Nov 29

splodeydope

n., slang for a suicide bomber

Nov 27

One More Ride: Chapter 5: Food

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

Norville tore into his pizza not quite savagely. People always told him growing up that eventually his metabolism would slow, that his freakish ability to consume and process copious amounts of food without weight gain would ebb, that his days of eating whatever he wanted without consequence would be over. So far he was in his late 30s and every single one of those people were still wrong–and living with the consequences they promised he would one day endure. He could rub it in their faces, but why bother? They were already miserable and envious–you could see it every time they appraised his lanky frame. And besides, it wouldn’t bring him any joy anyway–he had food for that.

“Do you think he’s OK?”

Norville snapped out of his pizza euphoria. He was so hungry he had completely forgotten Velma was there with him.

Awkward swallow. What had she asked?

“I said, do you think he’s OK?” Velma repeated, clearly reading his mind.

Euphoria gone. Norville put on his best smile, but he could tell by her eyes that it wasn’t working.

“I don’t know. I want to say that he loves himself too much to do anything drastic, but I suppose we all have our limits. I mean, a guy could deal with rejection from Norville, but from Velma? That’s entirely different. I couldn’t take it.”

Velma’s brow first furrowed at Norville’s mention of her part in Fred’s story. Then she cocked her head in amused curiosity–had Shaggy said what she thought he said?

Norville flushed so fast his face burned. Yet again he had said something–not that he didn’t mean–but that he didn’t mean to say out loud.

“He–he’ll be fine,” he said, hiding behind another slice of pizza.

“You know we have to talk to her,” Velma said quietly.

Norville loved to hear Velma’s voice–he just didn’t care for the words being formed at the moment. He didn’t want to have to do what she was suggesting. He wanted to say, “Yeah, you should do that,” because, you know, they were both girls. But they weren’t really that close anymore.

Besides, Norville knew that when women said, “we should do this,” what they meant was, “you should do this. And with some sense of immediacy.”

Chapter 6

Nov 20

Another Irish Curse

“May the cat eat you, and may the devil eat the cat!”

Nov 06

VBS 2013 Development Diary: #14: Digital Content Creation & Management

As I have previously mentioned, the first skits we started doing were entirely written by me an hour before we performed them. There was a single Microsoft Word document with all of that week’s skits–that was it.

As the years have progressed, we have strived to do better, and as a result we have created more content each year. Here are some of the tools and services we use:

Postcards & Signage

We make signage in the form of banners for external display and small signs that we print in-house and laminate for the bathrooms, seating, teams, classrooms, etc. I create most all of these in Adobe Illustrator and then save them to PDF so that Sherry can print them. We print our postcards and banners through Vistaprint.com, which actually appears to meet the trifecta of fast, good, and cheap.

Music

Allison records drafts for the theme music on her iPhone or cell phone. Right now she doesn’t actually write the music–it just stays in her head and she plays it for our pastor’s daughters, the violinists at church, who then pick it up and play it, then transcribe their own notes.

Skits

I write the skits in Microsoft Word for Mac, using a custom screenplay template I found online and utilizing the excellent and free Courier Prime font from JohnAugust.com. In the future I plan to switch to Fountain or something similar so that I can start formatting these properly.

Backup Storage and Collaboration

I use a product that just caught my attention earlier this year and has now become invaluable–Dropbox. It’s one of those products that I can’t see getting very much better–it’s almost perfect already. It’s like a folder out on the internet, accessible from all your devices (Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, Blackberry). One of its killer features is that it allows you to share folders and collaborate with specific people, which definitely beats the old method of emailing back and forth. Plus–it’s free for the first 2GB of storage. Download it here to give me some more space, or just download it from Dropbox.com. The only downside: there are no assignable permissions, so ‘shared’ means ‘everyone sharing the folder has the same permissions as you.’ I did have one of my co-sharers delete two very important folders. Fortunately Dropbox.com has an interface to recover deleted items back to a certain point.

Trailer

We planned a trailer for our VBS, but we ran out of time to execute, and it was one of the darlings that had to be murdered. Allison and I wrote the script for the trailer in Microsoft Word, then printed out storyboard templates we found online. I drew the storyboards, then we scanned them, cleaned them up in Adobe Photoshop, and synced them to the iPhone. Next we pulled them into iMovie for iOS where Allison edited them together. I recorded the voiceover, imported the music and sound effects and edited them in with her images.

Nov 01

Bausünde

A German word describing an architectural eyesore (literally: “construction sin”). Or, in my opinion, all skyscrapers in any style other than Art Deco.

via Better Than English, which has lots of other neat words from other languages.

Oct 30

Selfish

My wife is so selfish.

She doesn’t take her phone with her when she gets out at 3am to go to the gym. Therefore I can’t text her to bring me donuts. I’m starving. My stomach is about to burst out of my middle like in that sci-fi movie with the aliens in it, the one where the alien bursts out of that guy’s middle (I don’t remember the name of the movie).

Anyway, I’m starving and need donuts.

“Maybe you could eat something else,” you might foolishly say. My old boss Tom Runge didn’t call me “Something Else Dan,” he called me “Donut Dan,” and with good reason: I used to eat three glazed donuts every morning washed down with a whole quart of whole milk. Get it? A. Whole. Quart. Not flipping 2% milk.

Now I’m lactose intolerant. I can’t even drink that hazy water they market as Skim Milk. I have to use Double Ultra Skim on my cereal–I can’t even drink the stuff or I’ll be in a fetal position clutching the aforementioned stomach that now requires donuts.

My dad couldn’t drink milk either. He beat stomach cancer like a boss, but one of the side effects was an inability to drink milk or eat real ice cream. The other side effect was having a tiny stomach–he could only eat like three bites and then he was all, “Whoa, I’m stuffed.”

Back to donuts.

“You could just get in the car and go get some,” a foolish person might say. No, I can’t–my selfish wife took my car. You know, the one I drive to work. Just because it has a heater and she is chronically cold (maybe if she ate more donuts and stopped going to the gym, both of these problems could be solved).

“You could take the Jeep,” another foolish person might say. Where do all these foolish people come from? If you are one of these people, please don’t tell me–I don’t want to know this about you. But no, I can’t take the Jeep–or to phrase it properly, Heather’s Jeep. I need both of my arms attached. Duh. One time I took Heather’s Jeep .25 mile away to McDonald’s while she was at a wedding shower. She was all,

“WHERE IS MY JEEP’S FOURTH WHEEL?”

And I was all,

“Honey, put down the knife. It’s a Jeep–they’re made to drive on only three wheels–they’re tough like that.”

The mud didn’t help either. I tried the ‘It’s A Jeep,’ excuse again, but she wasn’t buying it. And I had the dangdest time getting the mud out of the Jeep–not to mention the stuff on the outside of the Jeep.

Then the third foolish person shows up. Great, now we have enough for a caucus.

“Maybe you could drive the old Chrysler.”

No. That is the stupidest idea ever. I’m not going to drive a car that messy.

The Chrysler is littered with donut wrappers.

Oct 28

Humblebrag

n., “a statement in which you pretend to be modest but which you are really using as a way of telling people about your success or achievements.”

The word was recently added to the dictionary. Tim Challies, where I first heard the word, has an excellent tutorial on how to humblebrag effectively.

 

Oct 25

Weird iPod / iTunes issue

A few weeks ago my wife brought me a secondhand iPod Nano to troubleshoot. She had already performed all of the basic troubleshooting steps herself, but it still would not sync with iTunes. When you plugged the iPod into the computer, the computer would see the device, but iTunes would not. It did not matter whether you plugged it into a Mac or Windows computer.

Here is the fix (can’t remember where I found it, but I can’t take credit for it):

  1. Plug the iPod into a Windows computer.
  2. Double-click the computer icon
  3. Check that the computer has mounted the iPod like a standard lettered drive
  4. Right-click on the iPod and click ‘Format’
  5. If it gives you the option, ‘Quick Format’ is fine.
  6. NOTE: THIS WILL DELETE ALL DATA ON THE IPOD
  7. After it formats it should appear in iTunes, and iTunes will tell you that the iPod needs to be restored.
  8. You may be prompted to download the newest iPod firmware.
  9. The firmware will install and you will be back in business.

Oct 19

Quotable: A.W. Pink

“No verse of Scripture yields its meaning to lazy people.” —A.W. Pink

Oct 17

Restrict color printing on Ricoh SP C425

If you are trying to completely restrict any color printing to a Ricoh SP C425, try loading a driver from a Ricoh black and white printer–this removes any ability to send color information to the device.