Don't drink & drive

It is such a simple logical statement yet seems impossible for most teenagers to follow. To be totally fair it appears difficult for some adults to adhere to as well. This week I took my oldest son to court for his third alcohol related driving offense. I have to hope that it is finally sinking in that there are consequences of breaking this important law. This is the third trip to the court that is three hours away for us on this same matter. I thought the third time would be the end of it, but turns out that we have to return yet one more time with proof of his attendance in a local alcohol driving school. Not that they teach to you how to drive and drink but what happens when you do! Apparently you can take this class several times and it does not help as my son can attest. I think the hardest think to convey to teenagers is that their actions have consequences. What they do affects others. What they do can hurt themselves for a long time to come. When a teenager can hardly think about next week let along next year this is a problem. On the other hand, it sure is nice to be around them when their energy and enthusiasm it is used for good. Which brings me back to the current discussion. I am so thankful that I have yet to live through a tragedy related to my kids, so the offenses although bad indeed, have yet to cause physical injury to themselves or others. For this I am truly thankful. Weekly I see in the local newspaper teenagers who drive when drunk and kill someone. This is a tragedy that doesn't have to happen and yet does. So sad. For now my son has to live a whole year without a driver's license, so maybe it will sink in for him even though he is well beyond being a teenager. Better late than never.

MRI

I guess all of my exercise over the last four centuries has finally caught up with me. Last week I saw an orthopedic surgeon for my intense knee pain. I waited for around two hours to see the doctor and at first I thought I was being punished for being fifteen minutes late to my appointment, but alas all patients were being treating equally bad. Maybe I am spoiled with on-site health care at the place I currently work. Once the doctor came in to see me it was not a nice experience. He pushed on my knee quite forcefully, I guess to make sure where the pain was located, but I could have told him where if he had asked. Then he pushed on the front of my knee cap and that hurt just as much, but it never bothers me at all. He said that was common with runners to live with tendonitis and not know it. He also asked if I used to play basketball as he could feel a bone spur on my left knee cap as he pushed on it. I wanted to tell him to stop pushing on my knees, but at $139/hr I wanted to get my money's worth somehow. Actually I only had to pay $20 co-pay as the insurance will pay the rest.

This week I visited the Wake Radiology facility for an MRI to find out what kind of cartilage or tendon damage I had inflicted on myself. I had previously had an MRI when we lived in San Antonio as a first cousin of mine had a serious brain aneurysm and all immediate relatives were advised to have brain scans. It was kind of freaky as my whole body was inserted into a narrow tube. The initial paperwork said if you weighed over 300 pounds or were claustrophopic or had metal parts in your body an MRI was not in your future. I got the same notice this week! For the brain MRI there was a small 2"x2" window you could look out of directly up above your eyes, as if that was to help in any way. I just closed my eyes and thought happy thoughts to get through the 30 minute MRI. The end result was no brain aneurysm existed in my head, which is a good thing. I never saw the actual MRI scans or films. I did see the bill for the 30 minutes of extremely loud noise as it was $5000 of which I had to pay nothing as insurance covered the cost. This week I just had to stick my knee into the small tube and the same super loud magnetic rumble carried on for around thirty minutes. In the end I was handed the original MRI film scans and I have yet to see the bill.

The MRI output in my case was 6 x-ray films about 14"x20" in size, with each one containing around 20 snapshots of my right knee at different angles. I tried scanning them using our computer at home. After playing around with a couple of the scanned images using the GIMP image editor, I was only able to get one of them to have any visible contents. That is the one I posted with this blog entry even though it makes my knee look like a dinosaur bone! I will find out next week from my original orthopedic surgeon the prognosis. At least the MRI films look neat.

family art show

I have decided that today is art show day, so I have loaded 3 of the paintings laying around the house.

Sarah's painting:

Nathan's painting:

Andrew's painting:

art of being an artist

I must say that some of our kid's character traits can definitely be traced to their parents. Some good and some bad. One such gene that has been passed down by us is the gift of drawing. I remember winning my first city wide art contest when I was not yet a teenager. I always liked to draw things around me, but the painting that won me the first place prize was an abstract painting of what I thought racing cars was all about. I may even find a photo of that painting one day and post it. My mother picked up painting when she was 70 and is wonderful. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and likes to paint desert scenes. I need to take a photo and post one of them as well. Then my wife picked up painting when the kids were small. She just pulled out one of her first boat paintings from the back of a closet a couple of days ago. one of her boat paintings is hanging up in her parent's house in their living room. Sounds like I need to have an art show in my blog one day! Our oldest son is a artist as well but he has to be in the right mood in order to create, but when he does it is special. Which brings me to the reason for this post as our middle son has recently been doodling as he sits at the computer. I think he would have thrown them away if we had not captured his drawings and put them on the refrigerator door. I have scanned them in for your viewing pleasure, from the family of artists.

being flexible

At work this week, I moved to a new group where the development environment is Adobe Flex. It is a breath of fresh air for me. Today it all became fun when I had a bug in my code and could acutally set a breakpoint and debug the code. For the past several years this simple process was torture. Found a bug in JavaScript? Good luck on finding where it is. Bug in JSP code, have fun finding it. Will an interactive debugger help? I am sorry it should be easy but it is not. Even using IE developer toolbar or Firefox Firebug it just seems like too much work to find a little bug. The best thing about Flex is the UI components, but it is the small things in life that make being a developer enjoyable in the daily trenches.

For the last couple of weeks at home on my Mac, I have been learning Flex by completely rewriting my Attentive 2 Design personal web site in Flex. I covered some of the things that I had always wanted to do in DHTML but never was able to get them working in all browsers. A custom dialog with clickable content, drop shadows, show/hiding content on mouse events. I used Flex Builder 3which was a great Adobe decision by making it work within Eclipse, since that is the development IDE of choice for Java for many years. I am looking forward to having fun again after many years.

perfection vs. addiction

Is it possible to be perfect? How about close enough so you don't cause grief? How good is good enough? Does it matter if we cannot be perfect on this earth? Such big questions don't normally come up very often. For some odd reason I have been thinking about it lately.

At the same time I have been reading another book on drug addiction beautiful boy: a father's journey through his son's addiction by David Sheff. I must say that this book helps more than A Million Little Pieces by James Frey or The Heroin Diares by Nikki Sixx. Having lived a couple of years through our son abusing himself and drugs and the hell it caused, I must say as in everything there is always someone who has it worse than we do. Yesterday I asked my son if he ever did crystal methadone and he said no he did not but every one he knew in San Antonio did. Now that is just another reason we are happy that we left that stage of our lives behind and returned to NC. Maybe a couple of quotes from this book:

• We pretend that everything is all right. But we live with a time bomb. It is debilitating to be dependent on another's moods and decisions and actions. pg 228


• A using addict cannot trust his own brain - it lies, says 'You can have one drink, a joint, a single line, just one.' pg 261


• An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie about it. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you find it. Part of me is convinced that he actually believes that he will find it for you. pg 265


• If they don't die or do too much damage, there's a chance, always a chance. pg 272


• I said, I'm a drug addict and alcoholic. He shook his head. No, he said, that's how you've been treating your problem. What is your problem? Why are you here? pg 295


• Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die. pg 302


• I want to open up and hear Nic and believe him, but I am unwilling to tear down the fragile dam that I have constructed to protect myself. I am afraid I'll be drowned. pg 303

There has to be a middle ground somewhere. Either way the mental institution is just a heart beat away if he try to attain perfection in ourselves or our kids.

kids and cards

It must have been the perfect weather with a cloudless sky and spring like temperatures that finally got all of the kids outside at the same time. I started washing my filthy car as it had not been bathed since last fall, mostly due to the water shortage in this region. Before I knew it my daughter came out to help me. By the time we moved onto my wife's van, I looked up and was shocked to see the boys watching us. Not that they were there to help but at least they were out of their rooms.

Later in the afternoon, my daughter and I played cards for the first time in a long time. We failed miserably to win any of our two-handed solitaire games, but as usual we enjoyed talking to each other about everything in general and nothing in specific. After several attempts we gave up and moved onto Uno. It is one of my daughter's favorite card games. She just likes to play and is not worried about who wins really.

Both of these events remind me of my childhood. I used to play all kinds of games with my mother but was a really bad loser. I still don't know why she played with me, but it must have been the word "love". I would get physically angry when I lost at any game as I was so competitive about everything I did. I played football, basketball and baseball in leagues, but I guess I brought that with me when playing games at home with family. Looking back that just seems so stupid of me. That was not the height of stupidity as I did many other such things that would rank much higher.

The other thing I remember is that it seemed like endless chores. On every other Saturday morning I dusting all of the furniture in the house - now today, who even knows what in the world that means? At least I had a sister who did it the other Saturdays. I chopped wood for our fireplace and sometimes did the same for a couple of elderly women in town. I mowed several lawns and at least got paid for doing them. I had to weed our nearly one acre garden. I had to wash the dishes every other night after supper. Most of these responsibilities increased when I became the official man of the house at 14 years old, after my parents divorced. That is when I got to paint the whole outside of the house, fix things that broke around the house and wash and wax the cars. Looking back I am glad I grew up on a small farm as I learned the definition of hard manual labor and responsibility, mostly from forced chores. I did not like the divorce as my family life was not pleasant in that regard and this one event single handily changed the course of my whole life for the worse. That is one of the reasons I am so determined to not let that happen my own kids.

So let the kids and car washing followed up by playing cards continue...

pure cuteness

Wow, these are the cutest photos of our kids and make me laugh every time I see them. Why did we not enjoy them more when our kids were this cute?

why do we do it to ourselves?

Somehow lack of sleep changes a person. I am normally pretty nice, or so I think so, but let me get a terrible night sleep or be sick and I somehow morph into someone else. I guess that shows what I am really made of. Sad but true.

Last night my daughter invited five other girls over for a "sleep over" birthday party. Sounds pretty harmless since girls are not as prone to trouble like we have seen boys get into in the past. We have had boy "sleep over" parties in the past, one of which ended with police ringing the doorbell and upon answering the door I found several police cars in my driveway. That event ended the boy "sleep overs". Plus in our previous house in Fuquay Varina, the game room/boy "sleep over" room had an adjacent wall to our master bedroom. Was that ever a bad design for a house! We just could not block out their talking, which frequently carried on into the wee hours of the night. It has been several years since we have had a big "sleep over" party as I think we forgot how little sleep we got in the last ones.

Nothing bad happened at all - just girls coming into the house about every hour from 9pm until 7am this morning. You know, when I was a youngster I pulled an "all nighter" only a hand full of times. I felt so tired the next day that it was not pleasant for me. We took the girls to a movie at 4pm and while they were in the movie theater we went out to eat with our oldest son at Dickey's BBQ Pit, which really reminds us of the Texas style BBQ we love. When we picked them up at 6pm, they were really wound up, so to calm them down we took them to Starbucks Coffee. That was probably a bad idea, but hey you only turn 13 once and we wanted to make the evening special for the last such event in our family. After the ceremonial cake with 13 candles, the present opening and everyone adorned in pirate scarfs, they ran out to play a dance party game in the sound proof shed. The only time we heard them was when the sliding glass door was closed as little girls came in and out all night long. What ever happened to the good old come to my party with birthday presents, eat some cake and then leave?

One more thought for the day...

I remember when our daughter was born 13 years ago, but just barely. In those good old days I would often get to work around 4am and then then leave early to be with the family. One time I got bronchitis from a viral infection and not listening to my body's cry for rest that quickly became pneumonia. The doctor told me it was walking pneumonia, but I could barely walk and for most days hardly get out of bed. The timing was horrible as my wife was pregnant with our daughter. Then came the due date and I was wondering how I would make it to hospital. My wife drove me to the hospital! Now that was sad. The good news was that the birthing room had a very nice recliner in it. I went right to it and put my feet up and promptly fell asleep. The gynecologist woke me up and told me to stand up and come over to see my daughter being born. It turns out with pneumonia that only the first couple of weeks are cause for alarm on being contagious, so that was not my concern. I just did not have the energy to get out of the chair. Somehow I pulled myself up and out of the comfortable chair and made my wife and the doctor happy! Oh the good old days!

good vs. mediocre

So by now you know I have teenagers, and with such an age comes unlimited curiosity. Combine that with the internet which never sleeps and it is just not a good thing. If we would let them, our kids would stay on the internet all night long either surfing the web or playing games with the internet connected XBox 360. Just to help them get to sleep, I had to limit their access to the internet. Plus is helps me get to sleep instead of hearing them all night long! So the big question is now do I limit the time they spend on the web?


I recently upgraded to a new LinkSys router as I saw they advertised a new access restriction feature that I did not have on my previous router. It does indeed let me limit the time, but it has an interesting bug in their traditional approach to user interface design and implementation. What I would really like to do is force the kids to go to get off the internet at 10pm every evening since they have to get up around 6:30am each morning to get to school on time. Easy enough as all I have to do is set the time from 10pm at night until 6am the next morning. I am sorry, you cannot do that since the UI has a check that 10pm is not before 6am. Well it turns out that it is if you are a human, but a non-human programmer decided to start the clock at midnight! My only work around is to start at midnight and go until 6am. Too bad, such an easy concept, but someone got a little too smart for me.

I actually called Time Warner as I thought maybe they would have a way to help me out. No such luck on that one. We had a DVR from Time Warner when we lived in San Antonio and it had all kinds of nice security and access restrictions built in, but the problem with that is it only affected the single connection through the DVR. We had other TVs in the house and the DVR settings had no affect on those TV sets.


When my wonderful Apple PowerBook died I did not have the funds to buy a new Apple model, so I temporarily bought an Acer laptop. It was the cheapest laptop I could find at the time and was on sale and I also had a discount that covered sales tax. I had heard bad things about Microsoft Vista and this was my first experience with using it. For the first several months I would get 2-5 daily patches to Vista updated on the laptop. In the past couple of months that has trailed off considerably. One of the nicest things about Vista is the built-in Parental Controls. It lets me do all kinds of wonderful things like define a web filter to allow/block websites and downloads, define time limits, control games allowed by rating and content, and allow/block programs from being used. I find a completely different UI under the Time Limits page. I just highlight the hours that I want to block and click OK and I am done. That sure is easy as it should be. What is sad about it is that this same interface could easily be done on a web page, which is what LinkSys uses for their control page pages.

Yet another example of how design works when done well and the effort is made up front to understand the intended audience.

Do you want to be a teenager?

Like The Last of the Mohicans or Custard's Last Stand or The Last Samurai, there comes a time for the final big event. Today is just such a day in our family as the youngest child is becoming a teenager. Of course there will be another big day in the not so distance future when we no longer have any teenagers, but we have to wait seven more years for that event. I am trying to remember this same day for each of our children, when they crossed the teenager line, but it is difficult to do so. Not different in a sentimental way, but a huge event like this seems big at the time but then later on it seems insignificant in the grand scheme of things or the current worries of the day. I am sure it was a big deal for me when I turned 13; however, how it seems like the day never existed. What I do remember of being a teenager causes me to never want to be one again!

However, today we will live in the moment and enjoy the time with our daughter and her six young friends. That is why we will quickly shuffle them into the Acoustic Shed to let them go wild and be noisy while we get a good night's sleep. Oh the benefits of the multiple purpose sound proof shed are all becoming clear now.

Akbar to 81

This was an interesting weekend as this time of year we celebrate the combined birthdays of my wife's father and my daughter, since their birthdays are only a couple of days apart. Before leaving for Wilmington, we started the weekend off by seeing the newest Indian movie called Jodhaa Akbar. Indian movies are so fascinating to me as they always seem to have an interesting point or are pure entertainment without bad language or sexual content. This was a movie of epic proportions - I am so thankful to have a wife who enjoys going with me as that makes it even more enjoyable.

I don't know what happened on the drive down to the beach city of Wilmington as I slept almost all of the way. Happily I was not driving! Once we arrived, my daughter was treated like royalty as usual. I think that is why she wants to stay longer when it is time to return. We had a few laughs over presents and times of reminiscing of life in South Korea for the Dietrick family. Then the subject of computers came up of which I quickly become the family expert. In the morning I tried to fix my wife's father's five year old laptop.

He was complaining about how slow it was and how he had no disk space left. I first looked at his Recycle Bin and noticed it was almost 1 GB. When I looked at the contents I saw it had never been empty since 2002 when he bought it. I am still amazed at how unintuitive computers can be to someone's who career is not working with them. After running Disk Cleanup, and cleaning up the trash can, the space was still not coming back. I then found a utility called Folder Size, and it pointed me right to the problem of 6 GB of temporary files on main windows folder. Then I found out that with all of the programs installed recently the disk was badly fragmented. When I checked Windows Task Manager, I found out that 400 MB of memory was allocated but only 204 MB of memory was installed. We went out trying to find matching memory and after visiting every store we could find we had nothing to show for it. In the last store the man was so helpful that he said we could substitute other memory for the one I was looking for, but they were out. We went back to the next to last store that we had visited and found another person to help us. He located memory we needed and once back home it actually worked! In the end, he had a computer with 7 GB more free and 640 MB of memory and a laptop he could actually use! This was my birthday present for him and it was greatly appreciated by the newly crowned 81 year old patriarch of the family.

Acoustic Music Shed

I really cannot come up with a name that describes what we built behind our house as I was speaking about in the last post. Let me explain the steps we followed as we built the shed mostly on weekends over a span of months (looking back I wish I had photos for each step):

1. Since we wanted an shed larger than 12' x 12' with a concrete foundation, we needed a $65 permit from the Town of Fuquay Varina. Filing the paper and getting the permit took about a month.


2. My middle son, who wanted to do all of the research on the internet found many sites that explained what were the best techniques (I do not have links since he was the foreman and I was the worker bee).


3. We found plans on the internet that explained how to build a 20' x 12' shed so we paid $45 to get the complete plans from Just Sheds Inc. This same site had free general instructions on building a shed, which really helped since we had no idea what we were doing. We had to slightly modify the plans as my son wanted to make the inside dimensions 19' x 14'!


4. The location we choose in our backyard had a wooden playset that had to be dismantled and a couple of mostly dead branches that needed to be trimmed. The wood posts for the playset were buried about 3 feet deep, encased in cement, so that was a fun beginning.


5. We had to dig out an area for the foundation as the ground was mostly level, but we had to dig down one foot for the concrete slab. Placing the wooden 2'x12'x14' edges and getting the level took us days and exactly at right angles was a chore.


6. Our neighbor drives a dump truck, so I asked him to get me a complete load of small gravel one evening on his way home. This filled the bottom of the dirt area we had dug out.


7. After leveling the gravel, we put think black plastic on top and then laid re-bar on top in a specific pattern.


8. I called the local cement company and they brought out a full dump truck of super high density concrete. When he arrove, we found out that it was our responsibility to pour it from the truck and to spread it and smooth it. Normally no big deal, but with high density concrete, this was really hard. The driver was so helpful in every way and without him we would have wasted $800 we spent on this part of the shed. The finished surface was not perfect, but good enough for me as it was level at least. This was the first compromise and my son got used to it eventually but he did not like the imperfections. Before the concrete dried you have to put in 1' long anchor bolts, on which the shed frame rests and is attached to the foundation. This is important since hurricanes come through this area occasionally.


9. Once the concrete dried and cured, we had to frame the shed. Looks easy when you watch workers building new homes. Guess what? They are professionals with tons of practical experience. Just trimming and placing the salt treated 2'x8'x14' attached to the anchor bolts took us several weekends. Once we had them close enough for my foreman son, although far from perfectly level and trim, we moved onto the actual framing of the sides and roof.


10. I think my son enjoyed the framing the most. Since we wanted extra thick walls we could not follow normal plans. We alternated 2'x4' studs offset from each other, one on the outside wall and one on the inside wall on top of the 2'x8' on the floor attached to the anchor bolts and separated from each other stud by one foot.


11. We hand notched the rafters and attaching them to the ridge pole was a challenge. Since most lumber comes in 14' lengths and our shed was 21' feet long that provided just the confusion we needed as newbees to the construction trade. We finally got them up somehow, but I mostly had to do it on my own since my son got so fed up with our imperfections. The whole framing process took us weeks to complete.


12. The roof and side sheeting was fairly easy and once all of the sheeting was in place we had a very sturdy shed. It was about this time that I really showed how little I understood. I called the inspector to asked him a question and found out that I was supposed to call him at each stage and get him to inspect that stage before we moved on. I had skipped about five inspections by accident. When the inspector showed up at house many days later I begged for forgiveness. Once he saw the shed and I told him what we were doing he was fine and approved all of the missing inspections. Just one of many shed miracles we witnessed during the many months of building!


13. With the walls all in place, the electrical lines had to be run all over the shed before we put up the insulation. This was such an easy job, my son did not want to be bothered with it and did more research on the best acoustical insulation.


14. The insulation was critical to our success in making the shed sound proof. We got special rock wool, which the most nasty thing I have used. I was covered head to toe with head covering and thick gloves with goggles protecting my eyes. Still that stuff got in my skin and itched like crazy. As we were weaving the rock wool insulation between the wall studs, you could hear the sound proofing working as we went along. In the ceiling we put the thickest fiberglass insulation we could find. I was so happy when the insulation was done as that was a dirty job.


15. A friend suggested an electrician for me to use as we needed a line run from the house to the shed. It could not just be an extension cord on the lawn! We needed real power in the shed. Another friend rented a ditch witch to dig an 18" deep trench from the house to the shed. I looked at the plans the builder gave me who built our house and decided where the lay the electric line. Turns out the builder had not followed the plans very well and the ditch witch ran right into our sewer line! Apparently this is just as bad as it gets as wet mud flying all over you is bad but when it is sewage, now that is not fun. We started all over and re-routed the new trench way around my original plans and this time we were fine.


16. It took the electrician about three major trips to the house to finish the electrical lines before we had lights and power at the shed. Since the shed is about 65' from our house, the normal activity was running a couple of extensions from the back porch to the shed every time we needed power for our circular saw or drill or lights.


17. The next exciting event was the drywall. We had to have the thickness drywall made at 5/8", which is called fireproof drywall. Then I learned from my foreman son that we had to make two layers all around the walls and ceiling! he made me feel better when he told me "real" music studios use four layers. The walls were straight forward except you have to stagger the drywall so none of the seams overlap. The ceiling was a really big challenge. I rented a dry wall lift from Home Depot to lift up this very heavy fireproof drywall to the ceiling. Since we used normal fiberglass insulation, my foreman son told me the secret to acoustic ceiling are that they are suspended. We bought metal tracks and attached them to the ceiling joists and then had to use special metal screws to attach the drywall to the tracks without going all of the way into the wooden joists.


18. Adding shingles to the roof was the part I had been dreading the most. The roof had a good 45 degree angle to it and if you stand inside the attic, there was about 6 feet of clearance, so the roof was steep. I did not buy enough singles, nor did I know what I was doing so I had to go back three times for more shingles. The roof does not look horrible, but I will always look at it and wonder what I was thinking when I was putting them on.


19. Somehow I had to find matching siding so the shed looked like it belonged to the house, so I found the local distributor of the siding we had on our house. They told me they do not sell to home owners and I would have to find an installer. They gave me several names and only one called me back. I explained to him that was son and I were building a music shed. He told me he would help me for free! He came by the house and met my son and then told me what I needed and bought it for me (I paid him for all of the material at least). Most of the family came out for the lessons on how to put up siding. He left and we began the process. We had the walls covered and looking pretty good. The siding expert returned to help bend the metal to cover the soffits and the trim around the edge below the roof. I would guess he spent over ten hours helping me and it was the most special miracle of the all.


20. There are no windows in the shed, as those are the worst thing you can use if you are trying to sound proof a room. And since we used such high grade insulation, the shed was liked a sealed can of tuna. We had to find a way to pump air into the shed all of the time. There is just such a thing called an Air Recovery Ventilator, which are normally used in doctor and dentist offices to keep the air clean and fresh. We bought the smallest model we could find. For the vents into the ceiling we built what I call coffins in the attic. They are really air dampers, which are boxes lined with special thick board insulation with baffles in them.


21. A good friend of mine installs A/C unit mostly for commercial uses, but he volunteered to help me install the mini-split in the shed. This is a special A/C unit that mounts on the wall at head level and the tubes are inside the wall and go out to to a fan unit at the back of the shed on the outside. This is to prevent sound house from leaving the shed. Or in our case very loud drums and guitar amplifiers!


22. Besides the paint and berber carpet and footer moulding to cover up our imprefections, the final task was a set of doors. What is interesting about that it the fact we only have one door to get into the shed! We have a solid core door on the outside and a solid wood door on the inside, so we have double doors. This took many weekends to figure this out and to get it to work. Even now the only place you hear noise coming from the shed when band practice is in session is from the doors. The oddest thing I found out is that there is special acoustical chaulk. There was nothing routine or normal about our shed building process.

It has been almost a year now since we have completed the shed and I am exhausted from typing about it. For my foreman son, I think it was the process that was important and we spent many father-son hours together on our creation. His older brother uses the Acoustic Music Shed all of the time for band practice as well as all night games and movie watching. The shed just cannot be cleanly named as it has so many purposes, but the best part is that it is sound proof!

The shed that is not a shed

Our boys are all musically inclined. They got it honestly as I learned how to play guitar and trumpet when I was in the 5th grade. I kept up with the trumpet through college as I really enjoyed the challenge. My wife knew how to play the guitar when I met her and our first Christmas together I bought her a Yamaha guitar. We have taken that 25 year old guitar all over the planet with us and now our middle son plays it constantly in his room sitting at the computer.

In our first house in Fuquay Varina, we cleaned up the shed and made it a music room. The problem was it was acoustically bad and did not dampen the sound at all, especially with drums. You know you cannot turn down the volume on a standard drum set? With the shed door and windows closed and the same in the house, we could hear them playing like they were in the house. When we moved to San Antonio, we took the '72 Rogers drum set with us and once there my son sold it to buy a guitar. The older boys quickly found someone with a huge drum set, who of course brought it to our house. They put it in the garage, but it might as well have been in the house as it was louder than our neighbors nitrous oxide induced racing Corvette.

With this history laid out, you can see why after 6 years of noise, we decided to take matters into our hands when we moved into our current house in Fuquay Varina. My Yamaha guitar playing son decided he would build a music room in a shed behind the house. A shed is not a very descriptive word for the final product. A shed is a small outdoor covering for tools and lawnmowers. Words cannot completely describe what we have built, so photos will enhance this experience for you.

We moved into our house in the early summer. By the fall after school started, my son was ready to go. I had to get a building permit from Town of Fuquay Varina, because of the size of the Acoustic Shed. Anything over 12' x 12' requires a permit and a concrete slab. Plus to get electrical work done you have to have a permit. How can you crank up the guitar amps without electricity? Got to have that. My son found shed plans on the internet that he modified to be acoustically sound using on-line bulletin boards that describe in detail how people accomplished similar projects. That is when I learned how serious an undertaking I had signed up for.

The big move : one last time

Nearly two years ago we completely the big move yet one more time, and hopefully for the last time. Moving half way across the USA just is not fun any more. It was hardly any fun the first time, but three times just is not acceptable. We learned a lesson from our Raleigh to San Antonio trip about using U-Haul trucks, so this time we picked ABF U-Pack movers. It was the best moving decision weever made. For a couple of hundred dollars more than renting our own truck, we paid to have a huge container delivered to our home. At our leisure, we packed the truck by walking the boxes into the container. When we were done, we called ABF and they came and hooked up the tractor and pulled away. We drove our van and car across the country, without any animals like cats this time and the trip was actually enjoyable.

Once back in the Raleigh area, we stayed in an extended stay hotel, while I worked and my wife looked for a house. We moved into an apartment with a short term lease so would not feel pressured to buy the first house we found. All of the kids wanted to go to the same schools they had attended previously in Fuquay Varina. We finally found a house just two miles from where we used to live! One thing the boys wanted to do was build a shed like music room, so we had to find a house with land so we could tackle that project. That will be a future post as that was quite an event.

A really good friend of mine found a job for me at GSK with a group he already had in their RTP location. I was a usability specialist working at a contractor through Role Model Software. One of the things that was appealing to me was trying to incorporate usability with Extreme Programmers, of which the Role Modellers were the best I have ever met. Usability and interaction design could appear to be contrary to pair programming and XP, but the whole year I worked at GSK with Role Modellers was the best experience for me. It can be done and I am proof that it can succeed. The business owners at GSK benefitted as well.

25 years

I wish I could say that is how old I am, but it turns out that is how long my wife and I have been married. I think it must be unusual in the USA to have been married only once and to have lasted for 25 years. We have seen many good and bad times together and still like each other, which has to be even more odd!

We met under the most unusual circumstances. I was a volunteer with a Christian group in India and Bangladesh for two years. I was not too keen on returning to university, but the leader of the group I was with in Bangladesh suggested I finish my degree and then go to the Middle East since my degree was in Geophysics. The summer I was to return, I went to visit an elderly couple one more time who I frequented since they were the only people I knew personally with A/C. He was a medical doctor and had spent many years in South Korea and had recently moved to Bangladesh to start more clinics. He suggested I visit a man named Mr. Dietrick, who was well known at VaTech (see an earlier post), as he had worked with his son in the same hospital in Korea for many many years.

Upon arriving at VaTech that fall, I went back to my home church to see who was still there that I knew. It is common in a university based church to see tremendous turnover, and I fully expected to arrive as an unknown. On the first Wednesday I arrived at our weekly home meeting, I was greetly openly by people I never met before. It turns out that my monthly letters were read in that home so every one had gotten to know me that way. I asked if anyone knew where Mr. Dietrick lived and he lived just down the street and his grand daughter was there visiting in this very house that evening. She fully expected me to be some old man she had been hearing about in far away India, but was pleasantly surprised to find me to be her own age and quickly offered to take me to see her grandfather.

Things progressed quickly and even though another girl really liked me as well, I decided Sarah would be a great choice since she had lived her whole life overseas in South Korea. It was really a mutual feeling I came to find out. Each Saturday a group from the church, including Sarah and I, would go to the local nursing home to visit elderly people and just be friends with them. We started spending time together in many different settings. We even played tackle football and she still liked me after my aggression raised it's ugly head on the field as we were on opposite teams.

With Sarah's family still in South Korea and my family was split apart from a divorce when I was 14 years old, we really had no hope of a family get together for a wedding. My mother said she would not come if my father came, so after many days of contemplation, we decided to take the leap and elope. We thought Valentine's Day would be cute, but it was during the week, so we planned for Friday, 11th of February 1983. We had a big problem that day as it snowed 18 inches the night before. In desperation, I walked all the way to her house a few miles away and spent a couple of hours digging her car out. That certainly was an interesting way to start 25 years of marriage.

The next decision we had to make was where we would live. We decided we could just live in my room in our two bedroom apartment with my roommates. They had grown up with none brothers in their family so it should not be a big deal for them, or so we thought in our unclear thinking. They were so graceous for a several months and then "helped" us find another place nearby. I must say that first year certainly was interesting as we were two very hot headed people clashing frequently. I can truthfully say that it was all GOD's grace that we lasted 25 years together.

We have lived in different homes in places like Texas, North Carolina, and Saudi Arabia, the last of which is a story for another day. We have travelled to many different counties like England, Amsterdam, Turkey, Hong Kong, Singapore, and India. We have seen our kids go through many changes. One thing is constant, we are still together and learning what the word love really means. I am glad we got married.

The big move again

Sometimes you really wonder what you were thinking in looking back at what you have done. What was I thinking in returning with the whole family, back to the great state of Texas? At the time it was definitely a huge decision for us to make. I was not too enamored with the job I had and in searching for usability jobs throughout the USA, I wandered upon my perfect job in San Antonio. We sold the house and off we went.

In order to save money we got rid of most of our stuff and whatever we fit in the 27ft U-Haul truck we took with us. Our oldest son drove my car and my wife drove our van on the big adventure. What made it even more challenging was that we had three cats with us! I tried as hard as I could and was not able to convince the family that it was a really bad idea to travel half way across the USA with pets. In the places we stopped for the night we not only had to find a place with two rooms but a hotel that accepted pets. We moved in the middle of the summer and the U-Haul truck A/C malfunctioned so with the engine and wind noise I was worn out each evening after the daily fight with the truck and traffic.


Before we left North Carolina, I had arranged for a 3 month stay in a nice townhouse near my work. When we pulled up to the rental office, they told me they could not accept our application as our family was too large for the townhouse. This was to become just the beginning of two years of trouble in Texas. Since we had no where to stay we moved around in several hotels until we found a very cheap In-Town Suites that had weekly rates. We finally found a house we wanted to buy, but our house in NC had not sold so we had to wait. The realtor we were using had a friend who rented us her house for two months while we were in a holding pattern.


The house we were waiting for and eventually bought was the same one we saw in NC in on-line house hunting The street appeal was amazing and the house was a couple of miles from work and across the street from Sea World's Shamu. It seemed like a perfect place for us. It had a super nice pool and a sport court, which both provided hours of entertainment for the whole family. Sometimes things that seem perfect are only so on the surface as we soon found out.


It is difficult to know what to say and what to leave out. We wanted to have a change for our oldest boys to hopefully wake them up into making new good friendships. That all back fired on us. Instead of a good change, things took a turn for the worse. So many bizarre things happened while we were in San Antonio. One night at 3am I found a policeman wandering through our house while one of our sons was in the police car in handcuffs. That was a high point. One morning while I was at work, the police called to tell me they found my son in the worst drug infested part of the city and I should hurry up and get him as the police were leaving him as they had real work to do. That was a high point. Then on the day we were heading to Arizona for a week long Christmas vacation, the police called to tell us they had our son in the juvenile detection center and we had to wait four hours before we could see him. That was a high point. One day we found out that between us and Sea World was a neighborhood that was riddled with youth gangs. One of our sons friends got beat up pretty bad a block from our house by one of these gangs. That was a high point. All of these were nothing compare to the highest point of all.

I knew something was odd on the night we first moved into our house I met our neighbor on the right side. He told me to watch out for the neighbor two houses down from us. Then a couple of hours later, this neighbor two houses down came to tell me to watch out for our next door neighbor! The neighbor on our left side had three corvettes. One was a Z06 with a $45,000 engine upgrade. When he started it up on Saturday mornings, I felt like I was at the raceway. No really bad, just odd. Things heated up between the two neighbors who warned me about the other after about a year of us living there. One Saturday I woke up to find the neighbor, on our right side, had all four tires on his white Saab 900 Turbo punctured by an ice pick and the whole side of his car spray painted blue, which is called tagging. A neighbor down the street had the whole front of his garage tagged with the same blue paint. Things were heating up to boiling point in our quiet cul-de-sac! The strange thing was that most of our huge neighborhood was gun carrying military good old Texans. The cops came in to figure out who was causing the problems. Within a couple of weeks the neighbor two doors down tried to kill our next door neighbor by running him over with his Ford Explorer. Our next door neighbor was badly injured with a broken pelvis, broken arm, four broken vertebra in his neck and a severely strained back. That was all we could take of high points. Even though my job was absolutely perfect and the best job ever, I decided it was not worth it and we sold our house in two weeks time and headed back to safe North Carolina. Thus yet another big move half way across the USA!

One of the few things we still miss from our San Antonio days is Rudy's Texas BBQ, which had a funny acronym of "The Worst BBQ in Texas". Kind of appropriate for our days spent in San Antonio. It is one thing to visit the Riverwalk, watch the Spurs play basketball or attend a conference in the Alamodome, but quite another to live where we did and see a whole different side.

The smaller move

Would you buy a house that looked like this photo? Let's to go back in time to our move from Apex to Fuquay Varina, which is related to a recent topic about why we wanted to leave Apex. While our Apex house was up for sale, my wife searched for houses with land - meaning more than 1 acre lot. After months of driving around, she located what is affectionately called a fixer-upper on 2 wooded acres backing up to a small lake. Now there are houses that need to be fixed and there are houses you should walk away from as they are beyond fixing. Looking back it was clearly in the latter catgory. I still remember the first time I walked into the house as it smelled awful and looked even worse. The owners had built the house 25 years previosuly and to save energy had burned wood in a pot bellied stove to heat the whole downstairs, thus the stale wood smell throughout the house. The wallpaper was the yellowed with age and from smoke. One of the oddest things was there were fabric needles everywhere on the walls, so instead of small nails, this is what they used to hang stuff on the walls. The vinyl flooring in the kitchen was torn in several places and the carpet was well worn brown and yellow shag. Would you buy this house even though it was over 2800 sq.ft. and cheap? Did I mentioned the outside with all of the beautiful trees? Only a picture can describe it.


After buying the house in January, I started gutting the whole thing in the hours after work and on weekends. It is actually a fun task and was one of the most enjoyable parts of modernizing the house, as realtors say. Just by removing the carpet the house already smelled better. Then my wife's parents came up for a family house painting party. The wallpaper was so old we could not remove it, so we had to use special paint called Kilz which specializes the removing stains and smells. This was bad in that it meant we had to paint every wall twice. Even worse you have to paint over Kilz within 24 hours or no paint would ever stick on it! My wife's father painted the drab brown kitchen cabinets white to brighten up a dreary appearing, yet large kitchen. The transformation had begun and was already paying off.


I paid to have someone come in and install vinyl in most of the downstairs, since the laundry, downstairs bath, kitchen and breakfast area were all connected. We bought two different shaded of berber carpet, one for the dining room and another for the living room. I eventually installed tile in the entry way, but that is a story in itself and will be left for another day. I completely destroyed all of the bathrooms and remade them from scratch, since the faucets all leaked and toilets were completely brown from the lime in the water. The water smelled like pure sulfur, so we had a water softener and conditioner installed. In order to get them to work we had to get a new water pressure tank. In doing so we noticed the hot water heater was under the house in the crawl space and because of the limited space was only a 40 gallon tank. We hired a plumber to install two new 40 gallon ones, just to make sure we never ran out of hot water, which we never did! And the hits just kept coming.

About half of the wall sockets did not work so I relaced every one of them, which took me days. Once we were all set to move into the house and the wife started up our first load of laundry, smoke started coming out of the fuse box. Half of the breaker panel had shorted out due to the overload. That alone was $900 to repair using a local electrician. Soon after moving in we noticed other things, like the roof needed fixing to the tune of $4500. The following summer was a severe drought in this area and our shallow 60ft deep water well dried up. No wonder our water was so bad in the house as we must have been sucking the water out of the pond behind our house! A new 250ft deep well only cost $5000. Then one of the heat pumps died and since you cannot repair 25 year old A/C systems, we had to replace them both to the tune of $5000. Looking back, I wonder where in the world all of this money came from, but it sure did disappear quickly.


There were many other repairs, but I have blocked most of those out of my memory. I did stain the whole outside of the house one summer. We had cedar siding so you cannot paint it, you have to stain it. The smell of new oil based stain was quite overwhelming. I would try to get the kids to help stain the lower parts of the house, but they were quickly over powered by the intense burning fumes. We had wood bores eating up the cedar siding, digging holes everywhere, so those had to be killed and the holes patched before the staining began - that is a bad memory still there. I almost forgot about the kitchen cabinets project, where we all tackled it as a family after a couple of years living in the house. That was fun destroy the whole kitchen and then building the cabinets from scratch.

The final repairs happened when we sold the house and moved to San Antonio. We found buyers for our house, as that was one of the things we learned from the last time, don't move before you sell the house as two payments are not fun. Once we arrived in San Antonio, the buyers complained the septic tank was not large enough for the house. After much haggling, we clearly lost and paid to have a new one installed, which was $6500 down the drain - pun intended. We had lived in the house for 4 years and all of our hard work resulted in us loosing tons of money, but many good memories are still in with us from those times, not related to remodelling of course.

teeth - are they straight enough?

Time to take a digression back into the moment and talk about teeth. This was a big week in the life of our youngest son as he finally was fitted for orthodontia (or braces as it is more affectionately called). Our insurance covered a little under half of it, but still the sticker shock was a bit overwhelming. I remember the days when I heard people getting braces for $2000. Well those days are long gone for good. I have perfect teeth and I am often asked if I had braces when I was younger. Some of my genes may be bad, but the teeth genes are the best and strongest. My daughter is up next for this exciting event, but at least the dentist takes monthly payments to cover the cost. I have heard from upper class co-workers that the latest trend is to get braces for your kids even if they don't need it - kind of like a prestige thing. Now that is America at it's worse.

The other big news of the day is that I was invited to attend the a company wide videocast of our CEO talking about us making over $2 billion last year. Now that would cover a lot of braces! I was not anyone special, I was picked at random from the general population. There was fewer than 120 people present and most of them were executives, so the number of worker bees were definitely a minority. It would have been exciting to see gifts given to those in attendence like on the Oprah Show, but no such thing happened today.

Lastly, our oldest son rode home with me today and I found out that he has a job at Walgreens pharmacy as a photo technician. He enjoys himself after retiring from the restaurant business, which he did not enjoy. At least today all is well.

The big move

Now that I have headed down memory lane, I am finding it hard to stop, unless of course that some current dramatic event occurs that I must talk about.


Before I talk about our life in San Antonio a couple of years ago, I must give a background for our big move back to Texas. Over 10 years ago we made a big decision to leave the oil industry in Texas and return to the east coast and thus the move from Texas to North Carolina. It meant leaving my career in Geophysics for a pure software developer role. We settled into a brand new house in Apex that was one of the first houses built in that neighborhood. We had a buyer lined up for our house in Buda, Texas but at the last minute they backed out. We had to pay two mortgages for almost a year, which was really tough on the finances. It was a typical new neighborhood where the houses were very close together. We liked our house because it had no fence and the house behind us had one of the largest lots in the neighborhood so our tiny yard seemed pretty large.

Our kids loved to skateboard and rollerblade up and down the street with their friends, and I installed a basketball goal in our driveway for even more enjoyment. Soon we found our next door neighbors became very agitated at us. He did not like our kids walking on his perfect lawn. He also did not enjoy how our basketball would go into his lawn and little feet would retrieve it - trampling his precious grass. Soon after he put up signs on our side of his lawn, "Keep of the Grass". Like that was a good idea with some many young boys around! That was might as well have said, "Please stomp on the Grass". Soon afterwards we got a dog and when he caught the dog going to the bathroom on his grass, he called the Town of Apex to report us for letting our dog run around without any restraint. After four years in that house, we decided to move out where we could have some land to ourselves and be free from pesky neighbors. Next time I will talk about that small move within the Raleigh area.

almost dead

My daughter has a friend who is having her tonsils out soon. When I heard this it reminded me of an event in my own life when I was that same age. I used to get the flu yearly when I was a kid and it would generally knock me out for a week. One year was worse than all the rest. I need to digress a bi for more context. We had around 25 chickens with a single rooster. I would gather the eggs most mornings and each spring we would breed about the same number of chicks. About the same time of year I would get the nasty task of completely cleaning out the whole chicken coup. My mother realized my flu symptoms were related to my unwholesome chore, so I did not resist her insistence that I quit.

Before I stopped my chicken cleaning duties, I just could not get over my flu symptoms one year. I was on the local basketball team and we had a big game coming up which I could not miss. On the morning of the big game I had trouble getting out of bed as my stomach hurt so much I could not stand up straight. My mother took me to our family doctor 1 mile away and he had me rushed to the hospital 10 miles away (the distances are important). When I arrived at the emergency room, they rushed me into the operating room and quickly took out my appendix. I had gange green and my appendix had ruptured about 30 minutes before they removed it. Later the doctor told me I had come close to dying. The drugs I received gave me serious hallucinations that I still remember.

What does all of this have to do with tonsilitus? I shared a room in the children's ward with a girl who had her tonsils removed. I was in the hospital a week and so was she, so we got to know each other pretty well. It took me several days before I could walk on my own and she did not feel like moving either. We finally both made it down to the community room to watch TV and play games, which was a whole lot better than being bored in bed. I don't recall her name at all, but I remember she loved eating her meals of cold ice cream, when I didn't feel like eating at all.

From that day on, my mother used to tell me how thankful I should be that GOD had spared me for a reason.

to Lasik or not to Lasik

There was an article in the local newspaper this morning about LASIK eye surgeries that have gone bad. It brought back bad memories of that fateful day in the summer of 2000.

I started wearing eye glasses when I was in the 5^th grade. Well, I was supposed to that is. I could not see the blackboard in front of the room, so I went to the local optician for a checkup. I got glasses but was too self-conscious to wear them, so I stained to see the blackboard the rest of the year. I have always wondered if that was made my eye sight so bad. Every year for my annual checkup my eyes got worse. Finally when I was in college I tried contacts but I had a stigmatism so I could not see with soft contacts. I tried semi-permeable contacts and got severe eye lacerations, so that was the last time I wanted to put something in my eyes. I played football, basketball and baseball and seemed like I always had broken rims, which I often would tape to keep them together. I also did not like sweat pouring on my glasses and making it hard to see when playing sports. Finally when my glasses became too think to be comfortable, the technology improved to where the lens could be ultra thin, so wearing glasses was bearable.

When working in Saudi Arabia I made enough money to try goggles, which looked extremely bad but never broke when I got hit in the face playing basketball. In the land of freely flowing money, I had several friends fly to the capital of Riyadh to have RK done by one of the original Russian inventors, who worked for the king. When my eyes finally stopped changing yearly, we were living in the Raleigh NC area. I read in the loal newspaper that an eye surgeon who worked under this same Russian man lived in Greensboro and would be coming to Raleigh to start doing LASIK. I set up an appointment and at the last moment decided to have both eyes operated on. I was not really nervous as I trusted this doctor, for some odd reason.

On the morning of the surgery, I signed a release form that basically gave me no recourse if something when wrong. It was a bit scary on the morning of the surgery as I meant the other opthamologist, who programmed the laser. I wondered how he tested his calculations, since every person has unique laser settings, and he no one double checking his work! Once in the surgical room, even though I was sedated with Valium, I could smell my eyes burning as the laser sculpted my eye - that was not right! All of the sudden they stopped without saying anything and starting doing the same thing on the other eye. Then I could tell that they were doing things to my left eye they had not done to my right, so something had gone wrong. After they completely the surgery and had me wait with my wife for 30 minutes, the surgeon finally came in to check my eyes and told me what had happened. The flap on my right eye malfunctioned and they could not do LASIK on it, but completed it successfully on my left.

After arriving home and sleeping the rest of the day and night, I woke up to see a different world. My brain kept telling me - I could see and I couldn't see, all at the same time. My left eye went from 20-800 to 20-40 but my other eye with stigmatism was stuck back at 20-850. The biggest shock was that I had to wake 4-6 months before it could be corrected as the flap had to totally heal. I could not read a book, I could not watch TV, sunlight really bothered me, and I was night blind. I had to wear a black patch over my right eye in order to survive the daily grind. I found a way to work from home during this time, but the room had to be completely dark and I could not work longer than 45 minutes at a time as my eye got really tired. It the worst time of my life as it was depressing being a prisoner in my own house.

When 4 months passed I was able to have a second attempt to fix my right eye. It was definitely scary, but after 4 months of torture, I had to trust someone to fix my problem. The surgery was successful, but then I had a real problem of both eyes fluctuated but were normally 20-45 and my driver's license was expiring in a few weeks. In order to drive both eyes must be 20-40, so I was really wondering what would happen. I found if I got plenty of rest and did not strain my eyes in the morning and wore sunglasses when I went out, my eye sight was good. Somehow I got my driver's license by following these steps and within 2 years of my eye surgery my eyes were stable at 20-25 and my night blindness disappeared.

Thinking back, I don't think it was worth it, as I will be wearing glasses again as LASIK does not cure eye degeneration due to old age. I can only help friends become aware of LASIK problems as I cannot change the past!

babies vs. teenagers

I have decided that all newly married people should consider that their cute cuddly adorable babies may one day become hormonal teenagers. It was the furthest thought from our minds when our small children were amusing us with their feats of splendor.

For the last week, everyone in the family has been looking at photos we have saved through the years. It has brought many a laugh to us all. Maybe it is news of day, like our son quitting his job before he finds another or our son who has a bad habit of being loud and waking me up in the middle of the night or our youngest son who is one minute pleasantly happy and the next like an uncontrollable hornets nest. I think I like looking at baby pictures more than the current reality.

A good friend of mine told me once that we had no hope for calm obedient children as I have rebellious disturbing genes. I can recall those teenage years and glad I never have to relive them. I was definitely out of control and only a small group of faithful friends could stand me. I was only grief and trouble for my mother. My dad was not present as he left the house when I was 14. Just as well, as life was not any better when he was around. I only heard recently that dad got fired from every job he had and typically that was yearly. I always knew that following Jesus would be the cure for my nasty life, but I never even thought about the consequences of my genes! I think mixing my bad ones with my wife's at least diluted them as none of my kids are as bad as I once was - thank goodness.

When it rains it pours

The last couple of weeks have been crazy as I have documented in previous posts. This week is keeping the trend going strong. We had problem with the heat not working in the van on Friday. I told my wife to keep calm and not come up with ridiculous excuses to get a new vehicle. Yesterday I had to work from home since an A/C man was coming to check our heat pump system as something was not right. At 2:30pm my wife called me to tell me stream was pouring out from under the front of the van. That was odd since a friend had the weekend before "fixed" the van. At least he is a friend I can trust. When I arrived all of the kids were peacefully sitting in the van for the father-hero to show up. I checked the coolant since our friend had replaced the radiator and it was as dry as the desert. Fortunately, I had bought an extra jug of coolant an left it in the van a couple of weeks ago, so I poured what I had into the radiator. The nice thing about living in such a small town is that my mechanic friend's shop was less than a mile away! Then the A/C man said there was a problem with the humidifier as you are supposed to service them every year and it had not been done in the last 5 years. Wow, what else could go wrong?

Turns out a lot could, but only one other thing affected us the past weekend. We found out that our oldest son has been having all kinds of problems with his other three roommates. Two had been fired from their jobs and no one paid the utilities, so he paid for them all. He does not have enough money to pay for rent next month. He hates his job as he works long hours at Lonestar Steakhouse and gets few tips. Sounds like a fun life he has chosen! He called yesterday to tell us he quit his job, but thank goodness he found another job and started that one today at Walgreens.

So far all disasters have been diverted - we just keep loosing money in the meantime. Maybe we are building character to make us better people. At least I hope so.

Let's create a movie

For my sister's 50^th birthday present, her boyfriend paid to have 380 photo slides, our dad took of us when we were kids, converted to photo CDs at the local CostCo in Virginia. She sent them to me by UPS so I could amuse myself, since I was not able to make it to see her last weekend. I had a wonderful thought that I should load them all on my laptop and create a single DVD movie. How hard could that be? When I had my Apple PowerBook laptop, it would have been so simple. Now I have a lowly Windows Vista laptop, which changes everything. I read once that Vista had made this easier, so I was about to find out in person.



About half of the slides were taken when my dad flipped the camera sideways. Not a problem, I thought, as it must be easy to just load then and rotate them in the default Windows Photo Gallery program that comes with Vista. Turns out you just load the first photo and page them the photos using the right arrow button and when you see one that needs to be rotated, you just click on the rotate arrow, when you click to see the next photo, the rotated one is automatically saved. This is very nice and easy as it should be. Once I had all of the images correctly oriented, I had to figure out how to make a movie.

Right at the top of same Windows Photo Gallery window, is an icon with a label next to it of "Make a Movie". How convenient. When I click on this link, I see Windows Movie Maker come up with a single photo in it. It must be easy to just add all of the images. I see a menu on the right hand side that has a section labeled "Edit" and under that section I see "Imported Media", but it is grayed out and I cannot click on it. I delete the single photo and it is still grayed out. Then I notice in the toolbar at the top is what I need the same "Import Media" and this one is clickable. Then we hit the part of Vista I like and hate all at the same time. The file explorer window comes up with the default path set to "<< Users > rick > Videos >". I go to the folder on my 2^nd hard drive with all of the folders, and then multiple-select all of the JPG files and click on the Import button at the bottom. Now I see all of my photos in the middle of the window and thumbnails are automatically generated. I actually have all of my images loaded, so it must be easy to generate a movie now.



I have finally arrived at the fun part. I have used effects and transitions in many different graphical editors, like Adobe Photoshop. Under the same Edit section that I saw previously, now I see both "Effects" and "Transitions" listed. When I click on "Effects" I see a wonderful gallery that shows me all of the effects and when I select one a window on the right hand side shows me what the affect looks like in action. Very nice, but how do I use them? I see a small strip at the bottom of the window that is labeled "Storyboard". I drag a photo down on a film strip looking area and now I see my photo in the storyboard. Turns out there is a gray star in the photo thumbnail within the storyboard where you have to drag the selected effect. With transitions there are similar gallery images and those must be dragged onto the arrow icons between photo film strip thumbnails.



I must say that the overall user experience was really nice so far as I had constant feedback on what I was doing and Windows Movie Maker allowed me explore and try things out with undo that made sense. I clicked on "Titles and credits" and found even more fun things to play with as each title has animations attached to them as well. It is amazing at how easy it is to create professional looking movie affects.



So what is the problem? I have Windows Vista Basic, so it does not allow me to create a DVD. I was able to create a video CD with a WMV file, which works great, by clicking on the "Publish Movie" link in the toolbar. It brought up a dialog with "Recordable CD" listed as one of the options. I clicked on the link at the bottom, which said "How do I publish a movie?". In the help window that came up it had another link which said "To publish and burn a movie to a DVD", which is exactly what I wanted to do. When I open the link I see the bad news:

To publish and burn a movie to a DVD, you must have Windows DVD Maker, which is included in Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows Vista Home Premium.

I am sure there is a way but I am tired after trying all afternoon to find a way with freeware or shareware to do it. Too bad Microsoft wants to make me pay as I definitely don't feel like giving them any more money after today.

don't get lonely

Yesterday in talking to a friend about his life outside of work, I learned that his father's recent death was more painful after his death, as he has had to deal with the crazy woman he was married to. This really reminded me of the story of my wife's grandfather, as there are many similarities. I remember the first time I met granddaddy's wife, who cannot be called grandmother as that name is way too regal for her. She was standing on the sidewalk outside their house next to a folding card table with maybe 25 items of garage sale junk on it. That was odd enough, but what made it really strange was the fact that a 75 year old wrinkly woman was there in a skimpy bikini. I began to wonder what kind of family I as getting involved with!

I used to help granddaddy by mowing his lawn and tending to his fairly large garden or anything else he needed me to do. When I became thirsty I had to go in the back screen door to the kitchen, find a clean glass and get a glass of water. The word "clean" should be emphasized as that was really hard to do. Every time I opened the cabinets I would see tons of cockroaches scurry off in all directions. I would hold the glass up to the outdoor window and normally it would be full of fingerprints. My lovely wife had mercy on me most days and would come by with a glass of water from our apartment for real refreshment. I also remember the visits we would try to have in the evenings after strict refusal to eat with them at their house for supper. We would sit in the living room and watch this women smoke at least 2 cigarettes at the same time and somethings 3 of them. The ashes would drop on the floor as she did her hoop rug, right next to the puddle feces. They had very dated white shag carpet, which had to have all kinds of nasty things we couldn't even see.


Granddaddy was the most pleasant elderly person I have ever met, and it was so hard for us to figure out why he would marry such a loony woman. My wife's father was the only child in the family and has told us many times how neat and super clean his mother kept the house. The explanation he gives is that his father became so lonely after loosing his wife of many years. With so many fine and upstanding eligible women in his church, his loneliness overwhelmed him and miss crazy woman just would not give up. Granddaddy was the dean of agriculture for 30 years at VaTech (many people know him indirectly as they named Dietrick dining hall after him and he was known affectionately as "Deet") and had accumulated some wealth so that was an appealing factor as well. She was a companion for many years, but I would not say a good one and looking back she definitely was the topic of many colorful stories. When granddaddy died, his wife was removed from the house and on cleaning up the house to sell, a large sized U-Haul truck had to be used to remove all of her garage-sale purchased clothes which filled the house, including the basement. Sometimes life is stranger than fiction. I am glad it is only past memories.

The moral of the story is don't be desperate and lonely as that is a bad combination.

not the week we planned

This weekend we had a great plan all setup. My mother was supposed to come from Arizona for my sister's 50^th birthday. We were going to drive up to the motherland, beautiful Virginia, for a getaway weekend. Sometimes you just cannot plan for the chain of events that occur.

Last weekend I took our van to get the oil changed and in anticipation of the big weekend I wanted to be all set. I told the Meineke man that I had seen stains on the driveway and to make sure the leaks did not come from our van. When I checked back in with him after an hour, he showed me how the radiator had a crack in it. I asked for a quote on the work and he said $850. That was odd to me since a couple of years ago I had the radiator fixed in my son's car for $400. I immediately went to a good friend who has his own car mechanic shop and asked him to check it for me. He told me I was the first person to complain about the high price at Meineke and he would find out the cost and get back with me on Monday. Sure enough, he quoted a little over $400. Since I was taking off from work on Friday, we scheduled that day for van radiator overhaul knowing I would be all set for the weekend trip to Virginia. One other odd thing about radiators... In the good old days you could fix radiators by pouring a solution into them and it would clog the small leaks in no time. These days of advanced technology, radiators are plastic, which means if the crack you have to replace them. When you get a crack the cold to hot temperature changes make them fail even faster. Sounds like progress to me. Except for the fact that plastic is lighter, but then again our van gets 14 miles/gallon, so I am not sure that lighter radiator is helping.

On Tuesday night my mother called and said she saw the forecast for ice and snow and extremely low temperatures and cancelled her flight. Which was pretty disappointing, but she had a cold recently and was afraid the cold might trigger more sickness. Our well intended plans were starting to fall apart.

On Wednesday our dishwasher stopped working. We had this same thing happen a couple of years ago and when I tried to find someone to fix it, they all told me to forget it as the dishwashers are self contained and it was cheaper to buy a new one that fix an existing one. And guess what? The dishwasher is plastic! Two plastic failures in the same week. We let the completely full dishwasher sit, until Friday. I took off the water line to check to make sure the water was flowing, which it was, so it was indeed the motor inside the plastic housing. I turned off the hot water shutoff value and sat down to read the newspaper. My daughter came down to cook her morning eggs and yelled to me to come over as water was flowing on the kitchen floor. I opened the cabinets under the sink and saw a lake had formed, which I cleaned up quickly. I thought that was odd, but checked the hot water line and it was indeed off. I left the find a new water hose, just in case the one had a leak in it. The odd thing was the length from the hot water line to the dishwasher was 10 feet. They only make dishwasher cords in 4 and 6 foot lengths. It took 4 stores to find the connections I needed to get it to work with a 10 foot ice maker cord. When I got back my daughter again told me a flood was happening in the kitchen. I checked the hot water shutoff value again and this time being wiser, I turned on the sink faucet cold water and saw water pouring out of the hot water dishwasher connection, which was plastic of course, connected to a PVC plastic water line. The custom builder who built our house liked to make sure everything was custom built!

On Saturday morning we picked up our fixed van for the bargain price of $420 and thanks to our corrupt Meineke shop, my friend had made some money. Since snow and ice were in the weather forecast we put off our trip to Virginia for one more day. Now that we had a van we could go find a new dishwasher. My wife and I checked every store we could find as we typically like to buy scratch-n-dent or discontinued high ticket items. We found a high end model normally selling for $498 which was marked down to $298, which was cheaper than almost any other one we could find. We brought it home and when I tried to install it I found that the connectors I got the day before were not right. Off to my favorite home improvement store as there was a plumber who worked there who had always helped me in the past. He fixed me up and by 8:30pm last night I had the dishwasher working. The place we bought it said the really high end dishwashers are stainless steel and are very quiet, we chose the quiet plastic model because of cost!

This morning we woke up to my daughter vomiting, which she has continued for 3 hours. Sounds like that seals our Virginia plans. What sounded like such a good idea has not worked out and we are $750 poorer as well. What a week!

food and family

It is almost impossible to get our whole family together at this stage in every one's lives, but for my wife's birthday we came close. Since my wife was born and grew up her whole life in South Korea, she really likes Asian food, so we went to P.F. Chang's. I had always heard that it was a very expensive Chinese restaurant, which it was, but the atmosphere was really great for such special occasions, plus I did not have to pay for the bill so it was even more special! My wife's parents, my wife's sister and a really good friend of theirs as well as our children were all present. My oldest son is currently a waiter at another lesser food establishment so he could appreciate the high cost which means high tips and even said he would like to work at a place this nice. This is the first event in the series of landmarks for this year and hopefully they will all be as nice as this one. The older you get, the more the events themselves are not the focal point, but who is present to share them with you and this is why this one was so special.

Speaking of my waiter son, he rode is the car with us and as we talked I realized how much he has become responsible in the last four months. Can I dare say matured? For me, the idea of becoming mature means taking the responsibility you have been given and using it wisely. I see in the American Heritage Dictionary they define maturity as "The state or quality of being fully grown or developed". I am not sure when I can say any of my kids are fully grown mentally, but he is definitely on the path to getting there. I think life should be about getting better with age and learning new things all along the way, so I guess I will never fully achieve this goal either, which is good. The other good thing about my son is that is he learning what he is not good at doing, which is just as important as knowing what you like to do. This for me also is maturing.

To end the day, our two youngest children huddled on the floor in our bedroom to watch a 2004 Bollywood movie called Bride & Prejudice with us. We had all four watched this together before and the kids liked the line "no life without wife" so they did not mind seeing it again. It was nice to have them watch it with us as who knows how many more times this will happen as it is not "cool" to watch Indian movies with your parents.

music and teenagers

My teenagers often asked me if I like the music they are currently listening to on their iPods. The question comes up most of the time because they are into retro music that was popular 20-30 years ago. I am beginning to understand the truth behind the Indian school of thought that life is circular. Long hair was popular when I was a teenager and is now popular. Bell bottom jeans are starting to become the "in" thing again. Rock bands of the 70's and 80's are touring again and making tons of money doing it. We seem to be making the same mistakes over and over again!

To end 2007 I picked up a book we gave our teenage son who has rock star aspirations. It is such a shocking book of unbridled hedonism and self-pleasure which was the norm for rock-n-rollers of the 80's. My teenagers don't understand why I did not like Motley Crue, Black Sabbath or Blue Oyster Cult when I was their age. For me as a teenager these bands were just too weird as they were forcefully against anything Christian and went the other extreme to openly talk about satan. Not that I was in anyway following Christ or his teachings, it was just too odd for me. Then my teenagers ask about AC/DC, Led Zepplin, Guns-N-Roses, Metallica and such bands who the local red-necks around me enjoyed so clearly I could not listen to them. I went to the logical extreme and listened to bands no one in the whole area I lived in had even heard of, who were at the real edge of the culture. After reading this book, I see what sex, drugs and rock-n-roll can do to a person. Please do not read this book as it will send your system into a state of shock. Here are some quotes from this book:

• Why take a shower if you're only going to get dirty again?
  
• Why make your bed if you're only going to sleep in it again?
  
• I've never been to Eden but it's nice I hear tell, When I die I'll go to heaven 'cause I've done my time in hell
  
• Days like these I hate to leave my house. I can muster up a fake smile and be cordial, but deep inside I feel nobody really likes me... and worse...nobody understands me.
  
• I love playing our music but I can't take the monotony of playing the same set every night.
  
• Stood in front of the mirror today and all I could see was death.
  
• I dreamt my whole life of making music and I have every reason to be happy yet I can't be.
  
• In the mornings when I wake I can smell death on me. It's right around the corner and unless I get out I'm not gonna make it.
  
• Why did my mom always want to be with someone other than me?
  
• My life is loud. Everywhere I go, people are talking to me, but nothing is as loud as the screams in my head. They are far off, distant, and I can't make out the words...I have come to realize it's most likely the drugs.
  
• You gotta give it away to keep what you get.
  
• What I've learned in this life so far is to let the little things go as much as possible and try to swerve to miss the big things.
  

The most amazing news for me is that Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx's girlfriend Vanity has since becoming a follower of Christ. It is such a huge transformation to go from immersed in drug addiction for so many years to what I see on her web site today. As opposed to the shocking web site Nikki Sixx still has but at least he claims to have left drugs and alcohol addictions behind. Sometimes I wonder whether people really believe in what they are doing, or they do it for affect to shock people and to make money. I can only make sure how I live.