My blog is moving and I'm excited about blogging again.

Find out why.

Jeeping with Max

Some photos from an outing with my son yesterday. We were a few miles north of North Bend and caught a spectacular sunset.

Speaking of sunsets, I caught a pretty one on Saturday during a last minute road trip to Whidbey Island along with a few shots of the ferries. I love riding the ferries.

Quick Book Review: Prayer, Our Deepest Longing

Obviously this is a book about prayer. If you are an atheist you are not likely to enjoy this book. I still recommend athiests read it to better understand why friends who are believers pray. I've read several books by well-known atheiests. I think we can always learn from each other.

This is an incredibly deep and moving book that is surprisingly very short (only 67 pages). I'm unfamilar with this author and look forward to reading more by him. The book focuses on prayer, the different types of prayer, and how to deepen your relationship with God through prayer. I learned several things and adopted some new habits for my own personal prayer practice. I read this book with my girlfriend and we both found it to be extremely moving and a wonderful tool to help us grow in our relatinoship with God and each other. Highly recommended.

Chillin' With The Rippingtons

Enjoying one of my favorite modern jazz bands on vinyl while doing a little cooking. 

The Rippingtons are an incredible band - seeing them play live is more like a rock concert than a jazz show due to their heavy drumming and Russ Freeman's amazing guitar skills. I was lucky enough to see them a few years ago when they played at Seattle's Jazz Alley. I had a table right next to the stage - they literally played in my face for over two hours. I LOVED it. My ex, of course, hated it. :)

Here's a couple of shots from that night. These photos were taken from directly my seat without zooming in. What a great show - they sounded flawless. I got to meet the entire band after the show and thank them for all of the great music over the years. I love these guys.

Outlook Crashing On Startup? Check Your Rules!

I haven't been able to run Outlook for several months and have been limping along using the painfully awkward web interface to manage my schedule and email.  Today I finally fixed this issue and can run Outlook again. I thought I'd document my issue here in case anyone else is having this problem. Our internal Help Desk was unable to fix this issue and finally gave up on trying to fix it. 

Here is the issue I was having: I'd fire up Outlook and all seemed ok but after a minute or two  then Outlook would just stop working and crash. No error message, nothing. Just crash. I initially thought it may have been an Outlook profile issue so I deleted and re-created my profile. Nope, problem still happening. Then I thought it might be an issue with the volume of email in my Outlook ost so I cleaned it up. Nope. problem still happening. Then I started thinking about what Outlook might be doing when it first starts up - it initially started up fine but would always crash after a minute or two. This is when I realized it had to the rules. I have a ton of Outlook rules and one of more of them were likely causing Outlook itself to crash.  Since I couldn't change the rules within Outlook (it kept crashing) I had to use the painfully awkward web interface again.  Clicking on the gear in the top right of the screen enabled me to get access to Outlook settings and my rules.

Upon reviewing my rules I noticed several of them were referencing a strange GUID value that I didn't recognize. I deleted those rules and restarted Outlook. Problem solved! I never thought I'd be so happy to be able to use Outlook again.

Hope this helps someone out there someday.

You Only Need Three Outlook Mail Sorting Rules

Speaking of Outlook rules, I used to have a ton of them and wasted far too much time setting up a complex series of folders and rules to determine which emails should go into which folders. Now I just have three rules and four Outlook folders. My folders look like this:

My three email rules look like this:

and

and

If I'm CC'd on an email there's no real hurry to get to it. I'll read it later.  All meeting invites and related activity lands in the meeting folder. External email from outside my company is usually lower priority so I'll eventually get to it.

I find this to be a much easier way to manage my email. How do you do it?

Fixing a Broken Known Config

Today seems to be the day for computer issues. I decided to start blogging again and wouldn't you know it - my blog stopped working today.   My blog is based upon Known, a wonderful open source blogging tool with great support for IndieWeb. Anyway, anytime I tried to create a post I received the following error:
   Something went wrong.  Class 'Ramsey\Uuid\Uuid' not found

Well that didn't seem good and I hadn't changed anything so I wasn't sure what happened. I finally decided to simply try re-installing Known and this fixed the issue. Here's what I did: 

1. backed up my Known folder
2. removed everything except for the config and upload folders
3. cloned a new copy of Known from github and copied all the folders except config and upload over to my Known folder
4. ran composer install in my Known folder to get all the dependencies set back up

I hope this helps anyone else who may be using Known.

A Quick News Roundup Before Bed

The US still appears to be a free country despite pure president's apparent attempts to change it.

A film of how the brain stores memories.

Alex Leifson, guitarist from Rush, has a new band and the sound is totally unexpected.

Incredible photo of the ISS over the Egyptian Nile Delta

Some car manufacturers continue to insist that you don't actually own the car you purchased

Another reason you should be listening to Joe Rogan's excellent podcast