The following is an obituary written in celebration of the life of Marvin Pistrang who passed away May 8th of this year. Marvin led the safari we took to Kenya in 1986.

Marvin Pistrang, 75, beloved husband of Temma, father of Larry, Jan and Mark Pistrang. Grandfather of Jenny, Molly, Nikki, Tasia, Kalli and Christopher departed on May 8th on his final safari. A geologist with the USGS for 29 years, Marvin began a second career, leading Safaris to Kenya, volunteering at Camp Hancock for OMSI, and teaching for the Heritage Institute and the Life Time Learning Center. He put in over 500 hours with the Aquarium and throughout his life led hikes and field trips for Audubon, the Sierra Club, Mountaineers, and the Issaquah Alps Trails Club. He reviewed books and even wrote a few. A talented artist and musician, and avid naturalist, he loved studying plants and birds and led over 300 people to Africa over a period of 20 years. Throughout his life he was a member of many conservation organizations and a 3 night a week contra dancer. He served in the Peace Corps with his wife and family from 1972 to 1974. He touched so many people and all were enriched by having known him. All are welcome to come and celebrate his life.

It's a wonderful day for reflection. The sun is out and the clouds are light and wispy. So many great men and women have given so much for us to have the freedom and opportunities we have today. Thank You.

On a separate note I spent a lot of last week working on a project in iMovie and iDVD. A few hints. First, make your iMovie into seperate movies that will be independent chapters in iDVD. This will speed the rendering process in iDVD and will enable you to lock down changes in one segment without having to re-encode later.

In iDVD my findings have been similar to Ken Stone's. You must let it background encode all video before making a DVD. While I never ruined a DVD blank, I did find that every time the process would hang and if I watched TOP it would become stuck and non-responsive.

This has been a heads down coding and production weekend. More than 200 photos and several hours of video have gone into the production of Justin's graduation video. It's been a fun project but for the first time I find myself considering a dual processor system. The x-serve is great but how well it runs as the primary desktop I'm not sure. Other notes include problems with the Contour Shuttle-Pro. For whatever reason it won't believe that I want to move forward a frame at a time. The other half the weekend included lots of PHP work and cleaning up several trees from the backyard. It's a large pile. More to come soon.

I finally got to getting the place cleaned up a bit today. This evening is sitting on the back deck, having a freshly grilled hamburger and a cool micro-brew. Yesterday's snow is passed and the tree cleanup is as far as it can go for the moment. In addition to the picture at right and the new theme the "essays" link is back above giving easier access to some past writings as well as the "notes" section with some tech notes.