Year: 2010 Page 3 of 7

Friday was my last day of work at Centice.  It was one of my best work experiences ever.  The people there are absolutely stellar people in every way.  Their technology portfolio is formidable.  I am looking forward to what I am confident will be life-long relationships with our tight-knit crew there.  All the best to all of you.  Your future is bright.

In the mean time, I have taken a new position at a company named Bioptigen.  Bioptigen makes Optical Coherence Tomography retina imaging devices.  I was pretty embarrassed to have to be corrected by my friend (and boss for three years at Centice) about the name of the new technology that will occupy my waking hours for the foreseeable future.  Thank you Prasant.  I will work on the images accumulated by these devices.  It is bleeding edge technology in a very exciting application arena to which I believe I have something important to offer.  And this all helps the doctors do their jobs better.  We will see.

Kelly and Christian will be both starting their full-time college careers on Monday morning at Wake Tech Community College.  Their first (and only) class together this fall is Differential Calculus.  Kelly should be talking about that in her blog over at Betty Blonde.  Kelly will also take Biology II, American Literature I, and Beginning Volleyball for a total of twelve hours.  Christian’s classes include the Calculus, Biology I, Western Civilization I, and Beginning Golf.  We are all very excited.

As for blogging, I am now ready to fire things back up while I am thinking about new directions for the blog in addition to our new job and educational directions.  Kelly will be doing her blogging over at Betty Blonde now as she and Christian spin up their efforts for the new phase of that comic strip!

Well, I am very proud of Kelly and Christian with all the work they have done in getting Betty Blonde out every day without ever missing a day.  They will both be starting college full time in mid-August, so we have decided to ratchet the strip back to once per week.  Their last daily strip can be found here.  Kelly will tell you more about that in a future post.  Most of all, though, this occasion for much congratulations for such a great two year run with dramatic improvements in art, story, and every element of production.

My boss, Andrew, brought in a book last week titled Getting Things Done.  I wrote about the The Dip a little earlier.  Between the two books and with college starting for Kelly and Christian, we have been on a big “getting organized” kick.  The worst part of all this is the realization that I am way over extended.  If I ever hope to have a life AND get some things done, I am going to half to perform and aggressive triage on my planned activities.  The up side is that it made me realize that I am doing a few things right.  Andrew introduced us to a tool called Basecamp.  You can find the free version here.  We use a paid version of Basecamp at my job at Centice that has a lot more functionality.

We use Basecamp extensively at GaugeCam.  Five people work on multiple aspects of the project and it is an absolutely great way to keep track of where we are.  Ease of use is a big part of the usefulness of this tool.  There are other tools that have more and better functionality, but require more knowledge to use.  This has worked well enough that we have decided to see if we can use Basecamp to help manage school work starting this fall.  I am not sure it translates perfectly, but since the kids are learning how to use it, I think it might be a good way to keep track of what and when things need to be completed.  There are a several other tools we use extensively in the GaugeCam project that we can recommend heartily.  I will describe them all in future posts.  They include DropBox, ProjectLocker, and some other tools.

There is a crazy flood caused by Hurricane Alex occurring in Monterrey, Mexico, Lorena’s home town.  No one goes to work, virtually every sector of the city is flooded, people are stranded–some drowned.

I grew up with David Joyce, the guy that hired one of the Russian spies.  I feel SO famous!!!!  It is the third story in the following video.  Click here.

Night before last, there was a bad car wreck at about 3:00 AM on the main road that runs past our subdivision.  Four people died.  I was able to show the skid marks and crash site to Lorena and the kids on the way home from the airport this morning at 2:00 AM.  The car was traveling at a high rate of speed so that it could not make the turn so it ran off the road and into a tree.  None of the four young men in the Chevy Blazer were wearing a seat belt.  It was very sad.  Still, it is great to have everyone home.  Even the twin cat sisters, Rubix and Kiwi, are happy.

I used the time well last night when I was waiting for everyone to arrive (an hour and a half late) at the airport.  I fixed an on-going, but nagging problem with our GaugeCam project.

Christian surprised us and did well enough on the COMPASS math placement test, he will join Kelly in Calculus I (Differential Calculus) this year.  That should make life very interesting for him.  He will take Biology I with Lorena and Calculus I with Kelly.  Right now, he is at Wake Christian Academy taking the sit-down portion of the driver education class required of all young drivers here in North Carolina.

Christian is scheduled to take the COMPASS test today at Wake Tech community college.  It is a test from the same company that makes the ACT college entrance exam.  The purpose of the test is to evaluate the level of math at which Christian will start this fall.  Kelly did not have to take the test because she took and passed the CLEP Precalculus test so she will take Calculus I (Differential Calculus).  We have entered our desired schedule for next year in the Wake Tech computer.  Everyone but special and dual enrollment students gets to register before new students so we hope everyone gets the classes they want.  If we get the schedule we want, everyone should have Tuesday and Thursday mostly free to take music classes, study for CLEP tests and that sort of thing.

Well, this is our last homeschool update for this year and maybe forever.  As I have written previously, the kids will both start taking classes at the community college this fall.  We will continue with some CLEP testing, reading, volunteer work, and other homeschool activities next year, but my full time participation is now complete.  I will keep writing about our activities, but not as the principal administrator of Kelly’s and Christian’s educational activities.  It has been a great run.

We identified classes at our local community college and got them entered into the system so that all we will have to do is push a button on the morning registration is available to new students.  It is all pretty exciting.  The loads are not too heavy, but he classes are hard ones.  If we get the classes we want, everyone will be finished by lunch most days and I think everyone will have Thursdays free.  Lorena and Christian are scheduled to take an introductory Biology class and lab together, so that should be fun.  We set it up so there is time for Christian to continue his guitar, Kelly to continue with her piano, and Lorena to talk with her mom in Mexico on Skype.  We are going to see if there is enough time for Kelly and Christian to attempt one CLEP test per semester, but we are not too sure how well that will work.

This Memorial Day weekend we mostly just hung out as a family.  I was able to make some pretty good advances on the GaugeCam project.  We did that thing where I make changes, Troy figures out what I did wrong, and I try to fix it.  I spent most of the time figuring out what I did before because I had been away from it for awhile.  Still, we identified some things we can do to make it better so I have my punch list of items to complete and am looking forward to working on them.  Troy installed some web-based project management called BaseCamp that should make tracking all of this much easier.  That is what Andrew has us using at work, too.  I like it a lot.

Kelly, Christian, and I took a short hiatus from our read of Jesus Under Fire to read through The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick).  We read half of it last night and expect to get through the rest of it tonight.  My boss, Andrew, lent it to us.  It is one of those books that can change your life.  The premise is that Vince Lombardi’s old saying of “Winners never quit and quitters never win” is just wrong.  It is all a matter of choices.  We love the book and heartily recommend it.  Andrew commented that it would have been great to have had this kind of direction at a younger age.  I concur and am thankful I am getting this kind of direction even now.

I got a nice new Dell e6500 laptop last month.  We got it all set up with a nice new screen and a docking station.  We use Carbonite, the service that unobtrusively and continuously backs up all the files on your computer so that if anything goes wrong you can get everything back.  You pay a reasonable fee for each computer.  We bought three years of service for one computer where we keep all our photos, videos, important documents, etc.  We backed up all our files on a couple of external drives, moved them to what will now be our homework* computer, a Dell Vostro we got last year.  That left us with two computers we can use for whatever we want!

One of the computers that is now free is my old laptop, a Dell Latitude D620.  The other is a Dell something or other desktop that was our old homeschool computer where we had the Carbonite service.  Our plan is to solve an ongoing contention for computer resources.  The old homeschool computer is where the kids always did Rosetta Stone language Spanish and French.  It is also where Lorena (Mom) liked to talk to use Skype to talk to Grandma Conchita in Mexico.  Our plan is to move the language programs over to the homework computer (the Vostro).  Then we will load Ubuntu 10.04 and Skype onto the old homeschool computer because Lorena thinks Windows XP is more complicated.  We were thinking of loading Linux Mint on the computer instead of Ubuntu in deference to our buddy Lyle, but Lorena knows what she likes and she’s the one who cooks for us.

Finally, Christian is going to load Fedora Linux on my old Dell laptop.  Fedora 13 was officially released yesterday.  He and Kelly will use that computer and their little eeePC netbook for college mobility.  There are few other things we want to do like load mySQL on Lorena’s Skype computer so we can use it for learning SQL, but those things will have to wait until we have a little more time.  Hopefully, that will happen before school starts again in August.

*I first wrote homeschool, but we are done with that now–it is like a
new year has started and I keep putting the old year on the checks I
write.

I remember the excitement of figuring out my own schedule for the first time when I was in high school in Klamath Falls.  There was central planning in junior high just like in the Soviet Union.  They told you where to go and what to take and you just did it.  It was great to get your schedule, but it was not the same as if you had picked it yourself.  Then, when I went to college at Oregon State, it was truly a free market arrangement.  I was on my own.  I had to make sure I got all the classes I needed with all the needed prerequisites for future classes or I would not graduate on time.  It was scary, but even more exciting.  Kelly and Christian are in the process of that transition right now.  They will move from a centrally planned (by me) schedule to a free market schedule they will have to navigate for themselves.

I loved walking over to Gill Coliseum to stand in line, hopefully with a cute coed, to get the coveted computer cards that guaranteed the slots in the classes I needed.  It was very frenzied, but very exciting with ready made conversation.  Did you get all your classes?  What time do you get out on Friday?  Do you have any 7:30 AM classes.  What is your PE?  Now it is all done on line.  That is kind of sad in some ways because there is not as much of a people element to the process, but still very exciting.  I will help them pick classes for awhile, but Kelly and Christian will have to talk to their advisers, go online to sign up, juggle their schedule when stuff does not work out, write the checks to pay the tuition, then figure out how to get their textbooks at a cheap price.

Both of the kids have planned their work and study schedule to a certain extent this year, Kelly a little more than Christian.  They are going to have to do that, too, but it is a different problem than that of planning class schedules that have both short, medium, and long term ramifications.  We will add to that burden by assignment of one CLEP test per semester, too.  We will start the process this weekend.  My plan, I hope I can stick to it, is to stay two arms lengths away from the keyboard.  With my old eyes, I will not be able to see the screen so well, but will be available to answer questions.  I will let you know how it goes.

My participation in the day to day operation of the homeschool ground to a stop when we decided to graduate Kelly and Christian from homeschool at the end of the year to put them in college.  I did a bunch of administrative stuff like prepare transcripts, order test results sent to the college, plan schedules, and that sort of thing, but the reading, correcting, planning, explaining math, and the things we did together stopped.  That ending was quite abrupt.  The kids transitioned from school work to end of year testing and that was it.

All that happened just a couple of weeks ago and what followed was not that pretty.  Without something planned to put us together for a purpose, we went different directions.  Kelly often drew her Betty Blonde or read up in her room.  Christian wrote code on his computer.  I worked on my side programming projects and planned for college, mostly on the computer.  Lorena is the only one who did not change her routine.  We were all together, but did our own thing.  Yesterday, we decided we did not like the way things were headed.

We decided we would try continue to read aloud together in the evenings when I get home from work.  The kids like to have something to do with their hands while I am reading.  Of course, Kelly always has a new Betty Blonde she needs to draw so that was taken care of.  Christian decided he wants to knit something while we read so we ran down to JoAnn Fabrics after meeting yesterday and bought some yarn for a new project he has in mind.  I found a good book on the historicity of Jesus and we were off and running.  I read the introduction to them last night on the couch while Kelly drew, Christian knit, and Lorena cooked up the awesome chef salad shown above.  The chef salad made us think of cousin Tim.  We miss him a lot.  Before, we did all our reading together both because we liked it and because it was a necessary part of homeschool.  Now we only do it because we like it.

Buy now

The advising staff has been very accommodating at Wake Tech, our local community college.  When we decided to put Kelly and Christian there for a couple of years instead of starting right in at Campbell University (mostly for budgetary reasons), we had to figure out the process pretty quickly.  I started by ordering the official test scores (ACT and CLEP) to be sent there.  Then, I found out Christian cannot attend as a dual enrollment student (college during high school) until he reaches 16 years of age.  I investigated a little further and found that he can enroll as a regular student as soon as he qualifies.  I decided to go ahead and graduate both the kids from high school if they met all the criteria required by Wake Tech.

A high school transcript that shows he studied a specific number of classes in a specific set of subjects areas and a qualifying ACT score of above 21 is what was required.  Both the kids qualified easily on the ACT score and had taken all the required high school classes, so all that was left was the needed high school transcripts.  Fortunately the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has a set of sample transcripts on their web site.  I down loaded one of the samples and modified it to build a transcript for each of the kids.  One thing I learned from the Home School admissions officer at Campbell University is that it is a good thing to grade classes on a 5.0 scale for those classes where the student is studying college level material.  For us, that meant all the classes for which the kids had taken and passed CLEP tests, I could grade on a 5.0 scale while the rest of the material I graded on a 4.0 scale.  That put both of their GPA’s above 4.0.  I had to either hand carry the transcripts into the academic adviser at Wake Tech so they knew it was my official transcript and not something the kids made up.

The staff was very helpful.  Based on Kelly’s ACT score and CLEP tests, she did not have to take any placement tests.  Christian has to take a placement test just for math.  He is preparing for that right now.  One thing I found out about the CLEP tests is that even though most Community Colleges accept almost all of them, only about two-thirds of the four-year, state universities here in North Carolina accept the bulk of them.  The rest of the state universities accept a few.  In addition, even though all the classes the kids might take are accepted by previous agreement with the state universities, the bulk of them are accepted only as elective credit.  Only about a quarter of the classes are accepted as direct equivalents to the classes the kids will need for their four year major.  That means, we have to be very careful about what the kids take so the credits will transfer in a meaningful way.  I will talk more about that later.

Note: This post is one in a series on how we prepared our homeschooled children to take various College Level Examination?Program tests. The introductory post for this series explains why we take these tests, what parts of the preparation worked for us, and what parts of the preparation did not work.

The CLEP test: PreCalculus

Primary study materials:

• Thinkwell Precalculus
• CLEP Precalculus w/CD (REA)

Secondary study materials:

• Teaching Textbooks
• Singapore Math

Discussion:

Every one of the math programs we used to educate the kids during homeschool contributed to Kelly’s performance on this test.  We started with Singapore Math and did that through sixth grade.  That broke down for us in the seventh grade when we switched from Singapore Math to Teaching Textbooks.  I described what we thought about the change from Teaching Textbooks here. When we hit Precalculus, Teaching Textbooks broke down for us, so we did another investigation and moved on to Thinkwell math.  You can read about our thinking when we made that change here. As always, we got the REA CLEP book for Precalculus to use in conjunction with Thinkwell for the actual test preparation.  Thinkwell was much broader and more detailed than the REA book, so after finishing the Thinkwell course, the REA book did its usual great job of narrowing down the sections of Thinkwell to revisit just to prepare for the test.  Of course, the REA tests were excellent as test preparedness metrics, too.

Results:

Kelly was sixteen years old at the end of the tenth grade when she took this test and had a scaled score that, according to the REA book, would give her a B if the course were graded.

What we would do differently:

We really felt pretty good about how Kelly did on this test.  The thing that might have moved her into the A category would have been more practice.  She has a firm grasp of all the concepts, but it takes lots of practice to avoid the ciphering errors and remember all the minutiae of this broad and minutiae filled subject.

Our friend Troy graduated from NCSU with a Bachelors Degree in Civil Engineering on Saturday.  We were privileged to attend about the best graduation I have ever attended.  All the speakers appeared to be grateful and humble.  Even more importantly, there speeches were brief and interesting.  The crowd was respectful (with the exception of a few appropriate and well-justified digs at UNC).  It is quite a thing to just get through the math required to earn a Civil Engineering degree.  Then, when you add Statics, Dynamics, all the Physics and Chemistry, and the big project classes, it gets even uglier.  These were the guys that were willing for, even relishing the hard work of really “getting” science and design.  The huge payoff is that now they have it.  The degree shows they have endured the pain and employers, having been through that same pain themselves, value it.

Lorena, Kelly, Christian, and I talked about it a lot on Saturday evening and Sunday.  It DOES pay to do something hard.  Troy put a link to this video on his blog a few days back.  It is awesome–EXACTLY what I have been preaching to my kids for several years now.  You can do ANYTHING you want, but doing something hard first opens a lot of doors that are hard to open when you get older.  My theory (and that espoused in the video) is that if you want to be a Sociologist, study Applied Math, Statistics, or Engineering first.

Congratulations Troy!

Over at Mother’s Journal, Lynn has a quote that reminded me of my mother.

The only disability in life is a bad attitude.

I would be rich if I had a nickel for every time I heard my mother say “Attitude is everything.”

We talk about that a lot in our household.  I am daily reminded that maybe, if I modeled a good attitude a little better, it might be easier to teach the kids about it.  The older I get, the more I realize the truth of these two statements.  Implementation is the hard part.

My buddy Andrew over at the GaugeCam project has gotten me addicted to Virtual Box.  I recently got a new computer (Dell Latitude e6500, 8Gig RAM, Core 2 Duo).  I have Windows 7 installed and I like it, but I have a need to run both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux 10.04, too.  Andrew showed me how to install them both in Virtual Box.  It might be just a passing fad, but it fills a huge hole that has existed in my computing world for a long time.  I had not looked at virtualization for several years.  The last time I tried it, the things I wanted to do were either too expensive or not possible with open source/free options.  So I ended up dual booting between Windows XP and Ubuntu.

Lately, I have been doing some cross-platform development on Linux with QT Creator and OpenCV.  I had to reboot the computer every time I wanted to test something out in Windows.  Now, I can develop in whichever OS I want and test it out in a window that runs the other OS.  All the stuff I use including all the hardware just works.  I recommend it highly.  I have only been doing it for a matter of weeks now, so I have not seen the snags that I know will raise their ugly heads, but the overcoming of a years long headache has me in a rather euphoric mood for the time being.

We have a full, but short summer planned.  Swim team practice starts at the YMCA in late May.  We go to Oregon in June.  We swim and hang out at home in July.  It is all over in August when Lorena, Kelly, and Christian start school.  My goal for the summer is to read a few books, do a little exercise, write a little code, and just enjoy the summer without the need to do our annual book purchase and year-long homeschool planning.  We still have to sign up for classes, but that is easier than developing a lesson plan and buying materials for an entire year worth of teaching.  After eight years of homeschool this is a new thing for me.  I LOVED doing that, so I will miss it, but it is nice to have a break, too.