It had been a long while since the argument, I thought to myself one lazy afternoon as I looked out the window at the cold clear sky above.  Oh, I know it wasn’t just one argument, I reminded myself.  I had had a good deal of time to think things over.  The selfish grief was gone, but in its place was a sort of cold, grim remorse that, in its own way was just as painful as the harsh words that had been spoken.  But in fact, it was not arguments that had thrust us apart.  You certainly couldn’t call them arguments — or even talks.  It was quite the opposite, really.

I used to think it was little things that one of us said or did that put an end to us as I would have liked it.  But it wasn’t.  Our love — and you know what I mean by the word — died of neglect.  Just as the warmest embers will eventually fade if they aren’t carefully tended, we slowly concluded — first her, and in my more recent moods, me — that the other was simply too much work.  We decided that holding onto a seemingly childish ideal was somehow not worth it anymore.

I think what really happened was that both of us became more and more selfish with age.  Each saw it in the other, but not in our own self.

There were high wispy clouds that day.  Not the puffy white ones we used to watch as children.  Not the dark grey ones of I pondered when our separation was first made clear.  They were white-blue — almost indistinguishable from the sky.  It wasn’t nostalgia that I felt, nor sadness, nor even despair.  Now I recall — it was that cold, heartless regret that I spoke of earlier — though unpleasant, not really even an emotion.

Other than the fact that I spent it thinking about her (which I rarely did anymore), the day was like any other.  Except for one thing.  It was the day I decided to actually be the friend to her I had been telling myself I had been for so long.  To be continued…

I know how big of fans you all are of my hideous web applications.  So, without any further ado, here’s another one located conveniently at my test site.

It's All the Rage!

doesn’t mean you should.  However, I think it’s pretty cool that I now have the ability to create hand-drawn images directly at my computer with the new Bamboo MTE-450 drawing tablet my brother Jedidiah gave me for my birthday.

One look at the first creation I made (during a short break from studying) will put the title into perspective. I’m looking forward to having a lot more fun with this device once finals are over.  Thanks Jedidiah!

Today is the twentieth time the earth has been in the location (relative to the sun) that it was the day I was born.    More precisely, had the oscillating radiation from a caesium-133 atom been carefully monitored since my birth, it would at this moment be found to have undergone approximately 5.8 quintillion (exactly 5,801,947,926,899,040,000) oscillations.

To put things into a relevant perspective that everyone can relate to, I could have observed more than three hundred fifty thousand generations of mayflies live out their entire lives, had I been a more astute ecologist.

Each birthday since I read the poem, I have thought a good deal about John Milton’s short poem On His Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-Three.  In the last hours before I go to sleep, I often think about how little I have accomplished in the time allotted to me — how immature I still am — how much I could have done in the previous year if I had only tried harder.  But this time, I’m considering the end of the poem.  Here’s my own rendition:

Through me, a light!
Within the black,
Earnest though dim:
Not of myself, and
Thoroughly thin –
Yet, growing. In Him.

There are things about me right now that I would give anything to change.  There are sins of action and omission I have struggled with for years without success.  My relationship with God and others has never been everything it should be.  Yet, in the midst of all of this — regardless of my weakness and immaturity — more often than not, in spite of me, I think God has used me to accomplish a small amount of good in the lives of the people around me.

I’m not exactly sure how my life will affect the grand scope of history, but in many senses, I’m glad that’s not my department.  It makes me happy to think that God has managed events in such a way that simply being oneself will fulfill an important role.  And, I hope that I can be a more willing participant in that role (whatever it may be) in the years to come — even if that means merely observing the life cycles of mayflies or watching cesium-133!

People always say that life has its ups and downs.  But, for me and many people I know, there’s hardly ever even the slightest warning between the highs and lows — making the common analogy to a roller coaster seem somewhat inadequate.  But then again, I suppose it sounds a lot better than “life is like a square wave.”

For the first half of last week, literally everything seemed to be falling apart for me.  I don’t really know how it happened, but within the few hours I spent at Awana club at my church, I didn’t seem to have a care in the world.  Since I spent the last post going on and on about the terrible things in my life, I thought it might be appropriate to list a few of the good things that have happened to me recently:

• First, with the valuable help of my invaluable mother, I actually finished the important project and paper that seemed completely impossible to complete at the time.  Considering the amount of time and effort I wasted convincing myself of my own inability, it truly is a miracle that I got anything done.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite as relieved as I felt when I stapled those last pages together.
• Second, two of “my” kids at Awana club drew me pictures and said they really missed me when I wasn’t there last week.  In my hurry to hand out workbooks and such to the clubbers as they went out the door, I accidentally left the pictures at church.  But, take my word for it, they were sweet beyond all reason.
• Third, some anonymous but nonetheless TOTALLY AWESOME person at my church gave me a mysterious Christmas gift!  It’s wrapped in a large but light (yet not light enough to be empty) box that unexplainably does not rattle when shaken.  One side feels more flexible than the others, so I’m guessing the box has one of those clear plastic windows.  THIS SOUNDS PROMISING!  I love this kind of surprise, so even if it turns out to be a Barbie play set or a pink Furby, whoever-you-are, THANK YOU!!!
• Fourth, my brother Jed invited me and some friends to go bowling go out for ice cream.  I had a great time, and I think that most everyone else did.  Though the actual scores I got weren’t too impressive, I did improve my bowling score by 37 points between the first and second games.  What’s more, I had a super fun time just chatting with siblings and friends — something I hadn’t done in a long time.
• Fifth, I got all my homework done for this week.  Folks, that’s 25 pages of written homework, 5 pages of online homework, an 18 page project report, and 1777 lines of c++ code.  Yippee!  Hooray!  :-)  :-D 

Sometimes I wish that my particular life square wave were more in phase with everyone else’s — that the people around me would always be able to share my good moods and could invariably empathize with my bad days.  I don’t like to bring others down when I’m down, and it makes me feel insensitive to be all smiles when I know that others are going through a difficult time.

But, maybe the changes in our lives wouldn’t seem so drastic if we were more willing to get help from others when we were feeling down; and, in turn, were available to help bear others’ burdens as we are able.  Hmm… Looks like if you or someone you know is feeling disconnected, the solution is, well, to re-connect with the people you care about!

Having spent the last 7 days doing nothing but engineering homework (with a 2-day break for Thanksgiving), I’m not feeling especially fluent. So, I hope the contrast between the format and the content doesn’t weird you out too much:

Facts:

1. I have barely moved from where I sit for two days straight.
2. I can’t remember the last time I attended all of my classes.
3. I’ve been to church once in the past five weeks.
4. I haven’t logged in to work for well over a month.
5. I seldom attend my Bible study, and almost never complete the week’s lesson.
6. The seat next to me is invariably the last vacant one on the bus.
7. I can count the number of times I’ve said more than 3 words to my family this week: Dad: 1, Mom: 3, Jed: 2, Moriah: 2, Micah: 2 
8. Regarding conversations (Divine and otherwise), I only speak when spoken to.
9. I do not read anything that I am not required to read.
10. There is no life in anything I write.
11. I often wear earplugs or earphones to shut out unwanted distractions.
12. The one thing I look forward to each week is watching a movie in my house.
13. I wasn’t always this way.
14. I hope to God this doesn’t last much longer.

Some of you might like this random php-powered art. It’s kind of slow, but slightly amazing:
Continue reading…

I just found out that my computer programming professor used one of my lab partner Derek Henscheid and my projects as an example for future classes!

Basically, the goal was to design a robot that would have assisted archaeologist Indiana Jones in his effort to retrieve the sacred stone from the Temple of Doom — making the adventure much less risky to life, limb, and soul.  There was a trail of some darkly-colored substance on the lightly-colored floor of the passageways that the robot had to follow into the heart of the temple, retrieve the stone somehow (our method utilized sonic shockwaves to shake the stone loose from its shrine), and carry it safely back again.

So, without any further ado, here’s the famous video!  Our robot wasn’t the most reliable bot, but it certainly was the most musically-inclined.

So, here’s the story:

Like every other person on the face of the earth, I’m faced with solving moderately-sized linear equations on a day-to-day basis.

However, because I’m too frugal to purchase an exorbitantly-priced graphing calculator ($50), I typically am forced to undergo a time-consuming and mentally-taxing procedure in order to avoid having to solve these equations (gasp!) by hand:

I have to remote desktop into school (10 seconds), which requires me to remember not only a username, but a complex password as well.  After this, I must navigate a treacherous start menu in order to find the miniscule icon for which I seek (2 seconds).  I nearly die of impatience as I wait for Mathematica (3 seconds) or Matlab (5 seconds) to start up.  And, by the time I enter in a matrix in abstruse and difficult notation (Example: {{1,0},{0,1}} ), my fingers are sore, and my mind is reeling…

If you know how to tell the future, read minds, or are moderately observant, you can probably guess where this is going…  I spent the afternoon making an easy-to-use equation solver in Javascript.  It’s not ultra-robust but it works pretty well for my purposes.  You should collect some terms, get together a group of friends, and try it out today!

Lately, I’ve been thinking more about politics than I’d like to.

For the past two months, I’ve been averaging about 4 unsolicited e-mails per week from the Barak Obama campaign — sent to my university e-mail address.  I’ve “unsubscribed” more than ten times, and I still continue to receive loads of political junk mail.  The only response I got from the help desk began with the all-too-typical “we need a week to process your request.”  Then, they proceeded to attempt to pass the blame on to Barak’s cyber-enemies who try to spread lies about him.  Folks, the e-mails I’ve been getting may have contained lies and may well have been written by ne’re-do-wells, but there was nothing anti-Obama about them.  The messages were sent from info@barakobama.com, and contained all sorts of links to his website.

Don’t get me wrong, people.  I don’t have anything against Barak Obama as a person — I just think that sending people mass e-mail spam is a lousy way to run a campaign.