Minnesota Nice??

For those who might enjoy a sort of "cheat sheet" about photography, I invite you to check out my new " Photography Crash Course, Tips, and Rules of Thumb " page.

Last weekend, I finally bundled up and biked over to Minnehaha Falls to see just how bad an effect the 2012 drought had on it. It was reduced to just a trickle: Compare that to how it normally looks, from about a hundred yards further away: Much of Minnehaha Creek upstream from the falls has been reduced to a muddy trench with puddles, with at most a trickle flowing along. This is one of the wetter sections near the falls: Again, compare that to a different view from a slightly different angle a few years ago, at sunset, a couple weeks later in the calendar year: Nasty stuff. As much as I hate to shovel it, this is making me hope we actually get a lot of snow this winter.

Sara and I attended a very meaningful All Saints Sunday service at our church, Lutheran Church of Christ the Redeemer , yesterday. The service had special meaning to us with the passing of Sara's father early this year. The most moving part of the service was when those who wished to do so walked to the front of the sanctuary, picked up a lit candle, and placed it on the altar in memory of a loved one who passed away in the past year. As I looked at all the people standing in line, it was hard not to be reminded that LCCR is a Reconciling In Christ congregation - that the church weleomes gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons, as well as those who may have been excluded because of other human distinctions, such as race, economic status, or gender. We thus affirm that this welcome includes all people. We pledge to ourselves and to all others that we will strive to live as a reconciling people, in our life together and in our outreach to the world. I saw all kinds of ind

(and why I would encourage you to do the same) One of the biggest hot-button topics in Minnesota these days is the proposed Minnesota Same-Sex Marriage Amendment to be voted upon in the November 2012 elections. The amendment would "provide that only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota". I reject this amendment for many reasons, that boil down to not supporting certain religious groups forcing their rules, which I believe to stem from a terrible misreading of their holy books, on all citizens of a state in a nation still subject to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment . Now, before you go off saying, "You're gay" (or the more common "your gay" found in the adolescent garbage filling so many web sites' comment sections on various topics), I will point out that I tested "exclusively heterosexual" on the Kinsey Scale , at least as tested by a Facebook app a few years ago. I

As a Lutheran layman, I am impressed that these Jewish cousins in faith are opposed to the Minnesota Marriage Amendment, as shown by the signs provided by Minnesotans United for All Families . For those who cite Levitical laws as one of their main rationales for voting in favor of the amendment, consider that these people believe in the same laws, while not believing that Jesus came to fulfill the law . Also consider the establishment clause of the First Amendment ....

The picnic shelter provided awesome shade, making this year's BMW CCA North Star Chapter picnic very enjoyable. Good food, good company, good door prizes, and some cool cars were all to be enjoyed this afternoon. Thank you to the board and volunteers who put it all together. Check out some photos for the event here .  

 I started using my new insulin pump yesterday evening, and have now been on the pump for over 24 hours! This is the biggest change in how I have been managing my diabetes in 39 years. Sara and I are still working with the pump training educator on zeroing in on the correct settings for me, but I seem to be doing better already this evening after a few small tweaks made this afternoon. Here are two shots showing what it looked like shortly after inserting the canula (tiny insulin delivery tube) into my side.   I feel a bit Borg -ish or, going back even further in science fiction television history, a bit bionic . I'm hoping that this will allow me to keep my tight control, without as many low blood sugars as I have been having recently. More to come, I am sure!

I came across this great piece by Sarah Downey, " 7 Tips to go Private on Facebook in 7 Minutes ", via a link a Facebook friend posted. I went ahead and installed the Do Not Track Plus web plug-in provided free by the author's employer, Abine.com, a privacy company. I thought I'd test out how many external networks the home pages of various news sites - local, national, international, and web-based - reported to. From "best" to "worst", here is what I found: Site Count Google 0 Deutsche Welle (dw.de) 0 Yahoo! News 2 CNN 7 NPR 8 WCCO 9 KSTP 9 BBC 10 KARE 10 Fox 12 Star Tribune 12 MSNBC 14 Pioneer Press (twincities.com) 15 Now, we have to remember that those counts for Google (and, presumably, Yahoo!) are "artificially" low. Of course they are not sending the information to external sites; they are saving and using it internally - and receiving

OK, maybe I should have gone straight to live chat, but didn't think the problem was urgent enough to warrant taking that much of my time, so I started with email. The problem, from the email I sent via the support web site: I have had a personal web site at home.comcast.net/~jwatne for as long as I have been a Comcast customer, but the site has shown up as being "Temporarily Disabled" for the past couple months or so. Also, when I try to ftp to upload files using my name and password, neither of which have changed since my last successful upload, I get a "530 Login incorrect" error. What is going on? - Browser: Default OS: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/534.52.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.2 Safari/534.52.7 The response? A lengthy boilerplate about how to use ftp - in Windows. On top of that, it was outdated, with lots of dead links and advice such as "Simply log in, then select Online Storage from the 'More'