Year: 2008 Page 8 of 15

This weekend was a nice summer weekend. We went to a friend’s house for a picnic and to swim on Saturday and we went to a potluck after church on Sunday. It was both busy and lazy at the same time. I worked on the homeschool plan during a few free moments. The plan is coming together very nicely. It feels so good to start getting things in place. Mostly, I have worked on Kelly’s plan because it is a lot different than in the past. We talked it over together and believe we have a schedule she will be able to complete every day in four or five hours if she works hard, but that will push her a little bit. We think it is similar in difficulty to what she has done in the past, but the content is different. Kelly’s plan changes have given me some ideas on how to improve Christian’s plan, too. I will start on that plan with some input from Christian starting sometime this week.

This Saturday, I think we will go out and buy school supplies. That is one of our great joys of the year. It is so much find to chose just the right notebooks, pencils, pens, and other materials to be as ready as possible to start school with vigor. We really need to prepare the bonus room, too, by getting all the books organized in the homeschool bookcase, setting up the computer with the latest software, and getting all the furniture back in place that we took downstairs for the summer. It is a little different here in North Carolina than in Oregon. We used the bonus room above the garage in Oregon all year long. Here in North Carolina, it is a lot cooler downstairs in our house during the summer, so we did not use the bonus room very much when the weather turned hot.

April 6, 2004 (no. 2)
April 7, 2004

We homeschooled Kelly when she was in first grade. We started the kids in the government school when Kelly was in the second grade and Christian was in kindergarten. We started to have some real challenges both with the kids and the system when Kelly entered the fourth grade and Christian entered the second grade. I was blogging about all this at the time it was happening in 2004, but I was using a different set of blog software. When I switched from the old software to the WordPress we use now, I stored the old blog posts in a text file to eventually put back up as part of the new blog. I ran across them yesterday and have started to put them up on the blog as I have time. I will start putting links to a couple of them per day as I get them cleaned up and uploaded to the blog. You can find the first two here:

April 5, 2004
April 6, 2004 (no. 1)

Last weekend, we were asked where we get our new since we do not have a television and we do not receive a daily newspaper. That is a question that comes up every now and then so I thought I would write a post about what has taken the place of reading the morning newspaper in my life. I get up at 5:30 AM every morning to beat the traffic into work. I leave the house a little before 6:00 and am at my desk at work by 6:20 or so. Before I start work I make a pot of coffee. I have a great job–they provide us as much Starbucks coffee as we can drink every day! Then I sit down to my computer, read a chapter or two in the bible using the e-Sword bible program, record what I read on the blog, post Kelly’s latest Betty Blonde comic, and then settle in to read the news for fifteen or twenty minutes before I start work.

The blogs I read can be broken up into four categories. The categories are Friends and Family, News, Homeschool/Science/Christianity, and Technology. I will not list the Friends and Family blogs because they are probably not of general interest. You might be asking why I include homeschool, science, and Christianity in one category. I do not have an answer for that. That is just the way I do it. If you see something I am obviously missing and that I should be reading, please let me know!

News

• Free Republic – Excerpts from, commentary on, and links to a lot of different news sources. Updated in realtime.
• Hugh Hewitt – Radio talk show hosts website about national politics.
• Powerline Blog – Three lawyers who went to college together at Dartmouth about national, Minnesota, and Dartmouth politics.
• World Magazine Blog – Christian worldview magazine blog.

Homeschool/Science/Christianity

• Betty Blonde – The best comic strip on the internet
• HSLDA – Home School Legal Defense Association
• Uncommon Descent – William Dembski/Denyse O’Leary intelligent design blog
• Evolution News and Views – Discovery Institute intelligent design blog
• Wittingshire – Homeschool mom and wife of leading intelligent design adovcate blog
• Tektonics – Christian apologetics website by J.P. Holding
• A Christian Thinktank – Christian apologetics website by Glenn Miller

Technology

• Nerdhow – The best technology “how-to” blog on the internet
• Linux Online – Linux news
• Slashdot – Technology news aggregator

Unplanned events are the source of much pleasure when it comes to both homeschool and summer vacation in our family. I had all kinds of artwork and learning planned for this summer as is well attested in this blog. We were going to work on drawing people. We were going to take some art classes. We were going to do some big woodworking projects. We did a little of all that and we plan to keep going on it, but with my work, the swim team, and just the busyness of life, most of that fell by the wayside. That is really OK. We like to give the kids a break in the summer and a chance to be just kids. So, we decided to just keep up with the read aloud books we had chosen for the summer because that is really not work, but something we genuinely love doing together. For summer reading, the kids draw while I read.

Kelly started in on what she called “gag” comics. Those are stand-alone strips that do not tell a big story. After the first couple of those, Kelly moved on to do week long, very uncomplicated story lines that she hopes will help the readers to get to know her characters. The longest that any story line might go is two or three weeks and each of the strips can stand on its own. Christian, on the other hand, has decided to tell a much longer story. He has about forty panels written with quite an interesting story featuring the same characters, but with a much more involved plot. We plan to put his strip up in three or four weeks when he gets it finished and scanned in.

I had kind of decided to write a program to help me scan in the strips, adjust them for size, and accumulate them into a single strip with four panels because I have had to do that one step at a time by hand up until now. When Christian saw how I was doing it with the open source image editing program, GIMP, he suggested I use a GIMP plug-in called David’s Batch Processor to adjust the individual images after I have them scanned. That took a twenty step process that has been taking me about 15 minutes down to a two step process that takes about 30 seconds. Very, very cool.

The only thing I have left now to really make the preparation of strip more tractable is something to perform the accumulation of the four panels into a finished comic strip with a title, byline, and copyright date. GIMP works really well, but the way I am doing it now is a little tedious and not as consistent as possible in terms of individual panel positioning. Currently, that process takes about ten minutes. After Christian showed me David’s Batch Processor, I looked into the GIMP a little deeper. It looks like I can write a script using either Python-fu or script-fu to perform the panel accumulation steps automatically. Very cool. That beats writing the program from scratch all hollow. If I get the script written and the steps worked out, I will post a “how-to” here.

There are about three weeks left until we start the 2008-2009 homeschool year. This year will bring a relatively big change in the way we do our work. Christian will be working in a similar way to what we have done in the past, but more emphasis will be placed on CLEP preparation. Since he is now in Algebra II that is so important for the science and engineering fields where his interest lies, we will work hard to establish a strong base there. Our plan is for him to take three CLEP tests this year in History of Western Civilization I and II and Spanish. Christian has a strong enough interest and background in programming now, that I think it is time to jump into C++. I am not sure whether we will do it on Linux or Windows, but either way it will be exciting to get started on a good project with him. Of course, he will continue with his guitar lessons.

Kelly will no longer follow the Sonlight suggested history and literature schedules. She will still read all of the Sonlight literature books for the year, writing about one book report per week. Mainly she will concentrate on college prepartion materials. She will use this year’s Apologia Biology to help her prepare for the CLEP Biology test, Rosetta Stone Spanish to help her prepare for the CLEP Spanish test, and the some CLEP preparation books to prepare for U.S. History II, Psychology, and Sociology. Her comic strip and two-per-week blog postings on a variety of subjects will be good for exercising her use of “new media”. She will continue with piano lessons.

As for exercise, both Kelly and Christian will swim until the outdoor pool at the YMCA closes for the winter. Then we have to make some hard decisions. I would really like to run a triathlon with the kids, but it would be kind of neat to systematically prepare for and run in a 10K race sometime before then. Running is a lifelong sport that could fit well into our schedule. I even think Lorena would like it. It is still a little early for Christian to do any serious weight training, but Kelly might do some of that with Lorena during the winter while Christian runs. We will see about all that and negotiate through what interests them and provides them a goal.

We spent much of this weekend on swimming events. Saturday we went to the all YMCA championship meet that include four or five of the local YMCA swim teams. The meet was extremely well run and both of the kids swam well. After Gospel meeting on Sunday, we went to the ice cream social and end of the season awards ceremony for swim team. Kelly got a sportsmanship award for her age group while Christian got most improved swimmer. Christian broke the local YMCA records for freestyle, backstroke, breast stroke, and butterfly, so they put his name and times on the record board by the pool. Kelly won one of her heats and got second in another in the championship meet. Christian won his three events at the championship meet. It truly was a great year for swimming. The new friendships the kids made were just as good as the exercise and competitions. One of our friends took a picture or two at the awards ceremony. I will try to put one up here if it arrives in the email over the next day or two. Lorena, Kelly, and Christian still plan to go down to the pool every day for the rest of the summer so the kids can swim laps while Lorena does her workout. I am still trying to convince everyone they need to train for a triathlon. It will be a great way to stay in shape over the winter.

After my post yesterday on programming with Christian, our new friend Ruthie left a comment about a program called Alice. I checked into it and it sounds pretty amazing. Alice is a program that was developed at Carnegie Mellon to teach kids how to program. Here is their homepage blurb:

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.

Before Christian and I jump into our big project I am going to have him download Alice 2.0, a program designed for high school and college kids. The thing that is cool about it (beside that it runs on Linux, Windows and Macs) is that it also involves storytelling, 3D graphics, and visual programming. Wow! I watched the promotional video and I think I am going to have Kelly play with the thing, too. It is very, very cool.

Thanks for the GREAT tip Ruthie!

In that vein, I am going to have six or eight hours to myself tomorrow. The final (very long) swim meet of the year is tomorrow. I am only needed when it is time to spectate; the kids will be spending the time between events playing games with their teammates. I am going to go into the YMCA and work on the Betty Blonde comic webpage so it is easier to use and more interactive by adding some JavaScript. We hope we have some time to go to the library, but the swim meet will probably run too long. On Sunday, the final YMCA swim team party will take place. We should be able to get there just a little bit late after our Gospel meeting on Sunday afternoon.

Update: Ruthie just sent a comment that noted that Rand Pausch, one of the authors of Alice died to day. We all really enjoyed his very famous “last lecture” shown in the YouTube video below:

I have been trying to figure out a good project to do with Christian. Something dawned on me as I was driving in to work this morning. Focus on the Family had a program on the radio about how there are not enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to get done. A person has to cheat one thing to do another thing right. It was really a program on setting a priority to spend more time with the family rather than at work. While I was thinking about that, it dawned on me that a great way to spend some time with Christian would be to teach him how to program. Previously, I had gotten a couple of C# programming books and had him start working his way through them. He has gotten a good grasp of object oriented programming in a garbage collected environment, something that is hard to do on your own if you do not have a specific task to accomplish. That is especially true if you are ten or eleven years old.

Well, now we have a project that would be a big help in running our website. It would make a great programming project, too. I have been working with the Python programming language and the wxPython cross-platform GUI libraries lately. There is a development environment that goes with it called Stani’s Python Editor. I would like Christian to know how to use that and the best way to teach that is to sit down at computer together and go through a project. We both enjoy programming and I think it would be a super way to spend some time together. So what are we going to do for a project? We are going to try to automate the posting and maintaining of Kelly’s Betty Blonde comic onto our website. If the project works well enough, we can put the program out as an open source piece of software.

Posting a day’s comic strip now requires multiple steps in several different programs. Kelly first draws, colors, and adds text to her strip in an art book as four individual frames. Then we walk through the following process:

• Use the XSane program to scan and save each of the individual frames as separate image files into the computer.
• Use GIMP to open each of the frames to rotate and save them in both the large resolution at which they were scanned and a smaller resolution to insert into a single image with the other frames.
• Create a new boilerplate image in GIMP with the comic strip title and author at the top and copyright at the bottom.
• Use GIMP to add the four scanned frames to the boiler plate.
• Save the image of the accumulated trip in jpg format and a smaller image to be used as a thumbnail.
• Open Firefox and use the FireFTP addon to upload the strip and its thumbnail to the correct location and modify the filenames on our website.
• Use the SciTE text editor to update the comic strip index page with the new info.

One thing we are not doing right now that would also be helpful is to add JavaScript to the comic strip page so it is possible to view any of the old strips without leaving the main page. The bigger point though, is that one of the best ways to learn a programming language is to write a program while a more experienced programmer sits behinds you to direct and correct as the program is developed. We can even listen to Pandora while we are doing it.

Our friends over at JKLMNOP blog put up a post that asked that I list seven facts about myself. It sounded like fun, especially when I read our friend Karen’s list. I knew about the pianos, the cooking, and the quilting, but I was way impressed when I found she is swimming five days per week! So here goes:

1. My mother found my first job in the robotics (machine vision) field in 1984. I have been working in machine vision ever since.
2. I wet my bed until I was nine years old.
3. The first time I ever ate hummus and pita bread was in a small Arab restaurant on the side of a hill in Nazareth (Israel).
4. I have eaten Mexican food in Brno, Czech Republic (Hacienda Mexicana – Ok) and Malacca, Malaysia (Renaissance Malacca Hotel – Awesome!).
5. I have a black belt (1st degree-shodan) in Kodakan Judo with certificates to prove it. I started playing judo at age nine.
6. When I was in college, I wrote funny poems that I sent to my sisters who were in high school at the time.
7. One of my greatest memories was when my cousin Merle bought my brother and I five scoop black berry ice cream cones at a little homemade ice cream store in Oakridge, Oregon. I think I must have been about eleven years old at the time.

The main people I would like to see do this are: H|esoteric, Lyle W., and Charlie. They are supposed to list seven things about themselves, strange or mundane, if they are so inclined. If they do so, they need to ask seven others to do the same.

Our good friends Carlos and Vanesa in Texas have a son name Joaquin. Carlos and Joaquin run in triathlons. When we were at Gospel meeting Sunday afternoon, one of our other friends, Mike C. told me that he and his kids were going to run in a triathlon next summer. I got to thinking that Kelly and Christian really like to swim and might really enjoy doing that, too. Today, they were scheduled to swim a mile at swim team practice. Some of the triathlons listed on Carlos website had swims that were much shorter than that. Of course, the swim is only a third of the race, but there were several races the kids could certainly handle right now. There was a 300 meter swim/11mi bike/2mi run, 750m swim/7mi bike/5k run, 500m swim/14 mi bike/3 mi run, and so on. I think they could make it through any of those. With a little training, they might even be pretty good. It would certainly benefit from getting ready and competing in some of those. I do not think I could keep up with the kids, but it would be a lot of fun. I think I will try to connect up with Mike and Carlos and see how they go about getting their kids ready for one of these.

Note to Christian: Check this out. I wonder if this could be programmed?

We have added a cartoon page to ChapmanKids.net: http://www.chapmankids.net/bettyblonde. Kelly is getting far enough ahead with her cartooning that she thinks she will be able to do one every day for quite awhile. I think she only has to draw one more to have enough for this week. I like her cartoons a lot. In addition to cartooning while I read aloud, this weekend she cartooned while we listened to Dinesh D’Souza debate Michael Shermer on the questions: Is Religion a Force for Good or Evil? and Can you be Good without God? and Christopher Hitchens on: Is Christianity the Problem?

A special treat for the Hitchens debate was that it was moderated by Marvin Olasky. Marvin Olasky is the editor of World Magazine. We have subscribed to World for many years. We look forward to reading Joel Belz, Lynn Vincent, Janie B. Chaney, and all the others. We lurk at the World Mag blog but we are special fans of Marvin Olasky. Kelly’s desire to study things like statistics, philosophy, sociology, biology, and politics has been inspired by the things she reads in World Magazine. Olasky’s interviews of Arthur C. Brooks, Rodney Stark, and others have provided fodder for many fruitful discussions and inspired us to learn more. We have listened to several of William Lane Craig‘s debates on the existence of God and the historocity of the resurrection of Jesus. We have purchased books by Behe, Dembski and others involved in the great intelligent design debates. We have studied logic and argumentation. I do not know what Kelly will study in college, but her plan is to prepare herself to participate as a writer in the national discourse on these great topics.

This fall, she will be writing for this blog. Every couple of weeks it will be given to her to describe her thoughts on what we call the great debates. The commentary she writes will not so much be about taking positions on the topics, rather they will be about what she feels she understands, what confuses her, what is interesting to hear and why it is interesting. We want the work to be challenging and interesting for her.

Christian, Kelly, and I are reading two non-fiction books aloud this summer. Actually, I do the reading while they work on their cartooning. Understanding the Times is quite a bit of work, but educational and rewarding. I am glad we chose to read it this summer because it is a great book to prepare us to read Understanding Intelligent Design and Explore Evolution. I tend to want to read straight through a chapter, but the material is sufficiently provocative that the kids want to talk about it as we read. My impatience can be an impediment to some pretty amazing discussions, so I have decided that I need to be more responsive and liberal in allowance for such interruptions. I need to remind myself that the goal is to learn, not to accomplish a certain number of pages read. The other book, The Thinking Toolbox is not only educational and rewarding, but way fun! It is the companion book to The Fallacy Detective that we enjoyed so much last year.

On the cartooning front, Kelly had a cartoon almost ready for scanning and upload last night when I got home. I thought it was really good, but she said she really needed five frames to make the thing flow right and make sense, so she decided to do another, just in the evening. She was able to draw and color the cartoon in the time we sat on the couch and read aloud–about twenty minutes. If she can do that regularly, she should be able to get a pool of cartoons completed so that we can post them regularly. Christian has about a three week story going that we will scan and post after Kelly does a complete week next week. I need to get a cartoon webpage set up here on ChapmanKids.net so we can have a home for all the cartoons and a way to step through and view previous cartoons.

The final large box of books for the 2008-2009 school year arrived yesterday from Sonlight. There is a big swim meet in Raleigh tomorrow, so I am looking forward to spending the time between events to work on the plan for the year. Every year I think it is going to get easier, but every year I think of some new or different way to write and manage the plan so it feels like I do about the same amount of work now that I did when we first started homeschooling even though I have a ton more experience. It is going to be a very cool year. We have always used an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet to manage the plan and we will do that again this year. I am trying to figure out a good way to “webify” the whole process so we can get to it anywhere. The best we did in the past is either email the spreadsheet to our self via Yahoo or Google so we could always get to it via webmail or ftp it up to a private directory on our web site, but neither of those solutions is very satisfactory. It would be great to have a Firefox extension that would allow us to upload, download, edit, and view the plan from our webbrowser. Maybe that is too ambitious given all the other programming projects I am investigating, but it would certainly be useful for a lot of us distributed homeschoolers.

Christian and Kelly have been writing cartoons for quite a long time. Every night now, when we read aloud together, I do the reading and they work on their cartoons. Over the two or three years they have been doing it, they have developed several characters with established persona. We have decided that I should start posting some of their work as a regular feature for this blog. It is very interesting how they both draw the same characters. They have a common, well-developed understanding of the personalities of each of the main characters. As they have gone alone, the characters, drawings, and stories have improved dramatically. You will always be able to get to the current comic by clicking on the small Betty Blonde comic image to the left. We will have a regular page for the strip here. I will add a link to the Betty Blonde homepage as soon as it is a little more developed. Here is their first offering:

Grandma Sarah’s twin sister Janet has a granddaughter (Jon and Sharon’s oldest) who has moved just a couple of hours north of Monterrey to work in the Rio Grande Valley for a program called Teach for America. Some of the poorest schools in the country are there. She will be a teacher at one of those schools. She is a wonderful writer with a very interesting voice. She is keeping a blog that I expect will always be interesting. I have put a link to her blog in my blog roll on the left-hand side of this page. You can also click here to get there.

The day is already off to an inauspicious start. When I got to work, I made the coffee and set down to update the weightloss chart, read my email, check the news on the internet, read a couple of blogs I check every day, and write in my own blog. Right after I sat down, I adjusted my glasses and they broke in half. There was no way to fix them, so I went out to my pickup in the parking lot to get my spare glasses in the glove box there. Somehow they had been sitting wrong so they rubbed against something so now I have a permanent mark on them right in the middle of the spot through which I look to work on my computer. It takes forty minutes to run to the store and back to get glasses, so I have decided to wait until lunch or after work to get some new ones. That, however, does not mean I will not complain loudly about this irritation. Complaining can be quite cathartic in the right circumstances.

It finally is starting to feel like summer. We had a long finish to our homeschool this year. After that the swim team and a whole bunch of small commitments kept us busy enough so that it did not really seem like we had slowed down after school let out. Last night, though, we went to a Gospel meeting in Fuquay Varina. After meeting, everyone stood around and talked long enough that we did not get home until over an hour after the meeting was over. It was really nice. Kelly and her friend Megan are planned to get together to go swimming and shopping, Christian talked over computer stuff with Hunter and Sterling. Most of all we just stood around and enjoyed the warm evening air. It will be nice to have a few weeks without any pressing commitments to enjoy the sun. There is a Dairy Queen close to where we are having the Gospel meetings. Maybe we will go there after meeting next week. Then it will really feel like summer.

We had two of our ministers, Robert and Harlan stay with us for a couple nights. We enjoyed them a bunch, but they have already moved on to be with some other folks. They really liked the pizza Aunt Julia taught us how to make.

Next year is going to be a very exciting school year for both Kelly and Christian. We bought the Sonlight books for Kelly this year, but not the study schedule. We were not even going to do that, but when we got to looking at them, we realized it would be a shame not to read them. Still, we are going to deviate significantly from the type of schedule she has followed in the past because we/she wants(s) to concentrate on college level material and material that will prepare her to take college classes. We will emphasize Math this year so she will be well prepared for Calculus next year. This year’s science is a Biology program that is nothing short of amazing. We are planning to supplement it with some discussion of current topics, too. We bought Understanding Intelligent Design by William Dembski and Sean McDowell and Explore Evolution by Stephen Meyer, et. al. Christian, Kelly, and I plan to read those books aloud together. Kelly’s other main area of concentration will be the CLEP tests she plans to take. They include Biology, Spanish, U.S. History II, Psychology, and Sociology. We are not sure how fast she can go on those tests, but it is a good goal that we can modify if necessary.

I started creating the 2008-2009 homeschool plan this weekend. I got a good start on making it significantly more automatic than in years past. I keep the schedule in an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet, so I downloaded the lasts version (2.4.1) to get started. Early in the process, I realized it would be easier to set up a schedule for the whole year, then make modifications to it when there were changes than to add one week at a time like I have done in the past. I finished about half of Kelly’s schedule, but have had some additional thoughts on how to improve it, so I might start over again from scratch next weekend. After I finish Kelly’s schedule, I will be able to start with that as a base for Christian’s schedule so it will go a lot faster.

Diet notes: This is the first weekend in the history of my diet that I have not gained wait on Monday. If I can just do that a couple of more times, I might be able to continue to lose weight. Bryan has almost met his goal. I will bug Lyle about where he is.

I was visiting a blog at lunch time and came across this website. I thought it was very cool! It features ticker that allows you to show your weight loss, debt reduction, fund raising, body mass index (BMI) on a neat little ticker. I thought it was a really cool idea. I know I would certainly use it if I had not already set up our very cool Goggle chart. Lyle looks like he is already using something like that on his website to track running/walking.

This morning, I drove Aunt Julia to the airport so she could fly to a trade show in Atlanta. She did her usual stellar teaching thing during her short stay with us. The kids learned how to play cribbage and another card game called Golf. They learned how to make ultra-thin crust pizza on the grill. I can truly say it is the best pizza I have every eaten. She showed us how to cut different vegetables into strips and grill them on the barbecue. She introduced us to a new and wonderful, low-fat salad dressing from Trader Joe’s. She went to the YMCA with the kids during their swim practice and worked out lifting weights and doing cardiovascular exercise. We talked about books and family late into the night. We love Aunt Julia and hope she comes back soon. I will put a couple of pictures up as soon as Christian emails them to me: