Talk in church

For those who missed it on Bonnie Jean's blog, on Tuesday before yesterday we were asked to speak in church on Sunday last. My assigned subject was humility. Kind of an interesting subject to prepare on since I'm not exactly the humblest guy in the world when it comes to the talks I write. But it was a good experience, went quite well overall.

Death of a camera

So, as Bonnie Jean mentioned in her blog, our camera is seeing purple spots. Which is kind of odd, because normally it can't see the color purple, interpreting it as white, pink, or blue. So I am looking forwards to its replacement arriving. It's amazing the difference a few years can make in what apprx. $350 can buy you. Back in December of 2004 it could get you a 3 megapixel camera with 3x optical zoom, red eye reduction, flash, f2.8 at widest angle, and capable of ISO100 before significant noise comes into play.

Now, $350 will get you 20x optical zoom, 10 megapixel, face recognition assisted focus and exposure control, motion tracking autofocus, image stabilization, focus or exposure bracketing, capable of (according to one reviewer) 400 ISO before significant noise comes in, along with the above mentioned flash (except with an exernal flash adapter), red eye reduction (except it can be applied in post editing in camera), and many other features.

Just makes me wonder. Give it another 4 or 5 years and what will $350 buy in a digital camera?

Care taker, or someone who can't be bothered?

So I performed a rather disturbing call at work the other day. I was requested to help someone with a ringtone download. When I reached them I discovered it was an elderly woman at some sort of managed care or nursing home scenario. In the course of helping her I needed to call her back on a landline phone. She didn't know the number, so she handed the phone to one of the care takers to give me the number. The care taker refused to assist the customer but instead demanded that I give her the instructions and when they were too techy for the young nurse to figure out she informed me not to try to help the customer anymore and that the customer would get help from her family.

So my mind at this point is screaming that we've got a serious ethical lapse here. A tenant of a nursing home should have access to their customer care representative and be able to perform whatever they want to over the phone with reasonable accomodation, such as giving a phone number to a customer care representative. Instead because it was too much trouble to handle it herself, the nurse forbade me to have an interaction with my customer that the customer initiated. Granted, ringtone downloads are not that important of a quality of life issue, but in as much as can reasonably accommodated people should be allowed to live their life without interference. I could here in the background the nurse telling the customer not to try to do this on her own and to wait for her family. Granted, the patient may have been unable to perform the function on her own, and I had even suggested getting a family member to help. However when the customer wanted to try it on her own, there is no ethical reason to forbid her a service from a customer care representative that she is paying to be able to receive.

As I've seen another blogger mention, care taker relationships are not equal power relationships.

Fire

So I went on a campout with the Elder's quorum this last weekend. Had a few interesting experiences. The campfire was left completely unattended while people went to play games. When the games descended into pelting eachother with glowsticks I decided to bow out and tend the fire. Earlier that evening large logs were being put on even though it was getting close to the end of the night. Didn't make any sense to me, but when I asked if that was a little excessive (thinking that we'd want to let the fire burn down so it could go out) I was told "well what else are we going to do with it?" So before I went to bed I poured enough water on the fire to reduce it to a smoldering bed of coals. Didn't want to use up the rest of my water bottle on the fire and I figured the other guys could handle it the rest of the way with their water when they came to bed. Woke up the next morning before anyone else and found to my dismay the fire was still burning as a smoldering bed of coals, which between myself and the next person who woke up was built back up to a roaring fire by just dropping some wood on it. I told the second person who woke up that the fire hadn't gone out last night. The response was, "It normally doesn't".

So, I'm wondering if I went through the same boy scout program as these guys or something. Leaving fires unattended, building them so high they burn till the morning light, chopping wood repeatedly so close to other people that we were routinely being showered with wood chips, attempting to chop down trees for firewood without even bothering to check if they are alive or not and continuing to chop them even after its pointed out that they aren't dead. Don't even ask me if that was legal. Kind of freaky, but the general sense I got from the condition of the park we were in was that most people were fairly disrespectful of the forest. The trees along the road had relatively fresh names carved in them (people dated their carvings) a good 10-15 feet off the ground, indicating going to a significant trouble to vandalize the woods. I just hope the fire practices of my Elder's Quorum are not normal for Utahans. If they are they deserve all the fires they have to fight every year.

Funeral, and birds

So I never got around to finishing earlier intended blog posts. The funeral I mentioned earlier was very nice. First LDS funeral I had actually been to with a viewing, so that was a little different. Hopefully that will be the end of people dying around me soon. Found out a lot about my, how would I say it, step grandfather in law than I ever knew before. Not too hard given that I didn't know him much.


Most of the driving on our trip that I mentioned above was in search of bird watching sites. Not counting the birds we saw at the aviary, Bonnie Jean and I spotted:
American Avocet
Curlew (I don't recall the variety
Chickadee (I don't recall the variety)
Robin
Yellow Warbler
Downy woodpecker
Pelican
Heron (didn't see well enough to see what kind)
Cedar Waxwing
California Gull
?Franklin Gull? (I'm really not certain on that one, it was a very far off sighting)
Meadow Lark
Marsh Wren
Cliff Swallow
Brewers Blackbird
Yellow headed blackbird
Redwinged blackbird
Western Tanager

and probably many others that I can't remember and definitely many more that I couldn't identify. Takes some practice to successfully identify birds and I'd never really tried with water fowl before. I saw a lot of ducks that I have no idea about. All in all a very fun trip, which shall have to be repeated someday, preferably in the fall when the migration is in full swing and there are thousands more birds around back on their way to South America or wherever they are going.

Driving

Typical conversation between Bonnie Jean and I as I drive towards her parents house:
"Justin, why aren't you going the speed limit"
"Its higher?"
"Yes, this is a 45 zone, your going 35 and annoying the other cars" (or 40/30, whichever it is I go 10 under)
"Oh, it just doesn't feel like a 45 zone, I mean this is a residential street with houses on it"
"Its not a residential street"
"Look right there, there's a house and driveway pointing towards the road"
"That's why they have fences"


Needless to say, driving isn't our favorite activity. At least we get to listen to audiobooks together, but this trip I've been trying to rememorize old flash cards to prepare for an examination, so we don't get to listen to the books as much.

Another death

Just last night my wife's step grandfather passed away. That makes 3 relatives in the last year. Hopefully we won't add anymore soon. Thankfully we will be able to attend this funeral as well since we were actually going to be in town anyways for a wedding. Seems like our planned trip keeps getting busier and busier. First we were going to celebrate our anniversary with a tour of birdwatching sites. Then a pair of my friends were getting married so we decided why not lump the two events into one. Then it just chances to be father's day so we're invited over to dinner at my in laws. Now a funeral has been added to the itinerary of our trip. Got to love life's curve balls some times. I guess we are just sort of at that age where grandparents might not last much longer. More on this subject later when I'm not dashing off to work.