We are very grateful to the Lord that we have not suffered near the damage or loss that so many around us have with all the flooding.

With that said, there is work to be done. Our driveway is currently unusable. Most of the top layer has washed into our front yard and there are big gullies washed in it of axel breaking proportions!

So lacking the necessary tools to effect the move of the gravel back into the driveway, I went to the store and got this to move the gravel back where it belongs:

My primary area of concern is right here:

It might be hard to get the scope of that from the pictures but believe me, If I were to try to drive over that, I believe serious damage to my car would ensue!

And one final picture for good measure.

Now Live!

I was very careful to offer the full access and functionality while still formatting it for the small screen real-estate of the iPhone. I can’t stand sites that offer limited functionality on the iPhone version. Usually I'd rather just have the full site when that happens. So I think I have avoided that on this mobile version of the site.

And the nice thing is, you don’t have to visit a special URL. All the URLs are the same. I’m detecting the browser type with PHP. If the browser loading the page identifies itself with “iPhone” or “iPod” in the string, the page is served up in mobile format. If the browser does not identify itself as one of those two, the normal site loads. This is great because it prevents confusion and preserves permalinks etc.

To you Android users, I'm sorry! I thought the mobile version would work on Android, but I had a friend load it up on his Android phone and said it didn’t work right at all. So for now I'm serving the regular desktop version of the site to you Android users. Unfortunately I simply can't afford to get an Android device just for testing websites so I can’t develop an Android version at this time.

The rest of this post may get a bit geeky so if you do not have an inner geek, please feel free to ignore the rest. You have been warned.

So I'm kinda excited seeing as how I really am not any good at PHP programing and despise it in general (don't get me wrong, I think PHP is a good thing, I'm just more of an HTML/CSS person). The code was actually fairly simple to implement. And believe it or not, I didn’t actually even find this exact code, I found the principle and modified it to fit my needs. So here's what it looks like:

<?php

$iphone = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"iPhone");
$ipod = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"iPod");
if ($iphone||$ipod == true) { echo 'Mobile Code Goes Here'; }

else { echo 'Normal Code Goes Here'; }
?>

It's actually fairly straight forward. The first two lines find out if the browser is identifying itself as iPhone or iPod, the second line says, if either one of those is true ( the double vertical bar means “or") then use the code in the “echo” section.

And of course “else” delivers the desktop version of the site. I must admit it took me about a week of evenings to get it just right, but I got it none the less. Now I have a few other sites I'd like to implement this on!

I’m telling you, that water that’s been coming out the sky… It’s wet! We haven’t washed away though…

yet…

Oh, and about that wet water, well there’s LOT’S of it! In fact, the road to where Heritage Church is currently meeting has been washed out, and there no power so Church has been canceled! I can’t remember if we’ve ever had to cancel services before.

Here’s what’s going on in my yard and driveway:

If you can’t see the video, I strongly recommend that you upgrade your browser to an HTML5 compliant browser. But in the event you don’t want to do that, try downloading the Quicktime file here.

And here’s a few pics:

It can’t have escaped the notice of very many people that Steve Jobs posted an open letter concerning his ”Thoughts on Flash.”

I agree with it for the most part. I despise flash! I have a plugin installed to block flash unless I specially tell it to load. And I CERTAINLY don’t want it draining my mobile phone’s battery. But I digress.

Toward’s the end of his letter, Mr. Jobs notes his beef with Adobe over the fact that Adobe has only just come to fully support OS X’s native programing language of Cocoa even though OS X has been shipping for 10 years now. And I agree, it has been quite irritating that Adobe stuck with the Carbon API for so long when it was obviously an intermediary step in the transition from OS 9 to OS X. And of course the Carbon API in OS X is now no longer being maintained, and will never have support for 64 bit, thus finally forcing Adobe to move to Cocoa with the release of CS5 recently. So yeah, I completely agree with Jobs that Adobe is VERY LATE to this party. And frankly the apps have suffered from having been programed in Carbon. This is a layperson’s perspective, but there is always a difference in feel and responsiveness between an app written in Carbon, and an app written in Cocoa. It’s noticeable to the user. And it was noticeable in apps like Photoshop.

Now I come to my beef. Steve states in that latter portion of the letter that, “Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.” And he is correct. The last major third party dev to fully adopt the platform. But here’s a dirty little secret. Apple released an update, not too long ago, to one of it’s major applications that is still written in Carbon, and is still 32 bit. It’s Final Cut Pro! You would think, given that Final Cut really is a major player these days, that Apple would put a little more effort into it’s development. I remember thinking at one time that surely Final Cut 6 would be a native Cocoa app. And here we are at Final Cut 7. No 64 bit, no Cocoa! I mean, speaking of being late to the party…

So uhh, yeah… as much as I hate flash myself, this makes Steve seem rather silly to me! I’m thinking he should get his own house in order before he starts trying to clean Adobe’s!