Happier Things Coming

I got a job for the summer! Yay!

I'll be writing an XML database to help preserve the Arapaho language. There's a website about the Arapaho project right here:
http://www.colorado.edu/csilw/newarapproj2.htm

If you go to the 'Language' tab at the top and click around in 'Archives' you'll find exactly what I'll be manipulating: spoken Arapaho conversations, very short ones, that I'll tag by part of speech, link to the sound file, and put in this platform-independent database that anybody can search and use. It's perfect preparation for Adventure Linguist research, the conservation of endangered languages -- yet another fascinating career trajectory. The cool thing about language documentation is that little-known languages in need of rescue are usually in distant, remote places -- so if I get experience at being useful in saving them, maybe I'll get to go to distant places and do interesting things AND get paid for it. Sounds worth trying for to me...

Felgeroth and the Spartans Fly True

It is the end of a tiring week.

With the help of Melissa Dawe, I managed to write a program that makes little birds fly after each other, but not into the sun. The golden leader Felgeroth follows my direction through the mouse icon. The little bird pictures change if the bird is flying left or right, following its leader.
Melissa found the pictures on the web, converted them to bitmaps, standardized the color of the sky and the background of each bird bitmap, made a golden bird by some photoshopish alchemy, made reverse images so the birds could flip around, and gave me a lot of advice and encouragment to do it. It feels like such a triumph.
Kelson named my leader Felgeroth on Saturday morning when I was teaching him how to write in C++. He saw my assignment and asked if I would teach him to program, so I accepted the challenge. It took some swift gymnastics to translate computer programming logic metaphorically into something a 14 year old boy could relate to, process and remember, but it was a great excersize for me. He understood and asked attentive questions, and after a little he sat there and typed in the commands, copying and pasting and paying attention to detail. It was really quite fun. I can't wait to show him the program in action.This is a gorgeous gnarled old tree Brian and I saw on our hike with the puppies last weekend.

Maddy is bringing out a whole new, vicious side of Tucker.

This is a crocus planted in our front yard. Spring is springing -- it even rained yesterday.

Sleepy Sunday with Mom and Kelson

This Saturday I had the luxury of spending the night with Mom and Kelson here in Boulder. It was very relaxing, finally having a chance to play The Farming Game with Kelson and to play double Solitaire with Mom. I am currently showing Mom how to make a Blog, mostly as a means of procrasticanting about the computer programming homework I'm supposed to be doing. It's important in my opinion to keep in mind why we bother working so hard; peace, respect, love -- what makes it all worthwhile. If we don't make time to remember what it's for, our motivation loses fuel, and life becomes nothing but exhausting. Yay for Saturday...

Happy Pi

We just finished the 7th annual Pi Party -- today is actually March 16th, not March 14th, but the party had to wait for a Friday. I've got this weird thing with Pi; the number fascinates me. I first started thinking about it when I read Carl Sagan's Contact, the ending of which differs from the movie version. I think I've sort of misremembered this over time, but the ending of the book involves a message written deep in the digits of Pi, when represented in binary in a matrix of a certain dimension -- something about a perfect circle of ones in a field of zeros. This hidden message in Pi is the alien's real proof that he's telling the truth, because a message in the number Pi would imply an engineer of physics itself. Sagan was an athiest as I remember, but this idea that another species could somehow design and alter the primary rules like that -- that's hard to imagine. Pi is mystical to me because it is an unchanging ratio, continuous, static and yet forever undefined value. I love the fact that it shows up in so many places. Mostly it's a deep admiration for the constancy of it: in a thousand years someone will throw a stone in a pond and the wave it creates will have a circumference equal to Pi times its diameter. That and it's a cool bar trick.

The picture is of Chet, Brian and myself in a chair lift last fall, probably at the Breckenridge ski resort, I think taken last October. We've been up in the mountains tons lately too so I thought I'd post this. I love these two.

Bavarian Postcard to Self

Self-

Remember the lake halfway up the Zugspitze where the mystic fog swallowed up the islands? As you read these words, whatever immediate concerns dictate your mood, remember that they are tiny and brief compared to the scene on the mountainside. Think too on your next journey, but know that the thick of distraction is good solid adventure too. The As on the screen are not worth weeks of wanting to cry, so step it down if you get there, and replaying conflict or hostility just prolong the injury so don't do that either. You have what you have searched the world for right there right now -- peace, respect, love. Value it and enjoy it -- you made your life this way, and it will keep beign satisfying if you keep making it so!!

-From Bavaria over my Christmas vacation