cut a bunch of stuff out. Also, I had to remove some of the silence between questions and answers, so it does not sound as natural.
This was the second recording since my computer ate the first recording. I had it all recorded, but ran out of space. When my computer was trying to convert the raw files to mp3 with no hard drive space, it just lost it all. It was kinda good. Gave us a chance to do it the second time around without being so stiff.
Enjoy!
That was a rhetorical question. The answer is obviously “no.”
As many of you will know, I listen to a few podcasts. Microsoft has decided that the final version of Windows Media Player (WMP) 11 will not support podcasts. Meaning that you will not be able to subscribe to podcasts (called “podcatching”) using their software. The most popular podcatching software is iTunes.
WMP 11 will not perform this simple task. Now, there are other software packages out there that do a good job with this, but one of the advantages to having WMP handle your podcasts is that if you use WMP to manage your music on your portable media player, you could eliminate an extra software package. Also, with 2 separate packages, there are bound to be frustrations when they don’t talk to one another properly.
I don’t use WMP. I don’t even use Windows. So this is not really going to affect me. It is just that the stupidity bothers me.
Ready for more stupidity? The Zune (Microsoft’s attempt at portable media hardware) will not automatically support podcasts either. Meaning that the software used to transfer media to the device will not have the ability to subscribe to podcasts. It will still play mp3 files, which is how most audio podcasts are formatted.
I will admit that there are still people who think that podcasting is just a flash in the pan and that it won’t be around forever. I respectfully disagree. But, it is something that is the hot thing right now. To not support it in media playing software is about as stupid as building a web browser that does not support blogs.