Monday, November 28, 2016

One More Time - Fresh Roses on the Altar - New Computer for the Broadcast

 "Those were the days, my friend,
we thought they'd never end..."

"When Morn, the rosy-fingered child of Dawn, appeared..."

"Blow, blow, thou bitter rain, the hard rain down can rain..."

Sassy showed great patience about her morning walk. I checked outside, lacking her radar ears, and saw how the rain was beating down steadily at 7 AM, after a night of howling winds and dreams about limbs crashing down around me. We walked at 8 AM instead, with her permission and appreciation.

The trees have given up their green and dropped their leaves, almost at once. Drifts are all over the driveway, piles of soggy maple leaves that I love to use for mulch.

Nevertheless, we had fresh roses on the altar yesterday, the First Sunday in Advent. That shows how persistent roses are in cold weather and why they have such a long blooming season, from one month after planting the bare roots to the first real winter days.



Falling in Love and Easy Does It bloomed on Saturday, but not in those big deluxe flowers that we enjoyed a few weeks ago. Not as deep as a well nor as wide as a barn door, but 'twill do, 'twill do. (Oxford aka Shakespeare)

We will remember with advantages that First Sunday in Advent when garden roses were on the altar.

Mid-week Advent services will be at 7 PM Central,
because we are not a Church Growth coven.


The new, used desktop came on Saturday, boasting a quad-core i7 CPU and 16 gigs of RAM. Quad-core is like having four computers share the work. RAM is where computing really happens - certainly not on the hard drive - so there is never too much RAM. Often RAM costs too much. This was used with a one-year warrantee.

We have used Ustream so long that the computer was obsolete for the demands of Windows 10 and the latest version of Ustream software. The honest tech helpers admit they have problems with each new Ustream edition.

I hope to learn video editing and alternatives to Ustream. We can always use Facebook for an alternative, but not everyone cares to use FB or has it on their computer.

YouTube is a better alternative, and I can learn how to broadcast there, too. So much to learn. I have been urging my graduate students to learn more about video, so now I get to lead the way. I am going to be learning on an iPad sent as a gift.

LI says we have the best desktop for streaming video now, and it will be good for some years ahead. He did not like the idea of streaming to two platforms at once, and I see the logic of that. More complications and more demands on the system.

I have stubbornly resisted mobile computing. For me, a mobile computer is a desktop I carry from the office to the chapel. I do not text and resist answering texts. My geezer phone has a five item menu for texting in emergencies. If I get a spam text, I answer, "Have a nice day" from the menu.

My undergraduates laughed at me for not texting. I pointed out that their computer skills were limited to tweeting all day long.