Packing for Nationals

I well into the process of packing for my trip to the American Vaulting Association's National Champinoships in Lexington, VA.  I'll be leaving home for Dreamswept Farm on Monday afternoon and hitting the highway with the Emerald City Vaulters early Tuesday Morning.

With any luck, I'll be making posts to my blog from my phone along the way. But I probably won't be able to sift through my regular e-mail until I get home in about three weeks.  In the mean time if you need to e-mail me please use my yahoo account. 

Cavalia

I went with Chris & Gretta Cook this afternoon and watched the Cavalia performance. It was good show and highly recommended for those who are equestrian inclined. At $60+ it's kind of expensive for those not particularly interested in horses. Click here for the Seattle PI's review.

I also picked up a nice long sleeve tee shirt.
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Beginner Vaulting Camp @ Dreamswept Farm

I got to spend another fun Friday at Dreamswept Farm's Vaulting Camp, this time with the beginners.
Again the vaulters participated in hour long yoga, ballet and gymnastics classes. The vaulters also got to perform their compulsories and freestyle routines at the canter or trot for a small audience while I video taped. Later they got to perform their team barrel freestyle routines, again while I video taped. [Sorry I didn't get any still pictures of the horse work as I was too busy panning the camp's video camera.] After the team barrel freestyle routine performances, Tames Alan worked with the vaulters on their individual freestyle routines on the barrel. Then Tamea Denault worked with the vaulters on various skill building drills while I provided some near real time video/digital photo feed back.

Fireworks on the Forth

Got a bunch of photos of the fireworks in Downtown Bellevue with my new camera last night. Including this one of my housemate Jen watching the fireworks from the front yard.

Advanced Vaulting Camp @ Dreamswept Farm

I had lots of fun observing and helping out with the Advanced Vaulting Camp at Dreamswept Farm. I only got to attend on the last day, Friday.

I watched as the vaulters participated in hour long yoga, ballet and gymnastics classes before lunch. After lunch the Nancy Stevens-Brown [AVA President and renowned clinician] worked with the advanced vaulters on their team barrel freestyle routines.

E-mail is broken.

The volume of junk e-mail coming in to random addresses at Soot-n-Smoke.com has grown significnatly over the past few weekes. On the order of three to four thousand messages a day. It's gotten to the point that it's now causing problems with my accounts and my e-mail client.

I'm working on the problem but I may not receive e-mail or may be slow to respond for the next few days.

TTFN
Tom

New Digital Camera

I got a new digital camera from my folks as a birthday present.

More photos to come later.

RSS Feeds for Coppermine Photo Galleries

I found and had installed a PHP script that generates an RSS feed for Coppermine Photo Galleries.

However the script has some bugs that prevented the feeds it generated from validating. So I had to debug it a bit. When I got it working on both my site and my Dad's site, I posted the revisions back to the Coppermine support forum where I found the script.

My.Yahoo Supports RSS Feeds!!!!

I recently found that Yahoo has support for RSS headlines in beta for their My.Yahoo.com portal service. I've already added this blog and my Dad's blog to my.yahoo page. And I've asked our hosting provider to install a small RSS script to our photo galleries. (I haven't had time yet to update the various templates with XML icons pointing to the feeds.)

Early access to G-mail!!

Hey I got my favorate user name at Google's new gmail service.

Post Dated Blog Entries

Can you post an entry to a Blogger site that uses a date in the future?

Evidently you can, but they don't show up until the first time you publish your blog after the Change Time & Date.

Tools for Editing Vaulting Music

Recently I've been using Easy CD-DA Extractor for CD ripping and audio file format conversion. I've also been using GoldWave for editing music files. Finally I've been using Roxio's Creator Classic 6.0 for burning CDs (part of their Easy CD Creator package).

AVA Board of Directors in about 2006

After much heart felt consideration, I regret to report that I'm just not ready to serve on the AVA Board of Directors. A few factors outside vaulting would make it difficult, at present, for me to commit the additional time and resources that a position on the Board deserves.

Serving on the Board is something that I eventually want to do, as I have many ideas about how we might improve our organization and our sport. And I had been thinking that I might run for a position starting in about 2006.

I sincerely regret that my decision may well leave Region III under-represented in the short term.

Web Site Overhaul

Now that I've got my Dad's site about done, I'm working to overhaul my web site.

I'm giving up on FrontPage, in part because it doesn't output clean HTML and partly because I can't find my CDs to reinstall it on my desktop computer.

AVA Board of Directors. Me?

Got an e-mail asking if I'd be willing to serve on the AVA's Board of Directors. I'm going to think about it over the weekend.

Cool Google Tool

Google has a built in calculator!

http://www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator

Atom & Blog "Plug-ins"

I've been exploring Weblogs lately. I read a few on a regular basis, generally just from bookmarks. Recently I set up a web log for my Dad, as that seem to be what he really needs as far as a web site. In doing so came across the Atom API. The more I learn about the technology behind weblogs the more it looks like a "power to the people" kind of "killer app" in it's early stages. Much like HTTP and HTML did in the early '90s.

While I'm only tangentially interested in the syndication and aggregation side, I'm very interested in the authoring side. Specifically in developing a few 'blog plug-ins. An example a 'blogger might have a home weather station that reports temp, pressure, humidity, etc. and want to post the local conditions on his weblog. If enough 'bloggers could regularly post this data to their weblogs using a standardized schema it might be of interest to weather researchers and forecasters. This could be easily accomplished with a plug-in that runs on the 'blogger's home PC and regularly posts the local weather conditions and station / location info to the weblog via the Atom API.

Again while I've got numerous ideas, I haven't got as much time to work on them as I'd like. If you're also interested drop me a note.

Need a Digital Camera

Now that I've got a Photo Gallery script installed I need to get a digital camera so I have something to post in it.

Dad's new web site

Did a major overhaul of Dad's web site this weekend. First I set Blogger to post to his homepage. Then I got our web hosting company to install a photo gallery script called Copper Mine. Finally I edited the various templates and style sheets to give the site a consistent look and feel.

Vaulting Demo at Small Farm Expo

The Redwing Vaulters presented a half hour demonstration of equestrian vaulting at the WSU Co-op Extension's Small Farm Expo. About 50 people watched 17 vaulters and four coaches perform on both the horse and on the barrel.