Archive for August, 2004
Tuesday, August 31st, 2004
Prague meetings
It’s great being back in Prague. This is my 8th visit in the last year. The weather is great, and our meetings are going well. Tonight we’ll hit our favorite restaurant here, Cesky Raj, and then take a walk downtown.
2 Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Wednesday, August 25th, 2004
1st day of school
Life changes gears today; school started.
No Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Wednesday, August 25th, 2004
1st Day of Pool
Found a pool to swim workouts in today!
8 Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Tuesday, August 24th, 2004
Cooler photo software!
Last night I thought Picasa was cool. It’s free, so I guess it’s still cool. But it made me curious about Adobe Photoshop Album which I already have. I started playing around and, WOW!
This takes a while to load, and it requires Internet Explorer, but it’s the coolest picture gallery I’ve seen. (Click the picture.)
2 Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Monday, August 23rd, 2004
Cool photo software
Last night I acquired two cool new software items:
Google Mail - with 1Gb storage!
Picasa - a free photo manager, also from Google.
While you can’t get yourself a Google email account yet, on my first Google email - from Google - I clicked an ad to www.Walla.com where I discovered you can also get a free email account, complete with virus scanning and spam filter, with 1Gb of storage. So my 100Kb Hotmail account that recently increased to 2Mb storage looks pretty lame right now.
1 Comment » - Posted in General by Jerry
Wednesday, August 18th, 2004
burnt toast
After cooking hamburgers on our aluminum (disposable) grill, the kids
sat around the back patio and burned toast - then ate it. Picture by
daughter.
No Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Wednesday, August 18th, 2004
Chillin’ on the back patio
This pool was the best $8 we spent this summer! Our kids and the dog all enjoyed it equally.
No Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Tuesday, August 17th, 2004
Photo blog busted
Hmmm. Something’s busted. I can get Flickr to send photos to my RSS syndication feed, but they’re not showing up on my website blog. I’m sending this through Blogger via email to see if that route still works.
1 Comment » - Posted in General by Jerry
Sunday, August 15th, 2004
Photo blog, too!
Better minds than mine have been down this blogging road ahead of me. Simply following the trail of applications in their wake to make blogging easier is challenging! But the results are worth it.
In the process I’ve not only created a written blog but a photo blog as well. www.flickr.com/photos/squarejer For now it only contains photos that I’ve posted in this blog. If I get the motivation and enough time I may start sending some photos to it, independent of my blog.
No Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Sunday, August 15th, 2004
Lake Balaton
This is our landlord who graciously hosted us at his home on Lake Balaton last month. Our friends, who previously rented our house from him, said he was the best landlord in Hungary. We agree!
No Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Sunday, August 15th, 2004
Flickr
This is a test post from 
, a fancy photo sharing thing.
No Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Sunday, August 15th, 2004
Ouch!
I did this a few weeks ago. My own stupid fault.
4 Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Sunday, August 15th, 2004
House in Orlando survived Charley
We called the friends in Orlando who rent our house, and they said it fared relatively well. They didn’t lose power at all. The two red maples in the backyard didn’t survive unscathed, and we lost some roof tiles, but there was no flooding and no major damage. Not bad considering the eye of the hurricane passed within miles of our house and Orlando had winds over 100 mph. Whew!
No Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Sunday, August 15th, 2004
Goatee
For amusement I grew some facial hair recently. It will remain as long as my wife and daughter continue giving it the thumbs-up. But now you have to wonder, is this the real Jerry or the evil Jerry? 
3 Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Saturday, August 14th, 2004
Nagyon nem jó!
Úres a sziget! Bárhol tud parkolni! Miért pont a taxiállomáson áll!? Nagyon nem jó!
“The island is empty! You can park anywhere! Why did you park in the taxi stand? Very bad!”
- hand written note on my windshield after returning from a run on Margarit Island.
No Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Friday, August 13th, 2004
Hurricane Charley
Ordinarily I wouldn’t care about a hurricane half a world away - except that my house lies in its anticipated path. We’re crossing our fingers and trusting God’s goodness (with either a hit or miss). What I’m most curious about is whether my surveying calculations prove correct or not. According to my crude measurements, made with an eye level, if waters rise in our backyard, they should flow into the cypress swamp before they flow into our house. Let’s hope!
2 Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Tuesday, August 10th, 2004
Top Ten Technologies for the Future - Draft
[Bear with me. I want to write an article that can be used in student magazines in Eastern Europe. This is my rough draft area. Please comment.]
Intro: Life changes quickly, so don’t get caught dozing. Just when you thought you had the latest gadget or understood what just came down the technology pike, your friend shows up at your door with some new toy that you didn’t even know existed.
Here’s a list of the technologies that you can expect to find their way into your life, and those you can expect to vanish.
10. Vanishing: Sony Mini-Disc. Proprietary. Doesn’t work well with a PC. And with USB drives and MP3 music compression, why bother?
9. Coming on strong: Apple iPod. Despite being arrogant and proprietary, Apple seems to have produced the portable music industry leader. If you don’t own an iPod soon, it will only be because Apple couldn’t get all the way over their arrogance and price their devices competitively.
8. Vanishing: PDA’s. Personal Digital Assistants. Why carry around a PDA when you can carry around a phone that does the same thing or a PDA that doubles as a phone? Just before they die there might be one last surge of popularity as their prices drop into range of absolutely everyone.
7. Coming on strong: Digital photography. If you don’t soon own a digital camera, you will soon own a phone that has a digital camera. Sell your film camera while there are still people willing to buy one!
6. Vanishing: VHS.
5. Coming on strong: High-speed Internet and all that comes with it: e-commerce, online video, graphically rich websites, IP phones, IM….
4. Vanishing: CD-R. Now that DVD writers are cheap, DVD-RAM will replace CD-R.
3. Coming on strong: NED TV’s.
2. Vanishing:
1. Coming on strong: Fuel cell cars
[Lots of work and research left to do on this list.]
2 Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Tuesday, August 10th, 2004
Are you offended?
Consider this: Most non-Christian university students don’t attend church. The world that attracts them is far different than the one most Christian university students live in. So would it stand to reason that a website that relates well to non-Christian university students would very likely make Christian university students a bit uncomfortable? And wouldn’t that same site make the far more conservative church, composed of people mostly older than university students, very uncomfortable?
So if you are attempting to create a website that appeals to non-Christians, doesn’t it seem logical that it would offend the church? Isn’t that a little ironic? Does your website offend anyone in the church? If not, do you think that’s a mark of ineffectiveness? Take a look at this to see what I mean. (Original idea by Tom Seely)
3 Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Saturday, August 7th, 2004
Ran to Margaret Island
Found a great running place this morning; Margaret Island. It has a rubber-surface running track around the whole island; 5350 meters by their measurement. This will be a good speed-training location as I get ready for the Budapest Half Marathon September 5.
1 Comment » - Posted in General by Jerry
Friday, August 6th, 2004
Bammo!
Yesterday an explosion rocked our little village. A fireworks factory in Törökbálint blew up. Ten people were injured; one person was killed. I was in a meeting, and we all heard a sound and thought a bird had hit the window. When we looked out of the window we saw the plume of smoke rising. From our vantage point we thought a plane might have crashed at the local airport, as the runway was in the line of sight between us and the actual explosion.
The event was a big deal here in Budapest. The Prime Minister visited the site and they did an investigation. It turns out that much of the explosives were stored illegally.
No Comments » - Posted in General by Jerry
Wednesday, August 4th, 2004
Driving nightmare
Yesterday I had to drive my collision-damaged car downtown to the insurance company. On my way there I experienced my personal driving nightmare; getting stuck in the middle of traffic with nowhere to go. I pulled into a left turn lane (rare in this city of no left turns) only to find it ended with no place to turn left. Three different streets full of cars stared back at me from three different directions. The driver behind me leaned on his horn, threw up his arms, squealed his tires out and around me, and I sat there stuck in the middle of a moving intersection with nowhere to go. I had pulled past the traffic lights, so I couldn’t see those either.
I finally escaped without any further car damage and without any further energy for a few hours.
No Comments » - Posted in Hungary by Jerry
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004
Done for now
Like every other time before, I can’t break my addiction to MS Publisher. Not that I’m happy about that. I found a publish feature in it, and that was what was compelling me to switch to Front Page. So for now I’ll tell myself that I won’t go any further down the Microsoft road by learning Front Page (hopeless resistance; you will be assimilated). I’ll learn Dreamweaver and publish through MS Publisher in the mean time.
1 Comment » - Posted in General by Jerry
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004
That’s all for now. Maybe I’ll waste tonight working on this.
….Later. Yep. I’m off to the races. I wanted to modify my website to include a link to this compelling blog. But that would require that I either continue editing my site with MS Publisher (a pain) or just take the plunge and start using Front Page. Or really do it right and start using Dreamweaver. But I’m not smart enough to master enough of Dreamweaver in one night and get my site converted. So I’ll comprimise and use Front Page. But Front Page and Publisher use different publishing conventions. You’d think after all these years of version changes that MS could agree on a single way to publish web content….
