"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

- Albert Einstein

Most of your small-engine equipment (think lawnmower, weed whacker, leaf blower) are typically equipped with what's called a recoil starter which is a rope and pull handle which you tug in a starting ritual that becomes personal as the equipment ages and the user adapts to various idiosyncratic choke and primer bulb rythms. Inevitably, either the starter rope or the recoil spring will fail. These are cheap (e.g. the rope costs about a buck) repairs the handyman can do himself with a little effort and patience.

Saturday, April 26 2008
Max had his first baseball game today, playing for Chase and Lundt Insurance. He was so excited that he urged me to get up at 7am so we could go practice for the 1:15pm game. We got Gabe off to Demi Wack's birthday party at 10am and headed over to Perkins field with our gear. The weather was nice and sunny, resulting in a mild sunburn on my arms. We practiced hitting, fielding and catching in the dry dusty infield and ended up using the outfield grass for more training. I taught Max pepper and how bunting could help with hand eye coordination at the plate.

Randy Pausch is a guy who is dying of Pancreatic cancer. He also has gained wide recognition for his talks including this one on time management given at the University of Virginia.

My brother was lucky enough to attend and was quite impressed. (note that he also makes the slides, and audio available so you can follow along with the video or listen with a media player.)

The other day, I got a letter from my son's Middle School Principal announcing an escalation of their no headwear policy. For some time, it has been against school rules to wear any sort of hat or hood in school. We've never had any problems with that. All along, Nick has been wearing hooded jackets as the best compromise between competing agendas. He needs to maximize his comfort while waiting in the cool morning air at the bus stop without sweltering in school all day.

it's deja-vu all over again

Graphics, Images, Art, Photos, the stuff you see with your eyes are part of just about everything digital, and yet when you want to find good copyright-free sources, it can be difficult. There are usually just too many bad (as in pathetic) sites or bad (as in see the thumbnail, buy the graphic) sites in the way. So, I've compiled a short list of sites that you can use to get good, high-quality, copyright-free images for use in whatever work you want.

The best
Open Clip Art

The timeline feature has been added to Rundlett.com. A number of other modules have also been added but I'll blog about those separately. Right now, I just have a simple timeline showing the history of when content was added to the site.

Timeline is pretty cool stuff developed at MIT originally, and worked on by a few Drupal developers. It has even been used in court to prosecute.

It has been almost three years since I was doing my exercise program on a routine 3x/week basis. Before any more time goes by, I am writing down my routine so that I not only have easy access to it, but so that I can start following it again.

1. high knee walk - 60 per leg (touch palms)
2. wide high knee walk - 60 per leg (touch palms)
3. high knee (running in place) - 60 per leg
4. heel to the backside (running in place) - 60 per leg
5. jumping jacks - 60 reps
6. lunges - 30 reps (walk across the room)

I've been running phpGedview as the genealogy software for Rundlett.com What I'd like to do is make it completely integrated with the rest of the site so that you can move seemlessly between regular content, photo and blog systems and the genealogy system. In fact Drupal (the content management application) users have already been at work on the same goal, and so I just have to add to their efforts.

There is the Genealogy Group on groups.drupal.org http://groups.drupal.org/genealogy

And, KarenS has created the phpGedview module for Drupal
http://drupal.org/project/phpgedview