Kihaawk weekend

05/07/2023

James and I attended Kihaawk at Hubert Eaton Scout Reservation (HESR) this past weekend. Unlike Induction weekend a few weeks back, which was at Camp Bighorn at HESR, Kihaawk was held at Camp Pollock at HESR. It's the main camp, and it has nicer facilities (i.e. cabins) for Cub Scouts and their families. It's not that the cabins used by OA adult leaders and youth staff at Bighorn are bad, but the cabins at Pollock are definitely nicer and accessible by road.

Because the Lodge Executive Committee (LEC) leadership would be elected at Kihaawk -- a fellowship and training event in addition to selection of leadership and Vigil -- I tried hard to encourage Oglala Lakota (OG -- the Chapter I advise) members to register and attend, and we got only 9 members to register and attend. This was crucial, because lodge leadership is selected by the chapters voting in blocks, with the number of votes being the number of chapter members present up to a maximum of 10 votes. So, because we got only 9, I was worried we'd be short.

It turns out that we were, by far, the largest chapter in attendance. This has happened to us several times. At the last (Spring) Induction, there were 13 candidates for induction, 12 of which were ours. At the Winter Induction, we had only 1 candidate, but we had 9 staff or Elangomats. At the Fall Induction, we had 10 Ordeal candidates and 5 Brotherhood candidates, again the largest number of participants of any chapter. Plus, some of our current Brotherhood and Vigil members were also attending as staff.

It has gotten to the point that Zack Becker said that, if he meets someone at an OA event that he doesn't know, he just assumes that person is Oglala Lakota.

To be honest, I feel pretty good about that. I think it reflects well on my years as Chapter Adviser to Oglala Lakota as well as on the team of scouts -- particularly my Core Group -- who have worked so hard for so many years and who deserve all the accolades that the OA can bestow.

Anyway, with OG dominating the LEC leadership vote, and with some enforced abstentions that were a strategic mistake by Lodge Chief Bradley... well, Bradley was ousted as Lodge Chief in favor of Stephen. So, next year, the Lodge gets a new Lodge Chief.

But we'll adjust.

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I forgot to mention: At Induction last month, I was finally given the Founders Award medal that Mike Cavalero had ordered some time ago. I was told there's also a special ribbon that was ordered, so maybe it'll arrive next year.

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On another note, I'm really beginning to like Sparkle as a replacement for iWeb and Sandvox, and it's much better than Rapidweaver and Everweb, neither of which is true WYSIWYG. Rapidweaver 8 is now being replaced by something called Rapidweaver Classic, but since it's not obvious that it has a WYSIWYG blog editor, I think I'll skip it.

I need to work on the home page.

My First Sparkle Blog Post

05/04/2023

Okay, this is my first blog post using Sparkle.

There's something insulting about a website editor nowadays that isn't WYSIWYG. The weird thing about the last application I tried -- Everweb -- is that the regular pages appeared to be edited in a WYSIWYG fashion, but the blog pages used a text editor plus a preview pane.

Rapidweaver was also mainly a text editor in its blogging module, but you had to use a separate previewer to see what it looked like.

Sandvox was a very nice WYSIWYG blog editor. It, too, had some tasteful templates, and the blog page editor was WYSIWYG while still being easy to use as a text editor or word processor. Unfortunately, Karelia went defunct. The website is up, but no support or other communication is forthcoming.

Apple's iWeb, in its day, was almost everything I wanted in a website and blog editor. It was true WYSIWYG. I had strong control over all the formatting. Blog pages were automatically formatted according to the blog template in use, but individual pages could also be easily reformatted. The templates themselves were very tasteful, in the best spirit of Apple design. The only problem with iWeb was that, when a blog got too large, the application tended to bog down. And then Apple stopped supporting it.

Sparkle is gratifyingly WYSIWYG. If anything, there might be too much control of formatting and layout, but I'd rather have too much than none at all.