The bike ride for the day.  I rode down to Higgins Point, and was supposed to meet up with Barney, Mary Ann and Jessica, but they didn’t show until I went down and came back already. So I made it to the point 2x today. Beautiful day.

Today started out waking up at 6:00 am, which wasn’t too good, as I needed more. Gene and Rose were up, and Gene and I decided to go flying.
We just toured around the islands around Mt Vernon, and it was a nice, smooth early morning ride, which was real nice. Thanks Gene!
I headed home after that, arriving in CDA around 3:00. It was around 6 hours on the road, and was thankful to get home.
Worked in the office for a bit, and being super tired, I left 8 minutes early!

This morning (1:00 AM) I pulled into Federal Way, and crashed on the floor of the Snyders (thanks for getting up and letting me in!!)
Up at 7:00, breakfast (blueberry pancakes and scrambled eggs) I was ready to go. Alex called (my contact to pick up the Russian Stranger books) called, and we planned to meet at 10:30 at the warehouse.
I arrived there ok, but Alex was about 20 min late. He arrived in a big U-Haul, and there were about 8 other people waiting to get books as well - all Russians. They didn’t talk English very well, and hence we didn’t communicate much ~!
The container that came over from Russia was found, and unfortunately, the load shifted in transport. That means that the pallets of neatly stacked books were not-so-neat anymore. It wasn’t as bad as could be, with only about 4 skids that needed to be off-loaded by hand. But they only allowed 3 of us in the warehouse at a time for ‘security reasons.’ Being the odd-duck, I stayed outside and waited until they got to my skid (which was in the front, and thankfully, in good shape.) Once they got to my skid, I packed the truck and headed up North, but not after giving these Russian speakers a copy of the book!
I made it to Gene’s place of work and helped out until quiting time at 4:00.
Once at his home, I took a nap for a couple hours. Supper was delayed because the pork wasn’t cooked long enough (Jessy’s first time cooking solo) so we played cards while it finished up in the oven. But it was very good when all was said and done at around 8:30! Good times.

Church today was good, in 1 Jn 3 - talking about sin and the believer. It ended with communion.
After lunch, I hit the road, and put 50.8 miles down on the bike in 3:38:35, averaging around 15.7 mph (moving average - I did stop a couple times for a breather.) I went to Spokane and back, but didn’t make it to Krispy Kreeme.

No real news on the condo, so I’ll just wait and see. All I’m waiting for is that the last page of the contract wasn’t faxed in (probably in by now, just haven’t heard) and then for the bank to come through. But there’s not really much I can do but to wait. No real hurry anyway, it won’t be finished till mid June anyway.
This week has been a challenge moving to the Mac. For the average person, I think it would be quite simple. But running the programs I have aren’t made for the Mac, so I have to either figure out how to run them on Windows in the Mac (a slick operation, and is working for some), or to find another software solution that is made for the Mac to do what I need to do. Either way it’s a work-flow change, which I think is the hardest part.
This week we also posted a new book on the website: By This Name. You’ll have to check it out!

As of 4:00pm, I’ve not heard back from my realtor. I did talk to him earlier today, but he was sick this weekend, and sounded sicker than a dog when I talked to him. So, I guess I’ll wait till tomorrow and see what happens.
Went for a ride yesterday (17.1 miles, 1:01:36)

Well, just after 5:00 Chad called, saying that the seller accepted my offer! Now the paperwork goes to the banker to see if they will accept the terms and get things in order. A sigh of relief in there for me.

Update later in the day (10:08 to be more precise.)
As you know I now have a Mac. Interestingly, I also just found out today that the DVD’s that I’ve been making don’t play very well on this machine. I don’t think it’s the computer’s fault - it’s a dual core 2.33, 2gb ram - it should be able to play a DVD, and in fact does a nice job on other DVD’s.
What I found out, after a few hours of playing around (if you call it playing…) is that the encoder I’ve been using (ProCoder2) doesn’t do a good job for playback on the Mac for whatever reason (this is just by trial / error, not some whitepaper on the web.) But, I’ve found out that encoding with Autodesk’s Cleaner does a good job for the Mac. I originally bought Cleaner, but didn’t use it because it didn’t save the Closed Captioning data when encoding the files, where Procoder did. But, I now have Scenarist, which enables me to put CC in later, so that’s not needed.
I’ve not been able to get Cleaner to work well on the Mac (I encoded files several times, but Scenarist won’t accept them) and I figure if the default DVD setting doesn’t work, I’m not going to take the time to try and fix it. I’m waiting for a Windows version of Cleaner to see what that does.
It’s frustrating when these companies make programs that just don’t work. I’m sure it works for them, but that doesn’t help me much!

Last Thursday I signed an offer for a Condo here in town. It was about $10k under what the builder was listed as, but I figured there was no harm in asking. It’s in the Lord’s hands as to where this goes from here. Buying a condo is not my first choice, but it does fit well into the plan of things. I was supposed to hear back on Friday the outcome of the offer, but nothing yet (and it’s Saturday evening.)
Another noteworthy event this week: the purchase of a MacBook Pro. That’s a laptop for those that don’t know…
Basically it’ll be a GoodSeed purchase, so that’s nice. But for the time being I’m covering it so I can get in and learn a new OS and try to figure everything out. So far I moved my email, Quicken, and Roboform data over, and so far so good.
It’s different, yea, and there are less options w/ the Mac, and because of that it can get a little frustrating at times. (Case in point: the only way to resize a window is to drag the bottom right corner of a box. Seems logical to have every side and corner as a drag point!) But it’s a much better machine than my old HP, and for that I’m thankful!
Today was spent in the office moving things to the Mac, but also included hanging some cupboards in the kitchen and cutting the grass at my house-sitting home.

Today was a abnormal day, in the sense that of the 10 people that work here at GoodSeed, only 2 were in the office today. Better still, both of us went to the dentist (but at different times!)
The phones were very quiet, which was nice in one sense. I did manage to put out about 9 orders before making my visit to the local dentist.
This time, I had 4 fillings put in. I wasn’t impressed, but thankful that they have the power to fill these up and hope that that’s all that’s needed. This was it, until my next checkup in 6 months. I’m not sure that I want to wait another 4 years before getting a checkup again - it’s too expensive and too painful.
Almost ready to make an offer on this condo - just have to get in touch with the ‘landlord’ of the condo units to ask a few questions. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Today Barney and I went to look at a Condo opportunity that has just come on the market. They are still being built, and move-it is around mid-June. 14 units, all 1 bed, 1 bath, from $115k to $120k. It’s steep, but there’s nothing else in my price range that works better than this. Plus, I do travel a lot, so nothing to maintain when I’m gone helps out as well. And it’s still better than renting. And it’s close to the office, walking distance (well, even Alaska is within waking distance, if you have the time.)
I did meet w/ the realtor today, and will hear back on Monday if my offer will be accepted.

This morning Russ and Ken took off for meetings up in Canada, and Lloyd and Faith are on their way to Indonesia. Tom is in Seattle, so that leaves Rachel, Barney and I to run the office for a week or so. It’s not been too busy, but keeps us on our toes.
Today a small skid of the Spanish Workbooks came in. It’s good to see them arrive, as it’s been a long time coming. It will probably take a week to get them available online for sale, as I’m not sure of the procedures to putting new products into our accounting software. I’m sure I can get some help to do that, but for now I’m opting to let it wait.

Ken and I got back from Las Vegas, where there was the huge NAB Convention. While there are bigger conventions in Vegas, this was big enough for me.
Last time I went (a year ago) I was more sheltered from the filth of the city than this time. Because we had our own car on the last trip, we just drove to the center and back to the hotel, and didn’t do much else. But this time we walked from the Sahara hotel to the convention center and back. A 3/4 mile walk with over a couple dozen newspaper style dispensing machines filled w/ porn. One day we walked down to another hotel that had an Ansel Adams exhibit. But that walk took us through the heart of the city, which wasn’t very pleasant. People standing on the street handing out porn cards to get you to go into night clubs and whatnot (I’m assuming that’s what it was—I was tempted to take it and rip it up and throw it away, but just ignored it and kept walking, or looked in the eyes of those handing it out with a good frown…)
I was thankful to get out of there, and glad I made it before the fire and brimstone fell. But it did show me how merciful God is, and, eventhough He is grieved by this, He still allows people time to turn to Him.
Riding the monorail (which isn’t that smooth) they were giving some statistics. Overall, 40 million people visit, of which, 87% gamble. And, those that gable, spend on average around $600. That was the end of the stats, but if you do the math, it’s over 20 billion spent. And they didn’t say how much money was won in that time by those people (or lost.)
The time spent in the NAB Convention, however, was a profitable time. A lot of ideas for new equipment, but nothing concrete just yet.

Just keeping up with another project I’m working on - building new Stranger DVD discs. The main reason was because of our new logo, but there are other benefits.
1. The software I used to author these (Sonic Producer) didn’t support Global Variable, so doing subtitles with a menu structure wasn’t really an option. This is why the set doesn’t currently have subtitles. However, I did put Closed Captioning on it instead.
2. The menu order of events is a little choppy, so I’ve re-designed that a bit so it’s smoother.
3. The cameras we used has some issues with them, so the bottom 2 lines in the video would flash on and off. You can’t see this with a regular TV, so most people won’t notice, but if you play it back on a computer, it’ll be obvious. So, since I’m re-doing the set, I’m re-rendering all the footage, blanking out that portion so it’s not a problem.
4. But in doing so, it destroys the Closed Captioning that’s on the video files now. But that’s ok, because I can now add CC in the DVD Authoring process.
So, all in all, it’s just a major crunch—in the sense that the computer has to crunch through all this data (over 130 gb) converting it 2 times before it’s ready for me to re-author.
Believe it or not, this is less work than putting together the Interactive DVD a while back. And it’s just on the heels of doing all this yet another time for the eLearning course we are building.

And just for fun here's an old video from cutting a tree down at Jamie & Chris' place in IL.

And while I'm at it, I might as well put up the other one, recorded by our neighbor. (No audio to speak of, as it was from inside the house.)

Another lake ride - 17.1 miles (but I think it’s a little longer…) @ 58:50 this time.
Also, I moved out of my house-sitting job and back to the Legers today.

Found out today that I’m pre-approved for a loan of around $110… @ 100%, 6.75%. Not much here in the area for that, but it is a start. There has ben some properties for under that, in need of serious work. Still looking, and needing wisdom in which direction to go.