I said that I could not plan a busier two weeks. Little did I know that there was more to come . . .
I now have a job interview in the middle of AECT.
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Category: life
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Life Moves Along
I just got a response from the University of Missouri regarding my PhD application – they want to schedule a telephone interview. This is the final step in the application process and indicates that they think I am qualified based on my application so far. I am thrilled and excited.
This completes my next two weeks. Laura has a month worth of activities scheduled for tomorrow – Super Saturday, Family History Fair and two baptisms (I think I’m still missing one thing in there), I will be traveling to Virginia for work during the first part of next week and when I get back I have a presentation in class, The interview with Missouri will be on Monday the 18th and then I will be going to the AECT convention in Chicago on the 19th.
Like I said – life moves along. I could not plan a busier two weeks.
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New Apostles
I think it is exciting and appropriate that we have a new apostle who is not from the United States. It reflects the growing maturity of the worldwide church.
I wholeheartedly support Elder Uchtdorf and Elder Bednar.
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Me and People
I was having a discussion with Laura last night about me and how I react to people. It is more pronounced in groups, but the fact is that I keep myself distant from people. Laura told me that it comes across as arrogant. For my part I was complaining that people never take me seriously. They always seem to think that I am naive or inexperienced and that really grates on me because I think that I have something to offer (most of the time) in most situations.
I got thinking about that whole thing and the thought struck me that the two things might be related. I realized that, for whatever reason, I expect that people will not place any value on what I say. I expect them to disregard what I have to say and so I don’t speak up loudly – why waste my breath. Because I have preempted people the whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Having figured that out, now I need to figure out how to correct it.
Perhaps I am losing my optimistic outlook that people are basically good, generally smart and usually engage their minds in life, but I get a little disappointed the more I am on the web and notice that there are so many basic errors. I find it ironic that the mainstream media talk about bloggers being fundamentally unreliable and unprofessional in their reporting and then the New York times offers this which was a decent article but it included this “‘Were not terrorists, were not subversives, were just decent dads'” as a quote from Batman’s accomplice. I am fairly certain that what he said was “We are not terrorists” rather than “{We} were not terrorists, but today we decided to be terrorists.” I know I’m nit-picking but they have editors and reviewer who are supposed to do that, yet it got published the wrong way. Why would I expect them to get their facts just right when they cannot even catch the most basic spelling and grammer before publication – and this is the New York Times, not some small town paper running short on staff.
9/14 P.S. – Not surprisingly the article has been corrected now, but it still got to publication before it made it to the spelling and grammar department.
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Genealogy Site
I have got the genealogy site that I talked about in Online Genealogy. It is located at www.miller-genealogy.us although right now it is only a message which talks about the site before redirecting any visitors back to this site.
I will report progress on the site development here as it progresses . . . slowly.
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Online Genealogy
My mom just agreed to pay for a domain name registration for a family genealogy site so that my brothers and I can combine our genealogy work in a central location. That is exciting for me because I get to try to implement my ideas for a system of online genealogy collaboration.
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Parents and Children
I went to a conference for three days this week and left Laura at home with the kids. According to the report when I got back, the kids were pretty good the first day but by the third day it was unofficial warfare. I guess there is no need to wonder if it is important to have Dad around. . .
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GMAIL
I have a Gmail invitation available if anyone is interested.
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The Web is Slower Than Life
Society has grown impatient generally because of how fast computers can get things done. I remember when waiting 30 seconds for a program to load on the computer was considered acceptably fast. Now I see people complaining when they do not notice any response from the computer within 10 seconds of them trying to do something on it. I thought that computers had made things generally faster.
I have fully immersed myself into this accelerated culture and I decided that I wanted to make my website more up-to-date by maintaining it as a blog so that I could put new thoughts up as often as they happened. That required that I restructure the site so when I got a break I did so. It took less than a week for me to completely restructure the site. That is when I started looking back at what had happened since I made the decision to change the site. Savannah got run over by a car in the library parking lot (thankfully she didn’t get hurt), Alyssa started walking, Laura got hit by a second car in the same library parking lot (no damage to the cars again) and I flew down to Albuquerque to see my new niece. All of that took place in about a week.
I guess the lesson that I learned as I looked back on all of that is that we like the speed of computers because life is fast. No matter how fast computers get life is faster. The reason that we get impatient as we start becoming accustomed to the instantaneous lifestyle is that we forget that the speed of the computer gives us only the illusion of going at the pace of life and not actually the reality of going as fast as life. We’re still behind even at the speed of life.
If the speed of light is “c” (from e=m*c^2) then the speed of life, “l”, must be close to “c^2” thus e=m*l . . .