Category: General Page 11 of 116

Day 779 of 1000

I tremendously enjoyed seeing all these little guys all over the place here in Colorado. I got this picture right outside the door of the engineering consulting firm I have been visiting. It is in a very busy commercial development.

Day 774 of 1000

I was scheduled to make a two day trip to Denver next week, but it got cancelled so I can stay here and program something that is essentially similar to a video game with a robot attached.  If I am going to be stuck in a hotel away from my family, I would rather do that than travel around the country.  I found a very cool new college library to visit, but it is at a school full of fundamentalist liberals, so I think the general public is not welcome there.  Kind of like the federal government.  Obama shuts down the government and then does not allow people use stuff that is normally free and is not paid with money taken by force from the American people by the government.  Amazing how that works.

Day 762 of 1000

My buddy Andrew, sadly, no longer a Raleigh resident, forwarded this to me. Click on the graphic to see the full size version at the source. I still am regularly amazed at how well homeschools perform socially and academically.  I should quit being so amazed, but I like it.  Thanks, Andrew!

Day 761 of 1000

Day 760 of 1000

Christian is required to take a technical writing class as a requirement for his math degree.  I thought this was going to be a throw away class, but it is turning into something good.  First, they made him write a resume.  That is not such a big deal, but it is important to do it well.  His second assignment was to write a Statement of Purpose of the kind required by almost all universities as part of the application process for a graduate degree.  I thought that was great.

Even more excellent is the requirement for an “Elevator Speech,” a 45 second description of why he should be accepted to graduate school.  What a great idea.  He has to give the speech today, but I think that is a good thing for him to practice and polish a lot before he gets to any more graduate school interview.  Most people who travel a lot for work give elevator speeches about their work whether they know it or not.  Some of them are monumentally bad.  I have honed mine over the years through necessity, but I am confident it could use some practice and polish.  I am looking forward to working on this with both Kelly and Christian.

Day 759 of 1000

The first conversation was a brief email conversation with a talented friend who recently bailed out of a long term lucrative career to go back to school for a technical masters degree.  It was a bold move, it paid off, and it was a joy to watch.  He did it, not to make more money, because he was good in that regard.  He did it to learn new stuff so he could contribute more to society.  Nothing every comes out perfect nor even like it was planned, but bold moves are a good thing.  It seems like if they are done unselfishly, they pay off even more.  If you go back to school to learn stuff you want to know because you can contribute more to society or enter the ministry to save souls or move to a poor foreign country to be a help–those are the things that gratify.  Now my friend is thinking of doing it again.  I like it.

That conversation inspired me to call Kelly.  We had a great talk about what she will do when she finishes her Bachelors degree in Statistics.  She loves Statistics.  She has a good enough resume now that she should be able to get a job without too much trouble after she graduates.  That might be the thing to do, but it might be time for a Masters or PhD.  It might be time to work for a year, then take a trip to someplace new or take a job out of the country.  It might be time to learn a new language.  Whatever she does, since she is getting to a place where she can pay her own way, it needs to be about something much bigger and more important than the money.

I really need to have that same conversation with Christian.  He is in the same place as Kelly, but has decided he wants to go on to a PhD in Electrical Engineering.  That is a pretty bold move in and of itself, but after that there can be more.  I think of people like William Lane Craig with Doctors degrees in Philosophy and Theology and William Dembski has a couple of PhD’s (mathematics and philosophy) and four Masters (statistics, mathematics, philosophy, and theology) from big name schools.  I do not think either of them pursued their graduate studies for the purpose of earning a living, but to pursue big ideas and contribute to society.

As I approach age 60, I am in the beginning of the start-up of a company that makes medical instruments for developing companies.  It was a pretty scary thing to quit my job in North Carolina to do this, but it is very invigorating.  If things work out, I will be here for another four or five years.  Maybe there is time in this life for one or two more bold moves after that.

Day 755 of 1000

I got stuck with a Toyota Prius today when I arrived in Phoenix.  I was not happy.  I learned to loathe them when I drove my parent’s Prius when I was in Oregon a few months back.  I am going to ask for the biggest SUV available next time I am in town.

Wow!  After I wrote the post below about Christian’s CLEP credits going into the community college, I realized I might be wrong about the number he had earned.  I WAS wrong.  He earned 15 credits, not 13.  When I looked that up, his mathematics placement scores came up.  Normally, students need to have completed Precalculus to start the first Calculus sequence.  Christian took the test after having completed only half of Precalculus in homeschool.  We were very surprised when he tested into Calculus.  What I did not know until today is that he did it by the skin of his teeth.  He tested fairly highly in virtually everything but Trigonometry.  In Trig, Christian needed a score of 50 or greater to get into Calculus.  He got a 50.  If this would not have happened, both Kelly’s and Christian’s trajectory would have been dramatically different.

Day 741 of 1000

The place where Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah now live had an event by the pond that Grandpa Milo built at their old place in Newberg.  It has been turned into a place that hosts weddings and other big events.

Here is one of Grandpa Milo’s signature concoctions he made for the event:

Day 732 of 1000

Lorena is passionate about home improvement.  I put this picture up previously, when she was refinishing a bookcase last month, but it is one of the ones that got lost when our service provider went out of business.  It was important to put it back up.  We plan to move back out west within the next year our two.  Our plan is to move to an area where there is a big university.  We like to live within easy driving distance to a town that has a big university.  Also, we want to buy a piece of trash house on as nice a lot as we can find, specifically so Lorena can do a remodel.  The amount of satisfaction Lorena gets out of this sort of thing is very great.  We needed to have this picture back up.  I am glad I found it.

Day 712 of 1000

I was pretty bummed that we lost a bunch of posts when our internet service provider went out of business and our newest backup was over a month and a half old.  Fortunately, Eric, Audrey, and family had us in their RSS feed so they had a bunch of the old posts in their RSS cache.  Amazing.  They were kind enough to forward those to us.  I do not think it will be all of them, but it is a bunch and we really appreciate it.  I will be putting them up one by one over the next few days along with any photos I have that might go with them.  THANKS GUYS!

Day 710 of 1000

Kelly is having a phenomenal summer.  This is really the first time she has lived away from home.  She is mostly on her own (living with some VERY good people–thank you Brian and Celia and thanks Troy for setting that up), driving to work in the kids little Ford Fiesta, going to baseball games (Go Orioles!), and just having a great time.

Today, though, was especially good.  She not only got an offer for another internship next year, but was told they would very much like her to apply for a job after she gets her Masters Degree.  It does not get much better than that.

Day 701 of 1000

There is an article in PC magazine that asks the question:  Do People Really Want to Touch Their PC Screens?  I think it is a great question.  Of course tablets, hybrid machines, and cellphones are going to diminish the demand for full-blown desktop and laptop PC’s, but the whole paradigm shift to PC’s that work best with screen touches seems to diminish my productivity unnecessarily.

Day 698 of 1000

Sometimes it is a challenge to have a good attitude when it does not seem like people who should know better do not have your family’s best interests at heart. Compound that with the knowledge that there is no excuse for a bad attitude nor a persecution complex, especially on the drive home from meeting. The discussion on the drive home was both animated and about an hour long based on events and history. Suffice it to say I struggled a little with all this, but believe I got the better of it by the time we home, life was much better.

Then Lorena sent Christian and I to Harris Teeter (the closest grocery store to the house) to pick up a few things.  They give away free samples in the store, but it is never as good as Costco on a Saturday morning.  This morning, though, they out-did themselves.  I do not know whether it was on purpose or by accident.  They had some awesome sourdough French bread in front of the bread section.  Over by the deli section, they had sliced turkey breast.  They had cheese samples over by the cheese color.  You can see the result in the picture and it was really good.  Christian told me to tell people that thing under my thumb is not a pat of butter, but a square of cheese.

An awesome little sandwich put it all into perspective.

Day 693 of 1000

My Finnish grandmother used to write letters to all her grandkids. She wrote with a beautiful hand about the weather, her garden, who she had seen, and all kinds of other mundane things.  It was fabulous to receive one. Whenever any of us felt bad, we would write her a letter because we knew we would get one back even though she just lived across town.  I wrote letters to my family when I was in college, to Lorena, when we were courting, and to many, many friends and relatives over the years.

Part of the appeal was the days and weeks wait between letters.  It made one work hard at getting it right because, if you blew it, it took a pretty long time to make it right.  I think people can get pretty flip with Internet communications because responses are so immediate.  If you say something wrong, you can correct it in less than a minute.  I think it probably coarsens discourse.

It gave me great joy to see that Kelly made postcards for her friends to send via “snail mail.” There are some things that the internet will never replace.  When someone does something like this for you, you know it took some effort.  You know the person was doing it for you.  Specifically.  I miss it.  I think I need to start writing snail mail letters again

Day 689 of 1000

Kelly and I have been having a fairly interesting text conversation about how to interact with people from work and school.  As the youngest person or the only female in a group, it is pretty disgusted when people use bad language and/or make off-color comments.  I have a theory about that.  If someone is willing to do or say something disgusting in a group setting, I think they are fair game and pretty much go for the throat on them, usually in a loud voice.  Some of you might have even seen me do it.

Invariably, the response is something like, “Hey, I was just fooling around,  It’s no big deal.”

Well, to some of us, it is.  Why anyone would say or do things at the expense of others is beyond my understanding and there should be a price to pay as close to the time of offense as possible.  I am not talking about one or two accidental innuendos either–everyone knows when this is actually going on.  The sad part is that, when it happens, sometimes others try to get in on the fun.  When that happens, it is time to just leave.

Day 687 of 1000

I have not been to Denver for years.  I think the last time I even flew through Denver it was at the old Stapleton Airport.  I will be there through the weekend.  Sadly, I will be working throught the weekend (except I hope to get away Sunday morning).  I am hoping to see an old friend or two there if I can get away.  I will post some pictures if I do.