Paul Brians of Washington State University has compiled a comprehensive list of Common Errors in English. If you are confused about such subjects as whether it is correct to use "appraise" or "apprise," "tragedy" or "travesty," "discreet" or "discrete," then this is the site for you. It's a great resource for teachers, students, writers, professionals, or anyone who wants to improve their mastery of the English language.

This is one of the best optical illusions I have ever seen. If you like optical illusions, or would just like to understand human color perception better, head on over to the eChalk color perception demonstration page. There are three buttons at the bottom, each demonstrating a different illusion (although they are all based on the same principle). Just follow the directions on each page. The illusions are so powerful, that even once you see the "proof," it is hard to believe. But in fact it is just as the website states! If you have a color picker/sampler application on your computer, you can verify the conclusions yourself.

Even if you consider yourself "artistically challenged," you can now paint like the masters over at the website Mr. Picassohead. It's like a grown-up version of the classic toy Mr. Potatohead. Just select pieces from the categories on the left, and place them in the drawing area on the right. You can customize color, size, and more. When you are finished, you can submit your masterpiece to the online gallery, as well as browse the creations of others.

Back when I was a kid, I remember seeing ASCII computer art at my dad's office in the data processing department of the University of Alaska. Back in those days, most printers printed only text (most often using only the Courier font!), and nearly always in black and white only. Imaginative computer users with time on their hands created a method to make pictures with just letters. So hanging all around the department were these large posters printed from dot matrix (or maybe ball-based) printers, using letters, numbers, and punctuation to simulate shades in an image. Up close you saw alphanumeric characters; from a distance you saw a picture.

Well, now you can enjoy the same excitement by visiting the ASCII-O-Matic website! You need a JPEG (.jpg) image, of yourself or anyone or anything, exactly 60 x 50 pixels in size.

Here is what I look like in ASCII:



PS: ASCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange." It's a system where all the "standard" characters are assigned a number from 0 to 255. For example, the capital "A" is always at spot 65, and the lowercase "a" is always at spot 97. If you have a Windows computer, open a word processor and try typing ALT+065 or ALT+097 (holding down the ALT key and typing the three-digit number on the keypad). You've just typed an ASCII code! Is that cool or what? In fact, to this day the only consistent way to type certain special characters in Windows is to type their ASCII codes.

There are 256 ASCII character numbers (if you count the zero space) because one computer byte contains 8 binary bits, each of which can be toggled on or off, resulting in exactly 256 possible combinations of bits (i.e., 256 possible values). Computer programmers did not want to devote more than one byte to each character, so the 256-character limitation was imposed. Until Unicode was invented, virtually all fonts were based on ASCII, and every font face or style was limited to 256 characters (actually less, because certain characters are reserved for special uses).

Yesterday our church had an evening vespers program at a park in southern Illinois called Ferne Clyffe. This park has rocky areas similar to what can be seen at Giant City or Little Grand Canyon, place I've described in previous blogs. However, we did not visit those parts of the park this time.

Instead we took a walk around the park, enjoying the fall colors.

Autumn reflections:



Around the shore of the lake:



For some reason I really like thistle flowers. I wouldn't say they are my favorite, but I think they are cool. I took the following photos. The first is, I'm guessing, a flower pod that is going to seed. I thought the spiny pod looked neat (it seems to be saying, in no uncertain terms, Do not eat me!). The other is just a regular bloom.





For vespers, the church met at this pavilion. We sang songs and listened to a short devotional. Later, after dark, we had a hot dog roast.

On Sabbath afternoon I went with a number of friends to the Hamilton County State Fish and Wildlife Area, also known as Dolan Lake. It's a nice park, perhaps not as breathtaking as some of the others in the area, but good for a leisurely stroll. There are some cypress trees growing there, and it's fascinating to see all the little "knees" (as they're called) protruding from the soil along the water's edge.



Joining us were some visitors to 3ABN from Russia. On the left is Alexi, president of the Russian Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. (Please pardon if my spelling is incorrect; also I do not know all the last names.) Next to him are Alexi (not related) and Valeri, engineering staff from 3ABN's Russian branch, and Julia Outkina, director of 3ABN Russia. And of course that's me on the right.

September 28-30 were dates of this year's 3ABN Fall Camp Meeting. I was greatly blessed to have a number of friends visiting from out of state, as well as my very own mom! This was my mom's first time to a 3ABN camp meeting, and she really enjoyed it. I was also blessed in other ways. Among other things, my mom did a pro job of cleaning my kitchen (my housemate and I keep it reasonably clean by bachelor standards, but when she was done, it sparkled!).

I also got to see my good friends Rob and Christine Neall from Ouachita Hills Academy (where my brother also works). And I also got to spend some time with Janna, Aimee, and Kymbrelee, three sweet friends from Arizona (below; sorry the picture is so small, but it is too blurry to look right at larger sizes). All of these friends were involved with the various children and youth meetings during camp meeting, so I didn't get to spend as much time with them as I would have liked. But we had fun while we could.