I’ve signed up for the Fundamentals of Weather course.  It meets the requirements for a Science class with a lab (4 credit).  It starts Monday 8/24 when I get back from vacation.  I chose this class and the General Oceanography course as they both seemed interesting.  The General Oceanography class fits with my diving so we’ll see just how well I do when I take that one in the spring.

I don’t think I’ll try to take another accelerated class but who knows, I have been tossing around the idea that if I took the other two remaining classes back-to-back I’d be done at the end of the spring semester.

After a lot of reading and visiting stores, we’ve purchased a guitar.  Right now Petra, Rebecca, Jonathan, and of course my little rock star Sara-Lee all want to play the guitar.  I don’t know if I’m lucky or not but Timothy wants to play the drums.  I’ve tried to sway Rebecca into playing the Piano.  She’s already learned some of the basics and I can’t have her and Jonathan always fighting over the guitar.  I also want to give Jonathan a chance to excel in something first.  He’s always following in her footsteps.  Rebecca and Sara-Lee want to play an electric.  Petra and Jonathan want to play an acoustic.

Given this, I needed to find a guitar that “fits” Jonathan and Petra.  Neither one of them can really handle a dreadnought guitar.  I’d bet that in a couple years Jonathan will grow into it but I need to find a guitar that fits them both comfortably today.  If the guitar is too hard to play or uncomfortable, they will give up on learning it.  I finally got them to both agree on an Mitchell MO100 Folk Acoustic Guitar.  It’s smaller and seems to fit them both.  It was also inexpensive as guitars go.

Now what I’ve not really said is that I’ve always had a desire to learn the guitar.  I’ve played the Violin, Trumpet, Chello, and Baritone.  If I were buying a guitar for me, I would have bought the Seagull S6.  It was way to big for either Petra or Jonathan.  Again, let’s see if I stick with it for six months or so.  If I do and I am still enjoying myself, I just might buy my own guitar

We’re heading down to Florida to spend two weeks with my parents.  We’re all looking forward to a break   We’ll  be on vacation from 8/6 until 8/23.

I just completed the Introduction to Psychology course.  I’ve got to say, the amount of reading, writing, and other assignments is just about too much.  Understand that just because a course is accelerated, it does not mean you have less material to cover.  I did pull an “A” so I don’t have that much to complain about.

I signed up for Introduction to Psychology.  I’ve decided to take an online accelerated course (8 weeks instead of 15).  Wish me luck!

I decided to see just what I need to complete my Associate’s degree so I had an academic evaluation done.  To my surprise, I am only six classes shy of my Associates in Transfer Studies Degree Program.  I also found out that if I submit a copy of my Military discharge, this should meet at least one of those requirements.  If I submit an Academic Standards Petition for Computer Competency requirement, proving I know how to use a computer , I could remove another required class.  This just leaves me with four.  They are two science, and two Social Behavioral Sciences General Education requirements.  This played out to be Introduction to Psychology,  Introduction to Sociology, Fundamentals of Weather, and General Oceanography.  I chose the two science classes as they seemed interesting to me

I just stumbled on a really cool app.  1st you need a jailbroken phone.  All you need to do is to install MobileSubstrate and VoIPover3G located in the Cydia application.  I’ve tested it with Skype and it works great

After years of avoiding dancing, I finally decided to take some lessons and see if I really have “two left feet”.  I spent the better part of a month reading up on styles, schools, and teachers.  From what I could see, the best known schools are Arthur Murray or Fred Astaire Dance Studios.  Where we live, my option was Arthur Murray.  I decided to sign up for six lessons to see if this is something that I might like to learn.

Last October when Hostmonster moved my site from one of thier smaller servers to the new hardware, they somehow screwed up my photo site.  I finally got some time and moved the site as is to a new location and re-built it.  The software package I use is called Gallery.  I’m using version 2.3 which is quite stable and very nice.

Once I got everything back up, I re-imported my parents 488 photos.  The import process was able to read the pictures from the old site but I had to copy by hand all of the picture titles.  As you can guess, it took me hours to get them all.  I had the kids help and do a spot check to see if I missed anything.

I also need to get the 10,000+ photos on my Mac organized.  I’ve decided that the website, my Mac, and my new external NAS are all going to be one project.  Right now they are all located inside iPhoto 08.  I don’t like that they are all stored in one big bundle.  I also can’t nest them.  Nor can I adjust specific colors (I.E. red for dive photos).  This is a big limitation in my eyes.  To solve this I bought Aperture.

I’ve been running this site on WordPress.  I finally took some time and upgraded from 2.5.1 to 2.7.  It took me a bit to get everything working again.  I broke one of the main widgets, one of the themes needed to be upgraded, and I found a couple sites lost the bot blocker software I installed.  That said, I think it’s done and everything is working again.