My normal/weird dream about Costco

Every once in awhile I have a dream that I actually remember for a few hours. Sometimes they're meaningful, and sometimes they're weird. This one was more weird, but not that weird.

I dreamed that I was in Costco with my mom and dad and siblings and my wife. I decided to go look at the clothes. They were displayed a little nicer than usual in Costco. I found a couple things I wanted, but then I found Julie and she pointed out that I had already spent my clothes budget for the month. By the way, I have not bought any new clothes in over a year, but I have suddenly been wanting to again.

So, we headed towards the exit. The exit looked a lot more like Home Depot mixed with Barnes & Noble. There were stacks of books. I found one for a movie we had just seen. The last movie we saw in real life was (500) Days of Summer, and in the dream, I thought that was the book I was looking at, but then I realized the book was The Time Traveler's Wife, which I haven't seen. Apparently in my dream I was confused.

The book was like a coffee-table book--really big hardcover. But, the words weren't that big. So I couldn't figure out how they made it so big.

The book also said the copyright for the book was the year 2625. That made me think that the book was written in the future and brought back by the Time Traveler. Just as I was contemplating the intricacies of time travel and how a fiction book could influence its reality within a store, I woke up.

I don't know why I'm so able to remember the details of this dream. It's not especially weird, and I don't see anything I could possibly learn from this.

Last night I looked at Relevant Magazine's movie guide, and I remember seeing "The Time Traveler's Wife" on the page. That's probably why it was in my dream.

Weird stuff. I guess I'm treating this as a "control experiment" for future dreams. I know how most of the scenarios got into my head. In the future, I'm sure I won't.

Now I'm listening to Imogen Heap's new CD Ellipse, which I like more than her previous CDs so far. Mostly I think her melodies have improved.

Lame Behavior: Rating your indie-ness

The other day, Julie and I went and watched (500) Days of Summer at the indie movie theater in Santa Rosa--the Rialto. The last time I saw a movie there was before it was an arthouse theater--I saw The Lion King in 1995.

I wanted to go see Garden State when it came out there. I wanted to see Hotel Rwanda when it came out there. I missed both, and ended up watching the DVDs and they're among my favorites now. So is 500 Days, and we actually went and saw this one at the Rialto.

I think what makes and indie film work is the charm of the actors. Zach Braff carried Garden State on his quirkiness and charm. Even a movie like Napoleon Dynamite has a degree of loveableness to its main characters. That's why they work.

I think that both the main actors in 500 Days (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt and Zooey Deschaenel) were very charming. That's what made the movie work.

Well, that and an awesomely placed song that conveyed the building emotion of falling in love through it's mere opening riff. I realized that indie movies (which tend to have good indie soundtracks) are often a feast of good sounds. While (500) Days didn't have a huge playlist, it did have one song that was awesome. So I looked it up and discovered "the Temper Trap." This band has become one of my favorites overnight, and I know it will stay there, because it's the kind of music I've always wanted to make, not just listen to.

I feel like I've wasted time by not being up-to-date on my indie band research like I was while I was in college. But, you know, you get a real job, and get married, and you have to shift your priorities. I think that's right.

I have a tendency whenever I discover a band whose sound I love. It's not a terrible thing. But it can lead to a bad attitude.

I like to inform people of great music. But that leads to a stupid desire to be the first to discover a band. I think that's a common problem in our times--the days of iTunes and home studios. Both of those technologies mean that indie is the future of music. Every 20-something would-be hipster has their list of bands that is far superior to anything you've ever heard of. While I don't claim to be a hipster, I did used to be one of those name-dropping indie snobs.

I love to discover bands that haven't been recommended to me. I love to discover movies that haven't been recommended to me. But then I like to turn around and recommend bands and movies to other people. Weird.

Well, go enjoy some good art. Something that makes you smile. If you need somewhere to start, go listen to the song "Sweet Disposition" by the Temper Trap.

It just makes me happy. I don't care if you found it first or I found it first.

Webdesign stuff I've learned

In the last year and a half, I've been learning a lot about webdesign. I took some classes on how to build websites, and a few on what looks good.

I've learned some stuff, and I feel like writing it all down, so here it is (well some of it at least).

1. Positioning should be done with CSS and not with tables. Designers used to use tables to lay out websites, but you're not supposed to do that according to the w3c (the governing body of the web, who determines what html and css are meant to look like, and how web browsers display those rules). In reality, css enables you to do way more than tables do. I find it frustrating to work with tables. Don't get me wrong, sometimes css is frustrating too, but in the long run, it opens up a lot more doors, and your web pages load faster, because they are obeying the rules.


2. Web 2.0 stuff is attractive to the average person. Even though Web 2.0 has been around for a few years (e.g. when YouTube and MySpace came out), the design principles haven't changed. Here are the key principles that make a website look a lot more clean and professional than a lot of other sites (which people are still making):
   
   
   • Top Menu Bars--side menu bars are old school. You want to see what you're looking far at the top of the page.
   
   
   • Rounded edges--these are a pain to make compared to how easy straight edges are, but they're well worth it. It's the clean web 2.0 look that everyone expects these days.
   
   
   • "3D" and perspective--again, it is more time-consuming to add drop shadows and reflections, and it's really easy to screw up your reflections, but they are so ubiquitous in professional media (iPod ads started it, but now everybody uses them) that to not use these techniques leaves you with a very flat webpage.
   
   
   • "Above the fold" homepages--Make everything (or 90% at least) of your homepage show up in a window so that the viewer never needs to scroll on the homepage. This also makes it so that your homepage is set up landscape instead of portrait, which is more natural to the screen and the human eye.
   
   
   • Images instead of just text--I learned this in an Erwin McManus book, actually--it wasn't really web-specific. He observes that culture moved from words to pictures, and now to images. A number of successful websites use graphics in their menus.
   
   
   • Shiny images--a lot of the icons for web 2.0 not only are rounded-corner buttons with drop shadows, but they look like they have a shine on them. I guess this kind of goes with the "3D and perspective" one
   
   
   • Actually using web 2.0--this is true for any organization, and especially true for churches, which I've been doing the most web research on. If someone is part of an organization, they're probably not going to go check out the website nearly as often as they will go on facebook, twitter, flickr or youtube. So, placing links to social networks in very prominent places is key as well.


3. Other simple design principles:
   
   
   • Color contrast--colors should be evenly spread around the RGB color wheel, and a mix of darks and lights. Text needs to be different enough that it's legible
   
   
   • Light colors (non grays) seem to be in for large areas.
   
   
   • Too many links to the homepage are a good thing. That speaks for itself. If you can't find the homepage quickly, you'll probably leave the site

And that's probably a sufficient list for now. I've decided that making a website that is fad-free is a dumb idea. A website should need to be replaced every 2 or 3 years max. The web changes so fast that if you are actually going to do a good job staying up to date with things, then you're also going to be out of style pretty quickly. That means redesigns and redos are so important. That is yet another reason to use CSS instead of Tables. It saves hours on the redesign.

This is so short, maybe it should be on twitter.

Leading is difficult. I don't love making spreadsheets and organizing volunteers. But, it's worth it most of the time.

Birthday stuff

Tonight I wrote thank you cards for my birthday presents. I wasn't planning on getting much for my birthday, being an adult, and all. But, I got some cool stuff. I used to feel weird sharing what I've received. But now I realize that saying "I got something as a gift" has little to no reflection on who I am, but speaks volumes about the generosity of those around me, and so it is well-worth talking about.

I asked my siblings to buy me a guitar pedal that I'd been wanting for a few years. It was on sale from over $100 to just $50. So, I got my first new guitar thing in 3 or 4 years.

People in my family also bought us a new grill. They had asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I sarcastically said "a grill, but there's no way you guys are going to buy me that." But they did. The family got together and got it for me.



It is pretty similar to the one in the picture above.

Oh yeah, we also were given a new mattress for my birthday. Crazy.

Well, we got money, and today we went and bought it. They're delivering it tomorrow afternoon. I don't get to sleep on it tomorrow night, though, because Julie and Lauren are hosting a youth group girls' night at my apartment, so I'm kicked out.

Hopefully no teenagers sleep on the bed before me.

Our old bed is a hand-me-down that was Julie's grandparents at one point. I'm sure it's 20 or 30 years old. A spring mattress is meant to last under 10 years usually. I'm looking forward to a healthier body.

Today we had to do some rearranging of our guest room/office so that we can put our old bed in here. It's going to be a tight fit, but hopefully it will work.

And, Julie took me whitewater rafting as a present. And, I bought a computer for myself.

Wow that is a lot of stuff.

God, help me to use this stuff for your Kingdom and not to become a slave to my things. It's a risk to have nice stuff. Materialism lays in wait. Keep me from its trappings.

Photo editing is time consuming

Yesterday I preached a sermon at church. It was titled "What is the Church?"

A few hours later, I was exhausted. It seems weird, because public speaking doesn't burn a lot of calories, but it does leave you wiped out.

So, I decided to process HDR pictures. I worked on probably 70 pictures, and spent 5 or 6 hours straight doing it.

They were from Julie's and my honeymoon, from the day we went to Chichen Itza. I uploaded one to Flickr. If you're reading this blog on facebook, there's a good chance you already saw it.

So, here's the picture (click to enlarge):



I had to do some editing (e.g. removing people from the foreground), and I'm sure I will have many more hours of that sort of stuff (photoshop) to the other pictures I processed yesterday. I'll post more in the coming weeks.

Growing Trees on my patio

This year, I've become really into a new hobby--growing trees. It is a very weird, unique hobby, I know, but I have fun doing it, and it's pretty cheap.

Basically, the way it works is this:

1. Find little tiny tree sprouts growing from seeds in the spring.
2. Pull up/dig up the trees and plant them in a pot
3. Water them

So, all you have to pay for is dirt, a few pots, and water. Except that Julie and I don't pay for water in our apartment. And, for a few of the trees, I didn't buy dirt, but used compost that was made from leaves at church and some of our fruits and veggies.

I planted around 16 Japanese Maple Trees, 2 Silver Maples, 2 Redwoods, and an Avocado earlier this year.

I still have 3 Japanese Maples, 1 Silver Maple, both Redwoods, and the Avocado died, but new shoots came out of the pit last week, and it's growing really fast. (The avocado actually started growing in a compost pile at church, and most or all of the pits in there were from avocados that Julie and I had eaten).

Here are my trees (you can enlarge these pics):










Those are the Maples and the Avocado (which is in the front row on the right).











Those are the Redwoods. I took these pictures with the webcam on my new computer, which apparently horizontally flips all the images. The word "tiki" on our tiki torch fuel is backwards. Interesting. And off-topic.

Anyway, on Sunday I was at my grandparents' house for my birthday. I got a sweet new Gas grill, which is in the background of the next picture. While we were there, I found a pretty big Japanese maple growing behind a vine on a trellis. Because of its leaves and location, it looked like marijuana.

Today, I went and dug it up and planted it in a bucket. I'm not too optimistic that it will survive the transplanting process, but I'm hopeful. Here it is.


I'm kind of afraid that a neighbor will look over our fence and think it's pot and report it to the cops. Japanese Maples do kind of look like pot. And really, who grows trees in a backyard that is probably 20' x 12'?

My plan is to get these trees to a decent size and sell them or plant them, if we own a house by then (or plant them at church, if we want to plant Japanese Maples anywhere).

Japanese Maples were going for $150 at Home Depot and $185 at Costco last I checked.

So, this is a pretty smart investment. I think I've spent about $20 on all the trees so far.