Year: 2007 Page 5 of 15

Bryan, I am down 10 again and riding a bullet.  I know you are way ahead, but I am on a roll.  What is your number?  I am going to try to get the progress bars going again.

In spite of the fun Bryan is making of me, I am still in the competition.  He may be down a lot now, but just wait until the REAL number comes in on Friday.  I am burning the midnight oil for awhile.  Right after I finished Kelly and Christian’s math corrections last night, I got a telephone call to come back into work so I had to be there until about 2:30 AM.  I kind of enjoy that kind of thing when there is a hard problem to solve.  We are right in the middle of it right now.  It is pretty tiring, but will be greatly rewarding if we can solve the problem.

Well, yesterday, I got a note from my good buddy Jerry at my old job. We had a standing bet to see who was going to get down to 200 lbs. We had two quarters taped to the wall. Winner take all. I am very said to say that the only thing in the note was the following haiku:

I spent the weekend in a place that used to be called Cid, North Carolina, but now it seems that it is just a wide spot in the road somewhere between Lexington and Denton. It was a beautiful weekend. It was a great weekend where we were reacquainted with some old friends and made lots and lots of new ones at one of our annual church conventions. One of the really fun things about the place was that many of the rocks found in that area are naturally formed cubes. I am not just talking about cubes that are kind of in the form of a cube, these are rocks that are about 20-30 millimeters to the side and form precise sharp little 90 degree corners. Amazing. Christian said he remembers reading about rocks like that in one of his geology books. I hope he can find something about them, because it looks almost like these are not natural, but just little gray rock dice cubes without any dots on them.

I was considering about our commemorative gathering and I ran into a couple of things.  Warren, Curt, and Susan should especially check these out. Maybe now that we are livin’ in the South again (not just South of Corvallis), we ought to spin our commemorative gathering back up. We still have time to plan for February.

We had a really nice birthday dinner of sheesh kabobs followed by the opening of some very cool presents, the singing of happy birthday, and the eating of cake last night. Christian’s was a memorable birth. He was born in Tualatin, Oregon early in the morning as one of the most beautiful sunrises in the history of the world shown through an east facing hospital window. He had lot and lots of beautiful black hair; probably not as much as his mother whose hair they say was already down to her shoulders at the time of her birth. It was a great time for reflection and to think about what we want to do next. The big decision right now is whether we want to build a more advanced version of the hovercraft we finished last weekend or save our pennies and buy a kit that we can build together over the winter. Both of them would be great options. The other issue is that one of Christian’s birthday presents was a subscription to the hard copy edition of Make Magazine. There are TONS of way cool projects in it. The hard part is going to be to stick to our project until we finish it without getting distracted by something else.

Lorena and the kids are taking off to convention this afternoon. I have to stay here and work until Friday night. I am hoping to get some work done on my Linux projects to kill the time while they are gone.

Just in time for his birthday (He is eleven today, he will be twelve tomorrow), Christian has gotten his hovercraft up and running!  Here it is.  ¡Buen provecho!

What a great three-day weekend.  We had to make major revisions on the hovercraft, but it worked like a champ.  We took some great videos of both the making of the hovercraft and of Christian riding it down the street, but ran into some technical glitches when we tried to put them up on YouTube.  As soon as we get that all worked out, we will send out an email and post links to where Christian is planning to put the videos on his blog.  It was WAY fun.  We need to find a way to mount the leaf blower on the hovercraft because Christian just holds it now.  Then we need to attach a rope to it so we can pull it around.  After that all works out, we are planning to go ahead and get a kit to put together.

The rest of the weekend was pretty cool, too.  Yesterday afternoon, we stopped at what looked like a Burger-King or some other fast food restaurant made over to be a fast food North Carolina barbeque joint.  When we went in, it was very clean.  Lorena ordered barbeque chicken and I ordered broasted chicken.  Both of them were great.  The lady that served us told us we missed out because their specialty was barbeque pork.  We are looking forward to getting back there to try it very soon.  It is just a single store barbeque place in Apex named Dixie Belle.  I hope they turn into a chain someday.  We would especially like to take Trisha, Bryan, and Mr. Bone there when they come to visit us.  We even might take the Waldos if they are not too snooty from eating all that New York City food!

On another hopeful note, after my inspirational morning at the Holly Springs Public Library, I spent the afternoon working on getting a bunch of vision code up and going in Linux on my laptop.  I had never quite figured out how to program very well in the Linux environment, so I finally took the bull by the horns and just hammered away at it until I got it.  It is going GREAT now.  I think I need one more session like that to be more effective with the debugger, but I am on my way now.  I got my main buffer and filter class going along with the ability to load and save images.  The next big step is to add a GTK+ GUI to the thing and I will be off and running.

Awhile back, I bought a $449 computer with Microsoft Windows XP on it for Lorena to be able to talk via Skype with her mother in Mexico.  I immediately installed Ubuntu Linux.  I think I we were at Dapper Drake at the time and I have to admit that I struggled a little to get all the hardware going.  Since then, I have did upgrades through Edgy Eft and Feisty Fawn.  It got easier each time.  I will be installing Gutsy Gibbon sometime toward the end of October.  I cannot imagine the torture I would have to endure if I had to do that with a Windows computer, but I am actually lookng forward to the new installs because they get easier every time I do them.  I know part of it is because of my movement up the learning curve, but part of it is that Linux, in general and Ubuntu in particular, just keeps getting better and better.

At any rate, some way cool things have been happening over the last little while that rarely happened to me in the past.  The first was that I found out the new V.P. of Engineering at my new job here in the Research Triangle Park area in North Carolina is running several Ubuntu boxes at home as file and internet servers.  The really big thing we have in common is that both of us have money burning a hole in our pocket waiting for the first under $200 Linux laptop to come out.  $201 is not good enough, so both of us have great hope for the new $199 Asus Xandros laptops to arrive.  We will buy them the first day they are available.  I will probably play with it for awhile, then start working on getting Ubuntu installed on it.  When it is possible to get a laptop computer with a camera and microphone for cruising the web, watchubg movies, Skype, writing papers, instant messaging, and all that sort of thing for less than the cost of a Palm TX or most smart cellphones, it surely feels like a sea change is taking place.  The funny deal is that the Asus computer is really small.  I actually think that the small screen helps them.  This computer does not feel like your grandfather’s PDA.

The other way cool thing happened this morning.  I am writing this as I sit in my easy chair with attached coffee table at the Holly Springs, North Carolina Public Library.  I am drinking my cup of gourmet coffee in the library as I write.  I know I have talked about this often, but it does not really get any less cool with time.  I forgot to turn down the volume on my laptop so a guy with two little kids nearby heard the Ubuntu boot tune when I fired up the computer.  Before he walked out, he came by and asked me if this was one of the new Dell Ubuntu laptops.  I told him my story (see above).  He told me he had been running Ubuntu for quite awhile now and was looking forward to Gutsy Gibbon, too.  I really feel some kind of momentum is being established here.

The last I heard from Bryan was that he was at -12 in our diet competition.  I was at about that at one time, too, but with the move, I did not take any time to think about dieting.  Now that I have been here for several months and with homeschool’s start returning us to a routine, I am back in the fight.  I am now at -6.  Hopefully Bryan, who is at convention, will gain a few pounds over the next couple of days so we can turn this back into more of a two-sided contest again.  Lorena has signed us up at a gym and I hope to start working out there tomorrow.  Stay tuned.

It looks like I kind of blew it.  I thought we were supposed to go to one of our annual church conventions this weekend, but it turns out that it is not until next weekend and then another one two weeks after that.  That will be great because, now Christian and I can go back to work on our hovercraft.  We are also thinking of making a carpet covered cat tower.  That should be a lot of fun.

In the meantime, check out Christian’s latest post at his Nerd-How blog.  It is really quite cool.  Eventually it will have a video.  I walked through some of the posts for the first time and it is getting WAY cool.  There are some cool listings of some cool topics on the bottom right of the page.  He has to make sure as much of his stuff appears on the main page as possible.  I do not know what that is not happening right now, but when he gets that worked out, he will have the start to a truly amazing blog.  Especially for an eleven year old.

We got up at a little before six this morning to see an eclipse of the moon.  It was very cool, but it went down behind a house before it started coming out of the eclipse, so we missed that.  School is going very, very well.  This year we seem to be a lot more organized than in years past.  The kids are getting up at 6:00 am, so they are starting about an hour and a half earlier than last year.  They are finishing up by 12:30 or 1:00 everyday, even when they have guitar or piano.  Lorena, Kelly, and Christian went down to our club last night to work out for the first time.  There was not much for Christian to do until Lorena and Kelly finished being on the machines because you have to be thirteen to work on the equipment.  After they finished working on the machines, Kelly and Christian swam laps for awhile.  It was great, but we are going to have to figure out a way to keep Christian for sitting around doing nothing while Lorena and Kelly work out.

I got stuck at the computer all weekend this weekend.  We are getting ready to start using the programs I have written since I started my job here in North Carolina, to replace what was there previously, so there is a good amount of pressure to get things right.  There will be a big test of the software in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, Lorena took Kelly, Christian, and Kasey all to Denton to help get ready for our church convention.  The kids met a bunch of new kids and Lorena had a good long talk with our very good friend, Terrie.  We have decided that we really need to get together with them as much as we can while we are here in North Carolina.  She has an amazing attitude of kindness and a desire to do the right thing for her kids.  We are looking forward to spending some time with them at the two upcoming conventions here in North Carolina, too.

Now that we are getting up at 6:00 am to read the bible in the morning, Kelly and Christian are finishing all their school work by 12:30 or 1:00 in the afternoon.  I hope that means they will be able to check out the YMCA today.  The one thing they are currently missing is hard exercise.  I believe hard exercise even helps them study better.  They were in tennis one day per week, but we decided that was just not going to be enough, so we are going to get a membership at some place where they can do an aerobics class, swimming, lifesaving, or some other such thing that gets their heart rate up.  Lorena has identified a YMCA and a club that would both be good.  The club is halfway between my work and home, so it might be close enough for me to work out at lunch time.  On the other hand, the YMCA might be more kid oriented and cheaper.  Lorena is going to look at both and decide.

While hurricane Dean is having its way with the Yucatan peninsula, we were experiencing quite a little storm in North Carolina.  The large shade tree in our neighbors yard was split in half and blown over in the wind.  It rained some, but not enough to make for the dearth of water here in North Carolina.  Meanwhile, our household has been suffering through summer colds and sore throats.  It looks like we are getting to the end of it all now though.  Kelly had her first piano lesson with her new teacher and it looks like she is going to do well under her tutelage.  The first piece of music she brought home was Menuet by J.S. Bach.  Way cool.

We got off to a great start in homeschool today.  I think we are going to particularly enjoy the “reading aloud” parts of this years program which include Christian’s history books for his two year survey of world history and a book on logic called Fallacy Detective.  We had to recalibrate a couple of things and we will have to order a few more materials, but all-in-all it was a good start.  Lorena got the kids lined up with a new Orthodontist yesterday and Kelly goes to her first piano lesson with her new teacher today so everyone is getting out of the house quite a bit, too.

We got a nice note from JoAnn when she got back from convention.  We were sorry to hear about Elena’s mother passing on, but other than that it sounds like everyone had a great time.  We are looking forward to going to our own conventions now.

One of the first things I thought about this morning was that Jim and JoAnn will be back from Saginaw this morning getting ready to start the new year.  It was great to be able to start the new school year with a convention.  We always tried to get a week or two of homeschool in before convention each year.  Going to convention after the week or two always helped extend out the really fun, “getting started” weeks.  And, with convention, it always helped us have the right motivation for our studies.  I am really very happy for the timing of our conventions here in North Carolina, too.  It is only a week or two later than in Oregon.  This year, it looks like we will get the weekend of Shelby and all of Denton, so it should really work about the same way.

This morning, Lorena and the kids got up at 6:00am because it is the first day of school.  We all sat down and read the bible together over breakfast.  We are starting to settle into more of a routine, so I have dedicated myself to getting back on a diet.  I started this morning.  Bryan, if you read this in Texas, I want you to eat a LOT on the rest of this trip so that we are closer to even on the weight thing.  I am back to exactly zero pounds lost.  I am game to ramp this thing back up, even if you have a twelve pound lead.  Let me know on Friday and I will start posting the weights again!

Tonight, we were invited to dinner with Courtney and Caroline, our old friends from Florida.  Their son Corwin is going back to college in Michigan.  This will be our last chance to see him before he goes.  Their daughter Chevon and some other folks will be their, too, so we are very much looking forward to it.  Then on Saturday, we are going to continue work on our hovercraft.  We have decided that we want to try to get it off the ground (literally) this weekend.  With any luck at all we should be able to do that.

Christian and I have been negotiating hard about how to make our hovercraft.  We want to do something inexpensive and not to difficult to see whether we like it.  At the same time, we want it to be cool.  I have been doing a little more reading and found that starting with a rubber raft is about the easiest way to get started.  I thought that would be a little expensive because it is necessary to buy a raft and cut out the bottom.  Well, this morning, I got to looking around for rubber rafts and found a brand new one for only $17.99.  I think that we really ought to consider buying that raft along with a piece of plywood, some nylon straps and some caulk to get started.  I am hoping Christian could start hand drawing up some sketches of how we could put in a low seat and add a fan for propulsion and a steering wheel with a pulley system leading to vanes behind the fan for steering.  We would probably start with a plastic molded chair like this, from which we could remove the legs and somehow attach it to the plywood platform on top of the raft.  Christian, if you do the sketches, try to make them with the idea that we can follow your sketches to do the actual building.  Draw them so it actually shows how things would work with arrows to indicate motion and maybe even some dimensions.  This could be QUITE fun and interesting…

Last night we got to talking about what a waste it is to spend too much time browsing the internet or playing computer games.  The kids decided that wanted to really work on doing some other things.  Both of the kids have plenty of reading, writing, music, and other things to do beyond homeschool, but Christian and I got to talking about some of the things he really enjoys doing.  One of those things was the construction of a working model of a motor.  I have been wanting to do some kind of a project with Christian.  Not a little project, but a big one that takes us all of one summer or even a year to complete.  After looking around the internet, I found this page.  Two high school kids built a one man hovercraft for around $200 in their garage.  Wow!  That is what I am talking about.  I think that would be awesome.  We even have a pond in the back yard where we could try the thing out.  Well, I started looking around and I found some more projects that looked very cool.  This one was very fun, too.  But this is the one I think we should get after we build a leaf blower one first.