Baxleys.org

Happy New Year 2014!

Greetings from the Baxley Clan! Here’s a recap of what is happening in our peaceful, country setting (we like to pretend it’s peaceful anyway!)

Patrick

We’ll start with Patrick who is 3 as of last March. He’s still the baby of the family and is loved by all of us, even when he destroys his brothers’ Lego
masterpieces. He gets to go to preschool 2 mornings a week where he loves to play with his friend, Lincoln, and eat snacks. Patrick has two speeds, full speed and complete stop; and he goes from sun-up to sun-down and runs everywhere he can. He especially loves puzzles and will unexpectedly stop for hours and work on puzzles and he always has time to stop and read books with mom & dad. Curious George TV show and books are his favorites right now.

Dominic

Next up the line is Dominic who turned 5 in September. He goes to preschool three mornings a week where he says he also likes to play with his friend, Carson, and eat snacks. As you can tell, the preschool curriculum is pretty rigorous. He is just starting to read and is really getting excited about the prospect of staying up 30 minutes later at night to read with the big kids. Dominic follows in the footsteps of his father and is attracted to anything electronic and has a particular fondness for the iPad. He’s just starting to get interested in LEGOs too. Unlike Patrick, Dominic does not have a fondness for running or doing anything dangerous. Needless to say our two younger boys couldn’t be more different from each other but usually they get along like peas in a pod. Lucky for them because they share a room!

Molly

Molly turned 7 in October and is now in the 1st grade! Molly is our tomboy and can hold her own with her brothers, but also loves to play with her dolls for hours. Lately she’s been tapping into her creative side and is really interested in doing more crafty things, which is nice because usually she just doesn’t want to stop moving! Her favorite subject in school is art class and she says she is disappointed they only get to have art class once a week.

Calvin

Calvin, 8 as of last March, is in 3rd grade and well…he’s our Calvin! He says his favorite subject in school is recess. His teacher says he always makes her smile. His current interests include anything medieval including castles, knights, swords, etc. If the weather is nice he can usually be found making a fort somewhere in the yard out of some junk he found in the barn. If the weather is not so nice, he has the living room set up as a fort and is fighting off his sisters with a laid-out tactical plan. True to his name he loves the Calvin & Hobbes books and even made a two-headed snow goon after our first good snow this year. Calvin also made his first communion back in May!

Marie

Marie turned 10 on the 10th of October, her golden birthday! She’s in the 4th grade this year and loving every minute of being in the same class as her best friends. Her favorite subject is also art. Marie is our very girly girl and LOVES horses. Did we mention she loves horses? Each summer we let the kids choose an activity, they usually choose something like baseball , and every summer Marie chooses something to do with horses. She is currently saving her allowance and extra money so she can buy her own horse. We have given her the go-ahead to get her own horse only if she can buy and then pay for the upkeep of the horse each month. At this point we’re not too worried we’ll have to give up an acre of our yard for a horse any too soon. Marie is an avid reader and currently is third in her school for reading points; most of the time the books she’s reading are about horses!

Noah

Noah is now 12! It is very hard for us to believe that our oldest baby turned 12 in October! Where does the time go?! He’s now in the 6th grade at the Jr. High. At this point the teachers expect the kids to be more organized and more responsible … this seems to be something he is still working on but overall he’s a great student. He says his favorite subject is math. Noah is playing trombone in the school band and starting in the second semester he’ll be playing tuba … just like his dad used to do. He is also in the choir and show choir. Noah is also playing 6th grade basketball and he is really improving his skills as a forward. The coach has described his rebounding as Rodmanesque. He is also another electronics fan like his father and is learning to do some computer programming and wants to “hack.”

Nate

As for Nate & Sharon: we’re in survival mode! Nate is still working at the University of Illinois in the LAS College managing the online learning programming team. Right now his office is in the newly renovated Lincoln Hall but he’ll be moving over to the English building soon. In his spare time he’s busy digging up our septic tank, doing multiple house repairs, and various honey-do tasks. If there is any time left he still enjoys programming and woodworking. Since Noah started playing trombone, Nate has also started playing his trombone again! Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can get a duet out of the two of them on special occasions.

Sharon

Sharon is obviously keeping busy being mom making sure everyone is organized, fed, and where they need to be. This year we moved and enlarged the garden. The garden did great and provided us with plenty of produce for her to experiment with canning for the first time. We now have plenty of canned tomatoes, peaches, applesauce and applebutter in the pantry. She’s already mapping and planning the 2014 garden! Other new things include learning to knit & crochet, which is a slow process due to the little time she gets to sit down to learn which usually results in her falling asleep in the recliner! Maybe by this time next year she’ll be able to knit a scarf or something simple at this rate 🙂 She’s still involved helping coordinate our church’s moms’ group and volunteering at the food pantry .

As for stuff we did in the past year…we honestly can’t remember what we did 2 days ago! I had to go back through the pictures on my phone and the calendar to recall what happened! We did our first summer camping/blueberry picking/beach trip in July and all went very smooth! We enjoyed every minute of camping out in nature and picking loads of blueberries and meeting good friends at the beach in Michigan. Noah and Marie attended Camp Ondessonk for a week back in July. The older boys both played summer baseball and the girls experimented with a summer tumbling class. We managed to squeeze in a day trip over to Turkey Run on a beautiful September Saturday. We adopted our new dog, Star, (as our old dog, Brownie, died last year) in the Fall and varied our number of barn cats from 20 down to our current number of 2. We still have just the one rabbit, Lilly.

Current happenings: Noah, Marie, and Calvin are all still involved in our local 4-H club and are now getting excited to start this year’s projects! Right now we’re enjoying our two week Christmas vacation with everyone home, including Nate, to go visit family and get some stuff done around the house like renovating the mudroom (an ongoing project.) The kids go back to school on January 6 and Nate heads back to work too. Then we’ll fall back into the routine of school and activity schedules for all the kids. Everyone is very healthy and strong and the kids are doing great academically in school. We are certainly very blessed with what God has given us!

Merry Christmas from the Baxleys and we pray that you all have a blessed 2014!

Nate & Sharon

Noah, Marie, Calvin, Molly, Dominic & Patrick

Cloud Services Revisited – Part 5 – IFTTT

Do you sometimes feel that you don’t take full advantage of all the free services on the Internet or wish you could make all these different things talk to each other? This is part 5 in a series of articles describing “Cloud Services” that offer some great functionality like Offsite Backups, Password Storage with LastPass, Note taking with Evernote, and Dropbox for Sharing files for little to no money and show how you can use the Internet for more than web browsing. This article is about a service called IFTTT that can tie all of these services together to get even more out of them.

Despite the strange name, IFTTT is a non-technical way to link all of these services together and get them to do more for you. The name stands for If This Then That, and that’s exactly what it does. You define the This and the That and IFTTT does the rest. For example, you can have IFTTT monitor Facebook and when you are tagged in a photo, IFTTT can copy the photo to your Dropbox. IFTTT can do that. To get the most out of IFTTT, you do have to give it access to your accounts on different services, but in many cases IFTTT doesn’t even get to see your password, since many services are able to approve access without it.

Each of the services you tie into IFTTT is called a Channel, and if you can get over the bit about granting access to many of your accounts to IFTTT, it can help out a lot. Each of these rules you create are called recipes. You can create your own recipes from scratch, or use some of the pre-built ones. Each recipe has a trigger channel and an action channel. The trigger is what starts things off, and the action is what gets done. Probably the best way to explain what IFTTT can do for you is to give some examples of my favorite recipes.

Get Cooking with Nate’s Favorite Recipes

Get a text message when certain people send you emails
There are certain people that are so important that you want to know right away when they send you an email. This recipe will send a text message to your phone as soon as an email comes in from a certain email address.

Copy receipt emails to Google Drive Spreadsheet
If you haven’t used Google Drive before, it’s a great set of free Google tools that stand up well agains MS Office. This recipie uses the spreadsheet tool to collect your recipt emails into one place. Whenver you get an email with the word receipt or order in it, the email is saved into a Google Drive spreadsheet

Craigslist or Ebay search alerts
Have you ever been looking for something on Craigslist but you just can’t find what you want? And then when you do find it it’s snapped up before you see it. This recipe will send you a notice whenever items you’re interested in show up on Craigslist or Ebay.

Download Facebook photos people tag you in to Dropbox or Google Drive
Facebook has become the place to share photos, but when somebody posts a photo of you wouldn’t it be great if you could automatically get a copy of it. This recipe will download any photo that you are tagged in to your Dropbox or Google Drive account.

Record your Facebook posts in Evernote for a running diary
Another way to tie Facebook into another service is with Evernote! It’s often hard to find what you’ve posted on Facebook earlier. This recipe will add any status update you make on Facebook to a continious Evernote note. You can easily go back and see what you were posting day by day.

Get an alert when it’s going to snow
If you’re like me, you don’t always follow the weather forecast as close as you should. This recipe will send you a text message when it’s going to snow tomorrow. You can also create recipes for rainy or cloudy conditions.

Get a text message when weather alerts happen
There are many ways to get weather alerts on your phone, but this one has the simplicity of using text messages that makes it usable anywhere. Start with this recipe and change the zone code at the end of the feed url to match the county you want to watch. You can find a list of zone codes on the NOAA Public Alert site.

Download school newsletters or other regular updates in your Dropbox
Our old friend Dropbox is a great IFTTT channel and here’s one neat use for it. Our kids’ school classrooms post PDF newsletters every week, and this recipe will pull down the current version and put it into Dropbox. Just change the file url field to the location of the file you want to pull down and set the time you want it to check and you’re off to the races.

Get National Geographic image of the day emailed to you
Lots of websites make content available in a computer readable stream. IFTTT can watch the feed and send you an email when something new shows up. This recipe monitors the National Geographic Image of the Day feed, but you can monitor anything. Comics are a popular thing to get in your inbox. This recipe will send you Dilbert cartoons, and there are many more.

Copy Gmail attachments to Dropbox
When you get attachments in your email, you often want to keep them around. This recipe will take any attachments to your Gmail and copy them to your Dropbox account.

Get a text message when a book is ready at the library
I love ordering books at my local library. The books can come from almost anywhere, so I’m never sure how long it will take to come in. The library will send me an email, but I don’t always see it when I’m at work and drive right by the library on my way home. This recipe monitors your email and looks for emails from the library with the subject “Requested items are ready for you”.

Want to know more?

Lifehacker wrote a great article recently that covered IFTTT, and since I began this article IFTTT has come out with some iOS specific features you may be interested in.

Go out and get an IFTTT account and start playing with it today!

Valuable tools from a marching band career

The days have been getting cooler lately, so I’m getting back to walking the mile or so from my office to the parking lot rather than taking the bus. During the summer it gets so hot that by the time I make the walk I’m drenched in sweat and not very nice to be around. But these cool days make for a great 15-20 minute walk to the car to unwind at the end of the day. Yesterday I wanted to go ahead and make the walk, but 15-20 minutes seemed like too long. How could I make the walk go faster?

Walking across campus I thought back to my days in the Marching Illini. Our director, the incomparable Gary Smith, used to say that the quickest way to move a band around a crowded college campus is to march it there. Nothing makes people get out of your way like 350 brightly dressed college students accompanied by a 30 people banging drums, and being led by someone in a ridiculously tall hat and carrying a large mace. It even worked marching through Columbus, right through a crowd of Buckeye fans and into the stadium. I wondered if my own walk to the car could be helped by this marching mentality. Sure I don’t have the presence of a full size band, but maybe the music alone would keep me going.

And it worked great. I popped on Street Beats 1994 and started off. In no time I found myself stepping in time to the cadence and measuring my steps so I hit the line every 8 steps (marching bands often take 8 steps per 5 yards for those of you not in the know). I was flying through my walk, and when I got to the end of the 4 minute song, I started it over and kept on going.

The one caution I would give to other people wanting to try this is to remember that you are by yourself and listening to music that no one else can hear. You don’t want to start calling out “Go Illini, Beat the Hawkeyes” or yell out “Big White Spats!” at any point during your walk. As I was nearing the last third of my walk, the parade cadence ended and the pregame show started. For a second I considered doing a quick step run on to Revised Entrance #3, but then I remembered that my marching career was 20 years ago and I’d likely draw some stares as well as make myself totally out of breath. And when Patriotic Medley came on, I had to physically stop myself from doing an Ankle Knee step at one point. Obviously old habits die hard.

So the end result of my experiment was a success. I shaved a few minutes off my walk, raised my heart rate a little, and relived some old memories. Now I just need 349 friends, a cape, a hat and some big white spats and I’ll really be flying!

Cloud Services Revisited – Part 4 – Dropbox

A few years ago, I wrote a series of articles describing “Cloud Services” that offered some great functionality like Offsite Backups, Password Storage with LastPass, and Note taking with Evernote for little to no money and showed how you could use the Internet for more than web browsing. Today I’ll describe a service called Dropbox that was mentioned briefly in the backups article, but which deserves an article of its own.

At it’s core, Dropbox allows you to put all your commonly used files on your computer but also have them instantly and automatically copied to the dropbox website and to any of your other computers! Together, the Dropbox website and all of your computers make up your Dropbox Cloud. Let’s say you have a work laptop and a desktop at home. When you save something on your laptop, the changes will be copied to your desktop and to the Dropbox website (protected by a login and password of course), all automatically. One of the best things about Dropbox is that you don’t have to have Internet access all the time to use it. It can’t update your Dropbox Cloud until you get back online, but once you do reconnect, any changes you’ve made in the meantime are sent immediatly.

Mac Menu Bar

Dropbox does all this by installing a small program on your computer. To have a file included in your Dropbox Cloud, simply save them into your Dropbox folder. This is usually inside your Documents folder, but you can put it anywhere. Anything that you put in this folder, pictures, movies, Word docs, other folders, all of these things will be automatically synced to your cloud.

One way we use this in our house is for the kids’ computer work. The kids are constantly moving between my computer, my wife’s computer, and the family machine. By creating a folder for each of the kids in Dropbox and sharing that folder between my account and my wife’s account, anything the kids save will be automatically copied to every computer in the house.

File History

Speaking of kids, you may have experienced the heartbreak of losing changes when someone overwrites your novel or the family budget spreadsheet. Dropbox stores the last 8 versions of every file in the Dropbox folder. When you realize that your file has mysteriously changed to a bunch of gibberish, just go to the Dropbox website, right click the file and choose Previous versions. You’ll see the last 8 versions and the date they were last saved. Then you can choose the version you want. A great way to recover work you thought was gone forever! You can even restore deleted files!

Sharing

I mentioned my wife and I share the kids folder between our accounts, and sharing is a great feature of Dropbox. There are two ways to go about this. Send them a link to a file, or Share with them. In the first case, you can make files and/or folders in your Dropbox downloadable by others, even if they don’t have a Dropbox account. Just right click and choose share a link to get a URL you can give to anyone who can then see those files. This allows for a simple way to let someone see a group of photos or get around email attachment issues.
When you share a folder or file, the other person will need to have a Dropbox account, or signup for one. You right click and choose Share This Folder and then add the email address you want to share with. They’ll get a message to agree to the share or create an account, and from then on you can both edit the files and changes will be synced between both accounts. Full collaboration details are on the Dropbox site.

Photos and Videos

Recently, Dropbox has been adding a bunch of Photo and Video features. They now include a central place to view all the pictures in your Dropbox Cloud, photo album creation, and you can upload pictures straight from your mobile phone or tablet. More on the mobile tools later, but selecting a few photos or folders you can add them to an album and easily share the album with anyone you choose. When it comes to letting people see the photos from your vacation or trip, this is about as easy as it gets.

Mobile

If you have a smart phone, Dropbox is a great way to get to the files you’ve been working with from anywhere. Install the app and browse your files, when you need a file click it and it will download to your phone. To make sure that you can get to it even when you don’t have a connection, mark it as a favorite. A special feature of the mobile app is Camera Upload. This will allow you to automatically upload all the pictures you take on your phone to Dropbox where you can move them wherever you want. Much simpler than some of the photo management tools on smart phones.

Get Free Space

Dropbox comes with 2 GB of free space, which you can stretch a long way, but there are ways to get more. You can purchase extra space if you want or get free space by going through their tutorial and referring others to Dropbox. You can also get extra free space if you are a student and have a “.edu” email address. In full disclosure, the links to Dropbox in this article are referral links and we get extra free space when you signup through those links. It doesn’t change our enthusiasm for Dropbox, and thanks for helping us out! Dropbox has truly become a central part of how our family works on the computer. We don’t worry about lost work, schlepping files around on thumb drives, or collaborating together on projects.

Health Care Crisis Redux

I recently made a post on Facebook about my frustration with the 45% rise in my family’s health insurance premiums which I blame in part on the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) legislation called Obamacare by many including President Obama. I was surprised at the number of people who chided me about it either in the comments or privately. Since many of them apparently didn’t want to discuss their points openly, I’ll respect that and post here a response based on what I sent to them directly. I certainly understand their decision to support Obamacare, and many of them had very well laid out reasons why it was the best option. I have much less problem with the particulars of the bill we’re now feeling the effect of and more problem with the entire approach that was taken to the health care situation. I had similar thoughts way back in 2008, but I wasn’t called to Washington 🙂 I have two big issues with these new health insurance legislations.
Continue reading “Health Care Crisis Redux”

Happy Advent 2012…Merry Christmas…Prayerful Lent…Happy Easter 2013…Whoa…it’s Christmas 2014!!

Another year flies by again in the Baxley household. Here’s the update on what’s going on for those of you who are not on Facebook.

We officially now have 5 kids going to school! All the kids are doing very well and we’re very proud of all of them! Noah, 11, is now in 5th grade and eats like a horse. We have given him the name “bottomless pit” because he constantly grazes and eats whatever, whenever. He started playing basketball this year along with playing trombone in the school band. Marie, 9, is in 3rd grade and talks a mile a minute from sun up to sun down. Her biggest interest is horses and she can tell you all about all about horses. She was able to take riding lessons this past summer and loved every minute of it and since then has been asking us to buy her a horse. We’ll let the grandparents buy her one and keep it at their house. Calvin, 7, now in 2nd grade, is a Lego maniac. When we can’t find him he is either building some extreme contraption out of Legos or outside using his gargantuan imagination playing castle-fortress in the back of the barn. Molly, 6, entered the big world of kindergarten this year! She loves school and even more finally getting to go to school with the big kids and riding that big yellow bus. Dominic, 4, started preschool two mornings a week. When we ask him about his mornings at preschool he always says he likes playing with the toys and eating the snacks. Patrick, also known as Patch to us, is just enjoying being 2. He’s really good at demolishing a neatly organized things.

Just recently Nate changed jobs but he’s still at the University. He is now working full-time for the LAS department and his office is on top floor of Lincoln hall. One of his hobbies this past year was tracing family history. It’s always nice to know that our ancestors were either royalty or horse thieves. Sharon is still going strong at home and in survival mode trying to organize the chaos and put food on the table. She is expanding the garden and even convinced Nate to dig holes on the hottest day of the year to plant 18 new fruit trees in the back yard. Our garden wasn’t super successful with the excessively hot summer we had but she still managed to pack the freezer with tomatoes for some mid-winter salsa marathons. One of her goals for this year is to update this blog weekly so maybe when you check in here from time to time we’ll have new things added.

Here are some photos from the past year. We still feel extremely blessed and grateful for all we have. Drop in sometime and say hello, it’s always slow out here in the country…well as slow as having 6 kids can get!

Nate & Sharon

Noah, Marie, Calvin, Molly, Dominic & Patrick