Blog Tune Up

O.k. - a couple of enhancements:

1. A new feature was added to the left called Cluster Maps (I first saw it on Mike Hyatt's blog, but I have to give credit to my friend Mark Whitlock for adding it to his blog and inspiring me to do the same). So, tell all your missionary friends, and anyone else you know in foreign countries to at least take a look at our blog! I would love to see red dots all over the map!!
2. Now that Google has taken over Blogger, the issue of separate users has been resolved, so now you can see when I post vs. Melinda posting. We will work on updating our individual profiles.

I hope this improves your overall experience with our little corner of the world wide web.

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Shameless Promotion

I don't want to turn anyone off with a bunch of promotion about upcoming Thomas Nelson product, however this time I just can't help it.

Yesterday we released a new audio project called The Word of Promise. Here is the description of the product:

A 20-hour, 20-CD, diverse star-studded audio Bible production of The New Testament. This multi-voiced faithful rendering of the NKJV New Testament is presented in a compelling, dramatic audio theater format.

The arresting world-class audio production immerses listeners in the dramatic reality of the Scriptures as never before. Complete with an original music score by prolific Italian composer Stefano Mainetti ( Abba Pater ), Contributions by Dove Award winners Michael W. Smith and Rebecca St. James, and ambient sound effects that are woven together with compelling narration by Michael York, the Bible comes to life for a new generation. The post-production, sound design and Foley (sound effects) are produced, engineered and mixed at Cerny American Creative in Chicago-an award-winning post-production facility ranked in the Top 3 in the nation for sound design.

Cast includes:

• Jim Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ, Déjà vu) - Jesus
• Michael York (Romeo & Juliet, Austin Powers) - Narrator
• Academy Award winner Richard Dreyfuss (Mr. Holland's Opus, The Goodbye Girl) - Quotes from Moses
• Academy Award winner Marisa Tomei (My Cousin Vinny, What Women Want) - Mary Magdalene
• Golden Globe winner Stacy Keach (Prison Break, Hemingway) - Paul
• Academy Award and Golden Globe winner Lou Gossett, Jr (An Officer and a Gentleman, Roots) - John
• Terence Stamp (Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Superman II) - Voice of God
• Kimberly Williams-Paisley (According to Jim, Father of the Bride) - Mary, Mother of Jesus
• Golden Globe and Tony Award nominee, Lou Diamond Phillips (La Bamba, Young Guns) - Mark
• John Heard (Prison Break, Home Alone) - Matthew
• Ernie Hudson (Miss Congeniality, Ghostbusters) - Peter
• TV Guide's TV's 25 Greatest Teen Idols honoree Luke Perry (Beverly Hills 90210, Jeremiah) - Judas & Stephen
• John Schneider (Smallville, Dukes of Hazzard) - James
• Chris McDonald (Happy Gilmore, Quiz Show) - Luke

To give you a better idea, here is a video from GodTube:

I have heard a lot of this project and it is truly powerful. It is virtually word-for-word the New King James Bible (there are some "scripting" elements to it to make the text flow better, like eliminating phrases "and he said", etc.), so it really lends itself to us for memorization. Or, just sit back and experience the Scripture like never before. If you have surround sound, even better! It's like listening to a movie!

I hope you don't mind the pitch, but I just had to share! Let me know if you any of you want to know more.

Scott

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Jott

Mike Hyatt (President and CEO of Thomas Nelson) has come through again with another cool productivity tip. It has so many applications I just had to share it with you:

Never Forget a To-Do Item

For more tips on life and productivity be sure to check out Mike's blog From Where I Sit (link to the left as well).

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Life and Whitewater Rafting

So, my friend Randy not so subtly pointed out that Spring has sprung and we are now into summer and there have been no updates to the blog. First of all, YEA! Someone actually does check our blog! :) Second, whew! Here is a quick rundown of the last 6-8 weeks:

• I started my new job (which has kept me busy)
• Melinda has quit her job (which, believe it or not, has kept her busy)
• Melinda has been taking some early education classes
• The girls finished up school
• Melinda's gandmother passed away
• We went on vacation to Colorado

These are just the highlights of what has been robbing our time lately. We will post details and pictures of our Colorado trip, but one of the activities we were able to enjoy was a whitewater rafting trip on the Colorado River.

It's interesting the parallels between the instructions we were given in case we fall in and our life lately. When we hit the water there were several Class IV rapids at the beginning. We were told that if we fall out the only thing you can do is put your feet out in front of you (like you are sitting in a recliner), hold your head up high, and float to calmer water where the boat would come get you and pull you in. Oh, and try and aviod the rocks! That pretty much sums up our life lately! We have been holding our head high, letting the river take its course, and avoiding the rocks. But, calmer water is ahead and we are waiting for the boat to come pick us up.

Thank you for being patient. Look for a vacation update soon. We are waiting for our pictures to be developed (our digital camera broke, so we took film cameras on our trip) and will post a slide show.

Keep checking back or, better yet, sign up to receive an email whenever we post something. Sign up is on the left!

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Spring Fever

The dogwoods are blooming, the grass is green, the oak tree in the front yard is bursting with leaves. Ah! Spring time! I never understood why you made new year resolutions in the month of January. You are entering the darkest, coldest part of the year. There is nothing environmentally that even remotely evokes a spirit of change. Spring, however, is the complete opposite. Birds sing loudest. Bugs buzz with vigor. People clean house. It's all about freshness and newness.

Which brings me to the subject of today's post: I have a new job. Like the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in the room, it looks/sounds funny just seeing it there out in the open, but it's true.

I have been with Thomas Nelson for almost five years now. I started off as a freelancer and four titles later I am currently a Senior Acquisitions Editor. All of this time I have been in the area of digital publishing - turning the books Thomas Nelson creates (specifically Bibles and Bible Reference products) into electronic versions. I have served passionately in this area the entire time. While here I have managed (and created) many top-selling software titles, and brought new strategies and relationships to Thomas Nelson. My heart, however, has always been in the relationship business. I love to be in front of people and talking with them and helping them see how what we have can help them. Hence the change...

Starting Monday the 16th I will be a Regional Sales Manager for Nelson Ministry Services. This division handles all of the sales to our author and large church partners. I will be covering the southeast helping authors such as Charles Stanley, Hank Hanegraaff, and John Maxwell just to name a few. I will be working with churches and ministries of all sizes, to help match Thomas Nelson product with their strategies to grow their ministries.

It's an exciting new venture, and I am most pleased that I can do it while still working for the largest Christian publisher in the US. Please pray for me as I transition. There is a lot to finish in my current position, and a lot to learn in my new one. Pray that I finish well here, and can start off running over there. More importantly pray I never forget that even though I am in sales, that my primary job is putting tools in the hands of people so that they can better understand God's Word. That, above all, is my purpose.

Scott

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New Feature

One of the ways I learn about cool things to do with blogs is by reading other blogs. I already credited Mike Hyatt with a lot of the tools I've added recently. Well, I've found another little gadget to add.

Look over to the left and you will see a couple of new sections that indicate whether or not Melinda or I are online via three popular instant messaging services - AIM, MSN (now Windows Live Messenger), and Yahoo!. I know you could just as easily pull up the messenger service and see if we are online, but a lot of people don't automatically sign in to their service when they log in to their computer. This way, if you are checking the blog (you are checking, aren't you? We've been getting more regular at posting! Better yet subscribe over to the left!) you can see if you want to sign in and chat.

O.k., I know what you are thinking and I admit it - I'm a gadget freak and things like this make me giggle like a school girl. There isn't any practical purpose to having it, I just think it's cool. You caught me!

Enjoy...

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Scott's Trip to New York City

O.k. - we really want to share photos on this blog however I haven't been very happy with any of the options so far. I thought Slide.com was going to work, but in the end I didn't like the results. Flickr produced great results, but it was a lot of work to get the actual show into Blogger. Also, both of those options required that I be online while I create the slide show.

The best way to accomplish what I wanted to do was to actually build a Flash slide show myself. That isn't easy! I'd have to program the Flash show, find an online place to host it, and then publish it so that I could link it here to play for you. Too much work (not that you aren't worth it!).

Enter Flash Slide Show Maker. This FREE (yes, free) desktop program allows you create a great looking Flash slide show, but also provides FREE (there's that magic word again) online hosting of the show through SkyAlbum.com. All I have to do is create the show and it will upload it for me. Once that is done I copy and past the link and, viola, I have a great looking Flash-based slide show on the blog! I love technology! There are a lot of great features to the software, but I will let you read about it yourself.

Now, on to the good stuff!

I took this trip almost a year ago, but it was great test for using the software. I went to New York to visit with the Sony Corporation and attend a conference. Like all of my trips, I had to squeeze a lot in a short amount of time. So, here is a summary of my three-hour tour of New York City!





I am extremely pleased with the results of the slide show, so after many empty promises we can get to work on putting up more photos for you to enjoy and catch up with us.

P.S. - I am going back to New York again in May, so I am hoping to see some of the things I didn't get to see last year!

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Spam Blog

The last entry about my sprain took a few days to actually post. I could write it as a draft, but when I attempted to publish it I got a message that our blog had been blocked by a spam-prevention tool because it appeared to be a "spam blog". What in the world is a spam blog? They had a handy link that explained it all:

The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text...

If that last statement doesn't accurately describe this blog, I have no idea what does! :)

Scott

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Off Balance

O.k. - this settles it. Scott must lean to the left. Literally, not politically.

This past Saturday we watched our pastor's kids at our house. It was a beautiful spring day. Kids, a beautiful day, and Scott trying to keep up all spells disaster! While playing hide-and-seek, and chasing a much faster eight year-old to base, Scott rolled his foot over and sprained his ankle. Time to go inside!

He sat on the couch for a while and called to Melinda to check on whatever was beeping in the kitchen. She called him a wimp and asked why he couldn't check it himself. He called her over and showed her why. At this point his ankle was swollen and the pain was increasing. It was off to the emeregency room.

Final prognosis was a sprain (thankfully, it wasn't broken). When Scott asked what exactly that meant he was given this quote - "If anyone ever tells you they sprained their ankle and are back playing basketball the next day, they didn't really sprain their ankle. "Real" sprains involve torn ligaments". Although only an MRI would tell how bad the damage was, the doctor figured this was the case here. He was fitted with a large "boot" to walk around in and has to follow up with our regualr doctor this week.

The irony is that it is his left foot. You may remember he broke his left collar bone almost a year and a half ago (also trying to capture some long lost glory of his youth) so, he must have a tendancy to fall to his left.

The moral of this story? Same as last time - leave the running to the eight year olds. From now on Scott can referee from the sidelines!

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Housekeeping

A few items of update on the blog:

1. Our profile is fixed, so the whole family is back! There's even an updated picture (it's bigger, too, so you can actually see us!). This was a snapshot taken at Thanksgiving.
2. I've added a couple of little tools. The first is a service called Snap Preview. It allows you to hover over a link with your mouse (try it with the one above) and a small pop-up window will give you a preview of the website. This will help you determine if you really want to go to the site before you click and navigate away.
3. Obviously we have been sporadic in updating (we are trying to correct that!). I'm sure that you have better things to do with your life than coming back to our little corner of the web just to see if we've posted anything. Well, worry no more. Over to the left I've added a place where you can sign up and you will receive an email notification whenever we get around to posting something. This is a service from a website called FeedBlitz. There is no spam, you aren't signing up for anything other than this update, and you will never have to worry about your email showing up anywhere. I've used this for a while and I've never had a problem. You will receive an email the morning after a post has been made. We'll try not to clutter your inbox too much! ;)

Finally, I have to give props to where these cool tools came from. The President and CEO of Thomas Nelson, Mike Hyatt, is an avid blogger. He's been a huge inspiration for me wanting to blog. He's also a fellow technophile and helps keep me up to date on technology. He has an incredible blog and I highly recommend that you take a look, and subscribe to it. Those of you reading this in the business world will find a treasure trove of information here, but even if you aren't in business you will find a lot of what Mike says useful. I've added his blog, From Where I Sit, to the links on the left.

I hope you enjoy these small enhancements. Like I said, we are trying to get better at updates. Keep checking back, or better yet subscribe and look forward to a surprise in your inbox soon!

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15 Seconds

Scott isn't the only one in the limelight these days! Jessica is enjoying some fame via an article in the newspaper about her class at school. It wasn't on the web, so below is a scan of the actual article (to read it, just click for a larger image):

Today the class went on their "special field trip surprise". They went to Chick-fil-A for lunch, then they were off to meet the Mayor of Murfreesboro, go to the top of the AmSouth Bank building (the tallest building in Murfreesboro), and then to the park to play (although with the high expected to only be 41 today (and it's only 30 now!) I'm not sure how long that will last!).

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Almost Famous

Recently I had two opportunities to represent my job, and my company, in two high profile situations. I'm excited to finally begin to establish myself as an expert in the arena of digital publishing.

First, in November I was a guest on a nationally syndicated radio program called Point of View talking about Bible study software, and specifically our brand, eBible. It was a two hour radio program and I was the guest the whole time! Unfortunately, the link is gone on their website, but here is a link to listen for anyone interested. A few technical notes: The first 5 people can click and do nothing. After that, you have to sign up for a free XDrive account. If you do, you get 5GB of online storage for free. If you don't, I understand. Also, the file is 22MB and the interview is long. I will NOT be offended if you don't listen! :)

Second, The Tennessean, our local newspaper, ran an article today about the future of e-books. This article was prompted by a press release from our company about a new partnership I made with a software company. The newspaper called me and I spent a lot of time on the phone educating the writer about the world of e-books. In the end, we weren't the feature of the article, but I was quoted in it and the partnership was mentioned. Here it is, for your reading pleasure!

I just thought I would share with you a couple of successes for me lately. It's great to have a job you love, and have the opportunity to communicate that to others.

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Scott's trip to Washington DC

Happy New Year to all!!

We have been a little dry on posting over the holidays because we have a lot of pictures to share and I've been trying to figure out the best way to accomplish this. The previous slide show of my trip to Washington state was done at a site called Flickr, but in order to upload any reasonable amount of pictures you have to pay for the service. I wanted to avoid that. After much research, and even trying to do it myself in Flash, I found Slide. It's free and it even gives you all the code you need to put a slide show directly into a blog post. Before I had to do some HTML coding (a not so easy task when you have no idea what you are doing!). So far Slide seems like a great solution. Let us know what you think and we'll get more up as soon as possible (including the long overdue updates on each of us, and the house tour!). On a little bit of a technical note, I'm very suprised that Picasa doesn't support doing this since Google owns both Picasa and Blogger. Maybe in future updates...

Now on to the subject of this post. Below is a picture slide show from a business trip to Washington DC I took in November. Unfortunately, I left a few hours before Mark and Shary came home from Florida, so I didn't get to see them. :( This is a summary of about 4 hours of hard and fast sightseeing! All in all there are some good shots, so I hope you like them.

On a final note, Blogger has updated their site recently and in the transition my picture and my profile have become the default. I'm not sure why, but I will work on that quickly so that you can see all of us again.

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Santa Claus lives in Franklin!

Last night we took Anna (Jessica went to a Fall Festival with a friend) trick or treating in our new neighborhood (that in itself made this night even more magical - walking around in a real neighborhood) and believe it or not Anna actually wore a Snow White outfit and said "Trick or Treat!" when the person opened the door. This is a big deal because we never know quite how she will react towards new things. Well, we went to about 7 houses before we happened upon a home that is always decorated for Christmas. And there stood and I am not kidding, (drum roll . . . ) Mr. & Mrs. Santa Claus! Their license plates on their cars even read "SCLAUS" and "MSCLAUS". The couple looked just like the real thing! I wanted to run home and get a camera! Unfortunately Anna decided she was done trick or treating before we got to their home so I didn't get to meet them. But imagine the merry old couple living right here in Franklin, and in our neighborhood! The man has a real snowy white beard and the Misses was just as if she were in costume for the holidays. We can't wait to see what they do for Christmas! If curiosity has the best of you, please feel free to visit us for Christmas!

Happy first of November to everyone! We are also enjoying all the beautiful leaves in our yard. Our home looks like a Hallmark card! The yard is covered with all colors of leaves, there are pumpkins on the porch, and there sits a huge pile of leaves in the backyard just waiting to be jumped in! Well. . . Jessica has raked it, jumped into it, then raked it up again. :)

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"People have no idea..."

Below is a link to a video about living with a child with autism. We really debated on whether or not to even post this message, but after thinking about it we decided to go ahead. Please know that our motivation is purely educational. While the video is very emotional, we aren't seeking sympathy, just understanding.

When we first saw this video we both agreed that this is the most accurate portrayal of daily life with a child with autism that we had ever seen. Most people still think of Rain Man when they think of autism, and although Dustin Hoffman's portrayal is somewhat accurate, it just isn't reality for most people.

There is another caveat, too - we are very blessed with Anna. Although she leans toward severe on the spectrum, she isn't as bad as some of these kids. We experience probably 80% of what you see in the video. However, every single thing that is said by the parents in this video, we have said, thought, experienced, agonized over, suffered through, and worried about. That is what we wanted you to see. We want you to know that when we say we battle with Anna, this is pretty much what it looks like. When we are stressed about money, or we are tired, or we can't go somewhere, this is why, and this is a lot of what our life looks like.

Extra credit also has to be given to Melinda. Unlike the women in this video, she works full-time. She sacrifices more than most when it comes to life with Anna. She is truly an amazing person and deserves all the credit, encouragement, and reward for everything she does. All day. Every day.

That being said, the video is called Autism Every Day. When you click the link, just go to the section called Autism Every Day and choose your bandwidth.

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New digs...

A lot of you have been asking for house pictures (Oh! You didn't know? We moved last month!). Like the blog, getting to that simple task these days is more difficult than it sounds! We really want to give you the "grand tour" through pictures, but we will need a little more time to get it together.

In the meantime, enjoy this shot of the front of the house. At least you will have something to refer to when you think of us living here in Franklin!

Stay tuned! We will have more up soon!

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Need to do a quick Bible search?

There is a new link over on the left. It's to a revolutionary Bible search website called eBible.com. This is a joint venture between Scott's company, Thomas Nelson, and a company in Calgary, Canada called Godspeed Computing. Scott was instrumental in the ideation of this website. The development was passed on to some other very talented people, but he stills feels some affinity for this project.

Check it out! Scott guarantees you have never studied the Bible like this on the internet!

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Since Matt & Mary Jo are showing us up...

Here is a little update on our blog since we have completely fallen off...

I can't seem to figure out what time it is in Ireland while reading all of Matt and Mary Jo's updates, so I hit the web. I found a cool little utility that will put a clock on your website or blog. Pretty cool! I sent it to Matt and MJ, so hopefully they will add one for Ireland for people like me.

In the meantime, enjoy a clock of the local time in Franklin (more for fun, not because the math is that hard!), and I also put a link on the side for Matt and Mary Jo's Ireland blog.

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Scott's Trip to Seattle

Recently Scott went on a business trip to Seattle and took some great pictures. Below is a slide show of some of the highlights. If you hover over the top and the bottom you will get some options for viewing - you can speed up or slow down the slide show, or you can look at pictures invidually and more. Click on the picture and you will see a description.

Enjoy!

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Fried Dough Anyone?

We've added a link over there on the left. Check it out. And if you are ever in Memphis you have to go and sample some of the best donuts ever. No kidding! Be sure to tell them we sent you, and you might even get a free sample! Yum!

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