John, my brother, is off for a week at the Olympic Training Center, so I get to take care of his dog, and his llamas. Seeing John leave.. with luggage ..made Buckie become 120 pounds of Sad and Lonely Dog - Buckie just mopes around, barely moving his head when you walk into the room. (Give him five days, though, and he will probably come back to quasi-normal. ) The llamas are a lot of fun, as they peek and peer at you as you bring their food buckets to them, so skittish and yet so curios.

So what did I do on Christmas Eve? I learned XML-RPC. The same folks that brought us Smarty have a great XML-RPC library for PHP. I’m in love with the concept now that I can see that it is doable and usable by humans..

I’ve never seen a paint job like this before. At least five different colors of paint are in various states of peeling off, or spray painted on. It’s pretty unique.

We are back from a quick trip to Arkansas for Chirstmas. Good to be home.

Elizabeth played CD’s off of her laptop for us, since Harvy does not have a CD player. We also watched quite a few DVD’s from her iBook during the three days we spent on the driving.

My little sister got to run camera for the first time at our Church’s Christmas service tonight. Naturally she was thrilled at being “Camera Two”, and taking orders over headset.

Learning by diving into to something is a family habit I guess. I ran the lighting board on my first paid show at the age of twelve, and John ran his first paid show on the spot light at the age of seven. No one batted an eye when we turned around and saw Elizabeth sitting behind a camera, we just waved and went off to find a seat. I love it that Dad trusted us with such stuff, and is willing to “hand us the keys” and then walk off and let us be responsible for whatever.

Going in to get my driver’s license today (which I finly got around to getting), the parking lot of the local DMV (Division of Motor Vehicles) was swarming with news trucks, from several stations. Inside a news reporter was briefing a employee on where to stand in front of a camera. As soon as the camera person from one station left the building, a camera person from another station came in and began recording. As we went through the inevitable lines, I was wondering,”What is going on here?”. After more waiting in line, taking my road test, and getting the final paper work done, it was time for me to get my picture taken. Even 45 minutes after we pulled up there was still a camera person in there. I may be on the news tonight, because he was looking for pictures of me getting my picture taken.

So after he’d stop recording, I asked him, “What is this all about?” “Oh”, he said, “Someone tried to steal the camera and the computer attached to it. Now we’re doing a follow-up story about how the DMV is back in operation now.” There are many DMV offices in the area, so it’s not like the entire state of South Carolina can’t get driver’s licenses. The only thing I can conclude from this is the Charlotte must be really bored for news today.

Broadcast news outlets - indeed probably any news company that depends on advertising for their money - has to have news to put on. That means that they’re sort of more like entertainment than real news. If you have a lot of important news on one day, some of it may be bumped aside. If they have no important news, well, they will go find something and make it look important! It’s not terribly good system for finding things to think about.

“Damage to the building is estimated at $75.” – Found on of the local TV stations home page. Heh, it probably cost the stations around $1,000 to put this on the news.

I’m using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to type this post, and it appears to work wonderfully. Straight out of the box, Dragon NaturallySpeaking gets about two out of three sentences correct. Considering that IBM ViaVoice got perhaps two sentences correct - in yesterday’s entire day of use - this is pretty good. Correcting mistakes is easier with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I just tell it to pick the word that it missed, and then choose from a list of correct phases - using only my voice. The program’s interface is also much better. The only sad thing about it, it only works on a PC. I do all my work on Macs, including e-mail, web site browsing, and writing. I will likely write a small program that takes what I speak on the PC and places it in the Mac’s clipboard.

I got IBM ViaVoice but sadly it’s quite terrible of debt its intended use and. All well and is it like a return of a tryout in Dragon’s NaturallySpeaking I hear the Dragon NaturallySpeaking is much more effective. I got all listed funny as it did of sentences I tested out with the dance that you concede live with said and what it put down paper. I’ve gone through the training routines but sadly its not packer yeah.