picture of road leading down waterfront park 

another picture of the statue in Waterfront park 

statue at Waterfront Park in Charleston SC 

picture of cannon at waterfront park 

flags blowing in the wind today, pretty good breeze.  

waterfront park sidewalk 

Palm tree waterfront park Charleston SC 

Charleston Harbor picture taken today 

Junior Propellerhead

I feel a blog coming on.   Yes I do.  Yesireee I have some news to share.   LOL…
Ok, now that the drum roll is fading in the background and you are sitting at the edge of your seat wishing I would spit it out here it is.  

Apparently there are more propeller heads in my home than I had first imagined.  As you may already know one of my nicknames is Chief Propeller head.  Do not ask me where that comes from however I know that it is a term used for folks that are also known as “geeks” and “nerds”.  While I do not fit the profile for an IBM employee and despise wearing a pocket protector in my shirt I still get accused of being a distant cousin of one or both.  Therefore one of my friends named me Chief Propeller head.  My wife calls me Techno Papa because anytime there is a problem with the computers or (God forbid) the connection to the WORLD WIDE WEB is disrupted for more than 5 nanoseconds (the time it takes for someone to inhale deeply and scream for help in my general direction) then I am the lucky winner.  I get to drop what I am doing or in some cases pick my carcass up off the floor or couch and jerk myself out of the mindless daze I might be in because of the idiot box that has captured my attention and then have to snap back to the world of binary to figure out the problems at hand.  

Computers came first and then the wonderful invention of the cell phone which is the thing that most of us use more than our own home phones.  I think that is why most folks have quit using ma bell in lieu of using the cell phone instead.  After all, why should we pay BOTH ma bell and the cellular provider to make phone calls?   Gosh, I am chasing rabbits, sorry about that.  The reason I am having the problem getting to the point is because this story has something to do with connecting the dots between cell phone and the personal computer which my sweet wife uses regularly.  

Typically my wife stays in touch with me in various ways through the day and I also try to do the same thing.  We probably communicate in one way or the other several times per day. That could be but is not limited to subliminal messages, smoke signals, screaming out the window,  sending our kids to tell each other something, IM messages, e-mail etc.   It is a married folk’s thing that most of us married folks do.  

Anyway, I noticed today around 4pm when I was leaving my cubicle farm in the tower of power in Monkey Corner that my wife had not pinged me all day.  GOSH, that had left a connectivity or latency problem in our network that desperately needed fixing.  So, I hop on the cell phone in my car and PING her.  I leave her several messages and of course my wife has forgotten that she is supposed to USE this device to ANSWER it in case I call.  Katy has one of the cell phones that ONLY make outgoing calls.  Hey, what the heck, I have been playing that game on and off for several years so I have sort of gotten used to it.  I figured she would eventually come up for air.  Around 5:30 pm I started to notice the connectivity gap was getting longer and longer so I called again.  It is amazing to me how long of a voice mail message I can leave on her cell phone.  

I guess around 5:45 pm Katy calls me and tells me that she is on her way home and that she is on Redbank road which is not far from us.  I had already gone online to TRACK my sweet wife via the debit card TRAIL that she had left all afternoon.  LOL…   Remember that I said that we communicate in more than one way?  You want to know where your wife or husband is just get online and see where they have been shopping.  LOL…  Anyway, my wife commences to expending some of the 5000 words that she has been storing up for me all day on the cell phone.  That is cool, I don’t mind, I have the rest of the night to listen, right? More importantly we are on the UNPLAN with Suncom which means we can blather to each other non stop 24x7  seven days per week and they wont charge us another dime.  

Katy surprises me by saying that she was on her way to a lady that is on the Free Cycle list to pick up a four cup coffee maker that she wanted to use in her classroom at school.  Katy has the navigational prowess of a wet rock so of course she got lost on her way to the address.  Katy then pulls over (I hope) whips out her laptop and plugs in the wireless card and finds a Wireless Access Point at a leasing office in a housing development and got on the Internet to check her email and get the ladies phone number that she needed.  I was like, SAY DO WHAT?  Katy is using her laptop and the wireless card to access a WAP to do what?  Holy wireless connections batgirl I have a JUNIOR propeller head on my hands.  I am so tickled that Katy has emerged into the 21st century and has embraced the power of wireless Internet access.   I will have to get Katy her very own propeller head hat to wear.  I can not wait to take a picture of both of us with our propeller head hats on and the props turning in the wind.  

In Loving Memory of Norman Clifford Orvin

January 12, 1947 - April 14, 2006
A member of Grace Fellowship Church since 1977, serving as an adult Sunday School Teacher. A USAF Vietnam war veteran and retiree from the Charleston Naval Shipyard. Mr. Orvin is survived by Donice, Mark, Jason and Amy.


This afternoon our church is burying one of our long standing members, Norman Clifford Orvin. I did not know brother Orvin very well but I do know that he expressed a genuine love for God and as long as his health permitted it he was in the pews singing and praising right along with the rest of us. Brother Orvin was 59 years old when he passed from this life into the heavenlies. We know that we know that he has received a permanent healing and a new body. No longer will brother Orvin have to use a walker to get around and the pain of arthritis is now gone. We have the assurance of salvation knowing that brother Orvin trusted in the gift of Grace. I helped to run the sound during the service that was held in our sanctuary and then there was a prosessional heading for somewhere in Moncks Corner SC which is about 20 miles north of Charleston.

Because Christ rose

Because Christ rose from the grave we have hope in the gift of grace and eternal life through Him.  As we are surrounded of pictures of Easter bunnies, eggs and the other trappings of this holiday join me as I celebrate the real meaning of Easter.  May God bless you abundantly and keep you in his loving grace.  Be safe and have a special time with your friends and family this Easter holiday.  God bless

Announcing Mobile Play

Today I learned about Mobileplay and you can find them at the following URL of http://mobileplay.com/ I was able to set up a free account at Mobileplay in approximately 5 minutes and then download their Mobileplay software to my Pocket PC which then allows me to dynamically chose and install any data information application on my device. No matter where I am I can connect to a wireless access point and effortlessly synchronize the data from Mobileplay. For now Mobileplay is in a beta stage which means that eventually they will begin to charge for some sort of extras. As for me, I am SOLD on this service. I love it so go check it out and enjoy data on the move.





James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
moffittj@bellsouth.net

In loving memory of Hedy A. Moffitt Dec 16, 2005

In the picture you see my adoptive mom and dad. James C. Moffitt SR is pictured to the right standing next to my mom and his wife Hedy A. Moffitt. This picture was probably taken sometime between the years of 1982 and 1990 when my dad, James Moffitt Sr lost his battle with cancer. My dad was 60 years old when he passed away and had a successful career in the US Army where he retired and went back to school at East Texas State University and went to work as the TV Man at Terrell State University.
My mom, Hedy Auer Moffitt, died on December 16, 2005 as she too lost her battle with cancer. My dad was a native of Quinlan Texas and when he retired from the US Army in 1969 he moved his family back to his home town of Quinlan Texas. My dad met my mom in Frankfurt Germany at a bingo game. My mother is a native of Austria and was a translator for the Austrian embassy and spoke 20+ languages. My parents met, fell in love and married. After several unsuccessful pregnancies my parents decided to adopt my sister and I from an orphanage in Aschofenburg Germany. My sister Tanya was adopted first and then after the paperwork was signed a year later my dad said the nuns told him about me which peaked his interest. When my dad walked over to the crib and picked me up I supposedly took the hat off of his head and threw it across the room and laughed at him. From what I was told that stole his heart and he adopted me too. I am so thankful that I had my parents and that they brought us out of that environment and provided us with the medical care that we both desperately needed.
Tanya was blind in one eye and was not supposed to ever be able to drive and I had my right leg in a cast up to my knee and was never supposed to walk. Thanks to a lot of love, surgeries and therapy my sister was able to take her first eye exam without glasses and pass it and I was able to walk and play basketball for 6 years.
My parents, James and Hedy Moffitt are survived by their adopted children James C. Moffitt Jr and Tanya Lynn Moffitt who live in Charleston South Carolina and Canton Ohio. My parents are also survived by several brothers and sisters who still live in the Dallas Ft Worth area and several grand children.





James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
moffittj@bellsouth.net

One day at a time

We can do this... :) One meal at a time. One snack at a time. It is all about making the right decision every time we decide to put something in our mouth. Is it good for us? How many calories does it contain? Will it help me lose weight ? How will it make me feel physically, mentally or emotionally?

Monday and Tuesday I ate less than 2000 calories and walked a 1.2 miles with a friend of mine. So far today I have had 120 calories and need to start drinking my water. Hope you have a good day and good luck on your weight loss activities. We can do it !!




James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
moffittj@bellsouth.net

Google Talk Plugins

(image placeholder)Coming to you live from my couch as I listen to the rumblings of my stomach and the garbage truck outside.  I am home today thanks to mother nature waking me up at 3 am to make some visits to the great white throne.  No, I am not talking about the great white throne that we will see when we go see God, I am talking about the throne that we all visit from time to time.  Need I say more here?  Anyway, I had so much fun with mother nature this morning that I was worn out when gizmo woke me up at 6:30 am.  There is no way I was going to go to work and make trips to the restroom all morning there so I just decided to stay home with Justin and be sick together.  Fun stuff, let me tell ya.  

One of the things that I love to do on the Internet is to chat with my friends and family via IM also known as Internet Messaging.  There are tons of clients out there, Yahoo, AOL, MSN and my favorite , Google Talk.  It used to be that Google was just a well known search engine but it appears that they are just going crazy with all sorts of cool applications that are giving Microsoft a run for their money.  GO GOOGLE!!!!

I love Google Talk because its simplicity of use.  I like it because it is not loaded down with all sort of CRAP that makes it BLOATWARE that eats up half of your memory resources.  Not all of us have 2gb of ram on our computers (giggle) so it is nice to know that the Google programmers are being mindful of everyone else when they write the code to this app.  The ONLY complaint that I have about Gtalk is that up until now I have been unable to make the FONT size larger.  I must have larger fonts than the default fonts in Google Talk.  Well, thanks to my having to be in close proximity to the restroom this morning I was able to spend some time researching HOW to do this.  Most of the time I find myself working on the Internet researching technical problems but today I was able to actually research something that was going to be directly beneficial to little ole me and of course you, if you have the same problem with the font size.  

Check out the following link and download the “extended talk” plugin and that will allow you to zoom in on your conversations withink Google talk and thereby make the fonts LARGER.  Cool stuff I tell you.  There are other cool plugins you can try as well.

http://esnips.com/web/google-talk-add-ons  

Is more better?

Have you ever heard the old saying “more the merrier”?  If you are talking about cash, rubies, gold, diamonds, stocks, bonds or Internet access then more is good.  When you are talking about weight however more is only good if you are trying to anchor a boat or provide traction to your tires so you can get your vehicle out of a mud hole.  When it comes to personal body weight more is never good.  That is right, the heavier you are there is an increased chance that you are going to experience more health problems.  My day started out with chest pains that were brought on by not taking my blood pressure medicine and of course my carrying around more weight than my body can withstand.  The doctor told me today that extra weight on a body causes undue stress which can lead to all sorts of problems such as chest pains joint problems etc.  So, once again I am faced with the need to make a life changing decision.  It is pretty simple.  If you want to lose weight keep your ASS out of the refrigerator. I got this saying from a cute cartoon that someone sent me the other day.  I forwarded it to several of my friends but the picture was not sent out by gmail.  The picture showed a, you guessed it, a donkey with his head stuck in the refrigerator.  Life is short and we only have so many days on this earth.  Do we really want to shorten our days here just to have one more plate full of munchies?

So, how do we get here?  It seems that one day we are fit as a fiddle and then we wake up and it feels like someone has inserted an air hose and we look like the Michelin Man.    The problem is two fold.  How I look at the problem and how I choose to deal with it.  The weight did not happen over night nor will it come off over night.  I need to take it off the same way I put it on one pound at a time, one day at a time.  In other words I did not eat the whole elephant all at once and I am not going to remove the elephant all at once.  As one of my friends fondly quotes I need to take baby steps.  One moment at a time I need to make the right decision to eat less and when I do eat I need to eat the right things.

One of the problems that I have is that I like to sit in front of the TV late at night and there is nothing better than to watch the idiot box and stuff goodies into my mouth.  I do not know why I like to do that other than maybe I just like to eat.  One of the things that I try to do is when I get the munchies while watching TV late at night I reach for the sun flower seeds in a hope to minimize the calorie intake damage.  The extra bowl of cereal right before bed and the “seconds” plate of food during the meal only add to the problem.  One of my friends tells me that she turns to food when she is going through an emotional crisis.  She gets blue or depressed for whatever reason and then self medicates with a bag of Doritos.  I had never thought about this before so maybe I need to examine that aspect of over eating too.  I told another friend of mine the other day that one of the reasons that I have a tendency to throw up my hands and quit is because I just get so overwhelmed with the problem.  The problem looks so much bigger than I can handle and my defense mechanism is to just give up and look the other way hoping it will go away.  Luckily for me I have not taken that approach in every area of my life.  Somehow I need to believe that I can DO IT.  I need to look at this as a challenge and not run from it but meet this thing head on.  Instead of thinking negative and being ashamed of how I look I need to embrace my faith in who God is in every area of my life and believe that “I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength”.  

This morning my body reminded me of the consequences of not taking my blood pressure medicine.  I thought I was going to have to call an ambulance and not go to some scheduled events.  However, after about 30 minutes the pains subsided and my blood pressure dropped enough for me to get on with my day.  This afternoon I went by Health First on Rivers Avenue and had them draw some blood, do an EKG and prescribe some blood pressure medicine.  Our health insurance will pay everything except for the 35.00 co pay.  I also found out that they have a diet plan that they can put me on to help me lose weight quickly and safely while being under their supervision and helping me to be accountable.  Can you believe that the insurance company will not cover a penny of this weight loss program?  They will pay for all of my exams and blood pressure medicine but not for something that is considered preventive that will cause all of the other costs to either be minimized or go away altogether.  This is simply amazing if you ask me.  

March Madness Car Wash

Like most churches we have a youth program that is designed to share the love of Christ and provide encouragement and guidance to our growing youth group. We do that through our Youth program which provides hands on training through bible studies and different types of programs. In order to help fund these youth programs we find community businesses like Auto Zone who are willing to host a car wash for us in their parking lot. Thanks Auto Zone!!

March Madness Car Wash at Autozone

Winter is almost gone and Spring is near

Gosh, I am a quart low on blogging folks. Life certainly has been keeping us busier than I would like to admit. You know the drill, we all do it. We sleep, eat, interact with our families, go to work and spend way too much time with people we barely know. Heck, sometimes we spend more time with those folks than we do our own family members. Then we have two activities or more at church and extracurricular activities with the children and before you know it Monday turns into Sunday and you find yourself doing it all over again. Between life’s activities and the many distractions that we have pulling us here and there we fail to stop and appreciate life and it zooms right past us. It seems that the older you get the faster time flies. Is it because when we were younger we spent too much time having fun and smelling the coffee and other things and now as we have come into a fuller realization of what the meaning of life is we are working over time trying to make up for lost time?

My six month contract is almost half over and I think that my supervisor is going to have me hold over for a couple of extra months and provide them extra cover for some projects that are coming up during the summer. That will be nice because I like working there and I love the pay checks. One of the nice things about working there is that I am learning some new technology. Then again that is the nice thing about contracting vs. being an in house employee. When you are a contractor you find yourself working in all sorts of environments with different technology implemented in different ways. You are always on a learning curve with what you are doing. In the last three months I have learned something about GroupWise administration, Tivoli Storage Manager, Dell Open manage, VMWARE and Citrix. I am working in a very large data center environment with over 200 servers and network support equipment. That is an awesome environment to learn in each day.

Katy spent the weekend with her Happy Days ladies on the Isle of Palms and had a good time cropping and going on a boat ride to see some dolphins. I can not wait to see the pictures she is going to share with us. I am hopeful that sometime in the near future that the Renaissance men of Happy Days will be able to put something together for them to do. Why do the ladies always have all the fun anyway?

Katy has a couple of months to go and her first official year as a teacher will have been completed in Charleston County. They like her so much they asked her to come back next year. GO KATY GO!!!! I am so proud of how hard Katy has worked towards getting her certification last year and this year and applied herself and did a good job. Just this week Katy got some new eye glasses for the first time in several years. Now that we have medical insurance we were able to get Katy some badly needed glasses. Katy said that she can see better far off but still needs them to make some adjustments to the bifocal part of the glasses which allows her to see close up. Speaking of glasses I finally went and put mine on so I could see what I am babbling about. One of the things I HATE about wearing glasses is the constant cleaning you have to do. Oh well, that is the price you have to pay when you are growing older.

Friday afternoon just before I got off of work I got an emergency phone call from a friend of mine who wound up in the ER with an ugly stomach virus. Poor dear was so SICK… I helped my friend by doing whatever they needed done. That is what friends are for, right? My friend told me that they called another friend of theirs before they called me because they knew this other person was off from work and they told them that they could not come pick them up because what they had was very contagious and they did not want to expose themselves to it. OH MY GOSH…. I could NOT believe THAT. Common sense would tell you that you just need to take some simple precautions to make sure you don’t catch whatever it is that they have. Some of those precautions are as follows. Do not touch the person that is sick any more than you absolutely have to. If the sick person needs to sneeze or otherwise expel fluids of some sort they need to be mindful of the others that are trying to help them. Make sure that after you touch anything that the sick person has used that you wash that object with hot water and soap and then wash your hands thoroughly with hot water and soap also. If you follow some common sense guidelines you don’t have to worry about catching a virus from someone.
I believe that my friend will be much better come Monday morning and I am thankful for that. I had my church members pray for this person this morning as I had promised I would.

I am so glad my wife is back home tonight. Katy brings a semblance of sanity to our household. Katy is the glue that holds this family together. Katy is dependable and the loving connection between us parents and our children. If it were up to me I might wind up in prison because I would give in to the urge to hurt or maim my children at least once or twice per week. Yes, I am kidding about actually harming my children physically however I have to be honest and say that they do drive me to the edge of the precipice and give me the opportunity to fantasize about how fun it would be to go after them. Remember that I said Katy was here so that means that when I start getting a crazy look in my eyes she is there to stop me and remind me that it is still unlawful to hurt your offspring.

Oh yeah, back to the “basketball coach” analogy. Parents are the coach, the kids are the players and the game is LIFE. Our job as parents is to keep the kids playing the game as safely as possible by watching them and making sure they are playing by the rules and staying within bounds. The kid’s job is to try and break the boundaries as often as possible and to be rebellious about the rules. Why should they play the game of life (ball) our way when it is obvious we are out of touch with life altogether. How many of us thought that about our parents when we were their age? I remember thinking my parents were clueless about life. Once I got into my early twenties and I had had enough of being my own man and getting smacked around by the game of life I realized my parents were not idiots after all.

I think I am way overdue on my Prozac prescription folks. I think that I have decided that instead of trying to be a basketball coach with my teenager (soon to be teenagers) that it would be easier to just medicate myself and just do everything myself. You know, clean your room, do your chores, don’t sass us, be nice to your mother, be sure to feed the birds or they will die etc Like I said, it is just easier to get up and do it myself. Whatever that it is IT surely requires a lot of work. I guess that the laziness gene runs very strong in my children because I think that they must have gotten it from dear ole dad. I will be the first one to tell you that it is much easier to sit on my proverbial rear end and order the kids to do this and that. My parents did it and therefore I should do it too and it is right. Is that right or wrong? When does normal chores and being a gofer (go fer this and fer that) go from being chores to slave labor? I think that I tend to teeter on the child labor law abuser more often than I care to admit. I guess that every generation makes its fair share of mistakes with regards to raising the children. All we can hope is that we do a better job and that we break the chains of bondage with regards to the bad stuff and we relearn and change the bad things into good things. That of course requires a heart change and a desire to do something a different way which requires a lot of thought and a change of direction.

One other thing that change requires is a heart attitude of looking to our God for the help we need when we reach the end of our rope. God knows that I need HIM all the day long. I need more of Jesus now than ever before. You see, the older you get the more you realize just how much about life you just don’t know. It is equally hard on you if you did not have a godly mom or dad that was there to be an example or they are no longer there to go to for advice. Hey mom or dad this is what I am going through and this is how I am responding or how I am thinking about responding. When you do not have that safety valve you have to depend on one another as parents and look to your connection with God and your local church to find the right answers.

One of the things I have to overcome with my children is what most parents have to overcome. We tend to raise our children and react to our children like our parents did. That is our instant frame of reference for us. It is hardwired into us because of 18 years of experience. The kids to this and we immediately want to do whatever it is our parents did. In my case it was either a slap across the face or whatever body part was within range and/or a lecture that lasted for hours. Luckily for me and my children I have only raised my hand to them on a couple of instances in the last 20 years. I have been able to collect my wits about me and send them to their room, when I found myself wanting to react to them in anger. That is a GOD thing and nothing that I have done within myself by myself. I have spent some time listening to godly parents and teachers like James Dobson who became a new role model for me in parenting skills. Lots of prayer and watching other godly parents has helped as well.

My next door neighbor keeps reminding me those kids are supposed to be kids and it is our job and responsibility to be the parents that they need. Kids are going to act and behave like children and that is how they learn, by making mistakes and receiving correction and love to help guide them and mold them. Children are not an interruption of our day but rather should be the focus of our day. No, I am not saying that we should worship our children above and before God or our mates. However, when I am getting irritated with having to be the basketball coach of life I hear my neighbors words that one of my roles as a father is to do just that. I also have to say that while my neighbor is certainly not the perfect parent (what is that anyway??) in my eyes I have to say that they both love their kids a lot and do an admirable job with raising them. Ok, now that I said that their ears will be burning or they just fell out of their chair. LOL… I have been accused of being super critical with regards to my opinions and so they might think that I am super critical of their parenting skills. See, that is what you get for assuming folks. LOL…. All parents have their weaknesses and their strengths and all you can do is to look for your mate, church and help from God with regards to your weaknesses and do the absolute best that you can do. Before we know it our kids will be all grown up and gone making a life and families for themselves and then it will be too late.

Good morning

I have to say that it is very NICE to have weekends off again for a change. For the last several years I have been working my second job on Saturday and Sunday which makes for a very long week indeed. Thanks to my new contract position with Systemtec I am able to give the security job a rest for the next five months. This Saturday Katy went to an all day seminar which left me to running chores all day. Laundry, getting tires for the car and paying bills. LOL.. When I went to church on Sunday I was surprised when the praise team leader and pastor invited me to sing. They told me that I had a good voice and they needed a male vocalist to be added to the mix. We also have gone from having 7 singers to 2 singers in the last couple of weeks which has not helped things. So, for now, I will fill in and sing. I actually had a lot of fun doing it even if I am not comfortable with being in front of everyone like that. I am more comfortable back in the sound booth running sound and doing recordings and such. I am taking my car to the shop this morning so that they can fix the ding in the right rear door. I was sitting in my car last Saturday while Katy and the kids were in Barnes and Noble book store in N Charleston when someone opened their car door into mine and left a dent and scratched my car door. They told the insurance company that there was no real damage and that a gust of wind blew their car door into mine trying to say it was an act of god and get away with having to pay for it. The insurance company spoke to all people invovlved and agreed with me that they were liable for the damages. So, this will be the second time in two months that my car has been in the body shop. I think that from now on I am going to start parking my car away from the other cars so this does not happen again. It is very cold this morning but after noon today it is supposed to warm up into the 70's. That will be very nice indeed. I am starting to get tired of the cold weather and all of the rain. Last night, thanks to our living on a dirt road I was forced to put cardboard down next to my car so I wont have to step in the mud again. Well, I guess that is all for now, time to get ready for my busy day. I hope you have a good week folks.

Command Line Hell

Today is Friday and instead of cruising around in low gear I am burning brain cells on my latest TASK. How is it that tasks always turn in to mind bending, brain cell burning projects before it is all said and done?
Currently I am trying to figure out how to backup our eDirectory database on our Windoze servers. More specifically I was tasked with figuring out how to utilize emtools and the ebox/java client to backup the open files that are being cached to memory while eDirectory is running. Open File Services in Tivoli Storage Management probably will not get a copy of the files open in memory. So, embox is supposed to be able to take a snapshot of the eDirectory database files that are cached to memory and create a hot backup image that TSM can then backup to the SAN and then to tape. Well, I have until Tuesday to have this accomplished so wish me luck...



James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.myblogsite.com/blog
moffittj@bellsouth.net