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Santa Fe Days 1 & 2

Originally uploaded by kerner.



Originally uploaded by kerner.

Tent Rocks
Originally uploaded by kerner.

Sunday morning we left Springfield for vacation in Santa Fe, NM. We had a rather uneventful 12 hour drive, which other than being long is good.  We were in Santa Fe a few years ago and liked it so much we decided to come back. Santa Fe has outstanding outdoor activities and some of the best food anywhere I've ever been. It probably doesn't hurt that we love spicy food. 

The biggest improvement over our last trip is that we rented an apartment rather than staying in a hotel. It's part of a larger adobe house about three blocks from the Plaza which is perfect - we can walk just about everywhere important in Santa Fe. The house is old with hard wood floors, adobe walls, and logs making up the ceiling 14 feet above the floor. It oozes Santa Fe character.

Monday we got up and went for the obligatory breakfast burrito at Tia Sophia's. This restaurant is credited with creating the breakfast burrito in 1975 and they're still great. I ordered one with sausage and have to say that bacon is much better with the chile. The spice in the sausage doesn't mix very well. I think ham might be good as well, but I'm probably going to stick with the original - bacon. 

After breakfast we made a quick run to Trader Joe's to buy some food for the house. <rant>We really need a TJ in Springfield - if Santa Fe can support one I know we could. I think I could do all of my grocery shopping at TJ. </rant> One of the advantages of driving here is that we were able to bring our bikes. We went on a 20 mile bike ride from the plaza out into the countryside SE of town. 

We ended the day at Tomasita's for dinner. I really liked Tomasita's last time we were here, but I don't think it was quite as god as I remembered. I had blue corn chicken enchiladas with green chile. Maybe my standards in chile have gone up, but it wasn't outstanding. The best part of the meal - sopapillas! 

Yesterday we took the first hiking excusion of the trip to Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument. These rock formations were formed by erosion on the deposits from volcanic eruptions. I took the XH-A1 out and got about 40 minutes of footage. I'm not sure what quality it will be, but hopefully I'll be able to get a 4-5 minute piece from the footage. About half the time I ran everything manually, but the constant iris adjustments moving from light to shadow were taxing so a good portion of the day was spent in shutter priority. Setup: 24f, 1/48 shutter, auto iris (except for when I stopped to do it manually), and the ND filter at 1/32. This is a location that is really well served by the HD camera. I'll post some unedited clips later. 

Last night for dinner we went to the Shed. We spent a long time at the bar waiting for our table and got to talk with a woman who owns a shop on the plaza. She made a recommendation for the red chile (which apparently they sell) and it was exceptional. This is the second night we've walked to and from dinner. The house near the plaza is great.

Today, Sarah is going on a yarn excursion to Taos. I'm going to lounge around Santa Fe and do some reading and maybe shoot some video of the town. 

Leopard: First Impressions

I finally got Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5, installed yesterday. So far I've got to say its nice. I started the install yesterday while we were prepping for Saturday night worship, and it was up and running before the service was over.

I really like the UI updates (except for the mirror dock). Stacks are great. I've consolidated a lot of my applications into stacks to clean up the dock - a stack for CS3 Master Collection, Final Cut Studio, iWork, Office. Other nice features, when doing a screen shot of a region the crosshair shows a tooltip of x/y coordinates and then clipping dimensions. 

Last night I hooked up a drive for Time Machine. It took most of the night to do a backup, but the UI is gorgeous. It's not the most functional backup tool I've ever used, but it's easy. Ultimately when it comes to back ups, easy is WAY more important than a powerful interface, because if it's easy people will actually use it. Time Machine is brain-dead simple.

Spotlight is much improved. It's faster, includes dictionary definitions, does math like Google (which lets me take Calculator out of my dock). The speed improvement is much needed, and greatly appreciated.

While the CoverFlow view in the Finder is nice it's a bit silly in my opinion. Quick Look on the other hand is great - it lets you preview documents without opening the main application. This is great for Office documents, PDF files, and other files that might be used for quick reference. I'm already using Quick Look and liking it. The Finder has other UI improvements that make it a joy to use - a better sidebar, a breadcrumb like path view, 

I haven't had a chance to use the iChat screen sharing yet, but I'm very excited about this feature. I think that there will be countless uses for remote desktop collaboration. It will be useful for training, for quick fixes without having to walk across the room. It will dramatically improve collaboration.

My favorite feature of Leopard is Spaces. It's essentially lets you set up multiple desktops on your computer. I intend to have a space for video editing, general web/email, miscellaneous documents, and Parallels. I was really pleased to discover that Parallels will stay in full-screen within a Space. This way I can have a Space dedicated to full-screen Windows (I know it's silly, but I use Windows only apps almost every day). Spaces makes it easy to have a lot of applications running and not have your screen be a jumble of windows. 

I'm sure I'll come across many more features of Leopard that I like, but these are the ones that win out in a few hours of use.

Transformed by Generosity Weekend

This weekend we celebrated our annual stewardship campaign. For the most part it's been a great weekend, we had a few logistical glitches, but overall it's been outstanding. We're blessed to have had Richard Blackmon from Viscern speaking this weekend. Richard and his wife Debby have been long-time friends of Schweitzer. Richard preached a great message about three stewardship stories: the poor woman who gave all she had, Zaccheus, and one from his experience working with churches. Richard asked the question, "What is it that causes people to give radically to the church?" He then explained his Popeye theory of stewardship, "That's all I can stand, and I can't stands no more." When you say that you can't stand the world the way it is any more, what better way could you invest in change than in the work of God through the church. I listened to this message all four services and each time it hit me in a different way. I can't wait to see what God does in the hearts of our congregation with regard to stewardship.