Weekend activities

It's hard to believe this weekend is already over!

The fall colors have been turning absolutely stunning in the last two weeks or so, so on Saturday we took a drive up to the mountains - it was amazing. It's still just a little early for all the leaves to have changed yet - I'd say about 20% are still green, but it's been windy enough that I think by the time they all change, the ground will be the only place you can see the colors!

Interesting though, usually only a tree or two here and there turn bright red or orange, but this year on the way up, we could see entire regions where it looked like ALL the trees were that red/orange hue! Anyway, the colors were stunning, and we'll try to get some pictures up on the website for your viewing pleasure soon. We didn't end up getting out of the car much - the wind was icy on top of the 36-degree temperature, and we didn't know if Kate was bundled up enough for it. But I hopped out at one point near a pond and took some shots that hopefully turned out nice (I was going for some desktop wallpaper-quality shots)!

Quickly after that, we had to get ourselves off to church - Kyla's worship team was on this week, so I was doing lights too. So that was Saturday evening and Sunday morning. One cool thing this weekend was we decided to go public with the podcasts and publish them in the iTunes store - you'll be able to find them by searching for our church soon! We're only publishing the Audio and Notes podcasts so far - we still have kinks to work out on the video side, but we'll get there eventually.

Sunday afternoon we cleaned up the house a bit, visited with my grandparents when they popped by, then it was back to church for dinner - this has been the kickoff weekend for the new building campaign, and they wanted to get all the leaders in the church involved early. So now we're praying about how much to commit to give toward the new building. The walkthrough turned out much better than I was afraid it might - though they got a lot of the exterior looks wrong, the inside is pretty darn accurate. It might be a tool we can use at work to prompt us to tweak a few areas so they work better, too. However, Kyla thought that my initial fear after seeing the 'teaser' trailer for the walkthrough 4 weeks ago proved to be well-founded - she liked the wireframe version of the building better than the rendered version. They really did a great job with the wireframe building overview - I'm going to have to study it to see how they made a wireframe model legible to laypeople...

The only other stuff that happened this weekend was a little more work on the website - notice I got a guestbook of sorts running, based on this blogger.com technology. The only problem is that I'm having to rely on third-party apps to embed it in the homepage, which always brings with it ads for their service. In my downtime at church, I was playing on my laptop trying to write my own JavaScript to do this, and I actually got it working, but when I tried it on Vista, I'm getting access denied errors - looks like IE7 is more strict on Vista than XP, so I'm afraid I'll have to either keep using the third party apps, or figure out how to use ASP on Vista's new IIS, which I find extremely dense to get into, by the way. This is probably the only thing in Vista that I actually don't see why such a drastic change was necessary - the other similar things are mere annoyances, but this is such a change that I can't find a way around it, and it's limiting its functionality! Oh well. Have a great Monday, everyone! ☺