hey everybody!

This is a DIY project waiting to happen.

The combusting stick of wood you see in the picture to the right is brought to you by the guys at MIT. They’ve come up with an ingenious, very inexpensive way to capture solar energy. They’ve built a parabolic dish out of cheap alumnium tubing and lined it with cheap flexible mirror. This creates a focal point that when pointed at the sun gets extremely hot, concentrating the sunlight by a factor of 1,000. Think of melting steal, and you’re about right.

At the focal point of the dish, they’ve run a coil of metal tubing with water running through it. The water gets flash boiled, creating steam. This steam can be used for whatever you need: heat, cooling, electricity, sauna…

Video, Pictures, and the original story.

I’d love to see this hooked up to the Green Steam Engine, which is a small, easy to build steam engine that can be easily hooked up to an electric generator.

My sincere apologies to my mother, who was holding out for a girl after already having 6 male grandchildren, but it looks like she’ll be having lucky number 7, because we’re having another boy!

Amy’s only 14 weeks along right now, so we weren’t scheduled to get an ultrasound for another month or so.  However, it seems events have transpired to allow us to find out sooner than expected.  Early Wednesday morning around 3:00 am Amy woke up with some slight bleeding, which to any expecting woman is definitely not a good thing.  We got hold of the on-call doctor who calmed our nerves a little bit, but still made sure we came in early that morning to check things out.  They did an ultrasound to make sure the baby was moving, and he definitely was!  He was stretching and kicking and smiling… not to mention showing off his wobbly bits.

So we found out early.  We haven’t quite decided on names yet, but we’re close.

I’ve decided to refresh my photography skills and post more pictures, so here’s a start:

And for all the PHP nerds out there, here’s a brief intro on PEAR.

There’s a lot of talk right now about PEAR and how it helps PHP development. So as a result there’s a lot of folks trying to figure out how to get PEAR set up. It’s important to keep in mind that PEAR is just a repository for PHP packages. It’s the packages you want. PEAR is simply a way to download and manage the packages. If you’ve got PHP > 4.3 installed, you’ve probably already got PEAR installed as well. Trying going to the command line and running pear -V. If you get anything besides command not found, then you’ve got PEAR installed.

So once you have PEAR installed, you can download packages by doing the following:

pear install <package name>

This will download the desired package into the extension directory. The extension directory can be changed in the pear.conf file, but it’s usually right in your home directory: ~/pear/lib.

Once you have the desired packages dowloaded, you’ll need to tell your scripts how to access them. PHP is a parsed language, so extensions are simply included in your main scripts. You can include the package files manually, using the full path. For example, if you wanted to include the DB package:

include("/Users/jdoe/pear/lib/php/DB.php");

You could also set PHP’s include_path setting. The following does the same thing:

ini_set("include_path", ".:/Users/jdoe/pear/lib/php");
include("DB.php");

If you’re including more than a single package, the include_path option is cleaner and more elegant.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m interested in all things science, especially biology. Central to biology is evolutionary theory, and as you know this topic is causes a big stir in much of the Christian community.

Here’s a free book from the National Academy of Sciences that discusses evolutionary theory and creationist perspectives. I’ve only skimmed it, but it looks pretty good.

Afternoon playtime

Originally uploaded by williambarry007

Owen is now 10 months old. In the past few weeks he’s been getting much more mobile. He’ll pull himself up to a standing position using whatever is close, then he’ll walk around using his hands for stability.

And two days ago he took his first two steps!

IMG 0303

Originally uploaded by williambarry007

Congratulations to Marty and Jenna Moyer on their new son!

From Jamey Richardson’s email:

Catherine “Kate” Elizabeth Richardson joined us at 1:10 AM on Thursday, May 24, 2007. She weighed in at a very healthy 8 pounds 3 ounces and measuring 20 3/4 inches in length (pretty good for a week early). She looks a lot like Jack when he was born and has a healthy, rosy color; no jaundice on this girl. She’s a looker and even has Jack’s dimple.

Nicole handled this delivery beautifully. Her contractions had been counting down from 15 minutes for about 24 hours and stalled out a few times. Nicole went to the park and the gym to walk and make those contractions work harder. It worked. We arrived at the hospital about 10:15 PM on the 23rd. She was checked around 10:45 and was already at 8 centimeters. It was a bit of a rush to get everything prepped for childbirth. Kate arrived after only two rounds of pushing. All the hard work paid big dividends.

Needless to say we are extremely excited and very proud of our gorgeous new addition. Thanks to everyone for the prayers and support. Feel free to come see her live and in person. We are at the Northport DCH in room WP12.

- Jamey (and Nicole)

Everyone, meet Hope. Hope, meet everyone.

Monday evening Hope Madelyn Carden was born into this world to the proud parents of Kevin and Stacey Carden. Hope weighed 7 lbs., 11 oz., measured 20.5 inches long and is beautiful. Both daughter and mother are healthy and well.

Kevin and I have been friends since the 4th grade. Hearing him re-live his first experience with an explosive poopie diaper on Tuesday night made me realize how much I’ve missed hanging out with him.

Often, you’ll be creating a template for a website and you run into a situation where your image isn’t large enough to cover the area you need covered. Or you might want to create a greater sense of volume by having a nice image repeat in the background of your header. Whatever your reason, here’s an easy way to do it.

Step 1

Find an image that you want to repeat.

Step 2

Split the image down the middle.

Step 3

Swap the sides of the image. This is done so you know that the outer edges will meet properly.

Step 4

Photoshop the middle of the image. This just takes practice. I find that the clone tool works great here.

Finished

Once you’re done, you just set the background of an element to repeat the image you just created, and this is your final product.