Year: 2011 Page 9 of 11

Day 5 of 1000

Hurricane Irene is hammering the North Carolina coast right now, but all we have seen is a little bit of ran and a light bit of wind.  The electricity went out for a couple of seconds at three this morning, but the weather is so mild we are not sure whether it was even hurricane related.  We expect the weather to degrade some between now and when it is supposed to be at its worst (for us here in Raleigh) around 2:00 PM, but we still expect it to be just a hard ran and higher than normal winds.  As I right this the winds have picked up quite a bit.  The trees behind the house are really starting to move.

Kelly’s current plan is to try to get into the best graduate school of journalism that will accept her after she finishes her statistics degree.  As part of her goal to get into a great one, she wants to go to something called the World Journalism Institute.  World magazine has a two year summer program for college students who want to be journalists.  They want prospective students to keep a blog and submit articles written for whatever publications are available to them.  Kelly has started her blog here.  You can also get to her blog from the link at the top of the page.  I think she has quite a good writing voice and is doing very well with it.  In addition to her writing, Kelly plans to continue her caricature work with the idea that she will draw and post some political cartoons when she feels like she is good enough.  For practice, though, she draws caricatures of her friends.  I think she solicits permission from her friends on facebook, then just goes for it.  Here is part of her latest efforts:

Kelly’s Caricatures

Housekeeping notes:  Christian is working on getting me a decent theme for this blog.  He came and looked over my shoulder while I worked on it last night and started asking me questions.  It became obvious, pretty quickly that he is way out of my league when it comes to web design.  He did mock-ups of some options for me.  It is not just the layout, but color selection, page load speed, and a bunch of other stuff that he is improving.  The blog will be in a state of flux while he works on it, but it should not slow down the posting.

The Other McCain has all the best stuff.  Sometimes I can’t let my kids look over my shoulder while I am reading, but he has a GREAT site.  The latest is an article he found about how gold is a super good investment right now, but guns are better.  Who would have thought?  My cousin Merle from Klamath Falls says that since Obama got elected, guns and ammunition have passed up marijuana as the most planted item in certain parts of rural Oregon.

This article reminded me that I want to put my thoughts down on peer review and scholarly article authorship.  There is something very disturbing about how the academic publication and peer review process works.  George Will has proved to be particularly cogent on this topic.  The ideological purity, institutional hierarchy, and profoundly pety personal politics play a big part in peer review.  This post is just a marker to get me started on the subject.

Day 4 of 1000

The talk of the town here in Raleigh right now is Hurricane Irene.  It is supposed to hit the Outer Banks of North Carolina sometime tomorrow.  WRDU and WRAL, my morning commute radio stations, are all hurricane all the time.  The first thing I heard when I turned the radio on this morning was the struggle authorities were having with surfers heading for the beach to surf the hurricane while everyone else is evacuating.  WRAL reported that Raleigh will probably experience one to two inches of rain with 30-40 mph winds.  It gets more intense the closer one gets to the beach.  It is expected that it will hit the Outer Banks as a level 3 hurricane (111-130 mph) with as much as a foot of rain.  Our plan to head over to the Hill Library at NCSU to study as usual.  We will write a post and put up some pictures if anything interesting happens, but we expect the equivalent of a hard thunderstorm with heavier winds than usual.

Oregon is demonstrating that it is as nutsoid as ever.  A man was arrested in Monmouth for the firebombing of a mosque in Corvallis in retaliation for a plan by a Muslim man to kill people at a Christmas celebration in Portland with a car bomb.  The mosque bomber was indicted for “damaging religious property for racial reasons” which is classified as a “hate” crime.  He was also indicted for “using fire to commit a felony”.  The car bomber was indicted for “attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction”, but the sympathies of columnist Steve Duin of the hard left-wing Oregonian appear to be with the car bomber.  In this article, speaking of the FBI sting that caught the guy, he said, “How far would Mohamud have traveled down that road without the help of those very operatives?”  No hate crime here.

Kinky is way too liberal for my blood even though he has a little bit of a libertarian streak.  I like him a little better today after reading an article he wrote for the Daily Beast.  I liked this paragraph a lot:

When I ran for governor of Texas as an independent in 2006, the Crips and the Bloods ganged up on me. When I lost, I drove off in a 1937 Snit, refusing to concede to Perry. Three days later Rick called to give me a gracious little pep talk, effectively talking me down from jumping off the bridge of my nose. Very few others were calling at that time, by the way. Such is the nature of winning and losing and politicians and life. You might call what Rick did an act of random kindness. Yet in my mind it made him more than a politician, more than a musician; it made him a mensch.

Rick Perry was willing and thoughtful enough to make the call. Kinky Friedman was willing to take the call and gracious enough to respond to it positively. I liked Rick Perry a lot before I read the article and Kinky Friedman almost not at all. I think I like them both a little bit better now.  Read the whole thing.

H.T.  Kevin Williamson at National Review Online

I did a little calculating and determined that the 1000th day from when I started posting again is on Monday, May 19 2014.  That is perfect.  Commencement for the 2013-2014 school year at NCSU is on Saturday, May 10, 2014.  Graduation in four years from start to finish with hard degrees like Statistics and Applied Math is very difficult.  It will be equally difficult for Lorena to finish her first two years of college for a 4-year college transfer (Associate of Science) degree while she runs (with an iron fist) our household.  I will need to pitch in at home more often to make that happen.  I have thought a lot about what I want to accomplish, too.  I do not want any more degrees, but there are lots of new and old things I want to learn.  I just need to pare my wants down to something tractable in the allotted time.  I figured that beyond the duties of my day job and household duties, there are several things at which I can aim.  I reserve the right to modify some of these goals as circumstances change, but I think it help to write them down and track progress.

• Blogging and reading – I attribute part of my blogging hiatus to the fact that I quit taking time to read for both edification and pleasure.  I had less things about which to write.  I have two-fold goal here:  1) Daily progress through a book unrelated to my other goals.  Reasonable Faith qualifies as does Farnsworth’s Classic English Rhetoric whose author I heard on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America this morning.  I will try to throw in a novel now and again.  Most importantly, I will continue to track my daily Bible reading here.
• GaugeCam – I make my living as a technology researcher.  There is so much stuff I would love to learn to allow me to do my job better, that I do not have time to learn everything.  We have identified a new project at GaugeCam to “webify” the work we are doing there.  My part of that task will be to write some vision libraries and to make the cameras and I/O devices available from an Android tablet.  My goal then, will be to learn how to program Android well enough on my Nook Color to write and publish a program to access GaugeCam connected cameras and I/O devices over the internet.
• Get my weight down to 170 pounds.

I think those are good goals.  Enough to keep me focused and interest, but not so much I cannot help out with everyone else’s school and around the house.  The kids have additional goals on which they work, but I will leave that to them to talk about in their own blogs.  We might not make it all, but these appear to be worthy goals.

Day 3 of 1000

I talked about a book titled Reasonable Faith that I downloaded to my Nook Color while I walked on a treadmill at the YMCA.  It is a great book, but not one that is easy to digest as a light read.  I have often listened to William Lane Craig debates and podcasts as I do my nightly walks (well, four times per week anyway).  I think different apologetic arguments appeal to differently to different people.  What I mean by that is, even though I am totally entranced by discussions of the historicity of Christ, the historical reality of the resurrection of Christ, cosmic fine tuning, and intelligent design, others are more interested in more philosophical questions such as the problem of evil (theodicy)  and other philosophical arguments for the existence of God.  Reasonable Faith covers all of these.

I started reading about these kinds of topics over twenty five years ago when I had a close relative start beating me up about what I believe.  He had been a serious Christian, but had doubts, and, for a period of time, tried to convince others of the rightness of his apostate worldview.  I was shaken to my core and wanted to figure out what I really believed.  This relative was very taken with the writings of Marcus Borg, a knee-jerk liberal (in the scholarly sense) professor of religion at Oregon State University who is a member of the fringe group called the Jesus Seminar and does not believe Jesus was bodily resurrected, but still claims he is a Christian.  After a few fits and false starts I found many, much more reputable scholars such as Gary Habermas, Ben Witherington III, N.T. Wright, and J.P. Moreland, and William Lane Craig.  It was quite gratifying to see both N.T. Wright and William Lane Craig destroy Borg in scholarly debates several years after I had started reading this kind of scholarship.  You can watch the Craig’s debate with Borg on YouTube.  The first in the series of videos can be found here.  Borg did not do any better in his debate against N.T. Wright.  It is very sad to me as a second generation alumni of Oregon State that this charlatan has been given an endowed chair and continues to promulgate his fringe views at a public university.

At any rate, I have started reading Reasonable Faith.  The first section is a very accessible treatise on some philosophical considerations.  It talks about Augustine, Aquinas, John Locke, Bultmann, Barth, etc.  I think I will get the most out of those sections of the book where I, because of my disposition, have less interest.  I am glad for that.  I need to be more well-rounded in my understanding of these importand topics.

Day 2 of 1000

One of the last things I did before I left Oregon this summer was to buy a Nook Color from the Washington Square Barnes and Noble Bookstore.  We bought it for two reasons:  1) It is a very inexpensive Android tablet computer that Christian and I plan to learn how to program and 2) We thought it would be good for the kids textbooks.  We are still excited about programming the Nook.  It might be good for textbooks, too, but we still have one or two books the kids need to read on their laptops with Kindle PC Software while the rest are real paper books.  We like the Nook a lot.  Christian plays Angry Birds on it every now and then, but I probably use it more than anyone.  I bought a James Mills author (I wish he would write a lot more books–great author) to read on the plane flight home and have been hooked ever since.

I bought my first Andrew Klavan mystery, Empire of Lies, to read on the treadmill at the YMCA.  The book was a pretty rough but an excellent read; I will get more.  The thing that was awesome about the Nook was that when I finished the book, I just connected to the YMCA wireless network and downloaded a new book without missing a beat on my workout.  The book I downloaded is William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith.  I love the book and will talk more about it in another post as I get further into the book.

The main reason we chose the Nook Color over any of the Kindles was the low price coupled with the ability to easily hack the Nook Color into a full blown Android Tablet, not just the limited version of Android provided by Barnes and Noble.  There is even a Kindle app for the Nook so you can read Amazon books as well as Barnes and Noble books.  How much better does it get than that.  There are two things we would really like to have on the Nook Color that are not there:  a camera and a microphone.  A little bit of searching showed that some people appear to have been able to hook cameras, keyboards, and mice, but no one has done the work required to hook up a bluetooth microphone for VOIP calls.  We expect it will happen.

In the meantime, I have downloaded the Nook Color SDK, have a project in mind that involves work I am doing at GaugeCam.  We want to control a remote, cell-phone enable Arduino, micro-controller to turn stuff on and off from both an iPhone and an Android tablet.  My buddy, Andrew will do the iPhone programming.  I will do the Android tablet.

The Dawning — Day 1 of 1000

It dawned on me last night during my walk that I am in a rut.  There is no excuse for my current mood and mode of operation centered around whining and complaining.  I am generally a “glass half full” kind of a guy so I can only image how disconcerting it is to those who have to put up with me when I am in this state of mind.  Still, I know why and when it happened–not to excuse myself, mind you, just to put down a marker and get back on that positive track.  If you have read this blog in the past, you will know that I spent about all of my spare time (along with my wife, Lorena) homeschooling my kids.  That ended in June of 2010.  It took about six months to get them established at the community college, but the real effort to make that happen ended over a year ago.  I spent some time and effort on volunteer and learning projects, but really, I have not aggressively focused on anything for more than a week or two at a time since homeschool ended.  The dawning that occurred last night was excellent because it made me realize two things:  1) The kids are only three years away from going off to graduate school and 2) I am going to go nuts if I do not set myself some goals and make a plan to accomplish them.

The Next Thousand Days

During my walk, I thought about some stuff that has gone on here in North Carolina that is just wrong.  It is not North Carolina itself.  We love North Carolina in general and Raleigh in particular–best small city in America in our humble opinion!  This lead to the thought that we need to get our family out of here as soon as we can.  The problem is that we would have a hard struggle to sell our house in this really bad economy with this really, really bad president who is making it daily worse and doing everything he can to kill unborn babies, take vacation, and play golf while he is at it.  The economy probably will not get better until and if he is out of office for a couple of years starting in 2013.  That pretty much means we are stuck here until 2013 or 2014.  Well, not stuck–we have really great schools for the kids, the best guitar teacher in the world, a great neighborhood, interesting work, summer opportunities for the kids, some good friends, great weather (except in the misery of summer) and a lot of other super cool stuff here.  Now that I put it that way, I wonder why I have been in such a funk these last several months.

The time we need to be in North Carolina corresponds almost directly to the amount of time it will take for Kelly and Christian to graduate from college.  They have a great university here for the applied math and statistics they want to study.  The time is almost exactly one thousand days from today!  That is a good chunk of time.  Not so much that you cannot see the end of it, but enough to accomplish some significant stuff.  I have even identified some stuff that would be good to accomplish.  Of course, we have to get the kids out of community college with a great education, summer internships, jobs, summer school (maybe necessary so they can graduate in four years) and good grades, then into NCSU for two years with the same challenges and opportunities.  That is not a full time job…

So that leaves me with some time for some very cool stuff.  Most of it has to do with the start of a business–one that does not interfere with my day job, but that still requires a lot of learning and work.  I have at least a thousand days of work and learning if the market accepts our concept, but only about 500 if it does not.  I do not have to worry about that for another 500 days or so.

Lyle over at our RWDub’s Reviews was kind enough to write an article on our upcoming software release of the BleAx comic strip aggregation program.  Thanks Lyle!

For anyone who is interested, click here.

The kids are in finals right now.  It is pretty rough this time because both of them have a much bigger load than last semester.  They both have their last final, Calculus II, tomorrow afternoon.  I have promised Kelly that I will have the BleAx (comic aggregation and publishing) program ready for her when she finishes the semester.  I am almost there.  Really, we can start aggregating and publishing now, but there are some finishing touches that are not quite complete.  This time, I am going to release the program for broader use.  Yesterday, I finished the first pass of the documentation for the program.  BleAx now has its own webpage here.  You can see the documentation I put up here.  I hope to have the program up for general download by the end of the coming weekend.

We went to the NCSU Hill Library to study yesterday as normal.  Lorena went shopping, then came back to pick us up at about 3:30 PM.  We drove home, passing a restaurant at about 3:45 on South Saunders St. that was destroyed–completely flattened–by a tornado at 4:00.  We did not know that anything was even happening until the elder from our church called us (along with everyone else–thank you Tom) to see if we were OK.  You can check out some video of the damage here.

I stayed home from work Tuesday through Thursday so the same bug that fell our whole family would not fell everyone in the office at work.  The flu is a real pain in the neck.  In the middle of all that I needed to get my taxes out.  After working like a maniac to get it all done, I found they are not due this year until April 18.  The normal day, April 15, is an obscure holiday in Washington D.C. this year, so the whole country gets a three day reprieve.  Well, now it is out of the way and I do not have to worry about it.

My plan for this weekend was to prepare and send out our taxes.  That did not happen.  Now I have to make time for that this week.  Really, I have it ready to print out as soon as I get one more number from last years documents.  I just need to pull them out and do it.  Kelly did some babysitting last week and picked up some kind of a bug.  Kelly was on the back end of a bad cold on the weekend, but Lorena and Christian got hit pretty hard with the same bug.  We spent the weekend recovering from that.  I have not been hit yet, but I am expecting it soon.  In the meantime, I continue to work on the BleAx program.  I have it far enough along now, that Kelly can start generating comic strip files for the restart of Betty Blonde.  We are still a couple of months away from that, but we are already better off than we were before in terms of infrastructure.

There are now only three weeks left in the semester.  The kids will be doing nothing but study between now and Cinco de Mayo.

William Lane Craig debated Sam Harris last night on the topic:  “Is Good From God?”  You can listen to the debate audio here.  We were hoping for a better debate this week after the Craig-Krauss debate last week when Krauss showed up with neither arguments nor coherency.  I would like to say that Harris did any better, but, if anything, he was worse.  Harris has a PhD in Neuroscience from UCLA and, supposedly, he has an undergraduate Philosophy degree from Stanford, too.  If that is all true, there are a couple of things of which I am thoroughly convinced after that debate.  There is no way I would pay for my kids to get a degree in Philosophy from Stanford and for any questions I have about the brain, I will ask Michael Egnor!

I continue to have a lot of time to work on my BleAx program lately because the kids are in the midst of their last round of midterms, semester research reports, and preparation for finals.  BleAx is the program Kelly uses to accumulate her Betty Blonde comic strips.  I have made a lot of progress on the program, adding new functionality, and making it easier to use.  Posting here will continue to be light until I have finished the release version of BleAx.  I also need to rebuild the Betty Blonde website.  It is very much a mess right now.  I plan to use the ComicPress theme in a WordPress blog, then add functionality to post newly accumulated strips from BleAx right to the blog along with some commentary.  After we get Kelly drawing her strip again, we need to do a bunch of how-to documentation and videos on how to use BleAx.  I will still post here now and again, but will bias my efforts more toward finishing these projects until they are complete.

We listened to the live stream of the debate Wednesday night between Lawrence Krauss and William Lane Craig while Kelly and Christian did their homework.  Craig was his usual self:  articulate, ordered in his arguments, gracious, and vastly knowledgeable.  Krauss was wildly under prepared.  Craig actually had to correct him a good number of times on issues of physics.  Krauss really made no cogent arguments about anything, much less a lack of evidence for God.  He made lots of statements about stuff that Craig has addressed in previous debates, but Craig had such a target rich environment that he could not get to them all.  Craig, in his usual style, had a list of five positive arguments for his side of the debate question.  He explained them thoroughly and listed the reasons they were true.  Krauss basically said, “That is false” to a couple of the arguments and ignored the rest.  He gave no disernable reasons for the falsity.  It is always a joy to listen to Craig, but debates are always a lot more interesting if you are not debating a buffoon.

Thankful there is another debate on Saturday night at 7:00 PM EDT between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig at Notre Dame University.  We are going to break out the popcorn and pizza again.  I am hoping for a better debate, but after reading a little about Sam Harris, I am a little skeptical.  I think he might even be as ill-equipped for this type of debate as Krauss.  We will see.  The only link I kind find to the debate so fare is on facebook here.  The debate is supposed to be live streamed so I will put up the link on this post as soon as (and if) I find it.