Month: October 2006 Page 1 of 2

Homeschool day 47 of 180
Government school day 37 of 170

Halloween is such an irritating triffle of a holiday. Pumpkin carving is virtually the only thing I like about it. I guess when kids are very little it is kind of neat to see them dress up in their costumes, but only when they dress up as princesses and heros. It saddens me to see little (and big) children goulishly adorned. What are their parents thinking? This halloween could be even more challenging in that everyone, but Kelly (keep your fingers crossed Kelly) either has a cold replete with sore throats, runny noses, and achey bones.

Last night, Kelly and I had another one of our wonderful evenings together. She worked on her homework and I helped her color her thank-you note to the Ramsdells. Christian will have to do his thank-you note today because he went to his cubscout pack meeting last night with Lorena. Lorena is right in the middle of her calculus class, so she constantly has too much to do. Nevertheless, she took the time to go to the meeting with Christian, who was the “Denner” last night. That is the guy that leads the flag ceremony and helps hand out all of the prizes and badges. Lorena took some pictures and had the chance to forget the worries of the day while at the pack meeting. I think she enjoys them as much as Christian.

Homeschool day 46 of 180
Government school day 36 of 170

I was sick at home all weekend. I made it to the meetings on Sunday, but was completely out of the loop for a couple of days. Lorena, took Kelly and Christian to a great get-together at the Ramsdell “cabin” on Friday night and Saturday. Kelly and Christian were the youngest kids there, but they were included in everything and treated very, very well. The event was well attended and required a lot of coordination effort and expense on the part of all the Ramsdells. Our hats are off to them for all their work and hospitality!

When I was not in bed, I worked on getting the new computer set up and the old computer converted over to a headless server. It is not perfect, but I surely did learn a lot about Linux servers. The server is set up, but not all the drives work as I want them to work. Some of them are read-only when they should be read-write. It will be interesting to get that all worked out. On the whole, though, it is working quite well and I see a path to getting exactly what I want. I also set up to pull videos from our camera and make DVD’s. The videos are now off the camera and archived on the server. The next step is to buy some disks to burn and try that out.

Homeschool day 45 of 180
Government school day 35 of 170 ***students not in class today***

Yesterday evening was one of those evenings that we all have every now and that you just wish you could do over. I got a cold, homeschool was a challenge, and I was only able to accomplish about a third of the computer stuff I needed to get done last night to have everything ready for the kids homeschool tomorrow. They will have to use the old computer one more day and I will get to stay home this evening so I will not give everyone a cold at the party we were planning to attend. Well, they should still have fun and I will have some nice, quiet time with computers.. The kids are wearing costumes to the party and they are pretty excited about that. They are going, surprisingly enough, as Mexicans. Who would have imagined that?

Homeschool day 44 of 180
Government school day 35 of 170 ***students not in class today***

Edgy Eft, the new version 6.10 of Ubuntu Linux came out today. It sounds great and I would like to make the leap, but really do not have the time or need to make the jump. There are a couple of things I would like to have, but can either live without or get by upgrading individual packages. I have installed the new 2.0 version of the still fabulous Firefox web browser on all our computers at home already. Everything else can wait.  With a new computer coming in the next few days, I will have my hands full.  The plan is to turn use the new computer for all the Windows-only programs (World Book Encyclopedia and Rosetta Stone Spanish) and turn the old computer into a headless (no monitor) file and print server.  That all should be fun, interesting, and educational, but it all takes time so I am having to pick my battles to get the most impact.

Homeschool day 43 of 180
Government school day 35 of 170

Lorena did her workout and studied hard for her calculus class last night. She is really keeping up the pressure. When I got home, she had just finished her thirty minutes on the elliptical machine and was talking about fixing dinner, but I decided we all needed a break so we went down to Wendy’s to have a baked potato and a bowl of chili. We love to do that every now an then. Grandma Sarah calls Wendy’s “the chili place” and that has stuck with Kelly and Christian, too. The thing that is good about it is that no one is tempted to get up and walk away to answer the telephone, grab a book, or (in Lorena’s case) wipe off the already clean counter. We are stuck with just sitting there and talking to each other. It is nice. We usually have that at dinner at home, too, but there were a LOT of distractions yesterday.

I called up the local VFW post today and talked to the commander. Kelly is going to take her essay in later this afternoon. As per popular request (thanks for asking JoAnn), we will post it here either tonight or tomorrow. I will also post Kelly’s cover letter because it was very cool, too.

You may have noticed that I have reduced the number of government school days from 175½ to 170. 170 days is the official government count of days that kids will actually be taught in our local schools. We were giving them the benefit of a doubt, but will go with the official count in our daily tally.

Dad ordered a cool hair book for me a couple of weeks ago and it arrived on Saturday. Since then I have been experimenting with several different braids and buns! I’m so happy! This book isn’t just for me, Mom is going to use it too. I could never get the hang of the complicated styles that my friends at convention always do. I’m not great at doing all the styles, especially the braids, but I am getting the hang of it. I am also very excited because Dad finished correcting my Patriot’s Pen essay. Patriot’s Pen is a VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) essay contest. All I need to do is send in my essay. This will be very fun for me. Mom is telling me to get back to my math so I had better quit typing. (-:

Homeschool day 42 of 180
Government school day 34 of 175½

Kelly and I spent yesterday evening together designing t-shirts. Lorena and Christian went to cubscouts, so we had the house to ourselves. Tios Jorge and Lauro are planning to bring Tia Mary and Primos Jorgito, Valeria, and Dayanita to Oregon for the holidays in December. We are trying to talk Tia Dayana into bringing Primo Laurito, too. Kelly and I decided that it would be good to design some t-shirts to give them as souvenirs. Kelly drew up a big picture of all the cousins in a group along with Grandpa Lauro to go on the back. I did the little logo on the front. It was really fun. We need to refine our designs a little more, then print them out and iron them onto the shirts. It was a LOT of fun. One of my favorite things in all the world is to sit down with one or both of the kids to do an art project. We absolutely love our summer Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad drawing sessions. We have at least one more summer of that before we will need to go on to something new. I think it would be good to continue on with pencil drawings. That is something that is almost always available.

I am getting very encouraged with Lorena’s calculus class. Lorena did well on her first test. When she gets through with this class, she will have all of the math out of the way for degrees ranging from pharmacy to microbiology to chemistry. She has been working very hard and really deserves a prize.

Homeschool day 41 of 180
Government school day 33 of 175½

There is an article in World Magazine’s Blog about a well designed, statistically significant study from the University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy that shows college freshman and seniors in universities across the country are abysmally ignorant about American history, government, economy, and “America and the world.” In addition, it shows that “students that demonstrated greater learning of America’s history were more engaged in citizenship activities such as voting, volunteer community service, and political campaigns.” This reinforces the finding that homeschool students are significantly more likely to be politically active than the general population in the United States. I have hope that, as this kind of research gets publicized, it will register with more and more parents that control of public education should be removed from government and large teacher’s unions and returned to parents and the private sector.

Homeschool day 40 of 180
Government school day 32 of 175½

As suspected, I had to spend most of the evening fixing the homeschool computer after I got home yesterday afternoon. I got rid of all the games (except Civilization IV), backed up our photographs on the Linux computer, did exhaustive virus and spyware scans, defraged, etc., etc. The computer really seems to be running a lot better now. While I was at it, I backed up all of our home videos of the kids from CD-ROM’s onto the Linux hard drive. The windows computer is getting pretty old, so I went ahead and got another low end Windows XP computer to use for the two homeschool programs we use that do not run on Linux. These two programs are Rosetta Stone Spanish and World Book Encyclopedia 2006. The kids also use Microsoft Publisher for their Kaktus Kids magazine, but that is not part of homeschool. The new computer cost less than $360 including shipping. The plan is to turn the old computer into an Ubuntu file and printer server with a big hard disk drive over the holidays when my brother-in-law Jorge is here from Mexico.

I heard that “Edgy Eft”, the next version of Ubuntu Linux is coming out on October 26.  I understand that it is a little bit of a bleeding edge version, so I think I will wait until July to upgrade.  We actually use the KDE based Kubuntu version of Ubuntu as I use KDevelop to work on a number of programming projects.  We do all of our homeschool planning and word processing on the Linux computer, too, so it is our most mission critical computer.  The “Feisty Fawn” version 7.04 will be coming out in April of next year.  I expect to have the time and inclination to upgrade to that version as soon as the school year is over.

🙂

Homeschool day 39 of 180
Government school day 31 of 175½

When I got home last night, I found that Kelly could not do her Spanish because she could not get the Rosetta Stone program to run. I checked it out. There is a small chance that there is something wrong with the disk, but it is probably something bigger than that. The system runs extremely slow at times and we were unable to run a whole bunch of programs without waiting for a long, long time for them to come up. The problem is that it is a Windows XP computer. We never have these kinds of problems on our Ubuntu Linux computer. It is all quite frustrating. The last thing I wanted to have to do tonight is work on a recalcitrant computer. The computer IS getting old though and we probably should get a new one. I was planning on waiting until the end of the year, but I probably should pull the trigger and get one. We will probably just run this old one as a Linux server and backup box.

I have been programming on our Ubuntu Linux computer for the last couple of months. Actually, we have switched over to the Kubuntu version of Ubuntu so I can program in C++ using the KDevelop IDE. I am working on a system to inspect rosettes for Quality Corners. The environment is really quite good. It is going to be very interesting to see how Microsoft’s introduction of their new operating system, “Vista” turns out. From what I have been reading, it is hard to imagine that it will be widely adopted as soon as it comes out. We would have to get all new computers to be able to use Vista while Ubuntu does everything we need and more on our current computers. The way we have used it, it has been way more stable than Windows, too.

Homeschool day 38 of 180
Government school day 30 of 175½

Yesterday afternoon after work the whole family went to see a friend from work (Jeremy Young) fly his model airplane at a local park that is specifically set up for that. It has special tables for setting up the airplanes before they fly, a runway, and lots of room for flying. Jeremy could do loops, rolls, and all kinds of amazing maneuvers. It was a LOT of fun and made me realize that we need to start up a project or two for this winter that involves putting stuff together. The kids are still putting out a magazine every couple of months and have big plans for that, but we really need to find something that is non-computer related. Maybe we can do something Christian can control with his Mindstorm robotics equipment. Maybe I could add some machine vision to it. We need to give it some serious thought. It would be nice if we could tie it into what we are learning at homeschool, too.

Then, last night, the Larson’s called from Texas. They had gotten their webcam going with Skype. They got a VERY cool camera that has a rotational axis and a motor that causes the camera to stay pointed at a person as he moves around. It was AMAZING how clear it was. The Larson boys are going to start submitting an article for Kelly’s and Christian’s magazine. Skype should be a big help in facilitating that. They are making big strides with the magazine. They have added a guest column as a regular feature, are planning to start doing more interviews, will publish the magazine as a PDF file on this web site, will blog about the magazine more, and most importantly, plan to develop a homepage for the magazine. Stay tuned…

Homeschool day 37 of 180

The study of mathematics can be difficult. Right now, Lorena, Kelly, and Christian are all studying math. Lorena is taking calculus. Kelly is studying algebra. Christian is studying pre-algebra. Maybe there are people who can get through math without spending many, many hours doing problems and going over them to assure understanding of all the processes. It is a messy thing. Last year when Kelly was studying the material Christian is currently studying, she was quite frustrated. Christian is going through some of that same frustration. Essentially, Christian is learning to solve certain classes of story problems without use of the tools of algebra. It is necessary to do that so that when he arrives at algebra, he will have a more intimate understanding of how and why algebra works the way it works. Kelly having been through the same pain Christian is currently experiencing and come to a good understanding of the pre-algebra topics, is thoroughly enjoying her study of algebra. The same thing will happen with Christian, but we will be going through about three more months of fairly difficult material.

I am required to learn a new programming language or programming environment every couple of years. After having been through the process a number of times, I have realized that it does not pay me to get too frustrated about what I do not understand. When I run into something that is difficult, I often do not understand it until I have been through it many times. It really helps to find a “recipe” that will let me use something that I do not understand for awhile even though I do not know why it works the way it does. I make a point of evaluating that recipe as much as possible during its use. It eventually sinks in. It has been a very frustrating process for me in the past. I wonder why I do not understand things that seem so simple for others. In watching the learning process, though, I realize that many other people have struggled in this same way with these difficult materials. The point to all this is to remember that frustration about such things is a wasted effort. Just patiently taking the time and plugging away at it wins every time.

The understanding does not always come in a flash of light either. Many times it dawns on me long after I come to an understanding that I now know those things that were such a frustrating mystery a short time before. The thing is, learning such things is addictive. It still is wildly exciting to me to understand very difficult things.

Homeschool day 36 of 180

Christian and I spent the day, Saturday, at a camp owned by the Boy Scouts named Camp Morrison. We enjoyed our time together very much. Christian worked on his BB gun and archery skills. He worked on starting campfires, stafety, and rescue. We worked on using his compass and generally had a good time. I am looking forward to doing more things like that in the future–maybe less with the cubscouts and more just doing outdoors things with the family. We are looking forward to our big crabbing trip in a couple of weeks and are thinking about getting a .22 rifle as soon as Kelly and Christian get through a hunters safety course. More than anything, we want to spend as much time together as a family right now as the kids are growing quickly. They are great kids.

Here is another of my great fabled blockbuster films.

Homeschool day 35 of 180

Yesterday was a day to get excited about music lessons. Christian had his guitar lesson yesterday. Lorena is studying for her first big calculus midterm on Monday, so she sat in the music store and listened while Christian took his lesson. I wish I could have been there because Lorena tells me it was pretty amazing. Lorena tells us that the instructor plays along with Christian as they go through the lesson so that Christian can hear how each piece should sound if played correctly. His practice sessions at home are sounding better and better all the time, too. It will take awhile for the comfort level to build up, but he is definitely getting there. Lorena bought him a music stand yesterday so he does not have to go into contortions to play his guitar and look at the music at the same time.

Equally amazing are Kelly’s latest efforts. She has been working on playing the hymns in our hymn book as a way to practice her sight reading. She needs to practice 45 minutes per day, six days per week. That schedule can be pretty onerous, especially when it comes to the weekends, but we have come up with a great idea. Nothing is nicer when you are getting ready to go to meeting or reading your bible on a Sunday morning than listening to the hymns. Our plan is that she will do her weekend practices on Sunday morning, working only on playing the hymns by sight reading. It is amazing how many more of the hymns she can play now than just three or four months ago. She only has the right hand for many of them, but is slowly working them out on both hands. It is fun to watch and listen.

I don’t like to be the first one to point out mistakes but I guess since no one else is willing to it’ll have to be me. First of all, someone in this household forgot to take the camera to the coast and remembered about it halfway up the next street. It was such a beautiful day that they decided to keep going so…(-: That pencil sharpener that Dad was talking about has been defective for years. First it goes well and then it decides to stop working. This new one is quite wonderful so y’all should bring some pencils and stop by our house sometime. Alsoooo…The aquarium was awesome! We saw the new exhibit, Crabs, and we saw one of those little nature movies on whales that they show in the little theater there, and we saw the jellyfish, and we touched the sea urchins and sea cucumbers and starfish, and we saw an octopus tentacle, we saw sea lions and sea otters, and finally we saw the sharks and rays in the shark tunnel. Cool! Also, my friend the Beautiful Ethne called up and we talked a long time about… wellll… nothing really. She told me that she and another girl there, the Lovely Brooke, were going to England and France to see the sights using a program caled people to people. She also told me that one of the professing ladies there is not feeling well, and she told me that she was going to go to Mt. Peak conventions. (unfortunately we will not be able to go this year) and I think that’s it! Can you believe that it’s just about a year since Dad went to Texas? Soon it’ll be a year for Mom and us kids too!

Homeschool day 34 of 180

There is not really much new to report here today. Either that, or I cannot get my brain moving this morning to think of something worthy to write. Homeschool continues quite smoothly–more smoothly than in past years. Both Kelly and Christian are doing well in their math. Lorena has a calculus test on Monday so will be hitting the books hard this weekend. Christian and I will be going ot a cubscout hike on Saturday. I have a big project that requires a lot of effort at my work. Quality Corners’ new automated paint equipment is coming on line. That is about it.

Homeschool day 33 of 180

Yesterday, Lorena came home with about 17 rolls worth of photographs from when Christian and Kelly were very little. They were almost all from when we lived in McMinnville and Cornelius. We are enjoying them very much. I am going to make up some compact disks with the photos to send on to the grandparents. Our friend JoAnn asked where were our pictures on the blog, but I have not put up any pictures for quite awhile because of some internet safety stories I have heard. I am going to have to find a place to put up some pictures under password protection. I think I will probably use Google’s Hello photo hosting site that works with Picasa. Stay tuned…

Homeschool day 32 of 180

Fourteen years ago today, Lorena and I got married at a wedding salon called “El Tio” on Avenida Garza Sada close to ITESM in Monterrey. It was a grand wedding. That Lorena and I found each other was a work of God for which I will always be grateful. I cannot imagine what my life would be without her. In many ways we are very different from each other, but in the most important things we agree. The funny thing that many do not understand is that the for the most part, our culturals are the same even though Lorena is thoroughly Mexican and I am thoroughly gringo–and Northwestern gringo at that which about as far removed as it is possible to get from Mexico in the United States.

Last night, Lorena took Christian to his cubscout den meeting after she returned from her calculus class. That left Kelly and I home alone. We decided to run down to Staples and get a new pencil sharpener. Our drawing class based on Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad demands a very, very good electric pencil sharpener. It does not demand it explicitly, but without it we find ourselves distracted from drawing and talking about life, so we believe it is essential. We wore one pencil sharpener out last year and bought a new one for this year, but it just was not cutting the mustard (or pencils), so Kelly and I went down to get a new one. It has to be the plug-in kind because if you really get the urge to draw, you do not want to risk having to hunt down batteries or, worse, run all the way down to Ray’s to get new ones.

At any rate, Kelly and I ran down to Staples. We really did not find what we needed there, so we went on to Costco and found the exact Panasonic pencil sharpener that served us so well last year. We bought it. Then, we decided we really needed to stop at Wendy’s to get some chili and a baked potato. We had a super grand time together. We really need to do that more often. We looked at books at Costco, talked about life, and just enjoyed each other’s company very much. I am going to make a point to do more one-on-one time with each of the kids. I normally get quite a bit with Christian because of cubscouts and other guy things, but my time with Kelly was good for both of us and we need to start in on some more dad-daughter stuff.