Author: Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

I just had a good friend point this article from Ben Stein out to me. Wow. It is extremely well-done. I’ll paste a few excerpts from it… Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to. … A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Read more…

Just finally got a chance to sit down at the laptop for half an hour and uploaded 50 pictures or so from the great time I had over the last couple of weeks. My sister (Hi Jenny!!) and her 2 youngins (Hi Nate and Elijah!) were out for 2 weeks. We had a blast, visiting Hershey, indoor swimming and diving, Lake Tobias, and other cool stuffies too. My brother Josh Kasper got to come out to spend some time with us too! He was at a King of Kings Skateboard Ministry shindig in Syracuse, New York, and was hanging out with Team 2 until Creation, East. So we invited him and his team to stay with us for a few Read more…

I have now joined the Borg Collective officially, I can say, and have moved all of my photos off of my personal website and onto my Flickr account. Time will tell the wisdom of this move, I suppose. I can say that the features that Flickr offers are WAY cooler than anything else I’ve seen in this space. I had previously been using Singapore, but became quickly disenchanted by the lack of good themes/templates and the lack of integration into WordPress. On the other hand, Flickr offers a VERY good service, gives tons of storage space (far more than I need, methinks), allows for a variety of ways to upload your pictures, provides a really cool interface (the slideshow thing Read more…

I don’t know why I didn’t think of looking sooner, but after struggling with the official Flickr Uploadr in Linux with Wine (the tool itself works great, but the windows file selector doesn’t allow you to preview images, and I can’t find a windows tool that works in wine that does show previews/thumbnails and works with drag-and-drop to the Flickr Uploadr), I decided to search for a Flickr Uploadr solution for Linux. I found this sweet little jewel of a tool that allows uploading images to my flickr account, and it works perfectly well with drag-and-drop from konqueror. Nice job Michele!! =:)

Yay! =:) Drag-and-drop doesn’t work, but the program installs and runs fine in Linux with wine!! The versions I’m running (I’m using Mandrake LE 2005 (10.2) these days): $ rpm -qa | grep -i wine wine-20040505-10.mdk10.2.thac libwine1-20040505-10.mdk10.2.thac

I am so proud of my brother! He is an amazing athlete. Our Dad would be proud. =:)

So, I’ve been using Singapore for the last few years to manage my photos, and it’s alright–not too horrible, it’s free, it does a pretty good job, has a couple of template options, etc. However, I really would like something that would let me tie into WordPress better. To Singapore’s credit, they do allow for this by providing an easy way to do this with the external template. And I’ve used this method to fit it into my site, and it looks moderately good. The one thing I’d REALLY like to be able to do is for the WordPress search to also search my photos–so that a search on my site would be all-encompassing, not just just a search of Read more…

I guess I was thinking that it would be neat to have a different /index.php than my WordPress blog. But… well, I never have and never will and there’s no point in it begin there. So I’m moving everything back to http://movingparts.net/ from http://movingparts.net/b/. Sorry for the chaos. =:/

My Teen Bible Quiz Team!!! =:) Originally uploaded by vanRijn. Forgot to mention this previously, but since I’m playing with Flickr, I figured I’d give it a shot. Here’s a quick shot of my team outside of the church we spent 2 days at in REALLY tough competition. Check out my Flickr pages for more pictures….