Josh Moody

Testing native wordpress application for iPhone.

I decided to go for a walk late this evening. There’s a walking trail in town that I used to visit quite often, and I am trying to start walking more. When I do go walking, it’s frequently fairly late at night… it’s not uncommon for me to go at 9 or 10 PM. The trail is paved and has lights at regular intervals (though several are burned out), and there are usually several people out, even at this time of night.

When I first started going out there a little more than a year ago, I worried a bit about being out there alone at night. Not that I’m a scaredy cat or anything, but let’s face it: There are some not-so-nice people in this world. Not-so-nice people tend to lurk in the shadows. On this walking trail, there are plenty of shadows…

I got over it after a couple walks, and hadn’t worried about it since.

Tonight, I went out around 10 and walked 2 miles. Upon arriving back at my car 1/2 hour later, I opened the door and realized the passenger side window was missing. Well, I guess it wasn’t exactly missing. I knew exactly where it was: in thousands of pieces all over the interior of my car.

My center console was open, and had obviously been gone through. I had left my wallet in the console and, surprisingly, it was still there on top of the pile. My driver’s license, credit card, and $3 in cash were still there. I guess the wallet wasn’t worth messing with.  I can’t tell that anything was stolen, luckily, I don’t usually keep valuables in my car.  I didn’t even have my iPod adapter in car tonight.

Mine wasn’t the only car hit. While on the phone with the police, I noticed a Ford Expedition had 2 windows broken out, and it appeared to have been searched too. The driver of the Expedition didn’t show up before I left, but the police were going to wait on them so they could get a report from them too.

Shortly after the police arrived, we saw somebody shooting off fireworks just down the walking trail. Thinking it might be related, 2 police officers went to investigate - but came back empty-handed.

This isn’t my first time to be the victim of a vehicle-related crime. When I was 18, somebody stole my 1986 Monte Carlo from my then-girlfriend, now-wife’s driveway. I had stupidly left the keys in the ignition. The police found it several hours later, undamaged, and being driving by a 14 year-old who had already been caught stealing 2 or 3 other cars in town for joyrides. I think he spent the night in jail, but that was about it.

The thing is, they’ll never catch the person(s) who did this, and even if they do, there will be little-to-no punishment.

Here’s an email my wife sent to some friends yesterday after talking about the plan of salvation with our 4-year-old:

Here is a sure fire way to know you child is not ready for the plan of salvation.

…I was explaining about sin and what sin is… that you can’t be good enough to get into heaven…that Christ died for our sins in our place…”…that He might bring us to God…” 1 Peter 3:18….God asks me to believe in him to take away my sin…

When I get to:
Believing is trusting what God did for me. When I believe that His death was for me, He gives me eternal life.

And then I ask: Rachel what does God GIVE you if you believe that his death was for you?

Her quick and honest response: CHICKEN POX

I think she needs more time.

Vacation is over and I start back to work tomorrow. We didn’t go on a big vacation, but several small ones instead. The main thing is that I WASN’T WORKING!

Here’s the break-down of the week…

 
Monday:
As I wrote previously, we took the family to the Little Rock Zoo.

Tuesday:
We took the kids to the babysitter so we could have a date! We watched “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian”.

Wednesday:
We loaded up the mini-van and traveled to Mena to visit the folks.

Thursday:
Today was our 9th Wedding Anniversary! To celebrate, we left the kids with the Grandparents, and went to the Raspberry Manor Bed & Breakfast. This was the best part of the trip. We got to the B&B around 3PM, then sat on the deck or in the hammock until about 5. Then we took a walk on one of the numerous trails in the area before returning for dinner about 6:30. We had a fantastic steak dinner, and lounged for a couple hours before retiring for the evening.

Friday:
Had a nice breakfast of ham and stuffed french toast, then did nothing for a couple more hours before checking out at 11AM.

Later that day, my father-in-law and I went Geocaching around town before my Wife and kids left for Conway with her parents. My Wife & kids, her parents, and her brother & sister-in-law all spent the weekend Greer’s Ferry Lake, while I stayed in Mena to visit with my own parents.

Saturday:
I attended the Acorn Reunion with my Grandpa (he also attended Acorn High School). Acorn is such a small school that they have an “all alumni” reunion each year. This is the first one I’ve attended. Aside from one 8th grader who was probably there with a grandparent, I was by decades the youngest in attendance. Most attendees were in their 70’s and 80’s. It was nice to spend time with my Grandpa anyway. Afterwards, my Grandparents treated me to a BBQ lunch.

Sunday:
We grilled steaks at Dad’s house. My grandmother baked a chocolate cake (with home-made chocolate icing… yum) and made ice-cream.

Now, it’s late Sunday. I’m home again, I’m tired, and I’m going to bed!

I’m on vacation this week, and we decided to take the family to the Little Rock Zoo this morning. It was getting hot by the time we left, but there was some nice cloud cover that kept it pretty comfortable while we were there.

This was Rachel’s 2nd visit to the zoo, and Levi’s 1st. I think Jamie and I had as much fun as the kiddos!

I just posted pictures to Flickr.

If you’re an iPhone user, you’ve probably already read that the iPhone 2.0 software is coming in early July - later than the original June estimation. You probably also know the 2.0 software will have support for built-in applications. While I certainly welcome this new functionality, I’ve been getting along quite well with the various iPhone/mobile web apps that are out there.

Here are some web apps that have made my iPhone experience more pleasant.

IMDb Mobile
http://nolanbrown.org/imdb/#_home

Not officially sanctioned by IMDb, this little web app provides a nice mobile lookup tool

NewsGator Mobile
http://m.newsgator.com/

I live between the worlds of Mac and PC. Thanks to NewsGator, I can sync my RSS subscriptions between NetNewsWire (Mac), and FeedDemon (Windows). I recently found NewsGator has an iPhone version of their RSS reader as well, http://m.newsgator.com/.

Twitter Mobile
http://m.twitter.com

While not strictly an iPhone web app, this light-weight interface does work well on iPhone.

Moviefone
http://iphone.movies.aol.com

Features iPhone-specific interface for finding show times for your favorite movies.

Weather Underground
http://i.wund.com

Not a particularly attractive interface, but it gets the job done with much more detail than you get from the built-in iPhone weather app.

Google
http://www.google.com/m

If you visit the Google home page in mobile Safari, you get the mobile version of Google by default. This interface is quite nice, and is much easier to navigate than the full version on a small screen. I am, however, quite disappointed that using mobile Safari’s search box takes you to the full Google instead of the mobile version. What gives, Google? You are already using browser detection to determine I’m on a mobile device. Why not implement this same functionality when searching from the tool bar?

After being exposed to Flickr for a project at work, I’ve finally joined the cool kids by putting my photos on Flickr. To avoid max upload restrictions, I had to spend $25/year for a pro account, but it’s worth it to get unlimited sets, uploads, and storage.

Some of Flickr’s features I like most:

• Great organization tools
• Easy uploader tool for both Mac and PC
• Multiple Access Levels (public, friends, family, private)
• Post Photos via email (camera phone + unlimited data plan = immediate posts of what I’m doing!)

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on Flickr this week while working on the aforementioned work-related project. Looking at all the amazing photos out there inspired me to get out with my camera.

I’ve taken thousands of digital snapshots over the years, but I’d like to take more than just snapshots. I want to capture things that other people actually want to see, instead of just pictures of the kiddos. Don’t get me wrong, pix of the kids are great to have, and I need to take more of those too, but there are lots of other things in the world to photograph. To this end, I spent a couple hours in downtown Conway this weekend, finding interesting things to shoot.

Here’s one of my favorites from the shoot:

You can view more shots from this weekend at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jgmoody/sets/72157605487590794/

If there’s anyone out there who still subscribes to my blog, you may be surprised to see I’m actually posting new content… yeah, yeah, I know. It’s been awhile. Get off my back already, I’ve been busy.

There was a time when I was really fired up about working on personal stuff like this after work and on weekends. But since I do essentially the same thing at work 10 hours a day (at least), it gets old and I haven’t been all that inclined to work on my blog lately.

I’ve kicked around dumping Wordpress as my blogging platform and writing my own software, but what’s the point? I just updated my Wordpress install tonight, after realizing I was several major revisions behind. It takes about 2 minutes to update vs how long to write my own from scratch? And I haven’t even bothered to do the upgrade?  And why bother if I’m not going to blog anyway?

BTW, while I was upgrading, I also installed a new theme. Hope you like it!

Web-stuff is still my job and my passion, and I recognize the need to spend more time keeping up-to-date on what’s going on in this Web 2.0 world.

In that spirit, I’ve been playing with Flickr and Twitter lately, and have pretty much embraced Flickr as my online photo gallery (I’ll post more on that later).

As for Twitter, I’m not so sure.

For those of you who have been living in a cave, the whole idea of Twitter is a micro-blog to answer the question “What are you doing?”. You are encouraged to tweet (”write”) what you are doing frequently, and a whole host of tools are available to allow you to quickly tweet (email, sms, web site). Your friends can subscribe to follow your tweets, and always know what you are up to at any given moment.

My primary problems with Twitter are:

1. If you spend all your time writing about what you are doing, how do you have time to do anything?
2. Who actually cares to know what you are doing all the time?
3. There’s some serious stability problems with Twitter, causing it to be down frequently.

I’ll probably either find or create a plugin for Wordpress that will show my Twitter updates, just for the experience of doing so, but I make no promises my Tweeting will be any more frequent than my blogging.

Meet Neville. I don’t know much about him except that he’s a boxer, maybe 2 or 3 years old. He’s a sweet dog who has had a tough time and needed a place to stay until he could find a permanent home with an adoptive family.

As of today, we are participating in a fostering program with our local humane society. We don’t feel like we are ready for the commitment of adopting a dog, but have decided to open our home to dogs like Neville on a temporary basis.

If you are interested in giving this guy or others like him a home, please contact the Humane Society of Faulkner County web site. Don’t live in Faulkner County Arkansas? Then contact your local humane society.

Update: After having Neville with us for about 6 weeks, he was adopted by a great family.  Good luck Neville!  While the experience of being a foster family was rewarding, I don’t believe it’s one we are in a hurry to experience again.  Rachel was very disturbed when Neville left.  She got over it pretty quickly, but I hate doing that to her.  Also, I’m not real fond of dog poop in my yard.  Some people are dog people, some are cat people.  I’m a cat person, and do not apologize for this (David).

A couple of months ago, I started getting concerned about my night vision — I felt almost blind driving at night. This was a bit frightening for me, because when my mother was about my age, she was diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease called Retinitis Pigmentosa — RP for short. Her first symptom: reduced night vision.

There is currently no cure for RP, and it typically results in total blindness within a few decades. Mom has no perceptible vision in one eye, and maybe 10-15% in the other. Did I mention this disease is hereditary? Well it is.

I made an appointment with the optometrist, and he checked me out real good. No sign of the disease! After the initial relief of a good examination, I forgot about the night vision problems. I don’t drive that much at night anyway.

Then there was today. It was a VERY foggy drive into work this morning, and that old sense of blindness came back. No big deal. It’s foggy. You’re not supposed to see in the fog.

After the kids went to bed this evening, I went to Wal-Mart to pick up the last Christmas present for my wife. As I pulled up to the car parked across from me in the parking lot, I could tell by the light pattern on the other car that one of my headlights had burned out. I know they were working before I went to the eye doctor, because that was the first thing I checked when I noticed reduced night vision. Must have just burned out.

This brings me to the point of this post. Sylvania Silverstar headlights suck!

I “upgraded” from my stock headlights to the Silverstar after receiving them for Christmas last year. I compared brightness after installing the first Silverstar, and it was indeed much brighter than the stock headlight… at the time anyway.

I’m somewhat of a pack rat, so I had kept my stock headlights. I replaced the burned out Silverstar with one of the old ones and guess what? The stock light was MUCH brighter than the remaining Silverstar.

Apparently the Silverstars get dimmer with age before finally burning out. The problem is, these headlights are less than a year old. I don’t expect anything to last forever, but less than a year for headlights?

What if you had more light when you needed it most, like while driving at night? Brighter light is as easy as upgrading to SilverStar® bulbs.

Source: http://www.sylvania.com/ConsumerProducts/AutomotiveLighting/HighPerformance/Silverstar/

Gimme a break.

Update: Days after posting this, one of my fog lights burned out.  I’ve also replaced the ignition switch that powers AC/Power Seat/Defroster/etc.  This week, one of the stock headlights burned out.  I replaced both headlights with Sylvania XtraVisions. We’ll see how that goes. If I have one more electrical problem, I’m trading the car in!