These are my links for March 21st:

• eSchool News – Schools respond to iPhone’s popularity –

These are my links for March 7th:

• AFP548 – Stop Time Machine from Nagging About Every External Disk –
• Ups and Downs and Everything In Between » Blog Archive » The 10 Geekiest Leopard Features I Will Probably Love –
• How to stop a 10.4 (and probably a 10.5) client from advertising the availability of ssh via Bonjour –

These are my links for March 6th:

• Hidden Secrets of Mac OS X Leopard – A list of preferences that you can change to turn on features in Leopard and some applications compatible with Leopard

These are my links for February 29th:

• How to uninstall or disable Apple Remote Desktop 2 or 3 –

These are my links for February 26th:

• AP2: Aperture and Time Machine, Together at Last – Aperture Users Professional Network –

How many people can say that?? I was practicing with Jackie the donkey today out at the farm to get her ready for her big performance at church. I was on her back and my friend Steve was leading her. We weren’t using a saddle or a set of reins. Everything was going well, and then we both got distracted just as something spooked Jackie. She jumped, and I lost my balance. Remember that we were not using a saddle or reins, so I had nothing to grab as I lost my balance. Two seconds later I landed on the driveway all tangled up in the lead rope. Oh well. That’s what I get for not paying attention.

–Pete

Once again it is time for our very own Jackie O’Donkey to perform in our church’s spring production of Son of God, Son of Man. Jackie will play the part of a donkey — in the scene which depicts Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey on Palm Sunday.

Today was the first day of rehearsal for Jackie. We have to get her used to walking across the stage again, as well as the sound of the actors, the orchestra, etc. She was a little spooked at first, but by the end she was doing fine!

These are my links for February 19th:

• The truth about truth: No truth, no nothing. – A nice article about the virtues of truth — spoken by a guy who does sales training

These are my links for February 12th:

• Mac OS X 10.5.2: Server Monitor and ipmitool cannot connect to server –
• Apple – Support – Discussions – Managing Scripts in ARD 3 … – Creating subfolders for your Send UNIX templates
• Setting up firmware password protection in Mac OS X – How to set the Open Firmware password or the EFI Password

An arctic front came through today and brought us a blast of winter again. We were at the farm when the front came through and with it came an impressive amount of wind, blowing snow, and plunging temperatures. While eating breakfast, the temp dropped four degrees and it has continued to fall all afternoon. As I write this, it is -8 F with a windchill near -30 F. YUCK!

What I could to for is a nice big snow storm. That’d be fun.

These are my links for February 8th:

• AFP548: Leopard Server Part 2 – Local Directory Services –

These are my links for February 8th:

• AFP548: Leopard Server Part 2 – Local Directory Services –

Michael W. Smith wrote a song a while back about the Columbine High School Shootings. The message of the song is simple. You never know which day will be your last, so live every day a if it were your last. This is a common thing we all hear, but it never hurts to be reminded.

Here’s an excerpt from the lyrics:

This is your time
This is your dance
Live every moment
Leave nothing to chance
Swim in the sea
Drink of the deep
Embrace the mystery of all you can be
This is your time

Like the song? Hear the rest by downloading it here.

–Pete

These are my links for February 7th:

• Avoiding image persistence on Apple LCD displays –
• Screen Savers: Using With Liquid Crystal Displays –
• Leopard homeSync changes « Managing OS X –
• Mac OS X Server version 10.5: Using Podcast Producer with the Active Directory plugin –
• An article about how to rename and Active Directory Domain –

I mentioned in a previous post that Jordan, the retired Helping Paws service dog was staying with us temporarily. While I was snapping photos of him the other night, I took this photo of one of his feet.

Dog feet are weird. For those of you that have dogs, have you ever noticed that their feet smell like nachos? Seriously. They smell like nachos. How do I know? I’ve smelled many dog paws through the years. Why do they smell like nachos? I have no idea. Anyone care to expound on this? By the way, my wife and I have a term for this strange phenomenon. We call it “Nacho Paw”.

For those of you who aren’t dog people, you can just move along now…..move along….. There is nothing to see here.

–Pete

It is no secret that I’ve become completely hooked on Flickr. One of the things that makes Flickr fun for me is the idea of “Groups”. A group is way to share photos about a particular subject and discuss them. There seems to be a group for just about everything these days and I’m personally part of a couple dozen groups.

Up until just recently, I never saw the need to create my own group, since I was always able to find a group about whatever topic I wanted. Last week, however, I finally find a spot where Flickr needed a group. I had taken a whole set of photos of horse-drawn sleighs when I attended the St. Croix Valley Carriage and Driving Society’s annual Sleigh and Cutter Festival at the Washington County Fairgrounds a few weeks ago. I went looking for a group to join to post my sleigh photos and came up empty. There were groups for horse drawn vehicles, driving horse, etc — but nothing specifically about sleighs. So — I seized the opportunity and created a group devoted to sharing photos and discussing horse drawn sleighs, bobsleds and cutters.

So far, after a week of existence, there is a grand total of four members of my group. Now I see *why* there wasn’t a group for this already. Oh well. It was fun anyway!

–Pete

These are my links for February 4th:

• Mac OS X 10.5: Disk Utility’s Repair Disk Permissions reports issues with SUID files –
• Use and cleaning of power adapter with MagSafe connector –
• Lensbabies >>> Selective Focus SLR camera lenses – I want one of these!

If you visit our house these days you’ll see we’ve added, temporarily at least, another dog to our menagerie of animals. The new dog is named Jordan, and he’s a big snugly Golden Retriever. That in itself is a bit odd for us, as we’ve always been much more of Labrador Retriever people around our house. One big issue we face as a result, is that Jordan has long, silky, yellow fur. Our labs all have short, coarse, black fur. Combine these two types of fur together and we now have a scenario where it doesn’t matter what color clothing you put on, EVERYONE can tell you have dogs. ARGH!

Jordan is a retired Helping Paws service dog. He worked for eight years for a woman named Bonnie. At the end of his career, it wasn’t possible for Jordan to stay living with Bonnie, and he needed a temporary place to stay while a permanent retirement home was located for him. Jordan was trained by my friend Jay, so we knew him well already. He still fits in well at our home, despite he fact we already have three dogs. We aren’t planning on him living with us permanently, but he is sweet — so who knows — maybe he’ll end up staying here.

–Pete

I was doing a little reading of The Bamboo Project Blog where Michele mentioned the 31 day challenge. That lead me to Problogger, where I found some more information about it. The idea is to look at different ways, over the course of 31 days, to increase the readership of your blog. I need to go even more basic than that. I need to start writing in my blog again!

I know it sounds cliche, but I’ve been so busy with work, with my volunteer work at Helping Paws, and the re-birth of my photography hobby, that I just haven’t found the time to do any blogging. Most of my spare computer time I’ve actually been spending at Flickr, which is a fascinating place to lurk, observe, and participate in.

So — I’m going to try once again to regularly write here. I’m not sure what all the topics will be. At least some of the posts will relate to the work I’m doing on Flickr. I still want to do some tips and tricks about my favorite operating system, Mac OS X, but I never seem to have the time to do it and there are so many good ones for that already. I’ll guess we’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, look for some more posts from me.

–Pete

These are my links for February 2nd:

• Apple Matters | Getting More out of Leopard’s SIdebar –