Yep, that is me...
I am INTP.
It is funny, some other bloggers that I enjoy have taken these tests, and come up INTP as well.
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August 31, 2007
Football season is here...
Go Vandals! Saturday is their chance to rock the football world to its core.
Don't know if there is much more I can say about Idaho-USC game without making a fool of myself.
I bet a Idaho win would really help Boise State when the BCS rankings came out... (We can't have that can we?)
Nathan's hole in the head..
Andee predicted that Nathan would have to go to the ER this summer.
He came within 4 days of proving her wrong:
He wasn't really goofing off at all when it happened. He tripped over the leg of one picnic table and bashed his head into the seat of another.
He was impressively tough at the hospital. After about the third of 20 or so stitches, he asked the doctor "Are you almost done?" Other than that he sat quietly and didn't fuss or anything. Pretty tough kid. Daddy and Nathan had so much fun at the ER, that we might go back next week! (I hope not)
August 27, 2007
My Crazy town.
I just found Colin Mulvany has a YouTube Channel.
He works for the newspaper here in town, and makes some very interesting mini-documentaries about the characters in my town.
Here is a sample:
August 26, 2007
Heckling the marketing picketers.
I don't know how common this is in other towns, but here in Spokane there is a new fad where a car dealer or a furniture store hires 15 or 20 people to stand on all of the major intersections within a few miles of their place waving signs inviting people to their sales.
It must work, because they are almost always out, especially on weekends.
Today, I noticed that the signs that the local car dealer had manufactured had a defect in them. The spelled the name of the street, "Sprauge" instead of "Sprague".
As I was driving home from church, I noticed this, and decided to bring it to their attention. Coincidence would have it that I had all green lights on my way home, so as I sped past one of them I yelled "You spelled Sprague wrong!" My kids laughed really hard.
I was very surprised that on my next trip out, I passed that same guy, and he had taken a sharpie, and corrected his sign.
August 25, 2007
Blogroll revamp.
Well, I decided to revamp my blogroll a bit.
"Actually Met" is the category for people who I actually have met in the flesh.
"Electronic Friends" is for frequent commenters or people who I feel like I know even though I have not met them in the flesh.
"Might Meet" is a group of people who are local to my area and circulate in some of the social or blog circles that I visit.
"Hangouts" are community type blogs that I comment on occasionally.
"Smart guys" are gurus of one nature or another. Some of them I just link to because they are interesting to watch. Others I have been accused of having a "man crush" on.
"Blogs" are for blogs I enjoy reading, that don't fit into the other categories.
"New/Untested" is where I put blogs when I first subscribe.
I have always managed this through my bloglines account. I made the rest of my bloglines account private, So it no longer appears on my blogroll. If you want back in, comment!
August 24, 2007
Brake Man
I changed the brakes on my van yesterday.
It now stops without loud grinding noises.
I love the partsamerica.com website. I can order my parts online, pay for them, then run down to the store 2 blocks from my house and have them waiting at the counter for me.
I got very dirty. Changing brakes was not hard. I bought a brake spreading tool at harbor freight for 4 bucks. It worked great, but it did break after 2 uses. Harbor freight seems to be that kind of store. They have a lot of inexpensive tools for odd things that you will likely only need to do once or twice. The quality is not the best, but having the right tool makes any job a lot easier.
August 21, 2007
Another backyard post
I resisted for a while, but I am going to give Flock another go. It does sound like a fairly slick idea. This is a test post from the Flock Editor.
Jess is a Flock fan, I believe, Perhaps he can give me lessons.
This was a photo taken by my MacBook while I was in the backyard. Nathan is a little too good at saying "cheese!"
It seems like summer is over in Spokane. Been chilly for several days now. I am sure it will make a resurgence, but it may be a few days off..
Flock doesn't seem to spellcheck as I type. That won't be too much fun.
Blogged with Flock
August 20, 2007
A Foggy Rainy Hike
Took the family up to Mount Spokane today to collect a few more huckleberries and see if we could recover the GPS unit that I lost last Monday. It wasn't the best day for hiking.
It rained pretty hard yesterday, and all the bushes where wet. We saw no other humans on our 2 mile round trip. We did see a few chipmunks.
Last week, we hiked and picked in the same area, and I lost my GPS. Andee was sure we could find it, but I thought it was a lot like trying to find a needle in a haystack. It is pretty hard to see your feet in many of the places that I was picking.
After 20 or 30 minutes of crawling around trying to find some recognizable spot, I had pretty much given up and returned to the trail. About 6 feet off the trail, I happened across it.
Click here to see the context of that photo. It is amazing that we found it.
On our way out, found one of the best patches I have found, and we quickly picked enough for a pie. It was quite rainy, but the kids where relatively patient.
On the way home, our brakes went out. Looks like we will have to replace the rotor on the front drivers side.
August 18, 2007
Initial Reaction to Movable Type 4.0
Well, The Movable Type 4.0 upgrade is mostly finished.
The upgrade ran about as would be suspected. Not great.
Getting the back end installed was a breeze. I uploaded the version 4.0 files into a new directory on my server, then gave it my MySql credentials and It converted nicely. I was able to go in and make a new entry without any trouble. The templates all still appeared to work, which has not always been the case in prior upgrades.
Then I tried to leave a comment. The authentication I was using didn't seem to work right. I remember doing some substantial customization to lock people into the typekey authentication a year or two ago. I did a little research in the documentation, and it the 4.0 default templates are using now are way more modular than the ones they used in 3.2 It doesn't look like a quick copy-paste fix is going to happen.
So I reverted back to the default templates. This wasn't too hard to do once I found the document ion. I had to remap the individual entry pages, which seems a bit odd to me. But over time I got it to work.
I installed the Portland-Cityscape theme. Seems nice enough, but I am not from Portland. Downloaded a public photo from flickr and saved it over the Portland Header.. Easy enough. Welcome to Spokane! Didn't get it sized right, but I can work on that, and the font color later.
Then I wanted my menu widgets back. I searched through the documentation, and didn't find any step by step instructions on how to modify these. I hacked it a bit, and figured out how to get my widgets to display. I wound up going into each widget and editing it so that it would match the theme. It seems like the default sidebar template is a massive collection of If/then type switches to display certain content if specified in the index page. I don't really understand the philosophy. I would rather just specify which widgets to show like the widget manager allows. Then I could move things up and down etc..
Now it works fine in Firefox, Camino, and Safari, but it is not working in I.E. correctly. The second column appears at the bottom of the page, over the text of the main body. CSS issues like this are kinda nightmarish, especially when you didn't write the code in the first place. Let me know if you figure it out!
The new interface is nice. It is is much more modern, and is comfortable to use. The autosave is nice, and I discovered that I have 3 drafts from a year or so ago. Some of them are pretty good! Stay tuned, and maybe you will see them. Live preview is cool too.. The editor allows you to add a link without losing your spot in the post. That removes one of the big annoyances of the old system.
If I where to do it again, I probably would have started with a fresh install, then imported all of the entries, comments, and trackbacks. I don't think the upgrading process is that smooth when using customized templates.
I am sure that documentation will get better over time. There isn't quite enough out there yet to be confident in your hacking. I would also wait for a few more weeks to get off the bleeding edge.
August 17, 2007
Hurry up and Wait..
Having youngsters, we are often privileged to get to tour a lot of businesses on emergency potty runs. One such "tour" was at the Red Lobster restaurant as we waited the seemingly compulsory 30 minutes for a table. We where there before 5 PM, and had waited for 15 or 20 minutes by the time Nathan and I walked through the dining area.
It was 2/3rds or so empty.
Initially I was a bit annoyed, but then I thought it through.
If everyone who came at 5 got to sit down right away, then the kitchen would have to prepare 300 meals all at once. The wait staff would have to take 300 orders all at once. The bussers would have to bus and wash 300 plates all at once.
Of course this wouldn't work, and so most folks would wind up sitting at the table and stewing for 30 to 50 minutes before their food arrived.
Modern manufacturing is very lean. Parts cost money, and there is no sense building a pile of parts before you need them. When there is a problem on a lean line, usually only a few parts can be built defectively before the problem is discovered. If you are building parts and putting them on the shelf, then sometimes hundreds of parts can be built defectively before the problem is discovered.
The restaurant is no different. There is no sense bringing people in to wait at their tables rather than having them wait in the bar or the lobby. If the wait is too long at a restaurant and I don't stay, I walk away sad, but I still have my craving to fill another day. There is a perception that the food is good enough that people are willing to wait for it. On the other hand, if I get seated, place my order and wait for 50 minutes, I walk away angry, and do not want to go back.
I suspect the mad scientists at Red Lobster headquarters have it all figured out. They probably let people in to be seated at almost the exact rate that meals are being cooked.
Brave Upgrade
I just upgraded to the brand spanking new Movable Type 4. This post is going to reveal if the new installation works. It seemed a bit too easy, so I am guessing I will do some template hacking tonight.
The live preview feature is nice. It looks good so far..
Update 1: Got a no technorati handler error when I published, but the post still went up...
Update 2: Looks like I had old tags in my old RSS template.. Removed tag, and I think all will be happy..
Update 3: Comments would not work. My templates had a lot of prehistoric MT tags and the like. Would up switching to a default template. Not super easy.. Probably best to start fresh and import old entries.
August 15, 2007
Idaho football rolls on:
Living in Seahawks territory it is impossible for me to be a Rams fan. But being an Idaho Vandal fan, it is hard to resist.
August 13, 2007
Jobs Jobs and more Jobs
A list of odd jobs I have had:
Lawn Mower: When I was a Jr. high kid, I mowed some lawns for spare spending money. Mostly for my violin teacher.
Newspaper boy: Delivered the Spokane Chronicle when I was in Jr. Hi. Also delivered the Valley Herald. Both of these have been absorbed into other papers.
Janitor: In High School, I worked for a janitorial company cleaning various businesses. The highlight came every other week when I got to sweep the entire floor of a trucking company's warehouse.
Tele-marketer: For 3 or 4 days I worked in a smoke filled room trying to sell coupon books. I think I sold one for 20 bucks over 4 days.
Dishwasher: Back in the early 1990's the airlines used to actually serve lousy food on actual dishes. I washed those dishes for a summer. This job made my shoes really stink!
Sewer-pipe installer. I worked for 4 10 hour days burying sewer pipe for a new mobile home park.
Head hasher: At my fraternity house, I supervised the clean up of the kitchen after meals. I was also responsible for cooking on the weekends. (Noel Bailey made sure that I knew that he ate at McDonalds every day that I cooked)
Plastic bottle maker. Temp job, worked for a couple weeks in a factory that made various plastic bottles... Really neat stuff. I managed to keep all of my fingers. I have made gallon Pickle jars, milk cartons, refillable sport drink containers, honey bear bottles.
Lighting louver assembler. You know those stainless steel reflective louvers above your cubicle? yep, I might have built that one.
Beer drinker. I got paid 10 bucks once to drink a bottle of 'Red Dog' and tell Coors what I thought of it. My wife had just met, and I where co-workers in this venture. We left the tavern with more money than we came in with... (That doesn't happen often does it??)
Wood cutter: I worked for a summer in a cut-stock facility making parts for wooden windows. There where a lot of fun tasks like pulling 20 foot boards off a ripsaw and sorting them by width. For a couple of days I actually had a job cutting the boards. That was by far the most math intensive job I have ever had. You had to look at a 20 foot section of wood, detect all of the defects, and figure out how to cut them out in the most economically beneficial combination. It was very hard. Speaking Vietnamese would have been beneficial, as English was not spoken much on that line..
House measurer: I spent two summers measuring houses. The insurance company wanted to make sure that they had a good understanding of what they had insured, so they hired a bunch of college kids to drive around, take photographs and measurements.
Robot operator. I worked for 22 months in a Clean Room environment operating robotic machines that welded some metal subcomponents for Microprocessors. 12 hour rotating graveyard shifts are fun!
Electronics assembler. I spent 3 years putting together meter reading equipment. For about a year and a half, I built radio devices that fit in electric meters and could send the reading to a hand held computer, a vehicle based computer, or a fixed network. The last half of my career there, I helped assemble computers that mounted on utility poles and read meters for an entire neighborhood.
Cardboard polish remover. I had a temp job once scraping a varnish off of cardboard packaging.. They accidently put the polish where the glue went, so the package wouldn't stay assembled. Worked there for a half day, then they figured out how to do the job with power tools..
Software tester: As an intern, I spent the last year of my college years testing Online banking software.
Trade show busboy: Ran around the convention center collecting trash for a day. My feet still hurt when I think about it. This was temp job I worked for a day between my internship and my real job. I found out I got hired about halfway though my workday.
I am pretty sure I forgot a few... Oh well, doubt anyone cares...
August 11, 2007
Blogger down! Medic!
I was blogging in the backyard, and down I went. I survived with a scratch on the back, and the macbook is unharmed.
Nathan finds photobooth.
I left Nathan alone with my Macbook. He discovered the cool little app called Photobooth. This is the resulting library:
Book Review: Family Driven Faith
I just finished reading Family Driven Faith: Doing What It Takes to Raise Sons and Daughters Who Walk with God
I think most Christians are aware of the troubling statistics regarding children leaving the faith. Between 70 and 88 percent of Christian teens are leaving their faith by the time they are in their second year of college. The vast majority of Christian teens do not hold a Biblical world view.
There are many efforts being made to rectify the situation, but these are all "inside the box" type solutions; Build better Sunday school programs, Build better youth para-church organizations etc. While there is nothing inherently wrong with these efforts, Baucham notes that there is no Biblical charter for their existence.. The Bible tell parents that it is their responsibility to disciple their children. Deuteronomy 6:7 tells us that we need to teach God's word at home.
You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.
It is not an easy solution. It is not an comfortable solution. It is not the "take a pill" or "take a seminar" and everything will be better in the morning kind of solution that we love so much. It requires a lot of work. But it is the right thing to do.
I began seriously investing in my kid's spiritual development a few months before I got the book. I started reading 2 or 3 chapters of the Bible per night to my kids. Julia understands some of it. She is 6. Nathan doesn't seem to understand much. He is 4. I still do it, as I know that it is teaching him that his Daddy reads the bible at least 20 minutes a day, and that Daddy cares enough about his spiritual well being to invest 20 minutes per day. Oddly enough, Julia doesn't seem to care if she misses it, but Nathan begs me to read it to him every night.
Teaching is quite rewarding for me as the Daddy, and I plan to make it more central in our family traditions. After reading the Family Driven Faith book, I think we will try to incorporate a some worship songs and hymns, and some more general theology/doctrine lessons in addition to bible reading.
Some of Baucham's teachings tend to be quite controversial. He is critical of the age segregation that is normal in today's churches. He has advocated that the SBC find a way to pull their children out of the public school system. He is a homeschooling advocate. His arguments are quite compelling, but politically incorrect enough that they are very difficult for the Christian establishment to swallow.
Luckily the solution is not to change the world one denomination or one church at a time, it is to change the world one family at a time - Starting with my own. I am the leader of my family, and it is my responsibility to be their shepherd. Life change is contagious, so by changing my family, it is likely to encourage and exhort those we fellowship with.
Overall, I find Voddie Baucham to be quite prophetic. His words seem to be laced in biblical truth. He proposes a pretty radical prescription that many people are not going to want to swallow. I think every parent and church leader should be exposed to the ideas in this book, and should reconcile their resistance with the teachings of scripture.
I am not sure I am comfortable with ending age segregation in Church, but I do think that we need to work really hard to encourage parents to disciple their kids. Sunday School should be a supplement to home teaching, not the other way around.
ID 10 M error...
Yesterday I was on a helpdesk call... It went something like this:
Caller: When I turn on my computer, I am getting a message saying the power supply type could not be determined. It will not boot into windows.
Me: Can you unplug the computer's power supply and plug it back in?
Caller: Okay, I got that done.
Me: Okay, Now fire it up again and lets see what happens?
Caller: What??
Me: Lets fire it up again.
Caller: Fire it up? What do you mean?
Me: Oh, I am sorry, Lets power it on again.
Caller: Okay, it is working fine now.
So, is "Fire it up" a Northwest idiom? Is it Technical Jargon? I believe I was talking to somebody in the Northeast.. Do most folks have the same response when they hear that phrase as my caller did?
I am glad they didn't have any accelerants handy... ;-)
August 8, 2007
Personal conviction vs Legalism
I have been personally convicted that I should abstain from all wagering.
I feel that wagering is by it's very nature covetous and the bible tells us "thou shalt not covet."
I believe that wanting to get something from somebody and to give them nothing in exchange is stealing, and this is also a "thou shalt not" Stealing by mutual consent is not any different than murder by mutual consent in a duel. It is still murder, and it is still theft.
I believe that gambling is distinctly different then investing, as you receive ownership in a security when you invest, and generally the money invested is used for productive means. It is not the risk that makes gambling immoral, it is the heart condition that you are cultivating -- wanting something in exchange for nothing.
The Television, Radio, Billboards, and every store in my community have state sponsored signs teaching us "It is good to play".
So my question is when a good Christian invites me to engage in one of these wagering activities, what is my proper response?
God allows poor engineering
Human engineering is an imperfect science. It is interesting to hear all of the Calvinist/Armenian debates erupt over the bridge collapse in MN. Mostly centered around John Piper's insistence that God is sovereign over catastrophes like this.
I think that God gives us the freedom to engineer. He however does not usually supplement our engineering efforts with miracles. Why did God allow the bridge to collapse? Most likely because the human effort to overcome the laws of physics failed.
How often do we place our faith in human efforts, then turn and blame God when our own efforts fail us?