Buyog Blog

Is this thing on?

2011-02-13T14:49:00.001-05:00

I've been a negligent blogger... too busy living life, I guess you could say.

I'm considering retiring this blog; mostly everything I used to put here is now being shared through other means (Twitter and Facebook), and the few longer-form entries I've done could just as easily fall under my geeky / coding blog (which has also been somewhat dormant this Winter). That said, I've got big plans for my site. Stay tuned...

Intervals

2010-08-30T01:21:00.000-05:00

I try to power walk / run during lunch at least a few days a week. Some days fast, some days slow(er), and some (okay, most) days I fall somewhere in the middle, although it's never a slow mosey like when I'm walking with my sweetheart. Usually, I have my Zen Stone on to help me keep the pace, and today I wanted to share one of my current favorite exercise albums: Blood on the Asphalt. Produced and released under the Overclocked Remix umbrella, BotA contains remixes of all the main themes from one of the best video game soundtracks to come out back when I was an arcade regular: Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Each character had a theme that perfectly fit their personality, stage, and nationality, complete with really catchy hooks that would leave you humming the tunes days later. Here's the bit I like to run to most often, one of the fastest stretches of the overall album:

(warmup) Dhalsim
(fast) Guile
(medium) Zangief
(fast) Fei Long
(mellow) Cammy
(fast) Ken
(REALLY fast) Ryu

Anyway, this isn't just a post about how much I love the album, or how perfect it is for doing interval power-walking. What I really wanted to share was my humble little add-on to the album, a little something I whipped up a while back to make this awesome album just a little bit more so:

Blood on the Asphalt: cutscene add-on

In the original game, there was a little cutscene between matches, where a jet plane would fly, Indiana Jones-style, to the country of your next opponent, while the announcer would call it out: "China!", "USSR!" and so on. This add-on pack adds those little interludes to the album's sonic storyline, taking you back to those glory days of yesteryear when you could perform a flawless bajillion-hit combo against all takers. To use it, just unzip the archive into the same folder as the album itself, and your player should insert them into the right places in the playlist. Easy-peasy.

Enjoy, and let me know in the comments about your favorite exercise music. I'm always open to suggestions.

Slaying the Beast

2010-08-08T21:14:00.000-05:00

(cross-posted from my code blog)

So tell me if this sounds familiar:

goal: build up my online portfolio.
how I'll do it: maintain a regular blogging schedule (this, too, I'll write more about soon)

Yeah, not so much. Instead, the past 6 months of my life have been swallowed up by a ravenous beast known as "graduate school," that has grown more and more aggressive in the past 3 or 4 weeks. I dealt it a mortal blow when I passed my defense on Monday the 19th, but it limped along for a while, whispering to me of Target Audiences, Proper Whitespacing, and Nested Bookmarks. Today, I think it finally gasped its last breath, but I have to wait until tomorrow for the official word from the ~~graduate reviewer~~coroner.

So, this is me saying "I'm back." I have a half-dozen half-finished posts in draft, way more free time than I'm used to, and a lot to catch up on.

See you soon.

Postcards from my Recent Past

2010-08-05T00:16:00.000-05:00

So. This has certainly been an eventful year, and it's only a little better than half over. I recently returned from a 10-day trip with Sweetheart and the kids to Utah, where we had almost more fun with our extended family than humanly possible for as long as possible. Oh, and I successfully defended my Master's project, capping 6 months of insane sleep schedules and kicking off two weeks of seemingly-endless rewrites. At least, that's how it's felt. Tonight, I uploaded the final(?) version to the BYU thesis/project/dissertation website, and should hear tomorrow if it's golden... or if I have to do more revisions (sigh).

Also, in preparing a blog post over on my code blog, I was reminded of my resolutions from the beginning of the year. I thought it would be ~~not at all depressing~~fun to review those goals, and see how I'm doing:

Spiritual
goal: read the entire Old Testament this year, from start to finish
how I'll do it: make time to read daily

This is one where I'm doing horribly. We read scripture together as a family at least 4 or 5 nights a week, but it's been a while since I've had a daily personal habit. Maybe that's something I should be doing with my commute time... (ya think?!?)

Academic
goal: finish my MA project
how I'll do it: get back on my roadmap (I'll blog about this in more detail soon)

Yay, one I can report complete success! I'm done, and qualified for graduation! Not that I'll take the time off and pay the airfare to actually walk in the graduation ceremony, but I'll have the "soup label" to pin on my wall, and will be able to take the "(pending)" off of my resume's education section. WIN!

Professional
goal: build up my online portfolio
how I'll do it: maintain a regular blogging schedule (this, too, I'll write more about soon)

Any semblance of a regular blogging schedule went out the window as a direct result of my focus on my academic goal. Now that that's out of the way, hopefully I can right the Good Ship Buyog.com.

Physical
goal: lose 15 pounds, and then maintain the loss
how I'll do it:
change my diet (less junk food!)
workout at least 3 times per week
sleep at least 6 hrs every night (this is a toughie for me)

I still haven't lost that weight, but that's probably in large part due to my general lack of sleep and steady diet of refined sugars and Mountain Dew. Trying to wean myself from that little caffeine IV drip is going to be a bit of a challenge, but so far, so good. Plus, I'm exercising a couple of times a week. Sleep, I'm still working on. Speaking of which...

[Lost posts] Recent family outings

2010-07-04T11:00:00.006-05:00

Author's note: This post has been sitting in my queue, half-finished, for the past 8 months. It's a story worth telling, and seems especially fitting given the long summer weekend here in the U.S... so I'm making it public now, leaving the narrative more or less in the form I originally drafted. Enjoy, and happy 4th of July!

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The last two weekends have both been crazy/busy (crizzy?) for our family. Last weekend, as an alternative to Princess's middle school dance, we decided to go camping in the Shenandoah mountains of Virginia. Sweetheart and the kids picked me up a little early from work Friday afternoon, and we slogged through Beltway/I-66 traffic (soooo glad we chose to live where we do, so I don't have to contend with that kind of traffic on a regular basis!) We finally punched through the gridlock to the calm, quiet roads of rural Virginia, and climbed the switchbacks to Skyline Drive, on the backbone of the Blue Ridge mountains. Up and over we went, to our final destination: Luray.

Sweetheart had reserved us a place at the Jellystone Park campground, which (as the name implies) is Yogi Bear-themed. As enthusiastic watchers of the old cartoons on Boomerang, our kids thought this was just about the coolest thing ever.

We pitched our tent and fired up the propane stove, and had a great dinner of grilled cheese sandwiches, applesauce, and chocolate milk. We opted not to make a campfire, so the mandatory s'mores dessert (All-Star's favorite part, since we don't usually have marshmallows) was assembled over the propane burners. The kids weren't too sure about this at first, but warmed (sorry) pretty quickly to the idea.

To be continued...

Catching up

2010-04-18T14:16:00.000-05:00

So it's been a while since I've posted anything very news-y about my family, and felt like it was overdue (my sister thinks so too, and has told me as much in no uncertain terms!)So, let's see what's been happening...

In February...

Princess had her "New Beginnings" event at church; it's a preview for the girls of the transition they make from the children's Primary Sunday School to the Young Women's program. Each of the moms got to present a rose and a letter to their daughters, extolling their virtues. Pretty neat.
In March...

All-Star finally decided he wanted to learn to ride his bike without training wheels—and within an hour he was off and going, and has never looked back since. If it's sunny and he isn't busy on the computer or with his nose in a book (he's recently discovered the Harry Potter books, and is plowing through them), there's a pretty good chance he's out in the cul-de-sac on his bike.

Princess has been working hard this year as part of her school's robotics club, which culminated in a competition in Waldorf one fine spring Saturday. She and her team did very well, but came in just shy of the cutoff score for state qualifications. Oh well, better luck next year!
In April...

All-Star is doing little league again this year. Moving up from tee-ball, this year he's on a machine-pitch team, the Rock Hounds. Games started last Saturday, and will be ongoing for the next few months. I'm glad the weather has turned the corner, and most evenings are more sunny than cold & breezy!
Coming up...

The rest of the month is looking pretty busy too. Next weekend, Sweetheart and her mother are driving up to Pittsburgh for a women's retreat, and the kids and I will get to hang out here. Princess is in the school play—they're doing Disney's Beauty and the Beast, and she's in the ensemble as a fork (or possibly a spoon; I'm not she they've decided yet). Rehearsals have been nearly daily for the past few weeks, and will run every afternoon this week and all day on Saturday (the show goes up next week). Of course I'll post pics when we get closer to the show.

Coming out of Hibernation

2010-03-10T13:09:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was our first bonafide "nice day" in a while, so I took advantage of the opportunity to go jogging during my lunch break. I ran a pretty typical stretch from last fall, a quick 2.2-mile out-and-back that takes me about 30 minutes to do, and I did I noticed something: I've slid backwards. This is pretty typical for most athletes, I'm told: the winter conspires to keep us inside and make us fat, no matter how much time we spend on the treadmill. (full disclosure: I've not been very good about that, either, but it's not like I haven't worked out for the past few months) But it still made me much more sore than I had expected.

Anyway, due to my continued soreness from yesterday's run, I stayed in today, and instead wrestled with Blogger's new layout engine, trying to re-create as much of the old blog's look and feel as possible. I'm not there yet; the current look and feel is a compromise between the default skin I picked and the old stylesheet, and some things (like the toolbar links and sidebar text) are still ugly and borderline-unusable. But it'll get better.

Plus, I still haven't got my server configured yet to redirect/proxy/whatever the blog content from the new hosted location, so things haven't yet gelled completely. I have every confidence that, at some point later this week, they will.

My Inner Child Just Passed Out For Joy

2010-03-10T11:53:00.002-05:00

The first full trailer for Tron 2.0 just hit the interwebs yesterday, and I'm REALLY excited about seeing it. Have a look:

Well, darn.

2010-02-15T15:53:00.000-05:00

I just started playing with the new "Blogger in Beta" console this morning, which makes editing my blog posts much less painful. That made me happy.

Karma should have told me there'd be another shoe to drop.

And here it is: Blogger is phasing out support for publishing via FTP. That means it's time for me to get serious about finding a replacement, since I do NOT want to move to a hosted account (e.g. buyog.blogspot.com). Sigh.

Blizzard!

2010-02-07T11:16:00.002-05:00

Over Friday and Saturday this week, we had a huge snowstorm that dumped over a foot of snow on top of the 5-6 inches we had leftover from last weekend's storm. Total accumulation is somewhere in the neighborhood of 21-22 inches!

We're very fortunate that we haven't lost power at all through the weekend... we have friends all around in the area that have had to do without.

Here are a few pictures of the "luge" I made in the front driveway for the kids to enjoy, since we won't be driving to a sledding hill anytime soon:

Pinocchio's a Real Boy Now

2010-02-01T11:07:00.000-05:00

After many years in school, I can finally call myself a "real" linguist: I've been published!

Here's the abstract

Snow job

2010-01-31T13:53:00.003-05:00

So for the second time this winter, we're snowed in... it snowed pretty much all day yesterday, and when the final tally was done this morning, I think we came in at about 12 inches (hard to say, since it's pretty powdery and is in drifts). The roads are all still snowpacked, so our church leaders canceled services this morning, and like last time, we had our own service here at home, just the four of us (plus the cat). Allstar chose our hymns, Princess shared a scripture and spiritual thought, and my Sweetheart bore a beautiful testimony. I was getting ready to give my little lesson/talk when Allstar piped up and said he wanted to give a talk too... so he ran and grabbed his scriptures and shared a couple of his favorites. I'm so glad that "my children walk in truth."

Now, while they romp in the neighbor's snowbanks, Sweetheart and I get to go shovel the driveway.

Mutants?

2010-01-27T12:28:00.002-05:00

A pair of two-legged dogs in the Philippines.

Apparently naturally-born, they reportedly get around by hopping like Kangaroos.

Biology is weird!

On matters historic

2010-01-25T12:37:00.001-05:00

Taking a break from posts about my graduate school workload (although there's probably going to be another of those coming up later this week, and one I just posted this morning to my tech blog)

Today I wanted to post a couple of items I've been waiting to blog about for a while now, with a common thread of history. The first is a fascinating "best kept secret" of the Southern Maryland peninsula where we live, shared with me by a friend and co-worker: the Ghost Ships of the Potomac. Most people around here apparently don't even know this exists, but in a secluded corner of the Potomac River, reachable by the determined kayaker, lies an entire fleet of scuttled WWI-era wooden ships. How and why they ended up there is a fascinating story, and a perfect illustration of the astonishing inefficiency (some would say ineptitude) of government bureaucracy.

Here is a public placemarker I put in Google Maps that pinpoints the fleet, and here is a great set of pictures of the fleet from kayak-level. Someday when the kids are a little older, I'd love to rent some kayaks of our own and go check it out.

On another, not-at-all-related note, I love this short story about what an internet forum devoted to time travel might look like (hint: think of how dysfunctional most internet forums are, and add in the complexity of Grandfather paradoxes). Just like the best comedic science fiction, it's funny precisely because it's plausible.

LingMA update, 1-15-2010

2010-01-15T12:25:00.000-05:00

Per my plan for January, today is the day I'd planned to have several EFR segmentation files ready for use in testing the project software. Here's what I've gathered:

Raw data files (sentence alignment files, XCES format)

The segmentation files aren't quite in their final form yet, due to some limitations with XSLT transformations. I'll be posting the gory details of the differences, and writing a JavaScript parser to bridge them, coming later today on the Code section of my site.

The Future

2010-01-14T11:40:00.004-05:00

I love this. It really sums up what I'm trying to do with our kids:

Original here

LingMA update, 1-7-2010

2010-01-07T21:26:00.002-05:00

So, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I reset my deadline for the first cut of my project software for December 31. Recall that this software would:

parse input segmentation file, determine lexical items
invoke subject field detection module
parse input termbases for lexical item matches

Item 1 is a simple parsing task. Easy enough to implement, but only doable once I have input files to parse in the proper format. This is a task I neglected to itemize in my initial project plan, which is unfortunate because it will take me some time. I plan to work on that over the next week, so let's say January 15 as a target date by which I'll have at least 2 or 3 input segmentation files.

Item 2 is now unnecessary, as my committee chair suggested I avoid the need to integrate a subject field detector by having the user specify subject field at processing time. One open question in my mind is how we'll represent the subject field: is it simply free-text, which is much less useful, or is it from a specific ontological system? If the latter, what ontology should we use? This seemingly simple subtask suddenly looks complex again.

Item 3 is the simplest subtask in this first incarnation of the software - all we'll need is a good XML/XPath parser to do the lookup. However, as with the segfiles, writing the parser isn't enough if there's no input data to parse. So after producing some sample segfiles with identified target terms, I'll need to hand-create a TBX file with enough entries to be useful. Setting January 22nd for this deadline is likely over-optimistic — even January 29th is probably pushing it, but that's the date I'm going to set.

I just got an email from the BYU Linguistics dept secretary, saying that in order to graduate this semester I'd have to have my final thesis / project writeup delivered to my committee by the first week of February. At this stage in the process, I think it's pretty obvious that I won't be ready to defend by then. Soooooo... Now shooting for Summer term.

Resolutions

2010-01-07T12:29:00.001-05:00

This time of year, everyone always waxes philosophical about the importance of setting goals. There are others who can do that much, much better than I, so I'll just say that I try to take some time every January to evaluate where I am, versus where I'd like to be. Here's part of what I've come up with:

Spiritual

goal: read the entire Old Testament this year, from start to finish
how I'll do it: make time to read daily

Academic

goal: finish my MA project
how I'll do it: get back on my roadmap (I'll blog about this in more detail soon)

Professional

goal: build up my online portfolio
how I'll do it: maintain a regular blogging schedule (this, too, I'll write more about soon)

Physical

goal: lose 15 pounds, and then maintain the loss
how I'll do it:

change my diet (less junk food!)
workout at least 3 times per week
sleep at least 6 hrs every night (this is a toughie for me)

Relatively modest goals, all told. But it's a start.

Home from the hospital

2009-12-29T20:59:00.002-05:00

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I underwent sinus surgery yesterday, and stayed in the hospital overnight. I'm back home again now, and will be recuperating the rest of the week.

The doctor removed the packing from my nostrils today, but I've still got plastic splints on my septum for a week, and gauze under my nose to catch the drips for the next several days. Overall I feel like I've been hit by a truck - tired and sore. I'll be resting a lot this week, catching up on my reading and "guilty pleasure" movies.

And I'll probably do some MUGEN and Javascript coding too.

Happy holidays, everyone!

LingMA status report for 12-15-2009

2009-12-18T09:20:00.000-05:00

It's been too long since my last school-related update, particularly since I've passed several of my self-imposed deadlines. So here goes:

3. Evaluate available methods of determining subject field of a text

Unfortunately, I haven't really found any good, open-source solutions to this problem, so after conferring with my committee chair, we've changed course slightly: now we'll specify a subject field for the the text prior to processing it.

4. Based on results of milestones 1, 2, and 3, determine overall program architecture
- which programming language will it be written in?

I'm still not 100% sure about this, but am leaning towards either Visual Studio Express (hint: the Express version is free), or Python.

- which SMT package will we use?

Moses is pretty much the only game in town for what we're doing.

- which subject field detection method will we use?

See above; we'll ask the user instead.

- how will we invoke these three modules (subject detection, termbase lookup, and SMT)?
-- due date: Friday, November 20

Yeah... "oops" on that deadline. I'll be invoking Moses from the command-line, rather than trying to integrate its source code into my own project. The exact mechanics of how I do this depend on which programming language I choose.

5. Find source(s) for initial input termbases
-- due date: Friday, November 27

Per my committee chair, BYU has a license to a piece of software called SynchroTerm (good thing, too: a license is $1,800!), to which I may be able to get access. It identifies and extracts source/target translation pairs from bitext input, which I can then plug into a skeleton TBX file. But, since I don't currently have access to SynchroTerm, I'll start with some hand-created entries. The input bitexts will come from a selection of movie subtitle files in the OPUS/OpenSubs corpus, probably English-French since that's a common-enough European language that OpenSubs has a lot of available content, and my committee members all have at least a passing understanding of the language (I don't, but hopefully Google Translate will help me to gist things well enough to proceed).

6. Project software 0.1 alpha
- parse input segmentation file, determine lexical items
- invoke subject field detection module
- parse input termbases for lexical item matches
-- due date: Friday, December 11

Oops, this has slipped a bit. With health, work, and family constraints on my time recently, I haven't kept up quite as well as I would have liked. My new deadline for this will be December 31.

(Assuming, of course, that my surgery on the 28th goes smoothly, and the drugs don't make me completely loopy. So that's my excuse if things slip again! ;))

Thoughts on Twilight: Why Stop at Vampires and Werewolves?

2009-12-03T17:03:00.003-05:00

Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably heard that last week saw the world premiere of the latest movie in the Twilight Saga, New Moon. My wife, one of maaaaaany 30-something, married "Twi-moms", counts herself a fan of the books, and wanted to share the experience with me. I haven't read the books, and don't really have any intention of doing so, but from her descriptions and the wonders of the interwebs, I feel I've got a pretty good handle on the overall plot.

We rented Twilight a few weeks ago and watched it after the kids were in bed, and despite some issues I had with Bella's general "neediness" (that's a whole 'nother blog post), it was likable enough. So last week, while we had Grandma's free kid-watching services over the Thanksgiving weekend, we went to see New Moon, and I liked it too. But Bella's vampire-werewolf love triangle set up by the film got me thinking.

It's easy to see the Twilight story as not only a teen romance, which it certainly is, but also as something of a cautionary tale to teen girls. In a nutshell, Bella's supernatural boyfriends look human, but have a dangerous hidden nature that makes them want to push her away. For Edward the vampire, it's lust: if he gets too excited, he wants to kill her. For Jacob the werewolf, it's domestic abuse: if he loses his temper, he might hurt her. Saturday Night Live did a hilarious, spot-on parody that used Frankenstein's monsters and mummies; what dangers would they represent? And what other archetypes can we shoehorn into this same dynamic?

Frankenstein monster: the sweet-but-inarticulate guy prone to choking people
mummy: the guy with the full-body, chronic skin condition
zombie: the guy with bad eating habits
ghost: the guy that she can never touch
sasquatch: the guy that never shows up when she needs him
goblin: the guy that loves gold and jewels more than her

What other archetypes can you think of?

FAILBox

2009-11-16T07:00:00.000-05:00

This past week I had a series of experiences that in a comic book might have made me a rage-fueled Mystery Man like Mr. Furious here, and it's all because of Redbox. Here's what happened.

My family rents from Redbox kiosks quite often. A dollar a night for new-release DVDs, it's perfect for our Friday "pizza and movie night" tradition. They're convenient, they're cheap, it's great. They even have a pretty decent website, where you can search for nearby kiosk locations, reserve new releases, and so on. But recently I've found some ways in which it's proven to be more inconvenient than helpful.

This week marked the DVD debut of Pixar's latest film, Up, and we haven't seen it yet, so I thought I'd hit up the 'Box for a copy on my way home from work. Nope, all checked out. No big deal, we watched something else instead. On Wednesday, I had the day off, so I jumped on the Redbox website, found an available copy at a nearby grocery chain, and reserved it online. I rode my bike over to the store, wanting the exercise anyway and not minding the rain. But when I got to the store, I found the kiosk out of order, and I couldn't retrieve up the disk! FAIL number 1: if you're gonna let me reserve online, the least you could do is verify that the machine is actually in working order!

(temperature... rising...)

Friday afternoon, driving home from work, I thought I'd pull up the Redbox website on my Windows Mobile smartphone to see if any of the kiosks I'd be passing had a copy I could reserve. I first tried to open the site in Opera Mobile, which renders web pages in their full, non-mobile format. I clicked over to the "find a redbox" page, entered my location, tapped Search... and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Yes, I know mobile internet is slow, but after several minutes, I concluded that either it wasn't going to load, or that it wasn't even trying. FAIL number 2: poor usability on the website could be improved by offering some kind--any kind--of user feedback.

(vision... blurring...)

So then I switched over to my phone's built-in Mobile Internet Explorer (which, yes, it's a lousy browser, but sometimes it works better than Opera for certain sites, because it identifies itself as a mobile browser, and requests any available stylesheets for handheld devices). This time, it took over 5 minutes just to load the front page! Over 300 KB of data on what was essentially just a splash page with a few links! FAIL number 3: no mobile/handheld stylesheet to allow for graceful degradation. It's NOT THAT HARD!

(rage... taking... over!)

After striking out twice, I tried one more thing: maybe there was a custom Redbox app available, something I could download and install on my phone to perform the location and reservation tasks. After a few minutes of searching, I found that Redbox started work on a mobile version of their site A YEAR AGO. I'm a web developer, and I can tell you, no matter that your software lifecycle, it shouldn't take a year to do something this straightforward! That same blog article mentioned an iPhone app, and sure enough, "there's an app for that," but for all the rest of you unwashed heathens with Blackberries, Androids, Symbians, Palms, or WinMos, (you know, the 86.3% of the smartphone market not cornered by Apple?), well, sorry, no cookie for you.

To quote Mr. Furious:

AAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Okay, done ranting now. Not like this has ruined my life or taken away my birthday or anything, but sheesh, for as widespread as Redbox is becoming, and for as much as they tout their convenience, it sure seems like their mobile strategy could use some attention.

Going Back Under the Knife

2009-11-15T23:15:00.003-05:00

I guess this is just the "year of the surgery" for our whole family... my Dad (double knee replacement), Grandma (broken hip), cousin (brain tumor removal), and now me!

I've been having a lot of problems this past year or so with sinus congestion, headaches, loss of smell, chronic snoring, etc, so I finally went to see an ENT a few weeks ago. He checked me out and confirmed my suspicion: the polyps are back (again)!

I had surgery for ethmoidal polyps my senior year of highschool (in '92), and then had a second surgery (outpatient this time) in Charlotte in 2006. Well, that one apparently wasn't as effective as the first one, and they're now back in force. Plus my septum (the cartilage that separates the two sides of your nose) is bent internally, which is contributing to the nasal problems I've been having, so it'll have to be fixed as well. The long and the short of it is, he wants me to undergo surgery again. Like my first go-around, it'll mean an overnight stay in the hospital and a week of down time afterward, so we've scheduled it for the week between Christmas and New Year's. My surgery is scheduled for December 28th, and that whole week will be "movie and book time", as the scheduling nurse put it. Not looking forward to the packing and the saline irrigations <shudder>, but the down time will be kind of nice.

School progress: domain detection

2009-11-12T12:32:00.003-05:00

So this is a few days late, since task 3 on my Linguistics MA project plan was due November 6th:

3. Evaluate available methods of determining subject field of a text

... but I don't actually have much to report. After several nights of searching, I haven't come up with anything substantial in the way of open-source code for subject field detection of a text. The academic papers I have read that touch on the subject (heh) all seem to gloss over the details of any domain detection step, or simply refer to proprietary solutions to the problem with no discussion of how those solutions are implemented. When I raised this issue with my graduate adviser, he suggested I "punt" -- that is, my software will just have to ask the user to specify the domain at run-time, or run without a specific domain in mind. Anyway, I have bigger fish to fry; the domain inference was never intended to be the core of my project, rather a means to the end of coupling statistical machine translation with terminology management/lookup. So now I move on to step 4:

4. Based on results of milestones 1, 2, and 3, determine overall program architecture

Also, in unrelated news: paralleling similar moves on my Javascript and MUGEN blogs, I've moved my site navigation from the sidebar into the header. I'm also working on merging the three templates used by these blogs into a single template that can accept custom CSS for each blog to help them have a unified appearance, while allowing each to retain its unique look and feel. I've also added more links in the sidebar to my various social media profiles, if that interests you at all. I suspect for most of you it won't, but anyway, they're there.

Accountability: MA Progress for 11-1-2009

2009-11-01T21:06:00.006-05:00

Last time, when I posted my fall schedule for my grad school work, it was for a very particular purpose. In fact, it's the same reason I track my workouts on DailyBurn: holding myself accountable.

Accountability is a weird thing, especially on the Web. Several years ago, Sweetheart and I were involved with a pretty cool network marketing team, and this is where I first encountered the idea of accountability to someone else. Not as a job, mind you, and not as any kind of a prerequisite to anything, but it was in my friend's best interest that I succeed, because ultimately my success furthered his own. Now, I'm not going to debate the relative merits of this kind of a marketing system with anyone -- it's probably worth noting that we're no longer involved with that company, but most of the people we worked with are still our Facebook friends -- but this concept of holding myself accountable still has merit in getting me to do what I know I should be doing anyway. The difference, of course, if that a lot of you probably don't care all that much (well, except you, Mom). The point is, if there's a public record of my performance (or lack thereof), it makes me that much more likely to want to perform well.

With that prelude, here's what I've done so far:

Evaluate available open-source SMT packages

I've really only found one good, open-source option for Statistical machine translation: Moses. Everything else I've seen is either too new/experimental, or is Rule-based MT (like Apertium). Moses, on the other hand, is mature, in active use, and well documented: all strong points in its favor. Here's how it met my other evaluation criteria:

what programming language / API?

It's written in C++, but may well be usable strictly from the command-line without requiring any code changes to its core source code

what are the license terms?

Moses is licensed under the LGPL.

does it accept bitext inputs in XLIFF format?

No, but this may not be a problem (see task 2).

Evaluate file format(s) of OpenSubs corpus

The OpenSubs project encodes its parallel texts in a different XML dialect, called XCES. However, they also provide a Perl script to convert from this format into the input format needed by Moses. So as nice as it may be to use the XLIFF format, doing so may introduce unnecessary delays into the project because I would have to write a pair of filters: OpenSubs-to-XLIFF and XLIFF-to-Moses.

So, that's where things stand as of tonight. This week, I'll be looking into open-source methods of text categorization and subject field determination: that is, trying to figure out programmatically if an input script is from a movie about rockets and rayguns, or Victorian romance.

Ling MA tasks for the fall

2009-10-21T07:20:00.000-05:00

Many of my readers may know I've been working on a Linguistics MA for a few years now. I finished my coursework last year, and only have my project/thesis left to be done, and I've been kind of drifting a bit. Part of the reason for that has been a busy work schedule and a long commute since our move, not to mention all of the work that goes along with home ownership. But a significant portion of it also has to do with a lack of a clear through-line from here to completion. Last week, when I made this observation about myself, I resolved to do something about it. This post summarizes the results of that effort, which I have forwarded on to my graduate committee chair so I have someone to be accountable to.

Evaluate available open-source SMT packages
- what programming language / API?
- what are the license terms?
- does it accept bitext inputs in XLIFF format?
- due date: Friday, October 23

Evaluate file format(s) of OpenSubs corpus
- if not XLIFF, develop a conversion / mapping / filter
- due date: Friday, October 30

Evaluate available methods of determining subject field of a text
- what programming language / API?
- what are the license terms?
- due date: Friday, November 6

Based on results of milestones 1, 2, and 3, determine overall program architecture
- which programming language will it be written in?
- which SMT package will we use?
- which subject field detection method will we use?
- how will we invoke these three modules (subject detection, termbase lookup, and SMT)?
- due date: Friday, November 20

Find source(s) for initial input termbases
- due date: Friday, November 27

Project software 0.1 alpha
- parse input segmentation file, determine lexical items
- invoke subject field detection module
- parse input termbases for lexical item matches
- due date: Friday, December 11

Project software 0.2 alpha
- invoke SMT module for lexical items missing from input termbases
- due date: Friday, January 1

Alpha evaluation
- Evaluate software gaps w/ AKM
- due date: Friday, January 15

Project software 1.0 beta
- fill in any functional gaps identified during milestone 8
- fix any bugs identified during milestone 8
- present the system to the rest of the committee (Drs. Lonsdale & Bush)
- due date: TBD

Schedule for my evenings (~9pm-12am):

MWF: schoolwork
Sun: personal reading / family time
Tue: personal code projects / coding blog
Thu: church service / new comic book night
Sat: family time / MUGEN work

Now, to see how long I can stick to it. I intend to post at least some of my progress here in this blog, albeit in a rough form, because it'll force me to get back in the habit of writing, and will function as the rough draft for my eventual project writeup. (don't worry, though, I'll try not to make it too dry; I can always make it more academic later)

On Faith and Testifying

2009-09-14T00:57:00.000-05:00

I just read this really interesting op/ed by Orson Scott Card:
Referrals only go to the select: "One of the most important things that full-time missionaries do is build relationships with LDS Church members in their area."

I realize not all of my readers are members of my faith, and it's likely some of you have had experiences with the pushy, manipulative kind of "gospel salesman" that Card talks about in this article. As the newly-assigned head of member outreach programs for our local congregation (i.e. our ward mission), I keenly feel this responsibility to share our faith in a generous, open, no-strings-attached way.

My Sweetheart and I were involved for several years with a network marketing organization. While the people in our support team (our "upline") were all great friends and good leaders in their own right, we eventually grew uncomfortable with the whole franchise because it encouraged us to look at every family member, every friend, and every new acquaintance we met as a financial opportunity: someone else to "sell" on our marketing plan. I feel too often we in the Church take that same attitude about our missionary efforts: everyone is a potential referral to give to the missionaries, which is somehow supposed to increase our personal "clout" among the ward membership. My brethren (and sisters), these things ought not so to be, and I'm sure looking at it in this way is not at ALL what our Church leaders--and indeed the Lord Himself--would want us to be doing.

Of course, we do have the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ to share with the world, and I'll never back down on that statement. But ultimately, we as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints should be sharing our faith not out of a sense of obligation to keep the missionaries busy, nor out of a desire to show others how faithful and "missionary-minded" we are. Rather, I would like to see us live our religion in the full light of day. Not wear it on our sleeves, but not hide from it either -- in so doing, questions will arise. We can do our best to answer them, and share our joy and our faith as we do so. If we do, we can be a positive, leavening influence in the world, and be a part of our Savior's work for the souls of men.

As we do this, I know He will grant us some small measure of the joy He feels when we align our lives with His. I hope to have the faith and the courage to do so.

Who's Got the Beat?

2009-09-03T12:34:00.007-05:00

The weather here has been absolutely gorgeous lately, at least in comparison to how hot the month of August was. So, I've been enjoying my lunchtime workouts in the sun all week.

Couple that with my Zen Stone mp3 player I picked up for a song (heh) on Amazon a few weeks back, and you've got the recipe for an energizing mid-day break from the stresses of work.

As I've worked out this past few weeks, I've learned something about my music: some groups are MUCH better for power-walking (my typical lunchtime exercise of choice), others for cycling, and others don't go well with either, but are great for writing code at work. Here's what I've learned lately:

Group	Album(s)	Best Suited to...?	Notes
Blue Man Group	Audio	Coding	I absolutely love this album, so was disappointed to realize that it's not compatible with the types of workout I prefer. The beats are either too fast, too slow, or too irregular to really work up a good rhythm! :(
Fanfarlo	Reservoir	Coding, cycling	Alas, as much as I love these guys (which I really do. Seriously, check them out), their stuff is too slow to work well for my workouts. But it's great for coding or cycling.
Information Society	Peace and Love, Inc; Synthesizer	Power Walking, hurrying to class, Social Dance 101	Most people know these guys for their early stuff, like "What's on You Mind (Pure Energy)", but I'm most fond of an album from the early 90's called Peace and Love, Inc. Way back in the fall of 1993, my freshman year of college at BYU, I picked up a cassette tape version of that album to accompany me on my way to class in my walkman (wow, I'm really dating myself here). I also discovered that the first half dozen tracks have a perfect 4/4 beat that fits great for doing the cha-cha, which I and a dance partner from my Social Dance 101 class would practice together at her house. Ah, Dacia Anderson, the "older woman" -- she was a sophomore and we shared the same musical tastes. I also crushed on her much more than she cared for me (oh well, I got my Sweetheart instead, which is even better).
She	Chiptek, and Beyond, Pioneer	Power Walking!	I discovered these guys through a friend on Twitter a month or so ago and totally fell in love. Most of their stuff has a nice, steady 4/4 beat that's at the perfect cadence to match my stride.

I'm sure I've left out several good groups, but these are the ones I'm keeping in heavy rotation lately. I'll do another of these in a few months, maybe as we get closer to the holidays.

I, Aqua Snob

2009-08-24T16:06:00.002-05:00

Right up front, let me say this: I'm a Water Snob. I admit it freely; most water--even a lot of the bottled stuff--tastes nasty to me. So I tend to resort to those little drink packets to flavor my water and de-nastify it (my current favorites are Hawaiian Punch's "Lemon Berry Smash" and Crystal Light's "Wild Strawberry"). Drinking more water and less soda seems to be helping my fitness efforts, too: since starting my lunchtime workouts last month, I've lost almost 8 pounds!

That said, I've learned something about myself: when I'm working out, my snobbiness evaporates like the sweat off my bare head. I've been using a Coleman hydration backpack for several weeks now when I work out under the hot sun, and its internal bladder isn't set up to handle anything other than water. So I've been using tap water from the building I work in -- which normally I can't stand -- and it struck me on my walk today, as I sucked on the straw, that the water tasted just fine to me.

Weird.

My Day at the Library of Congress (part 2)

2009-08-17T05:01:00.002-05:00

Back in June, I wrote part 1 of my story about our visit to the Library of Congress and said that part 2 was coming the next day... Then I promptly dropped the subject. I'm thinking I need better follow-through on my writing here, eh?

So when I left off last time, my Sweetheart and the kids and I were on our way into D.C. We took the metro from Huntington station, which is always fun for the kids and mildly stressful for the grownups (but much less stressful than actually driving into / parking in the District). One quick subterranean trip later, we surfaced a few blocks south of the Library.

Following all the out-of-towners into the main visitor's lobby, we uttered the requisite oohs and aahs at its impressive architecture (which is quite impressive). After pausing a few moments to take it all in (and take a few candid photos of Sweetheart and the kids), I asked a patron where to go for, you know, the books, telling him I was trying to find a particular book for my journal submission. He directed me to a sub-basement tunnel leading to one of the other buildings, where I could sign up for my "library card". So I left Sweetheart with the kids to look at the Gutenberg bible, Bob Hope memorabilia, Gershwin's piano, and the rest of the public exhibits, and took the elevator down to the catacombs (okay, not really, but it did kind of feel that way).

When I got to the right office, I filled out my request for access and waited my turn. Not much of a wait, actually (it was, reportedly, slower than usual: bonus!). They took my picture and gave me my official "library reader" card, then I sat down with another gentleman whose job it is to help new readers find what they're looking for, in exchange for their self-worth as a human being and grad student. When I gave him the call number and title, he kind of snorted and launched into a tirade about the uselessness of my chosen field, and Liberal Arts disciplines in general. A few times, I wanted to interject some rebuttal or counter to his points, but I bit my tongue for the sake of the mission: closing time was looming within a few hours and I might end up needing all the time I could get (I also wondered if you could get kicked out for arguing with the grumpy old librarian, and didn't want to risk it). At the time I idly wondered if goading young researchers was some form of "hazing," and it wouldn't surprise me if it is.

Anyway, after I refused to take the bait when Mister Sunshine belittled my research subject, he told me that my book - if I still really wanted to get it, and not abandon such a useless endeavor in the face of his soul-crushing logic - was in the main reading room. Cool! That's the place you always see pictures of, and one Ben Gates got the President's secret book from in National Treasure 2! Keen! So back through the catacombs I marched, and up to the research floor.

I checked my bag at security: no cameras, smartphones, or other potentially clandestine devices are permitted in the main Reading Room, although they've recently made an exception for laptops in one area of the floor. If I'd known this ahead of time, I would have brought my laptop; instead, my arsenal of research tools was stripped down to a small pad of paper and a pencil. Worse, the woman at the circulation desk told me the wait for my request could be upwards of an hour! Without email, Google Reader, and Patiences solitaire, my usual time-killing companions! Horrors! I noted with some interest (and a little concern) how dependent I've become on this little miracle of hand-held computing (it's with a liberal helping of irony that I'm writing this tonight from said smartphone).

So now I was in the Reading Room... and yes, it is as mind-blowingly big as it seems in its photos. And, like most of the government buildings in Washington, it was loaded to the gills with symbolic art, almost absurdly, overwhelmingly so.

With nothing else to do but sit and quietly wait, I began to write in my small notepad:

6/27/2009
So... Here I am in the Library of Congress's main Reading Room! It's quite an impressive place, just as amazing as it looked in "National Treasure" when Nic Cage tried to steal the President's secret book. I'm sitting directly under the huge rotunda, looking up at art celebrating our civilization's heritage: philosophy from Greece, religion from Judea, emancipation from France, administration from Rome, etc. Awe-inspiring is too small a word.

About that time, my book showed up -- in less than the predicted hour, so they were 2 for 2 on efficiency for me that day. Within 5 minutes, I'd found the quote I'm using in my paper, and had made a note of its page number and a few other relevant details. Here's the funniest part of the whole effort: I knew the answer all along: years ago, I learned from Douglas Adams the "Ultimate Answer" to the "Ultimate Question," and that was indeed the answer I'd spent this entire day seeking (and all this time blogging about it!):

The missing page number was 42.

Testing... Is This Thing On?

2009-08-06T08:49:00.001-05:00

So supposedly Blogger has this cool "mail to blog" feature, which would be pretty cool for short updates that aren't very HTML-heavy (if there are pictures, tables, lists, etc, I think I'd prefer to use the full editor).

Anyway, this is my test of the mail feature. Hopefully Wordpress has something similar, since I'm in the process of migrating to that platform (http://blog.buyog.net). More on that soon.

Pioneer Camp 2009

2009-07-26T22:47:00.004-05:00

In honor of LDS Pioneer Day, the anniversary of the early saints' arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, our family decided to go camping. In some small way, we figured, this would help us to better understand the sacrifices made by these early members of the Church.

In a way, it did: first, we got rained on Friday night as we attempted to cook our dinner. Admittedly it was a short and light rain, but enough to keep the fire from really taking off (Although I suspect lighter fluid would've helped too). We slept on hard ground in the sweltering heat/humidity (it got better as the night wore on, though). Mary and Sarah got woken up in the middle of the night by rescue sirens and a life flight helicopter (we found out later that there was a fatal 2-car collision involving a drunk driver, happening only a few miles from our campsite). Of course the pioneers wouldn't have had that sort of an experience, but I suspect there were the occasional nighttime encounter with hostile indians or wildlife.

Saturday morning we got up and the kids and I went over to the campground playground to let off a little steam before breakfast: orange juice, bananas & blueberry muffins. Mary closed the muffin baggie to keep out unwanted bugs and such, and came over to join us briefly. We returned to find this:

Those are bite marks... clear through the bag and into a bunch of the muffins! (Note there's also a bite mark in one of the bananas, but apparently the bitter outer peel was enough to discourage the little thieves from pursuing that effort any further.) Looking up, then, we noticed the camp surrounded by the perpetrators, who brazenly remained at the scene of the crime:

Apparently 35 years of campground life has conditioned these squirrel colonies to the "easy life" among us careless humans. Next year, we'll know to keep stuff in the cooler!

Anyway, we went on to have a nice morning, swimming in the campground pool and exploring the southern coast of our little peninsula of Maryland.

Happy Pioneer Day, everyone!

Hiligaynon Hymns

2009-07-19T23:52:00.005-05:00

When I was on my LDS mission in the early 90's, I grew to love the many different languages spoken by the people I was serving among in the Philippines, particularly Hiligaynon (usually called Ilonggo by the people). In subsequent years I've even worked with it fairly frequently in my academic career (in fact I've got a paper on Hiligaynon being published in an upcoming journal -- more on that when it happens). And while I never really got what I would call "fluent," I can modestly say that I felt pretty comfortable with using the language day in and day out for nearly two years.

One of the things I noticed about LDS church services in my part of the Philippines was that they didn't have very many hymns in their own language, and felt that was a shame (this in spite of the fact that they almost always sang from the English hymnal anyway). So I took it on as something of a personal challenge to translate some of my favorite English hymns (LDS and otherwise) into servicable Hiligaynon. In doing so, I try to follow a couple of rules:

As much as possible, the lyrics should fit the meter of the tune.
The meaning should be as close to the original as possible.
Where practical, keeping the original rhyme pattern would be keen.

Given that it generally takes more syllables to say something in Hiligaynon than it does in English, this is especially challenging. So I'm pleased when something works well, and when it does, I'm going to share what I've created. In that spirit, here's one I've been working on lately, God Loved Us, So He Sent His Son an LDS standard inspired by John 3:16

God Loved Us, So He Sent His Son
Hiligaynon Translation	Original English
1(a). Tungod kita ginpalangga (Because we were loved) Sang Dios, iya ginpadala (by God, He sent) Ang Bugtong nga Anak niya: (His Only Begotten Son) Si Jesus, ang Manunubos. (Jesus, the Redeemer)	1. God loved us, so he sent his Son, Christ Jesus, the atoning One, To show us by the path he trod The one and only way to God.
1(b). Si Jesus nagpakita 'ta (Jesus showed us) Ang (pa)agi sa kabuhi n'ya: (The way through His life) Primero kag isa lamang (The first and only) Dalan nga padulong sa Dios. (Path that leads to God)

Yeah, it takes two Hiligaynon verses to match the content of one English verse. But sometimes it works the other way around (for example, try to define the Hiligaynon word "palagpat" in English: now that's a meaningful concept!)

Home

2009-07-12T11:00:00.002-05:00

By the time you read this, we'll be in our new home.

I'm writing this on Friday afternoon, but scheduling it to be published as my regular Sunday post. This afternoon I'm running over to pick up the U-Haul, tonight we load it, and tomorrow morning we head for Great Mills. We've got friends from church lined up on both ends to help us load/unload, so that should go reasonably smoothly.

The one unknown is when we'll have an internet connection again. I recently found out that I can use the data connection on my T-Mobile smartphone as a laptop modem, so if need be I may try that, but otherwise expect me to be offline for at least the next week or two.

1600-year-old Bible now online

2009-07-07T10:46:00.003-05:00

I just read an interesting article on CNN.com about an ancient biblical text that has been put online for people to access and research. What's most interesting about this is that it isn't the same as the standard bible text that modern Christianity has come to accept as canonical. Contrary to what many people seem to think, the Bible didn't spring fully-formed from antiquity in its present form, so to me, any argument of "Biblical Infallibility" rings rather hollow.

I'll be interested to check it out to see what differences it has versus the King James edition we use in the LDS church, and if any of those changes reflect ideas that we've embraced through modern prophetic revelation.

Long Weekend

2009-07-05T22:07:00.005-05:00

This was a "long weekend" in more ways than one. Friday, since my office was closed in observance of the Independence Day holiday, we drove the kids down to the house to take the first load of "stuff" (kitchen supplies, pantry foods, some of the kids' toys, etc). Mowed the lawn while Mary and the kids relaxed and rested in the shade, ate lunch at the nearby Cici's Pizza buffet (not great, but not bad for $20 for the 4 of us), ran errands in getting accounts and memberships and utilities set up. We didn't get back home to Alexandria until after 9 that night. Tiring!

Yesterday, July 4th, we drove out to Amissville, Virginia, where some good family friends live, to join them for the baptism of their second son, Dallin, who just turned 8. Our kids reall hit it off with he and his 10-yr-old brother Nathan, and after the baptism we went back to their house for the afternoon, for a barbeque, lots of basketball and other outdoor tomfoolery, watching parts of the Star Wars prequels 1 and 2 (which my kids have never seen), and of course fireworks. Drove home when we'd finished blowing stuff up, and rolled in to our rental house's driveway about midnight.

Bringing us to today: our last Sunday in our current ward (a local LDS congregation is called a "ward", for reasons I'm not entirely clear on; but I digress). In the past year we've made a ton of friends here, so it's really hard to leave. Thank goodness for email and Facebook!

The house is now officially ours!

2009-06-30T23:02:00.003-05:00

(Well, ours and the bank's, anyway =P). We finally closed & settled this afternoon, and will be moving on the 11th of July (we didn't want to do it this weekend, what with Independence Day and all)

Tomorrow (evening, likely) look for part 2 of my Library of Congress story.

My Day at the Library of Congress (part 1)

2009-06-28T21:17:00.005-05:00

So yesterday afternoon I had the opportunity to go and do research for my ongoing Master's degree at the Library of Congress! This was one of those things that I never knew I wanted to do until the chance came, then I realized how unique the opportunity was, and got pretty excited about it.

This all came about due to a paper I submitted to the journal of Oceanic Linguistics a while ago as part of my Linguistics MA coursework. To my surprise, it was accepted for publication! Yay me! The editor, John Lynch, sent me back the comments from his two reviewers that I needed to account for in my final revision, and I promptly got busy with work and school and family, and forgot all about it. Fast forward 14 months, to now: John emailed me, asking in the most diplomatic terms possible if he was ever, actually, going to get my final revision so her could publish it. D'oh!

So, properly chastened, I spent my nights last week working on the necessary revisions, and submitted something to him last Thursday. All was well with the world, and I could get some sleep! Yay again!

Except for one minor quibble, John was happy with this revision. But the quibble was kind of a big one: I had included a direct quote from one of my sources, a grammar text for the language I'm working with (Hiligaynon), but I neglected to include the page number. With a direct quote, that's crucial. With that one change, John informed me, he'd be able to format the article for publication. One little problem: I'm not in Provo anymore, and can't drag my little old self over to the BYU library to look the quote up!

So my options were to rewrite the paragraph without the quote (which would be doable, but it would hurt my argument to not have that author's direct input anymore), or to find another copy of the book closer at hand. When I turned to Google's academic search engine, Google Scholar, I found that there was a copy close by -- in the Library of Congress! I immediately made plans for my expedition into "the District."

To be continued tomorrow...

The Problem of Categorization

2009-06-22T04:20:00.004-05:00

This weekend I've been working on adding Blogger-powered "labels" (some would call them "tags" or "categories") to my three major blogs. My programming blog was pretty easy - only 6 months' worth of content, much of it in service of a single goal (using HTML5+Javascript to recreate 8-bit Nintendo games). My MUGEN blog was a little tougher, because I have almost as long a history on that blog as I do here (I started it back in August of 2002), but ultimately the focus is pretty narrow: creating playable characters for the MUGEN engine. So each character project gets a tag, and I'm pretty much done.

Here on my eclectic root blog...? Not so easy to distill things down to a handful of themes. I originally started it to talk about my family, and I often do. But sometimes I also talk politics. I post funny stuff I find online. I occasionally embed videos that I think are worth sharing. And lately I've started talking more overtly about my faith. So for now, those seem to be the major themes: family, funny stuff, faith. Politics and viral videos to add savor to the stew. But then there are the completely random posts that defy categorization.

Given all of this, the temptation is there to go overboard and add a couple dozen categories, trying to accurately reflect each post's content. But that destroys the value of the categories themselves, if I have 50 tags with only one or two posts each. On the other hand, if I go too broad, I risk making tags that are too useless when it comes to finding specific posts or topics.

And besides... is this blog simply a sum of its strongest recurring themes? Looking back over the past 7 years' worth of my shared online self, I'd like to think it's more than that. I've rediscovered quite a few gems hidden in the rough, some of my favorite posts from the past few solar revolutions. My "greatest hits," if you will:

Finding Meaning in the Incomprehensible (1 Feb 2003)
War Against "the Other" (28 Apr 2003)
Fire Chief Ben to the Rescue (11 Jul 2004)
The Longest Hour of the Week (5 Sep 2004)
"Mostly Charming" (19 Nov 2005)
Who killed the electric car? (24 May 2006)
Going bald for a friend (17 Jun 2007)
Some armchair political commentary (16 Sep 2008)
Luthor 2008 (27 Oct 2008)
Thoughts on Being Halfway to 70 (27 Feb 2009)
LDS Q & A (8 May 2009)

I'm also planning on adding an experimental "tag cloud" to the right sidebar; I've prototyped it on my MUGEN blog but it still needs work, so look for that soonish.

-edit- I've added the tag cloud to the sidebar, and updated the ones on my other blogs. Fairly happy with how it's turned out.

"Social" Networking

2009-06-14T16:43:00.005-05:00

(Not my image)

Last night I came across this image and accompanying article about how fellow BYU alum Joe Pemberton handles the explosion of different social media experiences. As a fairly new user of Twitter and Facebook, and long-time user of LinkedIn, this caught my attention... and I agree with Joe 100%. Twitter is fun, LinkedIn is useful, but neither is very "social", at least in my use of the term. I finally caved and registered at Facebook for two reasons: 1, my wife has been using it for a while and is enjoying how it puts her in contact with so many old friends, and 2, I needed an online social network where I could actually be social.

So that being the case, moving forward I'm going to treat Twitter and LinkedIn primarily as professional networking tools, and use Facebook only for friends and family. But if you are either of those, feel free to friend me there and I'll respond next time I'm on.

For the class of 2009

2009-06-08T21:44:00.000-05:00

Missed my scheduled post here yesterday, so today you get a two-fer. Here's the first.

I just found this Carnegie Mellon graduation speech from 2007 by Bill Cosby. GREAT speech, from a GREAT man, give it a listen.

"Don't talk yourself into not being you."

Visualizing 3 dimensions, in only 2

2009-06-08T09:50:00.000-05:00

Recently I've been playing with a tool developed by Microsoft Research, called Photosynth. Maybe you've seen it, MS has promoted it with a couple of high-profile projects, most recently a ground-level view of the Obama inauguration.

I've thought for a long time that MS Research would be a very cool place to work, and I even applied to intern there a few years ago (short version: my target team was filled and they didn't have any other good place for a Computational Linguist MA candidate at that time). They're involved in some pretty cool research projects, and it seems like it would be an incredibly exciting work environment. With this tool, I'd say they definitely hit on something REALLY cool.

The basic idea behind Photosynth is that you upload a bunch of photos of a target location / object / whatever, and through its sophisticated algorithms, Photosynth stitches them all together in a sort of virtual 3-dimensional "world" that you can then navigate. As you move from point to point within the viewer, the different pictures shift and distort to fit together, with the gaps between images sort of "sketched in" based on calculated inferences made by the Photosynthing process. to attempt to convey perspective. It's a little bit like Google Street View, but much more immersive, especially when you take into account the ability to generate your own Photosynths to add to the fun.

I'm in the process of trying to put together a Photosynth-y tour of our new house, but I don't yet have enough coverage for the software to connect all of the pieces... so I have a nice panorama of the kitchen, another of the living room, and one of the back deck, but you can't easily get from one to another. So... I need to get more pictures and try again. Hopefully I'll be able to post that soon. Meanwhile, here are some interesting places to start.

We've got a house!

2009-05-31T21:08:00.007-05:00

So, some of you know that we've been on the hunt for a house for a few months now. After several false starts, yesterday we found it. It's in Great Mills, Maryland, about an hour southeast of my office in Fort Washington, but I work with a guy that lives down here and he's already volunteered to make room for me in his carpool, so we're set as far as that goes. It's 5 minutes from Matthew's new elementary school, 5 minutes the other direction from Sarah's middle school (shudder), and 10 minutes from our new church. Plus tons of shopping and whatever else we need. But it's at the back end of a fairly new but now well-established neighborhood, down a quiet street that ends in a cul-de-sac and is bordered by national park land. Quiet, and nice.

So, anyway, after looking at it and several other houses yesterday, we put an offer in on this one, and this afternoon our realtor called to let us know they'd accepted our offer! Huzzah!

The house itself looks great, has plenty of space for our family without feeling ostentatious, and has a really great spirit about it that Mary and I both felt from the minute we walked in. The current owners are a young couple with two small daughters, he's a Naval officer being transferred to a new base, so they're grateful to be able to sell before they leave. As far as that goes, it's in a great area for resale, close to several military and government contracting installations, plus there's a growing technology park in nearby Hollywood and California (apparently the locals have a sense of humor, judging by their place names).

For pics of the house, click the post title to see the realtor.com page (which should stay up for at least a little while; we don't settle until the end of June). By the time that goes down, I should have some more pictures up here on my server where I have more control over them. Anyway, tonight we're all feeling very blessed to have a new home within our budget and with nearly every important thing from our wish list. It's been a good day.

-Update, 6/8/2009: the Realtor.com posting is indeed down now, but I'm trying to do a Photosynth of the house as a sort of virtual walkthrough. If I'm successful I'll post a link here; meanwhile, enjoy the picture I added of the façade.

A day in the life

2009-05-29T16:48:00.003-05:00

Somewhat typical exchange at our house that just occurred a few minutes ago:

My wife: Okay, I just got the pizza in the oven!

My 11-yr-old daughter: ... and I'm almost done with this math worksheet!

My 6-yr-old son: ... and I'm reading Jesus the Christ!

Oh, life! I had no idea when I was a kid what surprises parenting would bring. :)

Catching up on the picture pool

2009-05-24T17:18:00.002-05:00

I don't think I've mentioned it yet, but I set up a YouTube account for our family videos that I want to share with the public. It's at YouTube.com/RyAndMary, and includes a few school concerts the kids have been involved in this school year.

I've also recently done a picture dump from my phone, so here are some highlights from recent months:

The kids at a recent "art night" event at school

Matthew playing Tee Ball

Picking our own strawberries at a local farm

Sarah at the recent Daddy/Daughter Night at church

Matthew at our church fathers & sons campout last weekend

Well, beat me with a wet noodle!

2009-05-19T12:29:00.003-05:00

Not an auspicious start to my new publishing schedule goal... I posted my MUGEN update on Friday, and my Code Monkey update today, but I totally missed my goal in terms of posting something here on the root blog this past Sunday. I take full responsibility for the lapse, and promise that my next post here will be more substantial.

The house-hunt is still ongoing, the old farmhouse fell through for a couple of reasons that I don't really want to go into, and the few other times we've been interested in writing an offer, we were either outbid by someone else, or priced out of it by high taxes or HOA fees. I'll update when we find something good.

Hard to believe it, but we're coming into the end of the kids' school year already... even in Fairfax County, where the school year runs to the middle of June, we're down under 30 days now. Tee-ball is in full swing, and Irish dance is preparing for the end-of-the-year recital. So expect some cool pictures soon, and maybe even some video on our family YouTube channel.

Update and scheduling notes

2009-05-15T12:00:00.003-05:00

For the past month or so, I've been following Chris Guillebeau's blog and Twitter updates thanks to a link from Seth Godin. Even though the stuff these guys talk about has little or nothing to do with my "bread and butter" sources of income (computer and linguistic consulting), I find it fascinating to see how people transforming the collective zeitgeist about what a "career" can and should look like for our generation. Highly inspiring stuff. Case in point: in his recent publishing sensation, 279 Days to Overnight Success, Chris suggested that bloggers who, like myself, aspire to extend their personal reach, should establish a regular publication schedule for that blog. So, that's the main point of this post, which I'm going to cross-post to my MUGEN and coding blogs as well.

Moving forward, I'm going to try an experiment, and we'll see if I can stick to it. If so, I may expand it out at some point, but this is probably a good place to start:

Sundays: I will post something on my root blog

Tuesdays: I will post something on my coding blog

Fridays: I will post something on my MUGEN blog

So look for something new from me here this Sunday (probably part 2 of my dialogue with Marcus), or tonight if you also read my MUGEN news.

LDS Q & A - part 1

2009-05-08T15:54:00.004-05:00

For the past week or so, my friend Marcus McElhaney and I have been engaged in a dialogue about several sticking points he has with my faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (often referred to as the Mormon, or LDS church). I usually don't address my faith quite so directly on this blog, but I felt that this was a good opportunity for open discussion of why I believe, as do so many of my fellow Mormons, the things that I believe. Marcus recently posted on his Christian apologetics blog a list of questions about certain points of difference between the LDS theology and that of mainstream, creedal Christianity, asking for my thoughts on these. I thank him for opening this dialogue; it shows me that he has a more open mind than many who profess to do so.

The format for Marcus's questions comes from a story on FoxNews.com from last year, in which a spokesman for the LDS church responded to several commonly-asked questions about Mitt Romney's faith. He took this list of questions and the church's answers, and posed his own follow-up questions. For the remainder of this post, and probably the next several, I'll address Marcus's questions directly, using the following format: 1, the original doctrinal question and the LDS Church's response to the media in black; 2, Marcus's follow-up questions in red; and 3, my answers in green. In some cases I have conflated multiple questions into a single block due to their similar content.

Q: Why do some call the Church a cult?

A: For the most part, this seems to stem from a lack of understanding about the Church and its core doctrines and beliefs. Under those circumstances it is too easy to label a religion or other organization that is not well-known with an inflammatory term like 'cult.' Famed scholar of religion Martin Marty has said a cult means a church you don't personally happen to like. We don't believe any organization should be subjected to a label that has come to be as pejorative as that one.

While I have to agree that no one wants to be labeled a "cult", the word does not historically mean "a religion that I don't like." It has been watered down culturally because no one cares about truth much anymore. I would define "cult" in this context:

a religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader.

Basically, leaving aside the question of if Mormomism matches this definition for minute I'm sure most people would agree that The "Charles Mansion Family", "Jim Jones' People Temple", and "David Koresh's Branch Davidians" all fit the definition I'm using. These were all false, living outside of conventional society under a charismatic leader. I'd rather not get into if Mormonism if false in the writing, but I'd like to use this definition to answer the question because the Church didn't answer the question in this article. I invite anyone to tell me where I can find a a better answer to this question.

This is being rather disingenuous, I think. First, I see the definition you site comes from dictionary.com, which contains several other definitions for the term, some of which apply equally to evangelical Christianity (e.g. "a particular system of religious worship, esp. with reference to its rites and ceremonies."). The point isn't if we meet such a definition; I would argue that you and I both belong to cults in the "historical" meaning of the term, as you put it. Rather, the point is that the term itself has come to be used as a perjorative epithet, particularly since the definition you cite is a relative one, subject to the belief system of the person employing it (that is, what is "unorthodox" to you, may not be to someone else). The question was why some call us a cult, and the answer, I think, adequately addresses that.

Going a little further, perhaps a more complete answer would be that evangelical Christians believe us to be a cult because we have a different conception of who God the Father and Jesus Christ are, a conception that is outside the typical parameters of modern Christian sects, but is quite in harmony with what many primitive Christian churches believed (for a discussion of this, see chapter 3 of Barry Bickmore's book, Restoring the Ancient Church:
Joseph Smith and Early Christianity).

Q: Does the Mormon Church believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God?
Q: Does the Church believe in the divinity of Jesus?
Q: Does the Church believe that God is a physical being?

A: Mormons believe Jesus Christ is literally the Son of God, the Savior and Redeemer, who died for the sins of humankind and rose from the dead on the third day with an immortal body. God, the Father, also has an immortal body.

The problem I have is with the words "literally" and "God, the Father, also has an immortal body." Does this mean that Mormons believe in Jesus' virgin birth, as Christians have preached for 2000 years? Or do they believe that Jesus was conceived in a sex-act between God, the Father, and Mary? If so, where do they have proof for that? Where is the proof that God, the Father, has an immortal body? Can you show that from the Bible? John 4 :24 says:

God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.

Is Jesus God made flesh or not? Is it true that Mormons believe that Jesus is Lucifer's older spirit brother? If so where do find that in the Bible?

I've already answered the question about the physical nature of God and the divinity of Christ by pointing to Bickmore's book (the topic is much longer than I can tackle in this setting). Your question about Lucifer is interesting to me, because I never realized anyone had a problem with this doctrine... from my childhood I have always accepted the idea that we lived with God the Father before being born into mortality, but in researching mainstream Christian thought, I see that this belief (common among early Christians; see Bickmore's book again, the section titled "The Pre-Existence in Early Christianity") was abolished several centuries after Christ's ascension, and would therefore not be found among Protestant teachings.

Perhaps a simpler statement of LDS belief is this: if God created all things, then it follows that He also created Lucifer, yes? We believe that all spirits are creations (and therefore children) of our Heavenly Father:

Furthermore we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live? (Hebrews 12:9)

In that sense, then, Lucifer and Jesus are siblings... just as Christ is our Elder Brother as well (He being the Firstborn). Notwithstanding this shared spiritual heritage, however, Lucifer elected to rebel against the Father, was cast out of Heaven, and became Satan:

7 And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,

8 And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.

9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

10 And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.(Revelation 12:7-12)

As to where in the Bible we find support for this doctrine of a pre-mortal existence, look no further than Jeremiah (I believe this scripture is commonly cited by those who oppose abortion):

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. (Jeremiah 1:5)

What is your understanding of this verse, if not that God knew us before our entrance into mortality?

Q: Does the Mormon Church believe that God and Mary had physical sex to conceive Jesus?

A: The Church does not claim to know how Jesus was conceived but believes the Bible and Book of Mormon references to Jesus being born of the Virgin Mary.

Funny Apostle Bruce R. McConkie seemed to think he knew how Jesus was conceived. Doe this mean that Mormons no longer believe this?

Just because Elder McConkie's book was titled "Mormon Doctrine" doesn't mean that everything he wrote is, in fact, revealed doctrine. We believe that man is flawed and fallible, and even when holding prophetic office is subject to error (see, for example, Jonah's refusal to understand God's plan for the people of Nineveh). I can tell you that we do not have a definitive answer as to how Christ was conceived, only speculation from McConkie and others, but ultimately it doesn't matter. The scriptural account tells us only that Mary was "overshadowed" by the Holy Ghost (see Luke 1:35), and that's enough -- as you said yourself, there are some things (such as the knowledge of how God enacted the virgin birth) that simply are not pertinent to our salvation.

I hope this helps clarify some things. I think it's important to state that all of this comes not of intellectual discourse or scholarly research, but from thoughtful, prayerful communication with the Lord through the Holy Spirit. My testimony of the Lord's reality and my understanding of these principles comes not from scientific proof (Douglas Adams once famously said that any such proof would cause God to vanish in a "puff of logic"), but from the revelation and confirming power of His Holy Spirit. I have felt it powerfully move my life in countless, undeniable ways. I know He lives.

My kingdom for a tamale!

2009-05-05T20:28:00.002-05:00

So seeing as how today was Cinco de Mayo, my wife and I decided it would be great to have tamales and chili for dinner. (Not that our highly-food-sensitive kids would go for it, but hey, they don't mind having quesadillas 3 or 4 times a week, so there you go). So, off to the store I go, in search of a can of tamales. We used to have these quite often growing up; I guess they were pretty cheap, and made for some good, hearty eatin'. Mmm, mmm, good!

Brief tangent: as a kid, I had a good friend who was Japanese, who I got to introduce to the wonder that is the canned tamale. But being from a culture where food may come wrapped in rice paper, he didn't know that you're not supposed to eat the tamale wrapper. His first impression of this crazy North American cuisine? "Tastes like paper!"

Anyway, craving tamales, I rolled into the local supermarket. But, after 15 fruitless minutes trolling the international aisle, the canned foods aisle, the chips-and-dip aisle, even the frozen food section... I was forced to admit that Giant doesn't carry canned tamales in Virginia! Curses! Calling the wife to get her opinion, we decided to punt on our plan (the kids' quesadillas were already made, and getting cold). So instead, we had taco salad and frozen chicken taquitos. Oh well, it was still tasty.

Feliz Cinco De Mayo!

JSConf Wrap-up

2009-04-25T22:40:00.003-05:00

Had a great experience at JSConf this weekend. I just posted a summary of my related tweets from the event, on my "code monkey" blog

Looks like the seller is living in the 2007 housing market, rather than 2009. We're both about THIS close to dropping the offer and looking for something better with a seller willing to play ball.

JSConf 2009

2009-04-24T21:45:00.002-05:00

Today and tomorrow I'm attending a local JavaScript developers' conference here in Arlington. Tons of great stuff today, I tried to tweet about it as it happened -- it's all tagged #jsconf

I also added a link on the right to my Twitter stream, and a widget that includes my latest Tweet. Yep, I think this Tweeting thing is going to work out pretty well.

In farmhouse-related news, the seller's balking a little at our offer. We think she's getting ready to counter, but it's been over two days and my wife's getting antsy. Watching House Hunters on HGTV didn't help, methinks.

Twitterpated

2009-04-20T22:51:00.003-05:00

So there's this thing called Twitter. I've been hearing about it (and pretty much ignoring it) for the past several months, especially when the mainstream media started talking about how awesome it was. (Me and the mainstream media? Not on speaking terms these days.)

Anyway, after discovering a couple of new people's blogs today and reading Havi Brooks's post about what Twitter is and why I should care... well, it made me care.

So I started out small, following a few people whose blogs/vlogs I've followed for a while, and a few famous people just for kicks. And I followed Havi too, since her post had convinced me to kick the tires on this thing in the first place.

Hoo, I wasn't prepared for what happened next. She replied with a tweet of her own, recommending people follow me... and now I've magically got 20-plus followers I've never met before! To perpetuate the misquote: "You like me! You really like me!" Clearly, this thing has a mind of its own...

Now, the only challenge left is to write something worth reading. Gah!

Anyway, if you're into that sort of thing, you can follow my Twitter-self here.

Farm house

2009-04-20T18:47:00.003-05:00

I told my Mom & Dad yesterday about a little farmhouse on an acre and a half about 45 minutes southeast of my work, in a little community called Welcome. Here's a link to a site with some pictures and more info.

We're meeting with our realtor on Wednesday to write up an offer; it's a bit less than she's asking, but we feel it's a fair price given that we're going to have to do some moderate renovation work (already got a guy lined up for that too). Will let y'all know more when we do.

Springtime is here!

2009-04-11T00:16:00.003-05:00

Looks like winter is finally beating a hasty retreat here in Washington DC. This week was the kids' spring break from school, so Mary went down with them to spend the week with their "Grandma R." That left me here to try and get some things done with school & other side projects. Now, it's last Friday night (or early Saturday morning, depends on your perspective), so how did I do?

Fair to middling.

The house didn't completely fall apart, which is good.

I spent the past 3 days on a "detox" diet called the "fruit flush," and feel healthier than I have in quite a while.

I got some school work done, but not everything I'd hoped.

I got some of my MUGEN work done, but again, not everything I'd shot for.

Dangit.

But in happy news, the transcripts for last weekend's amazing LDS General Conference talks just hit the web today. And tomorrow I'm driving down to pick up my family and bring them home again. :) So, all in all, especially seeing life through the lens of Seven Pounds, which I just watched tonight, I have to say my life is pretty darn awesome.

Now, to live it with purpose.

Seven Pounds

2009-04-10T23:55:00.003-05:00

Wow.

I just watched the movie Seven Pounds, by Will Smith and Rosario Dawson. That man can ACT.

I'm profoundly moved by what I saw, but I have no idea how to express my feelings about the experience without being a total spoiler-sport.

See, the whole first half (heck, 3/4ths) of the movie I had no clue what was going on. This was on purpose, I'm sure, but it was incredibly maddening. I'm doing the "bachelor" thing this week while Mary & kids are at her Mom's for spring break, so I'm sitting here shouting at the movie to tell me what the heck is going on. Eventually it didn't have to, I figured it out on my own. (thanks for nothing, movie!) BUT, because of that kind of story structure, I can't tell you my thoughts on the whole thing without spoiling it for you! Hmm.

I can say this much, as you figure it out in opening scenes: Will Smith is apparently suffering from some major trauma in his past, and is in L.A. trying to help... some people. Who... have something in common that isn't immediately obvious. I can't really say more without ruining the effect of seeing it unfold yourself.

I'll say up-front: the movie was rated PG-13, and had a little language and a brief "scene of sensuality" (not graphic, but quite obviously not appropriate for everyone), so if those things are a barrier to you, get a ClearPlay DVD player or the EFR software. But I definitely feel like it was worth my time and emotional investment.

At the risk of revealing some details that you can find in a 30-second Google search, this much I'll say (feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph if you don't want to know): in the end I found myself resolving become an organ donor, stop using my cellphone while driving, and tell my family I love them every day of my life.

What joy shall fill my heart...

2009-03-21T16:14:00.005-05:00

Yesterday my Mom called to let me know that my "Grandma Dini" (Dad's Mom) had passed away in her sleep the previous night. While we're sad that she's left us behind to continue on her soul's immortal journey, I think about all the people she's with today in paradise: her parents, her sister and brothers, her good husband, and most especially her Savior. She's been such a faithful follower of Christ, a good wife and mother and grandmother and great-grandmother, who lived to see her posterity blossom and flourish in the rich soil of faith that she prepared for us. I have every confidence that when she peacefully passed through that eternal veil she heard Him say to her, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."

I love you, Grandma. I miss you already, and look forward to the day I'll see you again.

Thoughts on being halfway to 70

2009-02-27T01:44:00.004-05:00

A week has passed since my birthday, and I'm only now taking the time to say something about it. And in doing so, I find that I don't really have much of anything very interesting to say. So, instead, an experiment into personally-relevant statistics for my past 35 years:

Family relationships

Number of great-grandparents I've known personally: 3
Number of grandparents I've known personally: 5 (all of them)
Number of cousins: 2
Number of siblings: 1
Number of marriages: 1
Number of children: 3

Places I've lived

Number of homes I grew up in: 5
Number of cities I grew up in: 3
Number of counties/states I grew up in: 1
Number of foreign countries I've visited: 3
Number of U.S. states I've lived in: 6
Number of times I've moved since getting married: 12 (sigh)

School days

Number of years spent in formal schooling: 20
Number of highschool friends I still keep in touch with: 3
Number of college friends/roommates I still keep in touch with: 2
Number of school subjects I use on a regular basis: Good question. Certainly more than teenage-me would have ever expected.

Online identity

Number of computers I've owned: 13 (14 if you count my smartphone, which is more powerful than my first few PCs)
Number of years programming: 24
Number of years online: 19
Number of years on the internet/www: 17 (wow)
Number of blogs/websites I actively maintain: 3
Number of blogs/websites I've effectively abandoned: 3
Number of new favicons I've made this week: 2 (thanks to this little tool)
Number of forums I moderate: 1
Number of RSS feeds I publish: 3 (here, here, and here)
Number of blogs I read in my Google Reader account: 42
Number of social networking sites I belong to: only 2: LinkedIn and StackOverflow

Bonus round

Number of cars I've driven until the day they died: 3
Number of times I've been in the newspaper: 4
Answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything: 42

Godspeed

2009-02-10T20:26:00.003-05:00

(note to self: I need to stop posting blog entries late at night! The last one was actually meant to go on my MUGEN blog, not here. But maybe this accidental post will give it a little more visibility. Or something. =P)

My step-grandpa, Papa Ed, quietly passed away at his home yesterday. Soooooo glad I flew out with my family to see him and Grandma a few weeks ago! That ticket was 100% worth it. Godspeed, Papa. I love you.

IMT Awards

2009-02-05T01:46:00.002-05:00

Tonight my friend and fellow MUGENer Acey sent me a note informing me that the folks over at IMT have just given Lex one of two "best updated character" awards for 2008

Thanks to whoever voted for us. :)

Ping-pong weather

2009-02-01T22:16:00.002-05:00

It was sunny and in the mid-sixties today. Most of last Tuesday's snow and ice have melted, and it felt like spring is on the way. So, naturally, we're forecast to get 3-6 inches of new snow by the middle of this week! Crazy.

This afternoon the kids and I had our first test run of Google's new(ish) "video chat" service through GMail/Google Talk. We got my parents a webcam with integrated microphone for Christmas, for this very reason. I got to see my parents last week, but the kids haven't seen them in nearly 6 months... so this was pretty neat. Highly recommended. :)

Quick note (almost a tweet, really)

2009-01-29T01:10:00.003-05:00

Back from Salt Lake. Had a good (if short) trip, got to see my family & spend a lot of time with them. My grandpa's not looking so good... he was in good spirits, but it was clear, even to him, that he might not have much longer on this earth. Good thing our spirits are eternal beings.

Fairfax county schools were out Monday & Tuesday for teacher workdays; they were also out today because of an ice storm last night, and will be delayed tomorrow by 2 hours for the same reason. Contrast that with Utah, where I don't think I ever had a snow day at BYU! Oh well... different infrastructure, different expectations.

Long weekends

2009-01-19T01:39:00.002-05:00

Living in the Washington DC area as we do, Inauguration Day and its attendant pomp & circumstance are swirling all around us here. For our part, we plan to spend a relatively quiet day at home, and not travel anywhere on the roads glutted with travelers if we don't absolutely have to. The kids have the Tuesday off for the actual inauguration, plus of course they get Monday off for "Civil Rights Day" (I don't see why we have to give up Martin Luther King's name as part of the day's official title; it's all in his honor, after all). Lucky me, working with a government customer right now: I get both Monday and Tuesday off as well! :)

I'm also taking next Monday and Tuesday off to go and visit my sick grandpa in Colorado with my parents & my sister... and we just found out that ours kids get those two days off of school too! I can't for the life of me figure out why the Fairfax County school district is built this way... the teachers get workdays seemingly every other week! (at least it feels that way) No wonder the school year runs from mid-August through mid-June! Sheesh!

On Resolutions

2009-01-18T23:56:00.002-05:00

I've been thinking about New Year's Resolutions this week. One of my biggest ones for this coming year is to learn how to manage my time better... I have a lot of things I could choose to spend my time on in the evenings after the kids & Mary are in bed and before I retire for the evening, but it seems that I never quite get done everything that I should. To that end, I've made myself a weekly schedule, and a goal to stick to it:

Sunday: personal blogging, working with family history stuff like journals, pictures, etc.

Monday: schoolwork

Tuesday: recreational reading (blogs, comics, library books, etc)

Wednesday: schoolwork

Thursday: post something on my professional / coding blog (I'm working on a series right now where I try and re-create the old Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda entirely in HTML+Javascript. Fun stuff.)

Friday: schoolwork

Saturday: post something on my hobby / MUGEN blog

Obviously, of the above days, schoolwork is probably the most immediately important, followed closely by this personal blog. However, if I don't watch myself, I end up spending all of my free time on those other, "funner" activities... hence the goal to keep them in check. We'll see how it goes; this is (theoretically anyway) my last semester of coursework for my Linguistics MA, only leaving the Masters project to finish & and graduate. It's a custom "readings" class I'm doing remotely with my favorite professor / boss / friend, Dr. Alan K. Melby, and is intended to feed right into my MA thesis/project work this summer. At least I hope it works out that way.

Simply smashing!

2009-01-11T15:33:00.003-05:00

Just got home from our church meetings a little while ago and had something to eat, and now the kids are outside smashing rocks with a hammer. Matthew got the idea from something he read recently, I guess, and they're both having great fun with it.

D'oh!

2009-01-04T21:54:00.002-05:00

So, I was at a friend's house the other day and wanted to show him my site, but the durn thing wouldn't open on his Internet Explorer! Odd, I thought, as I make an effort to at least try to be cross-browser safe (although why you would want to use IE over Firefox or Chrome or Safari, is beyond me =P ). Anyway, I found it: I hadn't closed the Google Adsense <script> tag! Firefox happily ignored it and rendered the page anyway; IE completely fell to pieces on it. Interesting.

Anyway, it's fixed now so all of my 8 or 9 regular readers can see my news.

Also, I got tired of the fixed-width content getting messed up when I posted pictures and videos, so I rewrote the site's blogger template to instead use a dynamic size, adjusting to the width of your browser. Many of you probably don't even care, but to me it makes the site sooooo much more pleasant to browse.

Happy 2009!

2009-01-04T14:39:00.004-05:00

So... one of my resolutions for the new year is to blog more frequently. Sunday seems the natural time to do this, so here goes.

Work has been slooooooow, both because a lot of people were out for the holidays, and because it was the end of the year. I expect things will pick up quite a bit when I go back tomorrow.

We had a pretty nice Christmas at Mary's mom's house in North Carolina, seeing family that we haven't in quite a while, and generally enjoying the slower pace of life "Down East." It almost made it hard to drive back up I-95 to the congestion and hectic lifestyle of suburban Washington D.C. ;)

Mary's been feeling a little run-down this past week, so her mom drove up a day behind us to help out around the house, which has been a huge help. Mary's feeling better, so I think she's planning to head home tomorrow before a forecast of snow in this area (which, of course, the kids are excited about... it would be the first real snow of the season if it sticks)

Some friends in our church ward invited us to a fun New Year's Eve party with a bunch of the ward's other young families. Mary stayed home with her mom, but the kids & I went for a while. Then we came back here and watched movies (the DTV Kung-Fu Panda sequel, and the Brandon Frasier "Journey to the Center of the Earth") until shortly before midnight, when we channel-switched a bit to see the various festivities including the ball-drop in New York. One thing I noticed in doing that was just how OLD Dick Clark suddenly looks... I know for years the running joke was that he didn't age, but apparently he had a stroke a few years ago, and now he looks really, REALLY old. Anyway, we had fun.

New Year's Day was pretty fun too... a friend posted something on her blog about a cool park she had taken her kids to, and Mary suggested I take the kids and go find it. After a quick Google search, we found it: Clemyjontri Park, in McClean. It was really cold that afternoon, but we had a great time. The park is neat because it was designed from the ground up to be universally accessible -- kids of all ages & physical (dis)abilities can have fun. As proof, here are my kids, thoroughly enjoying themselves:

Joy to Everyone!

2008-12-25T16:44:00.003-05:00

Merry Christmas! Been a while since I've had anything to say of significance on this blog. I'm planning an overhaul soon, just as I recently did to the MUGEN and programming sections of my site. For now, let me just wish everyone a merry Christmas (or alternative winter holiday of your choice), and best wishes for a joyous (and hopefully prosperous!) 2009.

Luthor 2008

2008-10-27T06:24:00.000-05:00

If you're in the U.S., don't forget to vote next Tuesday! And remember, whichever candidate wins, he's got to be better than THIS guy:

44 Days until the Election!

2008-09-20T22:10:00.004-05:00

I realize some of my readers aren't U.S. citizens, and I apologize for all the political preoccupation my blog has taken on over the past year or so. That said, here's another great video commentary on the upcoming U.S. election by that bastion of common sense, late night television. (wha?) Okay, but seriously. Funnyman and late-night host (as in, "after Letterman" late. REALLY late) Craig Ferguson tells us all "if you don't vote, you're a moron" (beware, there's a little strong language, but I think it's PG-level or so):

Also got around (finally) to watching Speed Racer with my car-obsessed 6-year-old son tonight, since it hit RedBox earlier this week. The story dragged in a few places and a couple of the scenes were a bit too intense for him, plus the script was a bit too free with cuss words I'd rather not have him repeating. Fortunately, I had the EFR (Electronic Film Review) software. More details over on my tech/coding blog, Palagpat Coding.

Ha!

2008-09-16T23:10:00.004-05:00

The rest of this may be kind of link-heavy, but I'll add a Libertarian-themed caveman video first to lighten the mood:

On to the meat of it: I'm trying to dig into something that happened late last week between Bob Barr and Ron Paul... there was apparently some kind of falling out. Congressman Paul called a press conference to get the nation talking about third party options for the presidential race, inviting the candidates from the Libertarian, Constitution, and Green Parties (plus Ralph Nader) to attend with him. (See below for the full video). However, at the last moment Barr dropped out, and the next day issued a press release saying he'd made Paul a "final offer" to join him as his running mate. What the heck...?!?!? Something smells fishy.

That said, I don't know who else to vote for. I'm pretty solidly Libertarian in my personal philosophy: while I may be against certain practices (abortion and legalized drug use, to name two), I believe that freedom in the United States can only be had when no one group's philosophy (be it Christian or any other) is legislated as law. Of course I believe there has to be SOME kind of baseline morality, I'm not an anarchist -- but I don't believe either of the two major parties gets it right. So I may still vote for Barr despite this latest weirdness, because people need to see that there are a sizable (and growing) group of people who aren't content with the 2-party system anymore. Besides, the Libertarian party isn't about the man at the top of the ticket, it's about the ideals, the principles of the party itself. And THAT, at least, I can definitely support.

When I talked with my Mom about this a few nights ago, she asked if I was worried that Barr would be a "spoiler" and effectively give the race to Obama, just as Perot gave it to Clinton in 1992 by drawing votes away from Bush. I really like how Barr himself answers this criticism: if McCain fails to win the election, it's because of a lack on his part, and the people who vote for Barr may very well not vote for anyone at all otherwise, so it's not as though those votes are being somehow "siphoned away."

Besides, the privilege and right to vote shouldn't be something we exercise with the cynicism of "whatever it takes for our team to win," should it? The true wasted vote, as I've heard Barr say, is one where a person fails to vote their conscience.

Finally, as I promised above, here's that video of Congressman Paul's press conference; it's longish but worth at least a quick skim even if you're in a hurry:

Some thoughts on the political race

2008-09-10T23:18:00.005-05:00

It's been a while since I've talked politics on this blog (been a while since I've said ANYTHING on here... but I digress), but when I went in to get my Virginia driver's license and register to vote this morning, it gave me a need to collect my thoughts. So, here are some of the things I've been thinking about.

Sarah Palin is, I believe, a game-changer. There may be some outstanding questions still, but I personally feel she was vetted at least sufficiently for where she is today. Troopergate and the other fluff attacks don't faze me, all politicians have enemies if they succeed in doing anything at all. I hate the fact that the media is apparently piling on her because she's an inexperienced outsider, when they laud Obama for exactly those same traits, and I really liked her acceptance speech at the RNC convention last week, but I still am uneasy about voting for the RNC ticket for reasons I don't want to enumerate right now (maybe in another post). At any rate, her selection was unquestionably a gusty, gusty move on McCain's part, one that actually made me not hate the idea of a McCain presidency quite so much.

... which is very UNlike the move Barack Obama made in picking his running mate! Personally I feel that if you're running as an outsider, and are proud of that fact, the one thing you DON'T want to do is pick a guy with 30 years of experience as an INSIDER!!! Arrrrgggghhh, that right there is proof that you don't believe your own message about judgment mattering more than experience! I felt it was a very poor choice, and diminished the ticket in my eyes.

I've been saying for months I'd vote Libertarian, and I am definitely a libertarian (small-L) small-government guy at heart, but I'm still not sure that Bob Barr is the guy to break the 2-party system... he just doesn't have the charisma of an Obama or a Palin. Or a Root, for that matter: HIS running-mate, Wayne Allen Root, is much more appealing to me than he is himself, making me wish the ticket was flipped. That puts the Libertarian and Republican parties on much the same footing for me. But all of that said, this latest video from the Barr campaign really fired me up. I got chills. Seriously.

The Democratic ticket still feels weak to me for certain reasons (the whole "increase the size and complexity of the federal government" is a big reason why), and a lot of the left-wing zealots are really offensive to me, but then again so are a lot of the right-wing zealots... I can't stand listening to Hannity, I can only stomach Limbaugh when I know he's not taking himself 100% seriously, and I can't listen to more than about 5 minutes of Bill O'Reilly's show. Imagine my surprise, then, when he caught my attention yesterday with a quick tease of a big interview he did with Obama!

So, here's Barack Obama versus Bill O'Reilly. It's part 4 of a 4-parter, and the whole thing is worth watching to see how Obama handles himself unscripted (pretty well, actually, especially since that's been one of the right wing's criticisms of the man):

So. Long story short, I still don't have the faintest idea of who I'm going to vote for in November. But like I said to the guy at the DMV this morning, I think that no matter WHO ends up winning, it's going to be a heckuva ride.

More soon.

Been a while...

2008-08-05T08:12:00.004-05:00

So, I think this is the first post I've made since we picked up 3 weeks ago and moved cross-country to the Washington DC area. Settling in to our new neighborhood, LDS ward, and my job with White Oak Technologies. Currently I'm working on an integration with some translation software that's been kind of fun, and when a co-worker mentioned the existence of this image on Flickr, I just had to go and find it:

This is what happens when you get too reliant on your software and don't validate its output... you might be led into thinking an error message is a legitimate translation. ;)

Anyway, more soon!

What a sad day...

2008-05-23T14:04:00.002-05:00

So yesterday my wife alerted me to an incredibly sad story... my favorite Christian Contemporary musician, Steven Curtis Chapman, just lost his youngest daughter to a terrible auto accident at their home... his teenage son Caleb accidentally accidentally backed the car over the 5-year-old Maria. I can't imagine how awful Caleb must be feeling right now. The family is asking that in lieu of flowers, condolences be sent in the form of donations to their adoption assistance charity Shaohanna's Hope:
In Memory of Maria
Steven Curtis Chapman's homepage

As many of my longtime readers would know, my family lost our baby Jacob just over a year ago, and it's been one of the hardest things we've ever had to go through, and Steven's music played an important part in our healing. His song "With Hope" is a beautiful, touching story of healing and hope for eternal life through Christ's resurrection. Give it a listen, and if you feel touched as well, please say a prayer for the Chapmans. They surely need all the love and prayers they can get right now:

With Hope - Steven Curtis Chapman

That was bad enough. Then last night I got an email from the CEO of my work, MasterControl, saying that a co-worker of mine, Gusty Colonna, had suddenly and unexpectedly passed away that morning! I didn't know Gusty well, but she was such a happy, friendly force in the office that we will surely all miss her. Again, her family can surely use a prayer or two if you see it in your heart to do so.
In Memory of Gusty

Last political vid, I promise (for a while anyway)

2008-04-03T14:59:00.002-05:00

So... I think I've decided who I'm voting for this fall, and it's not Obama, it's not McCain, and it's certainly not Clinton. It's Root. Wayne Allyn Root, to be precise. He's the Libertarian party's candidate, and he makes the centrist, state's rights guy in me smile. Give a listen:

Now, do I agree with him on 100% of his stances? No. But I think he comes closer to my personal political philosophy than any of the so-called "mainstream" candidates. And yes, I know, President Kang would say I'm "throwing my vote away". But personally I can't in good conscience vote any other way this year.

April Fools Roundup

2008-04-02T13:22:00.003-05:00

So, I've been so busy working with my MUGEN team on our April Fool's Day (Month) releases, that I didn't see some of these until today. Classic!

Google now supporting searches up to 24 hours in the future

BBC documentary about a newly-discovered species of flying penguin

New web-based photo time machine

And.... the best Muppet video you'll ever see!

80's Redux

2008-02-14T14:15:00.000-05:00

I've been posting nothing but politics for a while, so here's a nice change of pace: the trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie is up! Woohoo!

Yes, We Can.

2008-02-05T01:35:00.001-05:00

Okay, I know I've been posting a lot of political stuff lately. And yes, I've been leaning pretty strongly to the Republican side of the ballot. That said, I'm pretty impressed with Barack Obama. He may be one of the most liberal congressmen in the Senate (at least according to some people), but he can sure deliver an inspiring speech. Here's a music/speech video recently released by his supporters:

So, yeah. What's a fairly centrist Libertarian to do? Stay tuned, tomorrow (Super Tuesday) is going to have a profound effect on the race for the White House, one way or the other.

In Memorium

2008-02-03T13:27:00.000-05:00

Most regular readers of this blog (all two of them) know that I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly referred to as a Mormon, or LDS. We've all spent a good part of the past week mourning the loss of a truly great, great man: President Gordon B. Hinckley, whom we sustained as prophet and president of the Church. There have been many, MANY tributes to him in the past 10 days; here are two of my favorites:

As the hymn says, "God be with you 'til we meet again."

Okay, that's actually pretty impressive.

2008-01-29T13:35:00.000-05:00

I'm starting to warm to Barack Obama. There are a lot of his policies that I just plain don't agree with, but on the other hand, if he delivers on his promises and stays true to his stated core values, I think an Obama presidency could really go a long way toward healing the deep divisions in our country. Here's his victory speech from South Carolina last Saturday, one of the best examples of how inspiring and eloquent he can be. (not that that's the only thing a president needs to do, but it's certainly on the list):

Faith in America

2007-12-07T01:09:00.000-05:00

I'm not yet convinced that Mitt Romney is the right man to become the next president of the United States of America, but he's certainly on my short list of candidates. This morning, he gave the speech that many have been waiting for him to give: one concerned with his own Latter-Day Saint faith, religious freedom in America, and how they will affect his presidency. Personally, I'm not going to vote for the guy just because we share a religion... I think Huckabee, Thompson, and Paul all have intriguing attributes as well. That said, I think Gov. Romney knocked this one out of the park. Listen to the whole thing yourself (and not just the sound bites the media gloms onto), and see what you think.

Wow.

2007-11-07T00:41:00.000-05:00

Stan Lee & Hilary Clinton: the unknown story.

How can this have happened 7 years ago and I haven't heard a thing about it until now? Apparently Stan and his business partner at Stan Lee Media (remember them?) got bilked by the Clintons to the tune of a couple million bucks... freaking amazing.

I'm sure there's another side to this case that isn't presented here, but Peter Paul's version of events is pretty damning. Perhaps even "Swift Boat"-level damning.

My scalp itches...

2007-06-17T02:41:00.001-05:00

Right about the same time that our little Jacob passed on to the next world, we heard some news from some good friends of ours in North Carolina. Their son Grant, a superhero-loving boy about the same age as our Matthew, had contracted leukemia. That's cancer in your bone marrow, for those of you who don't know -- and that's where your white blood cells, your body's primary immune system, are supposed to be created. Cancer in there pretty much wrecks your immune system, which is, of course, a very bad thing.

Anyway, in a show of solidarity & support, many of the men & boys in Grant's family shaved their heads to match his bald-due-to-chemotherapy head. Today, Matthew and I did likewise:

Anyway, in the past few weeks, Grant and his family have received some very encouraging news about the spread (or rather lack thereof) of his cancer cells. Even so, consider if there's anything you might be able to do to support their family. Grant's website chronicling his and his family's journey through cancer is at grantnelson.blogspot.com.

The saddest thing possible...

2007-05-09T09:19:00.000-05:00

So, I was getting all set to blog about my first day at my new job at Master Control on Monday (it went pretty well), when I got a phone call from Mary saying that our midwife Suzanne thought there might be a problem with the baby and that we needed to get to the hospital to have an ultrasound and some other tests run. Lucky me, rush hour made the trip from Salt Lake to Provo, which usually takes about an hour, into a two-hour ordeal, with me fretting the whole time.

Anyway, I made it to the Utah Valley RMC hospital in Provo, and hooked up with Mary and Suzanne. Sure enough, after a volley of tests, they determined that there was something seriously wrong with little Jacob. He had a lot of fluid collecting in and around his lungs and other places, plus some apparent growth stunting (while he was supposed to be 29 weeks gestationally, his bone length indicated something more like 24 or 25 weeks), and there also appeared to be some abnormalities in his brain tissue. The doctor told us that his chances outside of the womb were unsure, but that his chances in the womb were nil, and she recommended that the best course of action would be an emergency C-section! So at 11pm Monday night our third child was born—alive, but only just. Despite 40 minutes of very dedicated resuscitation efforts by a team of dedicated caregivers, his little body just wouldn't breathe on its own, and after beating weakly for just shy of an hour, his little heart gave up and he peacefully slipped back to heaven.

The doctors still don't know exactly what happened, but the leading theory now is that a bacterial or viral infection apparently got to him over a month ago, and he's been fighting it ever since. Medical science hasn't yet advanced to the point where this sort of thing can be detected -- our first clue that anything was wrong was when Mary noticed Monday that he had stopped moving around (apparently trying to conserve energy so his body could use its last reserves to fight the infection). We agreed to let the doctors perform an autopsy on his body at Primary Children's Hospital in Salt Lake, and that's where things stand at the moment. When they finish there, the funeral home in Tooele (Tate Mortuary) will retrieve the body and prep it for burial. We're going to have a small family graveside service on Monday, and bury him at the feet of his great-great grandmother or grandfather (Federico or Maria Teresa Corradini, my grandpa's parents, who emigrated from Italy near the turn of the century).

Given everything that's happening in the world, I know this may seem a small thing to some, but it's the biggest to us. Everyone's prayers and thoughts for our family would be very much appreciated right now. The only thing that's keeping us going is the knowledge that our family has the promise of eternal life together, and God willing, someday we'll be with Jacob again. For now, we'll just consider him our own little guardian angel, spending his time with his great-great grandparents and watching us from a place where sin, pain, and sadness can never touch him. It may not take away the pain and the loss, but it makes it bearable.

Interview Stress

2007-03-30T00:22:00.001-05:00

So... I survived the interviews on Microsoft campus here in Redmond.

First I met with the tech recruiter (my third recruiter in this whole process), Katie, who told me how the rest of the day was going to go. She also broke the news to me that the two teams I most wanted to work on (Speech Server and Natural Languages, which does things like Word's grammar checker) have both filled their vacancies already, so they had me interview with two other teams instead, both under the Office umbrella:
1. Performance Point
It's a brand new product, never before released, in beta and due to come out this fall. I met with two people on that team, the first a regular one-on-one interview and the second a "lunch interview" at a local Japanese restaurant. Pretty unique, I've never had an interview over sushi and mango before. Both went, I think, pretty well.

2. Associate Services
This team owns the MS Office web site and content (things like online clip art and templates, stuff like that), as well as MS InfoPath, a tool for building XML forms.
I met with one guy on this team, Sasha, who is from Siberia and has a very thick Russian accent. We talked mostly code, not much of the "where do you want to be in 5 years" kinds of questions, which was good, because it was hard enough to understand him when I knew what he was talking about.

Anyway, I liked the feel of the first team more, but either could be a good summer home and stepping stone to a fulltime job when I graduate next year. Maybe by then I can finagle my way onto the Speech or NLP teams like I wanted originally, or maybe not.

Anyway, nothing is guaranteed at the moment. Katie told me that she'd hopefully be able to get back to me by this coming Tuesday, so we'll cross our fingers and see what we see.

All in all, I think it went pretty well, I feel like I presented myself as well as I could, and both of the guys on the first team seemed to like the fact that I also have a long professional work history... most college interns don't, obviously, so hopefully that will skew in my favor. The thing that's killing me right now is that I've done absolutely everything I can, and it's now out of my hands. I'm trying to put it out of my mind and think about other things... tomorrow Mary & I have most of the day to poke around and explore the area a bit, since our flight isn't until early evening.

I'll post more when I know more.

Classic Sesame Street

2007-02-25T00:46:00.000-05:00

Tonight I stumbled across a cache of classic Sesame Street clips from my childhood on YouTube... somehow the older late-70s/early-80's stuff just seems so much better to me! Here's a great clip with Kermit and the Martians (the Yip-Yips), plus a great bit about Old McDonald's ancestry (with a name like that, you know he isn't from Calcutta! XD)

Go Mitt Go!

2007-02-20T15:18:00.000-05:00

Okay, long time no post. Just saw that Mitt Romney has officially thrown his hat in the ring for US President next year... personally I say: Go, Mitt, go! And not just because he & I share a religion... I truly believe he's the right person for the job, with the best vision for the direction America needs to go both domestically and in the world at large.

Here's an excerpt from his site, www.mittromney.com:

Curious GWB

2006-06-29T09:37:00.000-05:00

This is pretty clever. I'm not 100% on either side of the political spectrum, and I don't necessarily agree with all of this guy's politics, but the song's pretty catchy -- and this from a guy like me that doesn't care for much rap/hip-hop.

Moving Right Along...

2006-06-26T08:53:00.000-05:00

I just realized that I haven't blogged about this yet, so figured it was time to do so. We've decided to move back to Utah (again). As of August 10th or thereabouts, we'll be residents of the small-but-growing town of Lehi, Utah.

The reason for the move? Well, there are several. The big two are that Mary & I have both decided to go back to school... she to massage therapy college, and me back to BYU for graduate work in computational linguistics.

So, yay us!

Who Killed the Electric Car?

2006-05-24T09:59:00.000-05:00

Long time no post. Anyway, I wanted to mention something I just found this morning.

This link takes you to a trailer for a new movie coming out this summer, that asks the question, Who Killed the Electric Car?.

I'm not talking about hybrids, exactly... at least not hybrids as they exist today. This is about the GM EV-1, which was street legal in California a few years ago... you plug it in at night when electric grid usage is low, and it'll go the next day for something like 80 miles. Sure, no good for long trips -- but for commuting, shopping, etc, why the heck not? I worked with a guy in San Diego that had one, and I remember he LOVED it.

So why, then, did GM decide to recall and crush them all? The movie looks heavily slanted to Ralph Nader-style conspiracy theories, but it really does seem odd that this would happen, especially in our current gas crisis.

More reading on the subject here:
http://www.ev1.org/
http://www.pluginamerica.com/
http://hondaev.org/

Happy New Year!

2006-01-06T13:35:00.000-05:00

Well, the holidays are now behind us. We had a nice one, quiet & (mostly) restful... but Mary & I now understand that line in the old Christmas carol: "Mom and Dad can hardly wait for school to start again!" For my kids, at least, a regular routine makes all the difference.

The big thing right now is that I'm applying for Grad School at BYU. Deadline is January 15th, so we're coming down to the wire now. I've finished the writing portions, just waiting on my GRE test results and recommendation letters. Hopefully they'll come in time. =P

Geek Poetry

2005-11-22T16:20:00.000-05:00

This is a hoot... I realize not all of you will "get" it, but I think it's pretty funny. (and it has a great beat! ;))

Update: you need to click the title (or here) to see what I'm talking about... sorry that wasn't clear.

"Mostly Charming"

2005-11-19T23:49:00.000-05:00

Okay, so Mary & I finally saw Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" last night. The verdict?

Nearly perfect! :D

So what did I like about it? Well, where to begin? The opening musical montage with the Dolphins singing "So long, and thanks for all the fish!" was catchy and cleverly-written, and the guy that did the voice of the Guide itself was PERFECT. The opening scenes with Arthur & Ford on Earth set up their characters nicely, and when you finally get to the title reveal, to hear the classic banjo theme from the original radio & TV versions of the story... well, that's gravy. The creatures are brilliantly done (there's a little scene with an alien crab that's weirdly hilarious), and the few changes the story underwent were all in perfect harmony with the tone of the original version(s) (I understand that Douglas Adams himself wrote the script before his untimely death... too bad he never lived to see it finished). There are all sorts of little goodies slipped in the film itself as "easter eggs" of a sort... there's a cameo by the old television version of Marvin the depressed robot, a planet shaped like Adams's head, several uses of "BELGIUM!" (which, according to the book, is the rudest word in the entire universe), all sorts of that kind of weird cleverness at play. It really is quite brilliant, and was a ton of fun.

The DVD extras are a bit disappointing; only a few (very) short deleted scenes, and a 9-minute documentary. Plus a few audio commentaries that I might find interesting in the long run, but I'm usually not much for those sorts of things. I would have liked to see them include a much LONGER documentary, including the several bits that were up on the movie's web site prior to release. The movie's multiple trailers would have been great to see on there as well, especially the one that purported to be the Guide's entry on movie trailers. Simply brilliant stuff... there's this bit about all trailers being narrated by a voice that sounds like it belongs to a "7-foot-tall man who's been smokin cigarettes since childhood" (courtesy of Scott Rummell). Anyway, hopefully by the time I've got the disposable income to devote to this film, they'll have a 2-disc "special edition" version. =P

All in all, we were both really quite taken with the film. We'd both read the book (Mary YEARS ago, and didn't remember much of it; I, geek that I am, have read it and all its sequels--my best friend and I even did a "duet acting" piece from one for our highschool drama team). That background knowledge certainly enhanced our enjoyment of the film, but I don't think it's a strict prerequisite. However, if you enjoyed the movie, you really do owe it to yourself to pick up the book. A fun, fun piece of work, well worth your time.

DVRocks!

2005-11-16T22:47:00.000-05:00

We signed up for satellite TV when we moved here to Charlotte, primarily so we could get BYU TV. But the thing I've totally fallen in love with about it all is the DVR: a Digital Video Recorder that's basically a VCR with a built-in hard drive that can store 100 hours of stuff on it. A few weeks ago, I took 2 minutes to set it up to automatically record every single episode of the Wiggles it finds, and now we're not beholden to the stupid time it comes on the air (6am and, I think, 8am), since Matthew's TV time is usually much later in the day than that. And all the episodes are stored until I decide to delete them, so we can go back and re-watch the really funny ones. Very cool stuff; it's really quite liberating.

Another cool thing about the DVR? I was watching Curb Appeal with the kids the other night, and I hit the tv guide button during one of the commercials, just to browse. I noticed that the classic, animated, non-sucky version of Dr. Seuss's "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" was coming on later that night... but past the kids' bedtime. No problemo! I highlighted the show on the guide listing, hit the "record" button, and it was all programmed to grab the show for me! So we can watch it as a family on OUR terms, instead of building our whole schedule around whenever the networks deign to give it to us. Very, very cool.

Okay, I didn't mean for this all to sound like a commercial, but I gotta say, I'm gonna miss that particular feature if/when we move & cancel our account.

Site overhaul in the works

2005-11-07T12:02:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I've redone this front page and registered the buyog.com domain name... but the rest of my site (particularly the MUGEN stuff) is pretty musty. I'm working on an overhaul with a new template, new colors and images and the works, but it's not quite ready for prime time yet. Just know it's coming.

Oh, and I fixed the archive links, which broke a while back.

Today, a Domain - Tomorrow, the World!

2005-10-12T14:48:00.000-05:00

I just discovered that my awesome hosting company, Brinkster, gives me a free (i.e. I don't have to pay anything for it. Gratis, even!) domain name registration. So what did I choose to go with... something immediately recognizable as mine, like RyanCorradini.com? Nope. Something that would further my business ventures, like IntConcepts.com? Nope. A nickname derived from a Filipino dialect that I, along with a handful of other people around the world, can speak and not be understood by virtually anyone else?

How'd you guess? ;)

Anyway, as of this morning, Buyog.com has gone live. This, of course, signals the beginning of the end of western civilivation as we know it... but hey, I feel fine. :)

In other news, we're moving to Charlotte. Whee!

2005-07-06T09:28:00.000-05:00

Long time no blog. Heh.

We're in our new house now, have been for 6 months or so. Pretty nice, although the yard still needs MAJOR work.

This past July 4th we celebrated American Independance Day here in North Carolina. I took the kids swimming in the sound that morning, and in the afternoon Mary and her Mom joined us as well, and we went to New Bern (about an hour from here) for the town celebration they were holding. Games for the kids, live music from two Marine Corps brass bands (jazz and concert), and of course, fireworks. Here's a small video clip:
Sarah-Matthew-July4.avi

2004-11-09T20:06:00.000-05:00

I'm a huge fan of "alternate history" and "future history" tales, so this really fascinated me:
How Hillary Clinton Won the Elections of 2008 and 2012: a French "retrospective."

2004-11-08T17:08:00.000-05:00

Well, President Bush won. Go team! :)

But that's not who I want to talk about... that would be Howard Dean. Love him or hate him, he certainly injected some enthusiasm into the political process last year. And now, he's managed to parlay his "RAAAARRRRGGGHHHH!!" meltdown into a new job as spokesperson for Yahoo! Local. I say, good for him for being able to laugh at himself (Be sure to check this guy's mp3 of the ad; it's pretty cool).

2004-10-10T00:12:00.000-05:00

Just found something pretty cool... the "World's Smallest Political Quiz." It's billed as a fairly accurate assessment of your political leanings... it tells me I'm a Centrist, which I pretty much already knew, but it's kind of nice to have something approaching proof. ;)

2004-10-03T21:20:00.000-05:00

I wonder... do you suppose this is the sort of "Global Test" John Kerry has in mind?

Buyog Blog

Is this thing on?

Intervals

Slaying the Beast

Postcards from my Recent Past

Spiritual

Academic

Professional

Physical

[Lost posts] Recent family outings

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Catching up

In February...

In March...

In April...

Coming up...

Coming out of Hibernation

My Inner Child Just Passed Out For Joy

Well, darn.

Blizzard!

Pinocchio's a Real Boy Now

Snow job

Mutants?

On matters historic

LingMA update, 1-15-2010

Raw data files (sentence alignment files, XCES format)

XSLT

Segfiles

Tools

Reference

The Future

LingMA update, 1-7-2010

Resolutions

Spiritual

Academic

Professional

Physical

Home from the hospital

LingMA status report for 12-15-2009

Thoughts on Twilight: Why Stop at Vampires and Werewolves?

FAILBox

Going Back Under the Knife

School progress: domain detection

Accountability: MA Progress for 11-1-2009

Ling MA tasks for the fall

On Faith and Testifying

Who's Got the Beat?

I, Aqua Snob

My Day at the Library of Congress (part 2)

Testing... Is This Thing On?

Pioneer Camp 2009

Hiligaynon Hymns

Home

1600-year-old Bible now online

Long Weekend

The house is now officially ours!

My Day at the Library of Congress (part 1)

The Problem of Categorization

"Social" Networking

For the class of 2009

Visualizing 3 dimensions, in only 2

We've got a house!

A day in the life

Catching up on the picture pool

Well, beat me with a wet noodle!

Update and scheduling notes

LDS Q & A - part 1

My kingdom for a tamale!

JSConf Wrap-up

JSConf 2009

Twitterpated

Farm house

Springtime is here!

Seven Pounds

What joy shall fill my heart...

Thoughts on being halfway to 70

Godspeed

IMT Awards

Ping-pong weather

Quick note (almost a tweet, really)