here's life

I guess it was nothing

2011-04-02T00:36:00.002-05:00

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

Last night I was driving with a friend, and it was a clear, chilly night, about midnight. We were in the north east part of town, it happened. I think I saw the sky glow blue for a second, but Jeff didn’t notice, but we both saw the lights and signs go black—the power went out for a second or two. We were approaching a stoplight, and when it came back on, it was yellow—is that part of the failsafe? Immediately, I thought that maybe it was an EMP or nuke or something. But it only seemed to effect things connected to the grid–other cars continued to drive. Of course, my car was unaffected, since it runs on heat and vacuum, not electricity. So, it must have been a power outage. If it had been a bomb or something, how would I have known? Maybe I should start carrying a dosimeter so that I know if we’ve gotten hit by radiation. Not that there is much one can do about it. But since I get all my news from webcomics, I wouldn’t know that the rest of the town was dead or had superpowers or anything until someone started poking fun at it. Or I show up to work on Monday,,,and no one is there.
Oh, that’s assuming I survived. So far, so good. That brownout didn’t even faze me!

Yesterday

2011-04-02T00:36:00.001-05:00

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

Yesterday, you could say I spent most of my time in my apartment…
Or, you could say that I searched my town’s stores for latex spray foam.
I followed a guy who has wandered from the Dorlish Wood. He’s not sure what’s going on, but I think he’ll survive. He’s setting up the world for someone else to complete.
I had a snap of inspiration in church this morning. I realized that God is bigger than the emotional difficulties I find from working with imperfect people at my job. I can’t care yet not be hurt when I am failed—-unless I realize that it has nothing to do with the logic of the my feelings, and they are washed over by God’s over-arching plan and and Nature which can be flowing through me and is no longer limited by me. eh, something like that—you had to be there.
I visited the magnetosphere, and learned how radiation from space attacks earth when we let our guard down.
I watched some normal guys in California build spacecraft out of fabric, that they send to the edge of space. Oh, and they mentioned this, which was sent to Venus—yeah, that place where solder melts. You don’t want to live there. But this balloon’s twin made the trip and survived to do its mission.
Based on something I read Saturday, I was inspired to develop a new kind of lightswitch—one that wasn’t there. I’d use this. I got it sketched out as I tried to fall asleep—usually I go instantaneously, but I had drunk some coffee hours before. That was at evening church, which morphed into having some friends over to eat chili. We discussed making houses out ofconcrete domes. Also, I talked to a friend about finding wifes. I also traveled to the good old days and met Mel, A Real Programmer. Oh and I climbed 800 something feet on a stairs machine while Clive Staples chatted to me, all the way from the early ’40’s–talking aboutChristianity being more than more than just merely being a nice person. The earlier chapters about pretending to be Jesus gave useful insight I used in the evening church bible study on 1 John 1~2.
I straightened up my house a little. Made some bread. And went to church instead of going and eating with a friend from work. I don’t like when my religion get in the way of my relationships.
Today, I barely visited my apartment. And now it’s about time to float off to some other world. Maybe the future, which is here whenever I close my eyes..

Auto-bots, Disassemble!

2011-04-02T00:35:00.000-05:00

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

Sorry for the delay. I didn’t feel like writing.
If you don’t already, I suggest subscribing to my RSS feed—get an RSS Reader, or use the Google Reader. But if you’ve been checking back everyday for the last months, you are more patient than I!

Anyway.
So, where was I? Oh, so this evening I was eating supper with a family from church, and afterwards, we were going to play a game or something. But, they didn’t have Pictionary, so I suggested they come over to my garage and help me take apart my car. They had been stuck in the house for a week because the youngest had chicken pox, and it was expected to spread. The youngest stayed with mom, and the rest came over. A week or so ago, I finally started to disassemble my old Mazda (poor Cecil!). I had spent about an hour, and taken off the two driver’s doors, some of the interiors, the driver seat, the back seats. So this evening they took out some more interiors–removed the glove compartment, the right mirror, the card that controls the blinker, the passenger’s seat. That was mostly the little kids. Meanwhile, there was a group working on the front. Took the hood off, and started to dig into the engine. The battery came out, the valve cover came off, the rocker arms out, part of the intake, some of the lights. I mostly struggled with the radiator. The car was mashed in the front, which pushed it all together a little more. I didn’t get it out until after they had all gone home. I’ve got the distributor off and the injector rail. There is an intake box that seems to be bolted from the bottom, so I think I need to take off the manifold and then I can get it apart more easily. I need to drain the oil before I get too deep into the engine, but that requires climbing under the car. Maybe I should have sent a little kid under there.
They seemed to enjoy it a lot, despite the cold. I think it is a pretty good evening activity. So, kids, find some screwdrivers, and 10 and 12 millimeter wrenches and sockets, and go to work! Until you get to a bolt that you can’t get started by yourself, you don’t even need to tell Mom and Dad!

Losing

2011-04-02T00:34:00.000-05:00

Friday, August 1st, 2008

To live your life
You’ve got to lose it
All the losers get a crown…

So, this evening, I lost. I lost at a couple different card games. Hand after hand. I’d make a few points, and my opponent would make more—even if I went out, forcing him to subtract his hand. Ok, a few hands I did well, good deal, good draw…but mostly, it was maybe this time, maybe this time…maybe a four of clubs…failure. I got the game figured out, I got my brain into a mode that intuitionaly sought out the right cards, right way of thinking. And then lost another hand. And I failed even at being a good conversationalist while playing. Then I played Clue. I’ve played this a couple times, and I know the basic idea…and it’s just a simple matter of deduction. Yeah, but I was clue-less. It’s like MasterMind—gaining information about specifics, by evaluating them in groups. I tried to write everything down, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. So, I failed.

I’m not used to failing. Usually, everything I do either works, or if it doesn’t, the circumstances hardly warranted hope that it would. Or, I just redefine success to match something that wasaccomplished. But I know people who’s lives are characterized by failure. Maybe not catastrophe, but chronic failure. And I thought, wow, if I feel this bummed about losing, at some games, for just an evening, imagine how I would feel after years of repeatedly failing at life. You get up, and get dressed (but there is the nagging suspicion that you wore the wrong thing), and then you brush your teeth, and fail, spilling toothpaste on the floor. You fail at cooking an egg, at making toast. At getting your car to run right. At missing traffic, at getting to work on time…and this continues all day. Everyday. For as long as you can remember. Just a string of things that didn’t quite work out for you. I’d be pretty unhappy. Probably not very friendly. Hard to deal with. Dull. Maybe even a hint of trying to fail, so at least I succeed atsomething.

I am glad that my life has been successful. Maybe not always as totally challenge-free as I could imagine, and in my weaker moments, wish for. But it’s been good, and it’s not all because Tobias is so awesome. God has given me this life. And since it is a gift, I should not look down on those who do not measure up to my standards. We soften the recoil against people by saying “maybe they are just having a bad day”—well, what about the people who have a bad week, month, years—so long they have given up hope of hope? Can I use the gift of things-working-out-for-me to help encourage those for whom things don’t work? Rather than thinking “maybe things would work better if you weren’t such an idiot” or “maybe if you were nice to be around, more people would like you”. I’ve had a glimpse of what that life would be like, and now I have a glint of empathy for those for whom the morning comes to herald in another day of unmitigated FAILURE.

Oh, and no, I don’t get a crown for losing a card game.

Chickens

2011-04-02T00:33:00.002-05:00

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

I may have messed up. Used someone’s trust of me to push them in over their head. Or, I gave them a great opportunity for learning.
So, there is this family from church, who want to grow stuff. A couple months ago, I helped them dig up some flower beds, and plant some stuff. We had a few leaves of spinach, and the onions seem to be growing well. The tomatoes are green, and the cucumbers and some of the squash are blooming. It might actually work. The strawberries have made a few berries. I think they need straw to help them stay dry and away from the ants.

Anyway, that’s not hard, plants grow themselves. But Sunday, I was talking to one of the kids and suggested that they grow some chickens in their backyard. Monday, the dad called me, with questions. Tuesday, I did some research on cost and such, and today is Wednesday, and they have ordered chickens, and partially planned out how it will work. The day-old chicks should be here in about a month. Probably long enough to find a light, some sawdust, and a cardboard box. And then three cardboard boxes, and then a place in the shed, or a little house in the yard, and then it will be on. There will be a couple dozen squawking chickens in their backyard, and they will have to be feeding them piles of feed and finding them new bedding, and it will be crazy. Well, maybe kinda crazy. Maybe 25 were too many. Maybe the neighbors will call the city. Maybe they will get tired of watering them. Maybe they will not be able to handle butchering them in the backyard (how do we dispose of the …”leftovers”? )

Or maybe it’s not a big deal. They will find out what chickens are like, decide if that’s how they want to make their own meat, and go on. I hope it works out.

Carbon in the air

2011-04-02T00:33:00.001-05:00

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

It appears that we can get rid of all the carbon that we have put in the air by just caring for the soil in our farmland. If we spread 1/2 of an inch of charcoal on all the farmland in the US, it would offset all the carbon humans released into the the atmosphere in 2006. Of course, in that form, it probably would not help our plants much, but if it were spread through the top couple inches of soil as humus, it would be very beneficial, increasing resistance to flooding and drought, as well as making the soil more fertile. Then we could drive all the SUV’s we wanted, and still not cause global warming. But, in order to do this to the farmland, we would need to shift how we farm—growing the soil, so it grows us food, instead of just making field factories crank out carbohydrate and protein nutrient paste. And this shift in philosophy would probably result in better health and wellness and less dependence on SUV’s anyway. We need to change something, because adding half an inch of carbon to the soil each year may be difficult.

Here is the math and sources behind my claim:
8.4 gigatonnes in 2006:
divided by
938 million acres of US farmland
divided by
208 kg/cu. meter: density of charcoal
divided by
90% carbon in charcoal
equals:
0.47 in deep

Of course, if the whole world helped out, instead of just the US farmland, we wouldn’t have to make our soil quite so much better each year.

inventing profanity

2011-04-02T00:32:00.002-05:00

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

The moralists have defined “words you aren’t suppose to use”. And in doing so, [we] create ways for people to purposefully violate rules about what is right, pure, and appropriate. We all know the words we aren’t supposed to know—at least by the time we are young adults—and they are “adult words”, words that kids aren’t supposed to be corrupted with, kids aren’t supposed to use or hear, which helps to spread them. Because all kids want to grow up and become adults. And using bad language, while we know it’s not “right”, it’s mature, and gratifying to finally be able to do things that only big people are allowed to do. Well, really they aren’t even allowed, but only adults are allowed to break the rules of what can be said. And the rules are pretty arbitrary.

Let’s take the word “snot”. Snot is gross, and sure, everybody has it (you swallow something like a pint a day), but it’s not usually something discussed in polite company. But it’s not a “bad word”. Just has it’s place, like any other word. But it is just a word, with a meaning (which may vary from state to state). But what if, we decided that sn*t was bad to say? If we defined it as something that “good people” didn’t say in front of kids, and the FCC didn’t let people say it on tv during the day. And you had to use other words to describe what happens when you blow your nose. It would take a while for people to catch on, but eventually, people would start using more. When they want to express their displeasure, or just rebel against being good, they would start sprinkling the sn__ word into their speech. Maybe quite liberally. “What the sn*t? That sn*t-faced sn*t and his sn*tty sn*tting can just sn*t off!” Yay, yet another amoral word made worthless by simply banning it, therefore increasing it’s misuse.

Now, this example was the corruption of a word that already existed, but the same would happen if you coined a new word, and gave it forbidden status as part of it’s definition:

iofdl: (ē-ō’fĭd-l) noun, something kinda bad, but this word has it in the worst connotation imaginable.
*DO NOT USE THIS WORD* However, you can use this similar word “eiffel”, to mean the same thing.
tr.v iofdling, iofdl
intr.v: iofdling, iofdled
adjective: iofdl, iofdlly

So, I don’t think I should use “foul language” (one exception: I quack at ducks, but they rarely respond so I’m probably doing it wrong). However, I don’t think forbidding certain arbitrary words is really helpful–it just gives people yet another rule to break when they feel like lashing out against all that morals stand for and the oppression they imagine moral standards bring.

…but while we argue about what words are good for children, they are dying from other things. The number one cause of death for children under 5 is fumes from inside cooking fires. Snot!

Reactions

2011-04-02T00:32:00.001-05:00

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

Watched Charlie Wilson’s War: Made me want to go kill some commies—or at least help war-torn countries build their school systems.
Watched Gone Baby Gone: Made me mad at parents who neglect their kids and made me want to help the kids grow up to be functioning adults instead of losers like their folks.
Watched Life Aquatic: Made me want to get better at making snide remarks—or at least better at dry and absurdist humour.

another random trip

2011-04-02T00:30:00.000-05:00

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

So, it was friday, and I hurried out of work, and jumped on the turnpike, heading for KC. My flight was leaving about 4 and a half hours, just enough time to get there. I got a call from my mom. My destination in Ohio was getting snow, and flights were being canceled. My dad was in one airport. My grandfather was stuck in Atlanta. Well, I figured I’d just keep driving, and see what I could make of it. But when I got off the phone with my Mom, I had a voicemail, saying that my flight was canceled. Ok, so I dropped off the next exit, paid my 30 cents, and headed for home. I could go back to work. I could try to find a flight from somewhere that would get me there. Sometime, maybe tomorrow….or…
I called up Aduma. “What are you doing this weekend?” “I’m on a mountain, snowboarding. Tomorrow we might go climb a 14er”. An hour later, I had more warm clothes packed, and was heading west instead of east. I drove. And drove. Western Kansas is pretty, but it is long. At dusk I passed a wind farm—fifty turbines spinning slowly. Then it got dark, and all I saw were the white lines. And then, suddenly, I was there, and found a bed, and went to sleep. Well, it wasn’t sudden, but I did have some meaningful times of prayer and singing while riding in my radio-free car.
We got up early, and headed for the mountain. Not quite early enough, it would seem. There was lots of traffic. Well, alot compared to my little big city. And when the right lane ended, all the selfish jerks were driving past everyone on the right, and then merging in, slowing the whole thing to a crawl. I didn’t have the nerve to be a jerk back, so didn’t pull into the right lane and stop. I did try to run over some people who merged in because I wasn’t fast enough to close the gap. Yeah, about that. My car does ok in Kansas, where there is lot of air, and not much hill. But, you get out to the mountains, and it has a hard time. It may have been trying to skip 1st gear, but it would take a while to get going. On the interstate it just annoyed the other drivers. But once we got onto the mountain trails, it became difficult to manage. It was too curvy and slick to go fast enough to keep the turbo pressure up to give the engine enough power to get up the hills. At one point we had to get out and push because the road was too slick and steep, and full throttle just made smoke. Eventually, we got to the parking lot—well, it was where we parked, since the road was blocked with a ten-foot pile of snow. We were a couple miles from the trailhead, and we gave up on climbing the mountain. Instead, we walked up the road (and railing on the road that was level with the snow) and the followed a snow-shoe path to a hill where we did dive-rolls until we were worn out and covered with snow. The trip down was much easier. Except that the car in front of us almost slid sideways into an oncoming car. They both stopped in time, and I was able to run into the drift at the edge of the cliff and stop before running into them. We passed a hydro electric plant with lots of wires, and not much water or drop. Not sure how they managed it. We got milkshakes at the bottom of the hill, in the little town. The lady who ran the milkshake place wasn’t as good at it as the normal lady. Even if she had been doing it all her life, she’d only have gotten a few dozen shakes done. But not to worry because Becky had some spaghetti for us that evening. We had a good time hanging out, and Discussing Important Stuff. Like a name for my car. It earned the title “The Bloviator”. It blows alot of black smoke. But also, in a more sophisticated sense, it looks like an impressive luxury car, and it says alot about driving, but when it come down to it, it didn’t go anywhere. So, it is pretentiously contentless. About that time, we decided to watch UHF. “oh, yeah…they really hate it when you do this!” Shake, Shake, shake.
Sunday we went to church, and heard another excellent message—that makes two out of two. We went for a walk in the afternoon, in the “Impressive Backyard”. I needed to leave, but stopped to get icecream with the others on the way out. But, it was late, and I’d be driving tired, and we wanted to climb another hill in the morning…so I didn’t leave after all. I called a coworker and said I wouldn’t be in. We spent a while wandering around downtown, while part of our party waited for the train. Then aduma and I got supper, and talked about Life. Now I know what to do with my future! I’m going to go live in the woods and eat squirrels. Maybe some rabbits, after the first frost.
Monday started out like another other day. Getting up before sunrise, and heading off—oh, wait, not to work, but to 10732 ft. ASL and then hiking up a snow packed path, and picking our way through unmarked drifts and boulders, and finally summiting at 11722 ft. The view, like all weekend, was excellent. I mean, Kansas is great. It has some nice flat stuff, and some good grass-covered hills. But, it’s not quite like looking down on angled slopes covered with snow-covered trees, and looking over and seeing peaks that are coated with snow. And gazing off the cliff, resisting the urge to jump, hoping that this time, I’ll learn to fly. It sometimes takes a little bit to get the hang of it. Then, it was back down into town, more of the perfect weather we’d had all weekend, and this time I really left. Once aduma got my car started, cranking while I pumped the primer pump. The Bloviator was off and running! I took a scenic route across eastern Colorado, on a two lane that flew past farms and paused in little towns. It was good to see the heart of the communities along the way. It was also a pretty lonely road. I think I went about a half hour without meeting another car. And I drove and I drove. With my sunroof open. And I thought, and I tried to stay awake, and I troubleshooted a kludge of two wireless routers that a friend uses to steal wireless from the neighbors and re-broadcast it. (unplug them both, and then plug them in in cascading order, Does it work now?)
It was dark by the time I got to the windmills this time. They each had a red light on top, and nearly all of them blinked in unison. There was one light that was about half a blink slow. I was driving in the dark and I looked up at the bright stars–so much brighter than in the city, and I inhaled, and smelled…snow. What’s that? Why do I smell snow when I look at the sky? It doesn’t smell like snow in my car if I look out the windshield, but the sky looks like snow smells. It made me think of this page which I read about 4 years ago. It suggest that humans can sense infrared, with lets us see the temperature of an object at a distance. Well, we all know we can tell if some thing is hot or cold without touching it—your skin can easily say “I am in the sun” or “I am in the shade”. But, no, this is something different—or at least feels different to me. That smell of rain or snow. I think it was that I was “seeing” the deep cold of space. Space doesn’t radiate much at all—-sure there are stars, but they are really small compared to the coldness of the nothingness of space. And why do I sense it most when I inhale through my nose? It could be that I am in the habit of associating smells with inhaling through my nose, or it could be it gives me a sample of ambient air to use as a reference. Suppose I have sensors in the skin below my eyes that can tell th e temp of an object straight ahead by checking for heat radiating from it. Now, it might get confused because there is also heat conducting out of the air, throwing off the sensor reading. But if I knew what temp the ambient air was, then I could calibrate the sensor to accurately see how much heat is radiating off the object I’m looking at. And since that is the only way that we ever notice this sense, we think of it as a smell. Maybe we all have special superhuman powers…but we don’t know it. I guess if we all have it, then it’s not superhuman. Oh well.
Well, gotta get to sleep so I can get up and save the world! There are a bunch of planes in a file at work that have my name on them.

latest Idea!

2011-04-02T00:28:00.002-05:00

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

So, I went to a retreat for a class at church (the introductory class that I hadn’t taken for the 2 years I’ve been going). We sang and prayed together and read from God’s own Word. It was a beautiful location down near Oklahoma, by the Ar-Kansas River. I didn’t come away with some huge breakthrough, or maybe I did. It’s the Self thing—everything is about me, and that attitude makes me compare mySelf to others. There is a nearly constant dialog in my head, comparing my actions to those of others, usually slanted so I’m the better one. This is unhelpful, and kinda shoots down the whole thing of being justified by Jesus’s righteousness. And it all stems from my Self being alive and well. Die, die, die!!! Can I let it die, so it’s not about “what’s in it for me”? Am I even a Christian if my core loyalty is to my Self?

Well, while my self is off dying, I went sledding this evening, With some friends. On the highway embankment. It was fun. The snow came this afternoon, and since it’s just about freezing, it won’t stay long. On the way home, I was reflecting on my future, and I had this crazy idea. Hanging out with a couple guys who run an ebay business can give you this sort of inspiration. We were together most of the retreat, and the trip there and back. Anyway. So, I could go back to raising chickens on pasture like we did back when. But from talking to one guy who is into natural food, it sounds like the market is kinda saturated. At the health food stores you can buy “free-range” chicken, and at Walmart you can get “No Antibiotics, No Hormones* Chicken” (*actually, as they note on the package, it’s against FDA regs to give chickens hormones anyway—but the No Antibiotics thing is real.) So. if people want meat with a healthy label, they don’t need me. Of course my chicken would taste better, and be “Fresh Range(tm)”–a phrase my dad coined. Sure the health-food-store-chicken is “free range” but that is accomplished much different from how my chickens would be raised. My chickens would be moved to new grass everyday—-they would have to stand in the grass, with the bugs. The “free-range” that I have seen raised commercially, while a step in the right direction, left something to be desired. They had a chicken house with LOTS of chickens in it (in the thousands) and then little doors in the sides where the chickens could come out and walk around in the sun—sometimes they had little fences up to keep the chickens in, sometimes they just let them wander. But, that’s kinda different from my chicken—but how would you tell from the package?
But some people would make the distinction. Those people might not be in my 1 hour radius. Which is where the crazyness comes in: I sell these chickens on ebay, pack them up and ship them to wherever people are who want chicken that “tastes like chicken.” To help show people how great these chickens are, I could video parts of their lives and put it on the internet. People could come watch “helmet cam” footage from my daily care of these chickens. I could even put the butchering process up–with a “graphic content” warning. Then people could feel like they know what these chickens are, and why they should get them shipped a thousand miles to their door. “Chickens raised in the Big Blue Room”. But, they would almost be raised on the internet. So, I’m not really shipping un-inspected meat across state lines! These chickens were raised in the youtube-o-sphere as much as anywhere else!

Yup, so that’s it! My niche is selling chickens to people like you, whether you live between here and the nearest Starbucks, or you live in Maine, you can login, order some chickens, and the UPS guy will bring them to you a couple days later.

Plants and purpose

2011-04-02T00:28:00.001-05:00

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

So, I’m dredging through Treehugger, a trendy website about Green news, and I see this TED video and it mentions Polyface Farms in the caption. The presenter in the video spends a while talking about Salatin’s biosystem, and how he uses a group of species to work together to make a huge amount of food off of 100 acres. The presentation is about how plants do things to make us grow them, to make bees pollinate them, etc. We all do things to promote one species over another in an effort to promote our own species, and so the selection pressures favor certain behaviors. Rather than thinking that it’s people-versus-nature, we should notice–and build on–the fact that people and plants work together. That is how Joel works with the grass, cattle and other critters on Polyface Farm.

It makes me want to go back to raising animals. Maybe I’m forgetting all those mornings where I went out and walked in the chilly, wet, grass, dragging feed around. Maybe what I really want is have a “hobby farm”, and fund it with my real job. Or maybe I should follow in my family’s footsteps and get a small amount of land, raise as much as I can on it, then quit the industry and go farming full time. But, then I think of the bigger picture—am I getting stuck on a tiny aspect: growing things, and really I should be thinking about how I can help others, serve God, and make life better in general? Growing food would cause a symbiotic relationship with my customers who would get better value food than elsewhere (business sense says they would). And if I could figure out how to help others do the same thing, that would be a benefit to others. And if, while so helping others—-whether here, or somewhere that it rains more, or in Africa where there is just packed dirt—if I also help them discover God’s love for them, then my purpose in life would be complete.

But, before going and doing something drastic, like quitting my job and buying a farm and some cows..,,in India,,,maybe I should do what I can in my current situation—because just moving to Timbuktu won’t magically turn me into a great dirt-farming missionary. So, what is the next step? Do I get my own house in town so I have at least a little area to capture solar energy? Do I start doing more active evangelism? (more than just hoping they ask why I don’t strangle annoying people). Do I go haggle with the City to let me build a cheap house so that I can help everyone who needs one have an affordable place to live? Or do I just keep doing what I have to do, wash my dishes and laundry, clean up my house, and wait for Monday to go back to work? I could change the foodscape in my town, help dozens of people afford their own house, help a town in Senegal have clean water, and help transmit the Gospel by radio into closed countries.
But, I don’t really have time. Right now. What with work and all. And, I’ve got some webcomics to check back on before I go watch a movie.

green

2011-04-02T00:27:00.000-05:00

Monday, February 4th, 2008

I’m floating in a green sea.
I am up to my neck, but my head is out,
so I’m not drowning.
And there are no waves, so no struggle.
I’m not sure if there are sharks.
I don’t think there are sharks.
I hope there are sharks,
I don’t think they would eat me.
Friendly sharks.
If they ate me it wouldn’t matter.

It might be raining.
I can feel something splashing in my head.
More water in the green sea
I am in a green sea.

I’m annoyed

2011-04-02T00:25:00.001-05:00

Monday, January 14th, 2008

I’m pretty annoyed right now. While I was in church this evening, someone stole my radio. Out of my car. They messed up my dash some too. My CAR! The one that I work on making better and fixing up—it’s messed up! Part of me wants to find them and throttle them. Part of me wants to go buy the nicest radio, a grenade, and a little string. Or made a device that calls fire down from heaven whenever anyone touches my car. Then there’s the response that says, “Just make sure you never have anything that anyone would want, and they won’t take it.” I’m pretty close—I’d need to get rid of my…I don’t know, maybe my bread maker, my linksys router, or the butter in my fridge. People hate me when I have more stuff than them. If I didn’t have more stuff, they wouldn’t want to hurt me, and we could all be friends. By having a nice radio with an MP3 player, I deserve to get my radio stolen—it was just a kindly Robin Hood helping out the poor that I am oppressing by having nice stuff.
But it’s just annoying. Stealing radios is not a profession. It’s something bad. It’s not just “Well, he can’t make money any other way, so who can blame him?” No, he is a person who does bad things. Am I allowed to say he’s a bad person? It make me mad at the type of people who would do this sort of thing, the people who don’t have jobs, the people who can’t seem to “make it”. I kinda don’t want to help people who can’t make it because they do things like this.

Maybe I’ll get another radio. Maybe I’ll pull one with a tape deck out of my closet and install it. Maybe I’ll stick a little amp in there and just buy an MP3 player. Maybe I’ll just cover it up, and install switches and dials for my diesel/vegetable oil system. Maybe I’ll fix up the dash best I can, buy another radio, and behind the face, tape a $50 bill and a note asking the thief to please just take the money, and leave the radio…because it is wired to a grenade!
I’m sure there is a Christ-like response that I’m missing. Something about praying for the bad person who did this, and not storing up treasure on earth. Is there a fundamental difference between turning the other cheek and rolling over and playing dead?

Tenor:
Treasure in heaven
Treasures in he-ea-ven!
Lay up for yourselves,
Treasures in heaven.

Soprano:
Ask and you shall receive
Seek and you shall find
Knock and it shall be opened,
Be opened unto you
Be opened unto you.

Eschotology

2011-04-02T00:24:00.000-05:00

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

I was hanging out with some friends the other evening, and something came up about international events, and Israel and Bush and peace in the Middle East. It was generally agreed that it was a bad idea for Bush to work for peace in that area, because peace wouldn’t happen, or Bush would be flirting with becoming the Antichrist. I have a tendency to challenge anything that is held as Orthodoxy, but doesn’t immediately commend itself to my reason, and reasonable understanding of the Bible. So, I challenged them on it, and then the discussion passed on while I dug through Revelation for a verse I thought maybe I’d heard about the Antichrist bringing peace. I didn’t find it right away. I did a quick search on the topic and came up with a couple articles. This one is rather critical of the Dispensational view that peace will heralded in the coming of the Antichrist. It also attempts to show that it’s scriptural support is nebulous at best. It seems that this connection between the Antichrist and peace is built on this verse in Daniel 9:

26″Then after the sixty-two weeks the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing, and the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary And its end will come with a flood; even to the end there will be war; desolations are determined.
27″And he will make a firm covenant with the many for one week, but in the middle of the week he will put a stop to sacrifice and grain offering; and on the wing of abominations will come one who makes desolate, even until a complete destruction, one that is decreed, is poured out on the one who makes desolate.”

See, by “week” it means “seven yeaSaturday, January 12th, 2008

26″Then after the sixty-two weeks the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing, and the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary And its end will come with a flood; even to the end there will be war; desolations are determined.

27″And he will make a firm covenant with the many for one week, but in the middle of the week he will put a stop to sacrifice and grain offering; and on the wing of abominations will come one who makes desolate, even until a complete destruction, one that is decreed, is poured out on the one who makes desolate.”

See, by “week” it means “seven years” and the “prince who is to come” is the Antichrist in Revelations, and the “firm covenant” means “Peace in the Middle East”. That was the NASB version. The NIV uses “’sevens’” but with a note that an alternate reading is “weeks”.

So, there is some room for different interpretations, just from the Hebrew to English. But, it doesn’t say “And the Antichrist will bring peace between the Jews and the Arabs, and then will break off that peace” Not is so many words. And, if you read the chapter, this is a direct answer to Daniel’s cry to God about the devastation and destruction and disaster that came upon Israel as a just consequence of their sin. I really get the feeling that what Gabriel is talking about has to do with the destruction that Daniel is currently praying about. Not some event still in our future.

I think it is safe to work for peace. Jesus says “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God”. And even if you somehow fulfill some prophecy in Daniel, that doesn’t mean you are THE Antichrist—-there is more to earning that title than just helping some people stop lobbing rockets at each other. We can work for peace for quite a while before we are in “danger” of bringing peace. Right now, “uneasy diffidence” would be way better than what we’ve got, and it still isn’t the dreaded “strong covenant” that we are supposedly warned about.

So, don’t believe that “peace is of the devil”, and therefore subconsciously (or even consciously) sabotage any efforts to make the world a better place. And go ahead and read the passages before agreeing with theology that doesn’t fit with themes like “Love your neighbor.”rs” and the “prince who is to come” is the Antichrist in Revelations, and the “firm covenant” means “Peace in the Middle East”. That was the NASB version. The NIV uses “’sevens’” but with a note that an alternate reading is “weeks”.
So, there is some room for different interpretations, just from the Hebrew to English. But, it doesn’t say “And the Antichrist will bring peace between the Jews and the Arabs, and then will break off that peace” Not is so many words. And, if you read the chapter, this is a direct answer to Daniel’s cry to God about the devastation and destruction and disaster that came upon Israel as a just consequence of their sin. I really get the feeling that what Gabriel is talking about has to do with the destruction that Daniel is currently praying about. Not some event still in our future.

What does this mean for us? It’s not like I’ll try and egg on Hamas if I believe that only the Antichrist brings peace (albeit fake peace). We all want peace in the world, in our neighborhoods, and in those of the Jews. But, if Bush can’t be a peacemaker without us worrying about the sinister implications, something may be wrong. But we don’t have to interpret it that way. In this article, the author holds to the Peace==Antichrist view, but he sees peace as a good thing—if the Antichrist is coming, the Real Christ can’t be far behind.
I think it is safe to work for peace. Jesus says “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God”. And even if you somehow fulfill some prophecy in Daniel, that doesn’t mean you are THE Antichrist—-there is more to earning that title than just helping some people stop lobbing rockets at each other. We can work for peace for quite a while before we are in “danger” of bringing peace. Right now, “uneasy diffidence” would be way better than what we’ve got, and it still isn’t the dreaded “strong covenant” that we are supposedly warned about.

The final solution

2011-04-02T00:21:00.000-05:00

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

I was listening to a recording of “This American Life” a radio show that usually shows up on NPR. In the second Act, a guy in advertising tells about an ad campaign he worked on, with the State Department, trying to sell Americanism to the Muslim world. PR for democracy and freedom. The story is pretty funny, but depressing as well. From their focus groups, trying to determine what would work, a recurring theme was that Muslims can’t be free or at peace, because of the Jews. The Jews have Jerusalem, which the Muslims need. According to this radio show, until Islams control Medina, Mecca and Jerusalem, there won’t be peace.
Of course, if there was no Jerusalem, then there wouldn’t be any fighting over it. But our current foreign policy does not include turning the Middle East into a glass parking lot. It does include giving aid, arms and aid to buy our arms. And I hear that it is common for us to help both sides. That way, everybody is happy, killing each other, in a careful balance determined by the US government, taxpayers, and defense contractors. As a taxpayer, this doesn’t seem like a good use of the money I could use to, say, buy more pipe fittings (I’ve been doing that a lot lately). And it doesn’t look like it’s really helping either. If it’s not the Jews and Arabs, it’s Eritrea and Somalia, Or the Turks and the Kurds. The North Koreans and the South Koreans. The Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears. The Serbs and Croatians. We can continue to send men and money and missles over to try and keep people from killing each other. People who have been trying to kill each other for centuries, and don’t plan on stopping. Or, we could break up the fight. Send them to their rooms.
Here’s the plan: if there is a chronic war going on, we take one side, and send them to a space colony, built on the Moon, Mars or Australia. Which side? Well I’d leave the side that is less likely to turn on us. With their rivals gone, they’ll have more free time, and excess weapons. So, keep the side that will turn to more useful pursuits. But what gives us the right to arbitrate between two people groups, and send one to exile, away from their homeland? On the other hand, is that worse than giving guns to the other side? Besides, what if you had the choice: stay in your war torn homeland, probably a desert, and covered with unexploded ordinance…or, get to start over in a state-of-the-art housing facility, that produces everything you need, with a whole new planet to spread out on? Then there is the question of whether we could afford it—isn’t it expensive to build rockets? Yes, but war ain’t cheap either, and if we didn’t have to finance it in so many countries, we could devote more money to some new technologies that make space travel much cheaper. Some people are already working on it—these weekend spaceenthusiasts are making good progress with balloons. And I have a feeling, that once we started taking drastic measures like exporting a nation, the others would be encouraged to find ways to get along while they have a chance. Oh, and it would give space travel a purpose—right now, it’s a nifty idea, but there aren’t many practical reasons to waste huge amounts of effort to leave our quite livable sphere. But, if it could stop a war, that’s a financial impetus. I’m sure there is a place on Mars that looks just like Jerusalem

amazing

2011-04-02T00:20:00.000-05:00

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

If you ever wondered how your cells find an infection, and what is going on, this is a complex video that shows the amazing work that happens:

http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/anim_innerlife_hi.html

In other news, I keep buying plumbing parts for my car. It is surprisingly hard to find some parts—like a 3/4 by 3/8 NPT bushing. I changed how I’m going about it, so now I need to return some stuff.

Is it better to buy good tools (like pliers) or cheap ones for 1/4 the price? I don’t use them much.

As usual, my house is cold, I’m hungry and it’s time to head to bed.

Did you know that it is a common misconception that microwaves heat water by vibrating their bonds with a resonant wave? You don’t get much resonance from liquid water with all the molecules bumping into each other. Actually 2.4GHz was chosen because it wouldn’t interfere with existing radio transmission. At least so says this guy, among other things:
howthingswork.virginia.edu

there and back…again

2011-04-02T00:19:00.001-05:00

Sunday, December 30th, 2007

It’s been a while since I was home. I spent the week before Christmas working, but rather than being at my regular location, I was in Connecticut, “coordinating” with our customer. Unfortunately, many of the people I would have needed to talk to were already enjoying their vacation with their families. They have to use-or-lose their vacation by the end of the year, so there was a good bit of that going on. Seems to me that like cell phones, companies would do well to offer “Rollover Vacation” since leaving for the last couple weeks of the year may not be most fun for the employees, nor may it be the most convenient for the company. I’m glad my company lets me store vacation from year to year.

After working all week, and battling a sore throat, I packed my items as well as I could, and drove my rental car back to the airport from which I came. But, instead of boarding a plane, I barely made it onto a bus heading to the railroad station. I needed quarters, so I ran to the snack counter in the airport, got some change, and hurried back to the bus, where the driver was still waiting.

At the railway station, I pulled out the ticket I had had mailed to my hotel room, and waited for the train south. It arrived, and I was whisked toward NYC, the automated voice announcing each station as we approached. Long before we got to Grand Central Terminal, we went underground. There we bumped along in the dark, surrounded by dimly-lit arches and pillars which held up New York City. I was struck by how much permanent infrastructure there is, supporting the world as we know it.

Eventually we reached the end of the line, and I followed the crowds toward the surface. I came out in a huge, ornate room, with tiny lights in the ceiling, as far away as the stars. It seems I have seen this important part of Grand Central before—probably in a movie.

I bought a 6-ride pass, and headed to the shuttle. A little train that went to Times Square, and then, as I found out, right back again. (I misinterpreted the signs, and jumped back on the shuttle I came on) So, I took an extra round trip back to Grand Central. Then I found the “3″ train,,,and went north instead of south. I actually set foot top-side in New York City, crossed Broadway, and went back underground. Finally, I got to Penn Station, and rushed over to the Amtrak station, printed my ticket, and found my gate. It was 9:03, and the train left at 9:09, but it seems it was slightly delayed—there were still masses of people waiting to get on.

I found a seat—it was like an airplane, but quieter, roomier, and I didn’t have to turn off my cell. And I didn’t have to fasten my seat belt, and there was a water faucet with cups at the end of the car. Amtrak is a very comfortable way to travel. People talking in hushed tones, or sleeping, and the countryside sped by. I think it was faster than a car. Once again, the huge amount of ancient infrastructure surprised me: all along the way, huge rusted towers held electric wires that feed the train.

Eventually I moved up a couple cars so I would be near the short platform at my destination, and then we pulled up, and I got off. I walked into the parking lot, got into a car I had never seen before, and drove off to the church, where my cousins and their cousins were having Christmas dinner.

It was interesting to blend in with people, a few of whom I had met before, and many who were new to me. But, we had a good evening of exchanging gifts, playing games, and discussing deep subjects of citizen responses to violence and safety.

It was late in the evening, and I finally was “home” to a place I knew, after jumping from ship to ship since 5:30 am.

The rest of the weekend was fine, drove to Delaware, and ate food, and again exchanged gifts (I liked the white elephant method used in DE better than the PA family version). Monday we went to the beach. We walked in the sand, toward some towers at the end of the beach. They looked closer than 10 miles away. But we walked and walked and didn’t seem to get much closer. Sim ran down to them and back. He found a green plastic item that seemed to be a “pull ring to light fuse” pyrotechnical device. Garret found some rocks and shells. I didn’t get any sand because I had already collected some a few miles up the beach. And I wasn’t carrying a ziplock.

Tuesday was Christmas day, and Uncle Charlie invited me and Jonathan to take part in their morning ceremony. It was interesting to see a real Christmas for the first? time. And I kind of understand it now. It is really exciting for the kids. And we read Luke 2 again (while we were waiting, Jonathan suggested we read Luke 1 so we would know the background). I’m not sure what I’ll do when I have kids. Will we celebrate Christmas? I guess if I’m going to start, I could before I have kids. I’m sure I won’t tell my kids that Santa Claus is real, but what about a tree? Seem still too pagan for me. Gifts aren’t very pagan, the devil didn’t invent giving. Oh well.

The man who would only be helped by God.

2011-04-02T00:16:00.001-05:00

Monday, December 10th, 2007

Once there was a guy sitting on his front porch, when a car screeched to a halt and the passengers yelled out the window “A flood is coming! Jump in and we’ll drive to the city!” But, the city was not where he wanted to be. He knew that once he got there, he would get sucked into it’s petty ways and would forever mimic the artificial bustle of it’s manufactured reality. “No” he replied to the carload, “I’m waiting on the Lord!”

A few hours later, the water came. A trickle at first, and then the waves started to lap at the edge of the porch. So, he moved his belongings into the attic, and nailed cross braces on the walls. He was sitting cross-legged on a chair when a boat pulled up to his second story window. “Hey! A survivor! Quick, get in! We’ll take you to safety!” They say beggars can’t be choosers, but this boat had clearly seen better days. “No thanks” he replied, “I’m waiting for the Lord to SAVE me!” The boat pulled away, but it was not out of sight before the water that had been filling the hold caused the engine to seize, throw a rod, kill the occupants, burst into flames and sink into the murky water.

He had just climbed onto his roof when a barge came by. It was swarming with lawn chairs, and people. Someone on the barge spotted him through the haze. “Dude! There’s a guy on that roof! Hey Roof Dude! You wanna come join us! This is the most awesome (*)^*(& you ever seen! It’s a great way to travel in a flood!” Umm, yeah. “No thanks,…Dude!” He shouted back to the floatilla. “I’m going to see what God has for me.” “Whatever, that’s awesome dude! On a roof! Hey, let’s go join him!” “Dude! we’d get wet, dude.” “Yeah, couldn’t risk that, dude….” They faded off into the distance. He finished tying his safety cable to the stovepipe.

He was standing on the left side of his roof to balance it, when a helicopter hovered overhead. They threw out a rope and were yelling something down. Seems they wanted him to grab the rope. He was just about to when he blinked and realized that the ‘copter was missing a blade! The vibrations would tear it apart any moment! Maybe they were yelling for help! He motioned to them to jump out, but they thought he was just waving them off. “Well, we’ve got others to save!” said the pilot, and he tipped the nose down to fly off…when the rotor hit the tail and the whole airframe shattered. The flaming schrappnel whizzed past as he threw himself flat on the roof. He stood up, and beside him a smoking turbine blade was impaled in the roof. “Thank you Lord, for saving me!” he said, looking up a the empty sky.

For a couple days, he floated on his rooftop. On top, he struggled to keep his house balanced by moving from side to side. Underneath, God guided his frail craft around the sunken trees that reached up to pluck it from the surface. And often, he was acutely aware that God was saving him, and all would be well, even if he drown.

On the morning of the fifth day, he felt a tremor ripple through his knees. The house had hit something. He jumped to the other side of the roof, and the scraping stopped…for a moment. And then with a THUD, the house stopped moving altogether. The impact made him lose his balance, his feet slipped, he fell over backwards, hit his head on the stove pipe, and lay motionless.

He saw a light, and opened his eyes. It was beautiful, and blinding. The light was at the crest of a range of mountains. He became more aware of his senses, the breeze touching his face, the smell of spring flowers that dotted the green hillsides of fresh grass, the sound of a brook trickling nearby, and a hunger…for food! Like he hadn’t eaten in a day and half. Wait, I’m not supposed to feel hunger here! His hand went instinctively to his head, and he felt a scab. Small enough that he realized he had collapsed, not so much from the blow, but from exhaustion. “Thank you Lord, for saving me!” he whispered into the wind. Then, he loosened up his safety rope, and swung into the attic where he found some peanut butter and jelly, and on the strength of that food he spent the next 40 days digging a new foundation under his house, planting a garden on the hills nearby, and catching fish in the brook. It was the perfect spot, and he was glad that he waited for God, instead of taking any of the almost-optimal options.
THE END

Etcetera

2011-04-02T00:13:00.000-05:00

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

So, I thought I was edgimacated and stuff…oh well!

This morning, I walked outside and it was sleeting, so I hurried to the apartment office to drop off a note saying that my bathtub wasn’t draining; it finally has gotten slow enough that my next shower start out with me standing in cold water. Then I got in my car, debated if the windshield needed scraping—had a dusting of frozen rain on it. Well, it didn’t start anyway, so it didn’t matter. It has the habit of taking a couple cranks before it will start—when it is cold out. So, I got in my redundant vehicle, started it up, and went ahead and got some of the ice off it.

Work went fine—I tried out some interesting tactics for dealing with overly critical people. “You are right, that is incorrect. Could you go ahead and fix that up? That would be great…” It would have worked, if what their criticism had a basis in the same reality as me. I need to work on being kind, but firm. Be considerate, but not ruin myself trying to fit other’s actions into reasonableness. All without becoming a vitriolic quibbler too. (I can hear the Reading Level ratcheting up!)

When started my car, I noticed that the brake pedal had a lot of give to it. Pumping it helped a little. I checked the fluid level—way low, and the light hadn’t come on. I filled it up, but it still was pretty useless until near the bottom of the stroke. I drove home with care. I’m glad I could see the accident from way off, so I had time to coast and down shift. A pickup had run into a concrete wall (I’m guessing) The front clip was demolished, but the driver (presumably) was leaning on his roof, talking on a cell. The cops were about, so it had been several minutes.

My other car still doesn’t start—I could dump some fuel treatment into the line; that worked before. Or, I could go install this glow-plug-powered fuel heater I assembled. I still need parts, but I’ve got enough that it will work.

But my tub drains like normal—I wonder if I had washed too much dirt, or paint, or hair, or epoxy down it (ok, joking about the epoxy).

I think I’ll go make my car go—I’ve got somewhere to be at 7, so I should be able to make it…

News Flash: random happening makes me look awesome

2011-04-02T00:11:00.001-05:00

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

Sometimes the most unpredictable circumstances make me look cool (the end all in life?). Last week, I showed up for Sunday evening service, and we hung greens instead—-and I produced, from my trunk, a stapler and a roll of duct tape. Bryan was impressed—but it really was pretty expected: I’ve been working on stuff, so I’ve been storing tools in my trunk. These items were just the beginning. But, that set the stage pretty nicely for tonight.

For some reason, instead of setting up coffee, Bryan brought cider this evening—and when I got up to where we meet, he had carried a microwave and table up there to heat up the cider. “Would this be better with some brown sugar and cinnamon?” I ask. Yeah do you have some? “In my car” I run out and return with a bag of sugar and cinnamon—with a hint of clove. See, I collect sand samples for somebody in this group, and I had a bag of sand from a recent trip. So, I thought to myself, What if I gave her a bag of brown sugar? Would she notice? So, I got some brown sugar, put it in a clean ziplock and then added cinnamon and cloves. I was going to put in some hot cocoa powder, but it didn’t look like it would add the right colors to make it look like dirt. Turns out, I’d forgotten that soil collector wasn’t going to be there tonight,,,,but it also turned out we had a use for the fake dirt. The funny thing is, it made me look like I had a magic car—and it wasn’t because I’d thought ahead or anything.

What if your entire life was like that? Whenever you did something, it would turn out that it was the best thing that you could have done. Hopefully you wouldn’t just use it to make yourself look awesome, but unlike me, you would use it to bring glory to God, who is the one who sets everything up for us. Sometimes it seems my life is being run for me by God, and it really is a good feeling to know that what happened was totally not my doing, but God’s and it turned out better than I could have managed. Like that time that I wanted a webcam, and then one showed up in the dumpster behind Quad 3 soon afterwards. It made me feel warm inside to think that God was looking out for my needs and wants. Or that time I quit my job on a Friday, drove to MO because I didn’t have anywhere to live anymore…and Monday I had another job, that paid twice as much—but didn’t start for a month. A month that I needed for family stuff.

God often operates with miracles that are “little”, just nudges of the probability distribution so that the “right” thing happens. Not like He’s not “allowed” to operate outside of the natural order, but sometimes He makes it almost fit into the explainable. And if we aren’t watching for it, or talking to Him about it, we might miss it altogether. And it won’t always be something that makes me look cool, but in the end, it will be better. I think there is a verse about it somewhere: God causes all things to work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose.

So, keep your eyes peeled for God at work—even if it’s something as “small” as knowing the correct kind word for the situation, or turning a surreal shenanigan into a delicious drink.

Only read the first paragraph

2011-04-02T00:08:00.001-05:00

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

I’ve been running for the last couple days–spent Thanksgiving in Hutchinson at Fjord and Grey’s parent’s place. Along with about 20 LeTourneau people. It was a great time. We sat around and talked, we ate good food, we stood around a bonfire while the first snow fell. We wired and sheetrocked a basement room. We played Polish Pingpong. We tried to put together a 2128 piece jigsaw puzzle. We played Settlers (I like Seafarers better than Cities and Knights). We played Munchkin (including a 3-hour game where everyone made it one point away from winning). We played a quick game of Axis & Allies—the dice bombed Germany pretty bad. Over and over. We went to church, and they sang “Dem Bones”. Then, as I was getting my car to start after everyone else had left, (sitting for days in the cold without running made it difficult) someone called, saying they were playing frisbee in Wichita, in half an hour. I got there after everyone had warmed up. Then I went to the Sunday evening service (instead of singing and praying together and reading from God’s Word, we hung Christmas ornamentation), and then I went to “a restaurant” with some friends. And it took forever, and the burgers were burned on the outside, and either raw or overcooked on the inside. I ordered a Philly Cheesesteak, which was quite delicious. So I was almost the only one to pay for my meal.

Getting home late (for the first time since Wednesday afternoon), and to bed even later, I was loath to get up in the morning, and as I was about to leave, I realized I had class—in 5 minutes. After class (which was hard to stay awake in) I worked a bit, and went home…only to soon leave for play practice and set setup. I got home, got to bed late, and got up, went to class. At lunch time, I was relaxing at my desk, chewing on a peanut butter sandwich, and someone asked me to come to a meeting. They were rehashing some plan on how they were going to set some system up. So, I ate while I listened to people make suggestions, some useful, some well meaning. Before grabbing some coffee and rushing back to class, I helped make some mark-ups to a document I’d made last week to capture the new decision. These markups made it similar to our original plan that had been modified by an email after I’d sent in an email asking for what seemed best at the time. By the time I got back from class, they had done some experimentation, to see if it was possible (brilliant!) and found that, no, they’d better stick with a variation of last week’s plan. I’ve had my fingers in all the plans, so it doesn’t matter which one wins out–I’ll still be the one who thought of it, or drew it up, or worked it out, or something. Oh, and it doesn’t matter who thought of it, as long as it works. Yeah, getting this planned right is important, but something, anything, is important too. Now. Last week. I don’t really care how it is, my requirements are simple and well known, just make it work.

With coffee, I could sit in class without my consciousness flickering in and out. I was doing stuff, and doing it fast! Almost as fast as the guy next to me who spent half the time reading webcomics! When I got home it was about time to go help build set for the play, which we did, quite successfully, and now I am home…with nothing to do for the rest of the week but dishes to wash…and clothes to sort out, and a bathtub with potting soil on the sides because the drain doesn’t hardly drain (it was like that before the potting soil!) and I don’t want to bring the plumbers in because they might get caught in the drifts of stuff in my apartment, oh, and my rent is going up, so I need to go buy a house but maybe I shouldn’t maybe I should just go rent a house, and get a roomate but no, there isn’t hardly anyone in Wichita that I would want to room with. So, instead, I made an egg quesadilla, and drank some milk, and now I need to go to bed. So I can get up and go to class, so I learn how to do some pretty cool things at work that may save our department from the approaching trainwreck. It’s pretty much like we bought some baby chickens, and the pens for them are on backorder. And we are sure that the heat lamps will get here any minute…

.25″ in by .045″ Diameter

2011-04-02T00:07:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

That’s how big the Black Locust thorn was, that was buried in my index finger, at about a 45 degree angle. I got it Saturday. I was playing disk golf, and I threw a bad shot teeing off for hole 4. It landed in the edge of the woods. I’m usually a stickler for throwing it where it lies, and it was behind some thorn-covered saplings. So, I tried to do a short swing, but didn’t, and a thorn met my finger. I pulled out the little pieces that I could reach. After hole 5, we pulled out the first aid kits, and I tried with a tweezers but couldn’t get it out. So I dressed it, and went back to playing. I made some pretty lucky shots with my off-hand.
I tried repeatedly to dig it out, bought some tweezers—for ultra-fine work, tiny eyebrow hairs, ingrown hairs and huge, sharp, broken-off tree thorns. They weren’t fine enough, so after digging and poking, and cutting and snipping, I got out a stone from a bore-sizing hone, and sharpened the tweezers to a nice point. Finally, Monday evening, I got a good grip on it, and pulled…out. Ouch! But is was relieving to finally be free. It didn’t really bleed. I poured some more alcohol over it, and bandaged it up with triple antibiotic. Now, it hurts slightly if I poke it right. Based on how much room I guess is in my finger, I wonder if it didn’t hit the bone. Whatever, I’m glad it’s out. It has sealed over pretty good, and doesn’t seem to be infected. I guess keeping it alcohol’ed and antibiotic’ed was good. Also, the thorn made a nice tight plug.

Success

2011-04-02T00:06:00.002-05:00

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

A few professionals were talking about success: the first guy said “I think my highest success would be if I were invited to a private conference with the president in the Oval Office.” The second guy said, “No, I’d feel I’d really arrived, if I were in a conference with the president, and the phone rings, and he doesn’t answer it.” The third guy says, “No, you’ve got it wrong, success would be if the phone rings, the president answers it, and says, ‘It’s for you’”
“That’s still pretty short sighted,” says the fourth guy. “I’d be successful if I type a letter into the search bar, and Google Suggest finishes my name for me.”

This was lifted from a book on success by John C. Maxwell. Well, the first three guys were. And John’s point was that success was a journey, not some destination.

Water from the sky!

2011-04-02T00:06:00.001-05:00

Monday, November 5th, 2007

Yup, it’s been just under a month, and water came out of my bathroom ceiling again. The good news is the plumbing upstairs is 97% effective. And this has only been going on since April. Actually, there were a couple months there that I didn’t see much sewer water at all. But, alas, they haven’t fixed it, and they don’t know what to do. Last month, they asked that I call the emergency pager number next time, while it is still wet and dripping, so they can trace it. Yeah, like I spend the day sitting in my bathroom waiting for the soggy ceiling to collapse! I suggested they drill a hole in the ceiling so it would drain into my toilet instead of the floor, but they must not have noticed such a brilliant idea. Instead of helping them out with it, I taped up a plastic bag, and it did its job quite well. I came home today, and the bag was on the floor, but the pint of water in it didn’t appear to have spilled. I poured it into a jar, and took it to the office with a note of explanation. Assured them that I was disappointed, and found it unacceptable. I sort of feel bad leaving a jar of urine on the desk in the office, but it was sealed inside—instead of all over my floor. I really need to get rough with them, but I don’t have the emotional stamina for it. “Enclosed is a sample of the sewer water that fell from my ceiling. This is a typical volume and color.” Maybe thinly veiled condescension will be effective. Or maybe I should call the Health Department.

Food

2011-04-02T00:05:00.002-05:00

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

So, I opened a can of Salmon this evening, and was going to eat it with a fork, but Bolt suggested that I check the internet for recipes. I chose this one because I had avocados in the fridge.

Here’s the recipe:
Grilled Salmon with Mango-Avocado Relish
For the mango-avocado relish:
*1 1/2 avocados
*1/3 cup fresh lime juice
*1 1/2 cups diced mango
*1/3 cup diced red pepper
*1/3 cup chopped scallions

For the salmon:
*1 Tbsp canola oil
*6 salmon fillets,4 to 5 ounces each
*salt to taste
* freshly ground black pepper

You chop up the stuff in the relish and grill the salmon.

Well, I didn’t have any mangos, but I did have an apple, so I chopped that. No lime juice, or even lemon juice, so I put lemon pepper on the salmon. I’m not sure if it is supposed to be chopped red pepper or peppers, but since I had neither, paprika seemed close enough. I had to look up “scallions” —turns out they are green onions. I’ve got onions I could chop…wait, freeze-dried chives are green and onion-like!
I figured frying the salmon in butter would be better than oil, and I sprinkled on some salt and pepper and lemon pepper. Maybe too much pepper, now that I’m eating it.

It turned out pretty good, but I think I would order a different interesting menu item next time. It’s way better than if I’d just eaten it as it comes out of the can.

I doubt that this is going to become a cooking blog.

Chapter 9, in which Tobias once again sides with Tradition

2011-04-02T00:05:00.001-05:00

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

The question:

On 11/1/07, K—— D——– <----------@yahoo.com> wrote:
Tobias,
I just ran across this clip about a company called Steorn. They claim to have developed a form of free energy (greater output than input) which flies in the face of accepted laws of thermodynamics. Who knows? Just wanted to get your perspective.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=346997458258985632
There are some other video clips related to it that are interesting too.
K——-

My response:

“They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern
intelligence won’t accept anything on authority. But it will accept
anything without authority. That’s exactly what has happened here.” –
G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much

I’m not sure what their particular technology involves, but there were some things with weights and magnets that seemed related to the name. Maybe they have found some combination of things that works in a way that commonly held physics does not account for. But I doubt it. I do think they have found a way to make something from nothing: venture capital. Hopefully not yours.

The problem with these claims is that it just doesn’t work. They have prototypes, they have research. But rarely do they have anything that works. It always is one of two things: it almost works, and if they could just fix this little problem, it would work…or it’s a scam. This is because heat flows from your hot coffee to the cold room. Just something about the world makes everything that happens, happen in a direction that makes the available, usable, power dissipate. Every little thing. A ball bounces slower and slower. A wheel slows down. You never coast as far up the next hill as you started. The coffee in your cup doesn’t get hotter and hotter and cool the room. No, everything goes toward a lukewarm existence. Every mountain tends to fall down, and every valley gets filled in. Even if you don’t trust the Establishment. Sure, they are pretty adamant that anyone who claims they have perpetual motion is lying or mislead. But, they have tested a huge number of systems, and combinations of systems, and it always comes back that everything goes downhill. So, they can say pretty strongly that your overbalanced wheel won’t keep spinning forever—-even if you use Magnets (which—I speak as if insane—contain a mystical force which makes things act in ways that science doesn’t understand).

So, if everything is falling, and not bouncing back as high, or spinning to a stop like a wobbling top, how do we survive? How can life go on, with so much working against it? The answer is, the sun.
That ball of fire is pouring so much energy into the world, that we (and plants, and animals and coal plants) are able to stave off the still, lukewarm night by channeling its power into our leaking buckets and letting the fringe of the sun’s rays keep us from starvation and asphyxiation.

It turns out, the sun makes a lot of energy. As our planet orbits this glowing orb, we sweep up a tiny bit of this light and heat. Some of that reflects back out into the darkness of space. Some helps keep the earth from freezing over. And some powers political debates about the risks of current and future trends. Because a little of it we catch, and turn into power. But so much of it slips through our fingers, but we catch enough of it to keep the sails full, and the wheels grinding in the mill.

There is another explanation as to why you see people claiming to make free energy, and nobody actually doing it: it could be because it works.
There is a way to show that you aren’t just miscalculating something, or that your multimeter isn’t inaccurate, and that is to actually have the input to your machine be fed from the output. Often people skip this, and just “demonstrate” that the output is more than the input. But if it really is “over-unity” why not loop the power cord instead of having it plugged into the wall? There is a danger with this: if it actually works, you could get a runaway process going, and it could spin faster, and glow brighter, magnet stronger until POOF! it explodes in a frenzy of energy, and the machine and the inventor who is manning the dials would be lost forever to history.

This is a dramatic, but unworkable theory. Perpetual motion machines end in not a flash, but a whimper.

—-Tobias

If it’s not real, can I have it?

2011-04-02T00:03:00.000-05:00

Monday, October 8th, 2007

I watched a video a while back with some people from work: What the Bleep Do We Know: Down The Rabbit Hole It was an interesting “documentary” on life and quantum mechanics. At the time, it seemed pretty reasonable—there is more to life than meets the eye. Or is described by science. However, since then, I have realized some things. First of all, it is not wrong to continue to believe something even though I have not definitively proven every competing theory to be false. The burden of proof is on others. I can still be open-minded, and not a dogmatic stick-in-the-mud, and yet ask that ideas commend themselves to logic and reason, and actually match with experimental evidence.

Here are the major evidences and conclusions of the movie:
The double-slit experiment: if you watch which slit a photo goes through, it acts like a particle instead of a wave. Therefore: Subjectivity.
Probability: electrons are just jumping around randomly. Can’t really be sure about anything, things can act in non-normal ways. Therefore: fringe “science” is reasonable.
Entanglement: if you get two particles in sync, you can separate them by any distance, and they will act in concert. Therefore: telepathy, positive thinking.
Atomic forces: atoms interact, and push on each other without touching. Therefore: telekinesiscould work, as well as any other “spooky action-at-a-distance”.

Well, it made more sense after watching it, since they weren’t trying to show themselves to be ridiculous. But you get the point. I still agree with their posit that thinking positively is good—if you hate yourself, you will probably hate your life. And even at the time I disagreed with their conclusions about God: they had the idea of a god-force-ness, not really a Person but more of a collective energy. And, I saw that their explanation of Entanglement was factually flawed. See, they said that if you align two particles (photons, for instance) and then send one far away, that if you do something to one of them, the other will instantly (no light-speed-time-delay) be affected. This is actually kinda wrong. You can get two photon entangled, so that they act in similar ways, but rather than doing something to one, and it affects the other, it’s more like, measure them both, and the measurements are predictably related. This predictability, combined with the unpredictability of quantum particles allows companies to build and sell hardware that uses quantum mechanics and entanglement, and the same principles as the double-slit experiment, to transmit data very securely. Nobody can decrypt it, and you can immediately tell if someone is even listening.

So, this video, while interesting, had little scientific value because almost everything they said collapses in on itself if you don’t already believe it. Their syllogisms are faulty. Some of their evidence is factually challenged, and their conclusions are non sequitur. At the root of it, they attempt to use the weirdness of quantum mechanics to disprove science. It’s like saying, “Calculus is non-intuitive. Therefore, math can’t be really true. Can I get change for this $5?” But, the very weirdnesses they cite have experimental evidence to back rigid equations. Even probability is formulistic.

But, if you are invited to watch, “What the Bleep Do We Know” by some sophisticated mystical humanist engineers, go ahead—it will make for some interesting discussion. But don’t rip out your hair trying to convince them that just because there is measurement inaccuracy, a real value does actually exist.

Minutiae

2011-04-02T00:02:00.002-05:00

Saturday, September 29th, 2007

Today I went to a park and played kickball with some people from my company against people from another company. We had lots more people show up, and we beat them handily. Then we bbq’ed food, and played on the playground equipment.
This evening I went with a guy from work to a play. It seems there is a secret underground theater life here in town. There are lots of theaters, but nobody (myself included) don’t know about them. This was my first foray into this world, and it was an auspicious start. Trixie Trueheart, Girl Aviator is an original piece, set in a struggling radio station in the mid 30’s. It was rather touching at parts. It is interesting to willingly suspend belief, and while in a different world, your ideas of what is important is changed. It’s as if it is true, and what happens to the characters matters. There was another level of abstraction, since the story centered around the title radio drama, so the actors are sometimes acting for characters within another story. One character in the outer story has a difficult time remembering that the inner story is just a story, which just makes it more confusing.
Then, after getting our emotions wrenched by this set of stories, it wraps up, and we walk out…where the cast is waiting to greet us. And they are back to being people in our normal reality, and the dream collapses in on itself, but part of you is still in the story.

I was traveling through Missouri, and I stopped, as I am wont to do, at a Subway. Thomas, the cheerful highschool student behind the curved glass and boxes of vegetables, was having a horrible day—he was at work. As I made my order, he removed the lids of the containers he would need. This was a new method I had not seen before. As I named off veggies, he stacked up the lids, giving me an instant visual of what I was ordering, and making it easy for him to remember what I had asked for. I thought all Subways should do this.

There is an oil refinery on the way from MO. Evidently they have some waste liquid or gas, and they vent it up a tall pipe which terminates in a huge orange flame, producing a pall of dark smoke. Seems kind of wasteful—-power that does nothing but light up the sky. It could be used to power my car, and probably yours too. And the smoke just floats away, to drop as ash onto my food. I think I will write to them and suggest they do something about this, and I think I have a solution: Remember that big eye thing on the top of the tower in LOTR? A flame on top of a tower could easily be converted into a lidless eye. Inject the fuel in a pattern that makes it into a glowing, flickering ring.

Tomorrow I go to play practice, to practice so that when I perform, the audience is able to willingly suspend belief, and invest themselves into the story, so that when the spell is broken, part of them is left behind, or part of the story lives on in their mind, and so the story never ends.

Things I’ve learned

2011-04-02T00:02:00.001-05:00

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

It turns out a bottle jack won’t fit under my car’s jack point. Not with a flat tire. At 10pm. Toward the end of a 5 hour drive. But, I found a place to put it, and got the car jacked up enough that by deflating and mashing the spare I was able to get it on. A police officer stopped and held a flashlight while I finished pumping it back up. I traded in the bottle jack for a floor jack.

I found out one good thing about rap. I don’t mean to sound like a racist, but I have had a hard time enjoying rap as a valid and useful genre. I guess I have been tainted by the stereotype that gives all the law-abiding, peace-loving, self-providing rappers a bad name. So, when a guy I work with handed me a CD, and it turned out to be Christian-themed rap, I had a hard time buying into it. But, I noticed that this artist talked about his faith in common terms—the music was in the same world we live in, not some abstracted higher plane. I found myself reacting to the words in the split second before I could switch into theology mode. My normal music uses a large amount of imagery and non-standard diction. This makes it easier for me to have two different brains: the one I think with all the time, and the one I use when I am spiritualized. Imagery is fine, if it helps you understand. But if it doesn’t, don’t worry about it, and find something that does.

I went to the Ozark Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Expo. It was interesting. I found out some useful information, some from workshops, some from just hanging out with people. It turns out that running Straight Vegetable Oil in your diesel is fine—I used to think that it was better for your engine to run biodiesel. There was a guy with a TDI Jetta that he had put 90,000 veggie miles on it, and had no problems related to the fuel. Another guy had a nice set up in the back of his older VW that was elegant, and primitive. Everyone seemed to agree that SVO was a good alternative. Except the guys selling the biodiesel setup. “Do you want this going through your injectors?” he enthused, holding up a jar with a layer of biodiesel and it’s black, glycerine, by-product. Well, it looks worse when it is pulled off the carbon chains. The guys who sell SVO conversion kits told me about people with cars almost like mine, who had success with Vegetable Oil. One good thing is I could run SVO in the winter—since I have two tanks of fuel, I can start my car anytime it will start on normal diesel. (Biodiesel becomes unusable as it gets cold)

Some people who have different worldviews from me, act in a consistent manner. A total stranger, Luke, and I worked late into the evening on wiring up a PhotoVoltaic system some guy was putting on a little trailer of batteries. It turns out Luke is a vegan. “It is amazing how little you can eat if you eat healthy”. He didn’t want any of the 40% DEET I put on myself, and instead of slapping the mosquitoes that landed on us, he shooed them away. Another guy I talked to was looking into alternative forms of energy, because he lived off the grid (i.e.: not hooked to the electric company) I asked him what he currently used, photovoltaic, wind, generator? No, just primitive—no electric. “I go to third world countries a lot, and when I get back, it’s like I’m in heaven! There aren’t flies, I don’t have to carry my water a long way…was down in Haiti, helping set up solar ovens–a lot simpler than the ones they have here. Trying to make so the people didn’t have to use cow dung for fuel, grow food with it instead—there are no trees, just bare dirt. We were planning to use cardboard for the ovens, but they don’t have cardboard. Most places have at least paper, but they have nothing.” I don’t think he drives a hybrid, but if he had, he could have parked much closer, in a special area.

I found out that cutting your hair with a vacuum cleaner and a scissors is difficult if not disastrous. Even with a spacer taped to the vacuum hose. I also found the clippers at walmart (near shampoo), in the middle of the night. It took two trips and some info from a friend.

So, I learned some stuff, but now I must go to bed. I played Ultimate this evening with people who were way better than me. My body is screaming things at me.

some thoughts

2011-04-01T23:57:00.002-05:00

Saturday, September 15th, 2007

I like my car. It drives differently from my other car, but it is cool. I am now one of those single, well-paid, technical people who buy cars so that they can feel like they are important. Why do I need two cars? Even I can only drive one at once! Before you know it, I’ll be in my garage all the time, shining the hood ornament.

The world in round, but it is inside-out from what you were taught in school (unless you were homeschooled–we know they all think the world is flat, and PI is “about 3″). So, when you look up at the sky, and see a blue dome, what you are seeing is the Pacific Ocean. It is huge and has no visible continents on it. But, at night, you can see the lights from the ships and stuff. Oh, and the classic “proof” of the earth being convex and round—the fact that when you see ships in the distance, you can only see the tops of them? This is a mirage. The temperature differences between the sky and water make the air have a temperature gradient and an inversion layer forms that refracts the light, and makes it look like the horizon curves away. Plus, they can tell you whatever, because you’re never going to watch a square-rigger disappear over the horizon.

There is a billboard I’ve seen around town that has intrigued me. It has a picture of a baby, on whose forehead is printed a blank Nutritional Facts label. The billboard reads: “Everything comes with Nutritional Information. Except her.” And then there is some text that is too small to read without swerving off the road. If their message is what I think it is, I totally agree: don’t eat babies! I thought this was pretty obvious, but then I figured it was obvious that when you are turning, you should use your turn signals.

And here is a [rant] that I was sending to a friend instead of getting some sleep. I figured I’d just stick it here. He was asking me what I missed about Windows:

When I switched from Windows to Linux, it was while I was in college, about a year after getting my first computer (a cast-off I bought for a couple bucks or scavenged). So, I didn’t really miss anything from windows 98, other than a driver for my webcam. Now, what I have trouble with are: web-based graphics occasionally don’t work quite as expected. Also, there are no good CAD programs for Linux. In fact, there are very few “good” CAD programs in the world, and the only one that gets ten out of ten (that I have used) is SolidWorks, but that is another subject. (if you want a free, OK CAD program, try the free version of Alibre). If I used windows I would probably use the little, random programs that make some particular task easier. All those little downloads that fill up your desktop and Start menu.

What do I anti-miss about windows? Never having to worry about viruses. Never having spyware, or adware or even having to scan for it, or worry if it is slowing down my computer. The package manager for Linux/Debian/Ubuntu is hugely superior to anything you find in windows. In windows, when you want a program, you either, drive somewhere and buy it (it’s only 39.99!) or you find it, download it (only 19.99 or even free) then you save it to your desktop, Then you unzip it, run the installer script, tell it where to save it. It puts an icon in your start menu in a new folder along with some junk icons, it puts an icon on your desktop, and it puts an icon in your QuickLaunch, and it is always running on your system tray. Then you reboot, delete the zip file off your desktop, and you are ready to go! Until an update comes out, and you have to repeat the process.

In Linux, if you want a program, the easiest way to get it is using the command line: “sudo aptitude install program name” (and because you have tab completion, you only have to type part of most words, and it finishes it for you–including the program name). Then you hit enter, put in your password, it tells you how much space it will take, and asks if you want to continue. Hit enter and….in a moment, the new program show up in your menu (once). If you can’t type things for some reason, you can use a graphical interface, with search, and rightclick on one or many programs and check “Install” and push a button, and it will do the same thing as the command line. There are thousands of programs. Oh, and to update all of the programs on my computer, I run two commands (or click a couple buttons) and it will go download and install all of the updates. All of my operating system’s updates. All the updates to the little programs I’ve installed. Everything. (unless I installed something using the primitive download-unzip-install method—which is rarely worth doing) And, you have to reboot for: updates to the hardware, updates to the kernel. (or if something locks up too bad, which does happen to me).

And, I never have to worry about Genuine Windows Advantage. Nobody turns off my security if I replace some hardware and don’t call up MS and beg them to let my computer work. Everything on my computer is there because I want it to be, and because I can choose what goes and what stays, the people who develop stuff make sure that they are working in my best interest. If it looks like they are pawns of some company that wants control over the users, the community moves away from them. There is incentive to make their system replaceable, rather than locking in the user—because the community cares about choice.

For only the low, low price of $29.99 a month, you too can have this freedom! Just send us your firstborn as a deposit–to make sure you don’t use my system in the wrong way, and we will get you signed up. And for complete functionality, “your” computer must always be connected to our server, and don’t put tape over the webcam at any time. We hope you enjoy the music we have selected for you. This month’s theme is “Why you should buy a Toyota”…

Breaking radio silence

2011-04-01T23:57:00.001-05:00

Sunday, September 9th, 2007

Today I went and picked up my new car. This is the first car I’ve actually picked out—the others were just sort of there, and available when I needed transportation. Not this Mercedes. It is the car I have wanted for quite a while: a 1984 diesel 300SD. I drove back from Kansas City without incident—except for the black smoke when I accelerate hard. My brother said it was some valve someone must have disabled, which made me feel better about it. By the end of the 3 hour trip I was pretty comfortable with the car.
On my Mazda, I’ve been ignoring most maintenance and upkeep that is not totally necessary. Things like vacuuming it out, or replacing parts instead of just removing them. But I plan to do a little more to this car. As a gesture of goodwill, this evening I wiped down the interior, cleaning the layer of dust off of it. It is still going to have some tears and dings, but it will be a little less dingy.
This car is sturdy. I was looking at it’s structure—the word that comes to mind is “tank”. The undercarriage looks like you could drive over flaming engine blocks without a problem. Not that I plan to do that, but I could. It isn’t impervious to damage, however. The drivers-side doors are slightly bent where it ran into something. I have another set of doors, but they would need repainting to match the rest of the car (dark silver with pealing clear-coat). And I would need to repair the rear door sill where it has been bent inward. But, I’m not sure if I want to dothat much work to it. But I do plan to clean the floors, if I can find an outlet to plug the vacuum into.

In other news, last weekend I went, with some people from church, down to Turner Falls—a place in Oklahoma where a creek runs through some mountains. In fact, it seems to be the best place Oklahoma has where cool water and rocks meet in a picturesque way. Which is probably why we couldn’t get in Sunday midday when we arrived—they had admitted 5000 people already, and had closed the park to any more. So, we went to the cabin where we were staying, and played in a different river. This one was warm and red. It was, as they say, “to thin to plow, to thick to drink”. You couldn’t see the bottom when you cupped the water in your hands. But, all this silt piled up along the edges, and made nifty “quickmud”. You could walk on top, but if you stamped your feet, you would sink in above your knees. It was kind of tricky to get back out of once that happened. The river rushed along very quickly—I could barely hold my own in a slow area—standing waist deep, or swimming against the current. But a lot of the 100′ wide river was only knee-to-waist deep. And the bottom was very hilly. It was a fun way to spend the afternoon. As it got dark, I wandered around the 70 acre hayfield between the river and the cabin where everyone else was sitting around a fire. It was quiet and peaceful in the country. I sang “The Spacious Firmament” as the stars came out.
After eating s’mores, we all found places to sleep. There weren’t enough beds to go around, so I slept outside, on a round bale. The bugs bothered me some, so I brought out the DEET and sprayed it on until they all went away. Then all I had to deal with was the fact that a bale is shorter than me by about 2 feet. And, my single, thin blanket was pretty chilly as the night wore on. Other than that, it was pretty ok, out under the stars and the dew. And it was more like camping than just living in “cabin.” (It actually was a house, and other than lacking an oven, was nicer than my own.) Next time you need to sleep on a haybale, here’s what to do:

Bring a warm blanket. Even in the summer, the nights get cold
Stack bales together. One bale is too short, and lying crosswise is only comfortable for a little while.
Bug spray. Bugs live near bales. If I hadn’t had it, my life would not have been much fun.
Have something between you and the hay. Even if you aren’t allergic to hay, you don’t want in all over you.

So, if you have a choice between a hard floor and some bales, go with the bales. But, roll two bales end-to-end. Or better yet, flop two or three on their ends, so you have a flat platform to lay on. You won’t feel like you’re camping.

Oh, then the next day we went to the Falls, scrambled around on some rocks, and went swimming in the cold water, swam under the falls (we weren’t supposed to) and ate lunch in a trashed-out, overcrowded picnic area. The water was full of minerals, so it was milky, and deposited rock, gluing the creek bed together. After lunch we went down to a big dammed-up pool area where they had a slide and diving board. It was fun. And about as crowded as the Y. Unlike the Y, no one was there telling people not to go down the slide head first. Or when it is safe to follow the next person.

Next time I go, I’m going to Missouri. I guess Turner Falls would be more attractive if my previous swimming experience was in a pond full of cows.

Oh, and this is an awesome video of the sun:http://www.orbitingfrog.com/blog/movies/SuninUV.mpg

addictions

2011-04-01T23:55:00.002-05:00

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

I have to admit it: I am addicted. Usually, it’s only “other people” who have life-altering dependencies. But this time it’s me, addicted to food.
When I see people with addictive behaviors, I wonder, “Why don’t they just…stop?” Are they just so nebbish that they can’t just say “no” to their cravings? They know they should stop, they kinda want to stop, but they keep on going. But now, I realize how hard it is. And I’m not even going cold turkey—I’ll continue to be a social eater, have a few burgers with the guys, but what is a problem is sitting alone in my apartment, scarfing down food. I start with a plate of food—”one plate should do….” and I eat it, and then I get some more food, and eat it. And I know I should stop, but I still feel…empty. And then in a few hours, I get hungry again. It never lasts.
So, I’ve failed again. Got home at 10pm after spending the day at the pool, and then frisbee, and then evening service,,,and I keep from loading up on food until after my shower, but then I heated up some enchiladas and ate them, by the light of my computer monitor. And I’m still hungry, even though there is something in my stomach. Guess everybody is doing it. A little more food won’t be much worse, while I’m off the wagon already…I’ll quit—tomorrow… and what do you know? The Verse-of-the-Day from two places each say something pertinent:

1 Corinthians 6:19-20
“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.”

and,

Hosea 7 : 5
On the day of the festival of our king the princes become inflamed with wine, and he joins hands with the mockers.

How best to keep people from dying

2011-04-01T23:55:00.001-05:00

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

This page shows how many people in the world die of different things for different lengths of time. Kinda morbid, but it showed me some interesting comparisons. Take war, for instance: 460 so far today. Now, I am usually pretty much against people getting killed because they can’t get along, but maybe I should be more focused on helping my neighbors not feel the urge to take their own lives, since the suicide count is at 2,348. Or malaria, at 2,451. Or maybe I should drive more carefully—traffic accidents clock in at over 3K. But, the big killer is still cardiovascular, which just crossed the 45,000 mark. That’s forty-five thousand people dead. How can I help reduce that? Encourage people to go get some exercise, by building a park, or inviting someone to come out and fly a kite with me? I don’t see “old age” on there, so maybe that is mixed into the other numbers. Maybe the “heart stopped when he was 110″ skews the cardiovascular number some. But still, there are a good many people dying.

But is death all that bad? Everyone dies eventually, and I’m not dead-set on living to be 110. And it seems that how you live is more important than how long you live. Of the 150+ thousand people who died thus far today—how many of them were really alive? Living life for something more important than their next meal. Having a goal deeper than, having a good time during their [short] life? It would seem that helping people not die, may be dwarfed by the task of helping those remaining people to actually live. There are 6,612,897,237 of us who would benefit from hearing an encouraging word, being shown Christ’s love, and being guided into better relationships with God and people.

The good news is that those two goals are not in competition with each other. We don’t have to help people live, at the cost of people dying, but as Jesus brings health and joy to our current existances, His plans for us can reduce our death rate, as well as ultimately make death not really even worthy of the name. And we can share this with others, until we all join in one song of “Salvation to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.“

Methinks he doth protest too much.

2011-04-01T23:54:00.000-05:00

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

We staged a protest today. Couple people from town, one guy came down from Reno county.
It was fun. Cool to see all the different reactions on people’s faces. The Pro-Casino slogan is “Yes, Yes, Win-Win” (summarizing how they want you to mark your ballot, and who they think it will benefit). So, we started out with:

Yes
Yes
Pave this Library

People looked at it and wondered what we were saying. We also brought out “Gamble with the Future”. Grey made “FUN before Learning” and “Bookworms never made MILLIONS” and taped himself in between. We had a “Libraries are for Loosers” [sic.] sign, and Jason drew up “Books R 4 fools” and put it on. But, after talking to people we realized that we were acting on some obscure and faulty premises—it turns out the “remove the library” proposal had been withdrawn two weeks ago, and it was just one idea out of many, so people didn’t know about it. Of course, everything is still a possibility because the counsel won’t decide until after we vote, but we were satirically protesting an idea that wasn’t forefront in people’s minds. So, maybe our “Gamble with the Future” sign was the most fitting. Anyway, we decided we needed a different angle.

Grey thought up “Casinos Now, Progress Never” so we split it onto two signs and stood side by side. It wasn’t as anti-library, so we felt more comfortable, but I think it drew more criticism from the passersby. But some people were cheering for us—probably because they saw the word “Casino”.
See, protesting with satire is hard–usually you only have time to convey “I’m on your side” or “I hate you and all you stand for”—which makes protests largely useless, because people either already agree with you, or already have written you off. So, when have a complex message, they see a key word, and use that to determine what side you are on. Really all you can get across is what camp you are associated with, not a whole message. But, maybe with a Burma-Shave style multi-message it would work. That way, you could have time to transmit a whole sentence. As it was, our message was pretty well hidden. The few people who walked by and talked to us needed to have it explained to them, so I am guessing that the people in cars reallydidn’t get it.

But, even just watching people drive by for a couple hours was instructive. I saw many different types of people, and it gave the city a face and showed me that you can reach a vertical slice of the social classes from the side of the road. Also, I learned about people’s reactions to this sort of thing. Some people waved and gave us a thumbs up. Some smiled and gave us a thumbs down. (down with us? down with casinos? the library?) Some people acted like they didn’t see anything, but most people wore confusion. It was a good trial run to know how things work. When I have a real message to get across, I’ll know how to do it.

You should try protesting sometime. It is fun. Even if what you say mostly gets confused stares, all the looks are worth a laugh or two.

Water

2011-04-01T23:53:00.002-05:00

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

I’m starting to get the feeling that water has no nutritional value. Sure, you need it, but it doesn’t make you less hungry. You drink water, and initially it can make you not feel like you need to eat, but it quickly wears off. Now, I can hear you protesting that all food only fills you for a while, and then you are hungry again, so how is water different? I too was under that impression for a while, but after some experimentation, I have concluded that water is much more transient, and doesn’t change the slope of the curve of hunger vs. time, but just masks it for short time. Eventually you have to either go to sleep, or go cook something.

Oh, and how does 4pm on this Saturday (the 4th) sound for our protest of the Library? Meet at the Central Branch of the Wichita Library, and you can bring your own signage, or, use some poster board I’ll bring. Think up more pro-Casino, anti-Learning slogans!

the world as we know it

2011-04-01T23:53:00.001-05:00

Saturday, July 28th, 2007

I saw this video (15 mins0) about world health wealth statistics—or, making these statistics availible to people. He has some cool graphical representations that show what the world is like, without having to pore over lists of numbers.
http://www.gapminder.org/video/talks/ted-2007—the-seemingly-impossible-is-possible.html

So, that is what our world is like. Good to know, what is going on, if we are to make it better…

You can play around with the charts yourself, if you don’t want to sit through the whole presentation. It is a pretty nifty program. http://tools.google.com/gapminder
But the presentation has more information, including exerpts from this:
human-development-trends
Which gives information about world incomes.

Just some interesting information. I think it will help me spot half-truths in the propaganda I constantly hear.

ad tedium

2011-04-01T23:51:00.001-05:00

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

It seems that no matter where I go in my career, having to do repeatative tasks never is far behind. Maybe I kid myself to think that I have gotten beyond the laborer class.

At work, I was annoyed that what I was doing was mostly useless because I could be replaced by a very simple shell script. I was going down two lists of parts, making sure that they matched. I did feel slightly smug because I had pushed two computers together, and was running both mice, scrolling through the lists, comparing the excel sheet to the main system. Unlike excel, the system that we use to keep track of our parts has one weakness: the mouse scroll wheel has no effect.

I wanted to make sure that the problem wasn’t with me, so I sent an email to our support people:

The scroll wheel on my mouse has no effect in [this program]. Is this a problem with my system and settings or is simply a feature of [the program]?
Either way, how can I make the scroll wheel move the displayed data so I don’t have to click the arrows on the scroll bar?
Thank in advance,
—Tobias

Well, ok, maybe I knew the answer already; so the reply didn’t surprise me too much:

[the program] doesn’t work with a scroll wheel.

Maybe you don’t use a scroll wheel all the time, or at all, but I do. That way, rather than going over and finding the little buttons, you just move your finger–without taking your eyes off your work–and you can make the display change. This became a standard feature in the late 90’s. This program is a main pillar in many huge companies. They pay people large amounts of money to interact with it. And it is lacking basic modern functionality. Good thing I’m paid by the hour! I get paid to stop what I am doing, move my mouse over to a tiny button or slider, interact with it precisely, and then go back to work. Sure it only take a moment. But hundreds of time a day, hundreds of users…I’d expect better from the system. Not like the rest is polished, but a scroll wheel seems obvious these days.

So, I am annoyed by the tedious tasks. The little things that I do, over and over that I really don’t have to. And as I scanned down a list of parts…”this assembly, and it’s components…yep, matches this list…” it reminded me of some other lists. See, I’ve been reading Ezekiel lately, the end of it, and it goes into great detail about the temple, the dimensions, the chambers, each level, the walkways and gates…kind of like Exodus, with the tabernacle “…forty sockets of silver under the twenty boards, two sockets under one board for its two tenons and two sockets under another board for its two tenons;” It struck me: if God thought it worthwhile to put all these detail in, and have scribes copy it over and over for millennia, maybe I should be ok with a little repetition. Sure, I’m not building a temple, a house for the glory of God to dwell, but my life and my work should show His glory. Even while making extra clicks, if that is what I have to do to get the job done.

Libraries are for Losers!

2011-04-01T23:50:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007

Ok, Sedgwick County is looking to put in a Casino, and/or a racetrack casino. As I mentioned before, the Central Public Library is one of the potential sites for this. It would take out the library, the expo center, and a hotel. The expo center has a huge auditorium where I went and heard a symphony last Christmas. It is pretty much a bad idea to bring in a casino, or so I am told.
So, I don’t want this cancer to eat into my city. What can I do?

I could protest it: go out in the street with signs and slogans and vent my spleen on the passing public about how horrible casinos are, and how this casino will create an estimated 5200 to 7800 pathological gamblers, and how the 80-20 rule applies: most of the revenue comes from a few (unhealty) customers.
But, if I got a group canvasing the city, decrying the vileness casinos will bring, most people will either: already agree, or pass us off as “activists”. But, what if we did a little reverse psycology? We could shout about how cool casinos are, make slightly rediculous arguments about how we should have these casinos, and hand out forms to get people to sign up to vote. It may get the attention of more people, and it would be alot more fun. Especially if we were picketting in front of the Library, telling about how much better a casino is than a library. It would be hard to have good taglines that look like they are downing reading and education, but by the time the advance ballots get to our audience’s mailboxes, they realize that we are ideots and they vote it down. So, what should our signs say? Here are some things I’ve thought of so far:

LIBRARIES
are for
LOSERS

SLOT MACHINES
not BOOKS

With a Million Dollars you can PAY someone to read to you!

KIDS NEED KASH
not
EDUKATION

Give Jonny penny-slots
not ….??

I’m sure you can think of better ones…
By the way, none of the proceeds would go to improve public education.

Everything you know is wrong

2011-04-01T23:49:00.000-05:00

Sunday, July 1st, 2007

So, I thought I’d go ahead and be politically active, and so I contacted my senator and asked that he support “Net Neutrality”. And, today I found a letter in my mailbox from Senator Brownback. Evidentally, senators don’t need stamps, they just have to sign in the corner where a stamp would be, and their content gets whisked to me. Cool.
So, the letter thanks me for my input, of course, and explains why government regulation of the free market would stifle creativity and innovation among the broadband access providers. The arguments I had heard for why these providers shouldn’t be allowed to charge content providers for quality service evidently do not appeal to all people. So, what do I believe? Are the proponents so-called “Net Neutrality” just anti-bussiness activists? Is S. Brownback being paid off? How do you find the truth when everything you hear is at least kinda true, and people you assume to be reasonable and intelligent are on both sides of the issue?

And Net Neutrality doesn’t really matter. Sure, if the pro-regulation people are right, before long the telecoms will decide what you see on the internet, by charging the people who have websites extra if they want their reader to be able to see their website in a timely manner. So it will be like having a couple dozen channels on TV, rather than millions of sites. And if the other side—that says just let the market, not the government, decide—if they are right, and don’t get their way, the internet will become stagnate, with telecoms not able to afford new fiber, and you will soon have slow service across the board. Those are the worse-case senarios.
But, there is an issue with not being able to tell which side of an issue is the correct one. And it is more important than freedom on the internet. This is matters of faith: what do you believe.

I am constanly exposed to different views on God, the universe and everything—the stuff that really matters. From people at work, to things I read, to people I talk to. And maybe this is a problem, but I try not to be the kind of person that is stereotyped as sticking with what they believe, even if it appears illogical, because that is how we’ve always believed, and we aren’t going to change now! Instead, I figure that if it is correct, it will be evident upon careful analysis. The problem is, rather than having a filter that just rejects everything that doesn’t line up exactly with my historic views, I have to logically evaluate everything I hear, to figure out if it is correct or not. And since I hear alot, this is hard.

And usually I am lazy. Too lazy to go check all the facts, so I absorb a view as “one way of looking at things that has some validity”. That’s a lot easier than picking it apart, and trying to decide if everything they claim as premises are actually true, to the extent that they are claiming, and if the interpretation they propose is actually logical. Instead, I grant the idea some credibility, which starts to cast reasonable doubt on my own beliefs. I have been led to believe that the burden of proof for my own beliefs lies with me—-that in order to be intelectually honest, I have to have logical, provable, testable evidence for what I believe before I can call for the same from someone who disagrees. But, with some of the most important things in life—”is there a God?”, “did life form by accident?”, “who says morality isn’t just a helpful ideal?”, “is this true, or do you just want it to be?”—on many issues, it is hard to get out your test tubes and multimeters and prove which view is correct.
Or maybe that’s another almost-truth that I’ve kinda given credance to.

So, maybe I just draw a line in the sand, and say, “This is what I believe, if I’m going to change, you’d better have some incontrovertible proof that this new view is correct!” But, wouldn’t that make me stick with things even if they aren’t true? I’ve been wrong before.

Maybe I need to do more in-depth analysis myself. I did a little research on Net Neutrality, and found out that it is more complex than it looks, and laws might not protect the consumer. We can’t make a law telling telecoms to “be nice”. This page seems to be a good view. But I’ve got no proof that what he says is true

Today

2011-04-01T23:48:00.004-05:00

Tuesday, June 26th, 2007

Today I went to work, and scheduled the same meeting as my boss—a week earlier.
Today I ate my lunch with a laminated card because I didn’t have a spoon.
Today I went to walmart and bought shoes I have needed for months.
Today I bought a toilet brush and have a sparkling toilet bowl.
Today I cleaned up my living room for a bible study that only the leader showed up to.
Today I drank a Jones Soda for the first time.
Today I watched the Blues Brothers behind a coffee shop.
Today I drove home in 13 minutes.

Garden

2011-04-01T23:48:00.003-05:00

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

This morning I went over to my small group leader’s house, and after breakfast, we started making a garden in their backyard. We didn’t have a tiller, so we used shovels to turn in the grass. A couple robins stopped by to find the bugs that we uncovered, and we would toss them grubs, which they would carry away in their beaks. By noon we had a three-cornered lot about fifteen feet by ten feet. It is going to take some work to get the grass dead—especially the wiregrass (thankfully, there isn’t much of that). Next step is to chop up the grass as it continues to grow, and once it is sufficiently dead, and the clods broken up, we will plant some stuff. Not sure what to plant yet, probably some pepper plants and tomato plants. Some beans would be good. I’d like to dig up some small spots elsewhere in the yard and put in some winter squash. Probably put down gobs of grass clippings. We do need to gather grass clippings, but that doesn’t seem to hard. This afternoon I got about a dozen bags—they are in my car, waiting to be transfered to the backyard. I hope they don’t permanently make my car smell…

This afternoon, after a nap, I went and played volleyball with some people from work. We had a good time.
I’m thinking that gardening is going to help fill my need to dig things and do things, and I may not have to build a house. Like it would be possible.

Thursday I drove south instead of home after work. I followed this aproximate route. Mulvane is on the line between Sedgwick and Sumner Counties, and Udall is in Cowley. Udall is about 30 minutes from work, while Mulvane is only about 17. But, driving around down there, I began to question if I actually wanted to live out in the rural areas, so far from my (few) friends and other things of interest that cities provide. The significance of the counties is that Sumner and Cowley do not appear (at first glance) to have building codes, so I would have more freedom to experiment with unconventional building methods. It would mean a lot more digging than I did today—my hands are sore, and almost blistered in some places. It seems like a cool idea, but then I realize that I can’t seem to find the motivation to wash my dishes or clean up my house, or even finish building a piece of furniture—what makes me think I could keep at something like building a house, and then living with the results?
Meanwhile, here is a cool modular home company

The roof, the roof,,,,

2011-04-01T23:48:00.001-05:00

Monday, June 18th, 2007

So, I’m getting ready for bed, and I look out my window, and see a reflection of flames in the windows of the building across from me. Orange flickering light. Yes, it’s a reflection of my building. Third floor. Something is burning. The lightning flashes in the gathering storm clouds. Well, I’d better figure out what it is. I walk outside an look up. Flames alright. From the Tiki torches on the third floor balcony. Intentional. Another boring night. That’s good.

Car Mileage

2011-04-01T23:46:00.002-05:00

Saturday, June 16th, 2007

I have been driving my 1990 Mazda Protege for over 3 years. Every time I filled it with gas, I would write down the information—I wouldn’t have, except my sister had a notebook of the information, so I just continued. I’m glad I did, now I have a record of every (almost) tank of gas this beater has drunk. Below is the last year of data.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pX6diIF07I8p4Z_yl_V4fZw
As you can see, I’ve done a good many miles—about 1000 per month, and that costs me about $100. How could I reduce this? I could buy a car that gets better than 26 mpg. I could not drive so much. If I cut out my ~monthly multi-hundred-mile trips (seen by dates near each other), I could reduce how much I spend—but at what cost? Not seeing friends and family? I could also buy a car that uses diesel, and get used cooking oil for free, and turn it to biodiesel for about 80 cent/gallon. At the same mileage, that’s about a third the price.
But, for that, I really should have a garage to store/process the oil. So, I should buy a house with a garage. And instead of renting at $460 per month, I could buy a house with a (460+70)/month mortgage. At 30 years and 6.5%, that means I could buy an $84,000 house (with garage) and I’d only end up paying 190,800 dollars by the time I was done (if I didn’t refinance). So, when I was 56, I would have a house, free and clear! And if apprieciation was 3%, I could sell it for a good 127,440! That could buy my RV so I could retire and travel around the country. Only RV’s will cost alot more then, so maybe it would buy my 4th car, and a tent, and I could travel in style.
If there were other options for Americans, maybe I could make it work out better.

Jess and Robert have updated their blog! Pictures of Moravia, with hints of more posting in the future: http://wesatterinafield.blogspot.com/

The Next Big Thing(tm)

2011-04-01T23:46:00.001-05:00

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007

net business opportunity: an add-on for myspace, facebook, blogger, del.icio.us, youtube, etc that pulls them all together into a common interface that is better and allows you to add content to any of them, and it self populates over them all. That way, you don’t stick with something that is mediocre because of a lock-in and all your friends are there—all your friends are everywhere. And it’s all connected. It’s Web 2.0^2. Who wants to help me?

Here’s the thing. Capitalism works, and it works well. But, companies have realized that they don’t have to be the best, or even very good, all they go to do is use advertizing to hook customers, and then set things up so they are stuck. Or, be big enough that customers really have no other choice. (how many cable providers can you access?) What lets this work is the sad truth: People put up with it! People don’t demand, or even ask for the option to easily move on to something different if something better comes along. They put their lives into myspace, knowing that if virb.com comes along, they can’t move—their information, their cool profile setup, their global network, it’s all stuck in myspace. And they don’t tell Tom “I’d like to have export options. And if you could make friend requests, bullitin board posts, and messages all RSS so I can just plug them into my new blog, that would be great. I’m not going to sign up for your 24/7 ad machine until I know I can leave when I want to.” If the companies had that kind of customers, the customers would be better served, because the companies would have to actually compete on quality of service. Not just compete on the ability to get that initial sign up.

So, your mission, is to become a customer that cares about quality, that cares about choice. Also, if you want to, let’s build a system that short circuits the corporate lock-in strategy. At least for online social networking. We’ll work on telcom’s later.

change of plans

2011-04-01T23:45:00.000-05:00

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Today I went to my Tuesday evening Bible study. We hold it in a side room at a coffee shop in the River Side area of town. It’s a somewhat up-scale part of town, lots of single family dwellings lining the river and the parks folded into the bends of the river. As I approached the coffee shop, I noticed, that although I was only 5 minutes early, there was nobody at our usual glass table. Then I realized that it was Monday. So, I figured I’d do something with my life other than go home and scroll through webcomics. I went to a nearby park, and looked at the native animals (mostly birds, a few turtles, a bobcat even!). They keep them in this big cage box near the edge of the park. There were kids playing in the water-fountain-and-sprayer section of the park. I didn’t join them, but set off in search of the local library. I found it, near the Convention Center and some lots that are being torn up (either to put in some parking, or an arena the local government’s good ol’ boys have been itching for—a smaller-than promised arena for a sales tax that has gone on longer-than-promised,,anyway…) I found the library and go myself a library card. It seemed like a good place—the central branch among many all over town. Too bad it’s on the short-list for being replaced with a casino. Will someone please think of the children? ….who’s schools will get all this money from the casino so they can, say, learn math better.
They said that the first time, I could only check out two books, and once I returned them, I could check out more. So, I chose C.S. Lewis’s Boxen, and a guide for homeowners who wanted energy independance.
I was almost home when I remembered I had wanted to check the local grocery store’s dumpster, since I am trying to move toward anti-establishmentism. But alas, they had a stupid compactor bin. So I drove home without. I’m kinda hungry.

Here is a place by my apartment that could really use a rain garden

Should I ask permission, or just do it?

Reliability

2011-04-01T23:44:00.000-05:00

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

In our daily lives, we filter huge amounts of data. One sieve we run it through is the “is it true?” filter. Suprizingly, we usually get it right.

Today, I told a coworker that the sky was falling. They, of course, disreguarded it is a non-answer to the non-question they had asked (”How is it going?”). A little earlier, people twice my age listened with confidence as I described to them a problem, and gave specifics about what a drawing said. Even though I am not a reliable source of information, people are able to filter the useful from the non-useful.

Sometimes I pull reliable information from patently unreliable sources. For example, I don’t watch the news because it’s too biased, so I get most of my news from webcomics. I am pretty sure that EMI is moving toward DRM-free music, based on a comic a couple weeks back. However, I don’t think that the conversation from whence I gleamed this info actually occured between picketers and a CEO.

Sometimes my reality filter fails me, however. I was reading an article today about science, and I had skimmed through a couple paragraphs and thought it gave useful information….and then I saw it was published in The Onion (a parody newspaper). That little bit of information showed that what I was reading was probably unfounded, and likely wrong. Yet, I had thought it gave some good points.

So, calibrate your bunk-o-meter well, because you are going to have to filter a lot of different information, and catagorize the true from the not-as-true

home sweet home

2011-04-01T23:35:00.000-05:00

Wednesday, May 30th, 2007

Here is my kitchen floor.

And here is my living room.

I’m in the process of building another piece of funiture. If it suceeds, it will be really cool. If I actually spent much time on it, I’d be done by now, and the mess cleaned up. And now it is after 11, I need to put in some bread, and go to bed, and I have something of a sore throat.

Traveling

2011-04-01T23:34:00.000-05:00

Saturday, May 19th, 2007

I spent the week in Connecticut, traveling for my job. We have a new program, building an airframe for a customer on the east coast, and I needed some training and we needed to do some coordination with them.
Turns out, Connecticut isn’t as crowded as I figured it would be. There are actually trees and hills and rivers between the houses and road. Roads that wind here and there, and connect in unexpected ways.
I also found out that one of my friends from college lives in CT, working for the company we are working with. So, I spent some evenings hanging out with him and his friends.
Traveling is fun, especially when you don’t have to pay for it. But living in a hotel room away from my current friends, my stuff and my computer is somewhat difficult. Or at least different. And it might be good for me, especially if I can keep from watching too much TV.

My head is spinning…

2011-04-01T23:32:00.002-05:00

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

this is the part of the show where Tobias freaks out
I’m trying to learn CATIA V5 (a modern Computer Aided Design program), which basically is just “oh, that’s what the _____ command looks like”—it’s nearly identical to system I used down in Texas, Solidworks.
I also spent an hour and a half this afternoon, instead of being in class, I was back in my usual building, filling out forms because I am going to be in New Program. (can you remember your addresses and companies of the last 5 years? I’m doing good if I know where I currently live!). They are scrambling to get me sent off to the east coast for the coming week. I first heard rumours of that this morning.
Then I went back to class, (it was over) and verified with the teacher what I needed to catch up on, and then did so for the next hour.
The most difficult thing about this class—really the only thing I am “learning” is to use three fingers on a three-button mouse (my index moving to the scroll wheel feels more natural). It’s one of those motor-skill, hand abstraction things. It’s like me learning a video game: my hands don’t know what to do, so my mind has to manually tell them.
The other new thing is that when you create a dimension in Solidworks, when you anchor it in place, a dialog pops up so you can type in the value, and press enter. So, in Catia, I constantly: click, slap some numbers on the numpad,…and about then I remember (or hit enter and get an error). The dialog doesn’t come up until you double-click on the dimension. Over and over,,,it’s hard to get your brain to do something new. And I imagine why it is so difficult for non-computer-savvy people to pick up on stuff that is second nature to me.

So, to reorient my mind, I went out and swung on the swing in the playground at my apartment. I probably use the swing more than all the kids in my apartment complex. I can spend 10 minutes swinging with my eyes shut, and if I do things to change up the rhythm, like un-pump on the downstroke to keep from going too high, it can really mess with my idea of what is up and what is down. The earth starts to sway with my movement, or disappears altogether. I wish the swing was taller, so I could go higher, and stay weightless longer, without the chains going slack and then jerking tight as I am hurled toward the ground, only to be yanked away at the last second. For years I have imagined that if I were to jump off while weightless, it might “stick” and I would be floating free of earth’s gravity. Someone finally put this idea into a line drawing. When I was younger, the swing I had was about three times as tall as the one I’m swinging on today, so if I had tried fooling gravity, and failed, it would have hurt more. But either way, I’d be in trouble.
The earth has gravity, which is what keeps us on it, crawling around like ants. However, it also spins—rather rapidly. You are traveling east, and slightly downward, at about 1000 miles an hour. You don’t notice because everything is moving the same way—well, most everything, the sun and moon and stars aren’t. But, if gravity stopped pulling on you, (like if you could trick it by jumping off a swing at the right time), you would drift upward. Actually, the earth would be curving away from under you, but it would seem like a force was pulling you straight up. A slight force. A can of soup would keep you down. But, say you are just 5 feet above the ground, the world is slowly pulling away, how do you get down, get down enough to grab the grass, some leaves, dig your fingernails into the pavement? You could try exhaling upward, and inhaling facing down. But could you hold up a can of soup that way? No, you are toast.

Maybe someone sees you as you flail upward into the black sky, gaining speed. What can they do? Can they throw you a string? 15 seconds: you are 50 feet up. Can you maybe catch a bird? 60 seconds: you are 800 feet up, and traveling at 9 miles an hour….Two minutes: “Well that was weird!” say the other kids, climbing down off the junglegym, as you pass three thousand feet, the wind whistling through your hair like a downhill ride on a bike.

Still want to jump off a swing?

Rice Planter

2011-04-01T23:31:00.000-05:00

Saturday, April 28th, 2007

Many moons ago, I found a Rice Cooker. The buttons and LCD display was in some Asian language, and it was missing the pot part that goes inside. So, rather than washing it out and using it to cook rice, I put it in my closet, figuring I’d do something with it someday. Well, that day finally came.

This after noon I was washing my Philodendron plant, when I figured I should repot it. Maybe split it up, so I had one I could take to work an put in my cube. I looked through my extensive collection of pot-like items, and came upon my rice cooker. At first I was going to strip it down, removing the electronics, but then I thought, Why not make the display usable? After much finagling, I got it workable.

I don’t want to cook my plant, nor start a fire, so I unhooked the main heater element. Unfortunately, when I plugged it in, the wake-up sequence failed because the electronics noticed that the heater was “broken”. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what it was thinking—I don’t know Kanji. So, I replaced the heater element with a resistor. It was necessary to use a very high resistance one so that it didn’t get too hot. But, the circuitry was satisfied with even a 1,000,000 ohm (brown-black-green) resistor. But if I take out the heaters, what good is the display on a rice cooker? Especially if it is full of dirt! Well, it has a clock.

In the picture above, you can see the display, but the big numbers are not the time—that is the time when the rice will be done. I’m not sure what what I’ll do with that function, however. Mostly I’ll want it for the clock:

There’s the clock. Yeah, it took me into the evening to get it done. But, now that I know how, I’d be faster next time. Next time I need to make a planter out of a rice cooker.
I’ll take it to work and spread the Philodendron arms around my cube. Then I can tell how much time I waste watering my plant

I don’t usually…

2011-04-01T23:28:00.000-05:00

So, I’m involved with this Internet Business Forum that is held at the church every friday night. By “involved” I mean I show up most weeks, take notes and wonder which of all the different ways to make money I could get into. I’ve got some major philosophical blocks that seem to crop up. First, I’m pretty lazy. I don’t really do a whole lot. But then there is the marketing thing. Most of the money you make on the internet seems to be by getting people to buy something. Pretty obvious. Problem is, I seem to have a fundamental problem with buying stuff. Sure, it’s the American Way, but everybody seems to be so focused on getting more and more, why should I encourage that? Then there is the problem of making money. Yes, you do need to make money—it’s part of life, it takes money to have food and raiment, but why should I try to get more? I have enough to survive, and I have much more than a huge percentage of the world. And that money has to come from somewhere—from the pockets and credit accounts of other people. So every dollar that I claim for myself is one less dollar that someone else has. Shouldn’t I try to save money instead? Buy things that are the best value, do without, invest in things that will make my expenses go down? That way, I can have more money to do other stuff with—like giving it to people or God. Speaking of giving stuff to people, that is really what I see as the optimum. I want to give to people, and let that help others find ways to save money, and give to others, and the chain goes on!* So, these are the preconceived notions that are floating around in my head as they talk about this way, and that system, and getting in on this other one. But, it’s, advertizing, and marketing…how are you adding value to the system? You are the middle man!

It is true that money, when reached for as a goal, will never be enough. And I can feel this greed rising in me when they talk about the large amounts of money to be made, for little effort. Or maybe it’s not greed persay, maybe it’s excitement at the opportunity to improve my situation. And, I have to remember, if I have more money, I have more money to give away! Robin Hood. I can take from one set of distant “friends” and give it to people I like more! I can write content to get people to click on ads, so I get money, meanwhile, I tell my real friends to get FireFox + Adblock + Filterset.G Updater to make so they don’t have to see the ads that I am polluting the world with.
What am I going to do? I’m not sure. I think I may need to throw out some of my illogical ideals and just offer a service and make a buck. After all, what do I do all day? I help to increase the price of airfares by not working for free. Traitor!

What do I want to do? Build house systems so efficient and cheap that they cost almost nothing and show others how to do the same. Like I can make a living off that. You need to get people to spend more, not less. That’s what keeps the economy going—people spending more, and more and more than they can afford.

*My feelings are influenced by the Free Software Movement, where everything is given away, and the more people you give it to, the better. [actually, I probably fell into the free and open source software community because I already felt that way inside]

Amish Friendship Bread

2011-04-01T23:27:00.000-05:00

I got some starter from a friend a week or two ago, so the time came this evening to make it into bread. Suprisingly, the recipe calls for baking soda and baking powder. It went together easily enough, and I didn’t need to knead or rise it, just dump it in pans, and put it in the oven. It cooked, and was pretty good, but I am wondering how much of its characteristics are a result of the Starter, and how much is in the chocolate chips that I put in it.

The recipe claims that “only the Amish know how to make a starter” but if so, the Amish seemed to have leaked the information to the internet—their secret formula of water, yeast, sugar and flour is now out for the world to see.
I figured that if it sits on the counter and grows, surely I can use it to make regular yeast bread. Whenever you feed the starter, you add equal amounts of flour, sugar and milk, so I should be able to substitute a cup of starter for 1/3 cup water, 1/3 cup flour, and 1/3 cup sugar, and put it in my bread machine…
It was supposed to be rising, according to the display on the machine, but the bubbles seemed to not be doing anything. I guess the yeast does need some help from the chemical leaveners. So, I add a teaspoon of yeast and restart the cycle. The machine is kneading and kneading this stringy liquid sillyputty, and doesn’t seem alive—it does smell yeasty, however. But, I lose faith in the automation of this process, and put it in a bowl and stick it in the fridge for later. We’ll see if it rises as it cools. It didn’t look right, but I don’t often see the dough as it is being made; the machine is handily fill-and-forget.

Seems like the only thing that you could get from Amish Friendship Bread that you don’t get from regular bread is more gluten (well, you might get friends too, or at least strengthen the interaction within your community). The way I figure, yeast is pretty monivorous: it eats carbohydrates, sugars and starches. So, if you have the culture sitting on your counter for a week and a half, it is devouring the starches, and since you keep adding milk, sugar and flour, the leftover proteins build up. This then makes for softer bread. Another possibility is that it is true about the Amish being the only ones capable of creating a starter right, and the simple yeast-and-water recipe I found was much simpler than the complex set of eating and growing things that make for extra special properties to the bread—like it tastes better or something. I couldn’t tell over the cinnimon and chips.

I guess I’ll turn it into bread tomorrow.

One of the nifty things about having bread starter, is it fills a need in people to grow things. To make something out of nothing, to nurture life that multiplies into more life. So, even if the starter does nothing but bubble slighly in the ziplock over those 10 days of waiting, it is living! And by parceling it up, and giving it to your friends, you are giving them the gift of life, and it will become more and more.

practically speaking, it is a lot more handy for me to dump the 10 cents of yeast in than to nurture the batter along, adding cups of sugar, flour and milk

Glass Vapor

2011-04-01T23:25:00.000-05:00

You’ve been in a gym. They have those bright, white, lights in the ceiling, right? Well, I picked up a couple at the SStore a month or two ago. I’ve gotten these before and made end tables out of them. The ones I got recently were special because they are made of glass—-the bell of the lamp is a huge piece of ribbed glass. Yesterday I was talking to my brother about making stuff, (he was working with wood) and I decided I should do something cool, since it was Saturday.

So, I took one lamp apart and started working on turning it into a table—I don’t know what else to make, even though the world, and definately my house, have enough tables. I went to a thrift store and picked up a glass plate, and was trying to use it to connect the bell to the feet. I didn’t have a diamond tipped drill or even an abrasive bit, so I was using a regular bit. It really didn’t cut very fast, even with the bits of glass powder as aggregate. That is, until, you get the friction to start heating the glass red hot. Then it goes through like through hot, umm, glass. But, we all know that uneven heat and glass don’t mix very well. I got two holes drilled, but the third one caused big cracks to form in the plate. Maybe I pushed too hard, or not hard enough. Or both.

Instead of glass, I cut the bottom two inches off a thin stainless pot I had found, and bent the edge over so it wasn’t sharp. I backed this up with some wood, and fastened it all together with drywall screws and tapered disks of wood.

I have not yet caulked the glass top down, I might want to put some lights in there first—-I drilled a hole through the base so I can run some wires if necessary.

What do you think? Should I light it or just let it refract and reflect ambiant lighting? I also need some ideas of what to put inside it–I need something to cover up the ugly wood disk that holds down the glass.

Spring showers

2007-03-29T18:01:00.000-05:00

I got a request to show some pictures from the current season, so here they are:

improve!

2007-03-25T02:16:00.000-05:00

So, I'm at this friend's house with some people from church, and we've bbq'ed some stuff, eaten, played a game, and some people are downstairs playing a bongo drum video game, others are upstairs, talking, and watching videos on the internet using the TV. Sure, it's not the best way to spend an evening, but it has a lot more interaction, and therefore is better, than zoning out for an hour and a half watching a movie. It's also better than dropping acid (even a face-shield and lab apron won't fully protect you from the broken pyrex and splash damage!)
So, anyway, if you are watching Mario Bros. Matrix remixes, the advertizements that are targeting your demographic range from beer-ad graphic styles to outright softcore. This is a little awkward when it is a mixed-company church group. Granted, maybe it is a little more suprising to me since I never see ads. So, I repeatedly make comments about Firefox until I was probably getting annoying. I'm not trying to be a nuisence, I just think we can do better than this. He was using IE 7, which has tabs--and admirable leap for the browser monster. But the ads are so annoying, taking up screen space, causing information dilution, and just not necessary. So, get Firefox, install Adblock, and reclaim your web experience, making it safe(er) to watch a guy playing a guitar, using a spoon in his mouth for a slide.

Moving

2007-03-12T17:56:00.000-05:00

Today I moved. My desk at work used to be one cube-set over from where it is now, but it is enough to change the whole environment. One of the cool things about the change is now I have a flatpanel monitor instead of a bulky CRT. Much of our group of 30 or so people are being rearranged. The purpose it to get the people who work together in position so that they might actually talk to each other and coordinate with each other. This is going to take a shift in Culture, but we may be able to break some of the "over the wall" syndrome. That is going to be the real change, not the fact that my cube is rearranged a little.
My bean plant is growing quite well at work. I used to just have a spider-plant-type critter, but a week or so ago, I found a bean in my pocket (must have fallen there when I was sorting beans earlier) so I stuck it in my flowerpot. A few days later, the dicot was growing out of the soil, and now it is reaching for the florescent lights with a pair of leaves. I've begun to leave the light on for it when I go home, so it can get all the light it can. Some other legumes caused a little more trouble. I was out at the park, and I found some beanpods from a tree. In digging out the seeds, I noticed the green, partially-hardened goo stuff that went between the seeds, so I kept some, and took it home and reconstituted it in a small, stemmed glass, setting (sitting?) it on the side of my sink. Unfortunately, I have this habit of memorizing my house, so that I can move about it without having to use some of my sense(s). So, a day or so later, I turn the corner into my kitchen, my right hand moves out, grabs the jar that is always at the corner of my sink (while my right arm turns on the light) and then the right hand snaps back tossing the jar into my left hand and then turning on the water. That's about when I felt my right elbow had connected with the glass-of-goo, sending it onto the floor. My left leg attempted to nudge it onto the carpet, but I don't think it thought of that until it had heard the crash, and identified it as glass breaking. And still the water ran. Tree-bean goo, while interesting, does not yet have a practical use identified. (Need a slow-hardening, semi-clear gel that is organic based?)
In other news, I've been playing frisbee lately--both disc golf and Ultimate. It's fun, and Ultimate is lots of exercise. And I get most of the thorns out of my arms and hands by the time Sunday rolls around again. Maybe I should start being more careful, I don't want to break a hip or anything. I guess really the problem is when I mow someone else down, not so much when I slide on my forearms attempting to catch the frisbee.

Congratulations to my two cousins (and fiance's) who are getting married, and a call for prayer for my cousin and sister who are overseas, and a note of happiness for my nieces who are getting siblings.

Relationship Assessment Day

2007-02-14T23:40:00.000-06:00

I am thankful, in light of the date, that I do not have an ex-, and that I am free to come, and go, and live and work, following only the will of God, and not having to have every plan altered by the calculation of it's effect on my significant other. I do realize thet that extra planning would be a joy, but I rejoice in the uncomplexity of my current life. When the rich, young ruler came to Jesus, He didn't say "One thing you lack, go sell your possessions and buy an engagement ring and some chocolate..."

Luck

2007-02-05T22:18:00.000-06:00

When people use the word "Luck" they mean lots of different things. One use is an arbitrary, chance-based idea of randomness. "You just got lucky!" they say, as you sink a three-pointer blindfolded. This is one way of saying, "Brownian movement and undefinable chaotic processes caused your results to fall several standard deviations from the center of the maxwell curve!" Another way that the word is used is to mean a points system that gets used up by preferred things happening--or is just measured by happy things happening. "Today is my lucky day! I think I'll go buy some lottery tickets!" Maybe it's based on what you do--like karma. "See a penny, pick it up, all the day you'll have good luck." People also refer to luck as the reasoning behind some complex set of cause-and-effect circumstances. "It's bad luck to break a mirror, spill salt, juggle chainsaws, etc."
Most of the time that Luck is invoked, it is in a way that totally ignores God's role in our everyday lives. Now, granted, there is a lot that happens that doesn't seem to have God's direct, obvious input. It seems that God has set up the world to operate in certain non-deterministic ways. Your Statistics teacher would get annoyed if his sample of random coin tosses wasn't a normal distribution of heads and tails, but God could intervene in the world that way if He wanted to. And He does intervene sometimes, and we call that a miracle---sometimes what we see is as simple as something other than the most likely thing happening.
Sometimes we think of a system of points, where you rack up luck, and then good things happen to you, or you don't have luck, and then bad things happen to you. This is an abdication of personal responsibility for the consequences of our actions (we blame it on some undefinable "bad luck") but it also forgets that God can rework how what we do effects what happens to us. Often God does this by changing something bad in a short-term, temporal sense, into a blessing in a more long-lasting sense. When you seem to be "down on your luck", take a moment to ask God to make something pleasing to Him come of it---and then stop digging, look around and see how you got yourself into this hole. Stop blaming others for things that are your fault---and don't go for the fatalistic cop-out of "I just have such bad luck!"
When it is some sort of cause-and-effect thing---where there is a valid reason that one thing would bring another---don't call it luck. Walking under a ladder isn't bad luck, but it may be a safety hazard, since a slight bump could send the ladder tumbling, and the bundle of shingles could land on you. Most of this category is all nonsense--superstitions and old wives tales. Often it would have to be enforced by some supernatural, but non-God and arbitrary entity. What natural properties of a black cat would bring unhappy circumstances to anyone walking perpendicular to it?

So, luck has no place, but it is often more handy to wish someone luck, than to affirm your feelings that because you care about them, you would be happier if the random, stochastic, un-calculable, complex processes would effect the outcomes of the events in question in a way that was beneficial to them.

On that note, I'm going to bed. I pray that God would give you true, lasting joy.

Snow!

2007-01-21T13:20:00.000-06:00

So, Saturday afternoon I saw all this snow, so I figured I should do something with it. It was too powdery to make a snowman, but ah! I had some buckets in my closet! So I packed them full and it stuck together enough to make a sand castle. I also had an extra collender I had found, so I made some half-spheres as well. Some kids came by, and they may have helped if they had had gloves or something.
Falling off the swingset was fun too. Into the 8 inches of snow. Playing in the snow was a nice break from working on servo motor controlers. Do you want the PID controller to get feedback from the speed or the velocity? How do you make it smooth if position at a time is what is critical, but velocity is all you can change? Do I need cascading PID controlers?
By Sunday, my 75 gallon pyramid has fallen over.

This after noon I went and played frisbee in the snow with some people from church. It was slippery, so starting and stopping were inhibited, but diving was great! No sand burrs, just snow. When we won, we built a snow fort, and had a laidback snowball fight. The sun started peaking around the clouds, bathing everything in a blue glow, and then came out in full brilliant color, suddenly making the world have texture and depth.
There were two Audis and my car there that had four-wheel drive, and we had a big, open field with 8 inches of snow on it. We drove around in circles, sliding sideways, spinning our wheels as we turned. It turns out that you do turn left to go right. The snow fort dissappeared into the powdery blanket. My awesome-cool Mazda seemed (to me at least) comparable to the Audis. It did have it's weakness: snow and wet makes the alternator belt sqeak at low rpm.

I came home and found that my partly-fallen snow castles had been rebuilt into one, and a couple other building had been constructed using the same methods. It's not like making packed-snow blocks is non-obvious, but I may have been an inspiration to others...

After a prayer and praise meeting, we bundled up and went sledding on an overpass-created hill--one of the best ones in Kansas! I didn't have any sled, so I borrowed from others, and found scraps of broken items used by earlier sledders. The best things I used (in my opinion) were some shards of Formicia, 18"-24" wide and 6"-8" wide. I would sit on the larger irregularly -shaped, sharp-edge piece, and put my heels on the smaller one, and then zip down the hill at lightning speed. At the bottom, I would simply tumble until I stopped to keep from falling in the ditch or hitting the manhole cover. I then would dust off my bruises, and tap-dance to the top of the hill and try again. The bottom of the hill was strewn with pieces of plastic and other sharp items, artifacts of other sledders who came with tubs and sleds, and left with shattered hopes.

It was a very snow-filled weekend, and I am slightly sore, especially where my bones are close to my skin.

Indestructability

2007-01-17T18:02:00.000-06:00

Cecil, my car, seems to be nearing the end of his life. For nearly 3 years I have driven this car, and it hasn't ever stranded me. Sure, I've gotten some nails in the tires, and I've had coolant leaks, but my normal way of repairing Cecil has been to remove the offending item. The latest hose to spring a leak was easily fixed by cutting off the end of the hose, and reattaching it. Sometime Cecil won't start---just a click, but no crank---so, I jiggle the battery terminals, and it's back to normal. For the $500 I paid for this car, and the lack of maintenance I've put in, I'd call this semi-miraculous. Sure, the Japanese engineers that built this thing had a hand in making it indestructible, but God has had a hand in keeping it running. And I think He will continue until it is time for me to get a different car. But, I got a warning recently that makes me think I should start planning for imminent failure.
I flew east for Christmas, but due to some mis-management by both me and the airlines, I ended up flying home, but with my car parked in a nearby state. This worked out ok---I had a bike, and friends, and before a week had passed, I had caught a ride with a returning grad student, and got my car back. Well, almost back.
When I pulled away from the Toll Booth 3 miles from home, there was a scraping, thumping, dragging noise and feel. Cecil hardly wanted to move. I let him rest a couple minutes, pumped up my tire, and tried to get the Center Dif Lock light to go off. No soap. So, I decided to just limp home---what was I going to do? Call a tow truck? The car did go, so I just drove slow, with my flashers on. I tried driving fast, but that just made the thumping faster. Going over bumps seemed to shake it back to normal, but only for an instant. I was halfway home when there was a loud THUMP! and I instantly checked the mirror for dropped parts. Nothing fell off, but everything was as smooth as normal. Once again, I saw my car get me home. However, this showed me that maybe it is time to get a different car. And there does seem to be another whine at high speeds.
Like my car, I often feel that I am invincible, at least sort of. In college it became obvious that I could go out and play football, throw myself at the ground over and over, (I only missed once---that was an odd feeling) and come back no worse for the wear. The odd thing was, I'd come back, be walking down the hall with my hands in my pockets, bump into some decorative trim, and gouge my hand. I would often do things that should have maimed normal people, and didn't get more than superficial scratches. This I also would class as semi-miraculous. I have certain "natural abilities" that make me good at keeping from getting hurt, but where did I get those abilities? You guessed it! I was given them, just like I am given everything else. So, I am postulating that I cannot be harmed until God decides it's time.
I have an instantanious replacement awaiting me when my body finally breaks, but my car does not, yet. I am heeding the warning signs, and do not intend to venture to take it on anymore long trips. It has served me well, but the time has come for it to be replaced.
Now I have a problem. I am planning to get a different car. Will it be as reliable? Maybe, maybe not. I have often sarcasticly poked fun at people when they have trouble with their cars. "Your new car not working right? Too bad you don't have a nice reliable car like me!" "Oh, too bad about your car! I could lend you mine, it only has a quarter of a million miles on it..." Now I could be one of those people whose cars are always breaking and requiring hundreds of dollars to repair, people I have looked down upon because I have been given something that they do not have. It's always a bad idea to be arrogant about something that is not your doing---and what do I have that I haven't received? And what do I have that can not be taken away?

Did you see it? Did you see it? It was right over there!

2006-12-17T23:18:00.000-06:00

This is how we ended the evening, with the first line of the shepherd's scene.

Well, that was for the cast, not "real people". In previous years, at the end of the show, the cast does a spoof of the play for their own entertainment. Well, this year, our isolated group of six (counting the baby) were the only ones who prepared anything. We did our scene backwards. Starting with the people coming to the open, lit stable, and ending with the shepherds running backwards off set, exclaiming about the angels. We thought of this with only a bit of the show left, and tried to practice between scenes. It was pretty difficult to remember what you are supposed to say when you have to take the cue from what the person just before you said that was what was normally after what you just said (or were about to say). But, we pulled it off with just a little bit of mess up. And it was quite entertaining.

All in all, the show was a lot of fun. I'm glad it's over, but it was a cool experience. Got to hang out with 4 people for 4 hours each night, talking about life, algebra, theology, witchcraft, binary, and of course, Christmas. This was interspersed with groups of people coming through, whom we tried to show the Advent story in a way that would make them feel it, feel like they had been there. To make it more than a story from long ago and far away.

...I know you will. Well, we'd better go now and let these good people get some rest. Goodbye! The Bible says that Mary treasured...

This is the night that everything changed for the world

2006-12-13T22:35:00.000-06:00

This is a line from the Guide's monologue after the stable scene in the "Road to Bethlehem" play that I am in.
The audience moves from scene to scene, witnessing a busy Nazareth marketplace, watch as Gabriel brings Mary the surprising news and as they see Joseph and his sister interact, the audience is given a glimpse of what this meant to his reputation, and see his resolve and Gabriel's visit to him in a dream. Then the audience watches as Mary visits with Elizabeth and Zachariah---who pantomimes his temple experience. Next they see the difficulty of the journey ahead as Mary and Joseph leave for Bethlehem. "Every angel in heaven was watching as they went down that road" the Guide says as they leave.
Next, it's off to Herod's palace, where he and his compatriots come to a solution to the problem the wise men have told them about. The innkeeper is next, turning the audience away since the inn is full, only to have a very pregnant Mary and edgy Joseph come for lodging. Eventually, they go off to the stable.
The shepherds meet the audience near their small fire, exclaiming about the things they had just seen until the Guide quiets them down and tell them to give the story from the beginning. They describe how they were out, "keeping and eye on their sheep, when suddenly there was a man! But he wasn't really a man! He was an angel!" And he gave them good news! The Messiah has been born in Bethlehem, tonight! "Then the sky was full of angels! Singing! Singing like you've never heard!" "It was beautiful!" Then they are ready to rush off to Bethlehem, and the Guide asks them how they plan to find the right baby, and they say that Bethlehem is pretty small. But one shepherd remembers something the angel said: "He said we'd find the baby, wrapped in cloths, and lying in a manger." "A manger?! Who would put a baby in a manger? I mean, what would the cows eat out of?" "I think he said manger.." "You heard wrong..." So they head off among the darkened buildings that are Bethlehem, with the audience in tow. It turns out the search is harder than they thought, there are no parties going on, or big houses with lots of people... "This is dumb! you would have thought the angel would have told us what house." "Here are some people, maybe they can..." Joseph hits a switch, but continues to sleep as the stable lights up. "Guys, there's a baby, lying in a manger!"
As people approach the now open doors of the stable, Mary startles. "Joseph! Wake up! Who are these people?" she asks as she scoops the baby from the manger. Joseph puts a protective arm around Mary, and keeps the shepherds at arm's length as he wakes up. "I don't know. Who are you? What are you doing breaking in on people in the middle of the night?" The shepherds are apologetic. "We don't mean to bother you, we've just come to see the baby." "What are you talking about, he's just been born! How could you kno---" "SSShhhh! Don't wake him," Mary interrupts, "but how did you know?" "Angel told us!" "Angels!" Mary and Joseph say together, as Joseph relaxes. "We're shepherds, we were in our fields..." the shepherds tell about the angel. "And this child is, this child is..." "The Messiah!" "But, how do you know this is the one?" Joseph asks. "The angel told us this would be the sign, we would find him wrapped in cloths, and lying in a manger." "Then the sky was full of angels, praising God and saying "Glory to God, peace on earth, and good will toward men!" "So we came as quickly as we could, and here you are, and here's..the baby!" "Jesus! The angel said to name Him Jesus" Mary glances to Joseph for confirmation. "Jesus!" the shepherds repeat. Joseph speaks up, "So it's all true! Your vision...my dream..." Mary cradles the baby in her arms, "Look at how He's sleeping...does He know, do you think? Does He know who He is? Does He know what will become of Him?" One of the shepherds has been strumming an instrument and now the shepherds pick up the song: "This, this is Christ the King, whom shepherds guard and angels sing. Haste, haste to bring Him laud, the babe the son of Mary!" Joseph looks at the Child, "And what will become of Him? The Messiah, a baby!" He puts an arm around Mary, "We need to protect Him now. That's our part." "And I know you will" says the Guide. "Now, we'd better let these good people get some rest. Goodbye!
"The Bible says that Mary treasured all these things in her heart, but she didn't know what it all meant, not yet. It's wasn't until Jesus grew up, performed miracles, taught on these streets, was betrayed, crucified and rose again. Only then did Mary, and the rest of His followers understand that this was the night that everything changed for the world.
"I hope you've gotten one thing from this tonight. We really believe this. To us, it's more than a children's story, it's the beginning of the Gospel. We've had quite an experience, there is a lot to think about and remember. Now let's go back to the Sanctuary..." the Guide leads the audience away through the quiet town of Bethlehem, away from the living Nativity scene, the shepherd softly playing.

Boxed Set

2006-12-08T19:42:00.000-06:00

So, I went to the SStore, and got me some stuff. Found several dozen 8 foot rods that looked like 3/8" rebar but was much lighter. Turns out they are carbon fiber, coated with epoxy mixed with sand. Not sure what they are for. I also got a crate:

Mr. Cecil doesn't like that. The guys at the SStore were rather dubious.

You may wonder why I got it. The reason is scrawled in the upper left of this picture. You can also see where it came from:

I took it apart, put it back on my car, took it to church and turned it into parts of Bethlehem. Here's a shot of me untying it at church. Only one side of the car was visibility challenged:

Thanksgiving

2006-11-27T18:22:00.000-06:00

This weekend, I went back to MO to hang out with my family. All 7
siblings, 3 sig. others, and 2 grandkids made it there. It was cool
to see everyone, and the weather was pretty much the best it could
possibly be.
I came back, and found my house slightly different from when I left.
I didn't notice until this morning, but the heap of dirty dishes had
transformed into a clean sink. So, thank you to who ever it was!
Sorry the place was so unsanitary. Yep, that's pretty much typical.

Now I just need some fish

2006-11-18T16:21:00.000-06:00

Here's device that allows me to view and photocopy microfich. I got it some time ago a the surplus store, but didn't ever try it out. So, today I cleaned it off and fired it up.

It worked pretty well, but I didn't have any microfich, so I used some photograph negatives. I was thinking that maybe I could use it as a sort of microscope---the highest magnification is 50x.

Here is a shot of my sink, as displayed by the device.

Below is a close-up of the stage and lens assembly.

I'm not sure what to do with it. Seems there should be some use for a device that displays and prints out anything thin and partially transparent. It could also be reworked to capture any light projected into it. I could use it for its normal purpose, if I had some microfich.

The Shampoo Bottle has Changed

2006-11-16T21:51:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I ran out of shampoo, so this evening I went and bought some more of the traditional shampoo that I have been using off and on for several years. Imagine my surprise when the bottle was a different shape!

It immediately becomes apparent why the change was made. Most obvious is the complex, interesting shape they have added to the bottle. Rather than being a cylinder with rounded edges, it now has flattened sides to give it a sort of grip, a set of creases that are reminiscent of the logo, and a smoother transition to the cap. The motivation behind the changes to the cap aren't quite as obvious. They moved from a screw-on lid to a snap-on lid, and dropped the butterfly valve for a simple flip-top. This of course drops the parts count (one piece rather than two) and it makes the molding process simpler, and therefore faster. Now they don't have to unscrew the cap off the mold, and they don't have to assemble the lid after molding it---the flip-cap is one piece with the lid. The lack of threads makes the bottle mold easier and cheaper too.
It's not all roses, however. The new design doesn't have quite as good a seal. The flip-top seals pretty well, but the bottle-to-cap interface isn't as good as the screw-on method. If I squeeze the bottle, it doesn't leak much, but air can escape if I wiggle the cap. On the other hand, how sealed does a bottle of shampoo have to be? It might be helpful for a little air to move in and out---that will accommodate temperature and pressure changes.
One thing that didn't change is the volume; surprisingly, it is still 22.5 fluid ounces, just like before.

Whiteboard!

2006-11-11T18:40:00.000-06:00

Well, I have yet another artifact in my living room. This time it is a whiteboard, with a huge-format scanner attached that prints out what is written on the board.

You can see the scanner head part way across the board. And down to the right is the printer unit

Not only does it print, this whiteboard also can be flipped over, and you have a whole new side. There is also a grid ghost-printed onto the board.
Now, I just need to figure out where to get more heat-sensitive paper for when I run out...

Funktober Fest!

2006-10-29T22:25:00.000-06:00

So, this evening my church had a Funktober Fest. It was put on by the young adult ministry, and we had a service and then bierocks and bratwursts. Then we had 70's music and dancing. The dance-off was fun, and I ended up winning! I guess I know more about 70's dance than I thought---or, the judges were impressed by my enthusiastic flailing. The coveted box of IBC rootbeer is mine!

Alas, I didn't make the cut in the costume contest. There were some pretty good outfits there. It ended up with two couples getting the two prizes.

Most people wore wigs. Me, I'm a natural kind of guy.

Sneak preview

2006-10-28T22:44:00.000-05:00

At work we are having a "get dressed up day" tuesday as part of a fundraiser for the food bank. Some people will participate. I am going as a member of the SUPER CAR Team! It's a pretty sloppy get up, but after all, the Super CAR Team can't spend a whole lot of time on their outfits, because we are too busy closing "greenlines" and fixing "multi-unit tags"---basically putting out fires. Here's a sneak preview of what I've figured out so far---work people don't frequent this blog, so they won't know until tuesday...[those are "tags" on my pants and "green lines" on my shirt, and a cape..well, because I'm SUPER!]

I'm not sure if I'll go barefoot or not. This is the one day that I would have an excuse to walk around work without any shoes.

A night on the town.

2006-10-28T00:40:00.000-05:00

So, I met some friends at the little coffee shop in the historic section of town and we headed off on tour of the local art galleries. We walked to the first one, a third floor room with items made of "Welded steel and Mixed Media" as well as "Paper and Mixed Media". Stencils, cut paper and guys with gas masks were the main themes. The welded steel was folded zigzags. I went around admiring the artwork until one of my friends quietly confided to me, calling the bluff of the emperor. It was harder to pretend that these were grandiose works of skill and talent after that. The next place was pretty cool. Here they taught various forms of art, but I went up to the top of the building where the glass blowers were working. Those refractory furnaces are hot. But the glass blower was so comfortable, working near things that were at about 2000 degrees. It was fascinating to watch as he expertly blew and collapsed, colored and melted, shaped and twisted, cooled and heated the glass, to make a glob paperweight with internal swirling colors and a few bubbles. Clear glass is unique when it glows. Being colorless, and transparent, the light comes from nowhere to light up the goo. I want a furnace---the materials they are made of! The furnace of liquid glass. they had a pool of it...
We walked back to our cars and drove to the next place--they had "acrylic/gouache on birch panel" as well as other things--woven stuff, undefinative fiber-based collages. Actually artful. There was a guy playing a odd guitar---all neck, many strings, no strumming---just tapping the strings at the fret to make enough vibration for the pickups to amplify. Used both hands to deftly pull huge amounts of music out of these strings. Turns out, one guy in our group knew him from highschool. We sat and listened to him until the place closed down.
What was left of our group wanted to stop by a local food/drink place and grab a bite to eat. I figured I'd go along, found out where we were going. Well, I found the place. and a parking space, and wandered about a bit and didn't see my friends' vehicle. So I waited, still nothing. This was not the part of town that I feel comfortable wandering around at night, and really didn't feel like walking in without my friends. The group of people standing in the shadows outside the tattoo parlor next door also made me uncomfortable. I drove around a bit, still couldn't spot their car, and after checking back where I had left them and finding nothing, I turned for home. I pretty much freaked out and ran. I'd go to a place that looked like that, if I were with people I knew, but I was not having fun, so I left. I called my friends and left a message on his cell when I got home. The city is no place for me. During the daytime, and if I choose what places I go, it's ok,,,but I just don't feel at home there. If I need to go into intercity ministry, God and I will have to figure something out, but until then, give me a grassy knoll and some trees. I just don't feel like sitting in a smokey bar surrounded by people who want to eat my brains, listening to music I don't like, eating food I don't trust. So, how can I bring usefulness to my friends' lives without judging their preferences? Jesus didn't run from the "scum of society" like I did this evening at quarter-to-eleven. And I made that determination without even going inside. I was too "better" to associate with the creeps I imagined seethed inside this restaurant and this part of town.

Today, I win

2006-10-26T23:24:00.000-05:00

I am the only member of the self-proclaimed Super CAR Team at work. Several months ago, I was assigned to work only on problems that are seen in the shop repeatedly. These problem statements come to us in the form of CAR's. Another guy was put on the task as well, but he never was able to do it because he couldn't get access to the systems we use every day, since he was Canadian. He lasted through several months of such difficulty before he gave up and went home.
I have been pulling CAR's from outboxes (there is a special box just for me, but it is usually empty) and fixing the problems, handing them off to drafters when I find a solution. Today I got done with a package, and needed another, so I looked in my box. Nothing, as expected. So I looked in the other boxes. Only one had anything, but none were CAR's. So, I declared myself the winner of the battle against CAR's and claim that the planes are as fixed as they can get.
Tomorrow I will go bug Dan, since his box has a note that says he has more work in another basket. Until then, the Super CAR Team is caught up, and I think it is about time we got uniforms!
SUPER CAR TEAM FTW!!!!

well, maybe...

2006-10-21T17:20:00.000-05:00

Today my apartment complex had a "Renovation Celebration" to introduce the residents to the new facilities that have been in work for the last several months. It was a great day for it: rainy, cold and windy--well, great if you don't want to have to fight over the bbq sandwiches and want to win at the drawings. I strolled over, and ate a couple sandwiches while almost conversing with my neighbors. They had a DJ playing music, and had a drawing to let people stand in this inflated tent, while blowing loose paper money around. Whatever you could catch, you could keep. One guy caught a picture of Grant. They called my number, and in my 15 seconds of wealth, I got 14 pictures of Lincoln. It was suprizingly difficult to catch money floating through the air. I came back a half hour later for another sandwich, and got into another drawing--30 bucks worth of gift certificates to a local sports grill. I thought about going swimming in the pool by the party--in the cold, blustery rain. I should start going to the fitness center sometimes---it would be good for me.

I am going to a party in a barn this evening with some people from work. I will be wearing a bannana outfit, and carry a baseball bat with peanut butter and jelly on it. As you can see, it will be amazing! I got the bannana suit from Aaron, who will have a nerf shotgun and a chainsaw for a hand. A skilsaw can work as a dremel tool if you ever need a baseball bat.

An arch now decorates my dining room. It is a very classy piece of masonite, and helps bring out the theme of the room with its upward bent, showing potential for collective improvement and systematic increase while harkening back to third century Rome.

footage

2006-10-16T23:45:00.000-05:00

Last night as I was driving through Kansas City, with my hands shaking on the reigns, the clattering suddenly got worse, much worse. I stopped to see what was the matter, and found that Cecil had lost a shoe. It was schredded. So, I pulled way off the track, and had him pick up his front left foot, and tried to get the shoe off, but it was on there good. So I loosened up the nails and had him take a few steps, and tried again, and again,,,and eventually got it knocked loose. All the while, the other horses were galloping past in the dark and wet, only a few feet from where we stood. But, I got the little clubfoot shoe put on, got back onto the trail, and kept going. The reigns didn't shake as they had both legs of the journey, but there was a whine, so I had Cecil hold back a bit, and not go full tilt.
Today, on the way home from work, I stopped by the farrier and got newer shoes put on both of Cecil's front feet, which should make him better at stopping and turning, especially in wet weather. I put the little clubfoot shoe back in the saddle-bag, and went home---no whining or shaking!

Shirts and sunset

2006-10-04T22:50:00.000-05:00

I was playing frisbee the other night with some people from church. It was pretty windy, but we had fun, and lots of turn-overs. As evening approached, some gnats materialized and made a cloud above one guy who had a white shirt. It was very bright white, almost glowed, probably UV brighteners in the fabric (they take the UV in sunlight and convert it into visible light, making colors brighter). A girl had on a white shirt, but the gnats seemed to ignore her. It was not as bright--just a normal white. Then as the sun fell and we continued to run up and down the field in the deepening red light of the sunset, the Pigpen-style cloud continued to track the guy, but then the girl started to notice that the gnats were over her too. Interesting. I think it has to do with defraction.
While the sun was away from the horizon, we got the UV light from the sun, which activated the guy's shirt, making it show up as more white to the gnats. Then, as the sunligh began to come more at an angle through the atmosphere, the UV got bent away, but the lower frequencies made it through. This made the two shirts closer to the same brightness to the gnats.
We lost, and went and ate homemade icecream. Now I wonder, what is the range of light that is visible to gnats?

Bread

2006-10-03T23:09:00.000-05:00

Fresh bread, fresh bread,
That's my favorite brand,
Straight out of the oven,
The best bread in the land!
Flat, long, monkey,
It don't matter to me
The best bread in this whole world,
Was baked just now, for me!

What's in a name?

2006-10-01T22:11:00.000-05:00

It always has seemed a little odd that people from the United States
call themselves "Americans". Come on, the United States has only 39%
of the land mass of North America! Then there's all of South
America that's being slighted as well. It appears that use of
"America" or "Americans" in to refer to United States and it's
citizens is limited to self-reference---the rest of the world knows better.
So, what is the reason for this pseudonomenclature? Is it because of
some vestiges of the Monroe Doctrine? Is it just our inflated ego
makes us think that we are the only people to exist on this chunk of
dirt that comprises 28% of the earth's dry land? Why do we insist that
"Americans" are "Citizens of the United States of America"?

I think it is pretty simple, and probably not intentionally malicious.
It's an identity crisis issue. Most of the rest of the countries in
the world have a name: Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Principality
of Andorra. And the people in these counties have names: Congolese,
Pakistanis, Andorrans. The United States of America doesn't really
have a name, just a descriptive title. So, rather than calling
ourselves "United States of Americans", or "US of A-ites", or
"USians", we just go with "Americans". Not very clever, and rather
ambiguous, seen as slighting by the rest of the great people who share
these continents with US.

What is the solution? Should we come up with some name to set us
apart, so we can have a unique identity?

And I don't even need a warp drive

2006-09-23T15:50:00.000-05:00

The date is 2007. The place is a factory floor in the Air Capital of
the World. Technology level: feasible at present day.

I'm talking to another investigator as I finish up describing my
latest fix to the airplane parts. "Just think, a year ago the 'Super
CAR Team' wasn't a team, just your joke name for the impending train
wreck you were working on!" "We have come a long way..." Before, I
was working on CAR's an acronym that meant "problems on every plane".
I was trying to keep up with a constant flow from the shop. It took
me way too long, but my megalomanical delusions prompted me to call
my efforts the Super CAR Team. I though about making a t-shirt... My
lead's voice fades into the conversation we are having over the
pilot's headsets we wear on the noisy factory floor...
"Abu, that change looks good. I've run it past our support people,
when you get it submitted, I'll queue it to the supplier." I tap the
submit button on my tablet, and then tap my lead's name.
"Here it is, I got the description inputted---why we made
the change. Can you check the photos I've marked up, make sure
they make sense?" "Sure, meanwhile, I've got this tag..." an icon
pops up on my screen "...it's on the other side of the factory, but it
came in yesterday..." Yesterday? We'd better get this fixed to reduce
the number of planes that have this issue. Our managers used to ask
us about 60-day-old problems---the averages had changed, now that we
have this new system.

I click on the icon, and photo pops up. A map shows me where in the
factory it is located. The map is pretty detailed, since it is
constantly being updated by the cameras on the overhead cranes. As I
walk, I glance at what we've got so far. The mechanic was about to
install this clip, but when he drilled the hole from the pilot in the
surrounding structure, it came in closer to the edge of the part than
is best. So, he got the PDA from the inspector, and clicked "created
new issue". Then he took some pictures, and marked them up with the
stylus to highlight the problem and gave a short description and
possible solution. Last year we started to specify where on parts
they get their number stamped---somewhere they could be seen easily
throughout assembly. Even our OCR software could load up the parts
based on the numbers seen in a picture. Plus, the RFIDs on the PDA and
a few parts, and the two-way positioning information from the time
delay in the wireless links helps the software know what parts it is
looking at, based on where it is.
Looking over the pictures, I'm not sure what the nominal distance is,
so, based on the part, and where in the assembly process it is, I
bring up the pertinent solid models on my screen. My tablet pc is just
a "thin-client"---all the computing power is provided by the extra
processor time on the computers in the office, taking what I do, and
piping me the results over the multiple wireless links that my tablet
is seeing... A view of the parts pops up on my screen, aligning
itself with the photo, which is now shown transparently over the
parts. I dismiss the photo, click the "measure" button, and click the
pilot hole, and the edge of the part. It tells me the distance, and
how that relates to the diameter of the fastener that goes through it.
Well, that should be good...if everything works right.

Oh, I need to turn left here, the where-I-am dot on the map is getting
close to to the where-the-problem-is dot. The mechanic says that the
distance to the edge is changing all the time, it just recently
started dipping beyond what it deemed best. The one he is currently
working on also looks bad---I take a picture with my tablet, and
compare it to what-it-should-look-like... yup, it's a bit short, and
it is because the part is shifted down...due to allowable tolerance.
Are the parts not the right size? I pull up the data from the
suppliers--the measurements they took when they made each of these
parts...import the data as fuzzy, shifted solids...move some around,
ok, the data shows that the parts should be close to nominal. Well,
do I move the edge of the part, or the hole? I expand my view to show
more of the parts--parts that get put in later. As I work my way out,
fading in parts in different directions, I see there is a part that
gets pretty close to the offending edge...but nothing is keeping me
from moving the hole. I call up my lead and discuss it with him. We
get stress on the line, and I show them the drawings I am working
with. They suggest some camera angles of the problem parts for better
clarity, so I move my tablet around until we get the views they
wanted. They agree that we need to move the hole, stress is happy
with the analysis they are getting--in fact, they say there is some
extra material, we could save some weight by moving this edge---a red
line appears on my screen---to about here...20 thousandths. Ok,
sounds good. I thank the mechanic, and he says he'll contact us if he
has any other problems.

I sit down to do some "drafting". A year ago someone else would have
done this because it would have taken a week---because at that point,
we had really just computerified the drafting-table-and-ink process.
Now I just double click the pilot hole, and a sketch defining it pops
up. I double click the dimension holding it in place, and type "-.02"
after the number and hit enter. There! Update part...pilot hole snaps
over. Now I move that edge...that was as easy...update assembly...a
flurry of activity...type in why we are changing it...done! The
pictures that the mechanic took, as well as the one's I took are
already attached. I call my lead, and we determine that we want this
implemented as soon as the parts get here. We approve it and forward
the change to the supplier.
Across the country, a CNC mill is drilling holes in parts. It was just
about to start a new one when the change came through. An instant
later it has updated the hole location, and the next part won't have
the problem. Tomorrow after it is painted it will be shipped here,
and soon our line will have the new parts.

Meanwhile, I've finished up all the problems that have been reported
for the day, so I go talk to some mechanics, see if I can redesign
some parts so they are quicker to put together---do they need more
holes? Less? Are there some shims that really aren't needed anymore?
Can we consolidate two parts into one?

The circle of life

2006-09-17T17:49:00.000-05:00

Come with me to my childhood home! The house holds little interest for us, and while we glance at the barn as we pass, our real destination is beyond it and it's double-trunked Red Maple which reaches above it. No, we are heading down the sandy isthmus, a two-track lane between two sets of fields. This year, there are soybeans on the right, and corn on the left. Every year, the same two crops are alternated on this fertile soil, which produced well each fall, with the proper application of seed, fertilizer, lime and pesticides. Every summer, the crops would pull down carbon dioxide, water and sunshine from the sky and turn it into plants. A small portion of each plant was harvested, hauled off to be made into chicken feed, most of which turned into chicken manure, mixed with sawdust, and was stored above our wellhead and then spread on the fields. Every winter, the rest of each plant---much more massive than the seeds which were harvested---the rest of each plant fell into the ground, and rotted. When we figure in the chicken cycle, I think we can ignore the amount of carbon hauled in and out in trucks each year, and call that part of the cycle steady-state, or constant. Because our winters were not very harsh, microbial action over the months would break down the dead plants, and turn them back into carbon dioxide, which was released into the air---or, dissolved in the water, washed away, and then released into the air---unlike places more north, where the cold winters stop the breakdown of carbon, resulting in deep, humus-laden soil, or even peat bogs. But, carbon isn't the only cycle going on. There is nitrogen as well, pulled from the air by the soybean plants, and the distant fertilizer plants, the excess nitrates being washed into the groundwater, endangering wells, and flowing into the ocean and bay, disrupting aquatic life. But, since today's environmental outlook is more focused on Greenhouse Gasses and Global Warming, we will ignore the death of coral in the gulf at the mouth of the Mississippi. After all, it won't matter what killed the coral-reef diving industry, when our Earth looks like Venus---as my little brothers explain, "you don't want to live there because it rains sulfuric acid, and is hot enough to melt solder!"
So, for the carbon cycle we have a fairly constant amount of carbon in the soil, and not a large amount of carbon being hauled off. Even though the plants remove CO2 from the atmosphere, pretty much all of it goes back again. This helps our plight very little. We need some way to hang onto the Carbon, keep it out of the sky. Maybe we should keep walking.

After passing a quarter mile of fields, we come to hundreds of acres of trees. On the left is a stand that is several decades old, the trees are tall, and block out most of the light, so there is little underbrush. The right side is a little younger, a little more brush, and so more interesting for us to play in. Oh, there is a tree which has fallen, landing on a smaller tree so that the top is several feet off the ground. I lost a Reindeer-horn knife playing on that tree soon after moving to that house. Ten years later that tree was much more rotten---in fact, it would have rotted more quickly had it actually hit the ground like some of the other trees around.
As we continue back toward the pond, we on our left is a stand of short pine trees, 15 feet tall or so. So thick with briers and underbrush that we didn't venture into it. It stands on my map as "Unexplored". There are more woods beyond the pond, but they are hardwood until you get really far back, so let's stand on top of the sand mound by the pond, and just watch the trees we've passed change over the years. The trees reach for the sun, drawing in water that falls from the sky, and gleaning tons of carbon out of the air to build their strong, uniform trunks, one ring each summer and a more dense one each winter. But tree's don't grow forever. Winds blow down branches and even trees, and these slowly sink into the forest floor, building up a thick layer. This mass of needles and wood slowly rots, turning back into carbon dioxide, which is cooking us all. Neither the woods nor the fields are helping to stave off the warming that is causing climate change, melting the icecaps, and triggering more and more massive hurricanes, which level our levies and leave our lower lands in Louisiana lying in liquid....oh, sorry. But since these plant cycles end up about the same way they started, we haven't helped anything. I must leave now, and move to the other side of the Mississippi, but you can continue to watch---what's that? You see that loggers have arrived. They are clearing the land of the mature trees, ripping them out using huge purpose-built machinery, loading them on trucks and hauling them away. The young, brier filled stand of trees is spared, but the woods are not the same. I wouldn't want to move back, not after that destruction! But, being curious, you snag a ride astraddle a log on top of one of the trucks, to find out where all this carbon is going, now that we have gotten it out of the air. Meanwhile, bulldozers are piling up the tree stumps, and some industrial crew of wood elves is planting more white pines, in long straight rows. You have arrived at the pulp mill, where you disembark, and watch the trees be debarked, and ground up, soaked in chemicals, ground to a slurry, and eventually turned into paper.

By that time, I am in college, standing in the computer labs, waiting for my two page English paper to print. Unfortunately, someone just sent a 500 page presentation on FAA rules to the printer, (one slide per page) and then forgot about it and went to dinner. When it is done, it sits on the table for several days, but no one claims it, so it is thrown in the Recycle bin. I grab a hundred pages, punch holes in them, and use the blank backs for my Robotics notes. The rest stay in the "Recycle" bin until the Phys Plant workers come and dump it, and all the other trash, into the dumpster, where it goes to a landfill. After Robotics, I go to Senate, where we discuss this paper problem, and tell Administration about our concerns. One day, Senate announces a victory! After harping on recycling for a long time, we find out that Ram Paper Products is going to do a pilot recycling program in the new Engineering building, and see if it is break-even or better. Ahh, so it is economics, not ecology that drives paper recycling! Which makes sense. Every tree we kill to print a Flight Science 1 presentation is replaced by a baby tree, which quickly begins to pull carbon out of our air. When we recycle a bin of paper, one less tree gets removed and replaced by a little tree, so more carbon stays in the air. When we throw a bin of paper in the garbage, that paper goes to a landfill, where it waits anaerobically for the next flood/volcano/iceage to turn it into coal. Meanwhile, my local model airplane field is built on top of years of trash from Boeing and it's employees that populate this town. Boeing, and now my company, uses a lot of paper. We print everything out a couple times each time we touch it. Whenever I make some tiny change I use a big stack of paper, which grows as it goes down the line. This is because our process is set up to fit the requirements of the FAA---me and some others joke that stands for Forest Annihilation Association, due to the huge amounts of paperwork we do in response to their rules. Actually, it is more our system which is at fault, but paper is so much easier than a screen to look at, thumb through, and mark up. I am not sure where the paper goes that I toss in our "Recycle" bins...

To Texas

2006-09-14T00:06:00.000-05:00

The drive down was uneventful. After leaving the presentation on SolidWorks 2007 (amazingly cooler than 2006) I got on I-35 and headed south. Saw gas prices fall and then rise again, and it reminded me of a Google Maps application---chart out current gas prices along your route, so you know which town to stop in. Saves the consumer money, or, makes price fixing that much easier.
We hung out at Bubble's place for a couple hours, didn't really feel like getting on the road again. Finally as our destination time slipped later into the night, we started out. We wanted to eat something first--just a quick bite--so we pulled into a drive through. Fifteen seconds later, we determined that we were waiting too long for the single car ahead of us, so we headed for Longview instead.
We got to Andrew's place and went over the Lists of tasks for the marrow. We weren't very hungry, so we ate some crackers and cheese. There were four basic areas: Painting, Construction, Landscape and Wiring. Aduma took the first two, and I took the others. Bubbles was just going to float, since he knew general information people would need.

Saturday morning we got up and finished preparing---setting things out, getting the paint ready, and getting tools together. Duncey arrived, so we gave him Construction. Then they arrived. About 50 people poured out of the 11 cars, and we introduced our tasks and divided people up. I took some people for making retaining walls, and gathering gravel.
I handed my Wiring List to Spork, and gave him a 60 second overview of what it meant. People began painting the house while we scraped gravel away from it. Others started leveling off for one retaining wall, while several began pulling up concrete flats and carrying them around back. The shed got painted, some trim out in the yard got primed, and then painted. A set of doors got three coats on one side...and none on the other. I found some guys who were helping Duncey---they had gloves on, so I had them move a big slab of concrete from near the A/C unit to in front of the shop. Nobody shredded their finger. In fact, it seems that there were no injuries all day! I just sort of wandered from place to place, working for a few minutes on something, and then getting some people started on something else. The first course of the wall was a big task, but I had a few dedicated people who went at it with a level, and made it flat. The next courses went on very quickly; we had a "brick brigade" handing bricks from the pallet to wall, and they stacked up like hotcakes. I didn't have them take the bricks from the pallets that had been put nearby---no, we took the ones that were near the other wall, tomorrow we'd have to carry them farther.
The crowd started to dwindle, but many people stayed for lunch, and continued to hook up downspouts into an invisible buried pipe, to finish off the ends of the retaining wall, to touch up trim around the roof, to hook up wires in the sweltering attic.
I spend a good part of the afternoon washing out paint rollers. There were so many, but they were pretty much dried, so I just tried to wash them out, having fun making them spin at incredible speeds using a sharp stream of water from the hose sprayer.
Eventually it was night, and so the few that were still around watch How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. It was rather enlightening, for being a chick-flick. I'll stay on the alert for girls who are trying to be as annoying as possible.
It's not everyday that you get to be a part of 60 people working on a house. Can't always find people who not only know what they are doing, but are willing to struggle in the hot texan sun, moving dirt and concrete, painting and building. It was a success. Some Photos, curtesy of Luddie.

Sunday we got to sunday school in time to eat doughnuts and sit on bean bags. Baker did a good job of leading it, and I drew a rubber duckie on the attendance sheet. I knew only a handful of people there.
Church was good, but there weren't any hymns on the agenda. This is a surprisingly global-minded church. Rather refreshing to see people bent on bringing the rest of the world to Christ. After church, we were some of the last to leave, as usual, and then we went to Bodacious for lunch. But first we stopped by Pier 1 to help some of our newly married friends pick up a chair. There wasn't much room in Bubbles's car, so we had to pawn off a box of maternity clothes on them...they didn't realize the gravity of it until it came up during lunch.

We spent the afternoon building a second retaining wall. This one had multiple curves, and we tried several different multi-degree functions before we got a shape we liked. Tip: when making stepping retaining walls, start at the bottom--it is a lot easier to get level when you are stepping up instead of down. We ended up being about an hour late to the Burger Burn at the pastor's house, but there was still burgers, and corn, and soda and stuff. We sat and talked, and had a good time. As it was getting dark, the conversation drifted to Baker's backyard, and he mentioned that he had a cord running across it, that kept getting chopped in the mower. "You need to bury it, then you won't hit it!" "Well, yeah, but I just haven't gotten to it yet.." "It would take like fifteen minutes to do!" We still only had our craziness-meter at about 326 for the weekend, so we volunteered to go out and bury the cable for him. They said we would need some electrical tape to fix the wire. Aduma has a roll in his pocket, of course. Borrowed a shovel from the pastor, and left. When Baker got there with his family, we had a trench across the yard, and were starting to lay the wire. We about had it covered up, when the local annoying armadillos came out. Bakers normal procedure was to shoot them with a bb-gun, but that proved futile, due in part to their impenetrable armor. So, Bubbles and I took some sticks and an old mower blade, and beat around in the bushes after the critters. We found one, and cornered him behind a tomato cage, and then I poked him out, and Bubble got off a solid hit with the sharp edge of the mower blade. It bounced off harmlessly. We chased them around the woods, but it was dark and briery, and we got our first wounds of the weekend, some minor scratches.
After finishing up the trench and checking out the cool job of tile in the dining room, we headed to campus to drop off the chair. We were going to try to forget the maternity clothes, but they remembered to bring them out. We stood and ate cookies in what once was Shroud and Bev's apartment, and then we headed for Dallas.

I took Aduma over to visit a local branch of his company in the morning. Dropped him off, went to Walmart, got a pump, which broke as my tire reached it's correct level, so I returned it, and drove back, arriving as Aduma and his former coworker emerged from the security envelope. After packing up, we went to the airport and I dropped off Aduma, and headed for Wichita. The ending bracket on the weekend was tryouts for acting in the Road to Bethlehem at church at 7:00. My clock read 6:59 as I pulled into the parking lot, having driven from Dallas.

So it happens

2006-08-17T22:55:00.000-05:00

Well, it appears that I have now paid off one of my student loans---I'm about halfway done now! It is cool that I have a job that allows me to chuck large amounts of cash at getting rid of these financial annoyances. I could have done it faster, if I had cared enough about it, and less about other things. Now I have more to concentrate on my remaining loans. Or, I could buy a nice car.

In other news, this evening I pumped about 120mA of current through one little infrared LED. The good news is that it didn't burn out. The bad news is that my current set up with a piece of glass did not light up satisfactorily when I touched the back of the glass. I could get a tiny crescent of a glow when I took a digital still of the glass---but that could have been ambient reflecting off my thumbs. The IR filters I have seem to work pretty good---I just don't have enough light! Maybe I should have gotten hundred of the little LED's, instead of just 16. Maybe I should just forget the IR thing, and go with visible light---a fluorescent tube or two, and some aluminum foil and tape.

Well, it is that time again: bedtime, and I haven't eaten supper. I don't think. I did put some chicken and potatoes in a crockpot. I should dump in some spices. oooh, maybe some onions if I have them. I had Chiquadillas(tm) for supper last night. While the idea isn't mine, the name is original. It's like chicken quesadillas, only you use unhatched chicks. Pronounced like chickadee.

Crazyness

2006-08-16T18:53:00.000-05:00

So, I am not quite insane yet, but if I take a picture with a digital camera through an IR filter, I get some cool images. Sort of like normal pictures, but pinkish, and trees are bright. Check it out!

In other news, I had a great weekend with Fjord at his parents', along with Bubbles, Dex and Grey. We cut branches out of locust trees, the type that has all these pokey things, and poison ivy climbing up them. And I got to drive an old Allis-Chalmers D17---that lever is a hi-low shifter, not a hand clutch.
Fjord told us all about his work at Wycliffe this summer. He showed us the program he worked on, and some of it's cool features he made. It is a well designed program--and even though I don't know linguistics, it was interesting and helpful. FieldWorks does it's job like a program should.

Today I spent a good bit of time walking out in the shop. I find that I can find out a lot more by talking to the mechanics, and looking at the parts, than digging through the part numbers on my computer. Really, the two strategies are complementary.

I got a new tire for Cecil yesterday--now I'm not running on a donut anymore, but a tire slightly wider than the others. For better traction, since it is on the tire with out a brake.
I am also looking for a new car. I'm sort of hesitant to replace Cecil---who knows if my next car will actually start everytime. Will it be as totally failure resistant as my current one?

And here are some more pictures---notice how the rainbow shows up moved over, and you can see a second one that you can't see in the visible light picture.

aaaarrrggggg

2006-08-09T23:05:00.000-05:00

So, I get back this evening, and my apartment smells like stale tobacco smoke. I've had this problem a couple days ago, but then it was just my kitchen, so I figured maybe I had something rotting somewhere. But, this time it was pretty clear. How is it getting in? The hall wasn't that bad, so it's not coming in under the door. The windows were closed. My AC was on (which is uncharacturistic). Maybe my house doesn't need much AC because air/smoke flows from my neighbor's houses. I don't know, but it is annoying.

This evening there was a special youth group meeting at church, and they invited the "college" group I am a part of to take part in it. Basically, they were graduating the seniors, and welcoming the new 6th graders into the youth group. We were there because they were handing the seniors over to us--well, after taking out the ones leaving for college in a couple days/weeks, there were only a couple. But it was cool. And afterwards we played Ultimate in the falling darkness.

I am once again realizing that I need to make some changes in my life/environment, because I can---the world is full of options, so there is no reason to live like you are trapped in a particular subworld, where everyone is helpless, and powerlessly struggles to keep insanity at bay, and so their lives become unmanagable. Reminds me of the song:

Love must go both ways
But now the only way was me
So I must leave before I fall
Into your twisted misery.

So, even though all my complaints are subjective and qualitative rather than quantitative, there is such a thing as good vs. not-so-good, even when you can't really write out when non-perfect becomes unreasonably unsatifactory. In the past, I have figured that problems are just my imagination, or my perspective, unless I could show distinctive, definable reasons that showed it bad against an absolute, not just rating less than 7 on a scale from 3 to 15.

Maybe, I instead should try looking at it from the perspective of the one I am weighing.

Lemmings

2006-08-02T23:13:00.000-05:00

Today I had a discussion with a guy at work about following the crowd. It started out with him saying that Toyota was the second largest automaker in the world, so Toyotas must be the best value for the money. It's the "so many people can't be wrong, Donkey-Donkey" idea. I tried to explain that often the masses are steered by less stellar ideals than finding the best car. That advertising has a big influence. That just because most people think something is a good idea, doesn't mean it is---I can't vouch for their motives and criterion. Couldn't get through to him. And I couldn't think of anything that the masses did, that he would think was stupid too. He contended that if you are walking one way, and everyone else is running the other way, you should think about turning around.
Actually he is right, the majority often gets it at least sort of right. Maybe I have these illusions that by staying from the beaten path, I will get non-mediocre results. Maybe I need to not just pretend to be different from the everyone demographic, but actually be different. Although I do have a good start. Oh, well.

This evening I peeled about 5 medium-to-small potatoes, schredded them with a grater, and fried them up with some oil. I figured that I could eat what I had left over for lunch the next day. Some grated cheese topped it off. Then I ate it all. It was good with some spices.

My FTIR project is coming along slowly. I've got a piece of glass behind me with a few LED's stuck to it. The webcam was having trouble picking up the light from them. Maybe once I get the infrared filter the camera will work better. Fjord pretty much has the software done. When I touch the glass and allow the light to excape, the webcam will pick up the spots, and his program will find them, and move the cursor on my screen to the location mapped by my finger. With other light sources I have gotten my cursor to move by moving a light, or bright piece of paper. Mostly we are waiting on me getting this hardware built. I got the idea from these guys. I think I need to adjust the current to the LED's so they are brighter.

I removed the part of my car that was making the whine/roar. The front tire now has a shimmy, and when I run my hand over it, there is a depression down the middle of the tread in one area. Good thing I've got a spare donut.

Well, seems like most people are sleeping at this point in the day/night cycle, so I think I will too.

Why things are looking up

2006-07-27T21:16:00.000-05:00

I have been either too bored to write, or too busy to put down the interesting things that are happening. So, here's what's going on:

Work:
Continues as normal, punctuated by the abnormal. Like for the next couple weeks, I'll be spending about half my time in class, learning some interesting things about making engineering drawings to show the guys who make it, what is important, what needs to be accurate, what can have some slop in it, as long as certain things happen. Plus, it is an industry standard, so even if I can't think of much way I will use it in my current job, it will be helpful later in my engineering career. Actually, if I had known this at my last job, I would have done much better. I think my text book is probably less dry than just reading ASME Y14.5M-1994. I am also doing the regular work thing, with it's joys and frustrations.

Projects:
Well, I'm on my way to getting an airplane that flies again--got the carb fixed, need a new airframe...
I am also working with Fjord on a new touch-screen system that others have been experimenting with. My IR LED's and webcam arrived today, I but I didn't get home until the office was closed. I built a preliminary set up, and Fjord has gotten the programing to the point that it can analyze a photo I took, and move the cursor on my screen to the place indicated by my index finger in the photo. Once we get the webcam streaming pictures in, I can just touch the glass, and move my cursor. I need some more glass.

Apartment:
As usual, it is a mess, although I did the dishes last night. I should probably find some other place to live--somewhere that has a garage. I need to make my house a nice enough place that I can invite people over. I did clean off my coffee table the other day, so I could sew some pillowcases.

Car:
While it still seems to operate correctly, my car may be needing some replacing pretty soon. It hadn't failed me---well, I've run it out of gas, water, or let the battery die, (always my negligence)---until today. As I drove into the parking lot after class, the tire was very low. So, after work, I was going back to my car, and I saw a Spirit Security officer filling up some one's tire. So, I waited until he was done, and asked for the same help. Sure enough, when I got to my car, the tire was pretty much totally flat. But, when he filled it up, I was able to drive to the store, get a patch kit, and then to a gas station with free air, and repair my tire. (really, it's not the car's fault I ran over a roofing screw).
As expected, the horrible scraping noise my brakes made is gone. Seems my rotor is now divided into a inner hub, and a thin outer disk that the caliper is tightly gripping. See? If you ignore problems long enough, they will go away!

Got the August VOM newsletter today---rather sobering. If you don't get this publication, visit www.persecution.com
It sort of puts into perspective the problems I have in my life. Maybe building codes get in my way, but at least I don't have the Ho Chi Minh City police using building codes as an excuse to demolish parts of the roof of my house church/bible school. Plus, they aren't beating me, or raiding my home and interrogating my wife more than 100 times---while I am in prison for 15 months. Pastor Nguyen Hong Quang has been the target of much abuse--as well as many other Christians in that area.

Football

2006-07-09T23:03:00.000-05:00

Today I watched the FIFA World Cup final game, at the home of a guy who grew up in Italy. We had a whole group of people there, and had a good time. I had watched very little of the games leading up to this, but then again I watch very little of any sport. The rest of the US watches lots of sports, but not much World Cup. The statistics I heard was 1 billion people world-wide watched the final game--that is nearly one sixth of the world's population--counting the guy who lives in a grass hut, and hasn't seen a TV. On the other hand we have the US, who have an average of 2.24 TV's per home, and who watch more than 4 hours of TV per day.* From this demographic, only 6% were watching this game today. It is obviously not that we don't have the wherewithal to see it---I was watching a local channel, picked up by connecting some coax to the metal fireplace insert. More than half of Americans have cable, and didn't have to adjust the chimney/coax connection part-way through the game.

What does this mean? It means there is a disconnect between US and the rest of the world. Many people couldn't care less that the rest of the world is cheering and screaming when the team from their country makes a goal. The rest of the world is celebrating this game...and we are so insulated from them that we don't seem to notice. There was a country in Africa that had to call their civil war on account of the game.

What should we do about this apathy for the rest of the world? Get out more. Find out more. Host an exchange student from another country. Build a global community. We just don't understand what is going on out there, except that most of what we buy has "Made in Some-wheres-else" stamped on it. We are deeply effected by what goes on in other countries, maybe we should start paying attention---instead of having an attitude that as long as we still get stuff from them, and don't get immigrants, everything is peachy. The rest of the world matters---America, wake up to this fact!

This was written while sitting in my basement apartment, where I spend 86% of my non-working time. I don't know my neighbors.

Explodes!

2006-07-04T12:35:00.000-05:00

This evening I went to the house of a coworker. I drove 30 minutes out into the country, between freshly plowed fields that had just received a light rain. There were tree-lines splitting the fields into manageable chunks, and houses, and old outbuildings. Finally I turned onto a sand road, and then parked at the end of the row of cars along the road. Old farmers stood around in little groups and talked. People walked around the stone-faced house, nestled in the gums and cottonwoods. One group was discussing a large tree. "Figure it's about a hundred years old--26 feet around" It was indeed a large tree, an old cottonwood that had been there since before any of the old guys standing around--guys tanned to leather by hard work and sun. I sort of felt out of place, but I shouldn't have--I'm an old farmer myself, but am totally out-classed by these guys. We had a good meal of brisket, pork and all the side dishes one would expect. I was introduced to various family members, and made to feel included. But, as often happens, I copped out most social interaction, and after discussing the major of one girl who goes to Rolla (Aerospace) I went over to the circle of people listening to a handful of musicians play bluegrass. It was interesting--especially to see the different styles/interests/specializations of the different artist. One guy wrote gospel-centric pieces--coulda been at that church in Beulah. One lady played violin and guitar, and sang songs about cowboys. Another guy with the same instruments played pieces that he wrote that made fun of stuff--himself, politics, domestic woes. One guy had a bag of harmonicas and accompanied the others. A guy plucked silently on his steel guitar. It really wasn't good weather for instruments, but they just kept tuning them, and didn't really seem to mind the rain blowing off the trees. I saw a cicada shell on the underside of a mulberry leaf.
After they stopped playing, I went over to the other group of people---these guys were playing country--Johny Cash, and that sort. But then it was getting dark and the fireworks were really starting to pick up down on the bridge over the creek, so I wandered down and tried not to get hit by stuff. A family (another coworker) was shooting stuff off--mother playing the voice of caution, son playing the somewhat compliant pyro, daughter and dad mostly just shooting stuff off. One ironic sequence: the son is holding roman candles, and directing the fiery projectiles off the bridge--into the air, into the damp bushes, into the water. "You aren't supposed to hold them! It's dangerous!" Dad can't really find a way to stand up the roman candle he is about to light, so he props it up somehow on the concrete bridge, and lights it off. Of course it falls over, sending a flaming ball of incendiary gunpowder across the bridge, narrowly missing the fleeing mother. The son rescues it a unpredictable discharges later, and directs the rest safely away from the bystanders. After all the fireworks were gone, I went home. Driving through town I could see explosions all over town, and I think someone is attacking my apartment complex.

Some pictures of my plane's "exploded view."

The engine---I think I see why it doesn't run:

Wing-bone not connected to the fusilage-bone...

Bad lighting on a broken plane:

another weekend

2006-07-04T11:51:00.000-05:00

This weekend I didn't have much planned, even though it was a long one. I was sort of wondering what I was going to do, but then Bubbles showed up. After we talked about our jobs for a while, we decided to make something. Well, first we cut some stuff up with a thread. Yeah, just a piece of thread, pulled back and forth against pretty much anything will cut a fine-kerfed line. And very manuverable.

We got my airplane engine back together--well, all the pieces that were reusable anyway. I need a few carburator parts.

Most of our time was spent machining a new manifold for the top of my fountain/waterfall. It was just a hose, delivering the water to one place on the stone--now we have a multi-ported distribution device with holes drilled from multiple directions, intesecting in the inside, with the ends of some holes plugged afterwards with epoxy'ed-in rubber stoppers. We tied some plants to it as well. Especially without a machine, (is that what you "machine" stuff with?) the fiber/plastic material we used was much better than wood or metal. I got some scraps when they made the deck around the apartment office.

I'm afaid the little plants are going to die, just siting out there without dirt--but that is how they were before I cut them off the parent plant--and I put those stems in the water...Maybe I'll machine some holes in the top of the block, with a tiny port to the water flow, and plant them in some dirt.

The Problem

2006-07-01T18:18:00.000-05:00

It's not a perfect situation
As things I'm stuck with always seem to bring
Such contant frusteration
I find I've started hating everything
So to all of you who've listened to me groan
I just want to make it known

I've finally found the source of my angst
It's different from what I've raved against
The problem that keeps me angry
The problem is me

I thought that if only
Things and people just did stuff right
I could be happy
I wasn't going to give up without a fight
I justified my negativity
As the only way to stay free

I've finally found the source of my angst
It's different from what I've raved against
The problem that keeps me angry
The problem is me
The problem is me

yet another trip

2006-06-27T23:52:00.000-05:00

So, this weekend I went to Missouri to see my family. It was an enjoyable time, and helpful to just relax.
Friday we textured a basement. Texturing is pretty cool because you start with a wall, and totally change how it looks using a little mud and even less effort. We had to hurry and finish up in the afternoon because we had a party to go to. We invited all our friends over for an evening of talking and eating. A few of them made it, so there was only 109 people there. I got to talk to a guy about why the sun is not just a ball of incandescent gas, but actually has rocks in it. I talked to some other people about making a house out of tires and other easily found material. We prayed for Simeon and Janelle and their future, as well as Jess and Robert and Moravia. Eli brought his bicycle-powered ice cream cranker. There were a bunch of people I didn't know, but many didn't know each other either.

Saturday we just sort of chilled. 8 of us got haircuts, and I came away much less shaggy. I need to get shorn more often. Jeremy and others worked on a railing in the Upper Room, to keep kids from walking off the edge. It looked really nice, and will look better when it is done. We talked about me and my future, as well as the futures of the rest of us and how they all could fit together. I realized that maybe the goal in life wasn't to progress up the corporate stairway, and make more and more money--that has only a scrap of usefulness if you use that money for good, God-glorifying stuff. Also, it seems that I could look at a broader picture and see many options for my life and work. While learning to live with less-than-optimal-situations can be helpful, there are alternatives. And I'm not doing much learning. So, maybe I should start taking classes instead of building a house...but I want to build a house! But maybe later would be better, especially since I still have planning to do.

Sunday we went canoeing after seeing half the crew off. We didn't paddle very fast, and found an excellent tree to jump from. The water was just the right temperature, and the sun was shining. The log was about 15 feet off the water at the top, and the water was about as deep. We stopped at Paddy Creek for lunch. It has changed alot in the last dozen years. We got home a little later than planned, so I had an excuse to stay another evening, rather than try to make the drive home that night.

Monday I got up and left. The drive was uneventful except for as I was whiffling down the interstate I suddenly heard this loud whine. It was pretty constant, even as I decelerated and killed the engine as I pulled off. Ahh, the horn! So, with it blaring it's woes to the passing cars, I attempted to unplug the wire that fed it. I could just barely reach it. I hit the steering wheel, and it stopped. That was helpful, but if I bumped it, it would start going again. So I found some tools to try to pry off the connection, but to no avail. Eventually I pulled back the cover on the steering wheel and unplugged it from that end. I continued the drive. This car needs help. It is slowly losing pieces of operation, and unless I fix them, eventually I won't have a car anymore. Actually, it is amazingly reliable. I got it over two years ago, and one time I ran out of gas. Another time I didn't put in water, and it overheated and I had to let it cool and add water. Other than that, it hasn't wavered in carrying me and whatever else, tens of thousands of miles.

After I got back here, it was too late to go to work, but my small group was going to a pool, so I went and hung out and jumped off the diving board. One of the guys was really good, and I made some bad landings trying to copy him. I think the high board was shorter than the log in the Big Piney, but it bounced better. After eating, we talked about Hebrews, and prayed for one another. It was a good evening.

Today it was back to work, but I had stories about my weekend for my coworkers, and got some parts dug up that I need to change. It's not finding parts that is hard---it is narrowing it down to just the parts you need that gives me trouble. I am coming to the conclusion that often I am looking for problems so I can say "I told you we were sick!" That isn't very healthy. I just need to figure out how to be ok with my life, without becoming delusional. And nerve, I need nerve. Because status quo just ain't good enough.

So, that is what is happening here and there. I enjoy being around my family, each one of them is cool and unique.

Plane Down

2006-06-14T17:49:00.000-05:00

It is actually pretty common in RC. Something happens and you end up with pieces of a plane instead of a contraption that flies. Sometimes it is a large emotional and physical loss---a couple weeks ago, Bob's plane disintigrated onto the ground. Sometime it can just be pretty annoying---a few days later a ~12 year old was making a second pass at landing after a round in an aerobatics competition, and he had too much advise, and cart-wheeled it into the tall grass. The diagnosis was that it may be salvagable. That seems to be impractical on mine. But let's start over.
I got a new engine, and ran it for the first time yesterday---after some prodding from experts, it ran quite nicely. Ran much of a tank of gas through it, and we got my radio hooked up with a buddy box so I could fly copilot with someone more experienced. Two experienced guys took it off and were getting it all trimmed out before handing me the buddy box. It flew well, and it was cool to see something I had worked on take to the skies. Then as it was coming upwind, the copilot said, "I don't have it!" and so the guy holding the transmitter took control and dropped the throttle...but it never responded. It came down at a slight angle, mid-throttle and disappeared among the trees along the river. Not really sure what to do, I acted upbeat and it seemed going and getting it was best, so I took off across the field toward where I saw it last.

Soon I had beat through the tall grass and could see the muddy water-path that passes as a River here. Ah, there it was, near the head of the sandbar, not floating anywhere, which was good. The others arrived in a vehicle and I waded across to the sandbar--up to my knees--and gathered up the pieces. It was in 6 inches of water, the wing was broken in half on the fusilage, and the engine had wrenched off the front of the plane and was lying in the water, still connected by control linkages. Pretty easy to recover. I drain the water out of the wings (now plural) and bring it back to shore. After we get back to the field, we assess the damage. The battery seems to test good. One servo has stripped gears, and the receiver doesn't seem to work right. Maybe it's the battery. So they charge the battery. Still, it just moves the servos a little when first plugged in, but gives no indication that it cares about the signals it is getting. Maybe the transmitter needs charging. That doesn't help. So, it looks like the receiver failed, and that is why they lost control of the plane, and so it just flew heedlessly into the river. Water, especially muddy water isn't good for an engine. So Bob told me how to take it apart and wash it out with fuel when I got home. He took my transmitter and receiver home to test, and offered to get it fixed, which is rather kind of him. Today he brought me another receiver, and is going to send mine in, having determined that everything works but it. He is pretty eager to see me in the air again. I feel somewhat hesitant, but try not to show it.
When I bought this plane it had an old radio, so I replaced it. The engine subsequently died, so I got a new one of those too. Now the airframe is gone, so all I need is a kit (and some servo gears) and I can be back in the air! Reminds me of the old ax that had been handed down for generations--the handle had been replaced 7 times, and the head twice, but it was still a good ax.

For what it's worth, here's a poem from last night:

I so recently found you
I gave you new life, new energy, new spirit...
and now you are gone.
I had a hand in making you live,
but I had no control over your death,
No one did.
Goodbye,
It it no longer you, even if I continue on with pieces of your life.
What died was all that defined you.
I lost you, goodbye.

Check it out

2006-06-11T00:22:00.000-05:00

Well, I figured if I was going to design a house, I should get some help. There are alot of things I'm not too good on, and plenty of stuff I just plain have bad ideas on. So, I created a wiki (a webpage that you can edit) where I am keeping track of my ideas and designs, and I would invite you to head over to http://house.on-wiki.net and see it. Here are some sketches I've got:

This is an idea of how the foundation will be.

Some calculated values for the overhang for optimum solar gain in the winter, while keeping out the summer sun.

Flying

2006-06-03T11:40:00.000-05:00

Here's a picture of my airplane after I had flown it. Notice that it seems to be in one piece and all!

aaaaaahhhhhaaaaagggggg!!!!,,,,oh

2006-06-02T23:33:00.000-05:00

Work has taken a turn for the better. My constant negativity was pointed out to me by a coworker, so I released my grip on "there has to be a better way" and just was positive about the System. Now, the little nuances make my life interesting. No longer do I have to keep up my "new guy/idealist" views, but I can see how all the other people get away with seeing the processes we go through and systems we use as quite helpful and really advanced. Now, rather than comparing them to an ideal, I can just see how much better it is than if I were using a slide rule. The paradigm shift needed to happen sometime; I was slowly losing my "edge" for foreseeing improvement, and didn't really have any more good ideas.
So, I was enjoying just doing the work. Sure I have to push "Enter", (wait ) and then "Yes", but amazingly, that makes it search for a drawing and then I can pull it off of a tape drive somewhere and put it on my computer with another click and a few more Yesses!

This evening I went to a Health Fair my company was hosting. I found out that my weight is a little high, but my blood pressure and Cholesterol are good. And I should exercise more, raise my HDL levels, and lower my stress. I was going to walk a mile to get a tshirt, but I needed to go to a radio control meeting. So, the shirt will have to wait for tomorrow. The RC meeting was good. We watched a video about the design, testing and flying of SpaceShipOne. It was amazing what Rutan did with a budget and a short time frame. They took risks, building a spaceship more quickly and probably better than any government. Previously, manned space flight was limited to three of the largest governments in the world. Rather than spending huge amounts of time and money on wind tunnel tests, they used the Land Shark---strap test sections to a frame on the front of a pickup truck. Their main engineers didn't look much older than me. Now granted, they were probably brighter than any of the geniuses I knew at college (no offence, guys and gals). But here were people doing what no one had done before---and the thing flew, and came back down in one piece. It used some pretty nifty tricks too---the wings folded on the way down so it would slow down and not burn up.

What does this mean to me? Will I ever get a job doing amazing things? Maybe I already have one---since I've been here, we have shipped out over 200 airplanes. Every time I make a fix---unless it doesn't work---that new design will show up on every airplane until 37's are no longer made. Pretty cool, although usually I brush it off as almost worthless because the changes are so small. But even if I did do something amazing---have a huge part in designing the next breakthrough in transportation---it really wouldn't be of value compared to what Bolt and Fjord are doing. When it is all said and done, the earth and it's works will be burned up---all the composite sky-taxis, all the tin-cans-with-engines will be ashes in the wind---but the people who come to know Jesus because of what you or I do, they will last. "Well done" will be more fulfilling than all the people's accolades for flying higher, faster, farther, or building some combination of cloth and glue that does what no one has done before.

Ducks and dilettante

2006-06-01T21:20:00.000-05:00

I wandered out to put a letter in the mail and found a pair of mallards picking their way across the lawn near my building. I spoke to them in their language, but there may have been some small nuances that I was missing because they didn't pay much attention to me. On my way back I saw them slipping into our recently-refilled pool. I don't think they will find much that ducks really like in the sterile waters. Poor dears.

I am feeling a bit under the weather. My nose runs unless I am sleeping, and my voice is going hoarse. I should eat something and go to bed.
Tonight's menu: Uncle Charlie Pizza
Classically, Uncle Charlie Pizza was made by spreading ketchup on a piece of white bread, laying a slice of American cheese on top, shaking on some oregano, and cooking it in the microwave or toaster oven. My neo-gourmet Uncle Charlie Pizza will consist of homemade white bread with pizza sauce on it and mozzarella cheese. Then I will melt the cheese onto it in the microwave.

A milestone, a mountain, a memorandum

2006-05-31T22:20:00.000-05:00

This weekend I went to Colorado. The first days were saturated with preparing for, and then participating in an age-old tradition interpreted with a respect for the past and a flavor of the present---the rite of passage of a boy into the path that would solidify him into a man. My cousin's Bar Mitzvah started Friday night with a Service that welcomed the Sabbath, and the rest and peace and focus on the community reaching for God that brought. Sabbath morning we met again for more celebration and ceremony like steps of a dance (sometime literally) until the climax where my cousin was called down by his Hebrew name to read from the Torah---the much-revered scroll that was passed from generation to generation and hand to hand. The significance was striking---this was the Word of God, the first extant epistle from the Creator to the creature---more than just ink on paper, but a living letter of meanings and deeper meanings. Max then expounded on his passage--the first chapter of Bamidbar (I'd call it "Numbers") with clearness and originality of thought. Then there was more singing---an interesting, rhythmic style which made our four-part rendition of "I Sing the Mighty Power of God" sound stilted and stoic in comparison. By the time it was over, we had gone through the the prayer-book, back to front.
We then had more food than I could eat and topped it off with various desert dishes. The afternoon found us floating down a snow-melt river over a small waterfall--it was cold to stand in, but swimming in it was warming and demanded repetition.

Sunday some of us walked up Bear Peak---hills, up a wooded gorge, rock field, to the fractured peak jutting into the sky. Then we ran back down. Monday was a more leisurely stroll up to a water fall. Tuesday before heading back to Flatland we took another foray into the mountains, up to the remains of a hotel that burned almost a hundred years ago, and then to an overlook the gave us a view of the the Continental Divide---had there not been clouds gathering over the mountains. In the remains of the hotel was a fountain which not only sported a large snake, but a piece of galvanized pipe sticking up out of the rocks. It had been about a century since this pipe was installed, and not only was it not very rusted (due to climate) but I could have bought a modern pipe fitting at a hardware store and it would have fit perfectly---the NTP standard has not changed.

Today I was back at work, catching up, and enjoying the discussions about what the title of flagnotes should say since the memo about the new way they will be listed. I asked how it affected how the plane was put together--trying to be matter-of-fact, not sarcastic, and got the answer that what mattered was that there be a standard for the naming of flagnotes, not because it would change the final product. Back in the day they had a piece of plastic with lines on it, horizontal, vertical, and slanted, and your text on the drawing had to match the right set of lines. It is fun to see the world crystallized into a position of obsession with such impractical pointless machinations. Gives me something not to be. An edge, a lip to climb up from.

Cleaner

2006-05-24T23:59:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I started cleaning. My living room is now pretty neat and clean. My dining room only has piles of junk around the edges. My kitchen floor is swept. My bathroom is amazingly more clean. The middle of my bedroom is swept, but there is more stuff piled there. And my closet is almost impassible now. But my clothes are washed. What sparked this domestic industriousness was the fact that my family needs a place to stay for a night, and so I need some accessible floor space.
Interestingly, I can waste time for hours reading stuff, writing blogs, etc. but once I can get myself started on something useful I usually have a hard time stopping. Last night I was just planning to clean my living room, but one thing led to another, and before I knew it I was scrubbing the shower.

Work goes on as usual. Monday I had a meeting with several people from the shop, my boss and a another guy. We discussed a problem and settled on a decision that everyone who showed up could be happy with. And it was a much easier fix that I was planning. Then there are times that I realize just how comically inefficient we are. Like printing out over 80 sheets of paper to represent some assemblies so I can change a "5" to a "7" in 8 places. And some of those places that "5" is in pretty small type. Now, there was lots more I was changing on those 80 pieces of paper, but it was just overhead for the change. I enjoy making little red marks on paper (especially if I had some softer red lead) and I have a kind of sadistic happiness in printing out massive amounts of paper.

Today I bought an engine for my airplane. The one I had doesn't work anymore. It is pretty old, but it seemed to have pretty good compression---even with the glow plug out! An engine should turn over easily with that cork removed from the top of the head. The piston only went partway up into the cylinder, even after I disassembled it in the field and the guys smoothed it down with some emery cloth. So, I picked up a new one. I shouldn't have trouble finding parts for this one. And the carb should work. And the head shouldn't leak.

Well, I need to get the blankets out of the tub so I can take a shower and go to bed.

And here's a picture of my kitchen the other day, to give you an idea of what messy means...

Mortality

2006-05-17T21:37:00.000-05:00

I sit here in my chair as I often find myself. Outside the sun is shining, and maybe I should go out and walk around. Or saw something. I have too much stuff in my house. I have a couple table tops, a couple bean bags, some bamboo plywood, a large coffee table without a top, a bunch of lumber, some thick slabs of black plastic, a mirror-with-pegs for hanging on the wall--the type you hang a small quilt or decorative cute objects, there is a scroll saw, several computers, parts, and printers, a lawn chair, a bike, and a partially disassembled rolly-chair. Also a few odds and ends, like a strainer for boiling a turkey in oil, a flat basket, and a long glass jar with layers of dry corn and beans. a big shiney pot without a lid has coils of foam sitting on it. I also have an exercise mat. That all is in the dining room. Obviously, no one is going to be dining any time soon.

Saturday I went out to Lake Afton and got my plane looked over by the experts, mainly Bob. Then, after we were satisfied that it ran right, Bob took it off. It was pretty exciting to see this piece of wood and plastic take to the sky. Suddenly it changed from being a collection of materials to actually an airplane. I had messed with it, and fixed stuff on it, and now it could fly. After Bob got it a couple mistakes high and had run through what I was going to do, he handed me the controls and instructed me, "Right a little, up, left, Left, No, your other left! up a bit.." and I flew it a round in swirling arcs, handing it back frequently when I felt out of control. We made a couple flights that day, but the engine was acting up. There was an old hand there who helped to make it run. It was interesting to see the contrast between Bob's careful, methodical, well thought out actions versus Mike's wealth of experience and understanding of planes and engines. He's standing over the prop, smoking a cigar and adjusting the mixture. Or sucking dirt out of the carb and spitting it out. Seemed to have all the right things in his pockets. Gets it running, runs it across the field and into the air, and soon hands me the controller, giving instructions in jargon that I don't understand. Just a different way of looking at planes, and looking at him he seems to have done fine, missing no fingers or large pieces of his face. The day was a success, seeing how I came home with a whole plane of the proper proportions and configuration.

Sunday afternoon saw me and some kids from church playing frisbee in the wind. Our team had some good catchers, but no throwers, and yet we lost 9-10 and we were down one person. It was a trifle cool, but not when you run until you can't. I got somewhat competitive---i.e. emotionally involved in the game--toward the end when we had a chance at winning. But it was fun, and a good dose of exercise for the week.

There is a guy at work who was expecting his first child--well his wife was, and Sunday they had a baby boy. They named him: Tobias. Now, it could be that they just always wanted to name a kid that, and did despite some clown at work already using the name. But, I like to think that they got the idea from me (not that I had a hand in choosing my name). That makes two people whom I knew who have named their kid Tobias. Maybe I will finally meet someone with my name.

This evening I talked to aduma and spork using skype, off and on for a couple hours. We also called my house phone and Bubble's phone using the recently-free skype-to-regular phone function. I am thinking that maybe I should get rid of my house phone and just use skype---people can call me from regular phones if I pay $36 a year.

I love a parade!

2006-05-14T00:57:00.000-05:00

After work on Friday I didn't have much time at the Surplus Store---just enough to buy some 1.5" linear bearings (it was a great deal,,,but I am not sure what I'll use them for) and a touch sensor for high precision machining applications. Then I hurried off to the parade. Yes, I was in a parade!  First we had to fill up the big helium balloon in the shape of an airplane. I'm not sure if it would have lifted me--couldn't get everyone to let go. We followed a band through the streets, pulling it down under the stoplights and dodging the sharp signs along the route. Some places we could let it up high. There was only one other parade entree that had similar large helium shapes--Raytheon had a humpback, an orca, and a white weather balloon with the company name on it. There were some other floats that were pretty cool--but I didn't see much of the parade since I was in it.

I stayed around to pack up the balloon.  We vented off all the helium---you could see it coming out, causing refraction like hot air on a still day.  They had a vacuum cleaner to help pull the helium out, and when the hose was stuck into the helium, the whine of the vacuum would rise considerably--like when it is clogged (because the helium is less dense).
After that I went a few blocks to an art show.  It was multiple art installations that focused on using technology along with art to further interactiveness. In fact, each one was created by a team made up of Electrical Engineering and Art students. Some were cool, some were ok.  The best was "Firefly Environment"---a darkened area with tiny lights hanging from the ceiling at different heights, with peaceful background of crickets.  On the walls were some fans to keep the "fireflies" moving slightly as they flashed in random patterns. On the floor was a 3'x3' grass area, with a mason jar on it, with more captured fireflies.  I want this in my living room. Another interesting one was a monolithic object with a microphone on it and a hole near the top that a dancing laser beam shined out of.  It hummed with sounds created by modifying the input sound an looping it, and feedback from it's own modulated, phase-shifted sound. The laser was driven by these sounds, tracing crazy lines on the wall. Later they moved it so it shone on a building across the street.  There was also a little room called "Secret Garden" that had things made of flowers and speakers with garden sounds that changed as you walked up. All in all it was pretty cool to look at, and interesting to talk to the people who had made it happen.  I think I might try to take this class. I talked to the teacher and he was a pretty cool guy and repeatedly said that it would be good for me to get involved.

As I drove home, I wondered about art. What good is it? So often it seems  to be an Emperor's New Clothes sort of thing; "If you were cool, you would be impressed by this."  And what does it accomplish?  Then I realized that what it provided was the happiness that I felt as I stood in the firefly-filled volume in that old building. It provides joy to people. Usually I attribute value to technical things a more efficient dishwasher, a better paperclip, a more user friendly computer program. They are worth my time because they make the world a better place---we can get more done, faster. But is anybody happier if I move a pilot hole in a piece of metal a fraction of a hundredth of an inch?  Maybe the guy who puts the fastener in, but that is only because then he can make airplanes faster.  Sometimes the things that we see no value in are the ones that matter while what we thought was important really was just a self-perpetuating illusion.
I talked for a while with the guy who helped the teacher with the dancing laser.  He works at a local company that make power supplies for florescent lights for aircraft. He also makes things like this and this. He said "I couldn't work for a big company" and I realized that maybe my frustrations with my job are fixable--I have been telling myself that there are going to be problems wherever I go--which is true...ish. After all, I left a start-up company, and my job was annoying because there was no system, and specifications changed all the time, and the job was not very reliable. Maybe there is a happy medium somewhere---or a whole different paradigm that makes it a moot point. Where the problems I beat my head against are real, not invented by the system, however necessary it is.

On the other hand, tomorrow I get to help out with the balloon some more---helping to deplete the world's limited supply of helium.

Mars Hill,,,

2006-05-10T19:30:00.000-05:00

,,,and I don't know what to say. So, there is this Philosopher at work, who has a plan to fix the world. A Utopian plan based on everybody being nice to one another and not being greedy. So far so good---it's worked before... He uses many biblical and pseudo-biblical ideas and metaphors. He takes on the label of "Christian", but usually doesn't stress it, because he talks about philosophy, not so much religion. I usually disagree with most of what he says because it is almost right, and almost plausible, and maybe I am just pretty much an antagonist. Today, after we had discussed something, I mentioned that part of my problem was that I can't seem to divorce my beliefs and philosophy---and so we got onto religion. He reiterated that he was a christian, but that he thought that the way that everyone in the world can get along is by all the religions coming to a compromise, because if you get down to the basics of all religions, they are pretty much the same. I suggested that he meant people could not kill others, but try to help others eventually see the light. No, that would be me waiting until I could conquer you, or prove you are wrong. What we need is a "world conscience" to turn around the way the world is going. Each religion will have to give up some beliefs, and come to a consensus about what to believe. I can't really tell him that actually, the others are wrong, and I am right. Where is my evidence? What would it accomplish anyway?

Often I find that I hate him because what he says has no obvious, glaring flaws, and even if it does, he philosophies it away. He seems remarkably patient when I attack his ideas---maybe he confuses my backhanded disagreement with the not-so-witty banter that floats around the office. It isn't as easy as I figured curing someone of wrong conclusions using logic would be--you can't just show that a view leads to eating babies--after all, if it's you or the baby... Without a lot of time, it seems that I have no direct, clear, reason for what I believe if I don't use Scripture or other evidence that would seem inadmissible in a secular debate. Maybe I need to make it obviously un-secular. Or, just ignore the stream of almost-correct views on life (I've ignored the glaringly false ones) and just do my work, and let it be. Or, bring a constant flow of anecdotal stories about my own walk with God. Hmmm,,,mostly I see my failure to regularly connect with God on a personal, reciprocal level.

And, I am not sure that posting such stuff on a public forum isn't uncouth, but, where else can I get advice about my day-to-day life?

Have I got a chance?

2006-05-05T23:03:00.000-05:00

It seems that I don't have to go insane just because I work at a place that isn't perfect, and my coworker are mostly harmless, but often are synced to a reality that doesn't fit with the facts. Not that they are majorly crazy---not most, anyway---nor is the environment distinctly difficult. It is just that I have this feeling that I have to push against the machine, or I will become an automoton. However, I can be happy, positive and realistic and still keep my sanity, if I choose.

Speaking of sanity, I've got this crazy idea that will never happen! So, I live in an apartment which is pretty fine, but I would rather live in a house I had built. The catch is that summer is coming, and I haven't really figured anything out, and it is too late, but here's the deal: Buy a couple acres, plant some stuff, maybe a couple chickens---enought to call it a farm, so that I can call my house a farmhouse, so that The Code will let me alone.
Make sure I buy where the soil has enough clay that I can use it as stucco, and do a rubble trench with a concrete footer on it, and stack straw bales on that. Put on a tin roof that overhangs enough to protect the walls from rain (porches) and make the south wall stick-built with windows and a passive overhang. Stucco the place, insulate the roof with a straw/clay mixture, floor it with vapor barrier, packed dirt, topped with tar/clay/paper mixture and move in! Attach a composting toilet, add a garage (separate by a wall for sound/fire).
Water is one thing I need to figure out. Shallow well wouldn't be hard, but that would need processing for drinking. Solar still? Probably hook to the grid because wind power is still pretty expensive. By then it will be fall, and I will wish that my wind break grew faster, but at least my house is snug, and warmed by the sun---probably I would need a woodstove that "sets outside the home" to supliment it. Doesn't seem to be any waste biomass around here, so maybe I would burn old tires.
Well, that's the idea, and I am sure somebody has some better ones, and I am all ears.