Eyes to See, Ears to Hear

Archive for July, 2009

I spent most of today editing Jonah in the Malila language.  Things went very well.  Almost perfect.  Except for 20 words I discovered were missing out of chapter one.  I looked through all my audio files.  Nope.  Then, I looked at the scripts we used.  The words weren’t printed!!!  Gggrrrrrr….  Small correction to make but annoying none-the-less.  They are narrator’s words which were spoken by one of our Malila translators, so getting him up to the studio for half an hour should be my quick fix.  Then, it’s on to testing the recording with a group of Malila pastors.  That part is awesome to see.

Screenshot of Jonah in Malila in Apple Soundtrack Pro 2

On the way back from conference, we pass through a horrendous stretch of unpaved road between the Kenya border and Tanga, Tanzania.  To give you a glimpse of why this is the most dreaded part of the conference travel every year, I asked Dana to video a short piece so that we may show you.

Today was probably a near-typical Sunday for us here in Mbeya, Tanzania.  This is what it looked like:

8:00am – Dana got up while the guys slept in. That was nice.
9:15am – Asher and I finally got up and I sipped a cup of tea to start the morning.
9:30am – I diddle daddled on the computer; this time I was cleaning up my photo collection
10:30am – Whole family had some scrambled eggs
11:15am – I fixed the shower because it was leaking
11:30am – I fired up the generator for Dana to use the crockpot
11:45am – I picked up loose items in the back yard to make it child safe; mommy and baby wanted some time outside
12:45pm – We ate lunch and were hopefully preparing for church online at 1pm; but, Asher wasn’t ready for his nap; church is postponed to the 4:30pm experience
1:15pm – Asher crashed quickly for his nap
2:15pm – Daddy joined Asher for his nap
4:15pm – Both guys got up
4:30pm – We did church online
6:00pm – Dinner
7:00pm – I prepared hot water and some food for the night guard; then locked up the house for the night
7:45pm – Mommy and Asher watched Sesame Street (turning into a daily item)
8:13pm – I’m writing this post
8:45pm – Hopefully the baby goes to sleep
9:45pm – Hopefully the daddy goes to sleep

Before we left for conference, I resolved to clean out & organize our outside storage room.  I knew it would be a large task but I didn’t think it would take me almost 7 hours.  I first had to empty it completely so I could sweep out the mound of dirt accumulated inside.  Here’s everything sitting out:

Our storage junk sitting outside

Next, I packed smaller long-term storage things inside a couple of our empty suitcases, sorted out a bunch of stuff we really don’t need (although I’m sure there’s a couple hundred pounds more worth in there) and began hauling it back in.  I tried to keep like things in the same area inside.  After a number of hours, yes hours, this is the final result:

Our storage junk organized back inside

One morning at breakfast, this African Pied Wagtail put his charm on…

Their songs are one of my favorite of all the birds I’ve ever heard.

Some of my recent responsibilities have been to gather profile pictures of our language cluster project team for a collaborative branch poster.  Those posters are displayed at conference and each office location takes one back with them.  So, I gathered all the photos I could and began sending them to our communications guy, a PC guy.  He replies, “The emails labeled MICP Photos 2, and MICP Photos 3 came with the photos embedded in the email, which makes things problematic. The first one is fine. You’ll have to resend the photos as attachments. How many emails did you send?”  Huh?  Didn’t I send them as attachments?  If he had a Mac, the answer would be yes.  He has a PC, so the answer is no.  We worked around the problem when we examined the ‘first one’ to which his reply referred.  That e-mail was different in that it included a list sent as a text file attached along with the photos.  So, we used that method to get him all the poster shots he needed, but talk about going around your elbow.

Fast forward to today.  Dana asked for a picture I have of her and Asher in Kenya.  I send it to her.  She can’t save it.  Using Outlook 2007.  What the crap?  So, I research.  Low and behold, there is some kind of ‘bug’ when sending picture-as-only-attachments e-mails from Apple Mail to a PC.  Aside from the work around described above, another relatively quick one is to change the message format to Plain Text.  If you have Mail set to this as default, you’ve completely wasted 3 minutes of your life by reading this post. Pole! (‘pole’ is Swahili for “sorry for ya!”)  But for all of us HTMLers, guess the elbow is still in office.

P.S. Selecting this doesn’t make a difference:

… and even though I’m a Mac guy, I ain’t scared to say that Apple needs to fix this.

When I built the studio out behind the house, I elected to have my desk up high instead of like normal.  4 ft off the ground.  That’s how high the desk is.  So, of course I needed high chairs.  Problem was their immobility.  The suckers are way heavy and don’t slide at all on the concrete floor.  So, to solve that issue and to raise me up a little more so I could see over my laptop and into the sound booth, I made a modification…

This is a litle piece of video I shot while waiting for our turn to pass through some road construction in Iringa.