Mowing the lawn

Here I am on a beautiful day mowing the lawn. I did not have much time in this video so I strapped on my running shoes, sharpened up the mower blades, and pushed with all my might. It’s a good thing Heather had a cold glass of water for me on my break because I was really moving. Enjoy the video.

By the way, I am for hire. Contact me if you would like your lawn mowed really fast. I can do up to 739 lawns in an hour depending on the number of trees and pink flamingos in the yard.

CSS for CLBC

I’m working on “tableless” layout using CSS. That’s Cascading Style Sheets for my web challenged friends – and mom. I’ve designed all my web sites using table up to this point so it’s time to learn the better way.

The point is that the HTML page contain all the content with few images and formatting while the CSS file get all the design and layout. This makes life easier in many ways. First of all, it makes it easier to code content into the HTML file. I won’t have to scan through layers of layout code to find the sentence that I want to edit. Secondly, it’s easier on the web browser and search engine. The page will run cleaner on the computer system, display faster in the browser, and rank higher with search engines.

Crescent Lake Bible Camp has graciously agreed to have me redesign their current web site for a new one.

This is great for me and them. They get a sparkling new web site and I get to learn some new tricks. It’s been fun going at it.

By the way, the link to the new site will change as I design and develop. You never know at what stage you will be viewing the site. Even worse is that I will eventually break the link to the next site. Enjoy while you may.

Arts Conference at Willow Creek

I just returned from the Willow Creek Arts Conference. It had to have been one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended – and I have attended many conferences.

The best parts of the conference for me were the breakout sessions. I attended audio soundboard mixing, earbud monitoring, and how to develop a Media Ministry sessions. All were very helpful and will change the way I lead my Media Ministry team at Pine Grove Community Church.

Javascript

I spent my free time today planning a web site for Crescent Lake Bible Camp. Heather was a big help and we really enjoyed working together – as usual. I realized that Adobe GoLive sucks and that I am more comfortable hand coding my web pages than using a WYSIWYG program. So, I cracked open my JavaScript for the World Wide Web book and reviewed my rollover programming.

As a practice, I removed all the GoLive code and reprogrammed my buttons to a nice snazzy look.

Enjoy.

Enough already

I’m done redesigning my blog for a while. It’s been fun but I really don’t know CSS and PHP well enough to redesign my blog into a static page. My goal was to build Crescent Lake Bible Camp‘s web site from WordPress. However, it’s just not worth the time investment when I can design their site using simple HTML and CSS. It will be static but at least it will be a well designed site.

Google rules the web

I’m trying new things. I’ve been frustrated with my Outlook calendar not syncing properly on two computers with my PDA as the intermediary. Somehow appointments were getting duplicated or put on the wrong day (mostly birthdays and reaccuring appts). Clearly it is wise to have only one calendar. I wanted to put a calendar on my web site so I can make changes anywhere I had internet access. This is where Google rules.

I’ve set up a Google calendar, a task plug-in, and have signed up for GMail. That pretty much wipes out Microsoft Outlook.

The only thing I’ve not done is import my address book into Google. But, I think it’s time to rid myself of the old address book with contacts gone by to never be seen again. I have over 500 contact but only need a fraction of them. So, no importing of the address book. I’m starting over.

I mowed the grass!

The grass is now growing and needs to be mowed! I dusted off the old push mower and cut the front lawn today. The grass isn’t that tall nor thick yet so I lowered the blade one notch. It was nice to get back to summer chores.

The last time I mowed the grass was October. It seems so long ago. The oil in the mower looked clean so I must have changed it late in the season. But, I really can’t remember. That was eight months ago.