Sandpiper Lanes

Most days when I go bowling I am just happy to break the 100 mark. That is because I seem to have a very difficult time bowling my average which is between 130 and 132 depending on what bowling alley I am at during league play. Tonight I am happy to report that I bowled my very first 200 game at Sandpiper lanes and a 166 average. Now that is something for me to be HAPPY about. Last night I bowled a 145 average which is excellent for me over at Marrington Lanes.

James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

Slaying the Budget Dragon

All the flowers are beginning to bloom here in the lowcountry. The weather was absolutely gorgeous today with clear skies a slight breeze and 65 degree weather. I wish we had this kind of weather all year long. Starting last Thursday I had a three day weekend. I went home early and took Katy to Florence SC which is about 90 minutes from Goose Creek North on I-95. I was doing the speed limit the whole time and you would have thought I was standing still. That was the day that all of the storms that devastated Alabama last week came roaring through the state of SC. Luckily for us there were no tornados or much damage. It made for wonderful driving though. The trip was pretty uneventful and Katy took her mid term exam at Francis Marion University in Florence.

After I dropped Katy off at the university to take her exam I decided to go find a Starbucks so I could enjoy some of their delicious coffee and wireless Internet access. I did not know that this was possible but I found a Starbucks with no WiFi access. Is that even possible? Much to my disappointment I spent the next hour going from one book store to the next looking for Wifi access. I finally ran across an Atlanta Bread Company that did have Wifi. I had no sooner ordered a cup of coffee when my phone rang and Katy told me she was done with her test. That meant that I had to hop back in the truck and go 10 miles to pick her up. Once we did that we returned to Atlanta Bread Company and had a coffee and Wifi break.

Friday I was off and Katy went to work to tame the wild savages in her classroom once again. I spent most of Thursday night in the recliner keeping a wary eye on the weather radar just in case we had any surprise tornados. Luckily for me none showed up but we did have high wind and lots of rain. When the weather is bad I am like a caged animal. No rest for me during those times. Katy and the kids sleep like rocks , it does not matter what the weather is doing. I went to bed around 5:30 am and got up again around 10 am. Friday during the day I spent some time slaying the budget dragon. The budget dragon is that proverbial monster that causes you to have more bills at the end of the month than money. You know the drill if you have ever lived from pay check to pay check. It seems that you get paid one day and the next day it is gone. How does that happen? Very simply put it happens because we live outside of our means. We have champagne tastes and beer budgets. We live in a very materialistic world and most of the time we get confused with our wants and needs. We are surrounded by different types of media messages that continually tell us that in order to be somebody you have to dress this way, live in that neighborhood, drive that type of vehicle and wear those types of clothes. We get sucked into all the advertisements that beg us to spend our hard earned money on materialistic stuff that ultimately makes us miserable and causes us more debt than it is worth.

The budget dragon is no different than any other dragons that might be stalking the corridors of our life. Some of us have problems with weight loss, alcohol addiction, toy addiction, drug addiction, money management, relationships or whatever. If all of us are honest we can look in the mirror and recognize one or several of these dragons that need to be slain and put to rest once and for all.

The first thing I did was to stab the cable company dragon in the heart. I was able to reduce that bill by more than half. Do we have to have Digital Cable or is 99 channels enough? Do we have to have premium movie channels when all or most of the movies that they show have already been seen? The answer to those questions is absolutely not. I told the local cable company that all I want is the basic local channels which is approximately 11 of them. That took my cable bill from 58 bucks down to 11 bucks. The next thing that I did was to reduce my high speed Internet bill by removing the extra 2 mb of download speed which decreased it from 8mb download to 6 mb download.

The next budget dragon that I was able to maim our telephone bills. We got rid of Bellsouth almost 9 months ago and switched to Vonage. Bellsouth was costing us around 45.00 per month and with Vonage we were able to reduce it down to 15.00 bucks per month. That was 9 months ago. This week I will be getting rid of Vonage thanks to my being able to shave 40 percent off of my cell phone bill just by changing plans. We went from the more expensive unlimited plan to our family sharing 2500 minutes per month. From what we were told we only consume about 1500 minutes per month total between the four of us.

The next budget dragon was more difficult to slay and that is the transportation monster. Can you believe how much money it takes to drive the roadways in this day and age? First you have the payment on your vehicle which can run anywhere from 300.00 to 800.00 depending on what you drive but then on top of that you have to pay taxes on that vehicle if you live in SC , then there are insurance payments, gasoline and maintenance if it is an older vehicle. Gasoline alone can cost you and arm and a leg. I am happy to say that I was able to tame the gas pumps by beginning to ride Carta Express from N. Charleston to downtown every day vs having to drive and pay for the gasoline to do it. Just recently we purchased a new Dodge Durango. We went from having a 2003 Pontiac Grand Prix to the Durango because we thought we needed a bigger vehicle. The problem with our purchase is that the payments are twice as big. Not only that but the Durango costs more to fill up and the taxes at the end of the year are more too. While it is nice to drive this type of vehicle it was not the best decision we could have made. For now we are stuck with the vehicle until I can pay it down some and wait for the right moment to sell it.

The next budget dragon was the recurring Internet Subscription monster. That is the many little seemingly tiny and inconspicuous subscriptions for this service and that service that you can only get on the Internet. The problem with those is that all of these innocent little charges add up into one huge payment at the end of the month that can leave a surprise hole in your budget. It turns out that I was lucky recently because the credit card that all of these services had on file expired. Before I knew it I was getting that proverbial e-mail that said I needed to update my information online so that they could continue to empty my budget. The answer to that one is NO. No more charges for services that I would like to have because they are NEAT but are absolutely unnecessary.

The next dragon that will need to be maimed and eventually killed off is the eating out monster. How many of us LOVE to eat and like the convenience of just stopping by Atlanta Bread Company or Cracker Barrel for a quick meal. I know that Katy loves it when she does not have to cook or clean the kitchen after a hard days work. This dragon can slowly and surely drain your finances out of your account if you are not careful. Eating out is expensive and it also is not always the most nutritional way to eat either. We are learning to say no to eating out and eat at home more. Even with as expensive as food is these days it is still cheaper to feed your family at home than it is at a restaurant somewhere.

With time we are getting better at taming the budget monster and getting control of our financial future. This has been a long time in coming. Thanks to divorce, bankruptcy and several other unforeseen events in the life of our family our budget has taken a severe beating. There were days that I thought that there just was not any hope with regards to our finances or credit. Thanks to a dear friend of mine I learned that there is hope. Once I realized that I did have power over my finances and that I could take tiny baby steps towards a positive future then and only then was I able to change my mind and hearts attitude towards doing something vs not doing anything at all. The bottom line is this. Nothing happens over night. Credit ratings do not go down the tubes over night and they also do not get fixed over night. It takes several things to dig yourself out of a hole.

The first thing it takes is a change of heart and a positive attitude that things can get better. Ignoring the problem is the worst thing you can do. Ignoring bills and avoiding the issues only makes things much worse. The next thing that you have to do is develop a plan. Some people call it a budget and some people call it a spending plan. Whatever makes you happy call it whatever. The important thing is that you stay within your allotted funds for living and expenses. The next thing that has to happen is you have to make a commitment to be disciplined enough to do the right things. You have to set the plan in motion and follow it as closely as possible. Having a plan and not following it is like filling the car full of gasoline and then locking the keys in the trunk. Doing that gets you no where.

In closing I will say that it is never too late to start. Today is the day that you and /or your family can set an action plan in motion and work towards financial freedom. My friend told me that it took them almost 5 years to dig out of the hole that they were in because of bad spending habits and abusing credit. This friend has helped me to see that there is hope and a positive financial future on the horizon.

Blogging with Word 2007

This is the coolest font on the planet. I am posting this meaningless drivel to my blog from Microsoft Word 2007. This is so cool…

 

 

Cannon Molthan

Cannon Luke Molthan was born on February 10, 2007 at 5:04 a.m. He weighed 7 pounds 15 ounces and was 20 inches long. He is absolutely gorgeous and too sweet.

James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

Cannon Molthan

Cannon Luke Molthan was born on February 10, 2007 at 5:04 a.m. He weighed 7 pounds 15 ounces and was 20 inches long. He is absolutely gorgeous and too sweet.

James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

Cannon Molthan

Cannon Luke Molthan was born on February 10, 2007 at 5:04 a.m. He weighed 7 pounds 15 ounces and was 20 inches long. He is absolutely gorgeous and too sweet.

Kimberly and her family are very special to us. Kimberly was the counselor for Jessica Ann Moffitt in 2001 when she attended the Camp Happy Days camp.

James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

Yes, I am a sucker for punishment. I figure that while I was playing musical OS's with my 40 gb hard drive on the Toshiba laptop that I might as well give Vista RC2 a spin. After RC1 turned the laptop into a clam shell on the last try I had pretty much given up on doing that again. My experience with Linux this week gave me enough reason to try this again. After all, what is the worst that could happen? I would have to put the dreaded Toshiba recovery cd back in and reboot and restore the laptop to factory defaults. How many times have I done this in the last 2 months? I have lost count. LOL
The first install of Vista locked up the laptop. I am not sure what happened so I turned the laptop off for several minutes, restarted it and gave it try number 2. Heck, you cant say you gave it a Boy Scout effort if you just give up when a computer freezes up right? In this case the second try was the charm. I left it running and went to church to attend the weekly praise team practice and left my son Justin watching the laptop as it installed the new OS.
As luck would have it the install went flawlessly and when I got home after practice I was greeted with the initial desktop setup screen which allowed me to set up specific user paramaters that would allow me to log on to the desktop. So far so good by this point. The install process rebooted the laptop several times and before you know it I was running with Vista RC2 without any major catastrophes. The first test for me was to insert the Linksys Wifi card into the same pcmcia slot and see what happened. What happened caused me to smile because Vista saw it immediately and started installing Broadcom wireless driver software for it. I dug around in the network setup section and figured out how to connect to my WAP here at home. I can not begin to tell you how happy I am that Microsoft has completely screwed up the networking configuration in Vista. Then again that is outside the scope of this article so I will visit that again as I learn more. I was very suprised that Vista identified the wireless adapter as a Broadcom and not Linksys which is the brand. The wireless Linux gurus at work told me that the Linksys card probably uses the Broadcom chipset and that is why that happened. I guess you learn something every day huh? I removed the broadcom drivers, reinstalled the Linksys Wifi manager and drivers and rebooted. Guess what? The wifi manager would not run and the drivers for the Linksys wifi card were not recognized by Vista. So, you know the drill, out with Linksys drivers and software, rebooted and let Vista work magic with its Broadcom drivers all over again. Heck , if it is not broke why fix it??
I am happy to report that over all I am pretty happy with Vista RC2. I have serveral hurdles to overcome and the immediate one will be to figure out how to do this and that in this OS vs XP SP2. In an effort to remove any and all security risks in the OS Microsoft has screwed the lid down on the pot so tightly that you have to pull out a screw gun and take all the screws loose so you can see what is happening under the hood. That probably did not make sense as far as word pictures go but hopefull you got that. LOL
My first software snafu came when I tried to install and USE Incredimail. For some of you that wont be a huge loss especially if you dont use it for email. However I am not so fortunate because a good friend of mine got me stuck on Incredimail long ago and now I feel creatively crippled when I can not use all of the cool stationary and animated gizmos that comes with this email client. The application installs just fine however when the app starts up and the notifier starts up to tell you that you have new mail the application locks tight as a drum. Vista now has a cool software widget that TELLS YOU the obvious. " Incredimail is experiencing a problem and will now be shut down. Before we kill the processes involved we will see if we can peek under the hood and fix it for you." So far all the widget really does is confirm the blantantly obvious fact that the app is frozen. The other thing it does is give you a handy dandy little link to the website of the software manufacturer. I bet Google is pretty hacked off about that functionality. LOL.... Hey honey, how can I figure out where to find the Incredimail website dear? How about www.incredi...... OH STOP IT.... LOL
Our next stop in the software discovery zone last night was in Microsoft Vista Widget land. Vista has a desktop application launcher like Rocketdock. However , from what I can tell you can only use Microsoft Widgets that they developed and I dont think you can drag normal apps in there to use. Please understand that I am still a rattle shaking toddler when it comes to this OS so I might be wrong about that. As of now I have the following widgets showing on my desktop along with my desktop icons which I will remove later if I can. At the top I have the Weatherbug widget , in the middle I have the analog clock widget and under that is the CPU/MEM system widget and at the bottom I put a calculator widget since I am always and forever figuring out how much moola I need to give away to the creditors. LOL...
My third stop in software discovery zone today happened to be with Symantec Anti Virus which is provided for free by the college where I work. I plugged my laptop into the work LAN and downloaded the latest and greatest version of Norton Anti Virus by Symantec. I spent at least 2 hours trying to get Norton Live Update to work only to find out that version 10.1 does not work with Vista but version 10.2 does. On my first install of the new version that is supposed to work with Vista Live Update did not install correctly and all of my pretty icons turned into white place holders. I was pretty excited about that developement, let me tell ya. I decided to reboot the PC thinking that maybe I needed to after a major install of an AV product even though I thought it was weird that it did not prompt me to do it anyway. When I rebooted the pc I was greeted by the dreaded recovery screen as if I had pushed F8 on boot up. I was once again reminded my Microsoft that there was a problem in software land and the OS was having a problem booting. Imagine that huh? I would have never known except for the pretty logo that was supposed to be there was GONE..... LOL
In a desperation attempt I clicked on the trusty and faithful LAST KNOWN GOOD menu selection and I was greeted by a pretty Vista logo and the logon screen. When I finally landed back on my user desktop GUI all of my icon place holders were once again pretty icons. Woooohooooo. Vista was happy but Norton Anti Virus was not. After several attempts I managed to get Live Update reinstalled and working. Live Update is doing what it is supposed to be doing however the definition file screen is not showing todays date yet. After researching the specific error on Google I was told to delete all the live update index files etc and that is supposed to fix that problem finally. I will play around with that tomorrow.
I have Microsoft Office 2003 installed with no problems and I installed AVS Video Tools on the laptop and I am converting some video files to .wmv format with no problems. I am noticing that AVS is a cpu hog as it has the cpu system clock pegged solid at 100%. I am pleased to say that out of 1 gb of ram on my laptop it is only using 33% of the available ram.

James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

Linux Wireless Nightmares

I am sad to say that while Fedora Core (RedHat) Linux installed just fine on the Toshiba Satelite laptop I still had issues with it. The first issue that I had was that I was having problems downloading all of the updates from the RedHat repositories. Perhaps they were just busy and that is why I kept having to start all over again with multiple downloads. The major issue that I was facing with regards to using Linux as the primary OS for my laptop was the wireless network card configuration nightmare that faced me. Lets just say that everything that I read about how to make this happen is not for the faint hearted. As a matter of fact I would go as far to say that your typical Windows literate computer users would not be able to figure this out on their own. Here are a couple of reasons why. First and foremost Linux does come with its own version of a GUI desktop such as KDE in Ichthux however it is so different that you can easily get lost. The GUI interface easily avails the user to the familiar Internet related applications such as Firefox, Email, IRC, IM programs etc. The fly in the ointment is that when you get ready to do any basic maintenance or try to install any software you are in for a treat. That treat is called the terminal window or command prompt. That is where the real nightmare begins and your excitement of using a new OS ends. The second reason that most folks would run screaming from Linux is that the install procedure for applications is no where near as intuitive as your typical windows software. There is a program built into Linux called Adept which allows you to download new updates for the OS Kernel and other applications that come with that particular distribution of Linux. Those packages seem to install ok however the gotcha with that is if you install a program that will conflict with another one of the apps already installed it could potentially corrupt the whole install of Linux and render it useless. Do you remember what Spy Assassin did to the first install of Ichthux the other day? Now lets say you are out surfing the web and you want to download a program off the web that is Linux compatible. Lets take Firefox for example. You download it just fine but then you get to take a trip down nightmare lane in the terminal program where you have to figure out how to extract the compressed fine, change directories to the location of those files and then try to install it. Good luck on that one. The third reason that folks would give up on Linux on the laptop especially is the difficulty level of installing your wireless adapter. Fedora Core did not recognize the Linksys Wireless adapter that was plugged in to the pcmcia card slot. The BIOS recognized its presence through card and socket services and provided the needed power to the device but Linux certainly did not see it. I wont bore you with all of the gory details of what it entails but lets just say that what I read about HOW I needed to get it to work was enough to make me say " Is all of this really worth running Linux on my laptop??" Sadly enough the potential migrane caused me to change directions on what OS I would use on the laptop. One other thing that you seriously need to consider about playing around with Linux is that you really do not want to try to dual boot this OS with a Windows Operating System. The reason I say this is because you can delete the partition that Linux is on but you will have a lot of fun getting rid of the GRUB Boot Loader that Linux installs in the Master Boot Record. Thanks to my inexperience with Linux boot loaders and my not changing the Adminstrator password on XP I found myself just using the recovery cd to wipe the drive and start from scratch. POOF. All my software configurations were gone AGAIN. LOL...

James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

Out with Ichthux and IN with Fedora on laptop

Ok, for now I am done with the Ichthux distro on the Toshiba laptop. I learned , much to may chagrin, that I was not able to remove the Linux partitions (GRUB boot loader) without trashing my ability to boot to Windoze. I had four partitions, one of them NTFS where Windoze resided of course. The active partition was on partition 1 where the GRUB boot loader resides. Windoze does NOT like it when it does not have control over the MBR (Master Boot Record). So, when I used 98 Fdisk version to remove the partitions and changed the Active partition to the one that had NTFS it would no longer boot up. I tried to boot to an XP install cd and select R for repair but it wanted the Administrator password. The last time I recovered my laptop with the recovery cd I forgot to set a password for Administrator. That means NO repair of the MBR, atleast not with keeping the existing install of XP. So, since I am going to have to do the recovery cd AGAIN one of my buddies at work told me to try Fedora Core on my laptop and see how well that works. Since I am in rebuild mode anyway, I say why not!!!!! It will be interesting to see if I can get the wireless functionality to work with Linux. That will be the ultimate in success if I can make that work. I sure am glad that I have all my data on cd and USB jump drives so I can restore it if need be.














James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

Ichthux Version 6.10 update

I got home from bowling last night and was eager to mess up my laptop one more time. LOL... Ok, I was NOT eager to mess up my laptop however I knew that my adventuresome spirit might get me into trouble again. When it comes to technology I guess that I dont worry about things getting messed up because when that happens you have to LEARN in order to fix the mess. I plugged the laptop in and thanks to something I found on a user group yesterday afternoon I knew to plug in the laptop to the hardwired network. Once that was done I started the install process and it worked like a charm. For whatever reasons Ichthux likes for you to be connected to the Internet so that it can go out to the data repositories and get the latest and greatest code. The install process took all of 15 minutes. I rebooted my laptop and was greeted with the new boot manager screen which gave me a choice between Linux and XP Pro. I chose Linux, it booted up to a nice pretty blue screen. Version 6.10 looks a little bit different than 6.09 but not anything major. I put in my user id and password that I had set up during the install procedure and guess what? I could not log on to save my life. Go figure sports fans. Now I have a new OS on my laptop that I want to tinker with and I can not log on. LOL... Luckily for me the laptop works fine with XP Pro so I am not crippled too badly. I have joined several Linux support groups and left a message to see if someone can help.









James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

Linux registered user 441766

I have been playing around with Ichthux which is a Linux distribution for Christians. I am on a steep learning curve since it has been ages since I missed around with RedHat years and years ago. I guess I am dating myself a bit huh? So, anyway, without further ado I am officially a registered Linux user. I am not sure what that really gives me other than association with the Linux user group but I think that is cool in and of itself. I have a cool graphic that I can add to my web pages as well which I will start to use. Neat stuff if you ask me. I am running the 6.09 distribution kernel and have it installed on two computers at home. My main Gateway machine is dual booting XP SP2 and Linux and my kids computer has ONLY Ichthux installed. I am not winning any popularity contests having done this so I guess I need to figure a way to get a spare computer other than theirs to play with Linux on. I can not get Linux to run on my Toshiba laptop and I wont be trying that install process any time in the near future. It really is a pain in the keister to have to install everything from scratch when you blow up a hard drive partition with Windoze loaded on it.

My next learning task will be to learn how to connect to Windows Network shares and a network printer. Wish me luck!!


James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

Join my new Frapper Map

Go CARTA GO

Good morning Charleston!

I am happy to announce that I am very pleased with my experience thus far riding the Carta Express from the Super K Mart in North Charleston to downtown Charleston. Typically I get on at 7:19 am and arrive downtown around 7:46 am. This morning I rode at 6:49 am and arrived downtown at 7:14 am. The rides have been comfortable and the drivers have been exceptionally polite, courteous and knowledgeable. I have spent some time riding buses in Houston Texas back in the 80's and I can garuntee you that the bus drivers there were no where near as nice as the ones I have experienced thus far on Carta Express. So far customer service from the Carta Express route I am on deserves a big thumbs up! When you get on the bus you will be greeted by other passengers and a free newspaper. The driver greets everyone as they get on the bus and he lets everyone know what time he will be leaving the parking lot. When the driver gets downtown he announces each stop before you get there so there is no need to ring the bell to get his attention. I have been riding the Carta Express since last Thursday and as time goes on it appears that more and more people are taking advantage of the service. Now is the time to try it because it is free for the first two weeks of service. Once those two weeks is up there is a nominal fee for riding back and forth to downtown. I can garuntee you that you will save a lot of wear and tear on your vehicle , your nerves and your pocket book. With the prices of gasoline still hovering around 2 bucks per gallon I think that all of us could use that money somewhere else other than our gas tanks. On top of all of that when you get into the parking lot there is a catering truck there that has hot coffee and breakfast items. What else could we ask for other than for the bus to come to our houses and pick us up? LOL... The bottom line is this Charleston. We need to use it so that we do not lose it. Amen?



James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

Fortune City gets reprieve and apology

Our domain , Lightourworld, is back online. I found out this morning that what killed it was that my domain expired on 1/25/07. Fortunecity told me that they automagically send out renewal notices to the e-mail account that is registered within the domain name registration portion of my account. I had changed my e-mail address after we registered the domain and I had gone into the Fortunecity billing website and changed my information but I had not gone into the domain services website and change it there. Therefore all the e-mail notifications that I was being sent bounced back to them. OOOOOOPS.... My apologies to Fortunecity for jumping the gun and being a tad bit peeved about loss of service. It appears that my forgetfullness caused our website and e-mail services to go offline for the weekend. Luckily for us we were not hosting an ecommerce site and I did not lose potential sales. I need to remember to register that domain for several years so that I can be ahead of the game from now on. I will also say that instead of the domain being down for another 24 to 48 hours that it has reappeared within several hours instead. Thanks Fortunecity....





James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

Introducing IMSAFER

I am writing this to tell you about a program called "imsafer" Go to www.imsafer.Com to read more about it. Basically speaking it is free for now and it flags any potentially dangerous conversations going on between your children's existing IM accounts on the computers that you install this software to. The program includes monitoring of MySpace IM as well which I am interested in the most. You must have administrator rights to install the program and even if your youngster is computer savy enough to try and uninstall the program they wont be able to. They have to know how to log on to your monitoring account via the web and click the link that allow for the uninstall. If they don't know your email address and password they wont be able to uninstall it.

Katy and I installed it on the two computers that are hardwired on the network at our house and used all of the existing IM accounts that we found under our kids logon profiles. We used some of the conversations that are supposed to trigger the alerts and it works great.

If your kids use Myspace or Yahoo, AOL or Yahoo IM I would encourage you to give this a test drive.

James C. Moffitt Jr.
james.moffitt@comcast.net
http://www.myspace.com/jcmoffitt chiefpropellerhead.blip.tv
jcmoffitt.blogspot.com
843-460-4006




James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

Fortune City Sucks

If you are looking for a website and e-mail hosting provider be sure to NOT use Fortune City. My credit card that was on file with them has expired and they could not get their monthly subscription fee. They sent me an e-mail today and then promptly disabled my website and my e-mail. They did this on Friday and I wont be able to pay the subscription fee until Monday at 9 am. Fortune City sells web services yet they are only available to their customers between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm Monday through Friday. You can send them an e-mail but dont hold your breath waiting on a response. I will be sure to pay for one more months hosting so I can make a backup of my website and then I will be moving my site and e-mail to another provider.



James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

Bam Bam needs access

Bam Bam is one of my sons, the younger one in fact. Justin was nicknamed that when he was a couple of years old. He seemingly could wreck an iron ball if left on his own for about 10 seconds. I guess all kids are that way to a certain degree. Justin has been sick most of this week after spending the night at Paul Bunyon's last weekend. Wednesday we decided that he was not getting over whatever bug that he has and decided it was time to call in the big guns to solve the problem. The doctor looked him over and listened to his lungs and pronounced that he would take an xray of his lungs to verify that he probably has pneumonia. Sure enough, the xrays came back and he has it. The doctor gave him an antibiotic booster via hyperdermic needle and bam bam was very excited about that. Katy told Justin that if he did not get better soon that they might have to send him to the hospital. Justin proved that he is indeed our child and addicted to the Net when he pronounced that he did not care if he had to go into the hospital to get better but they had better have high speed Internet access. Katy just about split her side laughing at that one. LOL...


James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

The Five Guys

This is a picture that was taken of the Jesus Connect Five in 2005. I had flown to Houston to see my son Jeremy graduate from High School. I then went over to Reynold's house where we all gathered to talk and share stories and fellowship. John Searcy is seen here standing next to the gentleman with crutches and has glasses hanging around his neck.

James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

In loving tribute to my friend John Searcy

AKA "Grouchy Old Man"

I supposed there is never a good way to find out that a loved one has passed on from this life to the life beyond. The Internet gives us instant gratification with regards to information at our finger tips. E-mail can be a blessing or it can be a curse. So goes it with my dear friend John Searcy. I found out from my friend Reynold DeGuzman that our friend John went to sleep last night and never woke up. I have known John Searcy for atleast 15 years back to 1991 or 1992. Technology was one of the things that we all have in common. I either met John because he was friends with Reynold or I met John because he logged onto either Jesus Connect BBS or Cross Connection BBS. Back then Reynold Deguzman had a computer in his home and he hosted Jesus Connect and I had a computer in our townhome in Houston and we hosted Cross Connection BBS. People would dial our modems and log in. Several years later the World Wide Web took off and Reynold jumped on the cutting edge of technology and moved the BBS onto a web page and programmed a custom website with message bases that we could all communicate on.

John, Reynold, Don Chapman and myself all were technology junkies and we all have Jesus Christ as a commonality that brought us all together as friends. I lived in Houston Texas with my family between 1981 and August of 1997. During this time I became pretty close with both John and Reynold. We would get together at one of our homes and brain storm on how we could use Internet technology to reach the world for Christ. One of the things that John Searcy and I did was we would spend hours on end hosting IRC chat channels on several different IRC networks. Internet Relay Chat clients like MIRC and PIRCH would enable someone to log on to an IRC chat server on either Dalnet, Effnet or Starnet IRC networks. John was real passionate about how Christ had changed his life from his old hippie days to the days after when Jesus had changed his heart and made a new man out of him. I remember how we would be sitting in a chat room and some heckler would come in to create havoc and disrupt the chat room. Brother John would be all over that and would not allow them to get away with being disrespectful.

I will never forget all of the times that brother John would come up with catchy little phrases that would enable him to share his faith in Christ.

One of the fondest memories that I have of my friend John is that he was nicknamed GOM or Grouchy Old Man and he nicknamed me GOMMIT or Grouch Old Man in Training. It seems that John and I always got along great in person or on the telephone but when John got into his chat persona he would act like a grouchy old man. I used to give him a lot of grief about that and it turned into part of his legacy as my friend.

I remember when John worked at Compaq Computers close to 290. He was a sales person working on their sales floor. I used to go visit him while he was at work. I think that he was helping to refurbish compaq computers and then resell them. John had a unquenchable thirst to learn about technology. He and I both learned alot about personal computers way back when.

I wish that I had been able to see John one last time but I did talk to him on Yahoo IM several weeks ago. I know that John was probably in his later 60's and maybe even in his early 70's but as far as I knew he was in relatively good health. I know he kept active with his wife as they managed self storage businesses in the Houston area.

John's wife lost a wonderful husband and the "five guys" from the Jesus Connect Ministry days have lost a dear friend. Rest in peace my friend, we love you very much.

James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net

Out with the old and in with the new

We are 10 days into 2007 and life is pretty much the same in our pond. We live at the bottom of a hill and thanks to the copious amounts of precipitation I feel as if I should be called rain man. Luckily for me I have a four wheel drive vehicle that sits up high enough to overcome the mud and water. We have been having some unseasonably warm weather in Duck Ditch. Speaking of ducks my neighbors quackers have been unusually quiet lately. I wonder what Paul Bunyon and clan had for Christmas dinner.

I found out last week that my contract for my job in downtown Charleston was renewed until June of 07 so I am pretty pumped up about that. All of my creditors will be happy to know that I can continue to pay my bills. Some day I pray that I can find a REAL job that is full time with benefits. I am happy and thankful for the employment that I do have however having benefits would be sort of nice.

Katy is working through her second year of the PACE program at Charleston County School District. I am really starting to wonder why anyone would want to be a teacher. Katy works 8 hours during the day and then she comes home and works and studies for another 5 or 6 hours before she goes to bed. I am so very proud of my wife for being the type of person that she is. She is a wonderful teacher, wife and mother of our children. Go Katy Go!!!!

The Dallas Cowgirls self destructed last Saturday evening and ended their football season with a 9 win and 8 loss record. I think that was their record last year. Tony Romo is the one shining star of the season even if he did screw up with the place holding on the field goal that was attempted at the end of the game. Had they pulled that off Dallas might be in the playoffs. My dad told me something a long time ago. If if's and buts were candy and nuts we would have a mighty fine christmas. As far as I am concerned the next game to watch will be the Eagles and Saints game where I hope the Eagles are soundly defeated. I have some guys at work that hate Dallas and love the Eagles. LOL

James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net