Cinderella

Faith
Steven Curtis Chapman is a five-time Grammy award winner as a singer/songwriter and recording artist.  More important to him than those accolades is being known as a great dad and husband.  His newest song “Cinderella” was inspired by a night where he wasn’t such a good dad. Click his picture below for the song on iTunes.

She spins and she sways to whatever song plays,
Without a care in the world.
And I’m sittin’ here wearin’ the weight of the world on my shoulders.
It’s been a long day and there’s still work to do,
She’s pulling at me saying “Dad I need you!
There’s a ball at the castle and I’ve been invited
And I need to practice my dancin'”
”Oh please, daddy, please!”So I will dance with Cinderella
While she is here in my arms
’
Cause I know something the prince never knew
Oh I will dance with Cinderella
I don’t wanna miss even one song,
Cuz all to soon the clock will strike midnight
And she’ll be gone
She says he’s a nice guy and I’d be impressed
She wants to know if I’d approve of a dress
She says “Dad, the prom is just one week away,
And I need to practice my dancin'”
”Oh please, daddy, please!”So I will dance with Cinderella
While she is here in my arms
’
Cause I know something the prince never knew
Ohh-oh ohh-oh, I will dance with Cinderella
I don’t wanna miss even one song,
Cuz all to soon the clock will strike midnight
And she’ll be gone
She will be gone.

Well, she came home today
With a ring on her hand
Just glowin’ and tellin’ us all they had planned
She says “Dad, the wedding’s due six months away
And I need to practice my dancin'”
”Oh please, daddy please!”
So I will dance with Cinderella
While she is here in my arms
’
Cause I know something the prince never knew
Ohh-oh ohh-oh, I will dance with Cinderella
I don’t wanna miss even one song, 
(even one song)
Cuz all to soon the clock will strike midnight
And she’ll be gone

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Tulips

Fun


Click the picture above to see a few more very pretty tulips that came up in our yard last week. Spring is here, but unfortunately, so are my allergies.

I thought I would escape this year, as last fall didn’t give me any trouble. But, last week, my eyes started itching, and I’ve been sneezing a lot.

I think winter and fall are my favorite times of the year simply because of allergies . . .

I spent most of yesterday out in the back yard, re-raking the leaves. Last fall, I was very busy with interview prep and working. I raked most of the leaves up around our house, but the backyard got left behind. I figured (incorrectly) that those leaves would just become nutrients for the grass the next spring. I’d have a beautiful lawn!

Wrong!

Instead, because of my error, a quarter of our backyard is dead, underneath the canopy of wet leaves that sat over it all winter. Whoops! We may spread seed or sod, but something will have to be done. Raking yesterday was not like fall raking. In the fall, the leaves just go where they are swept. Now, in the spring, they are hard, damp, and stick in the grass like paper-mache. Yuck. Lesson learned.

Enjoy the weather and sun!

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Travels to Hong Kong

Family


I will start training in Hong Kong for Cathay Pacific on July 7th, 2008. I am very excited, but a little nervous, too. It is going to be stressful, taxing, involve lots of studying, and I’ll be under the microscope. The whole training adventure will last between four and five months!

That’s a long time to be gone, however, Laura was able to get two months of time off from work (unpaid, unfortunately!) so she will be able to go with me for the first couple months. We are headed out the week prior, leaving from New York on June 29th. I wanted to get there a little early, to help with the 12 hour time difference from the East Coast of the U.S. I don’t want to start training groggy and exhausted.

Let me digress here, for one moment. I have had at least four or five different friends tell me that 12 hours of time difference is nothing: they’ve been to Australia, parts of Asia, and elsewhere, where the difference in time zone was 17 hours, or 14 hours, or 19 hours, or some other craziness. Nonsense.

How many time zones are there in the world? Asked another way, how many hours in a day? 24. There are 24 time zones on our wonderful planet. So, the worst time zone change can be 12 hours of difference, like traveling to Hong Kong from New York, because that is half of 24. If someone tells you that they experienced 16 hours of time zone change, they might still be suffering from jet-lag! Think of it this way: When someone travels from New York to Chicago, do they suffer from that huge and amazing 23 hour difference in time? No! It’s a one hour change. How about NYC-LA? Is that a 21 hour change or a three hour change? It’s three! Because the world has 24 time zones, then the worst shift can only be up to 12 hours, before it starts getting better again. Crossing the International dateline, out in the Pacific, means the date changes, but our bodies don’t care about what day it is, they care about what time it is. So, 12 hours stinks, but beyond that, it only gets easier . . .

Anyway, during that week of acclimation, we hope to go see some of the sights of Hong Kong, including Victoria Harbor and ride on a ferry across the water. I will be sure to update this site with pictures and tales of our adventures.

Also, our home number will stay the same, and you can call us at our regular number. That magic is brought to you in part by Vonage. Read about their benefits here. We will bring our Vonage router with us, so you can call us locally, we get free incoming calls, and we can call out for free. Good stuff.

More good stuff? God is good. Did you know that? Trust me, He is simply amazing and I’m glad He’s on my side. Really, He’s on all our sides, if we let Him.

Cathay Pacific is flying me over for free, but they won’t pay for Laura yet, because officially, when I go over there, I won’t be employed yet. Her ticket is going to put us back quite a bit. Just the round trip from Columbus to NYC, where we’ll depart for Hong Kong, will be around $900 dollars. Now, I’m a pilot, but $900 bucks is outrageous! We found a much cheaper deal on the internet, but it would mean that she wouldn’t be able to travel with me; she’d be on another airline. Laura is brave, adventurous, and willing to do a lot of things on her own, at least more than anyone else in her family (many of which are too scared to even get on a plane), but that was probably asking too much of her at this juncture. She would do it to save money but she wouldn’t want to.

We were discussing it over a video iChat while I was in Toronto on an overnight trip for work. We knew what we needed to do to be prudent with our money, but our hearts wanted to go together. We ended our conversation with me saying, “I won’t buy the tickets tonight, I’ll wait until the morning.”

The next morning, the conversation came up between me and my flight attendant that we were going to have to buy tickets for Laura to get to NYC. She immediately offered to give us two of her buddy passes so that Laura could go, and go for FREE. That way, we’d only have to buy the ticket from NYC to Hong Kong! Isn’t God good? We could have bought those tickets the night before and been out over $900 bucks, but He knew our plight, situation, and financial situation.

It’s almost like God toys with us a little bit to see what we’re going to do. Are we going to trust Him? Are we going to go our own way? Are we going to give Him a chance to act in our lives? Are we going to march on in our own plans or are we going to allow Him space to maneuver us? He wants to help us, but we have to let Him.

Thank you God for getting us through this one, yet again!

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Thank God in advance

Faith


With all the life decisions and potential pitfalls that this new job is bringing into our lives, I’ve changed my prayer strategy. Tell me what you think:

Instead of asking God to help us in this matter or that matter, with full humility, I thank God in advance for solving our hurt, pain, struggle, burden, thorn, issue, or whatever we are dealing with. Why not? God can do anything, and He will act, and He will carry us through the day. He promises that. Even Job ended up better than when his struggles began.

In the book of Daniel, God, by way of King Nebuchadnezzar, places an impossible task on Daniel. He has to tell the King what he dreamed, and interpret the dream, or be killed. Impossible for any human to do, but possible with God. Daniel prays, and in a dream, the King’s dream is revealed to him, and the interpretation of it. Daniel gets up in the morning and thanks God for the revelation, for it will save his life, the lives of others, and prove that his God is the God of Heaven. Then he goes and interprets the dream to the King . . .

Did you catch that? He thanked God for solving his huge dilemma BEFORE he went in to see the king! It’s one thing to “think” you’ve heard from God, go tell the king your thoughts, have those thoughts be correct, and then let out a sigh of relief and say “thank you, God.” Daniel had the faith to say thank you before he even knew he was right.

I think God wants us to stretch and grow all the time. When things look dire, impossible, or worse, that is the time to trust Him, and say thanks for getting us out of this tight spot.

“God, thank you for the way you will provide for us in our time of financial need. Thank you for the way you will give us courage in the times that Laura and I will be 12,000 miles apart for many weeks. Thank you God, for the answers you will provide us on the questions I have on how I am going to make this commute to work happen. Thank you for solving our family issues we are having. Thank you for showing us the way to proceed in job questions. I love you Jesus and thank you so much for choosing to love me when I hated you. Thank you for our salvation and the way you meet our needs every day, as your mercies are certainly new every morning. In Jesus’ name.”

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Add a favicon to your iWeb, Google blog, or web page.

Internet

*** UPDATE: This post is extremely old and out of date and requires revision. ***

Depending on your browser, its settings, and how often you visit our site, you may have noticed a change. The picture of two hearts in the upper left corner of the web site address appears when at TobyLaura.com. It is a small version of the one at the top of this blog. On this page, it’s a picture of yours truly. We added these bookmark pictures to make our site more personal and stand out. Also, if our homepage is bookmarked, it should also show up in your list of bookmarks.

It is called a Favicon and its file extension is .ico and here are some examples (just look at the image next to the ‘http’ part of the address in the address window.)

TobyLaura.com
Scattershooting
GreenExamPrep

They are fun to add and if you have a personal page or Google blog, they add a nice touch. You’ll notice that most companies have one, and large websites use them to attract attention, so why not add one yourself? Read on to learn how to do it. It can seem a little daunting at first, but take a deep breath, you can do it! If you need to, keep this window up, as well as the window you are using to make your adjustments, so you can easily get back to this page if you need help. Let’s get going.

First of all, you need a picture or drawing. If you know an animator, they can draw you a logo or some simple file like a flower, that will look good in such a small size. You’ll notice that the Favicons are very small, so a detailed logo or family group photo will not work. Something with just a few colors or a cropped photo of a face work well, like in my example links above.

Once you choose a picture, logo, or drawing, then upload it to this site here. It will format the image into an .ico file for you automatically, and then let you preview what it will look like in someone’s browser. Then, simply click the download button to put the .ico file on your hard drive.

Adding the favicon to your website or blog depends on how you host your site or blog. Google blogs and pages, iWeb for Mac, and standard sites where pages are published to a host via FTP are the most common ways to have something on the web.

If you publish to a host via FTP, you have it made in the shade. Just upload the picture saved in .ico format into your public directory and it will show up on each page of your website. It knows that a favicon file is the file for the address image, and you are finished.

Below, I’ll talk about how to add it to a Google page/blog and iWeb.

Google Blogs

Your favicon picture (formated into the .ico format as explained above) needs to be hosted, or viewable on the internet somewhere. Google can host an image through Pages, which comes with Google Apps. There are lots of image hosting options on the internet, but the image needs to have a unique web address that points directly to the picture. For example, you may put photos up on Google’s Picasaweb, but the picture won’t have a unique web url address. Google Pages will allow a unique web address for the image, like: http://www.tobycline.com/favicon.ico This picture loads in a page all by itself and is what you will need for this to work. Another quick and easy way to “host” a picture with its own direct web address is to post a picture into a blog entry.


Click on the picture of Elliot falling off the bicycle (funny!) and you’ll have a picture on its own web page and it’s web address in the url window, ready for you to copy.

Once your picture is online, where it can be seen on the internet, it is time to get it to appear where you want it. If you put your picture on the internet through the free Picasa option, click on the picture, and note its web address, or link. Then log into your Google blog and select: Customize>Layout>Edit HTML. You will see a window with all the html garble-di-gook that is your blog, in raw form. Find the code right at the top, that should look like this:

Make sure not to simply copy this exactly, but actually put your picture’s URL in, instead of the words ‘URL of your icon.’

The whole thing will look like this:

Click to save your new template and you should see the new icon (favicon) next to your address!

For Google Pages

Java script is used if you use Google to make your website with Google Pages. Open your Google Pages editor and on each page you want your favicon to show up in, click on either the header or footer, and click “edit html.”

Then paste this code into the html page:

Obviously, change the “URL of your image” to the actual url where your image is. For example, my url is: http://www.tobylaura.com/myicon.ico

Each page you create, simply paste this into the header or footer and you are all set.

Add a favicon to iWeb

Using iWeb can be a blessing and a curse. It is easy because all the html is hidden behind the scenes. However, when you want to knowingly manipulate the html code, it can be tricky. You kind of have to trick Apple’s iWeb to get it to do what you want it to — and Apple won’t tell you how to do this kind of stuff. Bummer.

Upload your picture to this web site here. It will convert it to a favicon format. Now, download it to your desktop. Then, save the favicon.ico file in your iDisk folder. It needs to be saved in your root directory. So make sure you select: iDisk>Web>Sites. Drop it in that folder, where you will also see a folder with your website’s name. (Hint: anything you put in this folder will show up as: YourURL/file So my icon in that folder would have an address of: http://www.tobylaura.com/myicon.ico. It is your root directory.)

Now, for every page you want your favicon to show up in, you need to paste some code into your page’s html code. How do you do that? Open TextEdit or some other simple text processor like Notepad. DO NOT use a word processor as it can add extra spaces and characters that may mess up your code.

For this example, we’ll assume you are going to change the home page: Home.html. In your files, you could have named this something else. So, in general, open any page that you have created by finding the page name followed by the .html extension.

In TextEdit open: iDisk>Web>Sites>yourwebsite folder>home.html. Important: Check the option to ‘ignore rich text commands’ because if you don’t, this won’t work. Ignoring rich text commands allows you to see the html code of the page. This check box is near the Open and Cancel buttons on the dialogue box that appeared when you selected Open. If you forgot to check the “ignore rich text commands” button, you’ll see your page like it looks on the web. If you correctly selected the button, you’ll see a bunch of html code; how your computer sees your webpage. Now you are looking at the html code like you would in the EditHTML page in Blogger.

Find the top of the page where the code starts out with the head and meta name, near the top of the page:

Then, paste this code into your page in the space above the meta name code:

Here is a text selectable version so that you can copy and paste it easily and properly. Just remember to change your URL inside the quotation marks to your specific web address.

So all together, it looks like this:

Click ‘Save.’ Do this on every page you want your favicon to appear, and also every time you publish a new page. Each time you publish a page because of changes you made to it, this code you’ve entered will be deleted by iWeb. So, after each publish, reopen your iDisk and put this code back into the pages that you made changes to. This code will remain on all of your pages where no edits were made, but all the pages iWeb “Publishes” also deletes any code you’ve placed on those pages. If it gets to be a pain, I recommend just putting it on your home page, and then not making any changes to your home page, but do as much as you feel like you want to.

Good luck — and let me know if you have any questions.

TobyLaura.com

The “high price” of Gas

Financial, Politics


It seems that all I hear today is complaining about the high price of gasoline in this country. Congress is demanding that oil executives lower the price of their product, people blame the sitting president for gas prices, and we act like we cannot afford gas at this price.

I know that in some industries, like my own, high oil is causing companies to go out of business. Truckers are especially hurting as well too. I think those industries have valid complaints. But for the average American, who happens to be the “average complainer,” please spare me your crying about high priced gas.

We drive around in our SUV’s, drinking our five dollar Starbucks or our three dollar Evian water (interestingly enough, Evian, spelled backwards, spells ‘Naive.’ Does that say something about someone who pays that kind of money for water?) We drive 80 miles per hour while talking on our $80 dollar-a-month-gee-whiz mobile phone, while shopping at Prada or Restoration Hardware, with our fancy hairdo and expensive makeup or tailored suite. We have cable, HD cable, highspeed internet, four cars (with two drivers!), huge homes, trendy this, instyle that, and bliss on tap. We in the U.S. want for nothing! Our poorest people are still the wealthiest 15% in the entire world. Go to GlobalRichList for more. Seriously, put in your salary and see where YOU rank — it takes 7 seconds.

And yet we complain about $3.50 a gallon . . .

I drive 60 mph everywhere I go, because I’m trying to save my hard earned cash. While on the interstate, I’m passed like I’m standing still! Americans can (and will) complain about anything, including high gas prices, but they don’t really mean it, at all. If they did, they’d change their driving habits. They’d buy less Starbucks and iPods. They’d put money in the bank and Roth IRA’s, where their money belongs. But we as a nation don’t. Sigh, oh well, but spare me the complaining!

I don’t mind people driving fast. I don’t mind people driving Hummers. I don’t mind people owning 8 cars and 10 iPhones. I really don’t. To do so is simply envious — and I like to think that I am above that. It only makes those who have less look terrible when they despise those who have more. Many people have lots and lots of money, and if they have 10 million in the bank, then go get five Hummers — I shouldn’t judge. Just don’t complain to me about high gas prices. I know several people who have so much money, gas could be 10 bucks a gallon and they wouldn’t care. But they also aren’t complaining like the rest of us.

Slow down, straighten out priorities on spending, watch every dollar, and don’t despise the wealthy simply because they are so. Our blood pressure will thank us for it!

*****

Some perspective:

In the 1973 oil crisis, the Arabs decided to hold out on production. Back then, a barrel of oil was about $1.50 a barrel. During the embargo, a barrel of oil shot up to over $11 dollars a barrel. Long lines at the pump preceded. In comparison, if that size of spike happened today, the price of a barrel of oil would be over $1,100 dollars for one barrel of oil! So, things aren’t as bad as they could be.

*****

From MJ Perry’s blog:

After crude oil costs, gasoline taxes are the second largest contributor to the price paid at the pump. Together Federal and State excise taxes on fuel account for an average cost of approximately 62 cents per gallon. That’s a combined tax of about 20% per gallon of gas.

The federal tax per gallon is 18.4 cents per gallon, see the history of federal gasoline taxes here, and the state tax per gallon varies by state, see the complete list of state gasoline taxes here.

Average profit per gallon of gas for oil companies: 10 cents according to the EIA.

Quote: The government collects far more in taxes on every gallon of gasoline than the oil companies collect in profits. If oil company profits are “obscene,” as some politicians claim, are the government’s taxes PG-13?

~Thomas Sowell

*****

And Finally, George Will sums it up best with his article here, on our historical price of gas. Hint: We are paying less for gas today than we were in 1981 . . .

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Airlines are dropping like “flys”

Aviation


Aloha, ATA (American Trans-Air), Champion, Skyway, Skybus, and Oasis have all ceased operations immediately, or in Skyway’s case, will at the end of May. Frontier has filed for bankruptcy, but will continue to fly . . . for now.

That’s seven airlines in trouble, within the span of 10 days! What is going on? How crazy is all this? Well, for those who bought tickets on airlines like Skybus (a terrible name for an airline that likens it to a Greyhound) it is even crazier, when they were stranded and unable to get back home without spending many hundreds of dollars on last minute airline tickets with other airlines. Most airlines have networks, like Air France/KLM, or the now merged Delta/Northwest. They sell tickets on either/or. In Skybus’s case, they had no partners (cheaper, right?) so they had no network for their stranded passengers to transfer tickets. That costs hundreds of thousands of bucks for last minute travelers. Yikes!

It is sad to see airlines that have been around a long time slip beneath the waters of the violent sea of high oil prices. Aloha, Champion, and ATA had been around for years. Unfortunately, with oil prices high and ticket prices low, their demise was eminent. Champion flew chartered 727’s, which is the airplane that I started my career with, at Ryan airlines. Oasis is probably another one you may not have heard of. Oasis was a low cost carrier based in Hong Kong and had only been running for 17 months. They had arguably the best paint scheme of any airline, but pretty colors couldn’t keep them afloat in these troubled times. I personally am glad to see them go, as they are a direct competitor to my next employer, Cathay Pacific.

Customers want cheap tickets, I understand that. Laura and I are having to buy a ticket for her to join me in Hong Kong for a while during my new hire training, and tickets are expensive! However, based on dollar per mile, and services given, tickets are cheaper than dirt. Try driving from NYC to LA for less than a ticket on an airplane. Here’s a hint: you can’t do it! Traveling in style, non-stop across the country in a few hours has to be worth something, yet it is cheaper to fly than drive. What is wrong with that picture? Why is it that in 1975, NYC-LA cost about $200 dollars. Now fast forward to today, 2008. NYC-LA? Around $200 dollars. Ridiculous! Airlines cannot stay in business with prices like this.

Why is it, than FedEx, UPS, and other cargo companies don’t care what the price of oil is? It’s because they charge what it costs to do business. If oil, or wages go up, so do the costs of shipping a box. Simple. However, passenger airlines shiver, wring their hands, and cry every time oil goes up. Why? Charge what it costs to do business! There is certainly more competition at the passenger level, and the model and answer isn’t so simple, but on the whole, airlines need to consolidate and raise prices, or more than 100,000 airline employees in this country will be out of work.

We’re told that prices aren’t raised because the profit margin at an airline is around 1.5% That’s it! If they spend 10 million a month, they only make $150,000 — if they’re lucky. Most of the time, they lose money. In the history of the airline industry in the U.S., the industry as a whole has never made a profit. Unbelievable! With that in mind, we still have worthless airlines like Skybus starting up and promising the moon to their employees, and then fail months later. There should be rules against reckless upstart airlines that use silly business models based on oil costing $60 a barrel. If they couldn’t survive on $120 oil, they should never have started. Shame on them and shame on investors of that airline: City of Columbus, Nationwide, Huntington Bank, and others, who threw public funds away, and investors money away on an airline that became the laughing stock of the airline world. Columbus is the laughing stock . . . thanks, Skybus.

Consolidation is the answer, because then there are fewer seats available on which to fly. Fewer seats means hotter commodity. Lucrative commodity means price increase. This, on the surface, seems bad for the customer. Price increases are actually a good thing: because then there will actually BE airlines to fly on in five years.

Delta/Northwest merged two days ago, and I feel that United/Continental will be announced soon. That would leave, American, Delta, United, USAirways, and piddly others like jetBlue, Spirit, Airtran, and Walmart: I mean: Southwest.

I do blame Southwest for a lot of these troubles because their model of cheap, low cost, no frills flying is popular with the public. However, when a large, international airline tries to copy that model and sustain itself, trouble arises, as we’ve all seen. The lucrative markets are now international flying (Cathay Pacific, International sides of Delta, AA, United, etc) and the losses are coming from the stateside flying. That is why there are so many regional jets flying around, like Chautauqua, because they can do it for cheaper.

The next few years will be interesting, and this is one of the main reasons why I am leaving for Cathay Pacific. I feel, in this turbulent time of airline restructuring, international flying based on an economy not tied to the U.S. airlines is as safe a bet as I can make. We’ll see.

So look forward to higher prices, but be thankful that the airline industry as a whole will survive!

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