The Mews News

Our conference was a grand success. Dr. Martin knocked another one out of the park with his information jammed pack presentation. The energy and excitement in the room really made the weekend just fly by. The doctors and their staff really put in some work during the workshop and had loads to take home with them at the end of the conference on Saturday.

I was great seeing all of our members once again and catching up with each of them.

Back from an incredible five day visit to Israel.

It was a whirlwind trip. We hit the ground running! Visiting, Tel Aviv, Caesarea, Haifa, Zefat, Qumran, En Gedi, Masada, City of David and the Old City of Jerusalem in just four days. My last day in Jerusalem was spent at the DVI Clinic during the morning; followed by additional sightseeing in the afternoon at the Bird Observatory, the Israel Museum and topping off the evening before heading to the airport a trip to the Farmer's Market.

In preparation for the trip, I had read Jerusalem: The Biography, by Simon Sebag Montefiore which was a wonderful history of the city. Which I was grateful for once there and visiting the city. We even watched a number of archeological lectures on Jerusalem and the area as well prior to the trip. Again it was the putting together of the pieces and parts of what had been learned during Sunday School with the history of the place and throwing in current events that caused me to appreciate so much the reality of the place and marvel at it's complexity. There are so many layers, historic, religious, political, and archeological one upon the other. It gives a whole new understanding to Biblical history and the country as a whole.

Standing in so many of the places where the events of Biblical history have taken place; and touring the country put into perspective both the events of the Bible and today's current events. That so much has taken place in such a small area it is hard to fathom. The experience truly does change you.

Visiting the DVI Clinic and meeting the staff, volunteer dentists, and the patients was a special time. There is dedication of the staff and dentists to the clinic can be felt from the time you enter the door. The patients come from all backgrounds and there is a feeling of unity. If the world could operate in the same way the way or world would be a much better place.

My "job" was to photograph the country, people, food, and clinic for the American Friends of DVI. Please be sure to check out their website. Pass along this opportunity to volunteer to your dentist or contribute to the work that they are doing. Changing lives one child at a time and in their own way forging peace in the Middle East.

Trip photos, subject to change and removal. Enjoy!

Close Your Eyes and Make a Wish!
May all your birthday wishes come true!

I had a great evening out with the guys last night at Legends Brewery. We went out to see the Big Boss Combo perform. Before the show, I was able to slip out onto the deck and get a nice skyline shot of the city.

The band was excellent and I was able to get some great shots during their performance.

BIG BOSS COMBO Photos

Looking good behind the wheel.

It has finally happened! Sean has taken to the road. He picked up his learner's permit this weekend and has been logging the miles. So far he's put in over 100 and that was before supper.

Be careful out there while you are learning and watch out for everyone else, you know that they won't be watching out for you.

I am beginning to think that something out there doesn't want me to have a ring made by Le Vian. Today, I tapped my hand/ring against a counter at work and half of the ring went flying across the kitchen! Definitely NOT what I was expecting to happen. Upon a close examination I found that one of the butterflies had sheared off at the base where it connected to the main part of the ring.

I dropped it by Jared this evening on the way home and we're not even bothering to try to have it repaired. Store credit here I come. I'll be shopping for something else when I have a better day to do it. They did tell me that they had never seen a Le Vian piece have a problem and here I have had two in less than 6 months.

I have been so bad with my blog post of late. So many excuses for where the time has gone between them. Work, school, family, holidays and just plain ole not having anything exciting to report.

School

Let's see since the last real posting, I've begun my final module for school, which is photography. Since deciding to finish out my program with the photography module, I have picked up a new camera (Canon Rebel T2i) which is much better suited for use than just a point and shoot for the class. It is pretty hard to learn anything about photographing using the .raw format when all you've got to work with is .jpg.

I've already begun utilizing what I've learned during my course work to improve my overall photography. Even managing to do some head shots for a dancer.

The Holidays

Walt & I had a great Christmas party at the house the middle of December. Which was an awesome success! Looking forward to our next get together at the house for the Super Bowl. I spent Christmas Eve at Mom & Dad's house and part of Christmas Day at Barbara & Jimmy's house.

Mom & I attended Christmas with the Richmond Pops the week before Christmas. We both took loads of pictures.

Richmond Pops Band Photos


On the Friday before Christmas, Mom & I went out to the Metro Richmond Zoo to see their presentation, Miracle of Christmas at the Zoo.

Photos from Miracle at the Zoo

I did have a three-day weekend for Christmas and New Years. Took a bunch of pictures and spent the extra time working on editing them. It fun getting out and taking a series of images from a new perspective.

The New Year

Here we are with January almost gone and February just around the corner. Where does the time go? Time to finally gather up all the remnants of Christmas and get them back into the proper boxes and back into the attic.

I need to get myself a packing list together for an upcoming trip. There will be loads of pictures after I return.

Dr. Michael Goldberg's just released "What the Tooth Fairy Didn't Tell You, The Wise Consumer's Guide to Dentistry in the Big Apple" explain the ins and outs of dental health. The stories and pictures will inspire and educate. The book is a guide to enable you to make health-saving, money-saving, pain-saving and time-saving choices. Although his book focuses on the New York City area, it is an invaluable resource for anyone who has a mouth, anywhere.

Proceeds from this book will go to support the DVI (Dental Volunteers for Israel), Trudi Birger Free Children's Dental Clinic in Jerusalem. Healing mouths is a worthy goal but Dr. Goldberg tries to heal the World by volunteering in a clinic where Christians, Muslims and Jews, children and dentist alike, routinely interact towards a common goal...getting and staying healthy.

Learn More about AmericanFriendsDVI.org

Get Your Copy at Amazon.com or Books-A-Million

Hmm...

As the tale ended in October, we were just days away from our conference and my fingers were crossed that the fix we had put into place was going to work (at least for the duration of the conference.) On Thursday afternoon, as I left to set up for the conference we were still operating well.

Friday morning arrived and it wasn't pretty. Doctor arrived and I expected the usual computer hand off, but NOPE! The MacBook had crashed yet again during the evening. So here we are at the 12th hour and it is time to punt.

I pull out my HP and got to the ball rolling. The big trick was downloading the new PowerPoint from my email (27 mg) and a sketchy connection to the internet in our conference room. After a bit of juggling things were set for the morning (or so I thought). There were videos that had been embedded into the presentation, that of course weren't on my computer. If that's all we have fall apart then it will be okay.

The conference was able to get off and running with minimal delay due to the availability of my working PC! It did put a crimp in what I usually do during the conference - providing tech support, sending emails immediately to members during the session so that requested information/materials are there waiting for them before they ever leave. And the biggie - sending emails back to the office so that my post-conference to-do list is waiting for me; it beats the heck out of a list on a little piece of paper.

Fast forward to Monday - Back to the phones to speak with yet another Senior Adviser at Apple, the adviser that whom we had been speaking with wasn't in and had not answered my phone message. Needless to say by this point - the experience with Apple has left a bad taste in my mouth. Hours and hours of trying to resolve the issue with very little progress. Our new Senior Adviser reviewed the information from the case, had me do a couple of things, but then said that the case needed to be referred up to Engineering. Good grief! That could take forever. While we were waiting on a response from Engineering it was suggested that we prepare just in case they sent back a recommendation to reinstall the OS. Okay sound advise.

I backed up the Mac using the built in TimeMachine (very cool piece of software); and just for good measure did the Office for Mac upgrade and backed up again.

No response from Apple before the end of business on Monday. We were left hanging and waiting. The only choice was to just wait on a call or call daily and check to see if they had responded to the adviser. My mission became to call daily to check on the progress of this case and to see if there was any way to poke the engineers into moving faster.

I guess it was Tuesday near the end of the day when I checked back again and finding no reply. It was time to talk with Customer Service - the Doctor was heading out of town on Thursday and we were getting back down to crunch time yet again. Customer service didn't keep me long they moved us up to the Management Division.

I've been dealing with Sebastian now for the past several days - not being in the technical support department there wasn't much he could do except watch and see when the reply came back from engineering. He was very good at returning my daily calls and following up on the status of the case.

Around 3:30 on Thursday I got the call from Sebastian that a reply had come down. He connected me with a new Senior Adviser and off we went to see if we could get the Mac straightened out. After checking on a couple of setting that the engineers wanted to know about the fix was to delete the "Lock" folder from Safari. Something in this folder was screwing with the virtual memory.

Not being able to duplicate the error at will, I attempted to cause it to appear but to no avail. So yet again as I left for the day, the MacBookPro was actually working. I've still got my fingers crossed that it will continue to be working on Monday when the Doctor gets back and continues to work fine from now on out.

The plan is to check back with Sebastian on Tuesday hopefully to close the case for good, but we shall see...

If you would like a higher resolution photos than the ones posted on Facebook please email me and I will be happy to send it to you.

Apple has been the bane of the boss' and my existence today!

It seems a simple trip to the Apple Genius bar to update the OS, get more RAM and have iCloud installed has turned into a exercise in futility.

I don't know what's going with their product, but the Mac OS X Lion (10.7.2) has been on the fritz for the last two days. I'd wager to say that I've spent about six hours or more on the phone with Apple support hacking away at this issue. The boss' MacBookPro has 8 GB memory and over 500 GB free hard drive space, yet he gets this lovely pop up window that says, "Your Mac OS X start up disk has no more space available for application memory."

Two calls on Monday followed by a trip by the boss to the Apple Genius bar, wasn't doing much to create a pleasant nor productive computer owner. It has been particularly tough since he is in the middle of doing time-sensitive work. It was hoped that the late night at the Genius bar would have done the trick, but alas that was not to be.

So back to the phones I went this morning spending a staggering 135 minutes with the first level tech support. Then after just a couple of hours of operation it was time to try it again. Thankfully I was able to go through the issue relatively quickly with the tech who determined that it was time for me to speak with a Senior Advisor after another 95 minutes, I've got my fingers crossed that it is finally fixed.

In finally getting to an alleged "fixed" state, in the past two days I've: verified the hard drive, emptied the library cache (in two different places), gone through several safe mode boot ups; deleted conduit folders and files; deleted CTLoaders; toyed with the idea that there was a bad stick of RAM (thus the boss' trip to the Genius Bar); changed trust levels on certificates; done a SMC reset; PRAM reset; reset all the caches; performed another safe boot; uninstalled and reinstalled Safari; and verified and repaired permissions.

The Senior Advisor left us a direct line back to her should things go awry and a recommendation that Office for Mac be upgraded to 2011. I think that since things are kinda of sketchy that the upgrade should be put off just until we are passed the next few critical days.

So as I left for the day, the MacBookPro was actually working. I've got my fingers crossed that it will continue to do so for many more days.

A few months ago I purchase a darling double butterfly Le Vian ring. Much to my disappointment, one of the side diamonds fell out after only wearing it for four days! Not to fear, back to the store and the ring was completely covered under the Le Vian warranty and off it went to have the stone replaced. I had hoped that this process would only take a week or so, but it was well over a month until the ring arrived back to be picked up. So here I promptly went back over to the jewelers on Wednesday to retrieve it. It was lovely and good as new.

That was until Thursday evening when the diamond above the one that had been replaced fell out!! Talk about being truly perturbed. I'd only worn the darn thing for about 10 days and here it was broken once again and I was sure it was going to end up being gone again for another month! In lieu of going through this over and over I decided to return it and just be done with it - I really didn't want to spend all my time back and forth having it continually repaired.

With that in mind I returned to the jewelers and found that I was past my 30 return period. Needless to say I wasn't the happiest of campers. The manager definitely understood my frustration and proceeded to speak with one of the on site jewelers. It appeared from a quick look under the microscope that the prongs holding the stone in place were too short and that was what was causing all the issues. With a promise of overnight repairs done in house, I left the shop satisfied.

That brings us up to Saturday evening when all the fun really began. I arrived back to pick up the ring and the jeweler who was doing the repairs met me at the counter. He had that "look" that something wasn't quite right. Boy was that an understatement. He said that when he applied heat to the ring to re-tip the prong the ring blew up!

Turns out that the original casting had air bubbles in the metal and when the heat had been applied the air expanded and the rest is history. I didn't see the end result but I bet it was a spectacular show. As a result of the poor casting a brand new ring is winging its way here.

On another note - the cameo ring that picked up in Italy suffered a terrible accident. About mid-summer the dog's leash got caught under the cameo and nearly ripped it off. It had been able to be put back to visually normal but the ring wasn't nearly as strong as it had been. Picking up computer case on Saturday finally dealt the ring a death blow, the band broke in half. Since I was already at the jeweler's picking up - I was able to find out if it was repairable. Much to my joy it is and won't take forever nor cost a fortune either!!

I had an interesting conversation this week about the political landscape and I heard the best analogy as to the condition that the voters are finding themselves in during this election cycle.

Fade in on a couple sitting on the sofa, neither in the mood to actually go out for the evening (there is nothing that is compelling them to go - no movie, play, etc.) There they sit flipping through the 100's of channels not finding anything to watch.

The wife says to the husband, "You go ahead and watch sports." He takes the remote and flips over to the sports channel only to find figure skating, ping pong, and a bridge tournament. Definitely not what he was looking to watch.

He then hands the remote back to his wife and say, "You go ahead and watch a movie." She flips through the movie channels and and comes up with nothing that she wants to watch either.

Together they finally settle on a rerun of CSI, not because they want to watch it, but because there is nothing else for them to choose from.

So here we are waiting to find a candidate that we can get behind, become passionate about, one that we just don't have to settle upon!