Posted by Steven in Work on April 27th, 2009 at 05:07pm
BestSitesNow.com is our latest DreamDolphin Media site. Basically what it does is return a list of the most popular sites for a specific topic. No useless forum/newsgroup posts or single blog articles like you get from search engines, just complete, quality sites on the topic. It also generates tag clouds of related topics. Try: Organic Gardening, Shopping, Basketball. You can read more about why we made this and how it works on the About page.
Our big gardening project this year began a month ago when Steven decided we should plant a vegetable garden. We got the wood at Home Depot and baby-love built an above-ground-garden-box. This past weekend we were finally able to buy dirt, pete moss and potting soil in order to give the veggies the best possible soil to grow in. We got all our dirt at the local Plant Shed, a family owned, garden-lover’s dream place. We transported 800 pounds of dirt in our trunk/back seat. Who needs an F-150? We planted Juliet and Cherry tomatoes, green and yellow peppers, one poblano pepper, cucumbers, green onions, and radishes. On four separate small gardens, Steven planted 4 watermelons as well. Right by the fence we also planted sunflowers and wild flowers. Here are the pictures.
Steven has a serious green thumb. It’s amazing! A few weeks ago half of our pansies were eaten by a hungry rabbit. Steven came up with a concoction made up of chilli powder. A week later the pansies were back in full color bigger than ever. Very impressive!
I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while. Now I can! Here’s how the story goes.
We got a note in the mail asking if we will be attending Southwestern Seminary’s awards banquet on a Wednesday afternoon in April. Sudi had marked “No” and had it all ready to mail when I came upon it in our foyer. I thought, “Awards? If anybody is going to get an award it had to be my baby!” After all, Sudi has gotten an A in all 20 classes. So I told Sudi my theory and she called the seminary to find out what’s up with the awards.
As it turned out, Sudi is the recipient of the Elizabeth G. Price Memorial Award for outstanding academic achievement (she earned the highest grade-point average) in the school of Educational Ministries. Today was the banquet and awards presentation. We first went to chapel to hear the wonderful Dr. Paige Patterson preach. At the banquet we were quite pleased that they had fajita fixings for us. In other words, we had vegetarian food at a Southern Baptist institution in Texas (there’s a first time for everything).
I’m very proud of Sudi for her work as a student at Southwestern during the last two years. She is a true student if there ever was one! Graduation is in a couple weeks when Sudi will receive her master’s degree in Christian Education. Woohoo! Here’s my footage from the awards banquet and some photos.
Last week a thunderstorm appeared on the radar out of nowhere. Here’s a video I took… of the TV. Listen to the hail that suddenly started banging on our roof and windows as the weatherman is talking. He was describing baseball sized hail in an area north of us. I only saw pea-sized hail so I can only imagine what baseball sized hail sounds like. I think it means a new roof.
I’m looking forward to the Spring storm season here in North Texas. I love taking pictures of the foreboding clouds and making videos like this. I especially love it when they send the low man on the totem pole directly into the eye of the storm (his name is always “Chris”) and when the news lady’s umbrella turns inside out, hits her on the head three times, then flies away.
This video is hosted on flickr. The upload to YouTube was faster, but flickr is so much more slick. YouTube needs a redesign. It’s so 2004-looking!
PS. If you want to see some REAL Texas hail, watch this and skip to 3:15.
Posted by Steven in Food, Work on April 3rd, 2009 at 04:16pm
We are pleased to announce DreamDolphin Media’s latest site: Vegan Diet Center. It contains vegan articles, recipes, restaurants, books and links. Sudi wrote the content and came up with the color scheme and logo. I did the design and put the whole site together using our new custom CMS (content management system).
This CMS is a joint project between myself and Mr. Dawson of Ei42 fame in the UK. It’s quite top-secret (“hilarious, my friend”), but basically it will let us make database-driven sites of Vegan Diet Center’s quality with zero programming. In other words, really quickly. Future sites will allow for more user interaction such as making comments and writing reviews.
Please give Vegan Diet Center a look and let us know what you think (bugs, typos, etc. appreciated). Don’t mind the vegan restaurants section too much as there are only two at the moment. We’ll be adding 50 restaurants to the site shortly.
BestSitesNow.com is our latest DreamDolphin Media site. Basically what it does is return a list of the most popular sites for a specific topic. No useless forum/newsgroup posts or single blog articles like you get from search engines, just complete, quality sites on the topic. It also generates tag clouds of related topics. Try: Organic Gardening, Shopping, Basketball. You can read more about why we made this and how it works on the About page.
Here’s my footage from the awards banquet and some photos.
