San Pedro Garza Garcia

Month: May 2016 Page 1 of 2

Blog update 2016

By Dad

On Tuesday, May 31, 2016

It has been quite awhile since I did an update on this blog itself. First, I would like to say I am glad I have been able to keep writing on a regular (sometime only semi-regular) basis and I plan to keep going indefinitely. Here are a few statistics, milestones and comments:

I started the blog on April 6, 2004, so the blog is a little over 12 years old.
This is the 2978th blog post, so we should hit 3000 pretty soon. I, myself, have only written 2810, so I probably will not hit the 3000 post mark until 2017 if I can keep going.
We average around two comments per post, but that has slowed down since I write less now about Homeschool since the kids are gone to college.
I started tracking my Bible reading on the blog on February 9, 2006, so I have continued with that for over 10 years and have to say it has helped my reading consistency a lot. My plan when I started was to systematically read through the Old Testament three times and the New Testament nine times. I am on track to complete that within the next year or two. After that, I will probably set another goal and maybe switch versions to the ESV or maybe even the Reina Valera. What is most amazing and cool about this little program is that the amount I read every day has been on a steady increase over the last year or so.
I do not keep many blog statistics, but have a tool that shows the last month. On average I get a little over 100 unique visitors per day and between 300-400 page hits per day (not including spiders and bots). I know how to make those numbers go up, but I do not really enjoy doing the type of writing required to increase traffic all the time (I sometimes go on a binge) and that has never been the point of this blog.

Something that has interested me lately is that the use of the most popular social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (and probably even SnapChat) appears to have fallen off a cliff in terms of daily usage by the great unwashed masses at the same time these sites are increasingly dominated by commercial clutter. Meanwhile, the humble blog has maintained its attraction for people who have a message, like to keep a journal, want a place to put baby pictures for posterity or distant relatives or a million other personal, non-commercial reasons.

So my blog goals are modest. I plan to keep writing about twenty posts per month. I hope to find some things that are compelling to read for anyone else but me. I have found that to be a little bit difficult since the kids are no longer in homeschool, but I have hope with a couple of pretty big things that are happening with life and work. The include a business, a new house and, who knows, maybe someday we will have grandkids and I will get to participate in homeschool again.

Kelly gets her kitchen knives

By Dad

On Sunday, May 29, 2016

We bought Christian a really nice set of kitchen knives for his birthday last year. This year, Kelly flew out to see us in Texas for her birthday and we did not do much else. She is working on her qualification exams, finals and research so hard she does not have time for much anything else than to do that cook, exercise and go to meeting. So we decided to send her something that might help her with her cooking. There are no better tools for the kitchen than like a good set of cooking knives. She really is a very good cook and beside the staple things she does, she loves to experiment. We got Kelly the exact same set we got for Christian before. This just made Lorena and I realize how much we cannot wait to get back into a house so Lorena can start cooking with gas again!

Avocation and life skills as part of homeschool

By Dad

On Friday, May 27, 2016

In Art, Cooking, Exercise, Health, Music

Christian and I talked last night about avocation. There were lots of things we tried when the kids were growing up as part of our homeschool and just as part of life. We focused hard on specific academic paths that gave the kids as many options as possible when it came to career choices. The reality is we did not do so bad at that part–the kids are now in a place they can go virtually any direction they want career-wise. At the other end of the spectrum were things that would be characterized as life skills and or avocations. We had varying degrees of success with things that were not the central focus of our homeschool academics, but at which we invested time, effort and a fairly large amount of our resources. I thought I might make a list of some of that stuff. I say only some of it because there was so much that I know I will miss a bunch of it. So what am I talking about:

Music–Lorena and I are actually very limited in our musical ability. The kids are a lot better than us, but not exceptional. Kelly can play the piano and sing very well. Christian is much better at classical guitar than he thinks he is. All in all, we did not do so bad. Both the kids got ten years of music/instrument lessons and both still love to play. I would put this in the joyful avocation category.
Art–We did well in art. Of course there is the drawing (e.g. here and here) and all the crafts we did, but the thing that surprises me most is that we all like to go to Art Museums when we are together. We know some artists we like and enjoy art appreciation as much or more as we enjoy making art.
Cooking–Lorena is amazing and deserves a post all by itself. She has followed a pretty incredible culinary path that is wildly eclectic. Kelly is going down that same path, but with here own twist that is heavily influenced, I think, by the fact that she lives in the amazing food culture of the Pacific Northwest. Christian is more utilitarian, but goes on a baking or cooking binge that pushes the envelope on a semi-regular basis. As for me, I make an OK omelet which is also the entire cooking legacy I leave to my children. Well that and how to cook a turkey.
Sports and exercise–This deserves a post all by itself because we made a decision very early on to assure that exercise become a normal part of life, but sports, especially football, basketball, soccer and baseball were given very, very low priorities on the list we wanted the kids to do or watch. Part of that is because I had seen this so up close and personal, but part of it was because those sports are a time and resource drain that have negative value as either life skills, avocations or activities that engendered positive values. We tended more toward swimming, running and a little bit of hiking. Both the kids are active as weight lifters and runners these days.

The thing that was great about all that stuff is we got into all of it and got excited about it at the same time we did not over emphasize it. We wanted this all to be something for which the kids could have lifelong enjoyment without it consuming their lives. We will have to wait awhile longer to see if we had any level of success at that goal.

Oblivious to evil (moral subjectivism, Sacket Hall and Ted Bundy)

By Dad

On Wednesday, May 25, 2016

In Christianity

I was a minor participant in a discussion where Ted Bundy the notorious serial killer was brought up as an example of someone who subscribed to the view that morality is subjective. The conversation itself was very interesting and a great illustration of the evil and ignorance of that sort of world view. Particularly interesting was the link one of the commenters made to something Ted Bundy said in a discussion with one of his victims about that very subject. You can find that here. It was his premise, and a true one I think, that if moral subjectivism is true, then no values are right or wrong. In what is characterized a paraphrase, he captures the true nature of moral subjectivism when he says:

…Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either “right” or “wrong.”

That “learning” was the seminal event that allowed him to throw off the shackles of morality and pursue his own personal pleasure without having to worry about whether he was encroaching on “the rights of others.” I had forgotten about my own personal physical and temporal proximity to one of Bundy’s horrific crimes. In May of 1974, it was the end of my freshman year in college and I lived across the street from Sacket Hall on the campus of Oregon State University. My mother had lived in Sackett Hall when she was a freshman in Pharmacy back in 1948. That was the last location Roberta Kathleen Parks was seen before Ted Bundy kidnapped and murdered her. It is believed he picked her up on the street between where she lived and where I lived at the time. They found some of her remains on Taylor Mountain in Washington State in 1975.

Life is good–maybe boring for others, but not for me

By Dad

On Wednesday, May 25, 2016

In General, Work

I think I have seen what is happening to me as sixty year old guy happen to other people who were working schlubs their whole lives. Over time, one tends to pick up knowledge. If somebody works at one thing, no matter what it is, they accumulate a lot of knowledge over the years, no matter what the field. Then, when they get toward the end of their career and are thinking about retirement, opportunities start coming out of the woodwork. It is not about intelligence, it is about experience. The older I get, the less irritating it is to hear about the importance of experience.

So now I have three active projects beside my day job that have to do with what I did in my career. I need to quit two of them and work on just one of them or I will do a bad job at all three. So, over the next few weeks, I am going to try to decide where it would be best to focus my efforts. This seems to be a very good thing partially because I love what I do, but also because it gives more to do now that the kids are gone. It makes me look back and wonder what life would be like if I had more focus on my career before I was forty. Maybe it would not have been much different and it does not pay to think about it, but it does make me thankful that we helped the kids remain focused on something that would last past their youth both in terms of work and spirituality.

I realize that what I do for a living must be supremely boring to everyone looking on and I have to remind myself that most people do not really care how I do what I do so I have to work hard not to talk about it too much. Still, there are people just like me and even more so. I have the good fortune of working on one of the projects with a guy who is ten years older than and with deeper skills than I. We talk the same language and really enjoy even the most trivial minutiae of our chosen field. I just hope I can get to that point in my relationship with God before I die.

Doing stuff for fun rather than money

By Dad

On Tuesday, May 24, 2016

In Education, Homeschool, Work

One of the great ironies in my life is that when I do something to help someone out with something, supposedly out of the goodness of my heart, it often turns in money either directly or because I learned a new salable skill. How does that happen? When I started the GaugeCam project to help out a friend in Raleigh I was almost exclusively a Windows programmer. We decided to write the code as cross-platform code on Linux and Windows using Boost, OpenCV and the Qt libraries. In my current job, I use the Qt libraries, OpenCV and Boost. I would not have had the skills to do this job if I had not first given away what I now get paid to do.

It is also true that the things I enjoy the most started out as a way to help out, but turned into avocations. Homeschool gave me drawing skills (Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad, forensic drawing skills), people skills (Tactics, How to Win Friends), blogging (I started this blog to record our family’s homeschool journey) and a gazillion other thing. Now that I have been doing this for awhile, I am always on the lookout for new opportunities, but there too many interesting, helpful things to do, too little time and too few resources so I have to pick and choose a little these days.

So, it has started again. The EKG project started out as a learning thing with the idea that, in the unlikely event that I stuck with it longer than just as a learning opportunity, I would open source the code to give back to the community and go on to the next thing. That might still happen, but it looks like there might also be a commercial opportunity that would help me push this along and still release at least part of the code as free (as in beer), open source code for the hobby community. How cool would that be.

Video of the EKG running with my own software

By Dad

On Sunday, May 22, 2016

In Health, Software, Technology

My hard work paid off this weekend. I am working with my long-time friend and colleague, Frank, to develop some EKG software for our $27 EKG’s. Actually, the EKG part has gone up now to $51 and the Arduino needed to run it costs another $20. At any rate, the software shown here accommodates six channels (even though that has not yet been tested because I only have one channel). It needs some cleanup, but it works great.

Strip charts for the EKG

By Dad

On Sunday, May 22, 2016

In Health, Software, Technology

When I started building my $27 EKG, I just assumed there would be an excellent library to chart the output to the screen in a compelling and useful way. There are a couple of libraries that are pretty good, but they are either really old, have bad open source licenses, are not fast enough (we need to eat a lot of data in real time) or they do not do exactly what we want. It is a little bit of a hassle to write something like this when in a rush, but it could not be helped. That is what I did most of the day yesterday. I hope to have the thing all up and running in the next few days. It will be useful to have an unencumbered library for a lot of the things we want to do with this little project and probably for future projects, too, so it is not a loss.

Texas. What’s not to love?

By Dad

On Saturday, May 21, 2016

We are enjoying our time here in Texas. One of the best things about Texas, now more than ever time, is its place as firewall against many of the evils of America’s current coarse and ignorant culture. You can even see it encroaching here, but if there will ever be a bastion of sanity against the current evil zeitgeist, I am sure it will be somewhere here in Texas. I got to thinking about this because of something someone wrote in a totally unrelated context:

No doubt about it: conservative Bible Christians are under attack — subjected to stereotypes that, for any other group (except Texans) would be taken to constitute bigotry.

The thing that is good and bad about Texas is the frequently don’t care what non-Texans think because really don’t get Texas. How could they? They are not Texan. I am not a Texan and never will be. In some ways, I know I do not understand it all myself. I don’t want to be a Texan, but that does not mean I do not have anything other than a huge (as it should be here in Texas) appreciation for all the good about this wonderful place.

Is this evil?

By Dad

On Friday, May 20, 2016

In Christianity

I have been following a discussion in the comments of a blog where a good number of fairly thoughtful people hang out. Some of the blog posts are pretty interesting, but the discussion that occurs after the posts is often even more enlightening than the posts themselves. The author of the blog engages in the comments along with several PhD’s in (I think I have this right) Math, Physics and Chemistry. The less credentialed people are equally as competent in their participation.

Atheist and skeptics show up there on a semi-regular basis. I am just going to put a couple of the comments here that are toward the bottom (at this point) and let them speak for themselves. The whole interchange was really quite interesting. As part of a longer discussion, a fellow with the moniker Jeannette, an atheist who I think actually believes she is making a coherent argument responds to commenter BillT’s observation about what she had previously written (link to comments):

From BillT:

Jeanette,

As I said before, good and bad are relative to a goal.

And this is what is so sad. Ted Bundy raped, tortured and murdered untold numbers of women but all you can say is that it might be bad if by doing that he didn’t achieve his goal. He was by any rational definition a monster. A heinous, depraved and evil man. But you say he’s only bad relative to his goal which it’s very, very likely he achieved (he certainly thought he did). What has it come to Jeanette that you can’t say he was “a heinous, depraved and evil man” and have it mean something other that he didn’t achieve his goal or that it’s meaningless. What has it come to?

Response by Jeanette:

I can certainly say he performed “heinous, depraved and evil” actions. Ted Bundy’s actions were horrendously bad according to my moral perspective—my goal of human flourishing / fulfillment for all.

I also believe his actions were bad according to his own stated goal of freedom, but I may be wrong. They might have been good according to his goals. I can’t know for sure.

I don’t think Ted Bundy—the person—was good or bad. I think that is also a meaningless statement. It was his behavior and the consequences they caused that were good/bad as measured against a goal.

The debt thing

By Dad

On Friday, May 20, 2016

In House and home, Money

I regularly read the Bayou Renaissance Man blog by a science fiction (and now western) novel writer who is especially interesting when he writes about debt. I read an article to which he pointed about a guy who got into serious debt while getting a Bachelors degree in English (bad idea), then went to Alaska to work as a laborer to pay it off (good, but unnecessary if he would have gotten a decent degree). He wanted to double down on his first bad degree choice by going to Duke for a Masters degree in liberal studies, but chose to live in a van in the parking lot and work menial jobs so he would be debt free when he finished. All of that would have been completely unnecessary if he had gotten a degree that would allow him to get a job in the first place.

The reality is that what he did was pretty cool. He was a whole lot smarter than me with respect to how he thought about debt when he was in his twenties. I in am one of those guys who, while I funded my 401K over my entire career and am in OK shape when it comes to that, I did not pay much attention to any of this at all until the blood started going to my brain sometime after my 40th birthday. So when I woke up in the early 2000’s, I had to scramble to do a bunch of things others had already accomplished. I discovered Dave Ramsey and got out of debt. That was good, but I had a finite amount of time to prepare for things like paying for the kids’ college and getting my house paid off. It was compounded by the fact that the kids both skipped high school, so my college payments started way early than I had initially planned.

I am going to try to write about the debt problem a little here. The focus is not going to be on global or national economics, but on what I did to shore up my own situation and what I expect to be another economic meltdown within the next few years. It is especially interesting to me right now because we are in the Dallas, Texas area in the middle of a house buying frenzy–houses in our town stay on the market for around three days and are selling well above appraisal value. All the signs indicate that the house of cards will come tumbling down soon. I am not sure what I should do, but I know I do not want to participate in the frenzy.

Whataburger

By Dad

On Thursday, May 19, 2016

In Cooking, Health

I found out today that I only work 0.8 miles, walking distance from a WhatABurger fast-food restaurant. Even though I love the things and get a couple mile walk in if I go down there, it is a bad thing. The problem is that I love them and they are definitely not on my diet. I think they have that “White Castle” effect with me. Not everyone likes WhatABurger, but I love them. People who do not like White Castle Sliders do not get why people like them and vice-versa. I think my addiction started while I was getting my Masters degree at UTEP. At that time, Taco Bell and WhatABurger were the two closest fast food joints with cheap food. I am addicted for life to both.

Some things are the same no matter where you are from

By Dad

On Wednesday, May 18, 2016

This is one of those posts I have to start by saying it is a true story. So, Lorena’s number two brother, Jorge was in a wreck this morning. It involved two trucks that ran into each other swiping both the trucks off the road along with Jorge. Jorge was OK, but it scared him to death. The police showed up, the insurance guy showed and they had everything just about worked out when the owner of the property on the showed up. It took them an extra couple of hours at the scene because of damage done to the fence. Take a close look at the fence. It was quite impressive to me that the land owner actually convinced the insurance guys to compensate him for damage to the fence. It was also quite impressive that this could have happened just about anywhere in the world. I think insurance turns people into victims–not that we don’t need it, but give me a break. You have to think though that the guy was probably a soccer player. Soccer, of course is a big thing in Mexico. You see what happens when one soccer play light brushes another soccer player in a even the most unimportant of matches.

Lorena hits an exercise milestone

By Dad

On Wednesday, May 18, 2016

In Exercise, General

Lorena arrived at an amazing milestone today. She rowed over 10,000 meters, burning over 500 calories in a little over an hour. I am sure she will get that time under an hour pretty soon, but the fact that she did over 10K in a single sitting on a Concept 2 rowing machine is an impressive feat. She has worked out hard on an uncompromisingly regular schedule for well over a decade now. Kudos to her.

Endianness “bytes” me one more time.

By Dad

On Wednesday, May 18, 2016

In Software, Technology

I had a little bit of a breakthrough on my EKG project last night. I actually had the idea when I was completely away from the project for a few days. It caused me to re-read the manual where it said the readings from the EKG are sent down the serial cable in big endian order. Each value for a 10-bit number takes up two bytes. The high order byte can either be first or last. The receiving computer expected little endian order. I now swap the bytes before they are plotted or recorded and we get the beautiful plot above. You can barely see four little lines below the left side of the signal plot. Those lines make up the legend for the electrode channels. The system can handle six channels, but we are going to try to do just four on this setup. The next step is to get the graph to be a moving strip chart. The graph, as it is right now, just writes over itself.

I completely duplicated my current setup for a friend, Frank who is joining this project. He is way more skilled than I in a lot of this stuff–especially the electrical engineering parts. I need to order myself an additional three channels of electronics, but that is on its way to Frank right now.

P.S. We are thinking of cross platforming (Windows/Linux) and open sourcing (free as in both freedom and beer) the software and writing a user guide/tutorial on how to set the thing up if anyone shows any interests because there does not seem to be anything out there that is really hobby friendly. If I am wrong, maybe someone can correct me. Because of our day jobs we are still months away from that.

More on the community college thing

By Dad

On Tuesday, May 17, 2016

We started looking at other school options for Lorena because of the low quality of the community college system here in Texas. The criteria we are using to find something for Lorena are things like cost, accreditation, location (whether the school is one where we might envision ourselves living so should attend on campus some day), the regional and national reputation of the school (the rankings by institutions like US News are almost always completely bogus). We loved the Rankings done by the National Research Council when we looked for graduate schools in Electrical Engineering for the Christian, but Lorena is working on an undergraduate degree in business and they do not rank business schools nor undergraduate degrees.

What we found is that both Arizona State University and Oregon State University have stellar online bachelors degree programs in business. Arizona State has a significantly better business school, but either would be perfect for our needs. Both schools would accept the bulk of Lorena’s credits from her community college experience and there is a good chance we would be willing to land in either place for a year or two (if I retire or get a work from home job) so she could finish up on campus. We are going to continue looking, but at least we have some options that are profoundly better than the community college we investigated here in Texas.

Challenges at the community college

By Dad

On Monday, May 16, 2016

Lorena took all her transcripts into the local community college north of Dallas, Texas and to say her experience there differed greatly from virtually every other community college she has attended would be an understatement. They said they would take almost none of her credits because they were taken in a quarter based system rather than a semester system. When she pointed out that most of the classes she has taken were in a semester system, they said (there were three people there looking at her paperwork), I kid you not, “We don’t care.” So in short, the facilities were shabby, the administration was surly and non-helpful, they had non-standard transfer processes, they required Lorena to take tests required for people just entering the system and not people transferring in with more than half of the credits required to graduate–and there is more, but you get the drift. It was truly a bad experience. These are the same credits accepted at better community colleges and state universities in Oregon, North Carolina and Florida. Oh well, we will find another place for her to attend. Maybe it is time for her to start at a four year college.

Good Mexican food in Texas

By Dad

On Sunday, May 15, 2016

It might be just us, but I have to admit we have struggled to find a good Mexican food place here in Texas. Of course we can get it with our Mexican family and friends, but it seems like what they represent to be Mexican food here is really Tex-Mex. I am not even trying to suggest Tex-Mex is not good or that it does not have its place. It is just that we really like Mexican food. We found the closest place yet today for lunch, but it was not nearly is close to real Mexican food as what we (actually took a long time to find) found in North Carolina and Oregon. I am going to start asking our Mexican family what we ought to try next, but we are a little bit suspicious that he conflates the two styles, too, in as much as he has spent the vast bulk of his life here.

Cooking at college

By Dad

On Sunday, May 15, 2016

Christian was a pretty good cook by the time he left home for college. He could more than hold his own when it came to the basics and had a few specialties he liked to do. Kelly had an even wider repertoire and loved to experiment with her mom whenever she got the chance. I am not sure what I expected when they went off to college. I did not really think about it much, but I have to admit I am a little surprised at how much they have both embraced the art of cooking.

The Strawberry-Rhubarb concoction in the picture was fabulous. Kelly’s efforts aim at health as well as taste. She has somehow mastered the art of crust that is light, flaky and healthy. Up in Seattle, she has access to extensive varieties of fresh vegetables that she uses to eat healthy food that tastes good. Her problem is that she is so busy, her exercise regimen is less regular than it was when she is in her undergraduate degree.

Christian, on the other hand, because he follows a fairly rigorous workout schedule when he is not in finals, takes a more utilitarian approach. During the lead up to the end of the semester he is so busy he depends on this stuff to get the nutrition into his system rapidly and efficiently. That is not a frequent occurrence–the rest of the time he cooks fish, pasta, chicken and eats lots of vegetables and the fruits that are more available in Arizona than colder climes.

The interesting thing is that they both try new recipes on an amazingly regular schedule. Who knew they would get into cooking so much?

A great homeschool story

By Dad

On Friday, May 13, 2016

In Education, Homeschool

Here is a link to the finish of a great homeschool story and the continuance of a couple of others. It is about a mother and her daughter who were a little late to start homeschool, but turned the typical government school “pick the winners, give them a mediocre education and neglect the rest” situation into a fairly incredible start. It also established a precedent and a path for the younger siblings. I especially love the part about the lacrosse. Too often, team sports in traditional school settings are as much a popularity contest as any indicator of who is the best player. With individual sports (track and field, swimming, wrestling), they cannot take it away from you if you are the fastest or best. That is not to say they do not often try.

What is particularly impressive is this young student went from pre-med to graduate in a math intensive field that is arguably more difficult with plans to go on to grad school. The whole story is very impressive. Kudos to them and good luck to the younger siblings.

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