Year: 2016 Page 8 of 13

Best article I have read in… forever

By Dad

On Saturday, June 4, 2016

In Christianity, Education, Homeschool

That might not be exactly true, but this article hit me right where I live on a topic about which I have been in a mighty struggle. Without further her is the article titled How to Live a Life of Privilege, Embrace the responsibility that comes with it. The title and subtitle of the article do not do it justice. The idea for the article came from a talk the author, David French, gave to a small group of Christian homeschoolers. He starts out by really nailing the truth about high school and college graduations–they are not really something about which we should do a lot of celebrating, at least not in the way they are currently celebrated as the accomplishment of something that required great personal sacrifice. That is only the start, it just gets better and better.

I think maybe the reason I love this article at this time and place is that Lorena and I are recent empty-nesters. The kids are gone, we have seen the world as an increasingly difficult, we struggle to figure out what to do next and we seem to have forgotten the fact that we are recipients of unwarranted privilege. I want to make sure people do not confuse the brand of privilege perpetuated by Social Justice Warrior culture. I am talking about the privilege everyone in America and most of the Western world experiences because of others willingness to suffer deprivation and even die to allow us to grow up in a country where almost everyone is privileged. French is careful to not suggest there is equal privilege for everyone, because there is not. He does rightly say that those that who are less privileged in this country still have great privilege.

Even that, though was not the best part of the article. This article was a reminder of what it is really important and amazingly what leads to a happy life. Please read the article. It is an important one.

H.T. Erick Erickson at the Resurgent.

A blast from the past to start the weekend

By Dad

On Friday, June 3, 2016

In Art, culture, Education, Music

For some reason this video came to mind today. I forgot how excellent it really was and thought I would put it up again because it is so fun. From the date of the video, this must have occurred right after he turned sixteen during his Junior year at NCSU.

The dark humor of Flannery O’Connor

By Dad

On Friday, June 3, 2016

Kelly sent me a link yesterday to a brilliant list titled How to Tell If You’re In a Flannery O’Connor Story was posted on a web site called The Toast. Some of my favorites from virtually all the great items on the list are:

You are being horrible to a blood relative. They drop dead.

You suspect a Baptist is lying to you.

You are lying about where your Bible is.

Someone’s hatlessness merits explicit reference.

The funny deal is the web site had come onto my radar earlier in the day due to an interesting article I read about one of the co-founders of the site. I looked at it and it really was not my cup of tea, so I was quite pleased with the O’Connor that came from Kelly in the afternoon. That all lead me on to a story about the amazing writing career and short, interesting life of Flannery O’Connor at New Georgia Encyclopedia. It is also, well worth the read.

A side projects makes the news

By Dad

On Thursday, June 2, 2016

I have participated pretty heavily in the OBoard project. It made the news. Check it out here.

Mexican food in Texas?

By Dad

On Thursday, June 2, 2016

We always try as hard as we can to find nice things to say about the place where we are. Really, it is easy to find nice things to say about our part of the Metroplex here in the Dallas area, but I have to say that we have struggled when it comes to authentic Mexican food in our neighborhood. Friends, acquaintances, food reviewers and total strangers on the street , bless their hearts, have universally pointed us to Tex-Mex which, in our humble, but sincerely held religious conviction, is , at its very best, and I am trying to be gracious when I say this, Americanized Mexican food. Some people actually like Americanized Mexican food.

With that said, we have new hope. Our good friend John S. has invited us to meet him at a little place outside of the rarefied air where we live–thirty minutes away (almost the same as across the street in Texas-speak)–called Cuquita’s Restaurant advertising Comida Mexicana. It got rave reviews in the Texas press. We shall see what we shall see and taste what we shall taste sometime this weekend. We have hope that it will not be Tex-Mex.

Computer eye fatigue

By Dad

On Wednesday, June 1, 2016

clarkkent One of the hazards of typing for a living at a computer screen for most of the day, every day is computer eye fatigue. Kelly, Christian and I all spend most of our days at a computer and we are familiar with the phenomenon. Yesterday, Christian went to the optometrist for an eye test and was told his eyesight was perfect. That is good, but I do not think that is the whole story. I looked around a little and found some stuff that makes me think I might want to get a special pair of glasses to use at the office for all the time I spend at a computer screen. Here is a link to a page that describes some of the problems. I might also note that Christian kind of has that Clark Kent thing going for him–a reason onto itself for wearing glasses.

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.

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