Legislative Breakfast

Posted on Thursday December 11, 2008 by Jacob Campbell.

A stock photo of breakfast.

My mom keeps telling me that I will need to change my sleeping schedule to more regular hours as I enter into more professional arenas. Waking up at 6:30 am this morning I decided that this is probably true. I got up before there was light this morning so that I could attend Children’s Alliances’ legislative breakfast in Spokane. This event both provoked me to better service and gave me a better perspective on on the shape of Washington’s economy.

The event took place at the Native Project’s wonderful facilitates. I got the opportunity to see many people who I have worked with from the School of Social Work at Eastern, Juvenile Court, and YFA Connections. Senator Lisa Brown also came and spoke.

We spent time looking at what Principles are needed for budget decisions in tough times. I found it particularly powerful to hear Representative Timm Ormsby described one of his views on budgets. He said that the things that we choose to fund in our budgets really show our values. The lobbyist for Children’s Alliance, Teresa Mosqueda explained their five legislative focuses for the 2009 legislature. Lisa Brown talked about the six billion budget shortfall that Washington State is looking at and some of what that might mean for social service organizations.

The Line Up is a graphic that I made in Adobe Photoshop ( see the PSD File ). It is to showcase the importance of helping the individual and the fixing the root of the problem when working with people. In Social Work we call this working at the Micro, Mezzo, and Macro Levels.

One thing that I did not hear talked about was adolescents. There was a lot of focus regarding young children and there needs, but seemed to be lacking care for teenagers. The only lobby focus that Children’s Alliance is having regarding teenagers would be health care coverage for every child by 2010 and foster care reform. Neither of these are focused on adolescents, they would just be helped as a type of by product. I firmly believe in programs focused on young children. This will elevate the need for some services when they become adolescents. This is a sort of macro focus for working with adolescents. We need to solve some of the issues that cause them to need services later in life. This is vital, but just as vital is to help those at risk youth now (a kind of micro and mezzo focus). We have a responsibility to continue to provide services to those who are right in front of us.

So… It Starts Again

Posted on Saturday November 29, 2008 by Jacob Campbell.

My yard in Spokane all snowy.

I guess I can say that it officially starts again. Winter is upon us. First I must say that I have been thankful for a lot of things this year. Two things I was especially thankful was that I could go to see my family in Tacoma over Thanksgiving (Pictures on Facebook). Seeing as how I only had a couple of days off for Thanksgiving and will not have Christmas Eve, Christmas, or New Years Eve off this year… I was very happy to be able to see my family.

Me and my mom drove back to Tri-Cities, I helped her move a table and hung out with an old friend for a while. But as I got back to Spokane, I started seeing a bunch of fog… and then some white stuff on the ground. I guess I kind of expected to come back and see snow on the ground, but was not excited. Maybe I can go sledding soon, but as for driving around I’m not excited.

Stupid Flash Debugging

Posted on Sunday November 16, 2008 by Jacob Campbell.

I taught myself xHTML, CSS several years ago. Since then I have learned some PHP and JavaScript, VisualBasic, and C++. The newest thing that I have been working on is Fash. It’s been really interesting, but I don’t think I have a great grasp on action script and I can even fail at following a Tutorial on creating a gallery. I like to work though some things like this to take breaks from studying and other projects that I am working on. The final product was supposed to look like this tutorial gallery:

<iframe src="/assets/media/flash-gallery-tutorial-example.swf"></iframe>

• Code no longer works for embed

But mine (remember that some of it was quickly done… so isn’t as pretty) Flash Gallery Tutorial did not work:

<iframe src="/assets/media/flash-gallery-tutorial-try.swf"></iframe>

• Code no longer works for embed

Anyways, I guess enough playing around with it today. I’ll have to go back though and see where I messed up later, I need to work on my literature review for my research project.

New Church Building

Posted on Wednesday November 12, 2008 by Jacob Campbell.

A screenshot of the Victory Faith Fellowship of a collage of photos regarding their new church facility.

My church, Victory Faith Fellowship, has been undergoing a lot of changes lately.

One huge leap of faith that we have made is in purchasing a new building. It has really been an amazing story of our church following after Gods dreams, which are bigger than anything that we could do ourself. It has really been a great ride so far. This Sunday, we will have our first meeting at 2024 N Argonne Rd.

My Website has Been in Every State, Plus Two

Posted on Tuesday November 4, 2008 by Jacob Campbell.

Checking out my Google Analytics this morning, I realized that my website has been visited by people in every state this previous month. It’s like I can travel around the country (really the world for that matter) every month. My Analytics US Map Overlay tells me that I’ve had visitors from 52 states. One of the extra is unspecified and the other is Washington DC. I thought thought that it was a pretty cool thought. Also, it’s pretty cool that I got 1,412 visits this month. That number is pretty constant too. Someday I will probably upload monthly reports so other people can follow my traffic.

Fervent Retreat

Posted on Monday November 3, 2008 by Jacob Campbell.

Fervent Fall Retreat at Camp Tshimakain, Ford WA

This weekend was the Fervent Victory Faith’s college age group called Fervent retreat. It was awesome. Unfortunately I did not get to go up for the entire event. I worked on Friday until about 1am. I got up there Saturday and it was pretty awesome. As Joe would say “I got saved.”

It has been a long time since I’ve really felt connected with church or even some sort of community. The last couple of years, I’ve had a number of groups that I got to build relationship with, but this year it’s been pretty dry. I have some friends that I hang out with at Eastern, but not nearly as much as when I lived on campus, or even last year when I hung out in Cheney quite a bit. I also haven’t really been to the Spokane Dance Company since I stopped doing the instructor training program. I just really haven’t hung out with people all that much the last couple of months. When I was in Europe, I met tons of people… but friends you make while traveling are way different then people you know more in-depth.

Needless to say, getting to hang out with a bunch of people at Camp Tshimakain was a very good thing. Joe’s word regarding community (and building relationship last Fervent meeting for that matter) was powerful to me and what I needed to hear. God is so good that way, he always meets us right where we are.

Thank you for everybody I got to hang out with at the retreat, it was the first time I’ve really felt connected in quite a while. It’s been really dry and you are all an encouragement to me. I appreciate all of you so much.

You can check out the Fervent Retreat Album from the retreat. Some great shots of the polar bear swimmers. I also uploaded some videos, The Polar Bear Plunge and Around the World… Play and Record.

Who Knew Ordering Pizza Could be Cool

Posted on Tuesday October 28, 2008 by Jacob Campbell.

The pizza tracking page on Domino’s

I got off work tonight, and was hungry. I don’t have any food in my house, and am in desperate need of going grocery shopping. For some reason, this didn’t sound like a good idea at almost midnight when I got home. I decided to order pizza. Looking up dominoes online, I found their order process super easy and kind of cool. I just had to enter information, and it placed my order. The confirmation page (see below) told me who began baking my pizza and when, and the same for putting it in the oven, boxing it up, and leaving for delivery. That’s pretty sweet. Probably more information than I need to know, but still very cool to know.

Now You Can Read What I’m Reading

Posted on Sunday October 26, 2008 by Jacob Campbell.

One of the benefits of working in the afternoon is that I have time to take my mornings slowly. I tend to sit outside and and drink a cup of coffee and read the news most mornings now. I read my news from Google News. I have made several personalization to the news that I read, and thought you might be interested in checking them out. You’ll see that in the recommended for me section there is a lot of information regarding technology and the election. I tend to read these a lot. I also have a section that searches the news for all the stories that are connected to social work and related material. I also have Googles local news for my area code and an addition of local news that isn’t included in their searching (the Spokesman Review, and the Easterner my schools newspaper). I hope this is interesting for you.