shawneverly.com

Check out the talented band Realign. They have just release their new project New Wine.

We are so used to our sunrise, but the Japanese JAXA probe has caught the Earthrise in a high definition video. I was blown away watching this video. I guess it is because it reminds me of what an amazing gem of a planet we live on.

Earthrise

There is a new band out there, unofficially, called Forgotten Freedom. You can check out their music at http://purevolume.com/forgottenfreedom. Okay, I will confess, these are my boys and I am being the proud papa. However, I think I have a reason to be proud, because these boys are really talented. They have had the ultimate opportunity to be in a recording studio with a great recording engineer so check out Shadow Closet Studios.  Shout out to Paul for his willingness to work with these boys. May you get many lawns mowed, kids watched, and a fence painted in return for your hard work. To see these young men grow in their music is really awesome to see and I will support it as best that I can. Watch out for a Forgotten Freedom website and more music to come!!

So if you happen to see my website the last couple of days it was DOWN! I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 using my hoster’s one-click install and I was getting:

Warning: array_key_exists(): The first argument should be either a string or an integer in /somepath/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 176

What was funny was that when I went to search for this error most of the hits were on pages exhibiting the same problem. I found what I thought was a fix in the category-template.php file. Not knowing a ton about php, but knowing a lot about code I tried to fix the error by doing this:

if(array_key_exists(’category’, $categories))

See if it works for you, but for now I am not upgrading anymore of my WordPress websites!

Peace,

Shawn

For you MEB members check out the top of my web page for the Songs tab. Click on that tab to listen to all the latest songs we will be singing. All songs are streamed so you can only listen! If you have any questions about the songs before our next practice contact one of your leaders. My email address is

shawn at shawneverly.com (remember to replace ‘ at ‘ with @).

Oh, and check out my crazy cousin in the video below.

Follow the link here to an article I happened to stumble upon (literally). It is a picture of earth from one of our probes looking back as it journeyed out of our solar system. Pretty small huh? This photo was shown as part of a lecture by the late astronomer Carl Sagan. He used this photo to show us how small we are on the cosmic stage. Pretty humbling when you look at it and really it should be. We have a tendency as a race to get full of ourselves and make silly things important. Ironically when I look at this picture I am drawn to a different conclusion than Mr. Sagan who said, “there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.” The universe points directly to the one who can help us, the creator himself. When I look up to the sky and see the vastness of our universe I take comfort that God is in control. Mr. Sagan and I do agree on something though, we do have to take responsibility for our lives and work together on this little dot. It may seem small from far away, but it is every bit significant to all of us who live here so we need to truly make the best of what we have been given.

To all those who had to “hit the road” yesterday and those who stayed home to clean up after the chaos, I wanted to say thanks for the great times. Times like hanging out at Guitar Center and Sheel’s, sitting out on the back porch sipping Margaritas and laughing, for the music and skits. What great times we had. Hope everyone gets home safe and takes home great memories. Lastly, to the meeting of Beer School I say, Ya mas, Skal, and Dosvadanya! We will see you all here next year, but in the mean time something to remember the occasion.

Check out All About Katie, our website about the adoption of our daughter. There is a new video of her on the site.

The other day I was accused by a Wii friend of sending him a Jesus Mii. I hadn’t created one so I checked to see if one of the kids had done it. No Jesus Mii. So he doesn’t know how he got him. Well today I fired up the Wii and who do I see? A Jesus Mii. A pretty good rendition if I say so myself. I looked to see who had created him, but there was none listed. Now here is the interesting part. I don’t know how he got transferred to my Mii Plaza. That is a manual process and no who knows how to do that says they did it. I have to admit there is a cool mystical quality of Jesus mysteriously landing on our Wii and making it all the way to our Mii plaza.

The funniest part of the story is when my four year old decided to play tennis as Jesus. Unfortunately Jesus didn’t win. The four year old hasn’t figured out the timing just yet. I was laughing the whole time though!

With it being around Easter time I had to chuckle when I decided it was time to pull my Palm Tungsten E out from my nightstand to resurrect it! Needless to say it was dead. So I brought it to work and plugged it into the charger, but no response. About three minutes later I heard some kind of sound from it, but when I opened it, nothing. I waited patiently for the device to charge and walla it came back to life!

It has been strange thinking I need a PDA again, but with my current assignment at work I definitely need to have something besides a notebook to keep track of contacts, appointments, and just general information. We’ll see how it goes, but it definitely adds more to my person as I go to work each day. My wife made fun of me the other day as I was putting all of my stuff on (wallet, phone, keys, USB drive, etc.). She said men should have a purse, a notion I quickly dismissed. Humph, a purse.

I recently put up another website for our adoption of Katie. You can get there by going to http://shawneverly.com/adoption. I will be moving all of our picture references there and all information about our adoption will occur there. So if you are interested in how things are going with that then hit the page and bookmark it!

I had to share a couple of cool techno experiences from tonight.

1. My wife called because she wanted to make sure I got something she emailed from our laptop. Well, no go, and I am not sure why. She needed to get a document to someone and is concerned that the email didn’t get to them either. So I start up logmein.com to remote to the laptop to check it out. For some odd reason mail is not going out on the laptop. So I start up FileZilla and upload the file to my webhost, pull it down locally, and send it to her friend. Walla, problem solved!
2. I am getting into web design as of late and decided I needed a local web environment to do my work so no one sees the between stuff. So I loaded Apache webserver, PHP, and MySql tonight. Ya baby, I’m feeling pretty victorious that I got it working! I installed a copy of WordPress locally (which is what runs my blog) and within minutes had a test blog up.<Code Orange Nerd Alert> Yes, I am a nerd at heart so this does get me jazzed up. It is especially fun since I don’t get technical work at my job anymore.

Well anyhow, enough for now. I need to sleep.

Okay, I just found a link on IGN about the Paley Fest, a television event which honors noteworthy television shows. They had the cast of Heroes at the event talking about the show. The article on IGN had a little bit of a spoiler for the April episode (bottom of the first page if you are actually interested) and it sounds extremely cool. Hey, why not, this show has been ultimately cool from the very beginning.

I don’t watch a ton of TV, but I have to say, the one show I will stop everything for is Heroes. I have watched every episode (some twice) and love theorizing about what is going to happen next. The producers do such a great job of integrating web comic novels on the Heroes website and involving the fans. You can currently check out fan videos on Heroes theories. So check it out at http://nbc.com/heroes

Movies come and movies go. Some are completely forgettable and some stick with you a long time. Facing The Giants is in that latter camp. A film created solely by a church in Albany, Georgia with a cast and staff of mainly church members, this movie was memorable. Most christian films I have seen are terribly cheesy and not well-produced. Having heard great things about the movie I decided to purchase it.

It is a common story of a man who is facing his own giants of failure in his job and at home. The difference with this movie is that instead of picking himself by his bootstraps he turned to God. In his darkest hour, he turned to Jesus Christ his Lord and savior for help. Then he turned to the word of God for his source of life change. As a football coach, he took that change of philosophy to his team. He asked them if they were willing to give God their best and, whether they won or lost, give Him the glory. What happens next is truly incredible.

The story is inspiring even though it is fiction. It reminds me of what Jesus said, “all things are possible with God.” Do I really believe that? Well, I am learning to trust Him and learning to walk in that promise.

I highly recommend this movie. If you have the bucks just go and buy it. Inspiring, memorable movies like this one deserve to be supported. Not necessarily because it is a christian flick, but that it is a good one you can watch again and again.

I attended the funeral of my wife’s grandmother today. As the pastor was reflecting on Grandma’s life I began to look around at the legacy she had left. The family was sitting close together in the pews so I was able to see all those she had left behind. It is quite a legacy. There are doctors, veterinarians, there are farmers and blue-collar workers, they came from all walks of life, but they were all really good people. I reflected on my own family too. This was my mother-in-law’s mom. So the ideals and wisdom Grandma passed down to her daughter were passed down to my wife. They are what make her a good wife, a good mother, and simply a good woman. I looked at my kids. Some of them definitely look like they are from her stock. So besides the wisdom and ideals being passed to my children, they have received physical traits from Grandma. We know what she has done with the legacy passed to her, because the last chapter of her life has been written. The question is what will we do with what has been passed down us?