July 2008


Family&Tech20 Jul 2008 10:15 am

A while ago we went in to JC Penney’s and suffered through a photo shoot. After we were tortured through the decision process of picking out what shots we wanted (and after I recovered from the coronary brought on by their ridiculous prices), I walked to the register to part with our life savings.

I saw a sign about buying a CD of our session. I asked about it, and she didn’t know much about it, the CD thing was new and her manager wasn’t there. I asked if the images were hi-rez (are you familiar with their Smiles by Wire? Oh my.), and yes she thought they were. Duplication license? Yes, that was included. The CD would have all the images from our session, save for the enhanced stuff they put together.

The CD was a hundred bucks. Which, my goodness, is atrocious. But compared to the prices of their print packages it’s a better deal, I think.

So I said wait just a minute, cancel our order of the prints. But oops, she had just put it through, she didn’t know if she could cancel it. So I got her manager’s number and said I’d call tomorrow.

To their credit, the manager called us the next day with the order already canceled. And after getting all the ensuing stuff worked out, we received the CD in the mail a few days ago. Now Jewel can get any picture she wants, in any size she wants, no limits, no restrictions. And if she wants more in a year or two or whenever, we still have them.

Wait just a minute. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea!!

ITF Business19 Jul 2008 03:30 pm

I mentioned that my wife broke her toe last week. Here is a bad copy of the x-ray.

Family15 Jul 2008 07:32 pm
ITF Headquarters12 Jul 2008 09:43 pm

I posted too soon. Tonight the car broke down. The serpentine belt was toasted, and I think an idler pulley broke off and abandoned us.

Family&ITF Headquarters&Tech11 Jul 2008 11:41 am

. . .hopefully. It’s been one catastrophe after another at the ITF house.

Early in the week we had a bad rainstorm. Now, Utopia gets the bad rap for rain, but that’s just asinine. Hoosierville gets routine rainstorms the likes of which Utopia has never seen. And our basement couldn’t handle the one this week.

Fortunately it wasn’t as bad as a couple we had last year, and only a small area of carpet got wet.

We don’t have AC (pure misery, be assured), so we have what’s called an “attic fan,” or “whole house fan.” Open the windows, switch that sucker on and you get some air circulation throughout the house. Unfortunately, the outside air is so hot and humid that half the time there really isn’t much benefit.

Anyway, this fan was just getting slower all the time, it was hardly moving anymore. Come to find out the belt was shot. I got a new belt, crawled up in the attic, and put it on. Wow! That did the trick! Now there were gale-force winds throughout the house.

A couple hours later the fan motor burned up.

The next day and over a hundred dollars later, our fan is running again. That was two days ago.

That night the motherboard on my computer fried. And I have a big recording project next week.

I was up until 1:30 in the morning figuring out what I needed and ordering parts from Newegg. They got here today, so hopefully I’ll be up and running tonight.

Then last night we ended up in the Emergency Room. My wife broke her little toe.

I really hope that’s the last catastrophe, at least for this week.

ITF Business08 Jul 2008 07:56 pm

As you know, whenever you refresh an ITF page, it picks a header image from random. Stanny has been sending me more pictures of Snow Peak, and I finally got some of them up. You can look at them all at once on the header page.

Stanny’s a great photographer. I’ve been on him for a long time about starting his own website, but so far he’s dragging his feet.

Music05 Jul 2008 11:39 am

Brett Manning is my future vocal instructor. I haven’t taken his program yet (Singing Success), but I will. I’ve researched it in depth, and it’s right in line with my vocal philosophy. His approach makes perfect sense to me, I believe it’s what I’ve been looking for ever since I started seriously studying voice.

Anyway, even though I’m not enrolled yet, I keep up with him and what he’s doing with his program. A while ago he put a video on Youtube of him running up and down some scales, all over the keyboard. There was some doubt on the internet about his supposed range, so this was his response.

Brett and his goofy hat. Anyway, some genius put together this hilarious parody, and Brett’s video editor saw it and posted about it on one of their websites. I laughed until I cried.