Blatant Obfuscation

June has been good to me.

When I thought I hadn't done as well as I had hoped in a class I ended up with a nice B- in the class. It is sweet. One less things to worry about. Actually all in all I feel that I was graded better than what I actually did for the last term, but then the last eight weeks have been a vague rush for me.

I have done a lot and with not too much success otherwise. It is a constant feeling of ever going and never stopping that got to me. It has been an overall good experience to decide to remain in Provo and take classes and work and socialize down here. I feel it has me done a lot of good.

Lately, I have had a lot of time for reflection or contemplation. I think it has been a side-effect of the philosophical readings that I have done. I seem to think about what I read in order to understand it. So this has become more so self-evident with the new term than with the past, but it was there as well. I find that as I take time to think over things I can put them in a proper perspective. It has been helpful.

I will relate a series of ideas that have come to me. It has been a fortunate series of ideas. I was reviewing a journal that I have been slack in keeping. It seems that I havent been serious about keeping one of these sense my younger brother violated my privacy and read my journal once. I just havent kept what I have seen others keep. In taking note of people as they attended church, I saw one of the sisters in my ward working in a journal. Upon a follow up to that, I found out she was keeping a log of spiritual impressions while at church. I found that an interesting notion. There have been several times where I have written stuff down about moments that I wanted to perserve, which until discussing it hadnt considered it a journal. Last week in Elder's Quorum we had a discussion of journals, and I came to the conclusion that a journal could soley consist of those moments and ideas that affect me as long as I take time to regularly keep things.

So to tie in both things mentioned, I have been working on this past month and what I have accomplished and finished in my life. It has caused me to realize the importance of certain things in my life. Now this is a natural ordering of what I was going to focus my energies on. I have felt thatI needed to concetrate on school work. This meant a cut back on the time spent playing WoW and other computer games. It was too easy to get tied up on these games and not do school work.
In conjuction to this I needed to ensure I was putting in a full effort into my job. It was becoming easy to not be there and that I needed to work in order to be able to live while going to school. With school and work, I am a busy person, but at the same time I feel i needed to make time for a social life of some sort [still working on it] as well as a more spiritual experince in my week.
Certain people in my family and other associations had been expressing their misunderstanding on why I would choose to go to church as it makes no sense to them. To them no rational being would believe in God. I am not sure about that, I think any rational being has to believe in something, but that ends up being a conversation best left untouched. So trying to gain a spiritual experience on a weekly basis, I decided to remove myself from things that would take away from that spirituality, and then I had been feeling like there could be something I could do. After some thought and reflection, I decided to volunateer at the Provo Temple one day a week. It has been an interesting and good experience as I go thru it. It has been fun to learn and grow, but it gave to me what I needed.
As I have done this, I have been keeping a journal of the level of experiences and how these changes have affected my life for good. One of those things that I am absolutely impressed with is that no matter how hard people try, on Turesday after working at the Temple for 5 hours and enjoying my time there, there is nothing that will bring me down. I am truely happy for the remainder of the day. It is fun.
I think that is much as I can discuss for the moment, until a later moment.

Posted by James at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The coolest thing I have found with the DS lite and it would also be true of a DS is the WiFi gaming. I get a wireless connection and I can connect to Nintendo's wireless gaming network. It is awesome. Then there is the downside to it all. The playing of Nintendo games in a wireless environment with people from around the world basically.
I dont know how it works, or I really dont need to know how it works, I just enjoy it. I load up Mario Kart in to the DS and then thru some magic [I have black-boxed obfuscated it] I am in a 4 person race against other Mario Kart DS owners. I do have the option of regional or worldwide searchs for opponents, but I stick with the worldwide, I figure broader search so I can have my trash handed to me every time.
And do I ever have my trash handed to me. Right now I am 3-15 in the online races. I have noted some of the cool things playing. Even so much that I ended up googling 'Mario Kart DS' and came up with a video of the feature called snaking. It was interesting and now I understand why I am 3-15 in racing. Some people can just 'snake' their entire way thru levels and have the perpetual boast that powersliding gives. I now need to learn.
But that is only part of it. I have been pushing hard to get each of the difficulties beaten to unlock the cool bonuses built into the game. For example, I have beaten both of the 50cc Circuits and have unlocked Dry Bones and Daisy as characters. Last night, I raised with someone who had Walugia so I am now working on the 100cc prix to get him. I thought it was the new tracks that allow you to race as him, but I was wrong, i just unlocked the third kart for everyb ody, which means I have 16 more races to place 1st in order to get Walugia. Damn time sink.
Dont get me wrong I think the DS was the best purchase as it has kept me sane the past few days doing as much writing required by my english and philosophy classes. The ability to load up the game and give it a go for a few minutes has been really really nice. I am tempted to buy Metroid Prime Hunters in order to have an FPS to play when needing to vent frustrations.
Until then I am working on improving my standings. I think I need to choose someone other than Yoshi.

Posted by James at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If I owned a car, I think I might have gone out Sunday and bought myself one. I dont own a car, and I didnt get a DS Lite until monday evening. That was an annoying struggle, but I now own one. I find that Nintendo has done something right for a change in the console market, or at least in the handheld market.
Why did I spend 130 on a Nintendo product of limited use to a 25 yr old? It seems like a fair question. I am attempting to put into words my snappy response. The normal response "because I could" seems to fit in the offical response somewhere, but it was more than just because I could.
Let me tell you, in the 24 hours I have owned the new DS Lite, I find myself wondering why I didnt already own a DS. Top of my list of cool things about the DS is the WiFi capabilities. I do mean WiFi. If i can get a wireless signal, I can play games against anybody. That is cool. I had my trash handed to be several times last night as I was playing mario kart DS, which happens to be another reason I bought myself a DS.
I love the other Mario Kart games on the various consoles, so the ability to have it where ever i went was rather appealing to me. Now that I know that any where on campus that I might be and wanted to, I could get my trash handed to me playing Mario Kart against worldwide competitors.
Another reason for the purchase was the serious of games under the Big Brain Academy that Nintendo is scheduled to have released by the end of the summer. Basically it is a bunch of mind games and teasers for the DS that is to make the DS an 'education friendly' platform. Not the reason I am interested in it, it has everything to do with the last Title in teh BBA series dealing with Sudoku.
Then there are a score of other GBA and DS titles that I have been wanting to play, but until now, would think about due to a lack of gaming platform. Now I own a DS, and therefore can play those games. Finally, I realized that I am related to people that want a DS. Now I own one and they dont. I can hold it over their heads.

Posted by James at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lately I have been wanting to get my hands dirty. What I really want to be doing is welding. I havent done any welding in 2 years and it is eating away at me. I just wont to have the rush of excitement that I get when I know I am melting metal to metal and creating something. I want to build a big BBQ pit. I want to make a monster out of it. Something that when you walk by and look at it you wonder what the hell the person was thinking when they built it.
I have plans. I have been thinking about this for about a month. I have two or three designs that I want to try to fuse into one really cool design. It wouldnt be the first BBQ pit that I built, but since high school I havent had the need to weld like I currently do.

I dont get the itch to weld often, but when I do, I tend to really really want to weld. Working at the research center, I was able to weld pretty much whenever I felt the need. I ended up spending 6 months working on welding bottoms to then monolith cores for one of the projects. [the monolith cores were meter square by 1.5 meter deep.] In order to install the bottoms drain holes had to be placed in each of them. That meant cutting nice circles and then welding a short pice of pipe into place. It was okay at first but after 86 bottoms it got tedious quick.
Having 86 bottoms meant 86 monoliths. Welding 86 bottoms to the bottom of each monolith box, was a challenge. Each bottom had to be custom fitted to the box and then welds that would be water tight. I experienced many burns during the 6 months of welding. There was much hot metal. After bottoms were placed on, each Box had leg welded into place to protect the drain and let the boxes sit higher then they already did...

6 months of welding, I got the bug mostly out of my system. I did weld on some trailers, a few odd and ends projects and made doors for a storage box I bought. But that was it. I havent done anythign since then. And now I really really want to weld again. Its an itch in my system.

So I have plans for a BBQ pit. My current drawinigs have a 8 foot cooking space with a 3 foot firebox, but those will be subject to change. I want to learn some more about smokers as I feel that in my pit design I want to have a smoker somehow. I think there might be a trailer purchase here in the near future if I am getting serious about this stuff.

Posted by James at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I awoke early for what I hope will be the last time to attend meetings before church. For the last 9 months I have been attending early morning meetings each sunday. As the ward mission leader [didnt really function as one], i got to go to all the meetings to talk about the ward and what needed to be done. My purpose as far as I was able to tell, was to point out the obvious and then have it completely ignored. It was the highlight of my week.
As ward mission leader, I was trying to figure out, what I was supposed to be doing. I live in a single's ward, that be the pure definition of the ward, you couldnt be inactive and a member of the ward. It also being one of the 250 student wards in the area, you couldnt really be a member of the ward and not attending institute or a religion class at BYU. So the list of 15 names that never showed up to church I would point out this fact every meeting. I was never really listened too. I tried to become in contact with those names to no avail. Then there were the two baptisms of non-members into the ward last Fall semester, only to not really be involved in any of that process as a ward full of return missionaries feel they could do my initial responsibilty and then lay it on my lap when it got tough.
For the last year, I have felt under supported and as if I were talking and no one wanted to listen. At one point I had suggested names for missionaries to help in the calling, told that I would get them only to have them called else where.

Two months ago, I began to joke about just releasing me. No one took it seriously. I didnt even think it was serious. And then about three weeks ago, sitting in one of those early morning meetings, we were going thru the list of names of members of the ward. We ended up talking about ward missionaries, the fact that I had none. I was quickly proved wrong by them listing off 3 people whose calling it was. I asked them when they were called and why I wasnt made aware of them until then. I had been in the calling for 8 months and everytime i asked I was never told of these 3 individuals.
I came to a conclusion quickly thereafter. I was complacent in my calling. Yes I could do it. Yes I could serve in it. Yes I could deal with the inactives never willing to hold an appointment or wanting to talk. But the breaking point was the complacency on my part as well as the part of the ward leadership. I really needed to be doing something else. It was just a matter of convincing the bishop I was right.
It didnt take too much. I had an interview the Tuesday after I came to the conclusion I needed to be released. After asking the bishop to be released and explaining that I felt complacent in the call, he agreed that he would get it done. Only with my luck he was going on vacation for 2 weeks and would get to it until he got back. For two weeks I got to deal with the call some more.
Finally today, I was released only to be given a heads up on the fact that they had another calling for me. All I can think of is NO.

Posted by James at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday became a hard day for me. I had a paper due in my Technical Writing class. It started off as a simple proposal to do my analytical assignment for the class, but it didnt stay simple long. After I had re-typed the docuement into Word [for some reason Word doesn like open office docuemtns] I began working on formatting so that it looked like I had imagined in my head.
I had been sitting in bed most of the morining working on my laptop and had gotten a good looking memo written with the appropriate line spacing and formatting. My print is connected to my PC so I saved the docuement to my jump drive and hopped onto my PC to review it quickly and then get it printed off. As I was reviewing it, I found that all time I spent on formatting was wasted as none of it had stayed. So I began to fight it over and over and over again trying to get things too look the way I had them on my laptop. It didnt work. I ended up giving up and printing off a decent copy of the proposal to turn in. Its a new month.
Also in teaching my lab yesterday, I came to realize the importance of clarification. Well, specificity of things. In STAT 221 [Principles of Statistics] the point that the class and the course work drives home is clearly defining the terms in context of the problem. The IDEA there is specificity. Most of statistics are about a particular variable that we are trying to determine the mean value of the variable to draw inference on it.
So I have been trying to point out the most specific terms as possible there. The is one problem that I have found that people tend to be lazy in rewriting the parameter or even just writing the parameter in full context of the problem. The problem dealt with the mean oder thresholds of DMS in wine for wine tasters. [Techinically it is to be untrained wine-tasting students]. Most of the responses centered around "mena odor threshold of DMS" not really including the population which we want to make inferences on.
I almost feel guilty for marking off, but I feel that I stress the importance of specificity.

Posted by James at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)