Year: 2011 Page 10 of 11

Kelly just texted me that there were a bunch of fire engines on campus because a student tried to shoot a faculty member.

One of my favorite scholars, William Lane Craig, will debate the existence of God tonight at the NCSU McKimmon Center.  I knew this debate was going to occur, but I had no idea it would be at NCSU.  Wow.  William Lane Craig is an amazing debater.  He will debate against Lawrence M. Krauss, who is wildly under-equipped to debate Craig even though he has a PhD in Physics from MIT and is a professor at Arizona State.  Craig has debated a lot of people, many of whom were more educated on the topic at hand than Krauss.  His PhD’s are in Philosophy from University of Birmingham (England) and Theology from University of Munich.  The topic is “Is there Evidence For God?”  I wish I could go, but I will probably just watch it online.

The last round of mid-terms are under way at Wake Tech.  It looks like there will only be a small respite between when the mid-terms and finals.  Add the speeches required for Public Speaking classes and the kids have quite a load this semester.  Nevertheless, we have talked a lot about where we want to put our efforts in the next few years while the kids are in college.  We know now there will be a very finite amount of time available for extra-curricular activities.  We also know that we are not very satisfied with how we currently use the little available time.  We have to decide what we really want to do and let the rest fall by the wayside.  GaugeCam will end by July 1 because Troy will move on full time to work on his PhD.  Christian has won a full time (paid) summer engineering internship, so the burden will be on Kelly and Troy to finish the research required to produce a paper.  When that is finished, our Saturdays at the NCSU BAE department and the work associated with that will be freed up.

The kids have better defined what they want to do.  They have a very busy summer schedule.  Christian plans to swim on the YMCA swimteam and work on his NerdHow website when he is not working.  Kelly will continue to work with me on the reintroduction of Betty Blonde.  She will also babysit and work with Troy on the GaugeCam research.  We will go to Oregon for three weeks this summer, too, so it will probably go by pretty fast.  Then, in the fall, Kelly plans to blog a lot more on her new blog KellyJeanChapman.com and start back in on her French.  Lorena wants to take a couple of classes this fall with the kids.  As for me, I am going to finish BleAx, work on my BeagleBoard project, help Kelly and Christian get their websites going and think about what I am going to do with this blog.  I want to keep blogging, but I am pretty on happy with the content of late. I know I need a major rework of the whole thing.  Maybe I should start to learn DruPal like Christian.

All our printers and scanners gave up the ghost, one by one, over the last couple of weeks.  We really do not print much anymore so the ink costs are not so important to us.  We print a map, a school report, or a list, but that is about it.  So, the main reason we wanted the printer was to be able to scan Betty Blonde with minimal fuss.  The features we like about this printer (although I am not a huge fan of HP printers) are that it is wireless, has an auto-feed for scanning and copying, and is easy to connect to all the computers in the house.  I continue to make progress on the BleAx program.  We in a race to get publishing again.  We are still several weeks away, but we our progress is speeding up.  Yesterday, I helped Lorena rearrange the bonus room to accommodate the new printer and make the other computers easier to use.  Here is a screenshot of the new GUI:

Kelly and I are on a roll.  She makes time to draw her strips whenever she can while I work on a rewrite of BleAx.  We did OK on Saturday, then kind of had one of those not so awesome study days yesterday.  Lorena dropped Kelly and I off at NCSU before she took Christian to a guitar lesson Sunday afternoon.  We made huge progress for about an hour, but then Lorena returned to pick us up.  If we could have stayed there for another hour or two, we believe we would have gotten lots of work done, but Christian did not have his study materials so we went home.  That is when the wheel fell off.  Sometimes that happens.  We will have to make up for it tonight.  Next Saturday, we plan to spend 3-4 hours at the NCSU library just to make up for it.

The big event of the week was that Lorena, Kelly, and Christian signed up to run the Pacific Crest Half Marathon on June 24 in Sunriver, Oregon (by Bend).  The training regimen starts today!

Our old printer went kaput about two weeks ago.  On top of that, all we have used the scanner half of a printer whose printer half does not work (if that makes any sense).  I bought an HP printer with a nice auto-feed scanner/copier.  We rarely use the printer anymore for anything other than maps and college reports.  We need it, but we really want to minimize the printer usage, not because we are so environmentally sensitive, but because of the cost.  The purpose of all that is to get ready to start publishing the Betty Blonde comic strip again.  Kelly has been drawing strips whenever she gets the chance and is starting to get a good chunk of them to give us a running start.  Both the kids HATE the drop-shadow that the BleAx program puts on them (it is so 90’s-ish), so I have to modify the program to add just a line border.  Then, we need to redo the blog site so that it has a better look than its current miserable state.  That is a big job because we have to change the file names of about a year and a half of comic strips and modify the comic press blog we plan to use.

Kelly and I had some good talks over spring break.  She will write about this more in her blog, KellyJeanChapman.com when we get that spiffed up after we have Betty up and running again.  We both knew she had spread herself too thin when she started the community college.  She wanted to keep up with everything she did in homeschool, but there was just not enough time.  Consequently, she felt like she did a lot of things poorly instead of a few things well.  Since those things were just for enjoyment, it became easy not to do them when the results were not so satisfying.  That lead to more Facebook and web browsing.  So, she decided she should focus on five specific things, consider them as essentials that she enjoyed rather than recreational pursuits.  Those five things are Betty Blonde, her blog, volunteer research at NCSU, French, and one other that I cannot remember right now.  The rule she made for herself was to not do any of the non-essential enjoyment activities until she finishes her commitment to herself for a specified amount of work on the essentials.  The essentials are not everyday items, so there is plenty of time for other stuff, too.  She wants to do one (minimum) or two (maximum) Betty Blonde strips per week, a blog post each day, two hours per week on the volunteer project until she learns R, etc.

Still, there is a lot more start-up work than day to day performance work on all these projects.  We were getting swamped in the start-up because we were trying to do them all at once.  Now we have decided to take order them and start them up one by one.  We will start with Betty Blonde.  When that is up and going, we will work on the blog.  After that, we will get the French going.  The volunteer research takes care of itself.  It is still nagging me what that other one is.

After our big blowout of fish tacos, flan, and Carmel corn last night, we got up VERY early (3:40 AM) this morning to get Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah to the airport to fly back to Oregon.  We had a great time, but we are all pretty fried.  The kids go back to school today, but this is their light day with only one class each.  Tomorrow is loaded up.

Grandpa Milo told me he and Grandma Sarah were on a diet so he did not want to eat too much when he came here to visit us.  We had all kinds of good intentions, but have been eating like maniacs ever since they arrived.  Last night we had a phenomenal dinner.  Grandpa Milo got some papaya and Roquefort cheese for a salad at Trader Joes.  Then he made up some of his famous candied walnuts.  He wanted Lorena to show him how she makes Orange Chicken, so they did and added it to the edges of the salad.  While she was at it, Lorena showed Grandpa Milo how she makes Kung Pao Chicken (Thank you Cousin Julia–it came from the book you gave me for Christmas!).  It not only tasted great, it LOOKED great, too.

I do not think we are going to do too much better tonight.  We are having some folks over for dinner for a last blowout before Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah return to Oregon tomorrow.  Lorena made up to big plates of flan, she is the queen of flan, and plans to make some brownies to go along with them.  Not to be out done, Grandpa Milo plans to make up some Carmel corn.  All of that is just for dessert.  We were looking at Troy and Youngin’s blog the other day and saw she had made blackened fish tacos with mango salsa.  Grandpa Milo has eaten Lorena’s fish tacos before, but never with the mango salsa, so that is what they decided to cook tonight.

The mangoes they bought at CostCo were sitting on the counter when Lorena made the comment that she only needed two of them for the salsa.  They looked so good that we decided to eat one.  That was no problem because, in his usual manner, Grandpa Milo bought enough mangoes to feed an army.  I was pretty amazed at how good he was at peeling an slicing the fruit off of the mango.  It turns out that he had gotten a lot of practice preparing mangoes when he was a cook in the army stationed on Eniwetok in the late 1940’s.  He explained he had used a lot of Roquefort cheese when he was there, too.  He would get big blocks of the stuff, let the outside of the block turn green, then serve it to the officers at the officer’s mess on crackers with their drinks.

You learn all kinds of fun stuff when Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah is around.  I will try to remember to write about the conversation Grandpa Milo had with John Woods about his “Madame Queen” at meeting on Sunday.

We were very happy that Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah came in last night from Portland, Oregon.  They took a five hour plane ride to Washington Dulles then the short hop down to Raleigh.  Right now we are missing the mini-van.  Lorena and I left the kids home when we went to the airport to pick them up because the new car would be too crowded for all six of us.  We stayed up pretty late to talk about life.  It is great to have them here and they are both looking very healthy.  I will try to add some photos over the next couple of days.  Of course Grandpa Milo and the kids plan to do some cooking and we plan to go to a museum or two, but mostly we are just going to hang out together and talk.

We enjoy our work on the GaugeCam volunteer research project at NCSU very much.  Early on, Kelly did not participate as much as Christian and I because she has not been as interested in the nitty-gritty details of the server, cameras, and C++ programming.  That has all changed now.  I have mentioned earlier that she is in an introductory statistics class at college.  Now, when we meet for our GaugeCam work every other Saturday, she spends the entire time working her way through a book on the R programming language.  That is a language used by statisticians to evaluate and present statistical data.  A couple good things have come out of that so far and her effort is just starting.  First, Dr. Birgand sat down with her and walked her through a few concepts to get her started.  Secondly, Andrew found a program an integrated development environment for R called R Studio that we have downloaded.  It should help a lot in both learning R and in the development of programs for GaugeCam.

Kelly and I had a fairly animated talk last night about the great opportunities she has right now.  The problem is there are too many things competing for attention and we have to narrow them down.  If she tries to take on too many things, all of her efforts will get diluted and nothing will get accomplished.  We have already decided she will start putting out one or two Betty Blonde comic strips per week.  In addition to that, she will start writing in her blog every day.  We have registered KellyJeanChapman.com.  It should be up and running in a day or two.  We have already created a blog for her there and she will start adjusting that to her liking so she will be ready when the domain name is active.  It is my opinion that there is time for only one more small project right now if she wants to do well in school and still have a little time for herself to cook cupcakes, knit, play the piano, and stay in touch with her friends.  Maybe that project is French.  We will see.  I will let you know when she has her website up and running.

I went into to work late this morning because I have to stay late enough to go pick Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah up at the airport at 7:00 PM.  Dad (Grandpa Milo) just lost his business partner of over thirty years, Dave Christie.  They met every day for a meal and went on several business trips together for trade shows and that sort of thing.  Even after they sold their business, they met frequently for a meal to just talk.  He was a good friend to our whole family so it was hard to see him go.  I am sure that will be the subject of some interesting talks when they arrive.

We have some fun things planned for the visit.  We hope to have some folks over on Friday night for dinner and we have two museum trips planned.  The kids have to go to one of the local art museums for their Art Appreciation class.  I hope to avoid that one, but will probably fail.  The other one is the Airborne and Special Operations Museum down by Ft. Bragg in Fayetteville.  I have been wanting to go see that one for a long time.

On a final note, Christian just finished up two hard and painful weeks of non-stop exams, speeches, and reports.  He has nothing to do until after spring break but play his guitar and work on his the projects he likes.  Kelly had a pretty heavy load, too (she DID ace her last statistics quiz), but was not hammered with one thing after another at the same level.  All she has today is her volleyball PE class, then she is off for spring break, too. 

We dropped Christian off at the NCSU library of Friday night after dinner at a restaurant in Cameron Village, then made our way over to the Raleigh Little Theater to see The Man Who Came to Dinner.  It was a great play.  Kelly said she loved it, but has a special place in her heart for Charlie’s Aunt which we have seen twice, once here in Raleigh and once at the community theater in Albany, Oregon.  It was a great play and a super good time with the Stepps.  We all decided we have to do it again soon.  Christian, for his part, found that almost no one goes to a university library on a Friday night.  He said it was little bit creepy up on the ninth floor of a totally empty building at 10:30 PM.  He said it was even creepier going down the stairwells on his way out.

Kelly and I went to our bi-weekly GaugeCam meeting on Saturday.  It was great to have Andrew back.  It is not the same without him.  We made some great progress and Kelly got some private tutoring from Dr. Birgand on the R statistical programming language.  In the meantime, Christian headed back to the NCSU library for another long session which he continued when we got home in the afternoon.  He continued after church on Sunday and should be able to finish the thing up tonight.  I am sure his paper on the cipher machine used by the Japanese in World War II called Purple will benefit from his herculean effort.  I did not even know something like Purple existed, but I get to proofread the paper tonight, so I expect to know a lot more shortly.  It sounds very interesting.

We are going to see a play this evening with our great friends, the Stepps.  We hardly ever see them anymore because we have switched to a new Sunday morning meeting.  The venue is the Raleigh Little Theatre.  I will report the results tomorrow.  The last time we went to a play with the Stepps, they took us to the Dos Taquitos restaurant in downtown Raleigh.  We could not recommend it more highly–great Mexican food and we think the owners are from South America.  South Americans are notoriously bad at Mexican food, but this was absolutely fabulous.  Tonight, we are going to go out to eat before the play.  Lester and Esther have been here a long time and know a LOT more about the great places to eat than us Oregonians, so they are going to pick the place.  That should be just as fun as the play.

Poor Christian.  He has a big paper due on Tuesday, so we are going to drop him off at the NCSU library after dinner so he can study.  We will be feeling pretty sorry for him, but at least he will get a great meal if Lester and Esther maintain the string of great restaurant picks.  I will report back next post.

The kids have a Calculus mid-term today.  It is amazing how much more efficient they are now at math test preparation compared to when they started last September.  They stayed up late last night to prepare.  Christian has a big paper due for his history class next Tuesday and a speech and a paper due for his psychology class on Thursday.  Kelly has a statistics mid-term next week.  They also have the normal daily homework, but it surely appears as though they know how to go about it more efficiently and less emotionally.  After the test today, Christian will go back to the NCSU library to finish the research for his paper.  He will go again tomorrow night to start the writing.  Spring break is coming mid-week next week.  They only get four days off for spring break with a weekend in the middle for a total of six days.  That is oddly short, but the up side is that they get off in early May.  Grandma and Grandpa will arrive the day before the break, so they will definitely have some down time.  Christian’s plan is to hang out and play his guitar.  Kelly plan is to hang out, draw Betty Blonde and work on her new web site.  She be fun but relaxing.

Kelly and I talk regularly about her “new media” plan.  After her “hard” degree in math and statistics, she wants to go on to a graduate degree in something that engages in the public discourse.  She has investigated things like summer internships at National Review and the World Journalism Institute, but she needs some more formal writing experience to be able to get into a program like that.  She investigates opportunities to get that experience as she has time and will discuss that on her blog as she begins to participate in them.  In the meantime, she wants to practice.  There are two ways she plans to get that practice.

First, she wants to continue with Betty Blonde.  It was difficult to just quit cold turkey after two years of daily strips, but she needed to do that to concentrate on a full load of college classes.  She did a good job last semester as a full time student, but with a light load.  This semester she is doing even better with a sixteen hours that include four credit classes in Statistics and her second semester of Calculus.  She has a good system for both test and daily class preparation so that we have many fewer “hair on fire” days this semester than last even though her work load is significantly heavier.  Kelly feels like she has time now to write one or two daily Betty Blonde strips per week.  She also feels, and I agree, that her comic strip is a core element of her preparation for life after her bachelor degree.

There are several things we have to prepare before she can restart the strip.  My part of this will include a rewrite of the BleAx program so that it is easier to use and does not require my participation.  I also need to work with Kelly (with input from Christian) to design a new Betty Blonde site.  We are not sure whether we want to do this from scratch or use WordPress again.  We will be able to get by with the old BleAx program for awhile, but we cannot even start until the new web site is up and running.  Do not fear, all the old strips will be included in the new site.

Second, Kelly plans to start a new blog just for writing and a few photos.  She has not chosen a name yet and she is still thinking about topics.  The purpose of the blog is to practice and try out new stuff that has to do with where she plans to go with her studies and career.  I do not want to steal any of her thunder on that, but will report on this a little more as we move forward.  When we get the two new web sites up and going, I will prevail on Kelly to write introductory posts here to introduce her new stuff.  We are probably a month or two away from these new beginnings.

I have a great job that I love, but it is a long way from where I live.  When I took the job, it was agreed that I could work from home 2/3 days per week.  Today I am at home and will start work as soon as I finish this post.  There is a real up side to not having to drive for forty minutes to get to work.  On the other hand, I am not really a “work at home” kind of guy.  There is WAY too much food around here.  Still, under the right circumstances, I can get a LOT more done here than at work.  Part of that has to do that I have two extra hours to get it done, but the isolation helps, too.  I am a social guy, so I do not like it as much, but it helps.  I have VNC to get onto the company computers and communicate with the office with email and Skype.  It all works amazingly well.  Best of all, Lorena brings me breakfast at my desk!!!  What a wife.  It is even more amazing today because she is having her annual checkup and the doctor said she had to fast after midnight until they took samples, so she made breakfast for me without having any for herself!

I received a couple of comments about my long hiatus from blogging.  When I complained about it to my kids, they gave me no sympathy and said get back to blogging.  And here I am.  The reality was that, after the kids started at college, I struggled trying to figure out what to write.  There was the added pressure of a new job and it was just more convenient not to think about it.  That is over now.  It is time to get back in the saddle.  Kelly and I are in on-going talks about what she needs to do, in addition to her school, to prepare for a career.  She has narrowed her goals down to something manageable enough that we have the beginnings of a plan–thank goodness it involves Betty Blonde.  I will save the whole plan for another day, but it has us excited.  It has also increased the length of our to-do lists.  As for Christian, we got him a new guitar (with mother-of-pearl in-lays–way cool!) that he plays whenever he can squeeze in a minute or two between studies.  We bought a BeagleBoard so we can build a vision system for a side project.  Christian will help me with some of the development on that.

I will try to spend the rest of the week on our scheduled revamp of Betty Blonde and a couple of projects.  Our original Betty Blonde rework plan did not work out so well, so we went back to the drawing board.  As for the projects, everyone has been so busy, we have not had much time to pursue and “fun” stuff, but we have decided we need to try to get back to that.

After a long and relaxing Christmas holiday, Kelly and Christian start back to school today.  We got maybe ten percent of the stuff we planned done over the holidays.  That is a good thing.  We DID spend a bunch of time cooking, working out (semi-regularly), talking about life, and just hanging out.  I think we all needed that.  Over the last couple of days we spent the last significant chunk of money for school on this semester’s books and a new laptop for Kelly.  Her netbook died on us.  Her only criteria was that her new computer had to be pink.  Amazingly, our SysAdmin (Christian) was able to find a refurbished computer at Dell with all the features she REALLY needs with the added benefit that it is pink.  We bought our books from Amazon and saved a bundle.  Pretty impressive actually.  We got hardcover texts less expensively than it would have cost us to buy the electronic versions.

Both the kids have significantly heavier loads this semester.  Kelly has a 16 credit load with both Calculus II and Statistics.  Christian has 17 credits.  They have one class each on Mondays and Wednesdays, so they are loaded up from dawn ’til dark on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Christian has a three-hour night class on Tuesday evenings.  We drove to Target yesterday afternoon to buy new folders, notebooks, and pens for all their classes.  It is amazing how this remains exciting, even after many years.  I envy them a little.