Category: General Page 32 of 116

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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