exactly

So here it is. I'm going out on a limb (not too far, mind you, not quitting my day job), and looking for clients doing web design and consulting. I've gained a lot of knowledge over the last nine years working with all (most, maybe 'all' is presumptuous) aspects of a web site at work, church, my personal blog, and more recently for a couple small businesses. If you want to put that knowledge to work for you, check out Exactly Web.

one

Our little girl is one year old (and six days). It's been a long, long time since I've written anything, and longer since I wrote about Breitlahn. She's now been confirmed as an over achiever by her doctor. She started walking 2-3 weeks ago, and now prefers it to crawling. Not sure that I've even seen her crawl in the last couple days at all. She has been climbing anything she could for quite some time, and just recently figured out how to climb on the rocking chair in her room (not a small rocker, but a full-size one). Amanda moved it into the living room, so that B's room would stay a safe haven where we don't have to worry about her. I was reading the newspaper and eating supper, and I look up and she's sitting on the rocker, backwards. She had her legs poking out the back side of the chair and was watching daddy through the rungs. Wasn't quick enough with the camera to catch her like that, but I'll probably post the couple I got to FB anyway.

six

It's been six years since we were engaged on February 14. Happy Anniversary, to my darling one and only:

writhing

There's a song called The Earth is Yours by Gungor and it's had me thinking quite a bit lately of a verse I've always heard used as motivation for worshiping God. It's in Luke 19, verse 40 and says, "if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” Most have probably heard the story. Jesus is riding into town on the colt of a donkey. People are throwing their cloaks and palm branches down before Him. The disciples break into song. And the religious leaders still don't get it. The creator of the universe is riding into their town, and they miss it completely. They say, "Jesus, rebuke your followers!" Verse 40 is His response to them. If His disciples hadn't praised Him, creation would.
It was not a question of when and if creation would praise Him though. As the above song so aptly mentions, when the trees twist in the wind, and when the ocean is writhing in a storm, it shows the awesome power of God. The whole of creation is shouting His praises as loudly as they can. So the question isn't when or if creation will praise Him. It's a question of when His followers will. When will we put down our pettiness and do as John 4:23 bids us? When will we worship Him in spirit and in truth? When will we remember that worship isn't and can't be about us? It isn't about our likes or dislikes. It isn't about our preference for contemporary or traditional music. It isn't about what gives us goosebumps. It isn't about us. All those things can help us get in the spirit of worship, but they have little to do with our heart. The heart is our own choice. Will we do our best to out-praise the mountains, oceans and trees? Will we praise Him from our heart? We must choose whether we are going to just sing words on a screen, or whether we are going to forget about everything that bogs us down, and worship our creator with everything we are. That's what it means to worship Him in truth.

up

I think our little one needs to slow down a little bit. She's getting to be a bit of an overachiever. My wife got an email update from some baby site saying she should be trying to move around and crawl this month (hah, sure). She's pulling herself up on things now like it was going out of style.

faster

The other day, Breitlahn started crawling, and she gets faster and faster every day. I caught her in the act today.

cruising

Five months later, and wow! We've hit a lot of milestones in the last couple months. First, Breitlahn was rolling over, and then she started scooting, and sitting up. Today, she officially started crawling and she keeps trying to pull herself up on things to stand. Amanda said she did it once, but I haven't gotten to see that yet. She loves to stick out her tongue, and blow bubbles, and laugh. She's gotten quite ticklish, although it seems the simplest things will make her giggle the most. She had her first Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day.

She started solids, and loves vegetables. Fruit is gross apparently. Breitlahn still eats it, but nothing compares to those delicious green beans and peas.

Those are just some of the highlights, you can visit the gallery to see all the new photos.

two

Breitlahn turned two months old this week, and a lot more has happened since she reached three weeks. She got to meet her other grandparents (on Amanda's side), visited her first airport (and saw her first airplane), she visited her first national park (Theodore Roosevelt National Park), she rolled over (at one month, she's a bit of an overachiever), she sucked her thumb, we dedicated her, she started outgrowing clothes, she reached ten pounds, and the list goes on.

She's started to smile quite a bit, which is loads of fun to see, and she's found her voice (not just for crying anymore). She got to see loads of bison (well, at least her papa did) at the park, and we even found some time to relax and see Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at Makoshika.

relaunch

Just over two years ago, I started a new job at Dawson Community College. When I started, their website was a mess. That's probably an understatement. It was not in good shape, and had probably fifteen different styles throughout the site. The front page looked like a circus, and it was difficult to find what you were looking for.

On Thursday, we launched the new site. It was exciting. At least, I'm excited about it. I'm sure there will always be more work to do on it, and we'll probably redesign it in two years again, but I'm pretty proud of what we've accomplished.

three

Breitlahn is now over three weeks old, and she's been having a grand old time. She attended her very own baby shower, a wedding (congrats Aftiana), went on her first elevator ride, and had her first visit (of many to come) to Makoshika State Park.

She's had fun trying on a few of the outfits she received, and I think my favorite so far is her giraffe hat from Aunt Stephie.

Oscar and Judy came over for the shower too, and they've got more pictures over at shutterfly. With all the family around, especially great-grand-parents, we had to take some family pictures too, and we've got a few with four generations. I'm sure there will be more to come, as we have more family here this weekend.

welcome

Welcome to the world, our home, and our family, Breitlahn Maëlle.

nursery

It's been quiet on the "western front" for a while, and that's because we've been busy working on the baby's nursery the last month or so. My wife did an amazing mural, and I put together furniture, and put up a lot of the decor. It was a load of fun, and turned out really nice. Now we just need a baby to put in it...

familylink

I don't spend as much time on Facebook as I used to. And so it's been a while since I went to the familylink app to update things. I clicked on it today, and noticed a funny thing. I was no longer on Facebook and it wanted me to login to a totally different site. So I clicked on the familylink app link in the Facebook bookmarks pane. Now, they wanted permission to use (steal) my email address (thanks for exposing that Facebook). I said NO, and then they tried to be sneaky and get me to update my personal info, which included my email address. I entered my name, and skipped the email, then they wanted permission to pull info from facebook. It was then that I realized I was no longer on Facebook (again). I promptly went to 'authorized apps' on Facebook, removed the familylink app, and gave them a 1-star rating. I don't need another site to keep track of, I don't like giving out my email address, and I wish they would go back to being a real Facebook app where I can see all my relatives that are on Facebook. Thanks Familylink. Thanks for making a pile of poop.

relevant

After a quiet month, I'm making up for lost time. I just got my new issue of Relevant Magazine, which is my favorite magazine. Ok, so it's the only one I'm subscribed to. My cousin hooked me on the Relevant Podcast a while back, and while I haven't caught every episode (or should that be webisode?), it's always entertaining, engaging, challenging, and many other -ings. The magazine is cool, but the website takes it a whole new level above that, and I just discovered (possibly my favorite) a really cool section of their site: The Drop. Now, they mention this on the podcast all the time, but I've never bothered to actually go see what the hubbub is all about. Free music that doesn't smell, that's what it is all about. You should go check it out. Now. Hurry, it might disappear. Probably not, but you should go. Quickly. They also happen to be featuring Seabird right now, which is one of my current favorite bands.

Jesusmas 2009

It's really easy to forget what Christmas is all about, so the title is an extra reminder. We had a great Christmas, and while I got some really nice gifts, my dad had one of those moments again. He said, "we need to be thankful for friends and family, that's what's really important, not all the material stuff." Don't know if I can really expand on that too much, but I just want to take a moment to mention some of the 'important' things I'm thankful for before I post some pictures of all the presents and such. I'm thankful for my wife, and my parents, and my sister, and my cousins (all of them, even Afton...). I'm thankful for the little girl that's on the way, and I'm thankful for my friends, at work, at church, and anywhere else. And I'm thankful for Scooter, Roo, and Oliver.

girl

It's a girl! And not a puppy this time. As mentioned before, due in late May. The 'awesome' ultrasound machine was broken today, but we still got to see some pretty neat things. She was sucking on her fingers for a bit, and yawned several times. We got to see her little heart pumping away at 153 beats per minute, and even were able to see the four chambers of her heart.  It was incredible the amount of detail that could be seen, even with 'old technology.'

review

A couple of my cousins posted their Christmas letters on their blogs, so I figured I'd follow suit, sort of. I actually put together a little photo collage that we sent out this year, but in case you didn't get one (sorry), here it is:

For more details, you can of course read back through my blog posts for the year. The side project I started, God Impact, is going quite well also. I've only missed one day (except for yesterday, when I forgot to hit the publish button).

We've also had a lot of exciting things happening at our church, and there's a little info over at www.glendiveag.org.

work

Seems a lot of my posts lately have been about stuff I've been doing at work. This one is going to follow in that tradition, even if it is Christmas. Maybe I'll write something about Christmas later too...

At any rate, my assistant (not a secretary) left last week for greener (maybe bluer is proper here) pastures at Miles Community College. We'll miss him dearly (I already do, it gets lonely on the IT Island). As such, we're hiring. If you're looking for a job working with computers, maybe this will be a Christmas present for you. If you're interested, go to http://www.dawson.edu and send in the required application materials.

static, but not

If you ever wondered if an interface with a dhcp obtained address can also have static aliases assigned to it, stop wondering. It can. That said, some (probably most) firewall distributions don't allow setting aliases if your external IP is obtained via DHCP. I'm looking at you, IPCop. I thought maybe my ISP was the only one that did this to provide static IP addresses to it's customers, but AT&T also does it, as I'm sure others do too, since I've seen a few posts on how to setup such a beast for firewall purposes. Because my beloved IPCop wasn't up to the task, I ended up using a vanilla install of Ubuntu server, and I used webmin to setup the firewall using iptables. I detailed that process in the post Wall.

direction

In case you've ever wondered how to figure out which type of port your traffic is using (source/destination) for the purposes of setting up iptables (with or without webmin), here's a little help.

The truth of the matter is that it varies depending on the type of traffic, but you typically want to set the port as a destination port when you're doing something like port forwarding. Here's an example of  what's going on for http traffic: a client computer doesn't start it's connection on port 80, it chooses a random, high-numbered port to open the connection on it's side, so the source port could be 10843. The connection is going to port 80 on the server, since that's what the server is listening on (unless you're using a non-standard http port), so 80 is your destination port. This isn't true for all types of traffic though, which confused me a bit this last week when setting up my firewall from scratch on a Ubuntu server. For something like ntp, the client actually starts it's request on port 123 (source), and ends up at 123 on the ntp server (destination). So for ntp, you could theoretically set a firewall rule that used 123 as the source port instead of destination port, and it would work, but doing so for port 80 for http traffic will not. Regarding the ntp port, I believe this is also why you can't run the ntpdate command (a one time synchronization) when the ntp service is running. Both the client and server use the same port on both ends of the communication.