Heaps

In canyoneering circles, there are two "big" canyons: Imlay and Heaps. Last weekend, we finally checked Heaps off our to-do list.

There were five of us on the trip. Left to right in the back: Randall, Josh, Corin, and me. In the front, Corin's brother, Jim. This was at the beginning of the West Rim trail (from the Lava Point side). We had a nice gentleman from Oklahoma take the picture for us. He was visiting with his son, and on one of our chats with him (we leapfrogged each other on the trail as we alternately rested and hiked) he mentioned that couldn't believe how amazing and beautiful Zion National Park was (quite a contrast from Oklahoma, I imagine). I realized that after so many visits, I was starting to take some of the beauty for granted, but it really is an amazing part of the country.


The night before, we camped at Lava Point. It was raining pretty much all day, but by the time night fell, the rain had pretty much tapered off. We decided to see what the weather looked like in the morning, since you don't really want to hike a slot canyon when it's raining because of flash flood danger. The morning was sunny and blue so we decided to go for it.

This is on the West Rim trail. I think the trail is about 12 miles long, and goes from Lava Point on one end to the Grotto in Zion NP. We could have started from either end, since our jumping-off point was somewhere in the middle, but we opted for the longer but less-strenuous choice.


The sunny blue skies quickly vanished, leaving us with light gray skies and the occasional passing sprinkle. It was actually great hiking weather, nice and cool, far from the low-90 degree temperatures that had been predicted. About four hours later, we reached Campsite 4, which was where we left the West Rim Trail and dropped into Phantom Valley. This is the first rappel:


After that rappel, we had to traverse a knife-edge ridge with sheer drop-offs on both sides. It might be a little hard to tell from this picture, but the ridge is about ten feet wide. The directions we were going off overstated the scariness a little though, I think. It talked about people crawling on hands and knees, etc., but it wasn't really that bad, you just had to be careful where you put your feet for a few steps.


The worst part of the trip was the hike to the bottom of Phantom Valley. After the two rappels to get in, we were still quite a ways above the valley floor, and we had to hike down some steep, ankle-twisting slickrock in the sun (which had reappeared). We finally got to the bottom, however, and debated whether to camp where we were for the night, or continue on and do a two-and-a-half hour section of narrows before camping at a place called "The Crossroads." Since we still had a few hours of daylight left and The Crossroads sounded like better camping, we finally decided to continue on.


We suited up in our wetsuits and started in! Heaps was all about the water, and there was plenty. In some sections, we had to swim for a few hundred feet. As usual, the water was frigid in most places, but I was borrowing Randall's 7 mm wetsuit and it kept me pretty warm.



This picture is a little fuzzy, but it gives you a good idea of what a keeper pothole is like. Due to our wet spring, the potholes were mostly full, which was nice. Note how Corin is treading water and trying to pull himself out of the pothole at the same time. Now imagine the water level even a foot lower. In that case, he wouldn't be able to reach over the lip, and would be facing nothing but a wet, mossy, sheer rock wall. There's various techniques for dealing with keeper potholes, but a lot of them involve not getting in in the first place. Fortunately, we came prepared with the neccesary equipment and combined with the high water level, we never had a problem.




Keeper potholes can be deadly for a variety of wildlife, not including canyoneers. One of the occupational hazards of swimming through canyons is running into floaters, a small speciman of which is pictured below. I have yet to run into large things like deer, but I've heard horror stories. You try not to think about what's in the water when you slide into a pool and your head goes under, or when you accidentally swallow some water.


Water, dead animals, and potholes aren't the only obstacles you face. There's often log jams left behind by flash floods. If you're lucky, they're stuck partway up the canyon like this one, allowing you to crawl underneath. If you're not lucky, you have to climb over a shaky mountain of logs, sticks, and other junk.


And of course, rappels are always fun. There were quite a few in Heaps, including the infamous final 300 foot rappel.


To get to the final rappel (actually, a sequence of three rappels, 500 feet in total), you actually have to climb up this little chimney.

Unfortunately, I don't have any nice pictures of the final rappel. All these pictures actually came from Randall's camera, since mine turned out to have an almost-dead battery, and I had left my spare at home. The rappel ends in Upper Emerald Pools, so there were quite a few tourists with cameras filming us coming down, and Corin left his email address with one couple who promised to send us the pictures they took. We'll see if they come through with that.

Here's the best picture we have, looking up at the lip we rappelled over, 300 feet above the ground.

Open Rant

I go the speed limit.

It drives Child crazy at times, but that's who I am. I prefer the casual, relaxed driving and letting people pass me to the tense, high-speed passing of other people.

On the Interstate, that means that I can usually be found in the either the far right lane (the slowest lane) or the far left lane (the carpool lane). Despite it being on the far left and usually having less traffic than the other lanes, that does not mean the carpool is the "fastest" lane.

The upshot and rant portion of this post is that if you come up behind me doing twenty miles-per-hour more than me and starting flashing your headlights, I'm probably not going to move over. If I'm in the far-right/slowest lane, there's nowhere for me to go. If I'm in the far-left/carpool lane, it's usually the same: most of the time there's a double-solid line and I'm not going to cross it, breaking the law so you can get on with your own breaking the law. Sorry. If I was going under the speed limit I might sympathize with your position, but I'm not, so I don't.

And just so you don't think I'm a jerk who loves to irritate people, the other day a truck pulling a trailer came up behind me on a hill while I was in the second lane and flashed his lights at me. I promptly moved over so he could keep his momentum. I'm not out to make your life miserable on purpose, I just have my own pace, I keep to the lane designated for people with my pace, and I don't like you trying to push me to a faster pace.

Enjoy the road!

Slow news day

Popular Media's Third Law of News Reporting:

For every completely pointless, unnewsworthy incident reported in the news, there will be an equal and opposite completely pointless, unnewsworthy incident reported in the news.

Yesterday, Child and I laughed together about CNN reporting how President Obama swatted a fly. "Obama kills fly in interview" the headline (front-page!) screamed. "When a fly bugs President Obama during an interview with CNBC, he kills the pest with one swat."

"Could there be anything less-newsworthy they could possibly report?" we wondered. "Since when is anyone, even a sitting president, killing a fly newsworthy?" There was even a video to go with it!

Apparently, we don't have a very good sense of what is newsworthy and what isn't. Not only is President Obama killing a fly newsworthy, but it's also important enough to inspire YouTube videos, spoofs, and discussion around the web. PETA even responded and CNN reported on THAT: "Fly-killer Obama chastized by PETA".

It just goes to show, as the Popular Media's Third Law of News Reporting indicates, there is nothing so trivial that you can't make a news story out of it, then make a news story about people's response to your news story.

Sacrament Meeting Meta-Talk

This Sunday I'm giving a 15 minute talk in church. My topic: Sacrament Meeting.

Obviously the most important part of (and main reason for) sacrament meeting is the sacrament itself, but Child was assigned that specific subject, so I want to look at some other angles.

Any ideas? Anecdotes? Thoughts or opinions on church meetings in general?

Whodunit?

The mystery would not have confounded Sherlock Holmes. It probably wouldn't have confounded a six-year-old, blindfolded child.

The crime scene:

Clues of note: the plant was a catnip plant, recently removed from its enclosed plastic greenhouse and transplanted into an open can. This can was placed on the ground at approximately cat-eye-level.

Relatedly, a cat (a.k.a. "Acouchi") was also recently transplanted, from the vet clinic where she had spent the last week and a half getting radioactive iodine treatment for hyperthyroidism, to the home where the crime occurred. The alleged cat was suspected to be harboring intense feelings of hatred towards those responsible for putting her into the vet clinic for a week and half, as well as a love of catnip. She also had no alibi for the night in question.

Motive: Check.

Opportunity: Check.

Perpetrator: "Who's hiding it? And tomorrow night I'm peeing on your beanbag chair with radioactive pee."

Drunk people aren't smart.

Last night, Child and I passed through a Sobriety Checkpoint in southern Utah. Child was driving. As we reached the front of the line, she rolled down the window and the deputy walked up.

Deputy: "How's it going?"
Obviously pregnant woman: "Fine."
D: "Have you been drinking?"
OPW: (Pats stomach) "No."
D: "Can I see your license?"
OPW: "I don't have it with me."
D: "But you have one? And it's not suspended?"
OPW: "No."
D: "Okay. Have a nice day!"

Now that's sexism. And probably pregnancy-ism. If it had been me with my three-day beard growth driving the car, you can bet I would have had to produce my license.

And who would answer "Yes" to that last question? I guess a drunk person might. "No, Offisher, I don't have my linshensh." "Ha! Gotcha!"

Anyway, we were glad they didn't give us any grief, but Child with her pregnant stomach, me with me Gatorade and "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" book and our car full of camping gear probably didn't fit the profile they were looking for.

Chosen By God...or Not

When you're a missionary, some people take it on themselves to try to convert you to their own religion. Fine, fair enough. Makes for some funny stories. This isn't one of them. Sorry.

Anyway, one person gave me a book titled "Chosen by God," by R. C. Sproul. It's all about predestination; I'm not sure the author's religion, but he's all for it. I remember reading it and not being impressed, so as I was moving books around today and noticed it, I decided to give it another shot, see if it was as bad as I remembered.

It was. It's been...seven or eight years since I read it, but on the first page I immediately encountered a paragraph I still remembered.

"Perhaps no American rule is broken more frequently than the one about not discussing politics or religion...And when the topic turns to religion it often gravitates to the issue of predestination."

My question is: How many times has your discussion of religion with your acquaintances turned to the issue of predestination? Answers could range from never (mine) to often, the point being that if the author's conversations frequently turn to the issue of predestination, it's possibly because it's his favorite topic and he forces the conversation that direction. I'm all for talking about things that interest me and I often do, but I try not to make the mistake of believing that my favorite esoteric subject is of interest to everyone I come in contact with.

Moving on to the definition of "predestination," he gets my hopes up when he says that "our definition is often colored by our doctrine." I agree with that! Perhaps he will take a well-rounded approach to the subject, show us several definitions based on various doctrines, be at least a little unbiased.

No such luck. "What predestination means, in its most elementary form, is that our final destination, heaven or hell, is decided by God not only before we get there, but before we are even born." That's it. End of discussion. No alternate definitions. Reading on, apparently he didn't mean the DEFINITION of predestination was colored by our doctrine (because THAT'S set in stone!), but rather the basis that God makes his decision on is open for argument.

Obviously, if you take exception to his definition of predestination, as I do, then the entire rest of the book is pointless since it builds off that.

Two thoughts:

1. What if "destination" referred to your role, position, or place in life, rather than your physical location after you died?
2. If, in fact, it refers to our eternal reward, what if God didn't "decide" it, but rather "suggested" it?

Anyway, forced to build from that incorrect foundation stone, the entire book is of necessity full of tortured conclusions and laughable contradictions. The whole time I'm reading it I'm saying to myself, "The answer is so easy! Why do you put yourself through this?"

Pros and Cons

Things I like:

• Helmets. It only takes one hit to the head to make a helmet worth every penny you paid for it. Especially when you're canyoneering, miles from medical help. They're hot, uncomfortable, and make my hair do weird things so it took me a while to like them, but after that first rock to the helmet, I won't go canyoneering without them.
• Biking. Last Saturday morning (6:45 AM) I went biking in the hills behind Draper with a couple friends. You could probably call it "mountain biking" but it was more "casual hill biking." Either way, it was a lot of fun.
• Ultimate Frisbee. Especially fun if you play with people who aren't quite as hardcore as some can be. Incidentally, one of my favorite presents are a set of orange cones that Child got me. They're always a big hit for pick-up games.
  
• Gardens. Our most recent set of plants (zucchini, green beans, and squash) have all shot up. Also, our green beans that we sneakily planted across the street in a vacant lot have sprouted, but they're pretty much growing in gravel so I'm not sure how well they'll do.
• Spiritual insights. I love getting inspirations to questions I've had--especially if they're mathematically-based. :)
  

Things I don't like:

• Dying pea plants. Why, my little pea plants, why?! I water you every day!
• Child being unhappy. Acouchi will be in the hospital for two weeks, and Child is sad because of this.
• How easily distracted I am. I shouldn't be blogging right now, I should be working on my story. So...goodbye.
  

Faith, hope and charity...

"And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the most confusing of these is hope."

-1 Corinthians 13:13, paraphrased.

I've always wondered about Hope.

Faith, I understand. Charity is easy. However, I was never quite sure how hope really differed from faith. It's probably been one of my longest-standing questions, and I've never really heard a satisfactory answer. Some of the confusion is probably due to the fact that faith and hope seem to be used interchangeably at times in the scriptures.

Then, a couple days ago, inspiration struck! A diagram came to mind, and Hope suddenly made sense in a pseudo-mathematical sense:


"Knowledge" is when you have enough evidence that you can say with certainty approaching 100% that something is true.

En route to any knowledge, however, you must pass through a continuum of faith. This holds whether it's scientific or religious knowledge. For many bits of knowledge, you may jump straight from one end to the continuum to the other with a single bit of evidence: your trigonometry teacher tells you that a² + b² = c² and you believe her. For other bits of knowledge it takes much more evidence: your parents tell you that Education Is Good and it takes you through high school, college, graduate school, and finally making 20K a year more than your high-school dropout friends to really believe them.

However, key to this equation (Faith + Hope = Knowledge) is the fact that faith is based on evidence. I've always misunderstood this. I assumed faith was what you relied on when you had no evidence.

But that's hope's domain! Faith is based on evidence, while hope makes up the difference.

Alma's "seed" analogy is a good one:

28 Now, we will compare the word unto a seed. Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed, or a good seed, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold, it will begin to swell within your breasts; and when you feel these swelling motions, ye will begin to say within yourselves—It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me.

29 Now behold, would not this increase your faith? I say unto you, Yea; nevertheless it hath not grown up to a perfect knowledge.

31 And now, behold, are ye sure that this is a good seed? I say unto you, Yea; for every seed bringeth forth unto its own likeness.

32 Therefore, if a seed groweth it is good, but if it groweth not, behold it is not good, therefore it is cast away.

33 And now, behold, because ye have tried the experiment, and planted the seed, and it swelleth and sprouteth, and beginneth to grow, ye must needs know that the seed is good.

34 And now, behold, is your knowledge perfect? Yea, your knowledge is perfect in that thing, and your faith is dormant; and this because you know, for ye know that the word hath swelled your souls, and ye also know that it hath sprouted up, that your understanding doth begin to be enlightened, and your mind doth begin to expand.

Alma 32:28-34

I Sleep For An Eon, One Eye Open

I sleep for an eon, one eye open. The cold is absolute. The dark is not, and I go towards the light. For half an eon I roll downhill, for the second half I roll up, to slow myself. All the while, my hunger grows. I reach the place where my prey waits for me, watching for me, signaling me to come, although it knows it not. I poise myself over its burrow, a spider who needs no web, lowering my delicate and deadly thread. Then I wait. Time passes. What is an eon? I have waited one, I can wait another.

My prey comes. Creeping up my thread, slowly, cautiously. Fearing what it will find, but drawn irresistibly regardless. I open my mouth. My mouth is filled with the bones of prey past. I have learned: prey is drawn to prey. The prey enters, I can feel it move through the bones. I wait. More will come. Patience is always rewarded. The prey leaves, taking the bones. I wait. More will come. Patience is always rewarded.

The prey returns, more in number. They fill my mouth with their bones, and I am satisfied. I retrieve my thread, my deadly, delicate thread, and my mouth closes. I am filled. I look to the next light, for the dark is not absolute. The cold is, however, and I sleep for an eon, one eye open.

Cardboard of Steel

Our cardboard boxes are getting a real workout. It's been raining on and off for the past couple days, and we have a pretty serious rainfall going on right now here in Draper. For the first few weeks, I was careful to cover the boxes with a tarp each time it rained, but I finally gave that up. I couldn't protect them forever; at some point, they would have to strike out on their own. We'll see how they look in the morning. Or whenever it stops raining.

Pages

Guys and girls are never on the same page. The girl will be on a page, while the guy is shuffling through the pages, glancing at the girl out of the corner of his eye, trying to figure out what page she's on so he can get somewhere in the vicinity.

Insurance Pics I

A week or so ago, Child and I finally got renter's insurance. Along with that, we decided to take pictures of all our belongings. I found a webpage that talked about taking pictures for insurance purposes to see if there were any tricks I should know about, but there was nothing particularly difficult about it. The webpage did have a few suggestions, however, one of which was, "Set aside several days for the process."

Child and I laughed at that. What sort of mansion did they think we were living in? I decided to start with pictures of my office, and Child went downstairs to make dinner. "Come down when you're done!" she said.

An hour later, my camera battery died, I was only halfway through my office, and I was no longer laughing. I was starting to realize that this was going to be a long process. I couldn't just snap a few pictures of the room and call it good, I had to pull out each individual item or set of items and arrange them on the floor, then take the picture. I also realized that there was a definite downside to storing my life in banana boxes instead of on easily-accessible shelves.

126 pictures and a day later, I was finally done with my office. Only seven rooms and our backyard to go! Fortunately, I think the office was the hardest room; it definitely has the largest collection of (expensive) objects since it holds my electronics, camping gear, and tools.

I really saw the need for the pictures, however. Pulling stuff out of the boxes, I was finding stuff I didn't even remember I had, and things I would have never remembered owning after the trauma of a fire or theft or something. That expensive graphing calculator I havn't used since graduating from college? That propane lantern I haven't used since getting a battery-powered one? The raincoat?

Edible Return On Investment

Yesterday I was shocked to discover a giant pea on one of our pea plants! The plants are only a foot or so tall, so I wasn't expecting peas for another month or so. Looking over the pea plants, I found several more as well. Our first return-on-investment! Gardening is fun!


Here's our pepper plants. There were originally three, but you can tell that the third one (center, back) had...difficulties. It went to "Happy Acres" yesterday evening and was replaced with a row of carrots.


Here's Child's herb starts. She planted a little mint, catnip, and basil, I believe.


Yesterday evening we planted our seeds: squash, zucchini, green beans, and carrots. Rather than use cardboard boxes, we used these large pots left over from trees we helped my sister and brother-in-law landscape at their home in Idaho. (The green stuff is grass clippings Child mixed in with the soil.) The small tin can on top is Child's basil plant, which had outgrown its small container and needed transplanted.

New dog, meet old trick.

I had to laugh as I read a CNN article. It's about a church in Texas that decided to (gasp!) give away money from the offering plate instead of just taking it. A couple of choice quotes:

"It was a eureka moment for Slough [ed. note: the pastor]"

"'You don't hear about a church giving money away,' Amy Sullivan [ed. note: a church member] said."

"The church has now formed a group to look into the best ways to give out money. And, Slough said, it plans on doing so as long as there is a need in the community [ed. note: forever?]."

The reason I laughed (especially about Amy Sullivan's quote of never hearing about a church giving money away) is because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been doing this in a formal manner for over 150 years through fast offerings.

These aren't new ideas, folks. This is what Christianity is SUPPOSED to do! As a basic tenet! It shouldn't be newsworthy when a church actually does what Jesus commanded, i.e. "Help the poor and needy."

Religions these days...

Blarny/Shenanigans

I have no idea why, but Blogger posts pictures in the opposite order that you upload them. Seems a silly way to do it, and one that's easily correctable, so who knows what their rationale was. Laziness, maybe.

So you're getting this trip description in reverse order!

Most canyons have an "exit hike." This exit hike is usually hot and exhausting. By this point, you're done with the fun part of the canyon and you're tired, and you want nothing more than to get into an air-conditioned car. However, due to a grievous oversight, the BLM didn't see fit to park helicopters at the exit of all back-country canyons, so you have to make your way back to your car on foot.

In many cases, including Shenanigans, this involves hiking straight up the canyon wall. A narrow rockslide gives you enough of an incline to climb up, while cleverly strewing the path with loose rocks and sand that threaten to send you hurtling backwards into space (or into the climbers behind you, if you're lucky) at the slightest misstep. Vertically, it's probably only three or four hundred feet...but that's vertical feet. Time-wise, it took us probably a half-hour of exhausting climbing in the broiling sun to get to the canyon rim.



This is a picture of the canyon we came out of (we're probably halfway up the exit at this point).



I liked how this picture turned out just because of the almost black-and-white feel to it. This was taken deep in a slot.



Halfway through Shenanigans, there's a nice hole you can crawl through. Right before the hole in the wall, there's also a deep pothole in the ground, which Randall is standing upright in.



I always take too many pictures of flowers on our canyoneering trips, but I'm always amazed by how many flowers there are in the desert. I don't think I've seen these yellow ones before...if so, not in the numbers that were in this particular rock bowl. Looking through just my pictures of this hike, I count six different types of flowers! And this is in the desert!



This group was a small one: Randall, Josh and I. The day was beautiful, and the weather was perfect as we started our hike to the canyon. Later, it would get warmer, but not the three-digit temperatures it might be hitting in a few weeks.



This picture is actually the previous day, Friday. Since we got to camp ("Sandthrax" Campground) fairly early in the afternoon, we decided to do a short canyon. We chose the left fork of Blarny, and it was a decently interesting canyon for only being two hours, end to end.



This is one of the more common flowers we see in the desert. From the side, it's a little harder to see the bossom itself, but I like the closer view of the cactus part.


Anyway, it was a fun trip.

Church Notes

As I may have mentioned, Child and I teach the six-year-olds in Sunday School (Primary). Actually, due to a temporary teacher shortage, we actually teach several five- and maybe even a four-year-old. Anyway, a couple open notes to the Sunday School leadership:

1. Mother's Day should not be celebrated by handing each kid a bag of candy and two long, sharp skewers and telling them to make two "candy flowers" for their mothers. The candy will not survive an hour and a half of Sunday School in the hands of small children, and the skewers will be used to impale everything but the candy. The teachers will curse (religiously, of course) your name as they spend the next hour and a half trying to keep the candy out of their children's' mouths and the skewers out of their own skin. It's just a bad idea all around.

2. Music leader: if you don't know the second and third and fourth verse to a song without reaching for your songbook, it's a good bet none of the teachers do either, much less any of their six-year-old children. Either stick with the first, familiar verse, or hold up a poster with the words (or better yet: pictures) on it.

3. Other teachers: turning around and shushing one of our kids or telling them to get back into their seat is not helping. I've already done that several thousand times in the past hour, and expect to do it another thousand times before Sunday School is over. It's like you're second in line at a red light, and honking your horn the split second the light turns green. Don't worry, give me a moment and I'll get that kid back in their seat and shushed myself. Oh, and P.S., one of your own kids is halfway across the room climbing a stack of chairs.

Despite how this post may sounds, it's actually been somewhat fun serving in Primary. The kids are wild and noisy and impatient and bored and energetic and it's like playing Whack-A-Mole to keep them in their seats, but they can also be funny and cute and it's good experience for our own imminent kid. Who will be perfect. And who will never get out of his seat. And who will not skewer their teacher like a rack of lamb.

Luck o' the Irish

Tomorrow, I'll be leaving to do a canyon in the "Irish Canyons" area. Canyons are named after Irishy things, like Leprechaun, Blarny, Shillelagh, and the one we're doing, Shenanigan.

Apparently the luck of the Irish decided to reach out a little early. Instead of the two cavities I thought were going to be filled today in my final dentist appointment, the dentist decided that one spot might not be a cavity after all, and he would just keep an eye on it until my next visit. In addition, the remaining cavity was such a small one that I wouldn't need any sort of numbing shots. Seriously, how often do you get out of a shot? It was great! The whole visit was over in 20 minutes! I love dentists!

Open Question

Would you take your dream job if it was in the last place on Earth you wanted to live?

Would you take your dream job if it was the last place on Earth your significant other wanted to live?

(The above questions are slightly exaggerated: it's more like "a really good job" and a "fairly disliked place to live")

Dentist Visit

I left "...of Doom" from the end of the title because it would be a little redundant.

Actually, my first dentist visit in years went well. (Well, technically, second visit. I had one two weeks ago so the dentist could jot down a list of everything that needed done, chuckling gleefully as he pulled out "the really big calculator" to add up the price tag.)

The dentist filled three cavities today, and will fill another two next week, while his assistant did a thorough (read: painful) cleaning of some tartar buildup. I can't really complain since it needed done, and it was fortuitous how our appointment was arranged.

A woman in my mom's home-school group sent out an email asking if anyone would like to trade massages for some dental work here in Draper. My mom forward the email to me, and since Child and I needed some dental work down, we responded to the email. Apparently quite a few people were interested, but we were the closest people so we got selected. (Lucky break? Or result of paying tithing? You be the judge... DUN DUN DUN!!!)

Anyway, interestingly, it turns out the dentist (an older, graying gentleman) was also a canyoneer! Two weeks ago he did a canyon that my friends and I are considering doing in a couple weeks. We talked about a few canyons, then he showed me an online video of him going through a canyon. "This is me...this is my son...this is a sort of odd guy we invited along..."

I looked closer at the "odd guy." "Is that John Smith?" I asked, and the dentist laughed.

"So you know him too."

I did. He kind of attached himself to our group, and had gone through a few canyons with us before we (as kindly as possible) extracted ourself from the relationship, mostly because he, well, complained a lot. Maybe that was just his personality, I don't know, but it got old after a while.

Kids These Days

Sometimes I wonder if technology is really all that good. My coworker just called me to see if I was at work. He is sitting in an office three doors away from me.

I would have IM'd.

Mechanical Mouse Pill Delivery System

In case it's a little tricky to pick up from the audio on the video clip, Acouchi has taken to hiding at the far end of the ledge over the stairs, which we had earlier given her access to. Unfortunately, she was recently diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, which means she needs a treatment of meth every morning and evening (methimazole, a small pill).

Fortunately, my brother Matthew gave her a present last Christmas of a remote-control mouse. As it turns out, that's the perfect delivery mechanism to get the pill to her.

Open Source Annoyances

Every now and then I'll make a little computer program, usually to experiment with a technology or to make my life a little easier, then release it on the Internet for other people to use.

It obviously comes with no guarantees, promises, or anything else, but apparently some people don't realize that. That, or they're just rude, or at the least, lacking politeness.

Example 1:

Email Subject: Bloomberg Gadget
Email: Why has this gadget died? It is a great gadget. Please fix it.

Commentary: The "Bloomberg Gadget" was a widget I built to go on a Google Homepage (http://www.google.com/ig). It was one of the first widgets I built, and I actually did it to help me learn how to build Google widgets.

At least the emailer (a reverend, actually) had the courtesy to mention briefly that it was a "great gadget," and he even threw in a "please," but it still came out as an order. Not only that, but he's not giving me any sort of clue as to actually went wrong except for the completely vague "it died." How am I supposed to figure out his problem based on that?

Example 2:

Email Subject: Keylogger not working after a few weeks how to fix?
Email: Hey there, How are you doing? I've had your keylogger addon for a few weeks now, and all of a sudden it stopped working. Do you know why? And how can I fix it?

Commentary: This was a Firefox add-on that logged keystrokes so if your browser crashed, you wouldn't lose whatever you were typing. At least this guy was civil in his email; the problem is that like the previous example, this guy gave me nothing to go on. "No, I don't know why it stopped working. Is your computer plugged in?"

Example 3:

Email Subject: keylogger addon
Email: I was looking for a keylogger that I can use to monitor the activities of my teenaged daughters (hereafter referred to as “the monsters”), and stumbled across the experimental version of your application. For this purpose, because the monsters are not stupid, I am looking for something that works pretty much surreptitiously. I noticed that the description indicates it will not be hidden. I am not a programmer or other IT professional, and would never consider changing an application, as some have indicated they have done to accomplish this [ed. note: the whole point of making an application open source is to allow anyone to modify it however they want]. Will there be a “parental supervision” version of this add-on that will allow me to be sneakier than the monsters?

Commentary: At first, I wanted to respond, "Seriously? You're an adult? And a mother?"

In the end, I wrote the following:

I'm sorry, there are no plans to create a "Parental Control" version.
You may use it to monitor your children, but far more often,
technologically-savvy children would use it to steal their parents'
usernames, passwords, and bank account numbers.

Honestly, your best bet would be to have your computer in a public
place (such as the kitchen or living room), and educate your daughters
on the various online dangers. It's a losing battle getting in a
technological war with today's generation. It's just a thought, but I
suspect that the first time you show them evidence from your
monitoring, they will realize what you are doing and either retaliate
(perhaps by installing a keylogger of their own) or simply move their
computer use to a friend's house where you have no control instead of
the small control you have now.

Good luck with your situation! I don't envy you the difficult job of
dealing with teenagers, and wish you the best in your parenting.

Mormons and Education

A non-LDS friend recently asked on his blog if anyone knew of someone his age (25 or so?) and educational level (M.S. degree in computer science) who had converted to the LDS church.

I couldn't think of anyone off the top of my head, but it made me curious and I did a little research. Apparently, Latter-day Saints are somewhat unique among religions in that education makes us stronger in our religion instead of weaker.

"A study by Stan Albrecht and Tim Heaton published in the Review of Religious Research in 1984 reported that opposite to the experience of most churches in the United States, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints become more religiously active as they become more educated."
- http://www.adherents.com/largecom/lds_dem.html

Not being on campus, I don't have easy access to the study in question, but it's titled, "Secularization, higher education, and religiosity," Review of Religious Research, 1984.

I also found something more recent:

"Consistent with previous research, we did not find education to have a secularizing influence on Mormons, but rather to have a positive association with religiosity for both Mormon men and women."
- "Lack of a Secularizing Influence of Education on Religious Activity and Parity Among Mormons", Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol 42, Iss. 1, pp 113-124, 2003

Unfortunately, there's no real data I could find on educational levels, majors, or similar things.

The Great Rattlesnake Escape

Here in Draper, Child and I teach the 6-year-old Sunday School class. At the beginning of Sunday School, all the classes meet together for "Singing Time."

On our row, I had three of our kids on my right, and Child and another kid on the left. The current song required us to stand up and "wiggle like a rattlesnake." I was momentarily distracted by Child's laughing at my shaking my bum like a rattlesnake, then Child pointed to my right. I look over to see the three six-year-olds who used to be standing to my right now halfway across the room doing an impressive army crawl, apparently taking the "wiggle like a rattlesnake" a little too literally. It took three or four teachers to surround them, but we finally got them returned to their seats.

By the way, I have to throw in a Faith Promoting Experience. The other night, my entire nose was stuffed up beyond belief with allergies. I had to breath through my mouth, which made it impossible to sleep (and gave me a sore throat), and it was 2 AM in the morning. "Just give me one nostril," I finally prayed. "Enough so I can breath through my nose long enough to fall asleep."

10 minutes later, I had one nostril open, and was able to fall asleep. Go God!

Garden 2

In our ongoing battle against the lack of sunlight in our tiny backyard, we've tried two things:

1. Raised the boxes off the ground, so they can get a precious hour of extra sunlight.

2. Cut down the sides of the boxes in the direction of the sun. This won't make a difference when the plants get a little taller, but for now, the plants originally shaded by the side of the box will now get an extra few minutes of sunlight as well.


We're also starting to hit a few days of cooler weather, so our plants get well wrapped up at night. Incidentally, the weather report on weather.com says, "Current Temperature: 60 degrees. High: 59 degrees."

Garden 1

A few weeks ago, Child and I read a story on KSL about "urban gardening," basically, growing a garden on a porch, balcony, or small backyard. We had already been planning on doing our own as soon as it stopped snowing, so we read the story with interest.

The story was more like a human interest story featuring a guy who started a garden on his apartment balcony. It was an interesting read until the second to last paragraph, where it said, "It cost Joel about $700 for the garden, including pots, plants and instruction on how to care for everything."

$700?! What was this guy growing, gold bars? Reading the story a second time, we caught something we hadn't the first time through: he had hired a guy to do a custom garden for him. Having grown up in a family which constantly had a garden, I would never pay someone to plant a garden for me, much less $700 for a few pots on a balcony, but to be fair, I'm assuming the apartment owner had no experience with gardening.

I still think he could have read a couple books (there are dozens about "square foot gardening"), and there's no way he's going to get enough food out of it to cover the cost, but perhaps he's more concerned about the organic-ness and environmentally-friendly side. Either way, I hope he sees how easy gardening really is and does it himself the next year. He's already got the pots and dirt.

Anyway, on to our own garden. We made our first real strides today, getting our dirt and plants. It's still a little early to plant, although if I remember correctly, our peas don't mind the cold, so maybe we'll plant them at least.

When it comes to containers, we're trying something unique, which could fail horribly, but has an outside chance of working and the benefit of being cheap (free). Dismayed at the price of containers ($5 for a cheap plastic storage tub that we could drill drainage holes in, up to $100 for decorative ceramic planting pots), Child and I looked into building some simple wooden boxes.

Wood is expensive as well, and I started thinking. Since we're only planning on living here one growing season, we don't need something permanent. What about cardboard boxes? They're free, and they decompose. Obviously an ordinary cardboard box wouldn't be strong enough or last long enough, but a banana box (the lid and bottom combined to give it double strength) might just hold out for a few months.

So we decided to give it a try. Worst case scenario, the cardboard starts falling apart and I end up buying the wood after all and building a wooden box around the cardboard boxes.

As far as plants, we decided on tomatoes, bell peppers, sugar snap peas, zucchini, yellow summer squash, carrots, and green beans. The tomatoes, bell peppers, and carrots need a little more depth, so they'll end up in a double-tall banana box.

The double-tall boxes were pretty easy to make. First, we popped open the flaps on both the bottom and lid of the first box. Second, we slid the flaps of the bottom between the bottom and lid of the second box (note from the picture how I cut off a wedge from the flaps of the first box so it would slide in easier). Push it all the way down and it'll rest solid. Finally, simply slide the top of the first box over the top of the whole contraption and push it down. Presto: a double-tall box.


Total cost so far: $42.50

• Dirt: $10 (Mountain topsoil)
  
• Shovel: $6 (Lowes)
  
• Trowel: $1 (Lowes)
• MiracleGrow plant food: $8 (Lowes)
• Plants/seeds: $10.50 (Lowes) and $7 (Walmart)

Quite a bit less than $700. Not only that, but the shovel and trowel are one-time expenses, as the dirt would be if we weren't moving/don't move. The plant food is non-essential as well, Child and I decided to buy it mostly as an experiment to see if we really saw that big of a difference between my parents' plants and ours.

Anyway, what it boils down to is that assuming we have no more expenses, we need each of our 7 varieties of plants to produce at least $6 worth of food to break even. I think we're pretty safe. That's a handful of tomatoes or peppers from Harmons.

My biggest worry for our garden, after the cardboard boxes falling apart, is sunlight. Since we have a tiny backyard (12' x 20'), with a two-story townhome on the south and a 5 foot tall privacy fence on the other three sides, not a whole lot of light gets into our back yard. We'll see what happens.

Here's a slightly more complete picture:

To date, getting the dirt was the hardest part. The pioneers would laugh at the fact that we had difficulty finding dirt, but that's modern times for you. Child found a couple people who were giving away "free dirt" on Craigslist, but at the one house we made it to, the dirt was a solid yellow clay/rock mess. Not gardening soil by any stretch.

We finally ended up taking our car to a topsoil company in Lindon (Mountain Topsoil). I felt a little out of place with our little Saturn in a line of pickup trucks and trailers, but we had the guy driving the Bobcat dump a half-cubic yard of dirt into a row of banana boxes. I stuck those into our back seat, then took a shovel to the remaining pile and loaded it into our tarp-lined trunk. We were riding pretty low and slow driving back to Draper, but we made it without any difficulties.

I have to add: this was all done on our way home from two hours of Ultimate Frisbee in Provo, so I was already tired. And from comparing a handful of links (e.g. this one), it's pretty fair that a cubic yard of topsoil weighs one ton. Since we got half a cubic yard, I had to lift and shovel a thousand pounds of dirt into Jasmine. Then, once we got home, I had to unload all of that and carry it to our backyard.

I'm tired. And Child gives amazing massages.

Nightstands...de muerte!

Child wanted some nightstands. "Find a garage sale," I said. "Buy some from DI. Heck, buy some from Ikea."

No, she wanted me to build her some. Our bed is on risers, so it's pretty high, and she wanted a nice tall nightstand to put stuff on. After some complaining and grumbling, I finally agreed to do it. Step one was deciding on a design:

Nothing too hard, right? A little woodwork, a little metalwork, some welding, and you have a nightstand.

I learned three things.

1. Woodwork is hard.

2. If you pay for crooked wood, you get crooked wood. If you get crooked wood, you get the Leaning Nightstand of Pisa.

3. While shopping at Lowes, if you can't remember the size of screw you already have at home, you will buy the exact same size.

Although I blame any aberrations from linear cuts on crooked wood, without admitting any personal responsibility, I will say that if I had a table saw instead of just a circular saw, the end result may have looked more like the above design. As it was, this is what Child ended up with:




Not...exactly like the design.

I don't think it was exactly what Child had envisioned either...okay, when she got back from shopping, she walked in the door and shrieked with horror, stumbling backwards and clutching her heart. When she had had a little time to recover, and a class of cold water, she managed to choke out faintly, "That's very...wooden."

Acouchi may take a few more days to recover, cowering under the guest bed with her terrified eyes fixed on the door as if afraid the shelves (they ended up too tall to be called nightstands) would lunge in like stiff (if slowly toppling) zombies.

You win some, you lose some...and some, you bomb so spectacularly that your wife never asks you to do woodworking projects again, which was pretty much what you wanted in the first place, so it actually ends up as a win.

Rookies

This morning, I was trying to figure out why one of our customers couldn't upload a picture to her website. She was using a form I had built, so fixing the bug was assigned to me. After some digging around, I found out that the problem was actually in another programmer's code library that my form used.

"Rookie mistake," I thought to myself. "He forget to lowercase the file extension." What that meany was that someone could upload an image called "test.jpg" just fine, but "test.JPG" would fail.

I fixed the bug, chuckling smugly to myself, then went back to my form to try uploading the picture again. It failed. What?! As it turns out, I had made a mistake even more rookiesh in my own code, trying to display the new picture BEFORE actually uploading it. Oops.

It's incidents like these that keep me from getting too cocky.

Speed v. Safety

When programming, you have to walk a fine line between getting code out, and making code secure.

I'm actually not talking about general security issues, although there are unfortunate circumstances when you (as an employee) don't have the option of taking the time to make your code (or your predecessor's code) secure.

I'm talking about coding for things that should "never happen." I'm talking about coding for that particular sequence of actions you think no one will ever do, or that edge case that no one will ever hit, or even that thing you think can never happen.

I try to be reasonable with what I do, although I like to err on the side of caution. For example, here's a bit of PHP code:

<?php
header("Location: index.php");
?>

Theoretically, that is supposed to redirect the visitor to the index.php page...say, if they weren't authorized to be on the current page. I always assumed it always worked, no exceptions.

However, back in the mists of my early programming, some person, or webpage, or something suggested putting an "exit" statement afterwards, just in case it didn't. That way, if the person wasn't redirected to the proper page, the current page would just die. It's better than having an unauthorized person viewing the page.

<?php
header("Location: index.php");
exit;
?>


So I've always done that. Better safe than sorry. I found out the reason for doing so today: apparently, it's up to the web browser (or web crawler, etc.) whether or not it wants to obey the headers, including the "Location" one in the PHP code above. I knew that, I just never really made the connection between that fact and this situation. So, if a browser or crawler doesn't obey the header, the page will just die.

You learn something new each day. I'm glad I was already writing secure code (for that situation), even if I didn't know why...

March Madness

This is why I don't gamble:


47th out of 49. In my defense, most of the other people had several entries.

Email to Text Messages (SMS) with Celluar Carriers

Most cellular carriers allow you to send an email to a cell phone number and have it appear as a text message (SMS message). For AT&T, for example, you send an email to 1235551234@txt.att.net, obviously replacing the "1235551234" with the cellphone number you're sending to. On the receiver's phone, it appears as a text.

There are some tricks. For example, if the message length is very limited. It depends on the cell carrier, but 140 to 160 characters is about the max. You can run into problems if you violate this: for example, T-Mobile will silently drop emails that are longer.

Other problems can arise. For example, AT&T won't accept the email if there's no "From" address. I'm speaking from a coding perspective here (sending the emails from, say, PHP code), but I've found the following two things to be key:

1. Keep the email short. 100 characters is safe.

2. Always provide a "subject" line and "from" email address, even if older phones can't even see those fields or use them.

Random Pic Time

Child and I were driving to a friend's house when we pulled up behind this truck. We decided to try out the camera on my new iPhone. It takes pictures surprisingly fast--I was impressed.

No idea why this guy was carting an elk head around in the back of his truck...

Qwest v. Comcast: The First Month

After the first month of service, the first problem, and the first bill, who wins: Qwest or Comcast?

Qwest. No contest. (Yet.)

Setup

If memory serves correctly, it took us several phone calls, visits, and quite a bit of downtime to finally get Comcast working. Comcast eventually refunded two weeks worth of service, I believe, but I would have preferred forgoing the headache instead.

Qwest had me up and running when they said they would.


Service

I'm inclined to be a little more lenient to Comcast here, simply because our last apartment was old, as was the wiring Comcast had to deal with. However, even after they put brand-new wiring in, they couldn't keep my Internet connection up and running.

So far (knock on wood) my Qwest connection hadn't had any problems except a brief downtime that was fixed by rebooting the modem/router, but it's only been a few weeks. This is better judged over a series of months. We'll see...


Support

Qwest wins again. When my connection died, I called up customer support. Unlike Comcast, who refused to touch my wireless router (and enjoyed blaming problems they couldn't figure out on it), the Qwest support guy didn't even blink when I told him I had a wireless router hooked up to their modem. He simply walked me through rebooting it, in addition to their modem, which fixed the problem.

I can't go too far blaming Comcast for not wanting to deal with "unsupported hardware," but it certainly wasn't that difficult for Qwest, and it made all the difference in my opinion of them.


Billing

Again, this is better judged over a series of months, but my first Qwest bill was correct, and (helpfully) told me which month I was on in my discounted promotional period. Comcast rarely got a bill correct two months running.

Let's hope Qwest continues to impress.

Phones

When Child and I had been dating for a few months, Child bought a new cellphone, and gave me her old cellphone with strict instructions to get a plan.

Up to that point, I had been content with a landline, and avoided it as much as possible. Phone calls usually meant someone wanted me to do something, and I am very selfish with my time. Child was cute, though, so I didn't really have a choice, and followed her instructions.

After Child went through six Walmart Quik-Brak® phones over the course of three years, my work bought me an iPhone and I gave Child her original phone back. The screen is pretty scratched, and the "6" key is a little sticky, but other than that it's still going strong. It's been dropped, drowned, and pretty much everything else but burned at the stake, and it's still trucking.

FWIW, the iPhone is for testing a new mobile version of my work's website on. Work paid for the phone, and I pay for the T-Mobile data plan and do the jailbreak on the phone.

Cables 'n' Cords

I just finished organizing my "electronics box." Ignoring the handful of electronic gadgets in the box whose cords are attached, I have the following free-floating, unused cords:

7 power cords
4 CAT-5 (ethernet) cables
1 coaxial cable
2 car adapter cables
2 extension cords
8 USB cords, not including the USB cord to my camera, which spurred the digging through the electronics box to begin with.

Add in the cables and cords around my desk, and you'll add maybe 6 more. Add the cords attached to electronics gadgets (used and unused), and you'll add about 20 more.

Washer/Dryer

Child and I bought a new washer and dryer. We got them from a Sears outlet store, where they sell less-than-perfect merchandise at nice discounts. Our washer and dryer are two different colors and both came with some aesthetic problems, but they're supposed to be functionally fine.

In theory. The dryer had some larger problems with the control problem (loose, sliding off), so Child and I decided to get the 3-year warranty on it. The idea was that if something went wrong with it, Sears would either fix it, or replace the dryer. Our hope was that something would immediately go so majorly wrong that Sears would replace it, and we'd get a brand-new dryer, and we could even get it in a color that matched our washer.

Well, the installers set it up yesterday, and it does have a few problems. The dryer door doesn't close completely unless you push it just right, and halfway through a dry cycle the control panel started flashing "F70". We have our fingers crossed that it's a horrible, unfixable problem, possibly involving the dryer gaining sentience and attempting to kill us in our sleep, so we can get a new dryer.

Comcast v. Qwest

In our new house here in Draper, an obliging neighbor is currently providing me with wireless internet, but I have my own hookup coming on Tuesday. Or Wednesday. I can't remember which now. Too much going on.

I'm giving Qwest a try for a couple months to see how I like it, and I can always switch back to Comcast if needed.

ISPs definitely need more competition.

Events

Child and I have had a busy past few days. Her father was recently diagnosed with lymphoma (cancer), then had a seizure Wednesday night and had to go to the hospital. Also on Wednesday, we moved from Provo to Draper and on the plus side, bought a washer and dryer. More on that later.

Yesterday, we visited Child's father in the hospital. On the way home, I was driving, and there was a sudden thump from under the car. I thought a car part had fallen off, and looked in the rear-view mirror to see a dog sprawled in the middle of the road and two adults and a kid standing on the sidewalk ten feet away.

Aw, nuts.

I pulled a U-turn and pulled up in from of the people. "Is that your dog?" I asked, and thank goodness they shook their heads. "Not ours," they said. Running over a dog is bad enough--doing it in front of the owners would be worse.

I parked the car and Child and I got out. To my surprise, the dog (a chihuahua mix) was able to stagger from the middle of the road over to the side. It looked like it just had a broken leg, and fortunately it was wearing a tag with a phone number. I called the number, and the owners turned out to live just around the corner.

While waiting for them to show up, the people on the sidewalk informed us that a cat had actually chased the dog into the road. Looking across the street, I could see the cat sitting atop a pickup truck, smirking at the scene.

The owners finally showed up, and were thankfully very nice. The lady apologized for not keeping her dog corralled, and said that some relative of hers was a vet tech at a local clinic. So all was well that ended well, and I was just glad the dog hadn't been injured worse. Apparently my karma from volunteering at the animal shelter caught up.

King's To You

Well played, God. Well played.

Flame Wars...Commence!

I'm a pretty easy-going, laid back, non-confrontational sort of guy, so I don't get involved in online flame wars very often. A few days ago, however, I managed to start one of my own.

I play online "Werewolf" (also known as "Mafia" and probably many other names) with a group of people. At the beginning of the game, the Game Master secretly assigns several people to be "werewolves", while the remaining people are innocent villagers. The game sequences through day and night phases. At night, the werewolves choose a villager to kill. During the day, the villagers attempt to discover who the werewolves are and at the end, vote to lynch someone, hopefully a werewolf.

Depending on how advanced you want to get, there are additional roles; our usual ones are an assassin (allows people to take kill or protection contracts), a detective (can investigate one person each night), and a necromancer (gives "dead" people a half-vote until the necromancer also dies).

Each of the special roles (werewolf/assassin/detective/necromancer) has a special user account they can log in with, so they can post messages while remaining anonymous. In addition, there is a visible list of every currently logged-in user. Here's where things got messy.

Last round, I wrote a program that monitored the list of logged-in users, recording when each one signed in and signed out--all public and freely-available information . I was one of the werewolves, so my priority was killing the necromancer and detective.

Right off the bat, the detective logged in, an action recorded by my program. Going through the log, I noticed that a certain user had signed out right before the detective logged. Right after the detective logged off, the same user logged back in. From that, it was clear that that user was the detective, and my werewolf buddies and I killed her that night.

At the end of the game, I didn't hide how I had discovered the detective's identity, and the flame wars immediately began. It wasn't explicitly against the rules, but was it unethical? Was it fair? Should someone use a skill not everyone had?

It was quite a heated discussion, but in the end, a rule was made against it and we moved on. Now that I think about it, it's like the recent discussion over the new swimsuits introduced in the Olympics. Everyone has the swimming skill, some better than others, but is the use of the new, high-tech swimsuits cheating or unethical?

Not sure. Of course, I tend to think that I can use whatever skills I can bring to the table, as long as they aren't against the rules or illegal, but that view didn't seem to be shared by many people.

PulseAudio fix for Ubuntu

On my laptop running Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex), I've had difficulties getting audio to work simultaneously in both Firefox (Flash, to be exact) and my music players. I can play music in RhythmBox or Movie Player, but if Flash, running in Firefox, manages to grab audio, then the music players can't get it back.

The following steps from here fixed the problem. (As usual, the most time-consuming part was identifying exactly what the problem was. Fixing took a few seconds.)

$ echo "default_driver=pulse" >~/.libao
$ rm -r ~/.pulse ~/.asoundrc*
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
$ sudo apt-get remove libflashsupport
$ sudo apt-get install libasound2-plugins padevchooser libao-pulse libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio

Reboot.

The instructions on the webpage were more detailed, described the purpose of each step, and included other things to check along the way, but in the end it came down to the above steps for me.

Hunger Games

I just finished reading a book called "Hunger Games." Child warned me that the end was a cliffhanger (with no sequel written yet!), so I was a little nervous.

As it turns out, it was just a cliffhanger in the romance part of the story, which I couldn't care less about. The Hunger Games themselves were tied up nicely and satisfactorily.

Poor Jasmine

Poor Jasmine. She was backed into just a few months ago, and now another car ran a stop sign and poor Jasmine plowed head-first into it. At least it wasn't bad; no one was injured, and there's only minor damage to the hood and front corner panel, which should all be paid for by the other driver's insurance.

That was at 9:30 this morning. When Child was finally returned safely to work, I took the car down to a car wash to spray off some mud and salt before the insurance adjuster comes over. The car wash wouldn't take the dollar bills I had, but our bank was only three blocks away, so I drove over and got a roll of quarters.

That took about three minutes. Returning to the car wash, I found the intersection I had just passed through clogged with a tangle of car wreckage. The accident was so fresh that a police car that had been driving behind me didn't even know it had happened until we reached the intersection, at which point I pulled over, he saw the wreckage, and flipped his lights on.

The car wash was on that corner, so I pulled in and rinsed Jasmine off. I was halfway done before the first "dispatched" police car arrived, along with a fire truck and ambulance.

It wasn't until then that I realized how lucky Child and I were. Child wasn't hurt, the other driver wasn't hurt, and both cars were drivable. Child's accident could have been a lot worse. I said a prayer of thanks for Child, and tossed in a quick prayer for the people in the accident I had just passed. May God watch over us all.

SSH Passwordless Authentication

Since I do a lot of website work, I have to log into a remote server I run fairly often. In addition, I wanted to set up some scripts that would automatically back up stuff from my local computer to that remote server, and vice versa.

However, logging in to that remote server requires entering my password, which is a pain as often as I have to do it, and which would make it impossible for the backup scripts to run automatically.

I found a great overview of the steps necessary to set up passwordless logging in through SSH, and they're pretty simple. I'm posting the link here just so I can find it in the future.

Zion

Six players. $1.20 in prize money, given out in 10 rounds of 12 cents each. (We're trying to make a point here, not make the kids rich.)

Each player has a card with two choices on the two sides: share the 12 cents, or take it all. Players make their choice, then simultaneously reveal their cards. 10 rounds are played, as previously mentioned.

If everyone chooses "share," the money is divided evenly between them. If 1-3 people choose "take it all," the money is divided evenly between them. If more than three choose "take it all," they simply lose the pot. (We could have been even more mean and said if more than one person chose "take it all," then they lost the pot.)

If everyone had chosen to "share," they each would have ended up with 20 cents. As it stood, at the end of the game, the winner had 16 cents, and it went down from there. (The winner was the only one to choose "take it all" on the first round, so he took 12 cents from that. The remain nine rounds, he earned his remaining four cents.)

Our goal was to illustrate the benefits of a "Zion" community. Moses 7:18: "And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them."

It's really true. If you could get everyone to "live in righteousness," then you really wouldn't have any poor people (materially OR spiritually).

Parab(ola/le)

parable: a short allegorical story designed to illustrate or teach some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson. From the Late Latin "parabola."

parabola: the set of points in a plane that are equidistant from a fixed line and a fixed point in the same plane or in a parallel plane. See parable.

So what does a mathematical construct and a short story have in common, besides their Latin (and from there, Greek) roots?

No clue. But a teacher in Sunday School today pointed out the similar roots, and I thought it was interesting. He made some sort of point, but my thoughts went a different direction.


I think this is a pseudo-mathematical illustration of a parable. The more we study it (x-axis), the more understanding we gain (y-axis).

However, parables are not meant to be perfect illustrations of a particular doctrine, they're simply rough teaching aids. Therefore, if you start to scrutinize a parable too closely, or interpret it beyond the original intent of the teacher, you start losing understanding, and can even go negative (understanding it incorrectly).

This isn't a particularly deep post, but it was a thought that interested me, so I thought I'd stick it out here...