Fall Semester, 2012

   Classes start on Monday. I have two classes this semester, CS 383 Software Engineering, and CS/Math 385 Theory of Calculation. When I said to Clint that CS 385 didn't sound so hard, he just leaned back and laughed at me. I have since begun to surmise that it might be more of a weed-out class. Doesn't really matter, they kind of all are to me.
   I'm feeling particularly fuzzy-headed and ill-prepared for the new semester. No use in worrying.
   I've been reading The Soul of Science, by Nancy Pearcy and Charles Thanxton. It's a history of science that is also to some degree about the history of science. The authors are putting the Christian and philosophical context of the development of science back into the history, noting where and why it has largely been left out. I'll have to get back to this, it's a good book and worth more comments.
   "The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him," --Psalm 25:14
   EC Bell has pointed out in several sermons that what we actually fear reflects what we do not wish to lose, and that the right way to look at 'the fear of the Lord' is as a fear of losing him. Evan Wilson has more of an old-school view of  'the fear of the Lord' as a fear of being destroyed by his Judgement. Those views are probably more complementary than not, reflecting basically the same thing.
   I think I'm more determined this year to spend some time sharpening my philosophical and poetic and musical skills. Just because I'm not here to only be an engineer. Off to bed, and then tomorrow, it's back to being way over my head in Math and Engineering.

A futile, vain, and meaningless summer was had by all.

   School starts again in two weeks. I have a place to live and some iced tea in a glass. Reviewing all the things I didn't get done this summer would also be a waste of time. But one of the things I did do was go to Evan Wilson's excellent four-week bible study on Ecclesiastes. It was eye-opening. Evan articulated insights that I feel I had been struggling toward for a long time, but had been unable to  quite coalesce on my own. I am very grateful for the chance to listen to him. Of course I won't remember it for long.
   I was already most of the way into a proper futilitarian frame of mind: convinced that we won't be here long, accomplish anything, nor be long remembered. But there are a couple of things that struck me in particular.
"What is crooked cannot be made strait" (1:15)
   We are living in a fallen world and subject to futility. We can't fix it. But oddly, Evan said, futility paves the way for the virtues. Someone who's trying to fix something misses the chance to instead respond to a situation with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness or self-control.
   "Consider the work of God; who can make strait what he has made crooked?" (7:13)
   I suppose this is much like the other verse, I'm just still mulling over the implications. Especially in the arenas of how to treat ones' self and others. Right now I have more questions than answers, and they keep running ahead of me. I grew up in more of a pietistic tradition where I was trying to be perfect and not really need the grace of God, which is to say, not really need Him. Which was Adam's sin all over again, and where futility comes in. We're dependent creatures: we will never not need him. Futility reminds us of this, even though we're proud and kind of dim.
   "Be not righteous overmuch, and do not make yourself overwise; why should you destroy yourself?" (7:16)
    Another mind-bender. I'm sure I gawked at this as a kid and then blew it off. I'm still not sure I quite get it, I may have to ask Evan again, but I'm tending to think that both have the potential to ruin the moment or avoid it entirely with just too much stuffed-shirt prudence. The moment is really all we have.

So it's Thursday of Finals Week, I haven't stayed up all night studying even once. I have one last final tomorrow and I just don't care anymore. I don't even remember what the class was about. Linux stuff. Bash and Perl and socket programming. Maybe I should go over my notes.

I am getting better at this programming stuff, I think, at least I think I'm better. I have a better idea about how to put together my poetry program. And I have a new assignment from Clint: implement 'Asteroids' for a couple of different platforms. I dunno, I may have crossed a line somewhere this semester. I've spent all semester writing programs in languages I don't know, and that was tiresome and unnerving, but now I'm a little bit inured to the feeling. So all the dorky little projects I have in mind aren't really intimidating me so much anymore; sure I don't know how to to write them, or even what language to use, but so what, that just makes them like every other project I've done this year. I need a program to convert text into image files for the fridge magnets poetry project. Oh I know, I'll write one. Hey, I haven't written anything in Unicon yet, I'll just write it in that.
Right after finals we're driving back to our hometown in Oregon. We'll stay with Colleen's folks and then my mom, and probably want to sleep a lot. But we'll also get to see our friends.

Update, and so on.

So I got into Grad School for the fall. This will be good, if I also can get a tuition waiver and a job in the department. But at least in means I'm on track for the Masters degree now and can skip some of the non-CS related Bachelor's requirements. I could theoretically skip the math, but that is such a bad idea, besides, I like the math.
We went to another poetry reading last Thursday. Jory Mickelson, a TA in Colleen's poetry class was reading from his new chapbook. It was good work, possibly not totally butt-kicking, but solid, coherent, playful. He's totally deserving of the MFA he's going to get next year.
And an interesting contrast with the woman that read before him. Whereas Jory's poems had a strong rural western style and voice, Ciara Shuttleworth set most of her poems in San Fransisco. It made me wonder if it is even possible to write anything but a youthful/urban-alienation poem set anywhere near SF, and if not, what is the minimum distance from SF you have to be in order to write something non-alienated? Or at least non-foggy? The fault may be mine. I am a poor critic, and I can't even remember what she was saying. It was trying for urban and edgy and it involved cigarettes.
I got started on my automatic poetry generator project, just an hour or two, enough to realize that it was a huge problem that I didn't have time for. I need a lexer and a parser to go along with my bag full of fridge magnets, also some composition rules. Hm, I wonder if I can't do a touch interface that lets one move the fridge magnet word blocks around on the screen, letting the user supply the polish that the machine probably can't. Hm.

Spring Break

Is upon us. I just hope we can rest. These semester thingys are long and quite tiring. We're half-way through. I've been mildly over my head the whole time. I guess it's fun, but when I get tired it seems a bit frightening as well. I'm working for the Dean of the College of Engineering for the rest of the semester, which is great, except my job involves stuff I can't do yet, like programming our new Surface computers to do Neat Stuff which we don't know what is yet using a optical touch-screen interface I don't know anything about in a language I haven't learned. YeeHaw! I'm a CS major, yes I am, and I'm finding that my ignorance on the subject of Computers and Computing really is infinite insofar as the upper limit of it is undefined. And people are going to ask me how it's going, and I'm going to say that I'm learning a lot. Which is true. I can now write a "hello, world" program in four languages.
Gotta pack.
This here blog needs more pictures.

Faith and Cynicism

While I was laughing because of one of our dear friend's poems, (and it was really funny) my own excellent Colleen informed me (blandly) that I was the most cynical person she knew. I thought 'this cannot be true!' I don't think of myself as being especially cynical, especially not to the degree of being an outlier. So I went to look it up, on Wikipedia, of course. I'll just insert the first line.
"Cynicism is an attitude or state of mind characterized by a general distrust of others' apparent motives, or a general lack of faith or hope in the human race."
Oh, well, that's OK then. A general lack of faith in the human race doesn't seem particularly inappropriate; but I don't want to belabor the point, many better thinkers than me have been over that ground. But I also hope that by now I've assimilated more of the Gospel into my thinking than that. Sure we're going to do bad things, and suffer in our turn, and then die lingering, painful deaths (as Evan Wilson assures us), but in the middle of that, in the middle of all of that, God loves us, and nothing can snatch us out of his hand. Perhaps I don't have faith or hope in the human race per se, but I don't really feel the lack. God's faithfulness gives me faith. His love makes it possible for me to love, and this inevitably mitigates my cynicism a little. I hope.
PS: Colleen, my sister, my bride, be my Valentine.

In which we stop and ponder cars.

Well here I am buried in Language and System software, wondering how I can translate a CS degree into designing and building cars. There's no giant rush to figure it out, I just have this small obsession that won't go away. So I am going to humor myself for a moment and put up something about my own fantasy garage. Ok, not the garage per se, just the cars that persistently present themselves to my imagination. Here we go.

This, being my own car, may not qualify as a fantasy. But it sort of is; sometimes I just want to pinch myself and make sure I'm awake. The Mazda Miata is on everyone's list of the best sports cars ever, to the point that Jalopnik has banned it from it's own weekly top-ten lists on the grounds that it would be on all of them and can therefor be assumed. The same sort of deal occurs at LeMons races, where anyone showing up with either a Miata or a BMW E30 is handed a liberal collection of penalty laps, because otherwise no-one would race anything else and that would be no fun. Ask a question to the folks at Grassroots Motorsports. The answer is always Miata.
I've already mentioned car number two, also near the top of everyone's top ten list: the BMW E30. E30 refers to the chassis code of BMW's 3-series cars from 1985 to 1991. Still pretty light, but stiffer than it's predecessors, the E30 was very popular and they sold a lot of them. Which is good. Slightly bigger and heavier than the Miata, it is also holds more stuff and seats more people. BMW invented the whole idea of a sports sedan, and a lot of people still think this was their best one.

A lot of people will demand that I resign my Enthusiast card for this next one, but I can't help it. It is the 1995-2000 Buick Riviera. Not a performance car, but a luxury coupe. What's compelling about it is just the shape: it unites the sleek with the voluptuous in a way that I find irresistible. I'm not going to resist.

Here's another picture, because hey, I'm feeling a little defensive about it. All cars provide a means of transportation, but they could and should do more than that. This Buick does. If it's more sensual and soothing than exciting, that's still good, and it is very lovely to look at.

Just for comparison, here is a Jaguar XK6 from roughly the same era.

The design is more restrained in its elegance, more conservative. It has read Browning's "My Last Duchess" and learned it's lesson. I would like to drive them both, then decide.

But now to try to win my Enthusiast card back. Another persistent favorite of mine is the Lotus 7. Still in production after more that 50 years, it's simplicity and purity put it in a different class. The tiny Miata is a thousand pounds heavier.

At this point I'm way over-due to say something about the almighty Subaru WRX. This is Idaho after all, and when we have to go somewhere, sometimes what we need is a lot of power and some undefeatable all-wheel drive. All Hail.

I doubt I will ever be able to obtain anything other than 1:43 models of some of these, so I might as well round off the list with some cars that I love irregardless of the fact that other people own them and I never will.
Something with a Pininfarina badge, because art: the Fiat 124 Spider.

In the years between 1952 and 1962 or so, Studebaker made some really lovely cars.

A 1953 Studebaker Starlight.

A 1961 Studebaker Hawk. These cars were much smaller than most American cars of the era, and are as sleek and lovely as nearly any of the comparable European cars of the era. Just for comparison, here's a 1960 Ferrari Superamerica:

It makes me go back and puzzle about the Studebakers. Where did they fail? Did they have all that style lavished upon them only to be cursed with lame mechanicals? I want answers.

On a sunnier note, here's a  BMW 2002:

Oh, hey, every BMW.

Here's a pair of Porsches. There is no substitute.

A Cayman and a 911. I'd drive either if I had to. Ezra Dyer says that the Ultimate Porsche Driving Experience involves sliding backwards into a tree at 200 miles per hour. So at some point prior to that I should just settle. I guess. Got a Porsche in your barn? Consider donating it to me, you know, for Science.
These are a pair of micros from the fifties: A Messerschmidt Kabinroller on the left, and a BMW Isetta on the right. I have this feeling in my heart that the world will rediscover Micro cars in the not too distant future. A few companies are playing with the idea now. I want to get in on the fun.

I really like the concept of the Kabinroller, Cabin Scooter in English. Besides being a fun layout, something like this might really work in the Pacific Northwest: economical, eco-friendly, and rain-proof. Add modern mechanicals, modern materials, maybe AWD, and yes, I can see a market here. Must have enough power to go up these hills. Easy to do with today's engines. Ok, I'm on it. Raise some money, hire some engineers...