Luke’s Notebook

Today we had a really long softball game. Instead of the normal seven-inning game, we played through the 10th inning because we were tied and neither team seemed to want to score! That changed in the top of the 10th, when Philip’s base hit over the first baseman broke open the gates, and we ended up scoring five runs in that inning. The opposing team scored three in the bottom of the 10th, but we were able to hang on for a 7-5 victory. Good going, guys! Unfortunately, I didn’t contribute much with my bat, going 1-5. Yuck! I’m now 10-15 for the year, and that’s a pretty good mark. So I’ll just have to do better on Thursday.

I’m actually going to head off to bed. I still want to do a recap of the whole wedding job over the weekend, but I’ll just see how things go. If I can find the time in the next day or two, I’ll do that. If not, I’ll just have to skip it or maybe give you a brief synopsis of the weekend. Good night!

Yippy! I did! I made it through the weekend, which turned out to be busier than I had even imagined! Hurrah! Hip, hip, hooray!!!

Oh, yeah, and I finally got my journal up and running again. The reason it was down because I had to, at the very last minute (or day, anyway) switch our website from the “new” server back to the old server. The deadline had crept up on me, so I have been kept very busy the past few days as I’ve taken care of things and have gotten the website back onto the original server. Things are going well so far. Thank God!

About that wedding…

It went very, very well! I’ll have to expound on that some more soon, but rest assured that the videotaping of the wedding and the reception went very well. I think we’ll give this couple a very nice DVD.

I have some more work to take care of, but I felt I needed to check in since the journal was on the fritz for the past few days. And, really, there have not been many entries at all in the past several weeks. I tell ya, it’s been busy. But hopefully I can get back in the habit now that things are slowing down a bit.

Until next time,

Luke

Tomorrow is going to be so busy! I’m going to Belleville in the morning to take care of a few computer-related things for an attorney, and then in the afternoon Mark and I are hitting the road, driving up to Pana, Illinois, where we are set to videotape a wedding on Saturday. The rehearsal is tomorrow evening, and since it’s a two-hour drive one way, we decided it would be smartest to simply stay tomorrow night in the area. That way, we don’t have to drive an extra four hours.

So I’ll be gone, not getting home until probably very, very early Sunday. If you would, please pray that the videotaping of the wedding and reception goes extremely well. God, give us wisdom and please bless our equipment!

That’s about it, I suppose. I’ll check back in when we return.

I’m about to go play an early softball game in Shiloh, because a friend of Paul’s was looking for a sub for a team playing over there, and Paul asked if I could play. I’ve never played there, but Shiloh is a nice area, so it should be fun. It’s a 6:30 game there, and then we have our regularly-scheduled 9:30 game over in Belleville. So I’ll have a couple of hours in between games, and I’ll probably just come on home and leave with the rest of the guys for the 9:30 game.

But, for now, it’s time to get going.

We received a late burst of rain this evening, and it was enough to wash out tonight’s game. That means we’ll have to wait until Thursday evening for our next game.

I’m going to get to bed now, since I’ve really been trying to get on an earlier schedule. So here’s where I can help my own cause!

Tonight we played our first softball game of the year 2005, and we started off on a good note, as we defeated Morning Wood in seven innings. It was actually a pretty close game, and we didn’t play nearly as well as we could have, but it’s nice to have a win to start things off. I batted 3-3 with one walk. Batting a perfect 1.000 so far! Tomorrow night we play at 9:30, so it’ll be a late one.

In other news, I finally bought a new video card for my computer. The built-in one that my computer has just isn’t very good, so I’ve been thinking for quite some time that an upgrade would be very helpful. It’s actually been nearly two years that I’ve been batting the idea around, but just recently I’ve gotten inspired and, with talking to my friend Ryan, who really has a lot of knowledge about this stuff, I finally decided to just go ahead and fork over the dough and buy a card.

I’ve been searching around on eBay, and I ended up buying an nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4200 128MB AGP card for $55.55 after shipping. That’s a pretty good deal for that card, and it’s supposed to be a pretty good performer. It’ll be interesting to see just how big of a difference I’ll notice when using it. I paid via PayPal, so I might be receiving it within a few days here.

I’m going to get going now, as I have to finish up the nightly website updates. See ya!

I’m so happy that Sunday is here. How wise God is to set aside a day of rest. It just helps so much to really get a change of pace and refresh yourself before another work week. It’s the perfect way to end a week.

Right now, I’m in the middle of playing a game of Reversi in the Game Room. The Game Room, by the way, is part of our website, and we currently have Reversi (or Othello, as some call it) and a really creative game called Tic-Tac-Tics. Jude came up with the concept of the latter game and actually put together both games. It’s very neat! Almost like a miniature MSN Gaming Zone or Yahoo! Games or something. It’s a lot of fun!!

This is almost embarrassing, but the highlight of my day came when I pinged some websites and, much to my delight, discovered that our ping times have dropped significantly! A “ping time,” basically, is the time it takes for my computer to communicate with any given computer — typically a website.

Anyway, our ping times since getting this wireless Internet have been anywhere from 90 to 120 milliseconds. Well, today, I decided to ping google.com, and I was getting results in the 50-60 ms range! So since then, I’ve been pinging all sorts of sites, and just getting excited over seeing those low numbers show up. Here’s what it looks like when I ping google.com

Pinging google.com [216.239.39.99> with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 216.239.39.99: bytes=32 time=60ms TTL=240

Reply from 216.239.39.99: bytes=32 time=63ms TTL=240

Reply from 216.239.39.99: bytes=32 time=42ms TTL=240

Reply from 216.239.39.99: bytes=32 time=46ms TTL=240

Ping statistics for 216.239.39.99:

Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:

Minimum = 42ms, Maximum = 63ms, Average = 52ms

An average of 52 milliseconds is excellent! Compare that with the 2,000+ (I think) milliseconds we would get with satellite, and the difference is incredible!!

Well, there’s no doubt about it now. I’ve blown my cover. The whole world will now know how these strange little technical things excite me. But, really, it makes sense. A lower ping time simply means that your connection is going to be quicker in every step. Be it load a webpage, check e-mail, play a game — everything will be faster! And that’s a good thing.

In other news, I finished up on my last typing job! It’s really nice to have that over and done with. It ended up being 87 pages long, so it was quite a task. And, again, the subject matter wasn’t very pleasant at all. But, thank God for the work! I’d rather have a large amount of work than hardly any. God is good!

I played at 8:30 this evening, and my team won two of three games. We lost the first game, which we were actually leading most of the time and only one point away from winning it when the other team mounted a good seven- or eight-point comeback and ended up winning. Oh well! We had some good games. Next Wednesday, we’ll play one of the best teams out there, and the week after that we play my brother Paul’s team, which is also really good.

My typing (transcribing) job is coming along well. I’m up to Page 75, and I think I’m at least 75% of the way through with the project. It’s just a single audiotape, and I’m halfway through the second side of the tape, so I’ve got to be approaching the end. And, trust me, that is something I’m looking forward to. This isn’t a very pleasant case, unfortunately.

The Braves won tonight, improving to 1-1! The Cardinals lost, though, and so they’re down to 1-1 themselves. Reggie Sanders hit a solo homer, and now he has two in the young season. I hope he has a great year!!

And the craziness just continues, doesn’t it?

Seriously, it’s probably been the most packed, diverse, busy and all-around crazy three-week span that I can remember! I’ve been wearing so many different hats lately. Care to see them? They’re truly lovely.

Hat One: Webmaster Webmaster of FamTeam.com. This has kept me very busy with all of the work we have done to the site leading up to and after the airing of the Montel Show on Good Friday. On top of that, we have encountered some really strange server problems in the past week or two, which have really made things confusing. I’m still trying to get things totally ironed out.

Hat Two: Network Administrator Well, that’s a fancy way of saying I take care of the network we have in our house. We’ve been having some issues with that, too, and I don’t know whether they’re related to the hub we have, one of the two routers, a computer that’s connected to the network and possibly infected with a virus or spyware, or if it’s something totally different! So that’s another thing I’m working on, trying to figure out what in the world is going on here.

Hat Three: Transcriptionist I have been typing in hours upon hours of video- and audiotapes over the past couple of weeks. These particular jobs are pretty rare, so it’s odd that we would have two different clients ask us to transcribe tapes within just a couple of weeks of each other. So I’ve been doing lots of typing — a good 365 pages’ worth, so far — on the laptop. And certainly not the most pleasant of cases, either, as they have been about different criminal cases that are really disheartening.

Hat Four: Scopist My normal duty, scoping, has still been active, so there have been depositions that I have had to proofread.

Hat Five: Video Editor Yup, I’ve also kept up with editing the Safe At Home Show. Nothing really new on that front.

Hat Six: Sports Still playing volleyball, and softball season starts this Monday!

So I’ve had some interesting headware lately! But God is faithful and good, and He is unchanging. Though things in my life may change, He never does! It’s so comforting to have such a constant like that. God is awesome!