Crooks.net

Pictures from the April 26th track meet at Pembroke.

Pictures I took while helping with the clean-up effort at Oakhill Day School after Friday’s early morning tornado. Most of the pictures have captions describing the photo.

Last night Gladstone was hit by some strong storms yet again. For being a small town, I think it gets more than its share of weather attention.

Calvin’s school took some significant damage this time. I took a few pictures which can be viewed by clicking the thumbnail below.

The damage is bad enough that it was unknown how the kids would finish their school year. Thankfully, the church Terry attends, Antioch Bible Baptist, stepped forward. It only took half a day after the damage occurred, and now things have been arranged to use the church for the rest of the school year. It’s very convenient since it’s essentially just across the street and the church has a lot of room. Kudos to the church and Oakhill Board for getting this done.

Hopefully between the insurance and the volunteers (Terry is over there right now), things can be put back better than ever for next year.

Pictures of the Oakhill kids at the Barstow track meet.

Here we go again:

Official due date is 15 Nov 08. Terry tends to pop them out well before the timer dings, so our guess is 15 Oct 08.

Whee!

A small group of kids from Oak Park went to St. Louis to compete in a robotics competition.

http://pictures.snapsandshots.com/gallery/5298011_3LTfr

Pictures from the Oakhill Chess Tournament.

http://pictures.snapsandshots.com/gallery/5301116_2ekhL

I know there’s likely nobody interested in this but me, but just in case….

If you want to use this site on something like a mobile phone where screen real estate and/or bandwidth is limited, you can now do that at http://mobile.crooks.net.

I’m trying an experiment with a tumble log. As defined on Wikipedia, a tumble log is a “variation of a blog that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging.” What this means is that the intimidation of putting out a well formed, well thought out, grammatically correct blog post is not present. And yeah, that’s part of what keeps me from doing much in this blog. It just takes a little too much effort usually.

I’ve decided to use tumblr.com for my tumble log for the moment. It lets me really easily post pictures and comments from my phone using SMS, and it’s certainly very quick and easy to post all kinds of stuff using a real web browser. I’m going to try to keep up with very short posts and occasional pictures and links to other things I find interesting. I’m approaching it as a personal journal I can go back and search when I want to refresh my memory on something.

Thankfully, I figured out a fairly easy way to combine my usual Crooks.net full-blown blog with this tumble log thing. So basically that means that to everyone else it just looks like I’m blogging more frequently and a lot of the blog entries are really short and sweet. (I’m sure they’re all sweet.)

As usual, this blog you’re reading right now can be found at http://steve.crooks.net, but now will be updated more frequently with content (until I give it up again). The blog supports feeds, of course, for those of you who use some kind of feed reader.

Crooks.net is built on open-source software called Drupal. I spent the weekend doing a pretty massive update to the latest released version, going from version 4.7.3 to 5.5. I also tinkered just a little with how things are laid out. You probably won’t notice much difference, and hopefully you won’t see any problems, but if anything seems odd please .