After returning from Miek's bachelor party road trip, I had nearly two weeks to relax, unwind, and enjoy some vacation time. I saw quite a few old friends, including Aaron, who is now a stay-at-home dad with his ~6 month old daughter. We watched Prince Caspian, and, surprisingly, ran into my sister and her boyfriend at the movie theater. They had just watched it.

I got to see two old friends from church who I don't think I've seen since high school. Warren is now married with a daughter, and living in Conway. Daniel B. is still going to the same church, and attending a nearby community college. It was very interesting to me that all three of us had similar stories since our teenage years: we stopped going to church, started drinking and partying, and then came back to Jesus. Interesting.

Dad told me to plan something fun to do together. He said he'd take off work on Friday. I pitched a few ideas to him, and we settled on floating a canoe down the Buffalo National River. I've done that a couple of times, growing up; this was his 2nd time.

The only other river I've floated has been the Upper Gauley in West Virginia. It was white-water rafting, not canoeing. They're pretty different. The Buffalo winds sedately through the Ozark mountains, between frequent hills and even 300 foot bluffs. The calm is punctuated by rapids every 10 minutes or so. By rapids, I mean the sort of rapids that occasionally have a tinge of white in them. All in all, it is a seriously gorgeous river. It was actually the first river to be given "National" status--as in, a national park.

We managed to get dumped out 3 times. The first time, we both leaned away from an overhanging branch in a bend. The left lip of the canoe dipped too low, water flooded into the canoe, and we were thrown out. The water was chilly, but not cold. We only had a single bungee cord, so our lunch cooler was not securely tied. So, Dad, being on the upriver side of the waterlogged canoe, held it in place, while I chased down our sandwiches, bananas, drinks, ice-packs, paddles, etc. Then, I dumped everything on the bank and helped Dad drain the canoe. By the 3rd time that happened, we were getting pretty good at it. :-)

We floated something like 12 miles of the river. We got out at "Kyle's Landing", and, thanks to a shuttle service (by the same people from whom we rented the canoe), Dad's car was there, waiting for us. We left the canoe and drove home, about 90 minutes away. We had a fantastic time--very bondarific. :-)

Last Wednesday afternoon, I flew to Little Rock to meet up with my old friend Mike (affectionately spelled "Miek"). Miek's stuff was mostly packed, but we hung out a few blocks away at Clay and Patria's house. Miek, something of a chef (and beer brewer), had marinated some pork in a scrumptious-smelling sweet cinnamon sauce. The plan was to take the meat to our favorite local pizza place, Damgoode Pies. They will actually cook custom meats into a pizza pie for you. But, they weren't feeling it that night--I guess they were busy--and they basically asked us to take our business elsewhere. So, we went to the supermarket, bought some ingredients, and made our own pizza pie. Heh, we made it in a casserole dish. It was fantastic! That meat was crazy good, too.

Thursday, after grabbing lunch and running a few errands with Miek, Miek, Clay, me, and an extra passenger hit the road for northwest Arkansas. We stopped by Russellville (my home town) on the way, grabbing a tasty burger. My mom met us there, so I got to say hi. I also grabbed a couple of long-sleeved shirts from her, which she happened to have in her trunk, ready for Goodwill. I had dumbly neglected to pack anything remotely warm, and we were going to Colorado. That's not the first packing mistake I've made. Ask me about packing shoes sometime... :-)

We got to NW Arkansas around 8, I think. We picked up Otto and Dan (Miek's bro), bringing the head count to 5. We stopped at Wal-mart on the way out of town to grab a tarp and some cables. That way, we could strap our luggage to the roof of Miek's parents' Expedition and use the back of the S.U.V. as a sleeping area. The tarp, unfortunately, was very annoying, flapping loudly in the wind. For the first hour or two, the navigator frequently opened the sunroof to check on everything.
( At this rate, this is going to be a long post... :-) (pics inside) )

This semester, I had the privilege of teaching COMP 524, Programming Language Concepts. Each computer science Ph.D. student in the department is required to teach a course. I was happy to get this one, because this was my favorite college class. Overall, it was a great experience.

At first, it took a while to get the rhythm. It was taking me pretty much all my spare time to prepare lectures. (I prepared my own curriculum and notes.) I didn't always feel very confident in myself or my knowledge of the material. Sometimes, I didn't feel fully prepared. But, over time, I began to hit my stride more frequently. Some days, I felt like everything went really well. Those days were so satisfying!

Other days, it didn't go so well. Once, I tried to teach on type systems, and the differences between strong vs. weak and static vs. dynamic systems. I really struggled to understand the material in the first place (it wasn't something that was stressed when I took the course at Arkansas). As a result, my understanding was cloudy and blurry, and I didn't convey anything very well. I talked to Prachi (a friend who knows his programming languages) about it, and he sharpened my understanding. I ended up going back to re-teach that material, because otherwise it wouldn't have been fair to ask any non-trivial questions on the test.

One of the more rewarding aspects of the class was the office hours. I held them twice per week, and there was almost always at least one person there. I held them in the lobby, which I think encouraged students to show up. It was really cool to be able to work one-on-one with them, to probe out the weak spots in their understanding. I think that that is teaching at its purest: tutoring somebody one-on-one.

Speaking of student interaction, I was pretty pleased with the level of class participation. Most of the students would ask questions during class. Some were particularly good at asking questions. Several times, we got a pretty good discussion going. I can't really take credit for the participation. I mean, I encouraged it, not only as a matter of policy, but also by stopping frequently and asking if everybody understood. But I think I was just fortunate to teach such overall bright students. We have some quality undergrads here at UNC, let me tell ya. :-) In fact, even though I told them to feel free to skip lectures (I always chafed at attendance policies in undergrad...), not many people skipped at all.

Another success was the homework assignments. I wrote some of them from scratch, and modified others from previous offerings of the course. I was very pleased with their relevance to course material. I think the students got a lot out of them, too. I think the amount of time my students spent on my course was probably on the high side of normal compared to other courses, but I don't think it was overwhelming. And besides, I don't think anybody thought their time was wasted with the assigments, since they were not only relevant but, in my estimation, pretty fun.

I made a fairly thorough set of notes to go along with the course. I originally started making these for my own use when giving lectures, but then I figured that the students would benefit from them as well. If I ever teach this course again, this will be a good resource.

I'm fairly old-school when it comes to lectures. I did not use one slide all semester. I think Powerpoint is a great technology, but I think it's more appropriate for conference talks than for class lectures. Instead, I wrote on the markerboard, using my notes as a guide. In fact, once I discovered that there was a chalkboard behind the markerboards, I used that instead. You don't have to worry about whether a piece of chalk is going to be low on ink... Yeah, I'm going to be a dinosaur someday. :-)

I've been helping out with the 6th-8th grade youth group at church. I wasn't looking forward to it at first, but it's proved to be quite enjoyable. Last Sunday was no exception.

It was the final meeting of the year. Typically, we meet from 6-8pm on Sundays, but this time, we took off after church and spent the entire afternoon out in the woods, at a church family's house. I volunteered to drive a big white van full of teens out there (45 minutes). It was funny to me, to hear the way they interacted and the things they talked about. I don't remember any details, but I mostly just smiled to myself in the front seat. Oh, and at one point, they started rocking the van back and forth, in unison. They really got it going!

We played several awesome games. The idea of the youth group is that there are 4 teams that compete against each other throughout the year. The team with the most points gets a special reward at the end of the year (a free trip to DC; teens on other teams can pay to go). And this meeting was their final chance to earn points, so the competition was fierce.

One game we played was my idea. For lack of a better name, we called it "rock ball". I got the idea from a couple of friends of mine from India. There's a stack of rocks, and two teams take turns throwing a ball at it. The first team to knock it over (call them the throwing team) chases down the ball and tries to either tag or throw everybody on the other team out. The other team tries to re-stack the rocks. Isn't that an awesome game? I wish we'd known about that, growing up. Although, freeze tag was fun, too... :-)

Then we did a relay race. Beforehand, we gave them a couple rolls of Mentos and a couple two-liter bottles of Diet Coke. (Yes. We really did. Mwahaha...) One person on each team, the catcher, had a small plastic cup. They tried to catch as much of the foam as possible. The starting order for the relay race was determined by the amount of coke caught. It was hilarious watching the foam spew all over everything--especially the catchers! The adults just hung back and laughed, hands alternately on our knees or hips. So funny!

Then the relay race started: a three-legged run, then a wheel-barrow. Then, they had to grab a frozen t-shirt, beat it out until one person could wear it, and then run down a slip-'n-slide. Best. Relay race. Ever. :-)

Then we started tying water balloons. This was actually not for a chaotic water war. Rather, it was for a chaotic capture-the-flag with water guns and water balloons. :-) Each adult leader had a flag, there were flags hidden throughout the woods, and also, there was a "base" with two special flags and lots of water balloons. We strung alka-seltzer on a string, and the teens wore it around their necks. If their alka-seltzer fizzled away because of getting hit by water, they were out. Isn't that brilliant?

I hid behind a tree and waited. I was wearing a green t-shirt, but eventually, a hunting party spotted me. I charged at them, trying to hit their little alka-seltzer targets, but not having much luck. They eventually realized that and started chasing me. I took them all on a merry chase through the woods, ducking under branches and jumping over creeks. It was awesome. At one point, I saw the woods end in a field, and I figured I had better stay inside the woods, so I took a sharp right. Winded, I found a large tree and hid behind it. Amazing, I had lost them! I heard them behind me, tromping around, saying, "Where did he go??" Eventually, they ranged wide enough to find me, and I took off again. As I ran, I ran straight into another small hunting party, and their fresh legs proved to be enough to chase me down. :-)

Lastly, we all inhaled lasagna and cookies before piling into the vehicles and heading home. What an awesome (if exhausting) day!

Last Friday afternoon, some of the guys at church gathered at Matt's homestead, which is kinda out in the country. We had a blast. It was the perfect setting, great company, and plentiful adventure. Here are some of the things we did.

- Climbed a big, old oak tree. We had to get a garden hose out and toss it over a branch to even have a chance at getting up there, and even then, it was tough.
- Chowed down on some pizza.
- Tossed a football and a frisbee. Matt and his dad are developing some land for a neighborhood, so there was even enough cleared land to throw an aerobie around.
- Discussed all manner of manly things around a campfire.
- Rasslin.
- Smoked cigars.
- Walked around the development property. Sophie, an awesome little dog, joined us.
- Worshipped, acoustic-style, with a geetar.
- Slept under the stars.
- Had chocolate-chip pancakes, compliments to Matt's mom. I ate 6. Matt's dad recommended peanut butter with 'em, but I didn't try it.
- Braved the swift currents of the nearby Haw River.

( Some pictures... )

A couple nights ago, I dropped a friend off at a UNC dorm after a church event. To drop him off, I have to go down a narrow lane, drop him off, and continue down the lane to a small parking lot behind another dorm, where I can then turn the car around and leave. Well, I dropped him off and drove down the lane. As I did, I passed by a group of guys. They seemed to be frat guys. At least, they were dressed that way, and had that sort of cocky air.

It was a rather strange scene, and I didn't know what to make of it in passing. There was one group of 3-4 guys, all facing another couple of guys. The 2 guys seemed to be embracing, but in a strange way. It didn't look like a hug, exactly.

I drove past them, and backed into a parking spot to turn around, when I realized what was going on: a confrontation. The two guys embracing was actually one guy trying to hold the other back. I parked, turned the music off, rolled down the windows, and watched the goings-on.

Just as I did that, the guy being held back broke free and ran at the other group. Or, specifically, at one guy in the other group. The two of them started throwing fists at each other, and both groups quickly interceded to try to break them up. This is when I got out of the car.

Surprisingly, they weren't having any luck separating them. There were 2-3 guys tugging on each of the fighters, trying to pull them apart. I stood there, dumb, for a couple of seconds, when one of the intercessors said, "Help us separate them!" So, I jumped into the fray, and grabbed the wrist of one of the fighters. I tugged, and, with a struggle, they came apart.

The friends got in between them and herded/pushed them away from each other. The whole time, they were hurling insults at each other and acting like they wanted back at each other. I stood around and waited for a couple of minutes, ready to lend myself to the cause of peace. Then, some lady came out of the back door of the dorm. She was probably in her 30's and had an air of authority. She told them to knock it off, or she would call campus police. They quickly left. After a moment, I did too.

Not your typical Monday night, that's for sure! By the way, it's amazing the dose of adrenaline you get when you're that close to a fight. I can't imagine what levels of adrenaline would flow had I actually participated in the fight. I do reckon I wouldn't feel much pain.

Last Sunday, I carted some of the youth group kids from church to the pastor's house for an event we were having. Apparently, one of them didn't quite close the back left door all the way. It's understandable: the door doesn't hang quite right, so you have to throw it shut kinda hard.

After the event was over, I went to go hang out with some friends. I was driving through a neighborhood, almost there, and I decided I would just reach around behind me and yank the door shut. Yes, dumb idea, I know. I don't know what came over me. But, I tried it, in motion, going about 15 MPH. I turned around, managed to yank it shut, and turned back around to see that I was headed straight for the curb. I yanked the wheel to the left and slammed on the brakes, but it was too late--BAM! I hit the curb.

I could tell that the tire was busted. I drove another 200 yards or so to my destination, and got to work putting the donut on. Well, as it turns out, the donut was flat, too. After hanging out, I drove home--about 15 miles away--on a flat donut. I couldn't go faster than about 30 MPH, so it took a while.

Now, I have a new set of front tires and a new donut. And it is now official that my driving record is no longer spotless. Until then, I had never gotten a ticket nor gotten into a wreck. Oh well...I guess that's what I get for being an idiot. :-)

Oh, and I think I threw out the rear suspension in that little incident, too. It seems to be riding low and bouncy lately.

I've been to an eye doctor several times in the past month or so. I'm trying to find some contacts that work for me. First, I got an exam and discovered that my eyes have deteriorated a bit since 10th grade (when I got my glasses). Then, I tried some contacts that you wear continuously (night and day) for a couple of weeks. I hate sticking stuff into my eye, so I figured, the less I have to go through that ordeal, the better.

They were OK for the first day or two. But later on, especially late in the day, they would get super dry and scratchy. Ugh, there's nothing like having a huge piece of dry plastic in your eye. *shudders*

So I went back. Apparently, there are sort of two spectra of contacts. One is permeability, or how well oxygen flows through them. The other is how well the lenses retain their moisture. The lenses I first tried were very permeable, but it turns out my eyes need more water than oxygen, I guess. I got a different pair to try, and, for the most part, they've worked out great. I sent off for a year's prescription, and I've been wearing them most days.

I'm even getting better at the terribly fun task of stickin 'em in my eye. At this point, it only takes me a minute or so to get a lense in or out of my eye. Not bad. Plus, it's nice having them in, because I (1) have peripheral vision, (2) don't have anything hanging on my ears and nose, and (3) can easily wear sunglasses.

My church has been talking about "margin" lately. It's the current sermon series. I've heard some gold nuggets of wisdom, and I figured I'd record them for posterity.

- Margin is defined as limit minus load. That is, {the limit of how much you can do}, minus {how much you're doing}. Note that everybody has a limit.
- In our culture, the tendency is to have a negative margin. This necessarily means some things get dropped.
- In our culture, the ideal is often seen as having zero margin. This is also known as "living up to your potential". It's the idea that we should be carrying as much as we can, to make sure we're not wasting any time or potential.
- This is reflected in a typical answer to "how are you?": "I'm busy." Busy ought to be a bad state, not a good/respectable state. But many mistakenly equate "busy" with "important".
- Yet, a better ideal is to have a positive margin. One reason for that is to avoid burn-out, which can happen with margin <= 0.
- Another reason is based around the idea that relationships are perhaps the most important thing under the sun: relationships only happen in the margin.
- Idea: take a retreat for a day (or three, or seven). Remove yourself from all human contact. Go hiking, maybe. Getting away from the hustle & bustle allows an opportunity to reflect, and to see your life and priorities more clearly.
- The idea of margin also applies to finances. Set some money aside in your budget. Otherwise, something will come up that requires money you don't have. (Just as, without time margin, something will come up that requires time that you don't have.)

A lot of these things were exactly what I needed to hear. :-)

The conference I so desperately wanted to attend last month is called onething. The tagline is, "One desire. One pursuit. One answer. God alone." The whole point of the conference is the why and the how of making God (or Jesus) the one thing of importance in life. Somewhere around 15,000 people attended. Bonus: it was free.

That weekend changed my life. Something I've realized for a while is that, if God really is who I believe he is, he deserves a lot more of me than I'm giving. In fact, he deserves it all. I don't want to be half-hearted. So, I had high hopes that this conference would be just what I needed.

Well, it was. But not because of the program, or any talk. Rather, because God met me there. (This is probably going to sound kinda weird to some. Oh well.) While worshipping him, he spoke to me through one of the songs that we were singing. (Incidentally, it was "Relentless" by Misty Edwards.) He said, "I burn with love for you." There was such a ferocity to his love, a burning intensity, that I at once understood what he meant when he talked about himself in the Bible as being jealous. The revelation of his love for me left me weeping.

("The jealous God", a name God self-applies in Exodus 34:14, is "El Qanna" in Hebrew. Hence the title of this post.)

I learned a lot at the conference, and I got quite a bit out of it. But eclipsing everything else was this acute awareness that I am loved by the living God. How glorious! Since then, I've been amazed at how easy life is. If I'm starting to get bummed about something, I remember--oh yeah!--God loves me! I'm his child!

Really, truly, this is life. Everything else just happens, just takes care of itself, when I walk in the knowledge of his great, passionate, firey love for me. Am I worried? Hey, don't be: God's got everything under control, and you can trust that he desires the best for you. Depressed? How can depression or frustration or pessimism stand, when the light of his love shines on it? Tempted? Pshaw, what sort of pleasure can sin offer, compared to this?

Anyway...I'm not trying to preach here or anything. I wanted to document the occasion that changed my life, and how it did.

After finishing up the semester, I hung around town for a few days, staying to run some errands that I had been putting off and also going to Courtney's birthday celebration. The celebration included kickball, Courtneyball (a variant of Calvinball), and 4-square (or boxball as Courtney called it), as well as grilled cheese and tomato soup on a cold, cold day. Beautiful.

Then I hit the road, making my annual trip home for the holidays. This time, I didn't want to spend the money on a big long audiobook, so I did some research online and found Librivox.org, which has free MP3 downloads of audio recordings of public domain classics. I listened to "Dracula" by Bram Stoker, which was pretty good.

I stopped in Little Rock, about an hour short of home, to visit my old high school and college buddy, Mike. The next day, I got to see my wonderful family. Well, Mom and Krissie anyway--Dad was still at work until Friday. Friday during the day, I saw Aaron and his new (and first) baby, Emma. She is a total sweetheart--she obviously takes after her mother more than her father! :-)

Saturday, we drove to Amarillo to see our relatives. That was quite a journey. It started snowing pretty hard just before Oklahoma City, and it got pretty dangerous for a while. I-40 slowed down to 20-30 mph for long stretches. My car was acting up--one of the cylinders was misfiring--so I was in the lead, with my parents behind me. (Krissie had to stay home and work.) At one point, as we're crossing a bridge, I looked back and saw my parents passing a big truck, going maybe 40-50 mph, and they start fishtailing. They went back and forth, pretty crazy, for about 5-6 times, but my dad finally got it under control. Scary stuff. Apparently, the same storm tore through Amarillo, caused a 60-70 car pileup, and stopped traffic on I-40 eastbound for several hours. Yikes.

I was a little worried about my car. It was misfiring pretty bad by the time we arrived. I really, really wanted to get to Kansas City on the 28th for a conference. I was worried because we arrived Saturday night, Monday was Christmas Eve, Tuesday was Christmas, and I had to leave for KC on Thursday, leaving only one day to get my car fixed. But, my dad and grandpa and uncles and cousins all pitched in, as did AutoZone's car computer code reader, and we got it fixed Sunday afternoon for only $55 or so. Very cool.

I did end up leaving Texas on Thursday, intending to sleep in Northwest Arkansas at my dad's work-week apartment and go on to KC on Friday. (The conference started Friday afternoon.) I met my other grandparents at a Braum's in Oklahoma City for lunch. They said a storm was coming through that was supposed to dump 6-8 inches in some places in Oklahoma. It felt like forces were conspiring to keep me from getting to KC (the car, then this), so I skipped out on Arkansas and drove directly to KC.

The conference was incredible, and it deserves its own post. It was over at midnight of the new year, so I headed back to Arkansas on the 1st. I managed to stop by and see the Hotzes as I drove back to Russellville. It is always good to catch up with them. Tobit and Brogan were their usual rambunctious selves, and Cassidy is about to pop with boy #3. She certainly has her hands full!

Let's see...I went back home, my family celebrated my birthday with a delicious meal of spaghetti and garlic bread and honey-bun cake. Yummy. :-)

I drove back to NC on the 3rd, a Thursday. I left kinda late from Mike's place in Little Rock, and I also stopped to lunch with a friend in Memphis, so I was not going to get home until pretty late. Not far from Memphis, digestion started in and I pulled over to a rest stop for a 2 hour nap. Much later, in NC, I pulled in to another rest stop and had another nap. It was so cold! I woke up, hit the road in the wee hours, and got home just after sunrise on my birthday. It was a really great, restful, wonderful vacation, but it's good be home and off the road. :-)

Another big milestone out of the way: I passed the doctoral oral examination yesterday! :-D

The "orals" is a big test you have to pass to get a PhD. Basically, you and your committee agree on a reading list on topics related to the dissertation, and then you get grilled on it. My reading list was, I think, 10 book chapters and 7 papers. Trying to get it done before the end of the semester, I gave myself 2 weeks after my proposal to prepare. That was a pretty intense 2 weeks of reading.

When I first started grad school, I remember a single 12-page paper generally taking a solid 1-2 days of reading. A well-written scientific paper has so much info packed into it. Each sentence carries a payload, especially because of jargon, each term of which has a whole range of semantics that the reader needs to understand before comprehending (e.g. "source-level network measurement", "passive measurement", "performance modeling", etc.).

The orals themselves went well. I got up in front of my 4 local committee members and answered whatever questions they threw my way. The general model was: start out basic, and penetrate to greater and greater depths until my knowledge was exhausted. Or, relate this concept to this one over here, and synthesize. It was the hardest test I've taken to date, but I was well-prepared, and earned an unqualified pass. Booyah.

That makes me officially A.B.D., or "all-but-dissertation". In other words, a Ph.D. Candidate. That means the only requirement I have left is the dissertation itself. That also means that, in my department, I get a little stipend boost each semester. :-) Yay!

Just a "buyer-beware" post. Beware the Apple DVI-D adapter for Macbooks, which converts the Macbook mini-DVI output to a DVI-D output. The trick is the *D* part of "DVI-D". I guess that means "digital", but the upshot is that it won't plug in to most DVI projector hookups. D'oh. I ended up buying a mini-DVI to VGA adapter, which worked.

Incidentally, Keynote '08 is awesome. I am really impressed. And this from a guy who doesn't generally like computer-aided presentations.

My RoadRunner cable modem went from $45 to $47 recently. I called them up to ask why--you know, to make sure they weren't pulling a fast one on me. After a bit of polite complaining, I reached the "retention" department, who told me they could offer me the same service for $35/month for 6 months (to retain me as a customer, apparently). I said, deal. I asked, and they said each customer can receive 2 such deals--but they have to ask.

(D'oh. I'm actually writing this in January, a couple of days after getting another $47 bill. So much for that, apparently. :-/ )

Yay! I passed my dissertation proposal!

I finished the written form a couple of weeks ago. I worked a lot on some really polished Keynote slides (with fancy animations), and the presentation went pretty well. My timing and delivery was a bit thrown off by having interruptions for questions (something I wasn't anticipating), and some of the questions kinda stumped me--but hey, I passed! What a relief!

Now, to focus on the orals...

Vern is amazing. He was the one I had to exclude when scheduling my proposal (we couldn't find a time that worked for everyone), so he read the written proposal. He gave back such a wealth of feedback! He really took the time to wrestle with what I wrote, working at understanding the heart of what I was saying. Not only did he think deeply about what I wrote, he also has a vast repository of research experience and knowledge about the general networking literature, and his feedback was amazing.

What a great guy. I'm so privileged to have him on my committee. My other committee members are great, too, but I thought Vern deserved special mention. :-)

I spent the Thanksgiving holiday with the Remers, my delightful family friends from Arkansas.

I got in to their home in Fairfax, Virginia, Wednesday evening. They have a tradition of watching movies and eating pizza on the night before Thanksgiving. I caught the tail end of "Cars", then "Nicholas Nickleby" (which was rather delightful), then "Batman Begins".

Thursday, we had fried donuts for breakfast. I think they're a bit too rich for me. :-) We raked the neighbor's leaves. Haha...(I'm typing these things as I remember them...) David (the 5th of 6 children) got his riding lawnmower out in the culdesac, and we tossed a frisbee to him as he rode...that was interesting. :-) Later, Scott's Japanese talking-budding Nobu came over, and we all played keep-away with a soccer ball until it was pretty much too dark to see anything. Poor Meg--their ~10-year-old Australian Shepherd, and the daughter of my family's deceased Aussie--doesn't know when to quit. She pretty much ran her old self into the ground.

The meal was incredible. In particular, I just couldn't get enough of the ham. Yum! Later on, Scott (the 3rd-oldest, and the oldest son) and I snuck away to Jill's (the oldest) brother-in-law's place, where 4 of us watched "Live Free or Die Hard". I was blown away by that movie. It is the standard by which all action movies should be judged.

Friday, Wes (the youngest), Scott, and I played disc golf at a nearby course. The course was in a wooded park, and there was a thick covering of oak leaves. Sadly, I lost a disc in the leaves, but, while looking for it, Wes found one--his first--so I'd call that a win. :-) It was a pretty course. Shortly after that game, I went home. I had my dissertation proposal to prepare for the next week, so I couldn't stay with the Remers as long as I would have liked.

An old friend and alumnus, Ben, came to the department two weeks ago on a recruiting trip for Microsoft. I attended not so much out of interest in MS, but out of interest for what Ben's doing. While there, I scored a free lunch, a t-shirt...and a copy of Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007. This is the version of Office 2007 that retails for $680.

I thought about using it, except that (a) I just bought a copy of Apple iWork 2008 (the "2008" means it's better), and (b) I don't use Windows anymore (and Office 2007 is, so far, Windows-only). So, I put it up on Ebay.

The auction is now over, and I just sent an invoice to the winning bidder for $300.26. Is that cool or what! Praise God, for he provides.

Sigh...now to finally get to work revising my proposal. I've been putting this off for a while. In fact, this has been the worst I've procrastinated all semester. I really, really don't want to do it...but I must. Today. Now. *summons grim determination*

(Note: I'm about 2 months behind on my posting. I'm trying to catch up. We'll see how it goes.)

Last weekend, 7 (incl. Fuller, Rachel, Justin, Tiffany, Aisha, Genevieve) of us went to the Blue Ridge mountains in NC. We left late morning on Friday, lunched at a mall in Greensboro (where there was a Sonic! Yes, I planned that out in advance.), had some great conversations on the way, and arrived in Boone by dusk-ish, after doing a bit of hiking in Linville Gorge. We stayed at Rachel's mom's (incredible!) house in Boone, NC. Rachel's mom, Lisa, made chili for all of us, and it was extremely tasty. She lives sort of up in the woods and mountains, and later we started up a campfire out back.

We talked about a variety of things. But, being around a campfire, the conversation naturally turned to scary stories. But, it wasn't just "scary stories". See, all of us believe in demons, and discussing demonic run-ins, in the woods, on a cold, dark night was, frankly, kinda scary. After one story, we kinda spontaneously decided to start praying. So we prayed. And prayed. And, some two hours later, we were reveling in the glory of God, who delights in his children crying out to him.

Sigh...it's hard to convey what that was like. There were so many things that happened that night. So many wonderful, spiritual things. I really believe the whole night was some awesome spiritual warfare. Anyway, I'll stop talking about that now because you probably already think I'm nuts. :-) Of course, if you want the full story, ask.

The next morning, we went to eat in downtown Boone. It was a cold morning, and we sat outside to eat because the restaurant was full. We got to Grandfather Mountain by sometime around 11am, I think, and paid $12 each to get in. (She gave us a deal; it should have been $14.) We hung out on the mile-high bridge for a while, then set off for some serious hiking. We got to the crazy cliff-face ladder system and the girls, minus Genevieve, turned back. We hiked on, and pretty much hiked our butts off. It was wonderful. It was also super windy. Like, dangerously windy. Especially on top of rocky peaks, with neither trees nor earth to stop the wind. I'm guessing that gusts got up to about 50 mph. It's probably a good thing those girls didn't follow us--they would have blown away! I still didn't get to hike the whole trail, though. I guess I'll have to go back again someday.

We left around 6pm and drove home, enjoying more good conversation. What a great group.

I gave an informal talk yesterday titled "Using Perl on the Command Line". I also turned my notes into a little tutorial. If you're interested, read the article here. It's pretty elite command-line stuff, yo. :-)

Feedback welcome.