General Conference

I know it is October because it is time for General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints again. It used to be that Halloween candy displays would alert me to the year waning, however they showed up early last month.

The second talk of the first session that just wrapped up is going to be hard to top. “Which way do you face?” was the question asked and challenges those faithful to Christ’s teachings to stand by them in the face of increasingly hostile peer pressure. If the last two General Conferences could be characterized as being defenses of Christian standards, the tone of the first session feels a bit more feisty.

Another thing that caught my personal attention was the first time a speaker used his native language rather than English to deliver a sermon. My complaint is a minor one: I wished it had been subtitled on the English stream rather than verbally translated. This was done for ease of comprehension, but I like to hear the inflections of the speaker.

Also of interest is the new Church move to embrace social media more completely. Now they have set up a way to easily share to Twitter, Facebook, Google +, and other services along with a page showing messages that have gone out. While not a fan of the Web 2.0, I can see the younger folks using this a lot.

I wish I was feeling a little more alert while watching the stream for the cold weather has made rest difficult and pain high. Thankfully, I will be able to download the talks later and listen to them as many times as I want to gain further insights into the Gospel. As President Uchtdorf said in the conclusion of the session, “the process of gathering spiritual light is the quest of a lifetime.”

Not only do I love his talks, I’ve grown to love that man.

As always, General Conference is open to everyone to see, not just members. Check out the October sessions here.

Return of the Russian Spam

A familiar pattern of false referrals has shown up in my September 2014 Blogger statistics making me wish there was a way to exile them to Siberia. Featuring a bevy of webpages originating from a site previously encountered, the spam is dedicated to parting you from your hard earned rubles.

While I don’t have any rubles to lose, precaution was taken in exploring the links. Firing up my trusty VirtualBox installation of Ubuntu 14 and using the TOR browser for anonymity I keep spam sites from looking at my real computer. Don’t try this at home unless you know what you are doing! It is best to never click on strange links.

Oh the irony of the first spam to hit my blog. http: // detective01 . ru / offers private investigator services of all kinds and would be somebody to hire to find out where spam is coming from in Russia. There’s just the small issue of them being spammers. Like quite a bit of spam from that country, it is connected to St. Petersburg and in this particular case the agency is based there.

Testing the FujiFilm HS25EXR, Part 2

More fooling around without a clue in order to see Fuji’s camera can do. As will become obvious, there is a lot to be learned yet. More photos and even a video only scratch the surface of what this far too capable mid-sized digital camera is capable of.



Ever behind on the times due to a lack of money, I feel like I’m constantly reinventing the wheel. It doesn't help I've forgotten everything about photography in the past five years. Due to dependency on automatic settings, pictures are never quite what I hope for, so expect to do better than this if you get your hands on the HS25EXR or one of its close relatives in the HS family.

In my previous post, I mentioned how post processing is needed to get good results. Spoiled by my Canon’s producing great results straight out of the viewfinder makes this a new experience. The two unaltered (other than resizing) shots above are a good illustration of why EXR mode is threatening my sanity.

Testing the FujiFilm HS25EXR, Part 1

Or a complete amateur’s fooling about with a new used camera in hopes of replacing his well out of date travel camera.

After failing to make a decent video of a once in a lifetime swarm of tens of thousands of dragonflies flitting around the property, I came to the reluctant conclusion my trusty Canon S1 IS was truly out of date. A newer used camera with HD recording was needed – hopefully one that took good stills as well. Hunting on eBay netted me a steal in the form of a FujiFilm FinePix HS25EXR 16 megapixel “bridge” camera capable of true 1080P video at 30 FPS.

Rave reviews online of this intermediate between snapshot and DSLR classes convinced me this would be a massive upgrade in capability. However, first snapshots had me wondering if I’d taken a step backward. Equipped with a bewildering array of settings, the HS25EXR was far more exotic than anything I’d used before. Of course that didn’t stop me from trying on my own.

Frayed or Fried?

Since I’m not getting anything done in the way of reviews, a report on why is in order. Simply put, things have needed doing and they have exhausted all my energy while absconding with my brainwaves. The trigger was having to mow the lawn, which is not good due to depleting my limited stamina along with the fact I’m allergic to grass. Not just grass pollen, but the plant itself.

A week later and the itching is finally gone, but the sinuses still hate me. Can’t say I blame them.

Dad may finally making some small progress. For the first time since March there are indications of fluids (water in this case) making its way from the stomach to the intestine. Cheap no calorie drink mix with very potent red dye revealed this when his feeding tube in the small intestines became tinted pink. Having spilled this stuff on white clothing, I can say it was a positive match.

Also, he has been measuring oral intake in milliliters in comparison with what he drains from the relief tube in the stomach. In the past few days, more than one hundred milliliters of water has gone missing with the implication that they have passed through the gastric outlet.

Too early to get really excited, but hey this is something that hasn’t happened before.

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidora (2001) Review

Giant Monsters All-Out Attack aka Godzilla: GMK

A darker take than usual in the Godzilla series of movies that adds a spiritual aspect to Japan’s battles with the giant lizard. While highly flawed, this is my second favorite Godzilla movie and only eclipsed by the original Gojira. It is the only other Godzilla movie in my collection other than the original and I purchased it from Hong Kong it was unavailable in the US at the time . That has since changed.  It also can be watched online at Crackle.com. UPDATED: April 2012. UPDATED again September 2014 with Blu-ray details and HD screen captures.

Toho Studios gave Shusuke Kaneko, the director of the competing rebooted Gamera trilogy, a shot at reinterpreting Godzilla and this production hit Japanese theaters in late 2001.  Domestically it was the most successful of the Millennium series of Godzilla movies. Yes, there have been so many films of the big ‘G’ that they are actually broken into subsets by era. GMK is a direct sequel to the 1954 movie and ignores all the others.

The movie begins with the most boring of settings, a classroom. This one is filled with Japanese naval officers being lectured by Admiral Tachibana (Ryudo Uzaki) about the only battle fought by the Japanese Self Defense Force.  That battle was in 1954 against the giant monster Godzilla and was a great victory for the JSDF.  Huh?  Wasn’t the radioactive menace killed by the Oxygen Destroyer? Something’s fishy here.

As the lecture goes on, mention of a giant monster attacking New York and possibly being identified as Godzilla occurs. This leads to a humorous slam against the 1998 American Godzilla movie during a discussion by two junior officers. One asks if it really was Godzilla. The other replies: “Experts in America say it was, but Japanese ones disagree.”

Working on Posts and Getting Old

The last couple of weeks have been difficult, so none of the reviews I’m working on have progressed very far. Dad simply isn’t showing any signs of getting better or a willingness to work at it, so I’m trying to push him to do things. That’s been difficult, not to mention time consuming.

As I’m typing, U2’s new album, Songs of Innocence, is playing in the background. A free download until the middle of October, it is proof that the music industry is in trouble. CD sales have dwindled to nearly nothing and now digital download sales are in free fall. Streaming from Pandora and Spotify are being blamed, however the quality of product is more to blame in my opinion.

Songs of Innocence illustrates this well -- for you get what you paid for it. It isn’t even mediocre. Only The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone) is interesting at all, the rest is banal. In fact, the album sounds like a band trying to sound like U2.