The Machine

I just couldn't not post this.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

I am joining a team working to compete in the upcoming DARPA Urban Challenge. This looks to be quite a bit of work, but also lots of fun. The guys running the team competed in the previous Grand Challenge, and had a car that was impressive. I will see how this goes.

Sometimes I do miss my goatee and shaved head. I guess I will just have to get by. I thought of this because I tried a barber who butchered my hair the other week. I guess I am going back to the hair cuttery place next time.

I hit the golf course the other week, and sometimes I feel like Sherman here, without the last panel. I have only played once this year, and it was showing. After just 9 holes though, I did get par on the last one.

The Babysat

On Saturday evening I cared for my nephew, Arthur, by myself for the first time. Nathan and Kathy were at a birthday party for a friend, and I got to watch the little guy. I was a little apprehensive, but it went well. I was able to play with him for a while until he got tired, then fed him a bottle to get him to sleep. Whew, no problems. He is such a cutie.

Now Nathan and Kathy are gone to Europe for a few weeks, so I have eight days of work by myself. I think it will go well, but having Nathan around to answer my questions is really helpful. He has helped me a great deal in solving problems I encounter programming.

The WCA

I went to high school at Westminster Christian Academy in Ladue, MO. I was just browsing around facebook and came accross these two links.

I am very startled by this. My heart goes out to that community that I was part of for many years.

Please pray for this boy.

You can't alwasy have what you want.

Ahh, the J. Peterman catalogue. Or as they call it "The Owners Manual". Where else can you get a great story with your overpriced clothing. At some point I am going to buy the duster that started off the company. The last chance department has some things that are actually reasonable in price.

Disappointing

I am troubled by this news. If these are the students of today, then the country will have many problems in the future. Now I guess I understand why every college class I attended spent some of the first lecture and part of the syllabus on the cheating policy, and the possible dire consequences. Perhaps I was just unaware of some of what was going on, but I didn't encounter lots of this cheating.

I think the closest I came to this sort of behavior would have been in the computer labs programming. I would sometimes work side by side with other students in my classes, and we would help each other out when stuck on a problem. We would sometimes look at each others approaches to problems, which under a certain reading of the syllabus might be considered cheating. I think that the people I worked with followed the spirit of the law and refrained from cheating. We were trying to learn the material, not just get the work done. I am a little surprised that those cheating on their work like this are passing their exams. I guess it is a good thing that exams make up such a large part of the grade for most classes, because it is more difficult to cheat in such a venue.

Avast, me hearties!

And here I almost forgot that today is an international holiday! Today, September 19, is Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Oh, did you hear about the new pirate movie? It is rated Arrrr.

If you were unaware of this holiday, feel free to get in some pirate talk this evening.

Bad DRM, bad.

It looks like the new Microsoft Zune player will not play Microsoft's own PlaysForSure DRM( Digital Rights Management) music or video. Thanks to the DMCA it is also illigeal to strip off the DRM and play your music on a unsupported device, so your purchased digital music collection will probably soon be useless. I was excited about iTunes until I found out that once you purchase music you cannot download it later if you loose your copy. I don't understand why they don't do what Audible does and keep track of your purchases so you can get any book you have ever bought. Audible does have some DRM, but it isn't too obtrusive, and if need be later I can burn my books to a CD to listen to on any CD player.

I really enjoy lisening to audio books, this weekend I started Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and I will report back when I am finished with it.

This last Saturday at the Altadena church we had a "Vision Day" to look at where the church was and where it should be heading. I found the small church presentation was enlightning, and the entire day was a good process for the church. Hopefully the things that come out of it will edify us and glorify God.

On Saturday evening some of the young group took some of the Sunday school to the LA county fair. I think it was the biggest fair I have ever been to (considering before that I had only been to the Creve Coeur city fair in MO). We had a lot of fun, and I was really impressed with a group of acrobats. The amount of their lives they must dedicate to acheving some of those feats must be astounding.

November 17

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

I am excited. Nintendo might just pull off something really fun.

Americans, take note.

This says it all.

BrettspielWelt

Awhile ago I posted about the XBox 360 getting some german board games. When reading about that someone directed me to BrettspielWelt and I was interested, but didn't get around to trying it out. Last night I had the oppritunity to play with my cousin in Chicago, and we played Carcassonne on this system. The German is a little tough to get past, but it is possible to set most of the language in their client to english through a properties file. With some form of internet voice chat this was really fun. I don't think that it will be too difficult to get several people togather online to play some games. The client interface is a little clunky, but once we were in the game it worked great. I am really excited to try out some of their other games. Oh, and did I mention that it is free?

If anyone is interested I am usually on AIM after 6:30PM Pacific (8:30PM Central) with the name matthewschrenk, and I should be able to help others set up the client.

I can dream can't I?

I got information in an email that if you fly to Hawaii between September 13 and December 10, 2006 on ATA (through Southwest) you earn double rewards (meaning 8 points, or half of a free round trip ticket). I looked at the flights out of Oakland and each way is only $147. Mmmmmmm, I dream of a trip to Maui.

Woozy

Spinning, oh the spinning. Today I woke up a little dizzy. Man that does not feel good. I was also a little nauseated all day with a slight headache. Hopefully tomorrow will be better, cause I don't like this.

Apple today announced some changes to their iPod product line. The new shuffle is a cute little clip, but I was interested in the new 80GB video iPod. I got a white one.

Election season is coming up, and we have some really big messes to look forward to. Maryland's primary election had some problems today with their new electronic voting machines. While most of the article is about user error (they forgort to bring the cards that had the election information on them needed to run the machines), there is some about the machines themselves (at least one person had to unselect pre-selected votes on their ballot). I think that electronic voting machines could possibly be OK, but there are so many things that can go wrong. At the very least when you cast your vote the machine should print out a paper record that you can look at to confirm that your vote was right. These papers should be kept safe in case there is any question of vote tampering. There needs to be a physical record of the votes, because it would be too easy to tamper with a digital only record. I just don't get what is wrong with having paper ballots?

Wow, people are crazy. I think that Steve Irwin was very knowledgeable about the dangers that he faced, and considering only seventeen people have died worldwide from stingrays ever, I think they can be considered not very dangerous. It was less likely then being hit by lighting. He was a unique man who died in a very rare way.

Going to bed now for some well needed beauty sleep.

Five years out.

I didn't even realize that today was 9-11 until the day was half over. Wow, I almost can't believe that it was five years ago when I sat there and watched the second plane hit the world trade center. It was a moment my generation will remember where they were when it they first heard about it. Since then I have been to NYC to see where the towers stood, and I think it is good that they are going building something new there.

Hmm, long time between posts. Last week was a nice short four day week at work. Over the weekend I ran some errends that had been neglected for the three weekends I was out of town. Finally changed my oil, which I had been meaning to do for about a month.

If you are even in a Bose store I recommend you check out their demonstration room. I was absolutly amazed by it. It has been quite awile till I saw some technology that really surprised me.

Today I started learning the Ruby programming language, I am pretty excited about it after just a little introduction.

I am firming up the plans for my baptism, and it looks like it will be one of the two last weekend of January, I will keep you updated as to when it will be. As for where, I will be babtised in St. Louis church.

Once upon a time in Los Angeles

Wow. I am still a little sore and sunburned from my labor day trip down in LA. I did manage to get quite a few pictures which can be found here. Most of the Altadena YG were down in San Diego for ACYF over the weekend. There were two sisters from Minnesota, and two brothers from Phoenix and Prescott, AZ in attendence. On Friday evening we had some struggles with pre-holiday weekend airports, ick. Things turned around Saturday with a busy day.

We started it off with some beach volleyball at Hermosa Beach in the morning. For lunch we hit Venice Beach and wandered around seeing the sights. We visited the UCLA campus town for cookie ice cream sandwitches and some bubble tea. Then we helped Braden Mogler pick up a free leather couch in Santa Monica and hauled it out to Pepperdine in Malibu. Braden's GPS steered us wrong when we tried a scenic route out of Malibu only to find a gated off dirt road at the top of a mountain. Braden's taurus had a slight case of smoking brakes on the way down. In the future shifing into first will be considered earlier. After a tour of Pepperdine it was back to BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse for some pizza dinner. We visited the UCLA quad for singing. A few in our party decided that they wanted to slide down a big hill there in campus seeing as how it was wet from watering. Whew, I think everyone was tired after that day.

After church on Sunday we were going to go for a hike, but the heat was pretty extreme, so we instead spent the day enjoying fellowship and games back at the Klotzle's.

Labor Day was spent again at Hermosa Beach with some of the group enjoying rollerblading, the local art festival, and some nice waves. Lunch at Scotty's on the beach was the last thing I did before having to clean up and hit Burbank Airport for my 6:00 flight home (which all of my expectations was right on time, and actually got in early to San Jose).

I hope everyone else had as good a Labor Day weekend as I did.

Titles? We don't need no stinking titles!

It has been a quiet week in Redwood City. I am looking forward to a long weekend down in southern California over the upcoming Labor Day weekend. For those of you not in LA that weekend, you are sure missing out.

Today I instituted a new policy, I will only lock my door from the outside with my keys. I was a little upset to find out when I got to work that I had forgotten my keys, wallet, and phone in my now locked apartment. I had to stop by at lunch to have the apartment manager unlock my door.

It looks like on thursday my Sumo Omni Tangerine will arrive. If I like it I will probably buy a few more to serve as my living room furniture. I will just have to decide what colors to get.

I also noticed the other day that commenting on my blog was restricted to only registered users, I have corrected this.

I also found out over the weekend that there is a diet drink that I really like, I just think that it has been a long time coming.

As I said, quiet week. All work and no play makes Matt a dull boy.

In what color do Elephants Dream?

I just watched Elephants Dream and was very impressed. I think that this movie is cool for many reasons, one being that it was made using only open source tools, notably Blender. The other cool thing is that they offer it in HD, which comes out at 815MB for a movie just shy of 11 minutes. If you don't want to DL that much they have versions ranging down to 99MB, but the HD one is stunning to see if your monitor can display that size (which is 1920X1080). My monitor can only display up to 1600x1200 so it is not the HD aspect ratio.

I found that VideoLan was a good media player to watch it with. In fact I VideoLan is the best media player I have ever used and I think you should try it out.

I really wish I would take the time to learn how to use some of these tools like Blender, but I just never seem to get around to even learning the basics.

If you watch it, please throw out your theory of what it is about, I am a little unsure of what is going on.

You came and you gave without taking.

I almost cannot utter the awsomeness of this. Are you ready for it? Really ready? It looks like Microsoft will be offering European board games over their new live service. I was not that interested in this device before, it had some appeal, but this news might just push it over the top. If I could play Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne with my friends around the country, I just might have to get one of these. When this comes down the pike, look for it.

We don't need no education. A small parable.

I just relized that for the first time in 17 years I am not going to be starting school this fall. It is a little sad, but then life moves on. Reading about every one elses back to school fun does make me miss it more.

Justin Moser this Sunday talked about this house in his neighborhood that was the biggest house around. It started construction, but was not finished. Whomever had started buidling it did not have the funds or something to finish it. It sat unfinished for several years. Then someone else bought it and was able to finish it. He compared this to some spiritual lives, and that the building can be interrupted, but still built on later. One part of the sermon really stuck with me, and I have been crafting this little illustration to let you into how my mind works.

You take some time off to relax and catch up with some old friends. Your friend invites you to stay with him for a few weeks in his new place down by the beach. His new house is beautiful. It has all the modern conveniences and is the lap of luxory. You head out and are enjoying the trip, catching up on old times. However you notice something strange, on the weekend your friend heads off and returns the next day. The next weekend he says he is going away again. Upon inquiring where he is off to you find out that he also has a place in the mountains. Thinking that this would be a nice change of scenery you ask to come along, and he is more then happy for you to come. When the two of you reach the house in the mountains you are startled because it is shell of a house. It was never finished and the weather is wearing it away. When you ask why he spends any time at this wreck your friend replies indignantly that this is his main residence and the other house is just another place. He claims his heart is up here in the mountains, but you question this based on where he spends his time and money to make it nice.

This friend's spiritual life only gets worked on when he gets around to it on the weekends, his real treasures, effort, and time are spent elsewhere. We need to give Christ the best of our time and build our house to him up, so that it is full of the things that we cherish.

Mi Casa

I finally got around to taking some pictures of my new apartment. I had kept it pretty clean, but I finally got around to scrubbing it top to bottom (pretty much) last night. I have to say that a cordless vaccuum is the way to go.

Yea, I got nothing else to say.