Sony eBook Reader

One of the things I missed during the worst part of my back problems was reading. The meds I was on just didn't let my brain work well enough to keep everything straight so I wasn't able to enjoy reading then. Now that the meds are reduced I can read again. A friend of mine convinced me to get a Sony eBook Reader a couple years ago for a promotion they had where it was really inexpensive and it came with 100 books. Since then, I've been reading everything on my eBook reader. The downside of that is while it is possible to rip a page out of a normal book, you are just out a book, but if your eBook reader goes down you no longer have easy access to your library! That's my position today...my reader seems to have died. I have tried several online resources and I cannot get it to come back to life. I will not actually lose all the books I purchased, they are on the main computer that syncs up, but my reader goes with me everywhere! Loosing it is like loosing the iPendage...it is necessary. With my birthday coming up soon, I may need to ask for an early present...a new reader!

The dreaded space

It is difficult to quantify how much effort has been put into getting our Sunday Worship Experience streaming live on the internet. I have spent many many hours on the NewTek forums trying to find out how others have been able to do it. The overwhelming majority of those who are streaming are sending rtmp streams to Mogulus. So I tried and tried. Mogulus makes things really easy as far as setting things up go. I was able to embed the player at our RCC Live page and I've seen the stream show up in the main control window. But it's flakey. It would show up sometimes but not show up at other times and it was worse on a Sunday morning. After about six weeks of working on it, I came to the conclusion that I had done everything I could do and I just needed some expert to bounce ideas off of. Pastor Dean was able to get some folk from BYU Broadcasting to agree to help on with it. We started talking via email but it soon became clear that our NewTek TriCaster was a new piece of equipment to them. I setup a meeting and spent about 90 minutes with them yesterday. There was an expert in the video aspect of the broadcast and an expert in the video to stream area and I filled in as an adequate person for the steam. We tried a different streaming company and messed around with some stuff but could not figure it out. Until one of the broadcasting folk remembered something he read somewhere that the names of a stream need to not have spaces in them. The stream name is used only for the studio knowing what stream is coming. The steam name was RCC Live and it would work sometimes and fail most of the time. We changed the stream name to RCCLive (no space) and it began immediately to work perfectly. We went back to the name with a space and it broke again. So, with the help of two broadcasting experts, we were able to solve our ongoing problem of not being able to stream with the removal of a single space!

Ow

Friday was a painful day for me. I had to have two wisdom teeth extracted. Top and bottom on the right had cavities and would require crowns so my dentist recommended extraction. He was concerned because one of the roots went a bit sideways so I went to an oral surgeon. He number me and ynked the top one without a problem. The bottom did not want to numb up though. After the fifth try to numb of I told him to just yank. He broke off the top and put the numb juice directly into the tooth. Yes, that hurt! Then he had to cut the tooth in half and the back came out cleanly but he had to yank and tug in the front half. It finally came out but left me tender.

Springish?

Yesterday was the start of daylight savings time. Then today the huge snowstorm arrived! I guess it was not a harbinger of Spring.

Customer Service

You know, as I look at it good customer service is really just about integrity. If a company just does what they say they will do, I view it as good customer service. I recently placed an order from Tyler Tool online and it included the lowest level Drill Doctor I could find. I wanted to be able to sharpen drill bits rather than buying a ton of jobbers so I made the purchase. The problem I experienced was the chuck that holds the drill bits on my DD did not have the end on it to tighten. With that missing, I couldn't actually sharpen anything. I emailed Tyler Tool and they were almost completely unhelpful. They told me it was an issue for DD and had nothing further for me...no ability to send it back to them, no email address for DD nothing. So I emailed DD. They came back immediately and asked for my serial number and then sent out not just the one piece that was missing, but the entire chuck! What a great company! I didn't have to prove anything to them, they just sent the stuff I needed right out. That is good customer service.

This is a problem we experience in the church. People outside the church want to see us have some integrity. For us to do what we say we will do. We don't need to march with signs to get our point across. We need to live the life we keep telling people about. We need to live a life of integrity showing our Savior's love.