Monday, July 17, 2006

Baby Blessing

On Sunday, we blessed Katelynn. We did it at the Barnes home. It was great. And afterwards, there were many pictures taken. Here is a sample of the many pictures taken.





Here is a four generation picture. Four generations of women. Great-Grandma Goldthorpe, Grandma Barnes, Jen and Katelynn.


Here are all the men involved in the blessing.





Saturday, July 15, 2006

I am in!

So Jen and I came to SoCal on Friday and when we got here I checked my email. I received an email that said

Subject: Admission Decision

"Dear Student,

The Admissions committee met this morning. Please log onto the Marriott School Website (where you applied) to view your decision.

Thank you"

So I signed in and I have been accepted to the School of Accountancy. YAHOO!! It was a huge releif. So I start this fall and I have a few things to do to finalize the process but I am in. I will be an accountant in 2-3 years. Isn't that exciting? Well for me it is — please refrain from any "dull" jokes. Thanks.

For you poor souls pt3

OK I have had this written for a couple weeks but work has gotten crazy and I have had minimal lunch time to do anything. The spare time I have had, I am usually trying to look something up. Well, I am here in SoCal now and have time to breath. So here is part 3.

Live Bookmarks using RSS feed reader -- Ok, this deserves a little explanation to what RSS is first. Wikipedia has a good explanation as to what it is. Basically, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (at least that is what I heard first, but like all acronyms, there are probably several). It was developed for news companies, like CNN or ABC, to be able to make news stories easily accessible to the public. Well, as technology goes, other people find other uses for it. Blogs and news are pretty much the most popular uses for RSS. RSS is basically a page that contains all the stories/posts of the organization. The administrator of the website the blog or news is on can tell the RSS on how many stories/posts to keep on the RSS page. As a new page is posted, the oldest one is removed so that there is always the number the administrator set.

Now there is a whole lot of different uses for the RSS but Firefox and Safari use it in a way that Firefox calls Live Bookmarks. Basically, the Live Bookmark is a folder in your Bookmarks folder that has a bunch of pages. The difference is those pages are not always the same pages (they aren't static, they are dynamic) and will contain the pages that are in the RSS. I find the Live Bookmarks most useful when they are in the Bookmarks toolbar folder. You can also put a bunch of Live bookmark folders into one folder, so you can have all your news in a folder and then you can easily scan the headlines.


Or you can have all the blogs important to you in a folder so you can easily see when they have been updated.


My blog is set at seven posts for the RSS feed. I found this guy's page which discusses using Live Bookmarks in Firefox.

So what! Well I like to use them to check out the latest blogs and see if there are any new posts. It saves time because it takes only a second to scan the first couple at the top of the list and see if I have seen it or if I am even interested. I don't have to load a page and battle all the blurbs or ads or blah. I can search just a list of the headlines. To me that is way nice, since it can be annoying to go to a blog and see that there is nothing new (as a few people probably are with mine the last couple weeks).