Luke’s Notebook

From an entry on July 29, 2005:

I was really happy with the way I was batting. I was hitting the ball much harder, and also hitting lots of line drives. Timing is so crucial in softball! When I consciously time the pitch in my head, make sure to keep my hands elevated, and also just watch the ball… good things happen then!

This is something to keep in mind! Now that I think about it, it seems that’s the key to my success. I’d also throw in there that trying to hit up the middle is really important, too, because it forces me to wait a little longer on the pitch.

I still wouldn’t mind taking some swings in the batting cages before tonight’s game, but I’m already more relieved after reading that. Phew!

We have just wrapped up our seventh week of softball. Overall, we’re 7-9, I believe, so we’re off to a decent start. Me, personally, I’ve been doing pretty well as a whole. I have been blissfully unaware of my batting average, which is nice. Yes, sir, I’ve been doing well… up until last Monday.

For some reason, starting with last Monday, I have been hitting pop-ups! I’m getting under the ball, I’m swinging early, and I’m hitting weak pop-ups to first base or to shallow right field.

We had a game last Monday in which I had a few unsightly pop-ups, and then the Tuesday and Thursday games were rained out. I wasn’t too worried about Monday’s performance, because you’re bound to have a couple of ugly swings here and there. So long as the tendency didn’t continue, I would have been all right…

Then came Saturday night. Paul, John, Jude, and I decided to go take some swings at some batting cages over in Collinsville. I had set out to take swings in front of the slow-pitch machines and really try to get a solid, consistent swing. I wasn’t panicking or anything, as I was still batting pretty well in games, but I just thought it might be a good chance to brush up on my swings.

Well, on our way to the slow-pitch cages, we passed a couple of baseball machines, which pitched 75-85 miles per hour. We couldn’t resist, and we each took a few turns trying to hit the fastballs. None of us had played fast-pitch baseball in a long, long time, so it took a lot of adjusting to try to catch up with pitches over twice as fast as what we have been seeing for years with softball.

I didn’t do exceptionally well in the baseball cages, but I made a decent amount of contact and even had a couple of really nice line drives. As I was very conscious of the danger of “ruining” my softball swing, I made sure to go back to the slow-pitch cages and take some swings there, to ensure that my timing wasn’t messed up by the baseball machines.

I was happy to see myself hitting a lot of line drives in the slow-pitch cage, and I thought I might have gotten away with something — that I was able to adjust well to the timing, to the difference in speed.

Then came the next week of softball. Monday wasn’t too alarming, as I went 1-2 with two walks. My one hit, though, was an infield single, I believe — meaning a ball that I didn’t hit very well, but I was able to run it out and beat the throw. I happen to remember my out, and it was actually well-hit — honestly, one of my only good swings of the week. The out was a fly-out to deep center field. It was just a few feet from the fence, so it almost was a home run.

So Monday was okay. Tuesday, though, I batted 1-4. The base hit was a respectable line drive to right field, but the three outs I made were not good. Pop-ups — short, weak pop-ups — and soft ground balls.

After Monday and Tuesday, I was batting 2-6 on the week. Not terrible numbers, but I just knew that I hadn’t been hitting the ball well. So coming into today’s game, I was already kind of worried about the trend that was developing.

Tonight, I walked in my first at-bat. The second AB, I hit a soft ground ball that I ran out and got a single on. Third at-bat was another one of the really bad infield pop-ups that I’ve been hitting. It was a high pop-up to first base — an easy out. My fourth at-bat, I tried something new — tried a new stance and a new bat. The result? I slapped a weak grounder to third and again managed to beat it out for a base hit.

I ended up going 2-3 today, which typically would be a really good thing. But what really concerns me is that the hits I’m getting are “cheap” hits. It shows that I’m not doing something right, because even though I might manage to get on here and there, I’m not getting many solid hits these days. Heck, even solid outs would be great, but my outs recently have been very poorly hit.

Normally, even with a less-than-ideal week of batting, I wouldn’t be too concerned. You have peaks and valleys, highs and lows, so I can’t expect to crush the ball every game. But what really has me concerned is that this week, I’m playing in a tournament, and I’m getting nervous about how I’m going to bat, hoping I don’t pop up or just tap the ball weakly.

The worst part about it is that this “slump” is now making its way into my head. I’m starting to think too much. Instead of just relaxing and kind of letting instinct take over, I’m now starting to think too much, and it’s making me paranoid. I seem to be at my best when I’m loose and free when batting. I don’t think about much, other than watching the ball and trying to hit a real hard line drive somewhere.

I think what I’ll try to do is hit the batting cages at some point before tomorrow night’s tournament game. I have a feeling that just taking 20 or 30 swings in the cage will be all that I need to get my confidence back and to get back in the groove of things.

It’s really funny how it works. When you’re hitting the ball well, it’s so easy. You just stroll up to the plate, worry about nothing, and just hit a triple or something. But then when you start to struggle, you start to worry, you start to adjust, you start to experiment. Before long, you just feel completely lost, because you can’t even remember what works any longer! What should my stance be like? What bat should I use? Should I pull the ball? But when I’m hitting well, all I think is “Watch the ball, wait on it, and hit it real hard.”

I think I’ll take that approach into the cages and into the tourney tomorrow. Watch the ball, wait on it, and hit it real hard. I suspect that my problem right now is that I’m just swinging too early. And, really, I suppose that makes a tremendous amount of sense. After trying to swing at an 85 MPH pitch, it only stands to reason that it might be difficult to adjust to a softball floating towards you.

We’ll see what happens. I know this is just a silly game and everything, but it sure would mean a lot to me to start hitting well again, especially in time for this tournament.

Earlier this week, we released the FamTeam Video Player. As of this entry, it’s only being used in the FamTeam Footage section, but it should soon be rolled out to other sections as well, including Mom and Dad’s Corner and Men’s Meeting.

I’m really excited about the new player for several reasons. One is that I built it from scratch using Flash, which is just a terrific program. I bought it last year, and I’m really happy to be putting it to use.

Aside from being proud of my own accomplishment, there are several improvements with this new setup. The video quality is a big one. We have been using (and still are, in certain sections) Google Video for many of our online videos. While it’s a great service, being free and all, the video quality just isn’t that great. No matter how good our original video is, once it gets to Google, the video get recompressed and resized before anybody gets to see it.

So this new player allows us to both have a larger video, in terms of dimensions, and also a higher-quality, clearer video. Streaming video does take up quite a bit of bandwidth, and we never had to worry about this when we relied on Google. Now that we are hosting it ourselves, this can be a possible issue, but I think our server will be able to absorb the traffic.

Another big advantage to having a custom player is, well, customization. Anything and everything in the player can be changed, as far as layout and function. So whereas right now the new video player is functional and maybe slightly generic, we now have all sorts of flexibility in terms of making the perfect video player for FamTeam.

I already am thinking of several new features I can build into the player, and some of them would be especially handy to our Family Room members. One possible feature in a future version of the player would be video playlists, or instant access to the video archives. What if a list pops up after a video finishes playing, and from that list you can select a previous, say, FamTeam Footage episode? It sure would make archive-browsing easies, wouldn’t it??

Speaking of versions, the current version of the player is 1.0.6. And you may be wondering what the deal is with versions. Well, the main reason I use version numbers is simply to keep all the changes straight. With something like this, there are bound to be bugs and glitches here and there, and so as I make changes to the player, I may just move on to 1.0.7, 1.0.8, and so on. That way, I know that if someone is using an earlier version, like 1.0.1, then they may be encountering a bug that has already been fixed, so all they need to do is make sure they have the latest version of the video player.

Now, some technical details about the player up to this point. All of the ActionScript code totals exactly 250 lines. That’s it! 250 lines of code handles everything, including a pretty useful debug mode that’s built in. I was kind of surprised to realize that this entire video player — which works pretty well, I’d say — is driven by just a couple hundred lines of code. Pretty neat!

Finally, since this player is still in its very early stages, I am asking people to give me feedback on it. How does it run? Any problems? Does the video come up fine? Any choppy playback? Any weird occurrences?

Go take a look at the player (at www.famteam.com/footage/, and then e-mail me your thoughts. Bug reports are very much sought after, but I’d also love any comments or feature requests! What would you like to see in the player? From something as simple or obvious as a volume-control bar (which we should have in the future), to something much more random or creative — let’s have it!

There have been a lot going on technology-wise over the last week here in the Arndt household/officehold.

Firstly, my new laptop. Again, it’s not new new, but it’s a replacement. I recently (end of March) got my IBM Thinkpad R50p up and running. It was a fine machine, and I was very happy with it. Until one day, I spotted an eBay auction for a T42p, which is nearly identical in terms of hardware specifications, but its housing is thinner and stronger than the R50p.

I was able to pick that T42p up for great deal, effectively allowing me to swap out my components from the fatter plastic of the R50p to the sleek titanium casing in the new machine. So the end result is a laptop with identical speed, memory, and hard drive space, but it’s now in a much nicer case. It’s quite a bit thinner, and it’s much sturdier, which is really nice.

Also, one big reason I was interested in this laptop is because it has a fingerprint scanner build into the palm rest. It seemed like such a handy (and, to be honest, extremely cool) feature to have. And I have been just having a lot of fun with it!

Obviously, using the fingerprint scanner is what initially got me thinking about the marvel of fingerprints. And it works really well. Instead of typing in my Windows password (or any other password, if I want to set it up this way), I just swipe my finger across the reader, and the laptop uses that to authenticate me. So it’s pretty neat! It’s great for security, because a finger swipe is much more convenient than typing in a password.

We’ve also been making upgrades to our in-house network here, and our file-transfer speeds should dramatically increase once we’re finished. What we’ve done is purchased a gigabit switch, which allows speeds up to 1000 Mbps (megabits per second). We have been using a hub that maxes out at 100 Mbps. So in theory, we have just made our network 10 times faster!

It will remain to be seen just what the actual speed difference is, but I’m sure it will be a significant boost. And it will help out big time when we’re transferring large files (such as videos) across the network, from computer to computer. Currently, not many of the computers have gigabit network cards, so we can’t all take advantage of the increase in speed yet. But those cards are inexpensive, and it is a worthy investment when you are able to instantly give your network a gigantic upgrade.

The CAT5e cables that we have running through the house have a maximum throughput of 1000 Mb (or one gigabit) per second. Until now, though, we had only been using them for 100 Mbps connections, so it’s a nice feeling to out those cables to work.

Finally, this last piece of technology news relates to FamTeam itself. We currently use nearly 11 gigabytes (not to be confused with gigabit, which is 1/8 of a gigabyte) of data, when you add up our e-mail, the thousands of photos, all the videos, Dad’s Diary entries, archives, and all of the downloadable media, such as the books and audio series.

I had been wanting to set up a daily backup system for safety in the event of a server crash. The problem was, 11 gigs is a lot of data! The thing is, on an average day, we probably only have a few megabytes of data change. It would be a shame to back up all 11 gigabytes every single day when 99.9% of the data has remained untouched. So, what’s a guy to do?

Enter rsync, an extremely handy Linux program that is used for synchronizing files/folders on two locations. What it does is the first time you use it, it copies all of the files from Point A to Point B. The next time you use it, though, it only copies the files which have been created or modified since the last synchronization! For us, that means it only copies a few megabytes of data each day, instead of the entire 11 gigabytes that we are using.

This is such a handy feature, because a full backup now can be done in under a minute. In about 20 or 30 seconds, I can have FamTeam synchronized with another web server.

Now, that’s great that the backup is so fast and efficient. But if it’s not set on some sort of automatic schedule to repeat itself, chances are that I will forget to run the script to back up the data, and then we’d no longer have fresh backups of the site.

Thankfully, the good folks who work on Linux also came up with cron, which is another incredible tool. This one is a scheduler, and basically you set it to run any command (or, in my case, script) at any given time, repeating it when you want. So for our specific case, I have it running every single morning, around 2:00 AM.

So now that the hard work is done, I can just sit back and relax, knowing that everything is backed up daily. Even our database — which houses the Family Room account information, the blogs (FamTeam Today and this one), Photo Of The Day entries, and Dad’s Diary — is backed up every day! That means, in the very worst-case scenario (say, our current server gets set on fire), then we would only be out one day’s worth of data.

Aside from web stuff, I really don’t use Linux that much, but I am extremely impressed with its very handy tools, saving so much time and trouble.

So that pretty well concludes our technology wrap-up! A lot has been happening around here, and I’m sure more projects will start up soon. Now that we’re migrating to gigabit here in the house, I’m starting to think about the best way to back things up internally. It’s a bit harder when you’re dealing with ~20 computers and you have terabytes of data, but I’m sure we can come up with something creative.

Psalm 130

If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?

But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared.

I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.

O Israel, put your hope in the LORD, for with the LORD is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.

I just love the idea of full redemption. When you’re forgiven, there simply is no catch to it. It’s full and complete. Every sin, every offense is just completely purged.

Over and over, I find myself kind of thinking, “Wait a second.. I know God loves me and He forgives me and everything, but look at what I just did! Surely that must disqualify for me… or something.”

Then I read something like this which just reminds me that this forgiveness covers everything. There’s nothing partial or incomplete. It’s just such a comforting feeling to realize that God forgives me, in spite of the mess I made.

This, obviously, applies to people who are truly repentant of their sins, who are through with them, who don’t want to have anything to do with them. It says in Psalm 51: A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. It’s just so great to know that when we come to God broken and repentant, that He is merciful.

Thanks to Jesus dying for our sins, we can really have full redemption — period. What an amazing truth.

Sometimes, it can be the most random things that make me just stop and stand in awe of our God. Sadly, it’s so easy for me to lose sight of how amazing He is, how powerful, how… just incredible.

I was using a fingerprint reader on a laptop today (more on that later), and it just got me thinking when I realized that once I scanned my prints, that the computer will only accept my fingerprints, and nobody else’s — which, obviously, is the idea of a fingerprint scanner.

I then looked at my fingers and was just amazed to realize that they are totally unique to me. I have been studying them, and I can definitely see the different ridges and patterns, but I’m just impressed that these fingers are like no others. They look fairly ordinary, but to know that my prints are mine and mine alone, it’s just kind of amazing.

To be honest, if I had never heard of the concept of fingerprinting, I never would have even imagined that my fingers basically contain my calling card! I mean, my fingers are pretty flat and fairly smooth, so I would never imagine that by simply placing my hand on something, that I’m leaving behind a tracking number, essentially.

Obviously, we all are now aware of fingerprints and how that works, but it just really, really struck me once I actually saw it in use. I scanned my right index finger over the fingerprint reader, and the computer logged me in. I had some of the other guys do the same thing, and… denied.

It’s things like this that make me wonder what else God has built into us that we don’t even have the slightest clue about. Fingerprints were here from the beginning. So was DNA. What else is there? We’re just so amazingly complex. What an intricate design.

It may sound strange, but just kind of seeing the fingerprint scanning in action made me just all the more floored by God’s creation, and I really can more easily understand how the God of the entire universe could still care about me. Somehow, just knowing that I’m a totally unique creation, it just really hit me that I’m not just one of billions of people on this planet. No, God fashioned me, and He gave me my own serial number, if you will. There will never be another me, and He made me for a reason, with a purpose in mind. And He gave me the ability to phone home.

Psalm 139

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth your eyes saw my unformed body.

All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand.

I love reading that! And I just love the idea of being knit together. I wasn’t just stamped out in a smoggy factory! I was handmade… by the same hands that made the world. Pretty amazing.