Naomi is home!

As is evidenced by the title, Naomi is safely back! Yay! She was originally supposed to arrive at 8:50 tonight, but instead arrived at 9:50. This morning. The person that she was traveling with was bringing home her mother from Vietnam, and so, since she was a forgien visitor, they had to go down a different hallway. Therefore, instead of putting Naomi up for thi night, by herself, they decided to go ahead and send her on the next flight. I was not able to be there, I did not thing that I would come out of that well, from a physical standpoint, knowing how airports are, and especialy since I am getting over the flu. She brought home small gifts for everyone, and 1107 pictures. needles to say, I am not going to be posting them all on here. She had a wonderfull time there, and was able to spend a little time with her uncle, relatives, and friends. She got Dad, Jeremy, and I a fountain pen, with a bottle of ink. I am loving it, I have never used one before. It will be my bible study/church pen. I am not sure what she got everyone else, she got Vanya and Shawn some mints. She also got a wonderful family… picture…collage…thingy that looks very very nice and well done.

Aunt Marion and Uncle Doug were here from Saturday afternoon to Teusday morning, in case I have not already mentioned that. That was a lot of fun.

Also, Our family has come down with the flu. Tessa was the first confirmed case of it, we took her to the doctor. We have not taken anyone else to the doctor yet, and we are not planning on it. I have had it, as well as Mom and Dad. We think Anna has it, Kathryn might be getting it, and The rest of the family/those that live at our house are expecting it any day now. We got off school today, because Naomi was coming back, and Mom is taking an official sick day tomorrow.

Also, something sad has happened, I was talking to Philip McFadden a minute ago, and apparently… HIS COMPUTER DIED BECAUSE HE LOGGED OFF IN THE MIDDLE OF A CONVERSATION!!!!

YAY

NAOMI IS BACK!!!

Wow. This sounds familiar.

CHICAGO—An otherwise routine e-mail-checking session went wrong when college student Gwen Petersen, 20, accidentally opened a message sent by her Aunt Sophie in Michigan, sources reported Monday.

After correctly identifying the sender as KalamazooLady5237@aol.com, her mother’s sister and a 57-year-old guidance counselor present at Petersen’s birth, Petersen attempted to properly delete the unwanted correspondence as she had many times before. But one mistaken click of the mouse began an ordeal that would overtake Petersen’s in-box for several minutes—thrusting the history major into an HTML-formatted world she “never intended to see.”

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Petersen, above, says she and her computer may never recover from the terrible oversight.

“As soon as I clicked on it, I realized what I’d done, but by then it was too late,” Petersen told reporters following the error. “With as much time as I spent talking to her on her birthday and Thanksgiving, something like this was bound to happen. I should have been paying closer attention.”

The moment her computer’s hourglass icon finished spinning, Petersen was subjected to a vast compendium of mass-circulated poetry, pet humor, and inspirational aphorisms with vague underlying religious motivations. Without needing to scroll down, Petersen further noted that the e-mail featured a background wallpaper of cartoon ducks, as well as numerous typographical errors and a large banner spelling out “You got 2 love this!” in a rainbow-colored, bouncing font.

The e-mail was also embedded with a midi version of the song “Wind Beneath My Wings.”

“Maybe it was the hangover or my roommate distracting me,” said Petersen, who, after realizing the roughly 17 different attachments had begun slowly loading despite her objections, passed the time scrolling through the two pages of addresses the message had previously been forwarded to. “The multicolored fonts, the smiley faces, the six exclamation marks after the subject line ‘Just a little something to brighten your day’—to think, this could have all been avoided.”

Though the e-mail validated Petersen’s worst fears about acknowledging correspondence from her only living aunt, sources close to Petersen said that once a looped-motion animated gif of a cartoon teddy bear appeared, waving its paw in a jerky back and forth motion, she was unable to tear herself away.

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Petersen’s Aunt Sophie

“Once she started scrolling, she was like a deer caught in the headlights,” said Petersen’s roommate, Kay Chiang, who witnessed Petersen’s accidental exposure to no less than five LOL cats and a list of reasons why aunts are better than cookies. “I don’t understand what the big deal is. I taught her how to use the spam filter months ago, and you don’t see me getting e-mails from my godmother once a week.”

Since her aunt uses a brand of PC that, according to Petersen, “no one has ever heard of,” the e-mail also contained a number of attachments incompatible with the operating system of Petersen’s laptop, further delaying matters by coming through as incomprehensible code. Unfortunately, a video montage of babies covered in soap suds set to the song “Splish Splash” downloaded and began playing without delay.

Looking back on the incident, Petersen acknowledged that she had only herself to blame for her predicament.

“It was my own fault, really,” Petersen said. “But once I saw it, the thought of my Aunt Sophie, sitting in her slippers at her little desktop computer in her basement rec room, smiling as she typed in my address, was too much for me. It took every scrap of energy I had left to close the seven new applications the e-mail had opened up, hit the reply button, and type ‘Funny! Thanks for sending love Gwen!’” Petersen said.

An initial scan with Norton AntiVirus showed that Petersen’s computer had been infected with more than 25 separate viruses.

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This sounds very familiar. This is a frequent occurence at our house. This serves as a very good reminder both why not to read chain letters, and why not to send them. Unless the receiver has a Blackbird 002, those types of letters can crash a computer. And download viruses.

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This post was copied from the Onion. I am fairly sure that is legal.

Original post found here.

Bad times, Good times.

Last weekend, Aunt Marion and Uncle Doug from Maryland stopped by for several days on their way to their yearly vacation to Florida. Also, last weekend, Mom and Dad went on a two-day vacation to… who knows where. Jeremy and Annemarie family-sitted for them while they were gone. They left early this morning. Unfortunately, our family appears to be having the flu. Tessa has definitely had it, she even took the test, and came out positive. We think that Dad and Mom have it, and I might have it. We hope that we have not given it to Aunt Marion and Uncle Doug. That is why I have not written anything on here as of late. Nor do I expect to write much more until I am feeling better, which hopefully could be tomorrow, but could be a few more days. I generally get over sicknesses rather quickly.

Oh, and My computer is apparently named Thor. Thanks to all of the… two… people that voted.

name game

there is now a poll to the left, under my picture, where you can vote on what you think I should name my computer. Please participate!

note: this post is post-dated to let you know about it until it ends.

GCC Youth Page

The page for our youth group at GCC has been updated, and has a whole new layout!

Yesterday, and Friday.

Yesterday was Sunday. We went to church as normal, and we had a youth fellowship immediately after that. We had originally planned it as being at the church, but, since we did not think that very many people were going to show up, we decided to have it at our house, since we have an open invite every Sunday, anyway. After we had the fellowship, Ben and I went and hung out at his house for less than an hour. We had originally planned to spend the entire afternoon at his house, but we stayed longer at our house than we had originally planned. We decided that we were going to get together again next Sunday. Except, instead of less than an hour at his house, by ourselves, I am going to go over to his house, and have lunch with him and the College and Career group, and then Justin, Mike, Ben, and I will go down to Barnes and Nobel’s(or however you are supposed to spell it), and hang out. At five P.M., we had the annual “business meeting” at our church, which lasted a little over an hour, and the elders briefed us on all of the upcoming changes, and what our financial plan is going to be for 2008. Mr. Moorhead stepped down retired as an elder. We are going to get the playground/outdoor recreation area started in a short while, and the soccer fields will be built soon. There are going to be a lot of changes happening soon, now that we own our own building, we can do anything we wanted to do, but were unable to do in the building we were renting. We are even going to paint the Youth Group room. I hope it’s not pink…

On Friday, I will be going back to Birmingham again, to get an EMG done. Electromagnetic-something, I think. I hope that I do not have to wait as long as I did last time. Although I think that the procedure is rather long. I think that that was the thing where they stick stuff in my fingers, and see the response in them, and it takes about an hour, according to the doctor. Or maybe that was not the EMG. Oh, well, I will find out when I get there, won’t I?

Jooce

Jooce. Weird name, I know. For anything. In case you have not heard of Jooce yet, I would like to give you an introduction to one of the first of many attemtps at online… everything.

Jooce is an online operating system. I know, that sounds werid and redundant, especially since you need an OS to run it, but it has obvious advantages, the main one being easy communication and secure file sharing. As secure as file sharing can get, at least. Jooce is only a Beta, so don’t expect to just try it out and see if you like it. Yet. I don’t remember how, but I obtained an invite. I think you could sign up for it when it first started being developed. I did. I am on it now, lamenting the lack of use it has. That is, however, for two main reasons: One, I am not like everyone else in the world. duh. Two: “w public beta 0.6.3.15.” *shakes head* what have I done…

With Jooce, you can upload any file, and supposedly share it instantly with any of your Jooce Friends. How, I do not know. Uploading files is ridiculously, and, since there is currently no space limit, I am taking advantage of it, and backing stuff up like crazy. Don’t worry, nothing that could get me in trouble if it was hacked, just my writing and a few songs that were already free. You have your Desktop, and you have your Joocetop, which it your public Desktop, which everyone can supposedly see, but I guess they do not have that service up and running yet. I have also found that hiding your desktop icons, and setting the page as your Desktop (nerdy, yes, I know) works really nice, and does not leave you with a browser constantly in the background. This only works in Wimpdows, though. Stupid.

You have your Jooce friends (how these are obtained, I have no idea), and it works with the IM services AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo!. Well, scratch one of those last two, since either one will be pulled off of the market if Microstink buys Yahoo. Lamentably, they are not compatable with Google. But I’d be willing to bet that they will, eventually.

You also have a “Jooce Disk,” which is a virtual hard drive in which all of your stuff is stored. That was done really well.

What they really need at this point, is to add E-mail capability, and a Word Processor. They also have a decent media player, but I cannot figure out how to get a visualization yet, it is probably my pathetic computer, though.

This project was designed for the constantly moving computer person, so that they can access all of their stuff at any computer. It shows a TON of promise, and I found out about it on Cnet, so it has good references, but it needs a lot of work before it can become a real web-based OS. If you are interested in supporting this project through feedback, or just want something to play around with, then please, PLEASE leave a comment, give me your E-mail, and I will send you an invite. I do not think that there is any other way to join, at this point.

update: I have discovered how to look at another person’s public Desktop. If you have them in your contacts, there is a button that says “view Joocetop.” You can view anybody’s Joocetop by going to your contact’s contacts, and your contact’s contact’s contact’s contact’s, and so on, and so on. Rather insecure, if you ask me.

…okay, screemshot upload does not appear to work. sorry.

Jooce is found at… Jooce.com! imagine that!

Allow me to introduce… Wilbur!

You know my peice-of-crap computer? Well, I have FINALLY decided on a name for it! Wilbur! Yeeeaahhh!
Oh, and Triskal arrived today, too. Jeremy’s new computer.
My next computer will most likely be named Vicky. That is short for Invictus. it means “unconquerable,” in Latin. What does Wilbur mean? uh… it… sounds… cool…? look at these names, and tell me which sounds the best:
Thor
Gibby
Prometheus
Lentus (”Libby”) latin word for slow.

GCC Parenting Conference 2008

Last Friday, Saturday, and this Sunday, our church hosted a Parenting Conference. Dad was the conference manager, and Paul Lamey and Tim Keeter, both from our church, were the teachers. I was a Gopher. That is what our family calls someone that is just along to do whatever anyone wants them to do. “Go pher this,” “go pher that.” (we live in Alabama) Therefore, the name “gopher.” On Friday, we arrived early, and I just sat around, doing nothing, because there were already so many volunteers. On Saturday, however, we made up for that. The conference was to be put onto four cds: Session 1 – Part 1, Session 1 – Part 2, Session 2, and Session 3. These were to be put into a case the size of a DVD case, with two on each side. Rob Dorsett, who is in charge of stuff like that, enlisted Shawn, Vanya, Jeremy, and I to help with that. Since we had a decent amount of people there, our church had borrowed a 9+1 DVD/CD multi-rewrite tower from another church than enabled us to burn 8 CDs at once (one of the drives was dead), taking about 7:20 per round, and having a 55/60 success rate. We needed 220 disks, 55 copies of each of the 4 disks. When we arrived on Saturday, they had already burned the Friday sessions, which was half of that. We started working on the third as soon as it became available, and put it in the top drive, and 8 blank cds in the other slots. We also had to print labels on the CDs, which took quite a while, the label printer was rather slow. I did that a while, and then left Shawn and Vanya to watch it, and to take the finished ones out, and put more blank ones in, whenever it finished. I went back to Mr. Lamey’s office, where Rob was making up the covers for the DVD cases. We were working on it to, not the very last minute, but even after that. He had some problems with the software’s interaction with the printer, and so he had to switch to another program, and start from scratch. After that, he worked on that, would print it out, cut off the edges, stick one in it, and see if it was right, go back, make it better, try again, and again, and again. He finally got it right. We were actually working on it together, sort of. He wanted an outside view, and I would tell him if it was straight, or not, and try it out for him, get the printed sheet, etc. Plus, I was learning, and asking him questions about it, since that is what he does at work, and he was more than happy to teach me some stuff. Well, anyway, we finally finished it, and printed off a sheet, and made over fifty copies of it. Then came the hard part. We were in the coffee/copier/printer/supplies room, Rob, Jeremy, Shawn and I, with people coming and going to check on the status of the burner. Rob was cutting the edges off of the pages, which had to be gotten just right, with a tool designed specifically for that, Jeremy and I were putting them into the cases, and Shawn was stacking them in the corner, preparing them for the next CD. And, during all of that, Mr. Lamey kept preaching. and preaching. and preaching. We were back there, getting very worried, and anxious, because we were afraid that they would come out of the classes, and just breeze them all off, and we didnt even have any out yet. After Mr Lamey finally finished, we had maybe 15 minutes to make 55 copies of the CD (and the duplicator was getting overheated, and was messing up some of the disks), stick them in the cases, and take them all out there. When they finished the breakaway sessions, we had sixteen finished products. The entire time people were out there, socializing, we were still back in there, working to get the rest finished, and get them out there. As it turned out, we had nothing to worry about, they did not take them nearly as fast as we anticipated. Which kinda made us me feel bad, after all of that work we had done. We ended up having a total of only 4 disks failing. Out of 110.