Jesus loves you. This I know.This page was written by hand.
Archived news items from March 2002
Since this is old news, some links may be broken.
news from April 2002
Service was pretty awesome this morning. You shoulda been there. :) Due to some easter baskets that came our way we have a couple dozen easter eggs in our refrigerator. Lucky I like hard-boiled.
I spent a few hours this afternoon finding and checking all the lyrics for the new albums I bought yesterday, so I can add them to the jukebox right next time I get by the school (probably tomorrow at some point).
Then I spent an hour or so making my own ring tone for my phone, and I think I've got one I'm pleased with. It's not perfect, but it'll do. The quality improved vastly once I figured out I could quadruple all the note lengths and bump up the tempo by a factor of four and still have a song that sounded the same, but with finer granularity for things like grace notes and percussion.
Sleeping in the garage last night was fine. And I even woke up in plenty of time this morning despite the fact that I had forgotten to turn on my alarm.
I dropped by Chuy's again and picked up a to-go menu, so I can start learning menu items and prices and such. And no, I have no assurance that I'll actually be hired, but I'm persistent.
I also stopped by Half-Price books, which can be bad if you know you have money in the bank. I managed to spend $45, and only one thing was from my wish list, which always amazes me.
After grocery shopping I moved my bedroom into the garage (except for a few things in the closet I haven't thought of a place for). It took a little moving around of the things stored in the garage, but now I've got a nice corner to myself in there. I'm sure my cats will enjoy seeing me more often.
Sleeping until 11:00 today was nice at the time, but I fear it will make it more difficult for me to go to sleep in time to be at church by 7:00 A.M. The service tomorrow is supposed to be really awesome, and Bob claims that it is "three years in the making."
We've got today and Monday off for the Easter break. Today has been quite productive. I went by the magic post office to turn in my passport application, and I should be receiving it by early May. Then I got a haircut, mostly just getting things cleaned up a bit (so it's not noticably shorter). I dropped by Chuy's again to see if the manager was ready to talk to me about working there over the summer. Apparently not yet, so I'll try again on Monday.
I then got my car inspected, and discovered that one of my students worked there. This is the place I've had my car inspected for the last four or five years, and I've seen him there before but since I'm only there once a year I didn't recognize him when he joined my class.
I had been given a coupon for a free sandwich at Chick-Fil-A, and it was going to expire tomorrow. So I dropped by there on my way home and used it, but spent $1.29 on a Dr. Pepper (which probably cost them less than 25 cents to produce).
I finally got mySQL working on the server at school again (ssh is nice so I can do such things from the comfort of my own home), so now the jukebox at school is blacklisting albums again.
And I've been working on getting myself moved into the garage, since Andrew is supposed to be moving in with Bob and I on Monday. I'll probably get a curtain so I can have a bit of privacy (not that people come into the garage very often anyway other than to do laundry).
And I get to sleep in tomorrow, too!
I've been eating Vegemite. Be very afraid.
The leadership training yesterday was excellent, but I was having pretty bad cold/allergy symptoms in the morning. I took an antihistamine at lunch and things cleared up a bit, but by three o'clock I was about to fall asleep in my chair. I managed to make it home and went to bed a little before 4:00. Fortunately I only slept until 7:00, and was able to get up, eat a little something, and rehearse In The Light and the new worship song for this morning. Then I went to bed again around 10:30.
Today I've felt much better, although I'm still tired. The service was wonderful this morning (especially the second service). For lunch a bunch of us drove down to The Salt Lick and had quite a bit of barbecue. We got back to church just in time for the monthly leadership meeting, which was also very good.
I spent some time this evening looking for the perfect ringtone to put on my phone but didn't find one. So I'm maybe going to compose one myself. Or, at least, I'll make my own ringtone from a song that someone else composed.
Well, we finally had a normal week at school. Other than my server mysteriously being off two mornings in a row, we actually got some material covered.
The past few days I've finally had a chance to implement a feature for the jukebox I've been wanting for a long time. Now on the screen where students vote for albums, they have the option to click through and see details for that album (cover art, track names, lyrics, a review, etc).
You can check it out for yourself if you like.
Yesterday we had our pastor's accountability team meeting for this month. It was a good meeting, like they all have been so far. And tomorrow is a leadership retreat, which by accounts should be very good.
Other than that, there's not much going on.
Spring break is good. Tuesday I got to have lunch with Jack and Monty, two of the primary Ogg Vorbis developers, which was cool. We mostly just swapped college Computer Science horror stories.
I went home to see Mom and Dad (and Paul) on Wednesday evening. I slept a lot and played with Dad's new electric guitar and amp. And read some on How to Read the Bible for All It's Worth, which I'm quite enjoying. Oh, and they finally got broadband: ADSL, which was installed on Friday just before I left.
I saw several movies which happened to come on when I was flipping channels.
I came back home Friday night. During the week I also listened to and added half a dozen albums to the jukebox, did my taxes (nice refund this year), wrote some recommendations for students, filled out a passport application, started learning French, applied to be a waiter at Chuy's over the summer, played some Unreal Tournament, and worked on the redesign for Lakeline Church's website. How's that for filling your free time?
I also sang R.E.M.'s Everybody Hurts this morning at church, and did surprisingly well. Apparently I can imitate Michael Stipe when I need to.
And happy St. Patrick's Day.
I was holding out for a day where I had time to do a long-version recap of the last two weeks, but I'm going to cave and just write something comparatively short.
It's been crazy.
T.A.A.S. week ended uneventfully, though one of my students is in L.E.O. for taking a digital photo of his answer sheet on the last day. Monday and Tuesday of the following week we had our annual district-wide Continuous Improvement conference, and this year I got to attend several good sessions. Monday night I installed the newest version of RedHat on the server in my classroom, which went smoothly.
Wednesday was a regular teacher workday, and I was trying to catch up on lesson plans when my recently-upgraded server got hacked into using a packaged (script-kiddie) exploit of the wu-ftpd FTP server. So I spent about five hours trying to assess and repair the damage and lock it down. Then (coincidentally) the main web server for the high school had a hardware failure and I stayed up at the school until after 9:00 P.M. helping Judi get it working again.
Thursday the kids returned and I was behind all day. I was up late preparing material for the sub.
Friday I was at school but helping facilitate Challenge Day, a day-long thingy which was very moving and worthwhile but emotionally draining. I got home and managed to stay awake until about 6:45 P.M., but then slept a long time.
Saturday the Haiti team met for hot dogs, and I explained to the children of all the team members about the trip and why we're going. Also led worship.
Sunday evening I drove down to a friend's new apartment to just hang.
Monday was the first real day of school in a while, and I lost a contact lens. (And don't ask how.) Tuesday I saw a few select A-day kids for the first time in over two weeks, and the C.S. teacher from Cedar Park High School was there all day to observe me teach.
And today was today. I got home fairly early and was able to clean off all my desks at home, pay the bills and balance my checkbook for the first time since mid-January.
And update the web page.
February 2002
January 2002
December 2001
November 2001
archive index (for dates back to August 1998)
Jesus loves you. This I know.
This page was written by hand.