Mike has come a long way since I gave him his first digital camera soon after Connor was born on May 1, 2005.

Here is an example of some of his experiments with HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. I find them both artistic and pleasing, worthy to me of being made into a coffee table book with absolutely no fatherly bias having entered into this judgment whatsoever!

I believe that for best effect you should watch the video in full screen mode by clicking the icon of the arrows pointing to the four corners of the screen that appears in the lower right corner of the player once you click the PLAY arrow to start the slideshow. (Escape leaves that mode.)

Mike has his own website called Shape Shifter Images and is available for portrait and other photographic work.

The visitors have gone. Recycling to do. Stockings no longer hung. Crumpled wrapping paper in plastic bags everywhere. Managed to enjoy ourselves amidst and despite the stresses of the season wrapped as they were in a whirlwind schedule nobody could control. Ate, drank, sang, laughed, talked together. Exchanged gifts as seen on TV. Played with toys. Wasted almost no time on sleep. Wallowed in the pleasures of having visitors whom I love in my home.

Not unexpectedly, acquired three almost-certain-new clients for my tech support help who were no doubt sent by Life to help me learn even more patience.

Thanks All for giving me the gift of your visit to my home.

Just sharing Gina Trapani’s excellent video illustrating Google Wave. Thanks, Gina.

I’m enjoying experimenting with Google Wave but at this stage having trouble finding playmates for this new toy.

Looking out my office window, I can’t help drifting off into the memory that Carole and I were married on August 25, 1962, a mere 47 years ago today, at the Decatur (GA) First Christian Church.  Dr. Charles Schwab performed the ceremony during which, in a move similar to that of Chief Justice John Roberts who muffed the oath of office to President Obama last January 20th, he asked me “do you Nelson Perry … etc.”  But despite that glitch the sun shone brightly on our wedding day. 

We left the church in the car that had been “decorated” by our friends but we switched cars a mile or so away from the church before leaving for our honeymoon in Gatlinburg, TN. And there we stayed for a few days at, where else?, the Ogle Cabins. 

Our first night together , however, was spent at the Riviera Motel on Peachtree at I-85 in Atlanta.  I failed to take note of the room number, I’m now sorry to recall.  It’s funny to me that details such as that are interesting this far removed from the event.  The remaining details of our first night together were buried with Carole on June 10th and my memory grows dimmer by the moment.  Yes, I know, but I ain’t tellin’.

So today I’m going to celebrate the anniversary of my wedding day by painting my ceiling. I’m a Romantic, don’t you think?

You may remember that I wondered a couple of days ago whether you were permitted to and if so, how you might go about setting up more than one Twitter account.  The answer, as I read the service agreement, is that it is permitted primarily because it is not expressly prohibited.  My reason for wanting to know that information was so that if it were legal and possible, I wanted to create an account to post updates on my friend Paul Moor’s condition.  I have now done that.  It is called FriendsofPaule and it is open for anyone who chooses to do so to follow. 

I was able to get around the fact that Twitter wants a “different” email address for each Twitter account you create by using Gmail’s flexibility. Gmail permits you to append a suffix, for instance, “+ TwitterPaule” between your email username and the domain name, i.e. Gmail.com, and still Gmail will treat it as if that suffix wasn’t there.  There are many clever uses of that feature, but for yesterday’s obstacle, that did the trick.  So I created the feed for informing Paul’s friends of any “little bits” of news I might have about him as illustrated in the following photo.

Two of the three of those so-called “tweets” are exactly 140 characters long which is the maximum allowed.  I enjoyed immensely thinking to name myself, the author of that feed, Paul’s amanuensis because that is essentially what role I am performing.  At the moment he can’t access, or possibly even absorb, Twitter, but as his amanuensis, I can convert what he tells me into tweets.  And thus his friends, if they should be challenged to cite on what authority they may have declared something to do with Paule, may simply say a little birdy told them so.

Put on your recording of John Mellencamp’s “Ain’t that America” and read on.

The story behind this picture is that Sandy Gillis, my son’s wife’s mother, was buried yesterday in one of the most unusual funerals I have ever attended. It was solemn and appropriately spiritual, but it was unique. Sandy was a biker chick of a sort who always had a Budweiser in her hand. Her funeral procession consisted of more motorcycles than cars. The minister was the pastor of the local biker’s church, and he delivered a beautiful and down to earth message of comfort to the family. He acknowledged that Sandy didn’t crowd the pews very often at his church, but he also knew her from their working together where she had an unbelievable work ethic to the point of being thought of as a workaholic and a reputation as one who would give you anything she had if you needed it. One of her male coworkers sang “Pass me not oh gentle Savior” a capella and did a great job of it. Very moving.

Cheryl asked me to read something she had written, which I was, of course, glad to do. She gave me good material with several laugh lines, something we performers always appreciate. One of the paragraphs from that eulogy received a laugh of acknowledgment from everyone that Cheryl had nailed the image of her mom when she said,

She loved so many people it would make me mad from time to time. She would let anybody that needed a place to stay, stay in the basement. She would let you eat any of the food and drink in the house even when we did not have enough to eat (as long as you did not drink her last Budweiser in the refrigerator door) and if that happened, you caught Hell!

Mike commented that he thought Sandy “would be happy with her service.” I couldn’t agree more. It was sad to have to assemble to say goodbye, but it was a perfect celebration and acknowledgment of who Sandy was, and her spirit pervaded the crowd and the entire event.

It was nice to see people comfortable being themselves and celebrating Sandy’s life in a way that she would not only have approved of but would have happily participated in. And just as Sandy would have wanted, when the service concluded, someone wheeled a cooler filled with ice cold Budweiser up to the graveside and the scene was set for Mike to take the photo. There are others here.

Even though this was a family event and therefore normally something you don’t share with the world, I thought you might appreciate hearing about this little slice of American uniqueness. I hope it brings a smile to your face, as it does to mine.

After a long struggle with cancer, Carole left this life last night at 9:45 p.m. EDT.

Though I miss her already, I’m glad she has gone through that necessary door and is now past the pain.  For those of you who didn’t have the privilege and joy of knowing her personally or of seeing her very often, this 3 minute montage will suggest something of what we all loved so dearly about her.  She was a beautiful woman in every positive sense of the word.

The funeral will be held on Wednesday June 10 at the Living Mission Methodist Church at 7289 Belton Bridge Road in Lula, Ga.    The family will receive friends today (June 9) from 3 to 5 and from 7 to 9 at the McGahee-Griffin and Stewart Funeral Home (706 778-8668) at 175 VFW Post Road in Cornelia, GA.

Flock's news reader, originally uploaded by CaptQuirk.

This screenshot illustrates Flock's new implementation of its RSS news reader, called "My Newspaper." The icon to call up the sidebar is designated by the red arrow pointing to the iconbar. In the list of RSS feeds, the bold font indicates unread items on that particular feed.

The photo is being posted, this time, using Flickr's Blog This option, so I am doing further testing to see whether it will post successfully with the Flickr tool.

I have changed the theme so that I can test whether doing so will permit me to post pictures here. So again, I’ll see if I can get the photo of “My Newspaper” from my Flickr site to post.

technorati tags: Flock, test

The lastest version of Flock, soon to be released in beta and codenamed "Cardinal," has improved the way RSS feeds are handled. The feed reader in Flock is called My Newspaper, and it is represented by an icon in the icon bar that looks like a newspaper (what else?) and is positioned just to the left of the icon for starring a favorite (which, in Flock's terminology, equates to marking a site as a favorite).

It was reasonably instinctive to me how to open the My Newspaper sidebar (just click the My Newspaper icon), but how to add a feed to the newspaper didn't seem as immediately obvious. So once I figured out how to do it, I decided to record a short video and upload it to YouTube to illustrate the process.

If you'd like to view the video, click here.

Update 4/30/06: If I had done a bit more research before posting, I might have found the explanation of how to subscribe to feeds in the specifications for the Cardinal distribution of Flock. But like so many others, I first see if I can do something without reading the directions, and only when that fails do I turn to reading the instructions.

technorati tags: video, Flock, RSS, Feedreader