Back and Caught Up

This is my final act to catch up with being away. I keep my room barely clean, refrigerator slightly stock with water, and bed always made. The first thing I did was make my bed. My rush to leave early Wednesday morning meant I didn't give myself time to make my bed or put any clothes away from the packing I did the night before. My room looked like someone had searched it and hadn't put anything back.. The second thing I do is to take everything off the floor and put it on the bed. Third third major project was to fill up the refrigerator with water. With the warm temperature here, I go through 3/4 a gallon a day. I still haven't cleaned off my bed, but the floor is a good friend.

My sister wants to redesign her website, so I was volunteered by my mom to do the redesign. The refresher on HTML has been worth it. Before yesterday, I didn't remember how to start a new light or how to make a table. Today I do, and I sent off a sample to sister M be examined for quality. She had already given me some rough drawings, but before I spent too much time implementing rough ideas, I wanted sister M to see and to change the design to suit her.

It looks as though I won't finish everything I wanted to finish tonight. I wanted to share some thoughts about the hypothetical questions I posed last post. After an hour on the phone with brother J, mulling over the issues myself for a while, and hearing mom's rationals in person with longer/more in-depth explanations, I've changed my opinion for my first response, and it shed a bit of light on how I see the world. :-) It is likely of little interest to anyone except family, but the best way to know and understand what I believe is to have myself be able to explain my beliefs to someone, and hopefully I'll be able to do that tomorrow evening. Maybe I'll even explain clearly! That would be a refreshing change!

2 Days Until Home

Whooo hooo! Home in 2 days. 36 hours and I'll be on the plane!

The real reason for this post is an article I read today in Discovery magazine. It made me think quite a bit about the moral judgments I make. These questions are NOT trick questions, and don't spend time on either one, because in real life you wouldn't have time to carefully decide.

Question one: A train is chugging down a traintrack ( big surprise ). If it continues, 5 people on a track farther down will die. If you throw the track switch right now, 1 person will die on the other route? What do you do?

Question two: 4 critically injured patients just came into the hospital and won't live much longer. They all need different and unavailable transplants to survive, but they would survive if they had transplants. A person that matches all five donors is about to walk out the doors. (Talk about long odds!) Do you take the healthy person and kill him to save all the others?

Now for the humdinger. Why did you choose what you chose?

Early Bird Gets The Worm

I don't normally bog about work, but I think today would be a good day to make an exception. Rarely does time just "fly by" while working. Time usually passes, meanders, and sometimes plods while working. It doesn't seem to matter what type of work I'm doing or if I enjoy it, the passage of time is something I can't judge very well while working. Last Thursday, I was working hard, didn't check the time and didn't look for lunch since I didn't feel too hungry. Eventually, I pull back, spread my arms, and give a wide long yawn. I tried to guess the time... 12:00? 1:00? 3:00? It seemed as though I had been working forever. 9:30. I couldn't believe it. I was ready for the day to be about done and the clocks only said 9:30. Ugh.

Today though, I started at my normal 8:00 time. I started working, researching, tracking down bugs. Things I would consider fairly routine or even boring. I check the time after a little bit and it was already 11:30! I hadn't done much work, very little productive programming and it was already 9:30. I went for lunch, came back and worked on the exact same issues and the clock yet again jumped forward to 4:00.

My net productivity for those seven hours: I commented out 10 lines of code. The code I commented out were lines of code spread throughout a single file that I had added about 7 months ago. Not only did I get rid of the progress I thought I had made back then, but I also didn't add any features to the program. Essentially, I cut the cost that I myself produced, and got paid for it. :-)

Fortunately, most days I'm a little more beneficial to the company.

I had a nice talk with my mom today. We chatted for a half hour about movies, websites, nephews, and vacations. Based on my mom's recommendation, I am planning to see "Meet Joe Black" whenever I get a card to the local video rental store.

Time to do a little clean up of my paperwork and then an early bedtime.

9 more days until I go home!

Tennis and Biking

Ah, another lovely Saturday comes to visit. Later this evening, I may be going to visit my cousins who are down here for vacation time. They said they would call me and let me know when a good time to visit popped up. My guess is I'm not going to get a call today: they are getting in today, and after an early start, a long drive, a long wait at the airport, flying, getting baggage, driving to their hotel, unpacking, and planning, the last thing they want is MORE things to do. :-) I hope they enjoy their time in Orlando.

I hope everyone enjoyed my pictures of SeaWorld. I was going to go back this Sunday after church, but when I realized it would be Easter weekend and prime vacation time, I decided it wasn't worth the crowds. Instead, I'm going to play tennis this afternoon and read a book. Don't know what book yet, but any book will do. Any suggestions? My living room has close to 2500 books and the library is just down the street, so if I can't find it in time for this weekend, I'll try it for next weekend.

I may go bicycling tomorrow. Depending on the weather and what I feel like, I may take a ride on the "nature" trail near my house. I don't know why it is called a nature trail. The 10 or so miles of it I've driven by are all by the road and next to housing developments. Not very naturish.

Weekend Adventures

The weekend is done, and it was great. I'll start where I left off: Saturday. I went to the Regatta, arriving 10 minutes late. By then I had missed the karate/tai chi demo. Next was yoga dancers... all under 10 I'm guessing. No wonder they could stretch! But the next show was by far the best, the Chinese Acrobats - or the Dragon Legend Acrobats as they are billed in the Epcot center.

It was by far the neatest part of the day. In the Epcot center, I'm sure I would be sitting 50-100 feet away. At the regatta, I was only 10 feet away. I didn't get any pictures. I thought it was just a local group - I was really wrong. In a way, I was happy I didn't have my camera. It meant I could just watch without worrying about my video moving or losing track of the action - I had a thoroughly enjoyable time. My favorite part of the show were the twin contortionists. They weren't as flexible as others I've seen, but they did their whole routine on one hand! They had a five minute routine, and it was all done standing on their hands. I didn't see them waver or look like they lost their balance in the slightest.

Sunday: I went to Aikido class on Sunday morning (so early... why so early!), then headed off towards Seaworld. I enjoyed my time there. From the other times I've been there, I've figured out which of the up-close 'wet zones' get the least water, and then positioned myself there. I got some nice pictures, which are below, along with my geo-caching pictures on the way home. I found one geo-cache. The other one was in a park, off a trail, and I couldn't find it anywhere. As you can see in the picture of the one I found, the caches can be quite small.