It’s been a while since I updated. What’s been keeping me so busy?

Well mainly work. But of course there’s also family. And Jess and I have moved into our new house in Perry, it’s very nice and we’re liking being a lot closer to where we spend most of our time. (I’m less than four miles from work.) More details on the house to come later.

Work has been good as well. I’ve really gotten into video production and I’m having a blast with that. We’re gearing up to launch a redesigned website in the next couple of weeks, needless to say that has been taking up a lot of my time. Work is awesome though, it’s nice to be doing something I enjoy with people who share common goals and vision.

But, what has most changed since I last posted is Rabun. Of course she’s doing awesome and continuing to grow.

She is still beautiful and is starting to look more like Jess. Of course those two go hand in hand.

She has enjoyed several trips to the lake this year and finally got used to her life jacket.

She went to the beautician for her “first” haircut. (We had to cut her hair around Christmas just a little bit because it was just too unruly.)

She loves playing with all her other friends, especially cousins.

She had her first birthday party…

…with awesome cakes from Alison.

She enjoyed her first trip to the beach.

She enjoyed her first popcorn.

She’s almost completely spoiled, which we’re working on.

She’s still extremely flexible.

She likes to sit in her chair she got from Nana for her birthday and read her book.

Basically she’s completely awesome.

There’s an update. Hopefully it won’t be eight months til the next one, but I’m not promising anything.

When we moved into our house, we knew it would be a lot of work.  Little did I know that my dear husband would have to risk his neck cutting down limbs in one of the trees.  While Dad lifted the tractor bucket, Dan would stand and cut with the chainsaw.  He is so talented.

How does your hair look when you wake up?  Our little one has some serious bed-head issues.  

Dan acquired a rubber duck float for Rabun.  It is rather large, not really the type toy you toss into the toy basket.  As you can tell from the picture below, both of them have had a great time playing it.  So, if you come to the house and see this huge duck in the corner of the living room, please don’t be too shocked.

Rabun turned seven months on the 18th. Time is flying by.

Rabun has started her version of crawling. She’s actually been very close to crawling for a few weeks now, but still hasn’t figured out exactly what to do with her hands.

The motivation in both of these shots is the well documented screen fascination.

On January 1st I started a new job. I am now the Media and Technology Director at Cross Point Baptist Church, where Jessica and I have been attending for about two years.

I learned a lot at Fort Valley and was able to do a lot of interesting things, but when the opportunity to work at my church came along, it was very difficult to pass up.

In my new role, I’ll be in charge of all the information technology, web site, most of the publications and media, and the audio visual elements on Sunday morning. I’ve just finished up two weeks, and I’m having a blast. Working in an environment where everyone shares a common desire to excel for Christ is challenging and encouraging. The team at Cross Point is excellent and everyone gets a long well.

I’m looking forward to learning a lot and doing ministry full time.

Today marks two years since Jessica and I were married. It’s been a wild and fantastic start to our journey.

At 6:30 this morning, somewhere in Monroe County, Ga, it was 18°F. I know, because I was there.

This morning was the opening day of duck season for our region of Georgia, and we had a good day shooting.

The sunrise was beautiful, but it didn’t make the situation any warmer. After the hunt, as we trudged through the pond, we had to break ice to find some ducks. And my brother-in-law Jim got especially acquainted with the cold when he decided to jump down from his blind, which just happened to be planted in one of the drainage ditches of the pond. “Man overboard!”

Everyone got their limit, a great hunt.

I’m a big fan of Terminator: Sarah Conner Chronicles on FOX, although Jessica won’t watch it with me, what with the shooting and the blood and all. On an recent episode there was a Bible reference that I didn’t recognize, so off I went to look it up. The story is in Genesis 34, and it’s one, that while I may have heard a long time ago, I certainly didn’t recognize. I highly encourage you to read the chapter for yourself, it’s an easy read, but here’s my retelling.

Jacob has a daughter by Leah named Dinah. And someone is in the kitchen with Dinah… sorry couldn’t resist. Dinah goes out to visit “the women of the land.” I’m assuming this meant that she was gone a pretty far distance from the house. Shechem, son of Hamor, who was the ruler of the land, saw Dinah and liked what he saw. He liked it so much in fact, that he raped her. And after he raped her, he had the audacity to tell his father to go arrange a marriage.

When Jacob heard about the rape he was upset, but his sons were out in the field tending to the livestock, so he decided to just kept calm until they got home. About this time, the sons get in from the fields and are understandably upset about the rape and Hamor shows up to try and arrange the marriage between Dinah and Shechem. Not only did Hamor want Jacob to give Dinah to Shechem, he also wanted to Israelites and the Hivites to get along and intermarry and share livestock and land and generally be good neighbors. The problem with that was that God had commanded Jacob to be separate from other people of the land. He didn’t want the Israelites to defile themselves by getting caught up in the ways of the other people.

Hamor asks Jacob to let Shechem marry Dinah, in fact he says that he would be happy to pay a great “bride price” to show how much he wants the two groups of people to get along. Dinah’s brothers were still pretty upset about the rape and so they “answered Hamor deceitfully” and told him they couldn’t let Shechem, or any Hivite man, marry one of their women, because the Hivites were not circumcised. They tell Hamor that all the Hivite men must be circumcised before they can marry any Israelite women.

Hamor and Shechem think this is a pretty good deal (obviously Dinah was a foxy lady) and go ahead with the circumcision. They then proceed to the “gate of their city” and convince all the men of the town what a great deal this would be. They’ll be able to intermarry, share livestock, share land, and generally be at peace with the Israelites if only they were all circumcised. So all they men agreed to be circumcised (the Israelites must have had some awesome livestock).

Now is the interesting part, and I just can’t say it any better than did the writer so here’s Genesis 34:25-29.

On the third day, when they were sore, two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and came against the city while it felt secure and killed all the males. They killed Hamor and his son Shechem with the sword and took Dinah out of Shechem’s house and went away. The sons of Jacob came upon the slain and plundered the city, because they had defiled their sister. They took their flocks and their herds, their donkeys, and whatever was in the city and in the field. All their wealth, all their little ones and their wives, all that was in the houses, they captured and plundered.

Jacob wasn’t too happy about this, because it was going to make life really difficult on him, but in the next chapter God tells him to move anyway.

I recapped that whole story to say just a couple of things.

Genesis (and the whole Bible for that matter) is full of amazing and interesting history that we sometimes miss. I can’t ever remember this story, but it’s fascinating. 

And finally, I hope if I ever have a son, he’ll be a brother to Rabun like Simeon and Levi were to Dinah.

You know you would love to have hair like this!

Rabun has been eating cereal for a couple weeks now. She’s getting much better, but at first it wasn’t such a breeze.

(For the record, the bib had a cow on it. I was wrong.)

Every year the Perdue clan gets together for a weekend in October and we all head to the Georgia National Fair. This year, with 10 kids running around (well, some weren’t running yet), it was a blast. I finally got around to uploading some pictures and thought I would share.

The festivities started Friday night when the Ghioto clan and mom and dad spent the night at the house. Jessica had made some of her world famous chocolate chip cookies. They were enjoyed by all.

Rabun got to hang out with her Big Buddy.

The fair is one of Jessica’s favorite things. She’s trying very hard to pass this on to Rabun, who enjoyed it, but didn’t completely understand what the fuss was all about.

We got to the fair early in the morning (good idea Mom!) so there wouldn’t be a big crowd. The big Pink Slide was probably the most popular attraction for both kids an adults.

The fun houses were also popular.

There was of course, plenty goofing around.

Plenty of children to hold.

Plenty of rides to ride.

Plenty of prizes to be had.

And generally just an awesome time with an awesome family.

Thanks for a great weekend to my family, the most awesome family on the face of the planet.

(As a side note, every year, right after we open presents and eat a big meal, we sit down and decide four times during the coming year when we will all get together as a family. I would highly recommend this to large, growing families that want to stay close. The dates may have to change, but having it on the calendar is better than not.)

Met Rabun and Jessica today for lunch, which is always a treat. Rabun was in a good mood, although a little pensive about the election results.

Everyone ready for a really geeky post? Good, let’s get started.

A couple months ago I started to run out of space on my hard drive. Of course I shuffled stuff around and deleted as much stuff as I could, but with an iPhoto Library growing by leaps and bounds thanks to you-know-who it was inevitable that I was going to have to do something to get more storage space. So I finally made the painful decision to upgrade my hard drive in my MacBook Pro. Painful, because the process is fraught with danger. (Opening up any laptop is generally not fun, MacBook Pros are especially difficult.)

Last night the package came in and I installed it. The process was stressful, but everything went according to instructions. I also decided rather than just copying everything back over from my old hard drive, I’d go through and manually install everything I used. This would give me a good chance to evaluate what I was really using and get rid of the cruft. Below is a fairly comprehensive list of what I’m using on my Mac. (This is really more for me than anyone else, this list is going to be pretty boring.)

Basic Stuff

• Safari – My current browser of choice. I tried WebKit Nightly builds for a little while, but the unpolished nature of them could sometimes be frustrating.
• Firefox - With extensions WebDeveloper Toolbar, Firebug, and Quartz PDF Plugin. I really only use Firefox when I’m doing development.
• Camino – For when a site won’t work in Safari. Much more Mac-like than Firefox.
• Opera and Webkit - Simply for testing websites, these don’t see much day-to-day use.
• Mail, iCal, Address Book, iChat- I’m a sucker for integration the way OSX does it. I use BusySync to keep iCal and Google Calendar playing nice.
• iWork ‘08 – Office was one of the first things to go when I started running out of hard drive space. Pages, Keynote, and Numbers are all great.
• iLife ‘08 – Most notably iPhoto, but iMovie sees some occasional usage as well, the other apps are there if I need them. I use the iPhoto plugins Flickr Export and Keyword Manager.
• iTunes – Of course.
• Miro – For watching video podcasts. (Jessica and I are getting rid of cable, so this will be getting more time in the coming months.)
• iBank – Quicken on the Mac is not good. iBank is not excellent, but is continually improving.
• NetNewsWire – Synced with NewsGator so I can read my feeds in multiple locations. Was using Google Reader until this went free, then decided to check it out and have never looked back.
• OmniOutliner – I’m always glad when I crank this up to create some sort of outline or list for doing something. Has a myriad of uses.

Development

• Adobe CS3 Web Premium – I use most all of this suite. Photoshop, Illustrator, Bridge, Fireworks, and Flash see enough game time to live in the dock.
• BBEdit – I wish I was good enough with this to use it to it’s full potential, but when I really want to do some serious text editing, this is what I use. It was the first web development tool I got on the Mac, so I feel some allegiance to it.
• Coda – Awesome tool from the guys over at Panic. 
• CSSEdit – For when I’m just going to be doing CSS work for the day.
• VectorDesigner – When I don’t want to wait for Illustrator to start up so I can draw a star and save it.
• Pixelmator – When I don’t want to wait for Photoshop to start and Preview can’t do the job. Rare occasion, but still use it.
• Wacom Tablet – Not really an Application, more of a driver, but I needed to put it down because it will really change the way you work on graphics.
• Transmit – The FTP client of choice. Another one of the first programs I bought for a Mac, not only do I feel allegiance to it, but it’s pure awesome.
• MAMP – Wonderful test environment that goes with me.
• MySQL Tools – Because I don’t want to have to remember the command line to give a user permissions to a database. 
• VMware Fusion – Virtual Machines were some of the first things to be deleted when I started running out of space. Now I’ve got room to have several and I’m looking forward to it.
• Colloquy – Ok, not really a developer tool, but I use it to hop on the Drupal IRC rooms occasionally.

Media

• Preview, QuickTime Pro, VLC, Mplayer OSX, Perian - All excellent media apps that shouldn’t be under-estimated.
• VisualHub – I read the instructions on how to back this up carefully when it went end of life. I’ve always found it indispensable and was sad to see it go.
• ffmpegX – I used this before VisualHub was around. It’s on my hard drive now because of VisualHub’s demise.
• iStopMotion – I don’t think I’ve every actually used this, but I’m always envisioning that day when I’ll do a picture montage or something similar that this would be really useful for.
• Handbrake – What can I say, it’s awesome.
• Audio Hijack Pro and Fission – Two of my most recent additions. Haven’t used Audio Hijack Pro yet but I do see a use in the future. Fission I use to losslessly edit MP3s and other audio. Much better than the respected Audacity for simple edits. 
• CoverSutra – Could definitely live without this, but it’s nice to have and it came in a bundle.
• Amazon MP3 Downloader – Um, because.
• ComicLife – It’s amazing how funny pictures become when you can add a caption to them.

Utilities & Miscellaneous 

• 1Password – Oh how I love thee, let me count the ways. Seriously though, I didn’t realize how good a password manager could be until this little gem.
• Angry IP Scanner – For scanning networks when you can’t remember the IP of the server and it would be faster to scan.
• AppZapper – For removing apps and their sundries. 
• Automator – Comes on every mac and I’m finding more and more uses for it.
• Awaken – Came in a bundle and sometimes comes in handy. We used it in the first exhausting days of Rabun’s life to track feeding times.
• Backup.app – A MobileMe member exclusive, I use it to back up my iPhoto library to a portable hard drive to put in the fire safe.
• Caffeine – For those times when you want to keep your Mac awake.
• Chicken of the VNC – A good VNC client, although I also use the built in Screen Sharing app that’s now in Leopard.
• coconutBattery – To see just how awful my battery is doing.
• CoRD – Better than Microsoft’s own Remote Desktop app.
• Delicious Library – I need to update my library with all my recent purchases, but for some reason I like having all my books, CDs, and DVDs cataloged.
• DestroyFlickr – An excellent interface to Flickr and the best AIR app that I’ve found so far.
• Disco – For simple burning of CDs.
• Disc Inventory X - To see where you’re using all that space at.
• Flickr Uploadr – For when I want to get a picture onto Flickr without going through iPhoto or the web page… when would that be again. I don’t know, but it’s there.
• Fluid – For creating site specific browsers, which I have for Google Calendar, Docs, and Mail, Facebook, Flickr, Remember the Milk, and WordPress.
• iStumbler – For finding out how many and how good your wireless networks are.
• Keyboard Cleaner – For when you don’t want to cut your Mac off and you don’t want to rename your hard drive, but you do want to clean your keyboard.
• Name Mangler – Useful for renaming a bunch of files, but I also use Automator for renaming groups of pictures.
• Paparazzi – For taking screen captures of websites.
• Snapz Pro X – For taking screen captures and doing instructional videos.
• Skype – Don’t really use this a whole lot, but it’s there if I need it.
• Speed Download – Came in a bundle, again, I don’t use it a lot, but it’s there if I want to.
• SuperDuper – Great utility for making a bootable backup of your hard drive. Used this before replacing my current drive.
• The Unarchiver – Useful for uncompressing more than just Zip files. Handles all those weird file formats very well.
• Unison – I don’t have a Usenet account anymore, but if/when I do, this is what I’ll be using to access it.
• SoundSource – Useful if you are constantly plugging/unplugging a USB headset.
• Secrets – Preference pane that reveals a lot of hidden stuff in OSX.

Wow, that’s a long list.

There were a couple of apps that didn’t make it onto the new hard drive. They shall remain nameless, because they’re not necessarily bad, I just didn’t have a use for them.