This is a picture Chelsea took of me while we were hiking out in the Badlands of South Dakota. The Badlands were one of our favorite places we hiked on our month long voyage. Definitely a sight to be seen. We traveled through the Badlands, into the Black Hills, over to Yellowstone, down through the Grand Tetons, Across the Rockies, and finally across the plains.

Photographs can’t do it justice. I wished I would have had a DSLR with a telephoto so I could have gotten some even better pictures over the course of our travels, but even then, it’s nothing like seeing it in person.

These sights put a lot into perspective for me. Seeing the beauty of nature and the mountains, to me it strengthened my faith. To me, the mountains symbolize God pushing the earth towards the heavens and the sheer beauty of His creation. The difficulty of reaching the summit symbolizes the struggle we have aligning our vision for our lives with the vision God has for us.

So many times, we shield our eyes from the beauty that surrounds us. If we took just a minute to stop and look around, we might see the world in a completely different light. Next time you are feeling the stresses of the world pushing in on you, stop and look. It may just save you.

River Roar 2008

Originally uploaded by lance.hill

One of the pictures I took at the opening day of the River Roar races in Bay City, MI. These boats are sweet and wicked fast! Don’t know if I would be brave enough to drive one. Check out the rest of the set here.

Freighter in the River

Originally uploaded by lance.hill

Took this picture while on a walk in the park next to my apartment building. Thought this one turned out pretty cool with the bird flying through and the bridge opening.

You can check out the rest of the photos from this set here.

Hope everyone is having a blessed day!

I have recently started a new position with Harvest Coffeehouse and Beanery in Bay City, MI. Being a marketing major at SVSU, I am always looking at ways to boost business and generate more revenue. Because I have seen that there is a great deal of opportunity within the college and post college crowd, I created a Facebook Page for the shop. With this, we will be able to send updates to fans of our shop, offer special promotions, advertise events, and keep a constant line of communication with our customers. Please add us to your fan pages!

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I know I haven’t been posting updates in a while, things have been very busy. Hopefully I will be able to post more in the coming weeks as I will finally get organized with projects that I have been doing. Please add us to your feed reader or stop back and check my updates!

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Many people look at my handwriting and wonder how a male can write so incredibly neatly. I get it all the time, especially from girls, “You have better handwriting than I do!” When I was young, my parents stressed the idea of good penmanship over and over. Both of my parents have exquisite handwriting, and I find mine holds techniques from each of them. My signature features many of the same attributes as my mother’s, where as my combination of ALL CAPS and lowercase lettering comes from my father.

It seems though, that the idea of penmanship has been falling to the wayside. So much of what we do these days comes not from our hands, but from the computer screen. Although I despised learning to write in cursive letters, and could not wait until I reached high school where they no longer required you to write in cursive, I still believe that it is an art students should learn. I think it is one of those things you look back on and realize “yeah, I am glad I learned how to do that!” More and more, pens and paper are being replaced by a keyboard and Microsoft Word. Although I believe computer skills are necessary in today’s technological world, I also believe that the basics should not be overlooked. As it is, conversations with friends are moving from ‘real life’ to posts on a facebook wall, tweets, and AIM conversations. Instead of calling up a friend, we check facebook to see what they are doing.

So much of the time now, business professionals are bringing laptops and crackberries into meetings because it is much more “productive”. I tend to disagree, as I find I remember something much better if I write it by hand rather than typing it on a computer screen. Try taking notes by hand at your next meeting and see how much you miss your laptop (and I don’t mean for surfing facebook or your newsfeeds).

I think we need to really take a look at how much handwriting we are doing. Here are some tips to getting back to using your handwriting:

· Keep a Handwritten Journal that you jot 3-4 sentences in each night. I talked about how important journaling is before, and I admit I am horrible about it, but it is a great way to break out the pen and paper and use you’re penmanship.

· Move out of your inbox and send a hand-written note. In my opinion, it is so much better to receive a handwritten note than it is to get an e-mail. We get enough e-mail, try sending your love or a family member a hand written note, and see what kind of response you get.

· Take notes by hand. More and more I am seeing students breaking out their laptops the minute they get to class. Now mind you, many of these are not taking notes but are on wifi playing on facebook. Try taking notes by hand, I find I remember stuff so much better by just writing it down. It seems to cut my study time in half.

· Practice, Practice, Practice. Yeah, I know, we all have too much to do as it is, but handwriting is important! Try transcribing the notes you took at class earlier in the day. Not only will it let you use your handwriting, but it is also a great study technique.

Penmanship and handwriting are becoming a lost art in this world of technology and virtual documents. We should really make sure we don’t lose the idea of writing by hand, and replacing our pens and paper for keyboards and LCD panels.

Let me know your opinions in the comments!

For almost a year now Since I bought it 3 years ago, I have been having problems with my Averatec Laptop. It went back to the company three times while it was still under warranty. Within the last year the battery took a crap on me as well as the motherboard battery went kerplunk. It was getting to be rather a pain to reset the clock everytime I disconnected power from the thing.

Well, I have been looking around at laptops for the last couple weeks, really wanting a very portable one with the amount of traveling I do. Switching to Mac was definitely on my mind but the thought of having to re-buy a great deal of software (Office 07, Adobe Suite, DJ Software, etc) turned me off to the idea at this point. I was also looking at the Dell XPS m1330, but a lack of funds and a unsure opinion of Dell was  turning me away from that route as well.

Last weekend I was in Best Buy just browsing their laptops while talking to my cousin (who is a manager there), and I came across the HP dv2752 which was on sale for $650. Even though I was wanting something “light and portable” the 14.1″ widescreen makes it not too much bigger in size to my 12.1″ standard screen. It came with an extended life battery and they also threw in a kensington Bluetooth adapter (one that is small enough to stay in all the time).

So far I have been very pleased with the machine. It is pretty fast with the AMD Turion 64dual core processor with 2 gb of ram. The 14.1″ Brightview screen is crystal clear and views dvds very nicely. I haven’t had time to try out the dvd burner with lightscribe yet because I still need to pick up some lightscribe discs. I have had a couple little quirks with Vista but I hope to get those worked out in the near future.

Being just over a week since I’ve had it, I still don’t have everything transferred over from my Averatec, but have the majority of necessary docs and programs (firefox, thunderbird, office 07, adobe, etc).

If anyone wants to buy a Averatec 3270 w/ 12.1″ screen, 1.67ghz amd processor, 1 gb ram, XP home, DVD burner, etc, it will be up for sale very soon :).

I, along with 10 other SVSU Campus Crusade for Christ Members (CRU), traveled to the windy city for a mission trip called Urban Immersion 2008. Meeting up with us were 90 other college students from Michigan State University, University of Toledo, VirginiaJames Madison University, and North Carolina State. We didn’t stay at one of the fancy hotels in the downtown district, on the contrary, we stayed at the AgapeCommunity Center in South side Chicago on sleeping mats, in what is called the “wild 100s district”. It was one of the many neighborhoods in need of a great deal of help. Tech University,

The first day we were split up by school and each sent on the “El train” to one of the over 100 campuses in Chicago to talk about our faith with students. This was followed with a tour of Pacific Garden Mission which is one of the nation’s oldest rescue missions, offering food, shelter, clothing, medical, and dental care to those less fortunate. PGM has beds for over 800 “overnight guests” and feeds up to 650 people per meal. They were blessed with a brand new building this past year, featuring renewable energy solar panels and a self sustaining greenhouse, encapsulated in a 150,000sq foot facility.

Yes, the paper is due in the morning. It is only a rough draft, but none the less. So why do we as college students procrastinate to such extents? We always complain about how much stuff we have going on, how we have to study for this or that, write this paper, do that project, but it seems that we talk about these in great detail before ever actually sitting down to do them. I know this paper was talked about at the beginning of the semester, some six weeks ago, and I waited until the day before to try and slam it out. I don’t know whether I feel like I work better under pressure or not (which I don’t seem to) but I know I need to start doing these things farther in advance.

Well, I am off to sleep to dream about Ash trees and the tiny bugs that feed on them. I need to try to at least work on my assignments due next week this weekend.

As I posted here, I regularely use Outlook 07 for all my business e-mail, dates, to-dos, et cetera. I have had the dilemma that the new outlook is horribly slow with handling gmail’s IMAP. IMAP is great because it allows me to check my e-mail on the go, as well as from my phone. My e-mail servers are all setup through google apps so I can have the gmail interface for my business mail too.

So, over the weekend I dug up Thunderbird from the land of long lost apps on my laptop, upgraded to the new version 2, and set out to try and speed up my e-mail. I setup IMAP accounts for both my business e-mail and my personal gmail account, and couldn’t believe how fast it handled e-mail! It seemed so refreshing. Outlook was a dog with IMAP, but Thunderbird seems to handle it like a pro. I haven’t had time to play around with Mozilla’s calendar app yet (Sunbird/Lightning). Spent the weekend getting stuff setup and cleaning and updating my plaxo address book.

The one thing I find I miss with Thunderbird seems to be Xobni. I was really getting use to using it with my Outlook inbox. So, it the devs over at Xobni are listening, we need a thunderbird compatable version!

Hope everyone has had a good week. Let me know what you guys have experienced with Thunderbird, or if you have any good suggestions for me!