I found this picture on Kevin’s Facebook page, though I think Rose is responsible for it.  I thought you’d enjoy seeing it.  (You can click it to enlarge.)

From left:

• (first person not labeled, but I think she’s one of Julie and Joe’s)
• Theresa Dierker (definitely Julie and Joe’s)
• Margaret Holmes (Ron & Eileen)
• Ariana Gabrielle Church (Rick’s stepdaughter)
• Mustache Guy in Blue Shirt
• Stephen Church
• Michelle Church
• Rose
• Kevin

I figure I have some of this either wrong or incomplete, but Rose will straighten me out.

Love,
Dave

I thought you’d enjoy seeing these… even though they’re not photos of our family, they’re from a family you’ve heard about.

Just click this line to open a new window and see the photos.

Love,
Dave

I know you’ll have a live visit soon, but just yesterday I found this on my computer.  It’s from your birthday visit in 2010.  Frank’s talking about a little confusion at the Windsor / Detroit border.

Love,
Dave

While we were in Wisconsin last weekend, we took Jeanean’s mother out to dinner at one of her favorite restaurants, the Copper Dock. It’s on the shore of Friess Lake (sounds like “frees”), in the suburbs (almost country) outside of Menomonee Falls.

After the meal, Linda Merkel (who took the pictures at our wedding) asked a waitress to take this shot in the outdoor section of the restaurant:

(You can click the picture for a larger image.)

From the left: Randy Merkel, Linda (Randy’s wife), me, Jeanean, Janet, Linda Merkel (Ron’s wife), Ron Merkel.  That’s Dolores in front.

Love,
Dave

When I was transferring music to Jeanean’s computer, I came across the music we played at our wedding. We picked three or four hours’ worth of songs that mean something to one or both of us.  This is a video of Carrie Newcomer, singing her song that was part of our collection.  I’ve put the lyrics after the video.

Holy is the dish and drain
The soap and sink, and the cup and plate
And the warm wool socks, and the cold white tile
Showerheads and good dry towels

And frying eggs sound like psalms
With bits of salt measured in my palm
It’s all a part of a sacrament
As holy as a day is spent

Holy is the busy street
The cars that boom with passion’s beat
And the check out girl, counting change
The hands that shook my hands today, and…

Hymns of geese fly overhead
And stretch their wings like their parents did
Blessed be the dog
Who runs in her sleep
To chase some wild elusive thing

Holy is a familiar room
Quiet moments in the afternoon
And folding sheets like folding hands
To pray as only laundry can

I’m letting go of all I fear
Like autumn leaves of earth and air
For summer came and summer went
As holy as a day is spent

Holy is the place I stand
To give whatever small good I can
And the empty page, the open book
Redemption everywhere I look

Unknowingly we slow our pace
In the shade of unexpected grace
With grateful smiles and sad lament
As holy as a day is spent

And morning light sings providence
As holy as a day is spent

Love,
Dave

Last Christmas, I got Jeanean an iPad, the tablet computer from Apple.  It’s very different from the computers you’ve seen–no keyboard (when you need to type, you can have a virtual keyboard on the screen).  No buttons (they’re virtual, too).  No mouse (no place to plug it in).

Here’s a commercial for it (a bit noisy on the sound track):

My thought was that she could use it for reading and for listening to music and podcasts (recordings you can download). I also thought that sometimes on trips, she could leave her regular computer home and take just the iPad.

But to get music onto it, you have to use Apple’s iTunes Store, an online site.  The easiest way to to day (and “easiest” is a very relative term) is to install iTunes on your PC.  Actually, I think the easiest way is probably to throw out your PC and get an Apple computer, but we weren’t quite up to that.

What you do is install iTunes on your PC, then connect the iPad to it and synchronize them (“sync” is the cool word).  But we never had any luck getting them to sync — the process would hang up at step 2 of 7, for more than an hour.

So this week I was determined the make this thing work.  I tried again; no luck.  I removed iTunes from her computer and reinstalled it — the kind of thing computer people do because it’s just easier in the long run.  STILL no luck.  I even let the sync run for four hours, thinking, okay, I’ve just been impatient the first time.

Nope.

So I went searching around online for help.  The secret is that you have to ask the right question when you search.  If you search just for “sync iPad,” you get a billion matches.  Ditto “sync ipad and pc.”  Finally I asked about “sync ipad pc windows xp” (XP is the operating system on Jeanean’s computer).  Finally I found some suggestions in an online help forum.

The problem was some obscure thing so technical I don’t think I can explain it.  The good news is, the two computers are now synched.  What this means is that if Jeanean copies some new music onto her PC, the next time she starts iTunes on it and has the iPad nearby, the music will automatically transfer to the iPad.

It’s weird.  It’s like scanning those checks instead of depositing them.  But I’m in a really good mood because my frustration is over, and because maybe Jeanean will now find more uses for her iPad.

Love,
Dave

Another technological step forward today–one even *I* am impressed with.

My credit union will now accept deposits that you scan on your printer and submit online.  In other words, you don’t have to take a check to the bank (or to the ATM) to deposit it. You can do it all electronically.

For some reason, this reminded me of the banking book you used to have long ago at the Bank of the Commonwealth. I don’t know if my kids have ever even seen this kind of thing, so I found an example online:

You’d make your deposit, and (I think) the bank teller would write in the amount and stamp it with the date, as in these examples.  I think the picture here is someone depositing their weekly pay.  Notice that there are several dates, about a week apart, where the same amount goes in.

Anyway, here’s the deal. Because our new inkjet printer has wireless capability, I can connect to the printer even though it’s in the next room and I don’t have… any wires. And there’s a built-in scanner.

The credit union has an online application to let you deposit a check electronically.  This is how it works:

1. You go to their website and click the button for “e-deposit.”
2. You endorse the check “for edeposit only at NFCU” (Navy Federal Credit Union).
3. You put the front of the check on your scanner, then click a button on the credit union site.
4. When the machine finishes scanning the front, it displays the image to you so you can make sure it’s legible.
5. You turn the check over and click again to have the back of the check scanned.

When all that’s done, you get a confirmation that looks like this:

The actual confirmation

I decided the way to test this was to write myself a check from an account at a different bank.  You can see that the scan is very readable.  I’ve already gotten confirmation from the credit union that they’ve accepted the check.  Their instructions are to wait two days, after which you can void the check you deposited electronically–or even destroy it.

I have to say that it’s a weird feeling to have made a deposit and still have the check in my hands.  But of course a check is just a set of instructions for a bank.

For the time being, I think I’ll void the checks I deposit this way, rather than destroy them.  Even though I’m only about 2.5 miles from the nearest branch, I think this can be a real timesaver–I don’t have to make a special trip to deposit some check; I can do it any time of the day or night.

I’ve come a long way from my first part-time job, as a stockboy at Sears, where I actually used to get paid in cash: a little brown envelope, with a kind of check stub indicating what money I’d earned and what taxes had come out and then bills and currence.  I think I made about $1.80 an hour, gross, so it couldn’t have been much more than $24 or so.

Love,
Dave

Since you’re an expert computer user–you’ve had one for more than a dozen years–you’ve heard a lot of the strange terminology that people think makes sense.

Like “wallpaper.”

Wallpaper is the term for the picture that you see as the background on your computer.  I think you use one with autumn leaves.  Here’s a similar image on a wide-screen monitor:

Just an example

That monitor is like the wide one that I use.  I told you before, I think, that I usually have two screens going: the one on my laptop, and the wider one that’s connected to it.  This gives me a lot more real estate to work with–I can open a document to read, open PowerPoint and move its window alongside so I can write about what I’m reading, and even have email or something in the background.

One problem is that the two screens are different sides, and so if I set up wallpaper to be on both screens, either the picture is too small for the big monitor or too big for the smaller screen on the laptop.  Here’s an example:

Leaf image doesn't look the same on both

I took these shots while I was writing this post. If you look closely in the photo above, the picture of the leaves looks very nice on the external monitor (the screen on the left).  But the image is too big to fit onto the laptop’s screen.  Look closely and you will see the little triangular hole in both pictures.  Basically, there isn’t enough room on the laptop screen to fit more than about a third of the total image.

So, using some fancy footwork, here’s what I did:

• Took the image that fit nicely onto the big monitor.
• Copied it and resized the copy so it’d fit on the small monitor.
• Pasted that copy to the right of the original image — so I have one, really wide image.

I call this a span picture, because it’s designed to span the two monitors.  Here’s what the spanned image for the leaf picture would look like if you printed it by itself:

The span image - image on the left resized and pasted on the right

The white space you see at the lower right of the picture is due to the fact that the laptop screen is only 768 pixels high (a pixel is one dot on the computer screen) while the external monitor is 1080 pixels — nearly half again as high.

This looks strange, but when I set the span picture as my wallpaper, the break occurs in just the right place.  As a result it looks like I have the same picture on both screen, with the one on the right smaller overall.

If you compare this picture with the first one, you can see the difference: the whole leaf picture shows up on my laptop (on the right).  The colors looks different, but in par that’s due to the angle of the screen.

I really like this two-screen arrangement, and I have a folder set up with a couple dozen of these span images so I can have a different wallpaper image each day–and have the wallpaper fit.

Love,
Dave

After talking about language the other day, I thought you’d enjoy this road sign:

Sign of the times

This sign was put up in Swansea, Wales, where they apparently have a policy of posting public signs in both English and Welsh.  Apparently there’s some type of service that the local council (the local government) uses to get the Welsh version of things.

It seems the practice was to email the English version of the sign to the translator, who’d send the Welsh version back. However, the people asking for the translation weren’t very thorough in this case.

Here is what the Welsh says:

I am not in the office at the moment.  Send any work to be translated.

Love,
Dave

When I get up in the morning, one of the first things I do is check my phone… not because I’m expecting calls, but because that’s the fastest way to check the weather report.

I have one app (an “app” is what they call the little programs or applications that run on a phone) that gives me the local time and weather.  And I can click to a more detailed report, like this sample:

Not MY weather forecast, but A weather forecase

That’s a sample I found online (you may recall that I don’t live in New York).  At a glance you can get the current temperature and other information, along with the day’s forecast.  I like the percentage of precipitation–I’m not one of those people who complains when “they get it wrong.”  if they say 50% chance, then to me that means half the time it’s not going to rain.

The picture above is shorter than the one on my actualy phone… where you see “extended forecast,” I see a display like they have on the TV weather report, with little clouds or suns or thunderstorms for each day.

What surprised me about this, after our fairly chilly weather, is that the predicted high for today is 86.  We’ve had things pretty mild, so it will be a surprise for it to get so warm.  By the weened it’ll be back down around 70, though.

This will be yet another test of our attic insulation job.  I’ve been tracking our electric bills and the monthly average temperature, just to see if I can notice definite improvement.  I got the monthly electric bill going back to October 2009 (since we had the work done in October of 2011, I backtracked two years).  I made a chart for the amount of the bill, the total kilowatt hours, the daily average kWh, and the average temperature at Reagan National Airport for a given month.

The dates don’t necessarily coincide, but I’m more interested in the overall pattern, which is why I use a monthly figure.  That means I only need three numbers each month when I update the chart.

This is my “average temperature” chart:

The thicker green is for the year that began in October of last year (after the new insulation went in).  You can see that the entire winter was warmer than the previous two years, so even without the insulation we’d have used less electricity.  However, the bills for December and January were nearly 1/3 lower than the average for the previous two years, which to me says things are working out well.

I mention all this because the paper this morning was predicting a very warm summer.  That’ll be another test for the insulation.

Love,
Dave