I received my FON router today and it already gave me some problems. When I plugged it in, the power light didn’t stop blinking, a condition which the Google results called “bricked”. I found a solution on the FON boards and was able to get it up and running again, though. I can’t believe they sent a bad router, but I guess their demand probably sky-rocketed when they started selling the routers for $5.

Anyway, it looks like it is up and running, and I was able to register it, so I guess I’m good to go. I’m going to be running two wireless networks for right now, since they don’t have a concept of local users, which I need for Angela to get online. Apparently that feature is in the works, but I guess we’ll see.

I’m merging the chucksteel.net and chucksteel.com websites into one. There might be some funkiness and missing links while I transition.

I have several projects that I’m working on.

• Ajax
  I have been playing with Ajax and have started to incorporate it into some of my projects
• The Daily Sites Project
  The Daily Site Projects helps you keep track of sites that you visit on a regular basis. It has the advantage over other sites of knowing on which days you want to visit a$ and only presents you the sites for today.
• phpBudget
  phpBudget is a simple budget tracking program. It stores the budget data in .csv files for easy importing into other programs. This project has now been turned into a PostNuke module and will no longer be developed in stand-alone form.
• SteelFarms.Net
  I’m trying to run a web hosting business.

Just a quick note that Ivy started to roll over from her back to her front yesterday. She now gets upset, though, since she doesn’t know how to get over again to her back, and she doesn’t like laying on her stomach.

We recently took a vacation to Williamsburg Virginia, which turned out quite nice. We spent a day in Colonial Williamsburg and spent most of the rest of our time there visiting with friends that live in the area. The twins performed quite well, which we were concerned about. They both did especially well in the car, which was a good surprise, but not well enough that we’re going to plan any more long trips.

Google released a calendar system today! First looks are pretty good. The only real problem that I’ve seen so far is that when I imported my Outlook calendar the times were all off by three hours. I don’t know if this was a problem on Google’s side, or whether Outlook exported the events incorrectly. Regardless, it was easy to change the events to the correct time, so I wasn’t too upset. If I had more than a few events, though, it would have been very disappointing.

Firefox shows the RSS icon when I’m viewing my calendar, but the live bookmark doesn’t seem to load, which I guess means it doesn’t actually publish as RSS. Which is a shame, that would be an awesome feature, assuming the privacy settings translated to the feed.

They include the ability to subscribe to a remote iCal calendar, which I tried to test with the Green Party’s calendar, but didn’t work. I’m thinking that’s a problem with the generated iCal file from the website, though, since it didn’t work in Apple’s iCal program, either.

What I’d really need for this to be usable is to be able to syncronize with my Outlook calendar, which is on our campus Exchange server, though. Maintaining multiple calendars is no fun, and I have a hard enough time keeping one straight.

Well, it’s the last day, and we’re done working. In the end, we worked on three houses, plus did some chores around the church where we were staying. Our team was very pleased with our work on the house, and the owner was very grateful.

All in all, I’ll say that I really enjoyed the trip. It was a good experience and I got to know some of the students well, which I always enjoy. All that is left is to get ready and back on the road, after dropping off some “Thank You” posters that we prepared for the home owners. We should be back in Carlisle sometime Saturday afternoon.

We’ve spent the past two days performing construction on a local house. Most of the walls only had drywall on the upper half when we arrived, but we have almost all of them covered now. The work has been rewarding, especially when you see the look of excitement on the owners face as she realizes that she is going to have walls again. She has been living in a trailer in her front yard along with her young son.

I spent most of the first day putting up insulation with Ben, a Dickinson student. We had a pretty good time, all in all, but I was very tired at the end of the day. It got very hot, since we had to wear long sleaves and masks for most of the day. I’ll admit that I’m not used to being on my feet all day, and so by this afternoon they were definitely letting me know that they weren’t pleased. I’m toughing it out, though, and don’t think I’ll have any problems making it through the week. Today was much better than yesterday, since we only had a little bit of insulation to hang, and that meant we could wear short sleaves the rest of the day.

Not much else to say, really, so I guess I’ll sign off.

There’s really no other way to describe what we saw today. We drove through Golf Port and saw the vast swaths of destroyed lots that resulted from the hurricane. Some of the imagery was really incredible, and the things that stand out the most were the tattered flags I saw hanging. Some were hung properly on flag poles, but many were attached to a tree, which was one of the few remaining erect items on the propery. The most drastic image was of a badly torn and tattered “Old Glory” that had been ripped from its proper place and was swaying from several tree branches. The thoughts that it left me with were full of philosophical ramblings about the state of our Nation during this time.

After Gulf Port we drove to New Orleans where we met John Miyahara, from Dickinson, in the suburbs. We parked in a restaurant on the edges of a now defunct shopping center, complete with a closed Circuit City and Toys ‘R Us. Normally this area would have been teeming with folks out shopping, but the only commercial outlet available was a catering truck doing a good business of feeding the day laborers from the surrounding areas.

From here we moved on to the now infamous 9th Ward. Seeing pictures and video cannot prepare you for being there in person. There are very few houses standing, and those that are, certainly don’t look like they are habitable. In some cases it looked like the water washed the house completely out from under the roof, leaving just that laying on the ground. Taking pictures seemed almost like a disrespect to the area, and in no way could capture what had happened there. I found myself sighting something to capture, but then when I framed the shot in the small view finder, the object lost its significance when removed from the surrounding area.

Since it is spring now, there is grass growing, and some small wild flowers were even blooming here and there. I found myself hoping for a small flower bed from when people actually lived here, but couldn’t find anything where we were. Seeing a perenial flower sprouting from the ground and coming to bloom would have given one a sense of hope that is hard to come by when surrounded by such devastation.

I’ll try to come back to this topic later, after I’ve been able to digest it some more. I will post some pictures from today as well, once I have more time, even though they won’t do proper justice to the situation.