Category: General Page 64 of 116

Three Mexican women form a singing group named Pandora. I do not think they are together anymore, but I like them a lot. Here they are singing El Farsante (The Fraud), a song written by Juan Gabriel. If you are a fan of blues lyrics

Nobody loves me but my mother,
And she could be jivin’, too.
Now you see why I act so funny, baby,
When you do the things you do. –B.B. King

you would love this music. I usually write in this blog after I come into work in the morning while I drink my first cup of coffee. When I write code (or in my blog), I often listen to Pandora (the music aggregator–not the group). When I turned on Pandora, this is the song that came up. It is one of my very favorites. I thought I should share it.

We started early on this year’s summer reading last night. The book we are reading is titled Understanding the Times by David Noebel. The book describes worldviews associated with Islam, Christianity, postmodernism, New Age, and Marxism. It describes how each of these worldviews think (generally) about such things as sociology, psychology, law, politics, economics, history, and other areas. I am sure that the worldview of the author will not be exactly in line with my (our) own worldview, but it will probably be pretty close and it will give us a framework within which we will be able to discuss all these issues. As the Kelly and Christian are getting closer to the point where they will be taking college classes, I think it is a good idea to get them prepared for some of the worldviews with which they will be confronted there. I really believe it is important to understand what one believes and why other people believe differently to be able to effectively sort truth from falsehood. It should be in interesting summer.

Rumor has it that two of our good friends in Oregon are getting married. A friend dropped a note revealing as much, but I got mugged by my WHOLE family because the facts in the email were quite spare. They are beating me up for facts regarding this joyous occasion. LOTS AND LOTS OF FACTS. HELP!!!

Update (06/02/2008): Here they are. I love this picture of Lisa, Brian, Mari, and Bryan. They are both great kids and we wish them the very best. Congratulations!

I usually get up at 5:30 AM to go into work. That is mostly because I want to beat the traffic in the morning and I want to get home early so I can work on homeschool with the kids. Last night, I worked until about 1:00 AM in preparation for an upcoming field trial of the equipment we are designing at my work at Centice Corporation. It is very interesting work and it would not be nearly as rewarding if there were not times like this where a special effort is required to meet technical requirements on a schedule. Still, it makes for a long day to work from 6:30 AM to 1:00 AM the next day. I got up a little later this morning to get into work a little after 8:00, but it feels like I am half-way through the day before it even started. There is a lot left to do for the field trial and, after today, there will only a week and a day until school is out for the summer. We have a lot to do between now and then. Kelly’s belated birthday party is my marker for when I think we will be able to catch our breath. That happens on Friday the 13th. We are all looking forward to it.

We have been our new house now for five months. It works well for us. We love to sit on the screen porch and look at the trees in the woods behind the house. We love the big open kitchen with the fireplace and all the windows that all look out onto the woods. We only considered after the fact that all those windows face east so the sun shines into the room in the morning, but is shaded in the heat of the day. There are ceiling fans in many of the rooms that keep it way cooler than the rental house we lived in last year in Apex. There are some small issues that we need to remedy like the lack screens on many of the windows and some work we would like to do on the yard outside, but for the most part we are very, very happy with the house. The kids like their rooms a lot (they both have great views and huge walk-in closets). We love the master suite downstairs (a big change — we have always been on the second floor) with its even huger walk-in closets and high ceilings in both the bedroom and bathroom.

There are two rooms that are under utilized. The formal dining room has been empty since we moved in because we are using our dining room table in the breakfast nook in the kitchen so we can use our round plastic Costco table out on the screen porch; we have been having dinner there quite often this spring. The other room is the living room. The problem is that we really have two living rooms. We have our two sofas and coffee table over by the fireplace in the kitchen area because that is really where we do most of our “living”. All we have in the other living room is the piano and the computer. Lorena is pretty happy with the piano, but pretty irritated that we have the computer their in her beautiful living room. It really does not go so well with the decor, but it is way to hot up in the bonus room during the summer. What we need to do, when we can afford it, is to get an elegant computer hutch for the computer (to hide the cables and avoid the wrath of Lorena) and another set of living room furniture. I hope we can afford it before Lorena tries to trade me in for a leather love seat at Costco.

Kelly and Christian had their first swim team practice last night where the actually got into the water. They said it was just perfect. They got a really good workout, but it was not so onerous that they could not handle it. It sounds like there is some good coaching going on, too. They will be swimming in the evenings for the next couple of weeks. That works out well for us while we are still in school. They will switch to doing a morning swim starting in mid-June. That will be great to get everyone out of bed and going during the summer. The YMCA where they swim is a beautiful, brand new facility. While Christian and Kelly are working out in the pool, Lorena goes indoors to work out on an elliptical machine. The exercise is great for her, but I fear that she is watching Oprah while she spins!! The kids have never swam in a meet before. They will get the chance to do that several times this summer. We are all looking forward to that.

Our next big project, and for the Chapman family this is a very important project, will be to find a place to either pick or buy a TON of blueberries. I got to North Carolina this time last year and remember there being some of the most beautiful blueberries I have ever seen on sale in Harris Teeter. We love to load up the freezer with blueberries, then eat them like candy for the rest of the year. I will keep you posted on our progress.

This will be a short post, but I should be back in the saddle with something better tomorrow. I worked over the three day weekend. We did go to a great potluck on Monday, but but that does not really make up for a full three days free. On the up side, this is the first weekend where I did not blow it really, really bad on the diet. I am only up one pound!

…this is just a picture of the progress Bryan has made on his diet! That is FIVE, count’em, FIVE notches already cut from his belt. We are all sitting on the edge of our chair to find out whether he meets his stated goal of 60 lbs. (lost) by his 50th birthday! With a week to go, it is going to be nip and tuck. We expect a picture and a daily report (to be posted here)!!!

Bryan whacks off five belt notches!!!

We have slowly been converting from a Microsoft Windows family to a Linux family. If it were just me, we would have switched a long time ago, but there are a few remaining programs we use for homeschool that were written for Windows that we have not taken the time to try to run using WINE. I thought it might be interesting to list some of our most used programs and which computer use them on. First it might be helpful to list the computers. We get very low end computers and upgrade them (a little) if the need arises.

• A three year old Compaq, 512 MBytes RAM, AMD64 based computer that runs Ubuntu Linux (32 bit) 8.04
• A four year old Dell Presario, 1.2 MHz Pentium, 1GByte RAM computer that runs Windows XP — we got an ATI graphics card to go with it.
• A four year old Dell Inspiron 130 laptop upgraded with 2GBytes RAM that runs Windows XP, but that Christian regularly boots to Ubuntu from a 4GByte memory stick.

Now I will just list some programs of interest. I will start with the obvious ones.

• Web browsing – Firefox for Windows and Linux
• VOIP – Skype for Windows and Linux
• Photo editing – GIMP for Windows and Linux
• Email – Thunderbird for Windows and Linux
• 3D Rendering – Blender for Windows and Linux
• C++ Programming – Kdevelop for Linux, Visual Studio for Windows
• C# Programming – I use MonoDevelop on Linux, Christian uses SharpDevelop on Windows
• Office suite – OpenOffice.org for Windows and Linux
• Bible – e-Sword for Windows and Linux
• Internet filtering – DansGuardian on Linux
• Desktop publishing – Microsoft Publisher on Windows. I am trying to get the kids to switch to Scribus which runs on Windows and Linux, but they already have everything set up for their KaktusKids publication and do not really want to switch. I might have them do a project on Scribus this summer to get them off center.
• Vector Graphics editor – Inkscape on Windows and Linux. Christian has started developing all the clipart for KaktusKids using Inkscape. That might be the thing that finally gets him converted over to Scribus as the Microsoft clipart library is the main thing that keeps them on Publisher.
• Video editing – Pinnacle Studio on Windows. This is about the only item we use for which a Linux replacement is a year or so away.
• Language program – Rosetta Stone on Windows, but as soon as we finish with Spanish 2, we will install the next Rosetta Stone course on Linux under Wine. Several people in the forums say it runs just fine there.
• Anti-Virus – ClamAV for Linux, AVG for Windows.

We are not really very far away from being an all Linux family. Lorena has made the switch to Linux and is really more comfortable using the Linux computer than the Windows computer. Because of the applications that are common to both Windows and Linux, the transition was very easy for her. Kelly does the vast bulk of her email reading and writing on the Linux box, only moving over to the Windows box to work on KaktusKids or to do her Rosetta Stone homeschool. Christian and I experiment a lot, so it kind of depends on our mood which OS we use. Still we are moving more and more to Linux all the time.

We have visitors this weekend. Tio Rigoberto and Tia helen from Milwaukee, Wisconsin brought their son jonathan down to do an internship at UNC Greensboro. They are leaving tomorrow.

Last night, Lorena and Kelly went to one of those parties in our old neighborhood in Apex where women get together to sell useless foo-foo stuff to each other. I hate those things. And for more than just the reason that the stuff they sell is almost always useless and overpriced. When they left, I decided I was going to install a new internet content filter on the computer on to which we recently installed the amazing Ubuntu Linux 8.04 Hardy Heron. I did some reading in the Ubuntu forums and found something called Dansguardian. I installed that along with the FireHOL firewall and tinyproxy. Then I found a GUI to manage the whole thing that is put out by some of the people who work on Ubuntu CE (Christian Edition). What this all does is allow me to control whatever comes into the house over the internet. The proxy server assures all the computers, not just the Ubuntu computer, are filtered. It is all set up and working. I found some actively managed blacklists that tracks the latest bad stuff. I can manually update them, but I will need to spend a little time to figure out how to automatically perform daily or weekly updates to the lists. I am impressed. It was free, easy, and very, very effective.

This weekend, in addition to spreading some mulch and rocks in the yard, I would like to get the computer set up for programming. It is supposed to be nice this weekend, not too hot, so maybe I should spend as much time in the yard as possible.

I have been trying to put together a good homeschool personal finance program to help Kelly and Christian get ready for “real” life. We just finished reading Dave Ramsey’s book on Financial Peace. We have pretty much been doing the things he recommends for several years now. Now that we are getting more settled here in North Carolina, I have started thinking again, not just on the debt reduction that Dave Ramsey hammers on, but on investing. I have talked some with my fellow homeschooling buddy, Eric about this and we have similar ideas. It is very easy for me to look at investing in the same way that gold-rushers looked at California in 1849. My great, great grandfather, Steve Jenkins, was actually a part of that gold rush. After traveling the Applegate Trail to Oregon in 1846, he went south to the California in 1848 or 1849. All he got was diphtheria and what must have been a painful ride back to Oregon in a weakened condition. I do not know if he was the wiser for his experience, but I like to believe he was.

So, my thinking about investing is that it is a necessary thing, but I do not want my life to be defined by it. I have always heard that the vast bulk of professional investors cannot pick stocks well enough to regularly beat the S & P 500. There are some who do, but awhile back I decided I would like to learn enough about how to buy stocks to control my own investment destiny. I read a book titled The Little Book That Beats the Market. The book is about Warren Buffet style “value” trading. I guess it would be just about as much of a polar opposite to “day trading” as is possible. I wrote a program to download data from the internet (for Linux), make the calculations and rank the stocks according to methods recommended by the book. Next, I did a year of dry trading. I did well (better than 25% return) with the program when I did not have any money in the markets. Then I put a relatively small amount of money into the market for a year and did about the same as with the dry trades.

Last year, I started putting more money into the program in a very controlled way. I never put in so much that it would hurt retirement. For some people it might have been a small amount, but for me, it was significant. I continued to do significantly better then the S & P 500 for about nine months, but then the economy started to turn. It dawned on me that all of the testing I had done was in “up” markets. When the market turned, I stayed even with or a little above the S & P 500 for several months. Then, one of the head guys at one of stocks got caught with his hand in the till. The price of that stock dived to less than 10% of the value of the initial purchase. Nevertheless, I was still only a few percentage points behind the S & P even though both of us were worth less than their purchase value when I started this investment cycle.

My stock picks stood a little below the S & P for the next six months or so until about a month ago when my picks started catching up again. Today, even though, the one stock that lost most of its value was still in my portfolio, my picks passed the S & P 500 again. I was still a little below water on the investments, but I was amazed because I was still beating the S & P. it dawned on me that if I would have put a stop-loss at 75% (or even less) of the purchase price of each of the stocks I had purchased, I would now be up about 25-30% for the period. At any rate, because I am death on debt, I decided to close out the investments to clean up a little after moving across the country and purchasing a new house. I am starting to get convinced, though, that for the money I have available to put in the market and after I add a stop-loss to each of my holdings, this is about as secure as I am going to get. I have a broad-based portfolio that I hold for a year or so that beats the S & P most of the time if I stay in it long enough.

I am not going to be ready to get back in the market for at least a year. My cash flow is all tied up in 401k’s, braces for the kids, college investments, etc., When I am ready, I think I will continue my experiment. In the meantime, I am going to continue refining the program I wrote and do another year of dry trading while I accumulate some funds. Maybe my brother-in-law, Rigo will be ready to join me when I start back up.

Note: I see Lyle is back in this brutal and merciless weight loss dogfight even though he is injured.

Work continues on the volcano computer project. Our USGS contact told us that we need to add GPS precision timing capability to the device so we can track the time each image is taken to within 100 microseconds or so. We thought that was going to add a lot of cost to the project, but found this device that should allow us to time the image captures accurately for cheap. We are finding out that there are lots of people who could use something like this. The ability to remotely capture images with a lower power ruggedized device that features an accurate time stamp and some image processing capabilities might be something that is quite salable to field scientists and people who have to track things. My buddy Evan continues to work on the version of Linux we want to use while I am still hammering away at the libraries. With work, school, vacation, and all that stuff going on, it is going to take us several more months to get to the point of taking images on the small computer and a little more time to add the GPS capability and write the application the USGS wants. We are plugging away at it with hope to get it finished by early fall.

We have just about finished identifying our summer projects. It is really pretty hard to figure out what to do because we like to do some fairly ambitious things, but we do not like to overload ourselves so much that we cannot get them done. We have tentatively settled on fourive things.

• The kids will be swimming on the swim team at the new YMCA. It is great because the team works out from 8:00-8:45 AM every day. They will get some good exercise and get the day started early.
• With all our moving around, we kind of let our portrait drawing fall by the wayside. We want to start that program up again with the excellent book we found to help us.
• I was thinking we would try to get our General Class Ham Radio License, but after looking at what is required, considering the time we have available, and talking to a couple of buddies, I decided that we should break this up into a two summer effort. I have ordered a book to study for the Technician Class License that we will study this summer. If we pass the test this summer, we will consider doing the General Class License next summer. I would like to get a radio for home and a radio for the pickup if we can afford it, but will have to see how it goes.
• The only academic item we are going to do during the summer is fifteen minutes of Rosetta Stone Spanish per day. I really want the kids to finish up so we can move on to French.

In addition to this, Christian and I want to do Hovercraft II. We are leaning toward a smaller one that we can run eventually turn into an AHV (Autonomous Hovering Vehicle) complete with computer controls and a camera. From there, we can think of making a ridable version. I would really like to do some kind of a furniture refinishing project with Kelly, too. I just thought of that this morning. We will have to give it a little more considerations, but it would be great to find a cool piece of furniture that needs refinishing at a garage sale–maybe another reading chair, a desk, a trunk, or a dresser. I think Lorena would like that, too. Finally, our buddy has a cool shooting thing going. The kids need a hunter safety course before too long, so maybe he can help us find a way to get them going on that.

Saturday was a wonderful day. One of the first people we met when we got to North Carolina is a very nice fellow named Troy. He got married about a month ago to a young doctor named Youngin. They are the couple who took us to a Korean barbecue place a few weeks back. At any rate, Troy organized a volunteer project to spread mulch on a greenway through a park in Cary on Saturday. Lorena, Kelly, Christian, and I joined Troy, his sister, brother-in-law, and our friends Sidony and Gary and their two kids to help out. It was a beautiful day with perfect weather. We had an absolute ball talking and working together. It was supposed to take about three hours, but we got it knocked out in an hour and a half. Troy had all the tools there along with Krispy Kreme donuts, bagels, hot coffee, and bottled water. I thought I was going to work off a pound or two with that pitch forks, but the Krispy Kremes got the best of me. Here are some pictures (click on them to see a bigger version):

We went to Costco after shoveling mulch, bought groceries and a couple of fans then ran over to the big Barnes and Noble bookstore at Crossroads to hang out, drink coffee, and read books. Those are some of Lorena’s favorite things and we did them in honor of Mothers Day. Mexico is still pure with regard to Mothers Day. They still celebrate Mothers Day on May 10th every year. It is not always on the Sunday around May 10th, it is on May 10th. Lorena likes it like because most years Mexican Mothers Day and American Mothers Day fall on different days, so we can celebrate both of them. Christian noted that May 10 is also the official Shrimp Day, so we bought some of those really big shrimps at Costco and had them for dinner. I was really skeptical about the Shrimp Day thing when Christian told us–he likes just about whatever excuse he can find to eat shrimp–but I looked it up and it is TRUE!!!

Of course, we took Lorena out for Mexican food on Sunday after meeting then went home for our traditional Mothers Day nap.

Notes: I found a great new website for Christian. Maybe he has already seen it, but I saw it knew that we could find some cool ideas there. And here is one for Kelly and the cat sisters. It looks like an essential project to me.

Other notes: Oops. I almost forgot another very important event this weekend. Kelly decided she wanted to cook something. She did Quiche Lorraine Lorena. It was awesome. She got the crust exactly right. I am not sure whether she is going to work on that some more or move on to meat pies.

I have been thinking about Mother’s Day lately. Whenever I think of Mother’s Day, I think of a time when I was in college. There was only one year when my mother could not make it to Oregon State’s annual Moms Weekend. B.B. King was in town to perform for the mothers and sons. Mom and I always had a great time at the annual Heckart Lodge Moms Weekend dinner and all kinds of other festivities. I was feeling kind of lonely and had nothing else going on, so I went to the concert. It was a great one. At the end, B.B. dedicated his last song to “all you little mothers out there.” Then he played an incredible, joyful, heartfelt rendition of “As the Saints Go Marching In” with the band of musicians that had already been with him for decades. It brought tears to my eyes. I was kind of embarrassed, but when I looked around, everyone else was crying, too. I remember calling Mom the next day before Sunday morning meeting to tell her I loved her.

Maybe what brought all this on was something my Dad and Mom sent me. They have an old intricately carved trunk Dad bought while he was in the Army serving at Eniwetok on the hydrogen bomb project in the South Pacific. They have kept all our important family memorabilia there ever since I can remember. They went through that trunk recently and sent us a small package of stuff they found that they thought we might like to have. There were some pictures and an old Mother’s Day card I made for Mom when I was in very early elementary school. I vaguely remember making the card. I think it must have been a second or third grade class project at Harrison Elementary school in Cottage Grove. That would have put it on Mother’s Day of 1962 or 1963. It could not have been after that. I remember being quite proud of the card and quite happy to give it to Mom. In honor of Mother’s Day, my mother (Grandma Sarah), Lorena’s mother (Grandma Conchita), my kid’s mother (Lorena), and all you other little mothers out there, here is my card.