Trust

Psalm 93
¹² The righteous will flourish like a palm tree, they will grow like a cedar of Lebanon;

¹³ planted in the house of the LORD,
they will flourish in the courts of our God.

¹⁴ They will still bear fruit in old age,
they will stay fresh and green,

¹⁵ proclaiming, "The LORD is upright;
he is my Rock, and there is no wickedness in him."

I read this little bit of Psalm 93 today during lunch, and the last couple of verses grabbed me. I sometimes wonder how people sometimes lose their fervor for the Lord as they grow older. Why is this? How do we continue on and "bear fruit in old age?"

Verse 15 sticks out as part of the key. "The Lord is upright; he is my Rock, and there is no wickedness in him." The righteous say that God is good. As life passes, hardships come. If our heart is still able to say, "God is my Rock, and He is Good," then we keep sight of something greater than our hardship. The full weight of our own problems is lifted in light of the infinite.

Something happened last week that could be considered hard. Reading Psalm 93 reminded my heart of something a good friend recently said, "Trusting God is always the right thing to do."

The Lord is my Rock. He is Good.

Entry posted by byscuits at 12:35 PM | Comments (3)

New look

Hey folks. I've updated the blog here with a completely new look. The main blog, individual entries, and monthly archives should all be ported over. I'll eventually transition the photo albums, but that's a whole other beast.

The site's been tested in IE and Firefox for Windows so far, and I've yet to iron out the kinks in the Mac versions of IE and Safari. Let me know if you're having any weird issues with how things look (if it looks odd, it probably shouldn't be that way).

Changing the look here at byscuits.com is really a preparation for the eventual launch of davegandy.com, which will be my commercial photography website.

Technical Design Details

Why the change? - Well, I'm eventually going to be launching davegandy.com, which will be my commercial photography website and blog. I'm using this site as a beta version of some new programming ideas. I'll keep posting to the blog and photo albums here at byscuits.com, I'm just not sure how much.

Template - It's heavily modified from version 1.2.5 of a standard template called Kubrick. Actually, it more closely resembles that of The Tao of Mac website. That dude can code.

PHP, Movable Type - The site is fully dymanic php now, and the pages pull in simple includes. This allows better integration with Gallery, which itself is written in PHP.

Photos - With the exception of one photo, all the above shots are my own. Kudos to whomever can figure out which shot it is. Cropping for that aspect ratio is an entirely other beast, and some shots I never knew I liked now work really well.

Blah
Feeling sad today. Ask me about it and I might tell you.

Entry posted by byscuits at 10:22 AM | Comments (1)

Stephen King on my commute

I now have two and a half hours in a car every business day, and I've been looking for something to fill that time. I've thought of two good options so far, but last month's $100 bill has caused me to rethink my phone habits. This left something I've loved in the past - audiobooks.

Once during a 60 hour cross-country drive, Stephen King accompanied me with his rich work of "Dreamcatcher". I understand that some of you might only know King as a horror and suspense writer, and for good reason. But he also has other work. Good work.

As a matter of fact, I do believe Stephen King is my favorite author. While he can craft the most frightening and terrifying images, I don't believe that's his best strength.

King is able to create characters better than anyone I can think of. The way he gets inside the head of his characters to truly write from their viewpoint entrances me. His writing has resulted in some of the most real people I've never met.

As I've been thinking more about writing lately, I've been looking for books on the subject. It just so happens that King has written a book entitled "On Writing," which also happens to come in audiobook form, read by the author himself.

I have been listening to King's thoughts "On Writing" for my entire commute this week. I expected it to be a bit more technical, with details on the craft of writing as King sees them. But instead, I've been given a bit of an autobiography. He does have excellent bits of his wisdom about writing, but he spends more of his time telling tales from his youth and how those experiences shaped him.

King writes profoundly on events in his life that aren't. He takes the simplest tale from high school and crafts plot and characters in such a way that draws me inside. I've found myself saddened by the arrival at work or home. I'm sad that I have to his pause and quit listening.

I wonder, are all great artists like this? I've seen photographers and painters give the most ordinary object emotion and personality. Can the great artists take any mundane subject and give it life?

And this leads into another discussion, one which I won't tackle here just yet, on God's position as the greatest of artists.

Entry posted by byscuits at 09:54 AM | Comments (6)

Urgent and Important

I was talking to my mom at some point last week on my way home from work, and she mentioned something about the difference between something being urgent and something being important, and how that's something that young people need to learn.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I'm one of those young people that need to learn the difference.

My new job has already been quite busy, and I've rarely had much down time at all. It looks like things will be popping up all the time here that have been deemed urgent. If I'm not careful, I'll end up working through my lunch breaks just because I enjoy the work. And on the surface, that could be a good thing. Except that in the past, that's when I've done my quiet times.

I normally live my life first doing the things that are urgent, but they aren't necessarily important within the big picture. But the time I spend in the Word is one of those things with a lot of importance and a little urgency.

I need to order things in my life according to importance, not urgency.

Entry posted by byscuits at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)

Funny timing

I got an email at work this morning (the account was just set up yesterday) letting me know that they'll be using my 'South Station' shot in a Fidelity Calendar. If you've been reading my blog for a while, you might remember my June 28th, 2004 entry about the whole thing.

It's just that this is pretty funny timing. I mean, I just got my email account back a day ago, and I get a random email out of the blue. Has this guy looked for me before to let me know? Has the photo ever been used for anything else?

I do get 5 copies of the calendar out of the deal. Not too bad.

Entry posted by byscuits at 02:01 PM | Comments (2)

New job, new car, new photos

Hey folks. I know it's been a long time since my last update, but I've been busy. I mean mad busy. Here are my most recently added photo albums:

• Cedarwell at Harpers Ferry
• Cedarwell photo shoot
• Cruftlabs E&M Party
• Alton Bay, New Hampshire

I finished up my job a few weeks ago at Design that Matters. I worked the whole summer completely revamping their internal IT structure, including bringing them up to speed with Outlook and Exchange 2003, a networked RAID-5 terabyte fileserver, and my biggest project of all by far: an entirely new content managed website. That means anyone can update and change the entire look of the website, including adding menus, photos, and webpages. You can see the final project, sans much real content, at designthatmatters.net. For those of you with a geek bent, it was developed in skinable CSS with Movable Type driving everything from the back end. Movable Type is typically used just by bloggers, but I pushed it fully into the realm of content management. I can pretty easily see those folks at MT taking their software to the next level and being a major player in the CMS world.

Okay, now to back away from the geek. I took a job back at Fidelity Investments, but this time it's in Marlborough, a suburb of Boston. It's about an hour drive each way in the mornings, but I really enjoy it. The job is even better suited to my talents than my previous position, and I'm tremendously excited about it. For now, I'm a contractor, but it looks like chances are pretty good that it could eventually become a full-time position. Both good for paying off school loans.

The commute also means I bought a car. I watched Craigslist for a couple of weeks, and then found the exact car I was looking for. Craigslist is sort of like eBay, except people don't have to pay to post something for sale. It's much less structured, and is a great place to buy stuff from individuals. It means that I also saved quite a bit on my car buying from an individual rather than a dealer. So I now have an all wheel drive manual transmission 1998 Honda CR-V. Oh, and it's red:

A couple of months back, I decided I would start naming my cameras. For some reason, cameras just seem very male to me. So the name would also need to be male. After a good deal of thought, I settled on naming them after best friends from my childhood. My Canon 20D was named "Tommy" after my first best friend from when I was 5 years old.

I've also decided to name my car (or is it a truck, since it's an SUV?). Names of childhood girlfriends (I think I had more simultaneously at 7 years old than real relationships the rest of my life) are out, since they're also the names of people in my circle of friends that could actually be riding in my car - names like Jill, Emily, and Rachel. I've come up with a few female names, and I need your help in the naming process. Here are the current front runners:

• Margaret - named after Margaret Yang from the movie Rushmore
• Hoyle - the last name of my unattainable high school crush, first name Heather
• Betty - the first name of my grandmother on my mother's side

I'd love to hear any naming suggestions, or what you've named your past and present vehicles. It would be nice if the name had that sort of quality that just makes sense in statements like, "Come on, Bessie!" This is why Margaret and Betty work particularly well in these situations.

Naming my cameras and my car is really just a symptom of me wanting a dog (or maybe ultimately kids, but that's not gonna happen just yet). But we can't have them in our apartment. It would be so nice to walk my dog in the evenings on the Somerville bike path with all the other neighborhood dog owners... But alas, for now it is not to be.

Entry posted by byscuits at 10:18 AM | Comments (10)