What would a musician be without a piano? And what would a computer-loving musician be without a digital piano? In the spring of 2009, I finally purchased my pride and joy: a Yamaha Clavinova CVP-307. This baby has it all: the touch of a baby grand, beautiful sound that uses microphones in the cabinet to sample reverberations in the room to give the sound richness and texture, hundreds of sounds, styles (to auto-accompany whatever you play) and songs (which you can play from music directly on the screen), USB storage, digital recording, video out (for large screen playback… including karaoke), and dozens of vocal harmonization configurations. But what’s really great is the story of how I finally came to own this beautiful instrument.
Book-Reading
So, I was off to a good start this year, reading 5 books in the first part of January. I’m a little at a standstill right now, mainly because I’m getting sick of Sherlock Holmes on my PPC (but am determined to finish the collection. Ugh), and am out of Audiobooks to listen to on my commute. I should probably make more time for reading paper books (I finished two on my last business trip), since that’s where I have a bit of a queue lined up.
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), I’m abandoning Dune, an audiobook I’ve had for awhile. I was a bit apprehensive to try it to begin with (20 hours is a big commitment), but then saw it on a list of 1000 books you must read. So I tried it out. I think this comic explains the main reason I put the book down. Less than one part into the book, and I couldn’t understand half of what was being said.
At least I have a few good audiobooks waiting for me in the next few weeks. Hopefully I don’t become too stagnant.
Huge update to the gallery
I just completed (actually am still in the process of completing) a huge update to the gallery. I’m filling in some missing holes from previous years, re-structuring some of the albums (‘Family Picture Archive’ got way too huge, so I’ve broken out 2005-2007 into separate years… will probably do older years similarly), and getting our latest albums up-to date. I have every intention of getting videos up and working in the gallery, but for some reason my trusty FLV video converter is choking on our cameras’ videos. I put the raw AVI’s up in some galleries, but I’m not sure they can be viewed online.
The other thing I’ve found is the color copiers at work are also super-fast high-quality scanners. I’ve been scanning baby books and can do 50 pages in around 15 minutes. I haven’t had a ton of time to work on it (I like to stay away from my family as little as possible), but next up on the agenda are all kinds of old photo albums. I’ve wanted to digitize them for a long time, but regular desktop scanners are SOO slow.
Anyway, here’s a sampling of albums that are now available in the gallery (all require registration and logging-in; remember, you need to log in at https://flessnerfam.com/gallery/, NOT this page):
- Monthly albums from May through August of this year including additional folders for:
- Ben’s work trip to Phoenix
- Memorial Day Gathering
- Buenting Family Reunion
- Our Vacation to Ames and the Iowa State Fair
- Family portraits from Sears (with reprint rights)
- Shots from the farm where Amanda grew up
- Flessner reunions in Madrid, IA from 2005 and 2004
- 2006 – Amanda’s baby shower, Madison zoo trip, Buenting reunion in Webster City, Theresa & Ian’s wedding, Nick & Maggie Meyer’s wedding
- 2005 – Ben’s college graduation, Amanda’s HS reunion, Becca Weber’s 1st Communion
- 2004 – Easter, Thanksgiving, and some cute shots of Amanda ice skating
- 2003 – Mother’s Day
- 2002 – Jenna’s Graduation
Other fun things to do include slideshows, viewing albums on a google map (the ones that aren’t right around family homes, at least) and, if I ever figure out why it crashes my editing sessions… the ability to turn any picture into a puzzle!
Go check ’em out! Feel free to leave comments on any picture. Let me know if you have any problems seeing any of them.
Wedding DVD!
Did you know our Wedding DVD information is available online? Bluehost sure did and didn’t like that it wasn’t directly linked from the website. So here it is: https://flessnerfam.com/familyDVD . Oh, wait? You need a password to view them? Oh… well, I guess you had better ask me for it then. Hannah’s 1st year DVD is available too. They’re big downloads, but I’ll explain more if you really want access to them, as long as my e-mail hasn’t been shut off…
Inexperienced Biker
I appear to be a very inexperienced biker. Back in high school, my parents and I would bike all over; we’d load up the carrier and try out trails, riding entire afternoons. In college, I went through no less than 3 cheap Wal-Mart bikes. The first rusted when I left it outside all winter. The second, I abandoned at a rack somewhere on campus, and it was never seen from again. The third… and this is when I really was trying to get back into exercising, when I really enjoyed biking around town… ended its life when I tried to go down a gully across from CyRide. There was a rut at the bottom. My front tire stopped cold… the rest of us: bike, mp3 player, me… went flying. It bent the front fork (including suspension) and ruined that bike.
So, I’ve finally saved up and bought a ‘real’ bike. Well, no $1500 professional-biker type a ride, but certainly not a Wal-Mart bike. It’s nice and comfortable, and it’s crossover/hybrid tires move a lot faster than the mountain-bike tires I’ve always had before. After I lamented that the front brake was a little off after I brought it home from Madison, my neighbor (thanks, Travis!) said, “well the back one will slow you down, but the front one is what really stops the bike well.” Then he helped me get it working again. Actually, that had nothing to do with the later incident, but Travis deserves a mention, since I got the same identical bike as he.
Anyway, last Saturday, I was invited to ride on Military Ridge trail with Ryan and Niha. Since I haven’t regularly ridden for several years, I was a bit apprehensive, but I made it across town to their house without any problem, so I figured I was ready for at least a short ride on the trail. We rode over to Pizza Hut where I got my trail pass (yes, you have to pay up here in Wisconsin). The trail started just across the street. I sped up crossing the street (it was a highway after all), but then didn’t realize the trail was so close until I saw Ryan slowing down right in front of me.
I could say I’m used to the cheap junk bikes without really good brakes; I could say Travis’s suggestion put off my fears of using the front brake on my extra-fast bike; I could call it dumb luck. But overall, it was just pure ignorance and inexperience that caused me to mash both brakes as hard as I could. The front tire stopped immediately, and I took a face-plant on the gravel road just inches from starting my first journey on the cross-Southern-Wisconsin trail. Ow.
I cut up my knees pretty well. I had been wearing biking gloves (Ryan and Niha were calling me such a serious biker) which probably protected my hands. Later that day I found some cuts on my shoulder and stomach (so that’s why it hurt when I itched there!). The bike’s none the worse for it; just a few scratches on the shifters. All in all, it wasn’t that big of a deal; more of an embarrassment than a serious injury. I’m looking forward to our next ride, where I’ll hopefully get to experience the trail itself.
But to add insult to injury, back home when I was in a bit of a daze (trying not to bleed on the carpet or anything), I slipped going down stairs and lost control of a thermos of coffee from that morning. Thank goodness we have brown carpet. 🙂
New pictures and geo-tagging in the gallery
Hey, you can actually write posts on this website! It seems like we’ve forgotten how to do that. Might have to get around to updating some things. In the mean time, I’ve finally updated the rest of our 2007 pictures and some 2008 pictures from Jan-Feb. Also, I’ve been playing a bit with geo-tagging. One some of our albums (try the Honeymoon or Living Spaces), you can click on ‘View Album on a Map’ (or something similar). I haven’t tagged too many things, but it might be crazy to tag everything. Still, a fun feature to play around with.
Protected: A tooth…finally
Protected: Big Girl
Awesome Online Backup Service
Mozy seems to be a pretty awesome online backup service. I can’t say it’s the best because I haven’t tried any others, but it seems very easy and secure (and free!). You only get 2GB of space (2.25 if you use my referral code: ‘CMNX55’!), but for the data that really requires backing up, that should be decent. Plus the program is a dummy-proof auto-backup software that continually monitors your files and updates changes. It’s all secure too, with 448-bit Blowfish encryption (that’s good) that happens on your computer even before you transfer it over the 128-bit secure SSL layer. (Yes, nerds, that’s redundant, but it’s for people who don’t know what SSL means!)
I especailly loved their descriptions of alternatives to their service (my comments in [brackets]):
- Burn a new CD or DVD every Sunday night and store them at your brother-in-law’s office. [Or, in my case, it was my mother-in-law’s home safe]
- Pay $200/year for an online backup service that uses old, mediocre software.
- Buy a $200 external hard drive and hope your office doesn’t burn down. [I have several of these, but really want fire insurance. Sorry.. fire-proof safes aren’t always all that fireproof…]
- Do nothing and don’t worry about backup. (We suggest closing your eyes, plugging your ears and repeating “I’m in my happy place, I’m in my happy place.”) [< -- Awesome!]
- Run a cron job of rsync, gzip and mcrypt piped over ssh to your friend’s server over his DSL line. [I consider myself a nerd and would STILL not really like this option]
A couple other alternatives I thought up were:
- Use your huge gmail/yahoo/hotmail account storage limits as online backups – this is fine, but then you have to manage everything yourself or get some kind of patched-together program that might do it automatically for you
- Use your web-hosting’s ginormous disk space – This was actually going to be my first option, and I’ll still use it for the really big stuff (though Mozy has a $5/month option with unlimited storage that is pretty cool)
All in all, it seems like a great service. And the user-interface of the program you install is so easy that a computer-inept person can figure it out, and a computer ept person can configure and tweak it to do just what you want.
Give it a try, it’s pretty awesome.