JAlbum Camelot

I played around with the new Beta version of JAlbum called Camelot which is all on-line. I created a photo album of the best photos from my India trip:

Best of 2009 India trip

The only thing I found a bit strange the first time I used Camelot was that I wanted to re-order the photos on the page where I added them to the photo album as well as add comments. I found out later that I could reorganize them and add comments after uploading them. I found the overall experience very nice. It will be good when I don't have to download JAlbum to my Mac to build a photo album. However, I think Camelot will not work for me as it appears I am close to running out of space. I post my albums to my public web site currently instead of using JAlbum free account. Very impressive for a beta product!

NC state parking

Last Sunday I managed to get the boys up out of bed at 9am and we were on the road by 10pm heading west on I-40. The goal was to spend the day in Hanging Rock State Park. I have wanted to go there ever since we first moved to NC many years ago. I read about it in the local newspaper in a Sunday morning newspaper travel special. For some reason we never made it there until now. I decided I needed a special event on the day before I turned 50 years old. Two months ago we were close to making it as we went to Stone Mountain State Park with hopes in also making it to Hanging Rock but that did not happen. After five hours hiking in Stone Mountain we just did not have the energy to go to Hanging Rock even though it was only 30 minutes away.

This time we had my son's GPS to help guide us to the state park. The route was not obvious at all and not the way I would have picked. I had driven on Highway 52 a couple of times which goes right by Pilot Mountain State Park and I saw signs for Hanging Rock right next to it. I was kind of surprised at the circuitous route the GPS suggested. It took us right to the main gate which was quite far from Highway 52. In fact we never saw Pilot Mountain while up on the Hanging Rock so it was much farther than I thought. We even spoke of going to Pilot Mountain afterwards and saw a glimpse of it as we drove a different way out of the park.



It was worth every minute of the 3 hour drive to get there as I enjoying climbing up the steep trail to the Hanging Rock. We also followed the park map and visited all of the waterfalls on the park grounds. We hiked around five miles all together. The weather was absolutely perfect for such a day's activities. I took along our digital camera as I have become quite addicted to since I used it so freely in India. As long as it is set to "auto" I am good. While in India because I took it in and out of my backpack frequently, I found the dial was often changed to some other setting which ended up taking a horrible photo. I do not pretend to be a photographer, but that "auto" setting was made for me. We were all pleasantly surprised to find many photographic moments around the waterfalls, which was an added bonus.

These are the photos from that trip:

http://50yearadventure.com/HangingRockStatePark/

travel in India

During the last week of October and the first week of November I went to India to travel with a friend, this is a summary of the transportation I took:

14,000 miles by AIR took 30 hours
3,000 miles by TRAIN took 75 hours
100 miles by CAR took 4 hours
30 miles by BUS took 2 hours
30 miles by FOOT took 18 hours
and who knows how many hours in auto-rickshaws?

by AIR : Newwark, NJ ➤ Delhi (3660 miles in 14 hours)
by TRAIN : Delhi ➤ Amritsar (278 miles in 8 hours)
by CAR : Amritsar ➤ Gurdaspur (43 miles in 2 hours)
by CAR : Gurdaspur ➤ Amritsar (43 miles in 2 hours)
by TRAIN : Amritsar ➤ Delhi (278 miles in 6 hours)
by TRAIN : Delhi ➤ Bhubaneswar (1070 miles in 24 hours)
by CAR : Bhubaneswar ➤ Pipli (12 miles in 1 hour)
by CAR : Pipli ➤ Bhubaneswar (12 miles in 1 hour)
by TRAIN : Bhubaneswar ➤ Kolkata (273 miles in 7 hours)
by TRAIN : Kolkata ➤ Varanasi (472 miles in 14 hours)
by FOOT : Varanasi ➤ Saidpur (30 miles in 18 hours walking the Ganges)
by BUS : Saidpur ➤ Varanasi (30 miles in 2 hours)
by TRAIN : Varanasi ➤ Delhi (471 miles in 12 hours)

scare me?

I just don't understand why someone would want to scare themselves on purpose. Why do kids like to be scared? I am not sure. Our two sons who are still living at home with us decided this weekend that they needed a good scare, so they drove an hour and a half to Greensboro to see Woods of Terror. One of them won free tickets somehow so at least they did not pay $25 each for such a thing. I heard three versions of the same night of terror. Our daughter talked to them when they got back so that was the first version we heard. Then I had to discuss it with our oldest son to see how he described it. Then I talked to my youngest son to hear his version. Somehow they enjoyed getting scared out of their wits. For me I think I would have died of a heart attack from the fright that they described. I really don't think it is good for me health and so I will use that excuse from now on.

While talking to my youngest son I found out why he has not been able to sleep at night the last four days. He watched a movie on the internet called Paranormal Activity. He said he watched it in bed on his laptop with headphones and has yet to be able to sleep at night. I heard him a couple of times this week running down the hall and then slamming the door to his room in the middle of the night. That certainly does not sound like a healthy affect to have on a person. Anything that makes you that fearful is definitely not a good thing. My son told me it was about demons. Also sounds like yet another reason not to see it. Now I understand why it is so scary for him. If you believe their is another spiritual world, then this is probably not the best film to see. The problem is that demons and angels both exist but neither of them should be our focus or concern. Jesus is here to protect us and keep us safe not to give us a spirit of fear. We should strive to help our fellow man not fear what we cannot see. If our fear keeps us from helping others, then I am 100% sure that is not something that GOD has sent to encourage us. I am not into calling things demonic but I would call this movie a scary distraction from what we should be doing with our lives.

cricketering

This weekend was the annual AID cricket tournament and it was the third straight event I participated. UNC was again chosen as the location for the event but because of the anticipated rain only 28 teams signed up instead of the normal 36. I was on the Cary Chargers team again this year but only three of us were from the team the previous year. We also had the same result as we lost all three of our games. This year we allowed a couple of the teenage sons of the fathers to play since we did not have enough people for the eight on a side games. As always I had fun hanging out with my new found Gujarati teammates, who are the same people I play cricket with on Sunday mornings. The nice thing about the AID tournament is that you have a lot of free time just sitting around. This is the best part for me as I love talking to my teammates, in English of course, since I know very little of the Gujarati language. As usual it is all about families so letting the kids play with us just makes the time all special for the parents. It rained on and off all morning long so it was not the best weather for playing cricket. I must say that I am not a fan of playing in the rain. I have a habit now of not being able to do well at batting and bowling in the same game on any given day. Yesterday was a good bowling day as I was able to get many of the opposing runners out, but my hitting was horrible. I just try to enjoy each day as I do not know how much longer I will be able to play cricket at this level. The main AID web site is http://durham.aidindia.org/cricket. I found the photos of the day's activities at http://picasaweb.google.com/aidrtpevents/AIDCricketCup09.


I met my co-workers as they arrived as they are on the serious cricket team of which I am not an invited member. It always seems that I get to see an interesting side of Indians when I play cricket. A couple of weeks ago on a Sunday morning as I arrived to play cricket at our normal location, I met my team members who said they had been kicked off the field because of a tournament. We then found a nearby field and started to play. Less than thirty minutes later the same Indian fellows showed up and said they needed the play on their normal field, which we were on. I was pretty angry as I could see what was happening. Their normal field had a little league baseball mound on it and so they had decided to take over our field instead that day. As they got settled into their game, the local town's grounds keepers came and said our normal field was reserved for a softball tournament. They had been forced to move to decided to reclaim their normal field. Since we were only four adults and five children, they realized we were just playing around and they needed the field more than we did. They told us they would help carry our wickets to the small field next to us if we would move. I was so sorry that they were taking advantage of us, but I did not want to make a scene and suggested we move.

Yesterday it got a bit more ugly in our second game. We were playing the UNC student team and it was very close. We bowled first and we all did very well and held them to 28 runs. When we battled, the adults all started and slowly we got out until only the young teenagers when left. Only the next to last ball, the UNC team overthrew the wicket keeper and we scored a run to tie. A great argument ensued with the whole UNC team charging the field to object to the umpire's call. I never feel comfortable in these situations as it is just a game for me and I don't understand the rules well enough to know who is correct, so I just watched from the sidelines. The captain of the UNC team was already unhappy with me as he claimed I got in his way when he was sure he could have gotten me out. The whole time I batted he complained to the umpire about me. In this case since teenagers were batting and clearly they were not as good as the UNC students, somehow the UNC team convinced the umpire that the run was not allowed. We ended up not getting another run and tied the game. One of the teenagers who was batting for our team was so upset by it that he started crying. To me that is the saddest part as someone forgot that winning a game was never more important that people and their feelings. In the heat of the moment it is easy to forget as I had done the same when I was that age, but it just reminded me that in my old age maybe I had become wiser somehow.

To end the day, on returning home I got lost just as I had the year before. For 30 minutes I wandered around lost only to find myself back to the same place I started. This time since it was raining and cloudy I could not use the sun to determine which direction I should be going in. I don't what excuse I had for last year. Driving around UNC is just very confusing to me. During the drive I was listening to "This American Life" on National Public Radio. I had heard about the show before but had never had a chance to listen to it. I had also heard the radio show was at times very liberal so I did not expect too much. Yesterday's show was about people following their conscience or ignoring it - some people say they have an angel on one shoulder and a demon on the other. There was three parts to the show. The first part was on a church in Texas who each October run what they call Hell House where they try to scare children into following Jesus. The second part was on the film called Devil's Playground about the Amish Rumspringa where teenagers are allowed to choose whether they want to abide by Amish traditions or not. The third part was about a man who denied to he committed murder until he got too drunk and confessed it to the police unknowingly. He said every day that he heard a voice telling him how worthless he was and could never be forgiven and at other times he just wanted to pay his time for what he did and then get out and start over again. For someone who claims he is an atheist, I thought the show was very well done and did not put Christianity in a really bad light which is what I was expecting him to do. I definitely learned something by getting lost!

This photo is of my friends at work who had a second place finish this year:

audio files

I have been helping a friend with audio files posted to a web server. First of all, we had to enable streaming audio as an option on our existing web server. Then I had to figure out the best way to stream a multiple day conference. I started out creating a Adobe Flex project which resulted in the Flash file being uploaded to the web server. It was pretty simple as I have been using Flex at work for more than one and half years and found the Adobe Flex Sound help page very useful. After finishing the simple interface with Flex I wanted to try other things. I found a very simple M3U file format that iTunes uses to load a playlist. The only problem for us was that the MP3 audio files were behind a password protected folder, so that did not work as iTunes never asked for a username and password to access the folders behind HTTPS. I then found an open source project that plays a series of audio files by configuring an XSPF formatted file. The last task that I tried was to create a podcast. I did not really know what a podcast was except I had listened to them in iTunes. I found a great Apple document explaining how to create a podcast without using a special tool. I found out that a podcast is really just an XML file that stores content in an RSS feed format. I was very easy to create an RSS feed using Apple's podcast specification document. I have since learned that you can do the same thing in Apple's Garage Band, but at least I understand what a podcast really is.

Today I had the latest new task of learning how to edit an existing MP3 file. We needed to remove the first 12 minutes from an MP3 file that was 49 minutes long. I asked my son how to edit them and he informed me that Apple's GarageBand would do it. Today within 15 minutes I had to file loaded into GarageBand and with a little help from my son, I had the MP3 edited and posted on the web server. Just another example of how Apple makes a simple task simple instead of over complicating and making it way too difficult.

trip down memory lane

Today I drove with my two youngest sons around town looking for BMX grips. We went back to a store we had frequented so many times in buying skateboards and accessories like shoes called Endless Grind. The bike store above it was closed so we had to find other bike stores in the area. Since we did not have my son's GPS, I had to rely on my unusually super sense of direction to navigate the area. My middle son told me that his electronic generation was too dependent and had lost sense of direction. That was true in more than one way! It was interesting to think back to being in that very same store ten years ago with much younger little boys. In roaming around the area we finally ended up in Sk8-Cary Skate Park. We actually went there when they first opened in 2001 as the three oldest boys all skateboarded. It just so happened that today they were having a BMX competition with some locals and professionals. It was very cold but we stayed and watched the first round since we were shopping for BMX equipment anyway. It brought back memories from the past and we made new memories all at the same time!

lessons in life

This has been an interesting few weeks as of late.

This week has not been the high point in my life. I have been learning Squash during lunch breaks the last month. This week, in my eagerness to learn from multiple people's different styles and suggestions, I played too long and somehow hurt my back. Not the best timing since I am due to leave for India in a couple of weeks. I did manage to get my 50 Year Adventure web site up and running while resting with a heating pad on my back. I decided to use Host Monster to host my book web site. I also moved my Attentive 2 Design web site there also, since I can host as many domains as I want for a flat $5.95/month. I was already using it for another private NGO web site that I help maintain. That is the good news that happened while having a pain in my back.

Today I finished reading King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema by Anupama Chopra. My wife and I saw it in the reduced section at Barnes & Nobles a couple of weeks ago. The first chapter alone is worth buying the book as it explains what Bollywood is all about. It tells a story about how a man in rural Georgia won the lottery when he got to go up on stage with SRK when he came to Atlanta. What a great story!

A couple of weeks ago I attended a high school reunion in Virginia. My wife and I stayed with my sister, who we seldom get to see. We had a great time talking with her at night and on Sunday morning after the reunion on Saturday afternoon. I attended my 20th high school reunion but this one was the 31st and was much better. I really wanted to talk to as many people as I could since I had just finished my memoirs and the memories were still clear. Most of the people I attended school with from kindergarten to high school were present so I had fun catching up with them. My wife wanted to know why it seemed like everyone of them had been my girlfriend at one point in time - I guess that is life in rural Virginia! I found it interesting that my close friends from high school had little in common with me now, but I had a deep bond with those I grew up with in Churchville. It seemed like I had grown wild, changed a lot and then came back to where they had never left. Most of them were so dependable that I would trust my life in their hands. How that is what I call a true friend.

One of my childhood friends who lived behind me told me about the man who he bought sheep from to raise on his farm. He had only one leg and I cannot remember how he lost it. He had a huge sheep farm which he worked on himself. He was also quite wealthy and traveled all over the world hunting wild game. He had two large single story houses just to hold the mounted game he had killed. He never let his disability get in his way. My childhood friend looked to his two boys and said "Remember that the only limits we have are those we place on ourselves". What a great profound statement stated so eloquently from such a simple person who I am glad to still call a friend. Some days I think I try too hard and think too much and I greatly admire such a person very much.

sleepless night

I am really unsure what happened last night. I have been waking up at 3 am for many nights now. Last weekend I did not feel very good so I took a 2 hour nap on both Saturday and Sunday. Yesterday I took another 2 hour nap and that energized me to finally finishing editing my book around 3 pm. I then raced around the yard finishing the mowing in a record time of around 1 & 1/2 hours. Today I will have to go back over it and collect the extra grass clipping spread all over the yard, but at least it is cut! Last night my middle son and I went out to eat Indian food at Udapi. I have no idea what happened but after chatting with my son in California for a while about his MacBook "x" battery problems, I finally told him around 9:30 pm that I was tired and needed to go to bed. I am not sure I ever really feel asleep last night and finally at 4 am gave up and got out of bed. Maybe it had to do with my wife and two youngest kids returning home this evening. I have no idea but will definitely be taking a nap this afternoon after my Sunday morning cricket match.

These are some of the things I kept thinking about last night:

1) I really like this thought provoking comment about the Taj Mahal in India: "The typical was used to create the outstanding"

2) Somehow this thought kept coming up "I firmly believe that each of us has a unique reason to be alive, part of our pilgrimage on earth is to find it."

3) I have talked more with my middle son while my wife and other kids have been gone than we have ever talked in his whole life, which is a great thing. We were talking about what makes a skilled laborer when we thought that my oldest son, who is a wonderful artist when the urge hits him, would be a great tattoo artist since he has been getting many tattoos lately.

4) somehow I thought of this list of sports activities I have done in the last year at work either at lunch or after work:

Cricket, Volleyball, Wallyball, Racquetball, Sqash, and Tennis

In the past I have also played the following at work:

Basketball and Flag Football

The only sport I want to try one day at work is:

Ultimate Frisbee

Stone Mountain

While my wife and two younger kids are having fun on a Princess Cruise to Scandinavia, my middle son and I decided to go hiking. I have always wanted to visit Hanging Rock State Park or at least hike up Pilot Mountain State Park next to it. Yet again I did not go to one of these as we decided to visit Stone Mountain State Park instead as we heard it had some waterfalls. Once on the park trails it reminded us both of the area where we last saw waterfalls earlier in the summer. Just when we were getting tired we decided we had to see the actual Stone Mountain while in the park. When we reached the grassy open field to see it we did not to expect such a huge granite rock mountain. As we looked closer we saw people at the top and some tiny little people climbing up the side. We went to the very bottom of the rock face and saw ropes that people were using to go up the 600 ft rock face. When I looked at the park map, I saw there was a trail that crossed the top of the mountain. Since we had to backtrack to get back to the car I suggested we try the trail so we get on top of the huge rock. The trail map said it was a strenuous climb but all we saw was a series of never ending steps. The more we walked up the steps the harder it became until we had to stop a couple of times to rest. It was all worth it when we reached the top as we had a full view of the Blue Ridge Mountains in all directions. I wanted to stay on the 2305 ft mountain top forever and just soak in the beauty that GOD created. We did not have a camera or else I would have taken a whole roll from that point. I did not find any posted on the internet either that fully captured the scene. I included a couple that I did find. I need to move back into the mountains and forget the city life.

photos of kids

photos for book

book photos

785 miles later

For the long 4th of July weekend we decided to take a trip to the western part of NC to visit waterfalls that we did not see in our last waterfall trip two years ago. It was a five hour drive for the three of us as we decided it would be a guy only trip. We finally reached our first destination at 3pm. The last time we had reached Panthertown Valley it had started raining on us as we got out of our car and after a short walk we gave up and returned to our vehicle. We were determined to actually see waterfalls in this park and we found around ten vehicles parked on the dirt road to the main trail. We reached Schoolhouse Falls after a long walk and there was another family in the water with the father and grandfather fishing below the falls. It was only after talking to him and showing him the map we had did we realize where we were in the park. He told us where to go to see Warden Falls as it would be possible to reach that and have plenty of time to return. The hike was pretty steep in places and when we reached the falls there was camping equipment scattered all over the area around the base of the falls but no one was around. We decided to go in the water since we were pretty hot. After swimming across the pool we walked up the side of the falls and found the moss under the water really think and spongy which was so nice on our tired toes. We also noticed how soft our skin felt and I could see mica and fool's gold particles all in the water and the sand around the falls. I tried sliding down the lowest part of the falls and bruised my tail bone, but it was a great remote place to relax and enjoy the beauty around us.



Once we got back to the car after the long walk back we decided to see one more group of waterfalls before nightfall on the way back to Brevard, NC. We decided to take a short sidetrack to see the French Broad river where there was a group of rapids around the Cathedral Falls. We had written down directions before leaving as otherwise we would have never found them. We were the only car at the small gravel pull off on Highway 215. There are a series of falls right next to the road with a small dirt path leading to all of the falls. Our favorite was called Bird Rock Falls and we stayed as long as we could climbing around the rocks going down the river. After a full day we headed back to Brevard and found out that both of the hotels were completely full, but the person in the Hampton Inn told me they had rooms in the Etowah Country Club and gave me directions on how to reach it in the dark as it was around 9:30pm. We decided to eat at the Brevard Pizza Hut, which was the very same place we ate the last time we were in this area after learning that the hotels were full. When we reached the country club they had plenty of rooms and so we settled in for the night. In the morning as looked out the front door of the hotel room I saw the two golf green style croquet fields in front of me. I did not even know such things existed in the USA! The night before one of my sons had walked on it and thought it was spongy astroturf.


It was a tough decision the second day on where we should do. One of my sons wanted to go to Sliding Rock, but when we got up and felt how cool the air was outside we talked ourselves out of that morning cold shock. We decided to eat at the Huddle House for breakfast and then head to Gorges State Park which was west of Panthertown Valley. The hike was not as remote as the one the day before to Warden Falls, but it did seem to go forever. We saw several people walking back on the trail even though it was 10am. No one else was going in the same direction so we began to wonder if we were going on the right path, but there was only one path and we kept going. A couple hundred feet on the top of a ridge I asked the people coming down if we were close and they said we were. When we saw Rainbow Falls from the railed overlook we were all amazed. It was the most spectacular waterfall we had ever seen up close. We crawled down the rough dirt path to the bottom of the waterfalls and decided we should get in and go for a swim. The water was quite cold but the boys went in first. After they both got in and started swimming, I dove in from a near rock and swam over to the cliff. It was cold but not unbearable. We stayed for a long time to enjoy the cold water and marvel at the falls. It was hard leaving but there other falls in the area we wanted to see. It turned out that both were disappointing. We actually stopped in the parking lot for Whitewater Falls but we were too tired to make the walk even though I tried to force the boys out of the car to see it. On the way back home we stopped to see Looking Glass Falls right outside Brevard as we had seen it before. The problem with that waterfall is that it is so easy to get to that it is always crowded. That ended our 4th of July waterfall adventure trip for the summer of 2009.

sunset beach vacation

Photos from our yearly family vacation to the beach:

Sunset Beach

high school graduation

Probably the only public high school graduation we will ever witness happened last weekend. Our oldest son quit school and eventually got his GED. Our next to oldest son graduated high school by finishing his last two years using an internet high school called CompuHigh. We received our youngest son's diploma from PennFoster yesterday in the mail. So our middle son will definitely be the only son to graduate from public high school. Today we finalized his community college registration by paying for his first semester this fall at WakeTech, which is a local community college. His older brother also attended that same college for one year and that was also how I started my university career. We tried to enjoy every moment of the graduation realizing it may be our last. There are rumblings around the house that our daughter may try finishing high school on line as well.

The graduation was held in the new Raleigh Convention Center as there was over 400 students graduating, so with parents and family the ceremonies were too large for the high school auditorium. The whole process took almost three hours as we had to arrive early and then getting out was not the easiest thing once we got everyone to the car. The man in the front left hand side of the stage is the mayor of the town where we live in this photo:

customizing Mac login screen

I found the following web site has hints on how to customize all kinds of things on my Mac:

# http://www.macyourself.com/2009/03/11/mac-login-window-tricks-part-4-change-default-background-image/
# DEFAULT - sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture /Users/javaswinger/nepal.jpg

# http://www.macyourself.com/2009/03/06/mac-login-window-tricks-part-2-add-a-custom-welcome-message/
# DEFAULT - sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText "Welcome to Dharma & MacBook world"

# http://www.macyourself.com/2009/03/05/mac-login-window-tricks-part-1-unleash-hidden-system-information/
# use any of the following:
# HostName, SystemVersion, SystemBuild, SerialNumber, IPAddress, DSStatus, Time
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow AdminHostInfo Time

Septoplasty

Yesterday was a different kind of a day from the normal grind. We all got up at the same time except my wife who woke up 30 minutes early. Since it was senior day for our son who was graduating from public high school, he decided to drive himself to school for the first time ever. They let the seniors out of school early after lunch and I told him we would not be home early to pick him up. We left the house a bit earlier than we expected and arrived at the hospital 30 minutes before the scheduled time of 8:30am. My wife was due to have her septoplasty at 10am and we began the waiting game. I took me Apple MacBook so I could spend the time either writing my book or learning Hindi. When we sat down in the general waiting area, I tried to see what wireless networks were available. There were two secure and one open wireless and so I was all set with internet access to learn some Hindi using Live Mocha. My wife was a bit nervous so it helped that I was not trying to talk to her but acted as if it was a normal situation. She had been given a paper that had her number on it and periodically an announcement was made but the numbers seemed to be totally random and unrelated numbers to the others we heard being called out. Finally she heard her number and after just a couple of minutes the initial insurance forms were complete. We then moved to the other side of the general waiting area at the front of the hospital. It was more like a huge room decorated like a high end hotel waiting area as the chairs were very nice to sit in. I know my wife did not notice such things, but I was in that area for the next six hours! At the desk on the other side of the room at the entrance to the surgery rooms, we were given a buzzing handheld device like is done at restaurants to notify you when your table is ready. It buzzed many times throughout the hours to tell us we were needed for certain events. It was just a great experience overall to make the best of place where no one wants to be. The deviated septum was fixed without any complications and we arrived home before 3pm. Our daughter was waiting to help in what ever way possible, so that was a pleasant but expected surprise for my wife, who needed the attention and help through the rest of the day. She had to sleep in a reclining chair all last night but they gave her really strong medicine to knock her out. I have to go find out how she feels...

Indian elections

Someone at work found these photos and posted the link on the India mailing list:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/05/indias_massive_general_electio.html

mother's day 2009

This was waiting for us when we came home from my wife's parents house on Mother's Day:





Lazy afternoon on Mother's Day as the kids were checking out the Princess cruise details for this fall:

series on breakdowns

The past week was just a series of things breaking down around our house. First our clothes dryer stopping working. I cannot recall the exact date when we fixed it previously, but it was within a few months of the last time we had it repaired. Our house has the worst possible location for a laundry area. I dare not call it a laundry room as it is more like a laundry closet. The problem is that the washer and dryer barely squeeze into the closet. The last time we had problems with the dryer, we shopped around for new ones and none of the ones that are made currently will fit into the closet, so we are forced to repair the ones we have. Soon after our dryer decided to stop functioning, our refrigerator started making scary sounds. It was like a slowly accelerating engine that would then deaccelerate. Up and down it would go all day long. It was especially obvious in the morning when I woke up as it was the only sound in the whole house. Fortunately, we have a really great appliance company near our house who helped us before. For under $200, he was able to fix them both.

Soon after buying our son a car, we heard a sound company from the back end of the car. I called my trusty mechanic to check it out. Both my wife and son complained about the brakes so I had him check those at the same time. Turned out that the brakes all needed changing and the noise was pretty harmless and should some day be fixed when our son gets a job and has money to fix it. At least the brakes are good, which is important for a new young driver!

The last thing to cause trouble was our Windows Vista laptop. For months the family account has had mysterious screens show up when you logged on. I tried downloading a couple of tools from a company called "PC Tools", hoping they would find this virus and kill it. I have Norton Antivirus on this laptop but I just thought I should try something else. After buying a couple of their tools, I was no better off than when I started. In fact a couple of days ago my youngest son informed me when I got home from work that the laptop was frozen. The new tools were complaining about the Windows Defender was running and it could not be running at the same time as these tools. It took me an around an hour to stop Windows Defender. Then the next day that same son told me that a third window was popping up when he logged on. It was in fact getting worse by the day. I had tried to update these tools and it hung the tool and the laptop. This morning I finally removed all of their tools and had to delete our family account and create a new one. For now all is back to normal. In my frustration last night with all of our computers, I decided to buy a new iMac for the family and a new MacBook for myself. I tried Windows for a couple of years and that was all I could take. I am back to an all Apple home again, like the good old days, 10 years ago when I had nothing but Apple machines. It is just not worth the struggle and fighting to have Windows any more.

rollercoaster of life

The past couple of days was quite the up and down affair. At work I had lunch with a man who had lived in the Middle East and we had a great time talking about our past experiences. He had also lived in Houston and his wife helped him decide it was time to leave just like my wife had helped me. After getting back to work, I had a meeting with a screaming woman who obviously hates me for some odd reason. The most unprofessional immature meeting I have ever encountered. Within a few minutes I went from feeling great to feeling awful. After taking 30 minutes of abuse, I got up and walked out of the conference room. I felt so bad that I had to take a sick day on Friday to recover. I guess she won in accomplishing what she intended to do and that was to make me feel really bad.

Yesterday, we bought my son a car and then on the way home we stopped by to see a local car show of hot rods. We had a good time as all of the boys at one time had enjoyed looking at cars. My son commented that now he understood what a really fine automobile looked like. After eating supper at home and sitting down to watch our latest Indian movie, our daughter entered the room and said one of her classmates had killed himself by a rope on a tree in their backyard. How horrible is that for a 14 year old to have to deal with. From happiness to horror in just a couple of hours. Such is the rollercoaster of life.

car shopping

There just is nothing worse for me than shopping for cars. I don't mind bargaining as that part is kind of fun but the vulture like car salesmen scare me with their forceful mannerisms. This weekend we were trying to find a car for our middle son, who is the latest in the succession of boys to have cars in our family. Like our next to oldest, I let him search the web to find cars he likes as he knew the amount that he had to spend and what he wanted to get. In these economically troubling days, small dependable cars are a bit hard to find as the days of the gas burning SUVs is on the downturn and people want just the car my son is looking for. He wanted a small car with good gas mileage and finally found one in north Raleigh last weekend that he wanted to see. He has been searching for the last couple of months but had to pass his final road test to get his unrestricted driver's license first before a car could be considered. That extra time was good as it enabled him to figure out what kind of car he really wanted. We test drove several cars so he got a feeling of what he liked also. Yesterday was the big day when he drove with his other two siblings and myself to see this car. It was a beautiful sunny day, which I tried to convince everyone that it would be a great day for hiking, but I got overruled as car shopping got a higher priority. The whole affair was fairly painless as the small used car dealer where the car was located had just bought this car at an auction and was happy to sell it to us. I bargained a little and before we knew it we had a car. We pick it up today as I did not have enough money with me and our son did not feel comfortable driving it by himself for the 30 minutes to our home through downtown Raleigh. Today we have yet another Hyundai in our family.

Car shopping brings back memories of past events with the other kids. Our next to oldest did his own searching for months and we bought his car at the local flea market since that is where the owner met us for the exchange of money for the car. He as so happy when he got home with his car, and yet just after a couple of months he accidentally ran into the post at a local gas station when his flip flop caught on the gas pedal. That resulted in a very nice "V" in the front of his car. His gray car became two shades of red as he found a bumper and hood at junk yard near our house. Then as he was driving home the hood flew back and smashed the windshield as the hood was not latched properly, so yet another car repair. The most amazing thing ever is that this car made it all the way across the USA as my son drove it with his best friend in a cross country road trip. Recently the car stopped working and may have met it's very end. Hopefully this latest car to enter our family will not be inflicted with such car abuse.

Then our oldest son was in such a hurry to buy a car in San Antonio that he quickly found a car and bought it in one week. The used car dealer was not a very reputable one and basically ripped us off. The good news is because we were buying a Honda from him, so the car could take much abuse and still keep going. He failed to tell us the radiator had a leak in it and since it was 100% plastic, it could not be repaired. The brakes were pretty much shot as well. In my son's frantic desperation, we had a car but just barely. Once we made a couple of expensive repairs, he decided to drive all the way back to North Carolina in a non-stop 22 hour driving spree. Eventually when he lost his driver's license, we sold the car to someone else by advertising with a for sale sign as it sat in the nearby WalMart parking lot. The car was in pretty bad shape but still with over 200,000 miles on the odometer, someone bought the Honda Accord for the good gas mileage. May our son's car make it that far as it has a little over 100,000 on it now.

spring break

This week was not just another week, but it was spring break, which meant our son came home from Emeryville, CA. It started out bad as he was supposed to be here last Friday but when his flight was canceled due to bad weather in NYC, it actually took him 36 hours to reach our house. He left this morning and hopefully will have a better experience getting back to school as this time he is going through Dallas, TX. However, I just checked the weather and the only place in the country that has bad weather is a region around Dallas! That is really pretty amazing as it was the same story when he tried to go through NYC last week.


My daughter was really hoping that this week would be better than the last time her oldest brother came and she was very disappointed in the lack of time she got to see him. This time was much better as this brother was around more and actually let her use his nice Apple laptop the last couple of days and even took her to the beach with him. Actually all of the kids went together to see my wife's parents in Wilmington and spent the night on Thursday night. It was the first time in over 20+ years that we were in the house without children. It is interesting how much of our lives revolve around our children as it was odd not hearing around the house that evening. Other than the beach trip they did not do anything special but just hung around each other. On the first day he was in the house they were all sitting on our middle son's bed talking, which unfortunately I did not get a photo of scene as it was a classic. Last night we went out to eat together at a local Japanese steak house in Fuquay and the food was really excellent and evening was entertaining as the cook prepared the food in front of us and definitely amused us.


The final event of the evening was the family bonfire as my middle son had been preparing a perfectly stacked pile of wood all week long, for the final evening together. The photo I took came out really cool as it looks like a fire breathing dragon coming up out of the midst of the fire pit. It was a relaxing memorable week, of which I am sure we will hear memories discussed around the dinner table in the weeks to come.

odd week

After ten days of not feeling well, I finally recovered enough to say I was over the recent nasty sickness. Even though I was at work for the first couple of days this week, it seemed like everything I touched went wrong. Maybe it was the sickness looming over me and maybe my mind was not clear enough for intensive work conditions. Whatever it was, I was not very encouraged by my slow progress on my tasks at hand. Just about when I was ready to give up all hope, I finally found a way to fix the bugs I was slaving away on all week. It has happened to me several times in my long career in software development.

In addition several other things happened yesterday of note. At lunch a friend of mine, who is a mechanic, showed up at our house to fix my car, which had a check engine light on for the last several weeks. The Nissan dealer told him it would be six hours minimum as the manifold would have to be removed in a long timely process. Being the experienced mechanic he knew to try other things first. He found and fixed the problem without the labor intensive procedures the dealer had suggested. The best thing of all was that the charge was half of what he originally estimated, which had to be at least half of what the dealer would have charged me.

Then when our kids got home from school, I was appointed to take my son to get his drivers license. Seeing that he had hardly driven, the end result was predictable as he failed the driving test. The people at the license office were not very friendly and were definitely intimidating, which definitely did not help matters at all. There crabiness never prevented a single accident or drunk driving teenager death and yet for some reason they spread their unhappiness to all who entered attempting to get a new license.

To top off the day, our son was to arrive from California, but his flight was canceled due to bad weather in NYC. He missed all of the flights for the evening and at the minute we are still waiting to see if he makes it on the next flight as a stand-by passenger. A typical end to a most unusual week.

resident evil

As my boys play the new Resident Evil #7 game, I have been laying around battling the evil bugs that have taken up residence in my body. Soon after reaching work on Monday I started feeling bad with my throat hurting and my head throbbing. I went to the company health clinic, but they did not help much. On Monday night my throat felt like I drank gasoline and threw a light match in my mouth. I did not get much sleep that night. The next day my head felt like someone was hitting it with hammers. My chest felt like a NFL lineman was sitting on my chest. In the afternoon I could not take it any more and went to our local family doctor. She had mercy on me and gave me antibiotics. By the time it turned dust my throat was on fire again. I tried gargling salt water, cough drops, some magic mouthwash stuff and nothing really helped. On Wednesday night I started cough uncontrollably. I moved into our guest room so my wife could actually get some sleep even though I had little hope of getting any myself. As the night progressed my whole body started hurting. My neck, my back and then my kidneys. When I got up in the morning I could only hope the medicine would start working so I could feel better. Finally after a morning nap I started to feel slightly better. Who knows when the evil residents will decide to leave, but I can hope that occurs sometime tonight.

Aradhna in Raleigh NC

For the last several months I have been planning on Aradhna coming for a visit to the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle in NC. I ran an ad in the local Indian magazine called Saathee for the last three months. I ran the same ad in the local Indian movie theater called Galaxy Cinema. For the last couple of weeks before the event, the same as was run on Nazar TV, which shows Bollywood videos from 3-4pm each Sunday afternoon. Lastly, the NC State radio station has Indian music from 10-noon each Sunday morning on WKNC for a program called Geet Bazaar so they announced the Aradhna concert also. It took work and money to do this. So on Sunday night five days before the concert, I get a call from the president of the Hindu temple telling me I could not have the concert at the temple which was where all of the ads listed as the location of the event. So I have to make a mad rush to find another place in less than a week. It was very stressful to say the least. I felt like I wasted my time and money and energy. We finally decided to have the concert in the same location for both Friday and Saturday night on the NC State campus in the middle of the graduate housing buildings. I invited all of my Indian friends to the new location and was very disappointed when not a single friend of my showed up. On Saturday morning, the Aradhna tabla player told me the house would be packed for the second night and it was hard for me to believe it after the sparse crowd the first night. Sure enough the crowd kept picking up as time went along and before I knew it the whole room was full. That was a great feeling although quite different from my disappointment the night before. Because the crowd was excited, the band fed off the energy and the performance was special in many ways. On Sunday morning, I drove two of the band members to WKNC radio studios to meet Afroz Taz and John Caldwell as both of them had been in India and had not responded to my emails. I was beginning to panic that yet another planned event was going to backfire. We decided to drive to the studio and just show up. Thankfully, Afroz was there waiting for us. They had a short but great 10 minute session and sang parts of two songs. On Sunday afternoon we had several friends over to meet the band at our house. Our kids were so happy to attempt to play Chris' sitar and then play Rock Band with them. A sad start but a strong finish.

Andrew's drawings

Latest award winning drawings by our middle son, Andrew. It is a shame to be so good and not enjoy doing it. This weekend, I actually heard hints that he wanted to go to art school one day. That is the problem with being a teenager, you are trying to discover what you want to do with your life.

relaxing weekend

Friday was one of the worst days I have had at work in a long time. It seemed like everything I touched failed to work correctly. I tried to fix one problem and and would cause another. My co-worker was on vacation and obviously could not provide me with the wisdom I needed to solve the many problems I was causing. I was very frustrated by the time I got home. Plus I was running out of options in finding an audio engineer for the upcoming Aradhna concert. At least when I got home and checked my personal email account, I found a couple of people offered to help with the sound, so by the end of the day I had good news to make me feel better about my bad day at work.


Just last weekend it was snowing and was under 20 degrees, but this weekend the temperatures rose to 80 degrees. That was quite the 60 degree temperature difference in just a few days time. That meant it was time to get outside and mess around. I cleaned up the garage to celebrate the warm weather and then washed both of our vehicles. Not too exciting, but then the big event came on Sunday afternoon. I finally took the time to mount the painting of the children on our living room ceiling. We put it on a wall so the kids would not have to see it all of the time but my wife and I could look at it as often as we wanted to. Since it is so large we did not want it to be in our faces all of the time. It looks very nice up around 10 feet from the floor on the wall I filled in. I took a photo of the painting on the wall with our new $17 Logitech webcam which we used to talk using Skype with our son in Korea last night.

This is the meaning of the words on the painting:

Prema milana ko nai-na tarase
The eyes long to be united in love
Ghaayala mana tori nagari aawata
Wounded hearts come to your city
Saba eka chana mei swaagata paawata
All, in an instant, find welcome

Google Chrome vs. Safari 4

I have been using Google Chrome at home and at work since it was released. Today I tried using Safari 4 for the first time. I really like the Google Chrome "most visited" page as I can see what the page looked like last time I visited it. Plus it remembers the most frequently visited pages. The challenge in Safari 4 was customizing their "top sites" to have the same site I had in Google Chrome. It was definitely hard but I finally accomplished it. Two of the web sites I added will not generate previews, one of them being Bank of America's site, which I find really odd. CSS 3 is the secret behind both of these web browsers. Webkit is used in both of these web browsers as well as used within Flex/AIR. The thing I have always liked about Safari is the built-in RSS reader available in the menu bar. Nice to see iTunes CoverFlow being used for Bookmarks. At least they have a new style carousel for the "top sites" page that just looks too cool. You can make a tab become a separate window but I could not find a way to re-attach it. I find Google Chrome annoying on how easy it is to make a tab become an extra window but at least they have an easy way to just drag the window back as a tab. Somehow several times a day accidentally detach a Google Chrome tab as a new window. I am glad I don't have this problem with Safari 4. I have had Safari installed on Windows for a long time but only used it to double check browser compatibility as I found the fonts looked really odd on Windows. I found the CSS checker interesting as it shows how lacking IE and Firefox are and how far they have yet to go to catch up. For now I am a Safari 4 convert.

Kwangju, South Korea

This is a blog about the place in South Korea where my wife grew up. Her maiden name is Dietrick:

Kwangju, South Korea

This is the house where my wife grew up:

Valentine's weekend

The last two days seemed like a long weekend, but in this case it was a good thing. At lunch time yesterday as I was talking to a friend I have known for almost 30 years, the mail woman rang the doorbell. I initially ignored her as I was on the phone and I thought someone else would get the door. Then she knock on the door leading to the garage in desperation. I walked out the front door and found her in the garage. She said I had to sign so she was determined to find me. She had the painting of the family as it arrived from India on Valentine's Day! I handed it to my wife and on opening it we noticed the painted was folded and had creases in it, which was the only thing wrong with it. Everyone had to make comments about it as they all saw the canvas laying on the floor. This morning I searched on the web to figure out how to re-stretch the oil painting to fix the creases. I found a useful video by artist Michael Bell which was on this wikiHow site. I found a couple of sites that sold canvas stretchers, which are really specialized pieces of wood. Then I found this site that explains how to make your own. My middle son and I followed these and now we have a stretched canvas, which is still creased, but at least it is mounted properly.



Yesterday afternoon my wife and I went to see Billu Barber for our anniversary entertainment. Since it had Shah Rukh Khan, we expected to be entertained. We have recently had no such things happening as we watched rental Indian movies. The new ones coming out are just not that good. This one on the other hand had us laughing like crazy near the middle and crying at the end only like King Khan can do. Plus it had a a couple of great points. Billu was very poor and felt ashamed to bother the famous movie star who was his childhood friend. Everyone else wanted to take advantage of them both. Billu's family had to decide if it really matter whether they met the famous movie star when they would always have their father. As usual I would much rather see a movie with a point than just be entertained. I feel like I did not waste my time every time we leave the Indian movie theater. I cannot say the same for other movies.

Aradhna @ Raleigh

book moved

This blog uses Blogger, so I decided today to use WordPress for my book blog: 50 year adventure

full Army day

Yesterday was an interesting day. It was not good and it was not bad, just interesting. I seldom get angry, but that is how I started my day off. On the final day before our oldest son was to leave for South Korea with the Army, at 9am I was wondering why he was not home. The week since we brought him back from Ft. Jackson in Columbia, SC was not the best of weeks. When we arrived after lunch last Thursday, he was home only until the evening when he newly acquired "girlfriend" picked him up in front of our house. She did not come in but parked by the mailbox out of view of the front of the house and call him by cell phone to come out to leave. On Saturday he returned to our house for a little over an hour before he took off again with the same girl for East Carolina University (ECU), where she attends. He returned home on Tuesday afternoon and said a hand full of words all day long to his mother and only mumbled a couple of words to me that evening. He looked and acted exhausted. He packed all day Wednesday and on Thursday night left again with the same girl. We hardly saw him all week and when we did he was not happy at all. His siblings also wondered where he was as they wanted to see him. My wife drove all the way to pick him up on Friday night but he said he wanted to say longer. Last that night he called us to say he had a great meal with his girl friend and her parents, which was not what my wife wanted to hear. I don't know what we expected but it was not that kind of week with our son before he left for South Korea. So when he called at 9:30am yesterday wanting a ride because his friends would not bring him home, that did not make me feel all warm and fuzzy. When we reached the apartment where he was staying with his long time bud, I decided it was time to get angry, which is something I almost never do. Probably not the best time to do so, but I had to preach to him the importance of family over supposed "friends". Who is there for him when he needs help or money? Family not his friends. Who picks him up all of the time when he don't feel like it? Family not his friends. Who forgives him always? Family. After ranting for 30 minutes I have no idea if any of it sank in. What I really didn't like was that this was the same thing we had been doing for years with him and the change I thought I had seen when he first joined the Army was gone and he had reverted to bad habits in a moments notice. Am I perfect? No. Is my wife perfect? No. That had nothing to do with it.

By the time we got home I felt emotionally exhausted and we all let him pack and get ready instead of spending time with him. My wife did not tell him that her parents had canceled their trip to our house to take him out to eat the day before and had considered driving up yesterday. They were excited as he was being stationed in the country they spent 25 years of their life. At 1pm when he asked me to help him start and file his taxes, what did I do? Because he is part of our family, of course I helped him. We sat down and completed his taxes using TurboTax in around 1 and 1/2 hours. We left the house at 3pm with hugs from his siblings. He wanted one last Cook Out hamburger, so we stopped along the way. As we drove out of the parking lot, he looked in the bag and found they gave him a BLT instead. It is hard getting in and out of that location, but he drove around and went back into the slowest line - of course. It was 3:45pm and I was getting a bit worried about the flight which was to take off in our hour. Since it was Saturday I did not have to think about heavy traffic, so I drove as fast as I could and we parked in the nearly vacant lot to the new terminal at RDU. At 4pm we were at the ticket counter with a very helpful woman as there was no line at all. Since we were the parents of our military son, we got special passes to go through security to wait with him at the gate. After 20 minutes he boarded and we were off. It was more of a relief than a tear jerking affair, which is not the way we envisioned our parting. He was after all leaving to go to the place where his mother and my wife grew up her whole life. My wife stayed up late thinking he would call her from LA airport before taking off in Korean Air, but the call never came. I was just glad to go to bed as I was tired from our emotional day. It did not help that our youngest son woke me up at 3am, but that is a whole different story not worth talking about.

A.I.T.

A.I.T. stands for Advanced Individual Training. Our oldest son graduated from his heavy vehicle mechanic A.I.T. this morning. We once again read and heard about the Army Ethos:

    I will always place the mission first
    I will never accept defeat
    I will never quit
    I will never leave a fallen comrade

We watched this film on the Army Ethos.

I like these four values as I could apply them to work or our family. How about saying "I will always place my family first"? Or how about "I will never leave a fallen family member"? How about "I will always place others first before myself"? Wow, that sounds like a Bible verse. The more I hear about the Army values, I like them. Of course no one is perfect now are any of the graduates today able to achieve all of the Army creed, but it certainly is a worthy goal.

Maybe if they hear them enough they will believe them.
Does hearing them all of the time make them true?

Yet another day of driving four hours home so for me plenty of time to think about these things. Of course today was a whole lot better than yesterday when we parked on I-95 north of Fayetteville for around an hour and a half waiting for a wreck to be cleaned off the interstate. We actually turned off the vehicle as we were at a complete stand still for that long. After driving again we pulled off the road to got the Burger King and I took over driving and when I got back on I went the wrong direction, so we lost twenty miles going north instead of south. We finally arrived at 11pm and we were all tired. We got the graduation ceremonies early at 8am and true to the Army motto of "hurry up and wait", that is what we did for an hour. By the time we got into the chapel, we discovered the batteries were dead on our camera. Fortunately, the woman sitting next to us kindly took photos of Nathan for us and said she would send them to us.

Nathan @ AIT graduation

snow

Not only did Obama become the 44th president yesterday, but it snowed over five inches at our house. Because of the snow I was able to watch the first presidental inauguration that I ever remember watching. There certainly was a lot of hype over it this year, so it was nice to watch on the TV from our living room. It would not have been fun in any way to be among the two million people in person. To see the event which was only five hours north of us when we were snowed in was interesting. It looked cold but it was sunning and bright for the big day, which was nice for them. It was many years since we all as a family had a snow day of this magnitude. I found a weather web site that shows all of the recent snows in the Raleigh NC area. We were in Apex NC for the January 2000 snow and our young kids loved every minute of the 20" snow fall. There was a very large hill outside our subdivision leading down to Highway 55, so I walked the boys down and we slid on cardboard boxes for sleds. There was no one on the road so we had snow fun for a long time. The next month we moved to Fuquay Varina and in 2002 was the next big snow. We had a long sloping hill behind our house going down to Johnson Pond below. We bought two red plastic snow boards that provided endless entertainment that year. Previously we built a quarter pipe skateboard ramp and the boys moved that to the top of the hill to launch them even faster down the hill. We were in San Antonio TX for the 2004 snow in this area, so the snow yesterday was our first since 2002. We had no hill this year, so we walked back into the woods behind our house to see the amazing underbrush and trees full of snow. Today was the second day the kids were out of school so they built a snow man to have fun. We have some really nice icicles hanging from the gutters at the back of our house which have grown even longer today. I guess this is what happens when you don't see snow or ice very often as the little things amuse us.

snow 2009

Famly Painting

For my wife's birthday this year, I had a movie poster artist in India paint the children through a friend of mine who is living in India. This is the resulting painting which is 6 ft x 4ft.