Kara is Seven

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You missed out on the fun. So here are some highlights to get you caught up. We started by opening presents ...


Then we moved on to the shine party at Justice for Girls ...


Then back for more pizza and cake ... cool cake, mom!


Group hug ...


And someone had fun sleeping the whole time ...



In Him.

One booty on ...

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Mommy did so well, and all by herself. Of course, I was there, but it was all about her. She did not let out so much as a whimper. The pain was clearly there ... whew! She did not shed one tear. Then after it was over, the doctor came rushing in, holding onto his cap, with only one bootie on ...

She is 8 pounds ...

and 11 oz ...


And her name is Valarie Grace.


Lord, bless them, and help them to quickly grow to love You, and love You for the rest of their lives, and know all the benefits of loving You.

While we are waiting ... part 2

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I walk by and discovered my two girls passing notes under the door to each other as follows:

6 yr old: Whaaaaaah!
8 yr old: ... Come on! Wawawawawawaaah! because of you!
6 yr old: You ---> :-) Me ---> :-(
8 yr old: No ... You :-) ... Me :-( She hates me .... why do you hate me? Because I write weird and I am a weirdo?
6 yr old: I love you. Now I write weird and you hate me. Now what will you do? I (heart) you.
8 yr old: Are you crying?
6 yr old: Yes (flip) ... Do you still hate me?
8 yr old: Stop ... get out of my beeswax ... NO!

I wonder if teachers learn the hard way ... not to read the notes that kids write back and forth to each other.

Her fourth baby shower ...

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Happy giggles ...


Who's hands are on the table?


David is in the house ...


"I will never forget your precepts, For with them, you have revived me." -- Psalm 119:93

Raise your hand if ...

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... if you've gotten frustrated, trying to guess the "correct" words to use in a google search.

I just googled:
db2 rownum, db2 rownumber, db2 row number, db2 row_number,
db2 row count, db2 rowid, db2 row id, db2 row_id,
db2 rowcount, db2 row count, db2 row_count,
db2 rownumber over, db2 row number function,
db2 sql reference

trying to find the following blurb of SQL ...
"FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY"

Yes, it's obvious, when it comes to choosing the right keywords, I'm clueless ...

Anyway, here is an example of it's use:

select PET from LIFE.PEEVES order by SURPRISE desc
FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY;

The "answer" to my issue was finally found in this great entry by "Craig S. Mullins".
Thanks, Craig.

P.S. I don't want to show you the "better" keywords to use to find the answer to this silly problem ... I'm hoping only idiots like myself find there way here with the keywords I first tried ... if I put the "better" keywords here, google might direct more of the smart folks here to laugh at me.

I love my sis ...

Don't we wish life could be like this ...


Girl ... May the Lord bless you and keep you ...

Wow! 20 years versus 20 months.

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When I was 20 years old there was no chance of being this graceful with chop-sticks. He's not even 20 months old yet, and watch this ...


Steady ...


Boom! Right on target.


Again, focus ...


Blow, this time, stuff's hot ...


Wham! Correct again.


Again ...


And again ...


Amazing. What could the Lord do with you over the next 18 months? And with noodles even. Maybe I could get a piece of meat if the shape was right, but noodles? Not without God's help. Praise Him.

Lunch on Saturday?

So, my daughter asked me to send an email for her because I did not want her to get her own email address yet. She is 8 years old, and the idea of her receiving some of the spam I see makes me cringe. So I told her to hand write what she wanted to send and I would send it ... Here is what she wrote:

Dear Veronica,

You're invited to our house! You can meet my new friend.
She's real nice, I think you will like her. You are invited this
Saturday before lunch. The time you should come is 10 o'clock or
10:30.

Your friend,
Lauren

I called her friend's father and asked him if his daughter (also 7 or 8) had an email address because my daughter wanted to send her an email, and he said, "No, forget it ... there is no way. Just send it to me or my wife and we'll read it to her". So we did just that. Here is what Veronica, his daughter wrote back:

hi Lauren I am so excited to go to your house on saturday I wonder what suprise i am gonna get oh just if you have a surprise for me and you know that jesus will be in your heart forever god bless you bye---bye and good---night. love veronica to Lauren and kara.

So ... yeah, no email accounts for them ... we're just gonna have to read all their emails. We might just learn a few things like ... you know ... Jesus will be in your heart forever.

God bless you. bye bye.

Encouraging Conversations

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of talking with someone who lives in Israel, and they offered the following real conversation witnessed between a believer and a Jewish friend:

believer: so, let me get this straight ... If his mother is Jewish ...
friend: then he is Jewish.
believer: Ok, so ... let's look at a few hypothetical cases ...
friend: Ok.

And let's also start with some tasty watermelon ...



believer: Case 1 ... Both of his parents are Jewish ... to avoid any argument there.
friend: Ok.
believer: But he is an avowed athiest ... he has told the Rabbi that there is no G-d, and that all of that stuff in the Torah was just made up. He says, "There is no G-d." Is he Jewish?
friend: Yes. He is still Jewish because of his lineage.

Let's take a break with this random frog our kids found outside our home ...



believer: Case 2 ... Different fellow, but again, both parents are Jewish.
friend: Ok.
believer: But he has been living in India for quite some time, and he is convinced of some Hindu god's worthiness, and worships those and other god's and refuses to acknowledge the G-d of Abraham. Is he Jewish?
friend: Yes. He is still Jewish for the same reason.

Ok, this better be good, because we are getting bored ...



believer: Case 3 ... Yet another fellow ... both parents are Jewish.
friend: Ok.
believer: But this last fellow has the biggest problem of all, because he actually believes the stories his parents told him. He believes that the Torah was given to them by Moses, and that the G-d of Abraham deserves his love. He also believes what Moses said about the prophets, and he believes that the prophets were inspired by the same G-d as Moses. He also comes to believe that the Messiah has come already, and will come again. And he believes that the Jewish Messiah is the Jesus of Nazareth mentioned in the bible. Is he Jewish?
friend: Well ... I cannot tell you what Jewishness is, but I can tell you what it is not. If it involves a belief in Jesus, then it's not Jewish.

My previous entry on this subject basically stated that Jesus defines Judaism today. I have been uncomfortable with this idea ever since that post. But, the fellow conveying the above example also made it clear that this train of thought is common between believers and non-believing Jews in Israel. This conversation was encouraging because now it's clear that I'm not the only one who sees that Jesus is the necessary beginning to the definition of a Jew today.

Let's close with this picture of last night's sunset here at our home ... click to enlarge and enjoy



Praise Jesus ... He is Moshiach ... and He loves the Jews first. Blessed be the children of Abraham!

Scalable Vector Graphics

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Correction: At this time all real browsers have committed to some level of SVG support except for Internet Explorer. "All" includes but is not limited to: Opera, Firefox, Netscape, Camino, SeaMonkey, Epiphany, Konqueror Safari, OmniWeb, Amaya, Webkit, etc ... Try the following using firefox:

An interesting SVG demo:
http://people.mozilla.com/~vladimir/demos/photos.svg

Demographics stuff in German.

The french are passing us by technically ... inflation calculator:
http://www.insee.fr/fr/indicateur/indic_cons/sip/sip.svg

Here is another interesting one also, but it requires (New Zealand) Chris Double's modifications for the HTML video element that he is adding to Firefox.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Har-PRP4X9U

SVG tetris
http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/svgtetris/svgtetris.svg

Again all of this was done using only "standards" ... imagine that.

He guards us ...

So, bà ngoại and mommy took David to their appointment with the folks at social services. Bà ngoại was watching David while mommy went to the restroom, and he was guarding her purse. When bà ngoại tried to take the purse, David held it back and said "momma!", and then tried to sling it over his shoulder and just managed to drag it along to make sure no one got it before mommy got back.

Earlier was this scene from the lemonade stand ...



And here was an early bird ...



This is the latest shot of David and his new box ... apparently he's not much bigger than my soprano ukulele.



May the Lord bless you and keep you.

The Tennessee Waltz

One of my girls requested that I sing this for her tonight ... This is really just a first stab at this song for fun. I plan to get much more deeply involved with this melody, and sing it much more gently than this, but until then she needs a memory of her dad singing before she goes to sleep ...



A link to some lyrics and chords I'm using.
Direct link to the mp3.

God is good.

long time ... no post

The girls at the flower and garden festival ...

(click to enlarge)

The lake at the flower and garden show ...

(click to enlarge)

A picture on a box ...

(click to enlarge)

A picture out of the box ...

(click to enlarge)

Someone's first birthday ...

(click to enlarge)

And Yes! ... they're gonna get'cha

(click to enlarge)

to be on His side.

Somehow we missed this picture ...

Just looking through some recent photos ...



Praise the Lord.

Getting ready for church ...

Just thought it would be nice to take a picture before we went out the door.



Just got back from JavaOne.

And, I just finished this book by Joshua Hammer ... wow. The quote that I will remember is that of a Palestinian christian who basically stated, "I want my kids to go to Israeli schools. I want my kids to join the IDF. But anyone caught collaborating against his own people should be put to death." And this was noted along side a description of homemade bombs being planted in the path of IDF vehicles. The fellow quoted must have been too scared not to tack that "But anyone ..." onto the end of his thought ... poor fellow.

10th Anniversary Fun

We went on a 7 day cruise to Key West, Grand Cayman, Cozumel, and Castaway Cay. Below are some highlights from before, during, and after ...

David getting ready for the trip ...



An island at our first stop ... Key West ...



The first sunset of the trip ...



Kara was a Junior Chef baking chocolate chip cookies ...



So was Lauren ... the Oceanear Club was fun for the girls ...



They ran into someone they knew from Orlando ...



Mommy catching the view from a porthole ...



Group picture ...



Girls getting ready to go snorkelling ... in Mexico ...



Resting in the stateroom ...



And then we met some deer behind our home when we returned ...



The Lord's provision for us is exceedingly abundant.

The girls had fun ...

Us guys, thought we were having a good time, but then we found this picture of the girls ...


Looks like they had more fun, doesn't it?

Chief Master Sgt. John Gebhardt

Picture says it all ...

Bloginterview.net

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Randomly flattered is how it felt to be contacted by this super cute Japanese girl, Kumiko Suzuko, and asked for an interview. She makes no pretense and tends to interview the more humble bloggers on the internet, so her posts are refreshing and easy to read.

Here is a link to our interview with her. She has started to accumulate some really good interviews.

Ethereal is now Wireshark

For those of us looking for ethereal in fc6 (Fedora Core 6) ...
Ethereal has been renamed to "wireshark" and is available in updates as follows:

[root@light ~]# cat /etc/fedora-release 
Fedora Core release 6 (Zod)
[root@light ~]# grep wireshark list
wireshark.i386            0.99.4-1.fc6           updates         
wireshark-gnome.i386      0.99.4-1.fc6           updates

You might want to check the wireshark faq for more details.

Make A Joyful Noise Unto The Lord ... along with the girls

Wow ... Uh, this was a fun one to do again. I think you'll agree this is our best version yet. Praise Him.



A link to some lyrics and chords I'm using.
Direct link to the mp3 via Odeo.
Direct link to the mp3 via podomatic.

Praise Him.

That's My King.

Awesome God ... Chúa Oai Quyền

The girls request this song almost every night, and even when they don't it's usually one of the songs they discuss. We love this song, and we hope the Lord does too.



A link to some lyrics and chords I'm using.
Direct link to the mp3.

Wade In The Water ... with the girls

Difficult song! Love the challenge. How should we plan the girls' debut?



A link to some lyrics and chords I'm using.
Direct link to the free mp3 hosted by Odeo.
Direct link to the free mp3 via podomatic.