Ten years ago yesterday
Ten years ago yesterday, Michele and I were married. I find it hard to grasp because ten years sounds like such a long time. On the other hand, the time has flown by. When we got married, I also became an instant parent. Keegan was eight. Ten years later, Keegan is a senior in high school and he hopes to be in college in the fall. And now there are three more children: Tristan, Brinley, and Cohen. What else has changed? Too many things to mention.
Happy anniversary to us!
I look at this photo of us on our wedding day and think, how much younger I looked then! I’m old and gray now 
Keegan turns 18
Well, the day that seemed so far in the future to me has arrived. Keegan turns 18 today. Wow. It is hard to believe that our eldest child is all grown up and soon to move on to college!
Last night we had his birthday party at Bryan’s. Here was the requested menu: Grandma J.’s lasagna, a “loaded” salad, a Caesar’s salad, Texas toast, strawberry cake, and chocolate eclair cake.
Proverbs 3:5-6 is an appropriate verse for this time in his life.
Happy birthday, Keegan!
Newspaper editors, please proofread
This morning I was reading the Chicago Tribune and noticed not one, but two pretty obvious spelling errors on the front page. The first one, shown below, is a headline with the word “artic” instead of “arctic.” Come on, people. (Click on each image to enlarge.)
The second blatant error is lower down on the same page, a headline asking “What Does Auld Land Syne Mean?” Puhlease. Folks, it’s Auld Lang Syne.
Everyone makes spelling mistakes, including me. But somehow I expect newspapers and other formal publications to do a better job of proofreading.
This concludes my first rant of 2010.
Google real time search on my iPhone
I am really impressed by Google’s new real time search on my iPhone! I somehow missed the announcement of its availability. You can see it in action by this screenshot below.
Tristan turns 9
It doesn’t seem like it could be true, but it is: this past Saturday, Tristan turned 9. We had his birthday party at his Uncle Bryan’s that night. Michele and my mother-in-law made the food that Tristan picked out, including a nice Black Forest chocolate/cherry cake with cherry cordial candies on top.
He has grown so much, as evidenced by the photos I’ve included in this post.
He was tremendously excited about his presents and waited very patiently, for several hours until after everyone had finished eating supper, to open them. Several of the presents were Lego sets and he didn’t get a chance to open and put any of them together before bedtime Saturday night. He spent a restless night and finally woke us up around 6:30a Sunday to ask if he please, pretty please be
allowed to open one of his Lego sets?! He spent all day that day putting together some of his presents and playing with them.
With this event comes the realization that Keegan, whose birthday is in January, will turn 18 (!) and then, Michele and I will celebrate 10 years of marriage at the end of next month. Again, how time flies. It hardly seems possible.
Sweet dreams
I came across this photo from earlier this year and couldn’t resist posting it here. It shows Brinley fast asleep, wearing a baby towel on her head! I think it’s cute.
Photography dreams
I love photography, especially nature photography. One of my all time favorite photographers is Jim Brandenburg, based near Ely, Minnesota (also, incidentally, one of my favorite areas on Earth). His photos are simple yet evocative, and just plain beautiful. Check out “A Secret Bay” as just one example of his gift.
Another favorite is Larry Kanfer, who is based near where I grew up and who specializes in landscape photography. Most people who visit east central Illinois think it is so boring and one-dimensional — miles upon miles of corn fields and soybeans in a land that is incredibly flat. Larry changes that perception and his photos bring out the great beauty and variety in landscapes where I grew up.
And then there is my niece, Josie, who has a real gift for photography as well. A recent post on her blog illustrates this. Another post entitled “Fall in Central IL” is also a favorite.
Christmas time
I’ve mentioned before that I have mixed feelings about Christmas. In fact, sometimes my children and wife think I am Scrooge personified. There are a lot of complicated reasons for these mixed feelings, but this year I am looking forward to Christmas more than in the past. I’m not sure why.
On this, the first day of December, I am thinking Christmas-y thoughts. I recently put up Christmas lights on our house — something we haven’t done much since we lived in Indiana. The Christmas tree is already in the house but not yet set up. (I pulled it out of the garage when we were cleaning the garage on Saturday.) We hope to add a few more outdoor decorations in the next few days. The lights give the house a nice glow at night.
Part of the reason Christmas time has always been a bit negative for me is the onslaught of spending on gifts and such. Many years in the past, this has put us in debt. We are extremely fortunate to have a small amount of extra income at this point in the year, so I am not as stressed about the money angle as I have been in some years past, and that helps. Another stress in the past has been when we host Christmas at our house and kill ourselves trying to get the house cleaned up and decent enough for family to come over. We haven’t hosted Christmas for a few years now, and I don’t think we’ll be hosting it this year, either. That’s a good thing because our house is in need of major renovations and cleanup. Not having to host Christmas takes away a major negative aspect of the season for me, too.
More than anything else, though, I struggle with getting excited about Christmas or any other event that children get so excited about. My glass is half empty, not half full, which means that I tend to be negative in outlook. I hope and pray that this year I will join my children in their excitement and anticipation. I also want them to truly appreciate and focus on the reason for the season, which is the fact that God came into our world as a baby, in order that He might save us from our sins by dying on the cross in our place. Recently I’ve begun to pick a passage from the Bible to read to the three younger ones as part of putting them to bed each night. They seem to really enjoy this. I think I’ll plan to focus on Bible verses throughout this month that talk about Jesus’ birth and what it means to us.
On a rather sad note, I was thinking the other day about the fact that this Christmas may be the last one where Keegan is living at home with us. At this time next year — hopefully — he will be busy finishing his first semester in college. Where has the time gone? And more importantly, I ask myself, have I used that time well?
Blogging won’t die
Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook status updates, and other micro-blogging services are extremely popular right now. Many people use them to post short bits of information that might once have gone into a blog, including me. Because these micro-blogging services are so popular, some people question whether blogs are doomed to go the way of the dinosaur. I strongly disagree, and I think there are others out there who feel the same way. In fact, there is some evidence that blogging is making a comeback.
There’s no doubt that I post things more frequently on Twitter than on this blog. My blogging efforts have lagged quite a bit over the past year. In spite of this, I think something like Twitter is fundamentally different, and complementary, to traditional blogging. If you take a look at my Twitter stream and then compare that to what I tend to blog about, you’ll see that the topics rarely overlap. Yes, I use Twitter Tools to ensure that my blog posts are reflected in my Twitter stream as well as to include my Twitter stream in the sidebar of my blog. But I use each tool in fundamentally different ways. I tend to write a blog post only when I feel strongly about something, or have a particular interest I want to express. I use Twitter for quick throwaway comments or to share a quick link here and there that I find interesting or want to comment on.
One other point is that in spite of the exponential growth in other online tools such as Facebook, my personal blog has not diminished in importance to me. The opposite is true: Family Man Librarian has become the one place where I freely express myself online; the place and the content are completely under my control. That is very important to me. The desire to have more control over my online identity is a key factor in my decision to delete my Facebook account, as well as to rely more on hosting my own photos here instead of directing everyone to a photo sharing sight like Flickr.
An informal review of Waze vs. Google Maps
Given my daily work commute, I am interested in using my iPhone’s built-in GPS capabilities to alert me to traffic jams, accidents, or other problems I might encounter driving to or from work. I’ve been trying out two iPhone apps in particular for this purpose: Google Maps and Waze.
Both apps are freely available, which is a requirement for me. Both make effective use of the iPhone interface and GPS. Both provide real-time traffic information and have good coverage in the areas of my commute. There are quite a few differences, however.
Waze is a relatively new service that is built upon the idea that the more people who participate and contribute information to the service, the better the information it distributes to everyone. In other words, it’s a crowdsourcing app in its purest form. Google claims its map application is also crowdsourced, but it is a different shade of crowdsourcing altogether, one that is far more passive than Waze’s approach. I like Waze’s approach better than Google’s, and I think it is more effective and informative to users.
Another difference is the way each app operates. My iPhone is the 16 Gb 3G model running the latest OS version. My settings are set to auto-dim after a certain period of time. This means that with Google Maps, in order to keep it visible I have to keep touching the screen every once in a while or else the screen will go blank. Not so with Waze, which nicely keeps the screen active throughout operation. Another plus for Waze.
Waze uses a completely different map source than Google Maps, at least for here in the U.S. It uses the United States Census Bureau TIGER map which, by its own admission, has many faults which Waze hopes will be gradually corrected using its crowdsourcing approach. In addition to its map source, I find Waze’s visual map representation to be very mediocre. For example, although you have choices between a 2d and 3d view, as well as day and night views, there is no option for satellite view or some hybrid view, like Google Maps offers. This is a huge negative, although in daily driving it isn’t a big deal. One small gripe I have about Waze’s implementation, though: Somehow it can sense when it’s nighttime and it will automatically switch to nighttime view. However, at the moment it doesn’t seem to be capable of auto-switching to daytime view when it’s light out. (Note: this bug has justed been fixed in the newest app version.)
I really like the popup notifications of traffic problems that Waze has in its interface. In contrast, Google Maps currently offers only a visual alert by means of the coloring shown on a particular road (e.g. if a road section is shown in red, that means there are traffic problems). In addition, Waze offers a might greater variety of feedback or detail about traffic.
At the moment, Google Maps’ data is far more accurate and reliable than Waze’s. The good thing about Waze, though, is that it will “learn” over time, and it also provides users with the ability to easily correct problems within the interface.
One outstanding feature that Waze has and Google Maps for the iPhone doesn’t have, is free — yes, free — turn-by-turn voice directions. The directions don’t include street names yet but I’ve found this to be a minor annoyance so far.
Things will get much more interesting when the new Google Maps Navigation functionality, currently available only on Android phones, is ported to the iPhone. But for now, Waze is the clear winner in this comparison, at least for me.
Recent Photos
