Well, the storm pictures are finally processed. I ended up with three that I kept. They can all be viewed in the Photo Gallery's "Photo Experiments" album. Also, I decided to go ahead and post one of them to skiasma, so go ahead and check it out and leave me a comment. :-)

P.S. I've been trying out the whole "mircroblogging" thing, which I have lovingly titled my "microblag" over there on the right. What are your thoughts? Do you like it? Is it too much? You like it, but don't like where it is on the page? Let me know!

Here's a special skiasma photo to celebrate the 4th of July. I hope everyone has a great time watching fireworks, grilling hamburgers, and spending time with friends and family. God bless America!

P.S. Why don't you head over and give Ed some love for the 4th of July? (EJ: Warfighter)

We had some more crazy storms off on the horizon tonight. So, I grabbed my camera and snapped some shots. This round turned out much better than the previous ones. I think the main difference is my choice of lenses. Before, I was using my 18-55mm kit lens because I thought I needed a fairly wide angle, and this is the widest angle lens I own. But, for tonight I switched to my Pentax-M 50mm f/2 lens. It's an old, manual-focus lens, which was helpful. I just set the focus to infinity, bumped the f-stop down to around 2.8 and snapped shots in 5-second exposure bursts.

As you can see, the shots are a lot sharper and more vivid (mostly thanks to the amazing difference between a cheap kit zoom lens and a "cheap" prime lens from Pentax's heyday). I haven't even done any post-processing on the shots yet, and I think the contrast can be even more improved in the GIMP.

Once I get everything processed, I'm going to post them into the "Experiments" album of the gallery. Who knows, though...one of these might just make it to skiasma!

Here's something I like:

Cheap chocolate-striped shortbread cookies dipped into cheap Earl Grey tea. The chocolate melts oh-so-deliciously, and the tea is made oh-so-daintily sweet. Oh yum!

This has been something I like.
What do you like?

Some days you wake up, take a look at your RSS feeds, and just want to go back to sleep.

It's a sad day for me. LugRadio, easily the most entertaining Linux podcast out there, is being canceled after a 5-year run. I've been a listener from the start, and the foul-mouthed presenters from across the pond have kept me company in so many different places: driving to and from church while at seminary; riding my bike to Araya while living in Japan; plowing up the fields in a tractor out here on the farm...I don't know how I'm ever going to drive across the country to New Jersey without these fellas.

My biggest regret now is that I was never able to make it to one of their live events. They always sounded like such a great time.

Thanks, especially to Jono and Aq. You guys are awesome. Good luck in all your future endeavors.

Here's Jono's write-up about it all.

Right. So, I am currently doing my absolute best to get down a rap. Oh my. I am so sorry, world. Brian White was never meant to rap, let me tell you.

So, why am I attempting to rap? Well, it was one of those things where I got asked to help with a children's sermon without exactly knowing what was wanted of me. And yes, indeed, the "sermon" came from one of those books that tries to be cool and "relate" to the kids. And so, naturally, that means rap.

And, yes, it's bad and cheesy.

But, I'm doing my best with it. Hardest problem so far: finding some reasonable beat track to go with it. I kind of wanted a 90s bad-cowboy Kid Rock sort of thing. Yeah...kind of hard to find for free (legal) off of the net. I found some nice creative commons stuff, but it's all really hard and heavy...not quite right for a children's sermon rap.

But, who am I kidding? The tunez are the last thing I need to be worrying about!

UPDATE: Well, it went much better than I thought. Not that I will be getting a hot record deal anytime soon, but the kids seemed to enjoy it, and that's what counts. :)

Before I had to re-install the photo gallery (I'm still working on getting all the photos uploaded again!), I used to have a wallpaper section there. After some thinking about reimplementing the wallpaper album in the gallery, I thought a better solution might be to choose only the best of the best wallpaper photos and put them over on skiasma. That is my official photo site, after all.

So, after a bit of tinkering with the theming, there's a new "Wallpapers" link at the top of the main page of skiasma. So far I've only done the editing for one wallpaper, but I think it's a pretty good one! This photo is actually going to be featured on skiasma fairly soon, but I thought it would be okay to put the wallpaper version up first. I have at least 3 or 4 more wallpaper-worthy photos I'll put up in due time. For now, though, I hope you'll download the one that is up there and let me know what you think.

Well, farming was still the main item on the agenda today. We finished the wheat harvest, and started plowing up the wheat fields. (This keeps any volunteer wheat from coming up.) We'll let it sit like that for several months until we plant the wheat again in the late summer/early fall.

However, it's not really the wheat fields that we're worried about right now. David wanted to start planting the milo several days ago. Unfortunately, the drill that we use for that was broken. So, for the past several days we've been working on repairing the drill (planter). I think we finally got the last pieces tacked back on, so we'll be able to start planting tomorrow. We'd better hurry, too...for insurance reasons, we have to have everything planted before July 1, which isn't too far away!