Posting...

...to blogs. This is surely self-evident, but regardless I thought I needed to add that I like posting to blogs, which includes adding comments to other people's blogs. If I had to pick a top ten advancement for this decade, blogs would definitely be in the mix. Of course as you all know, not only do blogs give you a convenient soap box (or rameumptom for some people) from which to throw out your opinions for the world to see, they are also a wonderful mechanism for rediscovering and keeping up with friends and family. And since blogs are so much easier to maintain than websites and easily allow visitors to post responses, blogs are very useful for huge collaborative research projects, such as discovering a family's origins. I myself, maintain over 10 blogs (primarily genealogy related), so I have plenty of opportunities to enjoy this activity. And since I enjoy reading as much as I do posting, please feel free to add comments anytime.

Photo Editing

I have found that editing photos, particularly repairing and even coloring old photos, to be quite enjoyable. It is so wonderful to have the technology to easily do things such as erase random people out of the background, airbrush blemishes, or even fabricate meetings with famous people. Of course the later comment highlights the growing need to be skeptical about a photo's authenticity.

I primarily use simple tools such as gamma correction to lighten up an underexposed photo, thus revealing a face that had once been covered in the shadows. I notice too often people post images that are too dark to see anything. Please tell such friends to use gamma correction, which most graphics programs have, and it can be free through open source software.

This week I played around with coloring old b&w photos, and discovered that I could get decent results by copying the image to several layers, coloring each layer to the color of the specific area, and then erasing the areas to be colored differently on each respective layer. The results can be seen in two of the images in the below arrangement. (I know I should have "Photo Chopped" my double chin, but I was going for as much authenticity as possible.)

Fraternity

Perhaps it is my extroverted personality, but I've always enjoyed being around friends. Unfortunately, I have come to realize that it is hard to find friends as a guy, particularly due to my religious beliefs (i.e. it is easy to find drinking buddies). I mean women in the church have their book clubs and stuff that strengthen their sororitorial (yes, I made that word up) bonds, but if you don't like the ironic fist fights, cussing, and bench warming that bear their ugly heads during church basketball, you are really at a loss for male bonding. This is particularly true for men, like myself, who move away from their hometowns.

I have been trying to rack my brain about why it is so hard for guys to make friends, especially when as teenagers we always roamed in large packs. One thing I have come up with was that as teenagers, we always talked about girls and were thus never at a loss for discussion topics. Now happily married, I am not going to get together with guys to talk about girls, so that puts us behind from the start.

Many men seem quite content and/or are too busy for the brotherhood, but I know that there are others out there like me. Here is some advice for these three categories:

To those who are content, quit playing your video games by yourself, and realize that making friends (aka networking) is good for your career. You have more chances at boosting your income, thus making your wife happier, which in turn makes you happier.

To those who are too busy, same networking thing. You also can always have kid friendly get togethers, allowing your wife a break, thus the happy thing again.

To those who want to form friendships, plan activities that would energize the other two groups. And don't wait for someone else to initiate, or you'll still be sitting at home.

Else we are forever destined to be occasional dinner friends with the spouses of our wives' friends (I only have one wife, you know what I meant).

To get you going, here are some possible activities/places to go to get you started:

• Playing sports other than basketball (tennis, flag football, controlled rugby, broom hockey, dodge ball,volleyball, tug-o-wars, golf, cycling, boating, all the stuff you used to think was fun)
• Shooting range (ok, this can go in the sports category, but I just wanted to highlight it)
• Sports to watch (try something new like going to an Irish Pub to watch rugby, horse races, what the rest of the world calls football)
  
• Game night, to include board games and/or video games (if done in couples, invite more than just one couple)
• Of course movie nights
• Taking kids to park or restaurants (at the park play some father-kid games, perhaps something like kickball)
  
• BBQ (probably should be coed, but doesn't have to be. Some Costco's have root beer kegs)

In the comment section feel free to add more potential activities.

Frogs

Ok, maybe not back to the manly rugby posts, but more boyish at least...I like frogs. I have been fond of frogs forever. While I delve into my love of frogs, I'll interweave my general love of nature.

As a kid how wonderful it was to go on nature hikes with my mother, taking time to look at tadpoles and trying to catch frogs. Of course snakes were cool too, so I can't leave out the story my mother loves to share about the time she picked up a rock, saw a snake, screamed, quickly dropped the rock, and had me begging her to lift the rock back up so that I could see the snake. My love of nature for certain was my mother's doing.

From my earliest memories, my mom was always taking us to the parks, farms, zoos, etc. We would frequent places like Winton Woods, Farbach-Werner Nature Preserve, Fantasy Farm, the Cincinnati Zoo, Krohn Conservatory, and farms where we would drink cider, pick berries, or get a pumpkin. As my mom was actively involved in a gardening club and Girl Scouts, I had even more opportunities for hiking and camping at the various parks and nature preserves (Yes, yes, I tagged along with my mom and sister on Girl Scout activities).

My favorite magazine growing up was Ranger Rick and eventually I graduated to a World Wildlife Fund magazine. I was inspired by a book I read about Teddy Roosevelt (one of my favorite presidents), and had my personal natural history museum in my room, complete with rocks and minerals, fossils, snake skins, insects, drawings, and nature books. My mother was kind enough to build me a nice display area and was always very encouraging. But before you label me an environmental extremist, know that while I love trees, I also believe in using the resources (wisely of course) that God has given us. This means I conserve and recycle, but also support more domestic oil drilling, and would never spare an endangered salmon at the cost of the lives of brave forest fire fighters.

Anyway enough of that and back to frogs...I remember my first frog was a bull frog that grew to over12" long. He lived in the pond in our backyard. Unfortunately our concrete pond, believe it or not, was too pristine and didn't have enough dirt in the bottom for my poor frog to survive the hash winter temperatures in Cincinnati, alas he froze, and I cried...but lesson learned.

I know that at least on one occasion my mom sent away for mail order tadpoles. I don't know if they were part of the mail order, but once I had two leopard frog tadpoles that I kept in a jar in my room. I enjoyed watching them transform into frogs. Unfortunately, I didn't have a net over the large jar they were in and when the first one reached froghood it jumped out. I left a pan of water under my bed, and I begged my sister to help search for it. Several months later I found its dried corpse under my sister's bed, and I of course blamed her for the tragedy and it took a good while for me to forgive her. Of course I now rightly blame myself for letting it get out in the first place, and I don't know for sure that she didn't search. Again lesson learned.

A few years back my wife learned of this cool environmental project called Frog Watch. We went to a meeting where we learned all the different frog calls and were then assigned a local pond to watch. On a weekly basis we would go to the pond and make an account of all the different frogs we heard (mainly spring peepers), and perhaps even listed how many we heard. We always loved to hear what my wife calls the "bully bull frogs," with their deep guttural, truly cow like call. Anyway great fun, I highly recommend it.

Fragrances

Ok, I know it sounds kind of girly, but you know how I like sweet nectar by now, and taste and smells go hand-in-hand (I mean chou dofu, aka stinky tofu, smells like a dumpster on a hot summer day, and tastes like it too)...I like things that smell good. This includes of course food smells (no details needed), cologne/perfume, flowers, air dried laundry...the list is long.
As far as cologne/perfume, I first off Happy by Clinique (of course not for myself). Certainly sweet nectar for the nose. For myself I like Cool Water, Drakkar, and Tommy for Men...in that particular order. I used to like Ralph Lauren Polo, but that was in the 80s. I also like shower gells and lotions that smell like those colognes, or tasty fruits such as lemon, melon, grape, or mango. (Yes, I am expecting to take some ridicule for this posting.)



I discovered that my favorite flower smell is the subtle but flavorful fragrance from the tall red tulips. If anyone knows of a perfume that has captured that smell let me know, if not I claim it first and want a hefty portion of the predictably high volume sales.



Finally, I remember when I lived in Japan, nothing beat the fresh crisp feel and smell of a futon mattress that had been beaten and hung outside all day. Truly the best nights sleep that I have ever had, well yeah, of course that was after hours of proselytizing door-to-door.

For the record I am only 20% girly, according to the "How girly are you?" blog quiz!

Meetings

I have discovered that I like meetings...yes I know that makes me the type of person people hate, but hear me out. I do not like having a meeting just for the sake of meeting, as I think doing is most often better than just talking about doing (I say most often, as of course doing the wrong thing is not better). I am also all too familiar with meetings that drag on, or are so boring that even five minutes seems like five days in solitary confinement (not that I have such an experience).

What I like is having good meetings where I have something of substance to contribute, even though the love of meetings sort of goes against my nature. My Myers Briggs tends to be ENTP (it fluctuates a little), so I would say that the E makes meetings appealing, as I like to work and be around people. However, the P in me (ha ha...I know what you just thought) goes against meetings, as I just want to get right to a task, as I said I value doing. The MacGyver in me knows that planning is essential to success, but with the doing mentality my approach is "get it done and over with as quick as possible.) I'm a haptic learner, meaning I am a hands-on kind of guy, so I don't like reading the instruction manuals. This of course does produce some errors, but I accomplish tasks within an accepted tolerance very fast.

So why do I like meetings? It is hard to say. As I said, I like being around people and I like having my comments valued, but beyond that it could just be that I have finally started working on issues that are interesting to me.

My new office is undergoing a transformation and they are trying to apply an Agile project management framework, which has been quite interesting. My personality shys away from theories and business practices, because I feel that they slow down my doing something...I mean don't tell me about how to figure out how long it would take a monkey to fall from a tree after shooting it, just give me a gun and a stopwatch (don't worry, I love monkeys, and would never shoot one of those or any other cute furry creatures. )That said, I am starting to enjoy learning new frameworks for doing business, even though I think half of them are just plain common sense.


Perhaps my love of meetings stems from the fact that I will get to be Scrum Master for a new working group. My wife says the word "scrum" reminds her of the word "scrod," which is a baby cod fish. But since it is derived from my favorite sport of Rugby, I am quite pleased that I will be Master of Scrum!

Model Rockets

I always wanted to shoot off model reockets as a kid, so the 4th of July weekend last year seemed like a good time to finally start, especially now I can enjoy the hobby with my own children. I bought ready made rocket kits and materials from Michael's craft store. I bought a Estes Super Shot Mini pack of two roockets that would travel about 700 ft up and a Estes Wicked Streak SST, which came with launch pad and ignition switch, as shown above.

For all of our launches we have gone to a local park, when it is less crowded. Our first launch of the "Shark Attack" (red) Super Shot Mini, travelled about 394 ft to the NW, and landed on a gravel path. Eventually, however, both Super Shot Minis were lost. The last "Sting Ray" (yellow) launch took it into a near horizontal flight path a few seconds after launch, taking it into a neighborhood of townhomes. No reports of death or injury caused by said rocket, so that was good.

The "Wicked streak SST" has had several good launches. The most memorable one, however, made me glad that the park was empty at the time. The nosecone did not release, thus the rocket became a ballistic missile, narrowly missing the blacktop and embedding itself at least 3-4" into the ground a little over 100 ft behind our launch site. It took a little effort to pull it out.

MacGyvering

I love troubleshooting and coming up with solutions. If someone needs or wants something, I'll rack my brains and gather my resources to make it happen. In Japan, Greg C., one of my mission companions, was the first to call me MacGyver when I made homemade salsa. This was a great complement, as MacGyver, is my all time favorite TV hero, but I am not sure salsa rises to that level.

Now I am not running around with a swiss army knife and duct tape in my pockets (at least not everyday), I am not traveling the world on secret missions, and I definitely stay clear of having a mullet; but I do like to consider myself a MacGyver of sorts. I use the term Macgyvering loosely to refer to my love of making and fixing things. Below are just a few of my projects to give you a flavor or two.

Speakers

Some of you will recognize these as the speakers that I used back when I would help DJ dances. I saw some speakers in a magazine that I thought looked really neat, but I felt they were to expensive for my 16 year old wallet to handle. So I drew up a design based on what I saw and my Grandfather helped me cut and assemble the wood boxes. I bought six of the eight speakers to go in the boxes (starting with 15" MTX subwoofers), and realized I could have purchased the speakers in the magazine for less money. Hey, even MacGyver was not 100% successful, plus I don't know that mine didn't sound better.


Disco Ball

One year I was on the Activities Committee in a single adult ward of my church, chosen because I was DJing all the dances back then. Paula S. wanted a disco ball for a New Year's dance, and I was going to make sure she had one. No, I wasn't in love with Paula, we were just friends and colleagues. As I said, I love making things happen. Anyway, I decided to get an old globe at Goodwill to turn into our disco ball. I first put a big bolt with an eye hole straight through the center and attached a washer and nut on the bottom of the globe, so that it would be easy to suspend without too much worry of it taking out a dancer or two. I then began cutting and gluing mirrored glass to the globe. I then went up to Dayton to my favorite electronics store Parts-Express (Radio Shack is not What I Like) and bought a motor specifically made for disco balls. Since the mirrored glass was free (recycled) and the globe was only $1.50, with the motor I had our disco ball for under $25.

Christmas Door Decoration

My previous workplace has an annual Christmas door decorating contest, and one woman had the idea of doing a simple snow globe with a Chinese dragon, since the theme was China. I ran with the idea, and developed what you see in the video. We first used an overhead projector to trace the design onto our frame. I then used shredded office paper, rice and water to make a paste that would harden into a three-dimensional dragon. I then painted the dragon. I decided to go further by making it a working snow globe, so I procured a computer fan and made a battery pack to run it. I put holes in the back for airflow, used coat hangers as a frame to put shrink wrap over, and put in packing peanuts for snow, before gluing and heating the shrink wrap. I then made a base out of cardboard, used an exacto blade to cut out the Chinese characters for "Merry Christmas," painted it (filling the characters with gold paint), and then mounted it. The packing peanuts did prove problematic as the static electricity cause them to adhere to the dragon, but overall it was a success.




Painted Cardboard Toys

Again, every once in a while I'll get an urge to make something. One day I decided to make a cardboard X-wing fighter for my son. Then another day decided to make a castle for him. Since I decided to paint the castle, I thought I should paint the X-wing as well. A while later, I made the head of an AT-AT walker. These were very fun projects, especially since my son helped me paint and quite enjoyed himself, not to mention the fun he has playing with them now.

Meteorology

If you ever live in Cincinnati you have to enjoy weather in its many forms, or you'll probably be miserable at some time or another. In Cincinnati you experience it all. I guess having lived there most of my life I gained an appreciation for the different seasons and all that they had to bring. In the Spring, you had rains, wind, and comfortable temperatures; in Summer, you had heat and big thunderstorms; in Fall, you had cool crisp days; in Winter you had cold and snow. The weather enabled me to enjoy activities from flying kites to sledding down the hill next to our house. And I should add, summer movies are never as enjoyable as those enjoyed in the cool theaters when you do not have air conditioning at home!

My love of weather watching also stemmed from my grandmother, who supplied me with the essentials: "Red in the morning, sailors warning; red at night, sailors delight," "Watch out for rain when the leaves of the trees looked turned over," etc. She also had a little German "weather house" exactly like the one pictured below, where a woman in a sunny outfit would appear on nice days and a man dressed for rain would come out the door on gloomy days.


At a young age I had my plastic yellow rain gauge to tell me how much rain we had, and I always watched the weather forecast with my grandfather, my favorite weatherman was Ira Joe Fisher.

I have always loved looking at the clouds in the sky to gauge what weather they may bring, as well as to try to see pictures in their various forms. Sometimes I have envisioned them as giant mountains. While in Japan I learned many of the cloud names in Japanese as I asked my Japanese missionary colleague what they were during our daily bike rides. My favorite cloud remains the nyudogumo meaning beautiful cloud, better known as the cumulonimbus.

Perhaps crazy, but true, I get excited by the possibility of inclement weather. The possibility of a major snow storm, tornadoes, and now that I live on the east coast, hurricanes. Don't get me wrong, I take no pleasure at the loss of life or property, but I do stand in awe of the power of Nature. I even miss the big thunderstorms of Cincinnati bringing thunder and lightening so loud and so bright that a sleeping mind first misjudges as an attack.

One last snow storm story, this time in DC during the Blizzard of 2003. In our neighborhood we had at least 3 feet of snow pile up, which shut down the city for almost a week, so snow days as an adult! Boy did that excitement wear off fast as I had to cross mountains of un-shoveled snow and ice to get to the metro for weeks after. I also had to shovel multiple parking spaces as out "nice" neighbors with SUVs chose to not shovel at all and then take my shoveled spaces. It may have been a different year, but I remember shoveling 8 spaces after a storm. Anyway, the remnants of the 2003 snow storm lasted through April, before finally melting away.

I remember one big blizzard in Cincinnati, I am not sure it was the big one of 1978, but it would not have been more than a year or two after. My mom, sister, and I had gone to a Christmas party and when we left the roads were covered in snow. My mom's green CJ5 even was stuck in a ditch and a guy came on a snowmobile to come help us out.

Another snow storm was in 1998 or 1999, when I was commuting to attend Miami University. A snow storm of 12 to 18 inches left me stranded at the university in Oxford, Ohio. I went to the local Wal-mart, the only store in town, to get supplies to include a change of clothes. Luckily some students in the dorm for foreigners got me into to sleep on a couch in their study. I remember waking to a Japanese girl tucking me in, and then again in the morning when another Japanese girl brought me breakfast. As you can see, even bad weather can be good.

I hav always been fascinated by tornadoes. I have seen the eery green coloring and felt the thick atmosphere that exists during a tornado producing storm. Numerous time did I get awakened by my mother to get to the basement after the air raid sirens signaled a tornado warning, I was always grumpy when I was aroused in the middle of the night and cared not that a tornado would come. We listened to the radio announce a tornado heading our way, just to veer away in the last few seconds. I have seen the mystery of their destruction, as a tornado ripped away a convenience store, but left all the food neatly stacked on the shelves.

As far as hurricanes, we experienced the influence of Hurricane Isabel in 2003. While many of our neighbors did not, we maintained power. We seemingly were in a small bubble that was left unaffected. I did not understand why my work was shut down until I started driving and viewing the huge trees that had been felled by the storm. We shopped in the dark at a Target that had just enough power to run a register or two. Of course they kept all doors but one locked, to avoid any looting. It was sad to see all of the freezer sections of grocery stores locked with thick chains by the fire department. During hurricane season, I like to track these storms via the National Hurricane Center.

As long as I have a radio and access to the internet, I will enjoy tracking these big storms. I will continue to enjoy the variety that the Lord provides, cherishing the calm to breezy, sunny to overcast, 70 degree days along with the windy, cloudy, sub 32 degree days.

Traftracking

traf-track-ing [traf-trak-ing]
noun
-an activity where one tracks another using online traffic cameras, receiving cues from the person being tracked via cell phone.
verb
-to be engaged in the above described activity.


This is an activity that I came up with today when my sister called for me to be her personal navigation system, which is a very intermittent service I must add. Anyway, I thought that since I was giving her directions it would be kind of cool to see if I could see her on the live traffic camera feeds. She would give me cues to include the mile marker she was at and the descriptions of the vehicles near by. I then used ctrl+Print Screen to get screen shots of when she passed the camera, as shown above. Now, this is not stalking, because the one being traftracked has to be a willing participant. Anyway, if you have some time on your hands (like a Saturday when kids are napping), give it a try. Obviously, it was fun enough to make my list of what I like. Please leave any comments about your successful traftracking experiences, as well as any fun variants that you may come up with. Happy traftracking!

Traveling

Like most people, I like to travel. I have found that some of our best travels have been spontaneous, as you always beat your expectations when you don't have any. Of course most of our trips are short...under 4 hours, and the short trips lend themselves well to spontaneity. I have traveled to Asia and hope to travel back and to Europe some day too. I enjoy all sorts of destinations from amusement parks, historical landmarks (whether of popular significance or ancestral significance), natural beauty, architectural wonders, and of course gustatorial delights. But most importantly, I enjoy the time travel offers to be with family.

Technology

I still love technology, always and forever.....I have loved technology my whole life. This interest first manifested itself when I was four or five and took a part our Alphie. My first computer experience was in second grade, using an Apple IIe to navigate the Logo "turtle" through mazes and to make various shapes.

We didn't own a computer until we got one for Christmas when I was twelve...the top-of-the-line 286 with a 20 meg hard drive. I added a blazing fast 2400 baud modem to "surf" the BBS scene. Oh and I got so excited to upgrade to DOS 5.0...those were the days. I learned by experimenting...which of course leads to set backs such as reformatting hard drives, but hey it was only 20 MB. I remember asking my cousin, "Can you even imagine a 1 gig hard drive?" It didn't take long for me to take the 286 apart and to begi9n adding things like an Ultrasound sound card. I was the envy my freshman year, thanks to my Grandfather's purchase of a HP Laserjet IIP, skipping right over dot-matrix.



In high school, I elected to take an electronics class, where I was able to put together a high power strobe light and a 3 channel light organ (which I used to have a green, red, and blue light flash with the bass, treble, and mid-range of my Techno/Eurobeat/Dance music. It was like a dance party in my room every night). I remember designing and making my first circuit board, putting it in a bath of acid to eat away the uncovered copper. I should also mention that in working with electronics always look where you rest your hand...I took about 250 VDC through my body by hitting the leads to a charged capacitor with my thumb.

Anyway, as we all know technology has come along way...hey, we already have over 1 tera hard drives, and thankfully no more overnight downloads destroyed by someone picking up the phone.