wanito's world

Walk in the park

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:47:00 -0500

This morning we went to ZUMBA!, where i didn't lead a single song but it was fun anyway, and then we took a walk. Through the woods that are right by our house! Then we tried to clean the house, and then ate food. Now i'm making naan again.

Oh man, the kids were a handful today, except for that hour or two while we were walking. Houston was impulsive and moody, Katrina was whiney and too tired to tidy her room, and Zane kept hurting people by playing. But they're incredibly sweet and i love them so much i'd jump naked into a swimming pool filled with double edged razor blades for them.

Katrina is adorable, and Houston is really cool.

A picture

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:38:00 -0500

I will respond to the overwhelming outcry sweeping the universe for a picture on my weblog. Hmm, let me find my camera... okay i found it. Now lemme find the picture of (yet again) Hello Kitty that i drew... Nope. I could only find drawings by the kids. But Hello Kitty was carrying a giant assault rifle with a chainsaw bayonet. Oh wow. Such things exist... not to actually use, barring the apocalyptic rise of the undead. Even then, i would rather have a chainsaw and a rifle, not a chainsaw bolted to a rifle.

So instead of a picture drawn by me, please accept a picture drawn by Katrina, photoshopped by me. I have no idea what it represents. But it communicates something, right?

Today Houston had to turn in his House Project. He had to build a model shelter built in the rustic style Pioneers would have used. Houston chose a log cabin. He was supposed to build it, but i accidentally built it myself. Mostly (i tell myself) because the sharp stick cutters are dangerous, and Houston's level of patience with stacking logs while the glue is drying is not as vast as mine. But all i did was build the house. Houston designed it, he chose how big it would be, and he made some Sculpey accessories for it, like a person, and axe, and a pig. And he had to write the report. So he'll get a good score, and the score will be his. On Monday we go to his school for parent teacher conferences, so we'll get to see all the projects.

Katrina got a haircut!

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:25:00 -0500

I have been getting up every single morning early since last Friday. Okay, on Monday i got to sleep in until seven thirty, which was nice. But i'm just T I R E D. I'm sure i've said it before, but being permanently sleep deprived is part of being a parent of young kids.

Sigh. So when i got home today, i saw my little Katrina. Her hair has been growing out since she got her first haircut back in 2005. So it has been long. Fortunately, long hair is really cute on little girls. But i love bobs on little girls too. Today, Katrina has a bob. It's ADORABLE. And she hardly even cares. I made kind of a big deal about it, and she smiled and let me hold her, because she loves her daddy, but really was not impressed. But i love it.

It must be weird to be an adorable little girl. Everyone responds to you with warmth and attention. Katrina's living in a different world from the rest of us.

Stupid music!

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:41:00 -0500

I lost my mp3 player last Friday. Usually when i lose things, they kind of show up later, but this time i knew exactly when i'd had it last, and my path from there to where i knew i didn't have it was short and not complex, so i'm sure it's not in one of the dozens of random places i deposit things when my brain is otherwise occupied. By things like wondering how daddy long legs muscles manage to move those super long legs around. And can they see?

In fact i had a dream last night that i'd found my sturdy little toughened Sansa, which has served me so well. And which was cheap. I miss it. I think it fell out of my pocket between the YMCA and my home, or i left it in the YMCA building, and someone lifted it. Oh well.

So, i put my ZUMBA! tracks on my GPS, and made a playlist, and even tested out the first three songs. It worked well! The forth song, however, crashed. Crashed! So i had to lead the class with large gaps between numbers, and let my ZUMBA! addict homie Nicole lead a couple of the songs. I'm glad my class is patient with me. One of my regulars said "Hey, this is how Beto started out!" which is true -- Beto Perez got the idea for ZUMBA! when he was going to lead an aerobics class, and didn't have the proper music, so he just used whatever he had in his car -- a typically Columbian mix of salsa, merengue, reggaeton, cumbia, etc. It was a hit. My class, not so much.

So anyway, enough complaining. Next week my new (cheap!) mp3 player will hopefully be here, and i'll be back in business. I just hope it'll run Rockbox.

Area Morning Show Features ZUMBA!, Me

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:39:00 -0500

There's me on teevee! It's a local program, with a couple of the news desk people promoted to co-hosting a chatty upbeat morning show.

Now, i don't get much screen time, because the cameraman was a cameraman, and so he focused on the Hottie McHotster girls dancing behind me. Except i did have a line: "The salsa kick!" I am so proud. Karen pointed out that Tara (my fave instructor) didn't even have any camera time leading!

Yesterday we took family pictures, and they turned out really well. Thanks, Beth! Our family is cute cute. Unfortunately, i can't make Windows Networking work properly, so Karen's computer is not visible to my computer on the network. Some problem with my custom hot rodded WinXP install disks. All that to say that i can't post pictures, not without going over to her computer and moving the pictures from there. Not a bad idea -- it's been a bit of time since i did a proper backup.

Yum, Indian food and naan!

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 07:15:00 -0500

We don't get enough Indian food. And, we don't spend enough time eating at friends' houses. Tonight remedied both lacks! Thanks Andrew & Linda!

Last night i couldn't compose my thoughts, mainly because they were centered on going to bed and avoiding buying a new mp3 player because mine isn't in the first place i looked (and the exact one i'd love was for sale at Woot.com for $35). So i didn't buy anything, and went to bed. But now i'm at work where there's nothing like "going to bed" to keep me busy. All my morning responsibilities are complete besides doing bed checks to make sure everybody's where they're supposed to be.

At the dinner party ("party" for the kids, since they were running around being crazy, "dinner" for us, since we sat around conversing wittily) we wondered at how naan can be so yummy even though it's just flour, salt and yeast cooked in a hot pan. Linda cooked butter chicken, which tasted awesome, and much less lemon flavor than i'd expected, since for some reason i thought we were eating "lemon chicken". Andrew talked politics with conviction i've usually only seen from the other side of the political spectrum. The six children ran about the house generating chaos in their wake, which i guess somebody else cleaned up.

Okay, i'm going to go make coffee now. Thanks, guys!

My job...

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:03:00 -0500

I don't remember if i ever wrote about this: my workplace has changed!

Crossroads is the unit i've been working at for a few years, and it has always been one of the more successful programs in the agency. We've had a waiting list while other programs have been seeing their numbers drop. We left the Pine Rest campus about a year ago, because leasing their land and building was costing us like fifty grand a month. We moved into a building custom built just for us, and with the high census of our home, we necessarily had several rooms which were designed for three kids.

Now, as soon as i found out about THIS, i was disappointed. If we had a full house -- sixteen kids -- then nine, NINE, of them would need to be in triple rooms. Over half of our group trustworthy enough to be roommates? Really? We're going to have, so objected i, kids mistreating each other, sexually verbally, physically or otherwise, in their rooms. It will be obnoxious, retorted leadership, but we'll just have to deal with it. Now, one of the things about residential treatment which has always bothered me is the lack of emphasis on a SAFE milieu. If kids don't feel safe, they're not going to be ready to accept our help. So i felt that we were setting up our whole milieu to be disrupted by what's going on in kids' rooms -- their only space to be alone and really safe.

So anyway, for whatever reason we decided to mitose our unit into two units. One of them will have up to twelve kids and one will have up to eight. The eight bed unit will be more firmly scheduled and activity based, with the larger unit being more focused on cognitive therapy. I'm on the smaller unit, which suits me GREAT! My goal here is to provide these kids with a stable, safe environment, where they can finally take a deep breath and look at what their lives have become and realize that there can be a better way. For many of my kids here, this is the first time in their lives they've had that kind of stability and safety. They resist it, causing chaos and problems when they can, to recreate something familiar from their past. But it's pretty easy to remove that kid until he's feeling more cooperative.

Well... i am at work right now, and kids are getting up. So i guess i'll go out there and provide safety and stability.

I've been shot!

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:09:00 -0500

Shot for a TV program. If you watch TV, you might be aware that there are sort of morning shows on, where they talk about stuff and do little stories about local goings on. Well, one of the people who's a regular at my fave ZUMBA! class works at Wood TV, (and she's also in a local ad for an air conditioning company or something). So anyway, she works with Terri DeBoer, who's one of the meteorologists and the co-host of a morning magazine show called eightWest.

All this is a fog shrouded mystery to me. I am aware that there's this non-PBS television which is broadcast all the time, but it has no bearing on my life. Besides... no... no. It has no bearing on my life. Okay fine, on Monday nights, i try very hard to take over the kid responsibilities by eight so Karen can watch House.

Right. So Joy (the commercial actress) gushes about her ZUMBA! class, so Terri DeBoer must have smelled a story (and probably a freshly showered coworker) and decided to come shoot a story about us. I was invited while i was talking to "the cool kids" a couple weeks ago.

So Tara (my favorite ZUMBA! instructor) was going to teach Terri some moves, do an interview, shoot some footage, etc. The song we were doing is one i've been doing for a long time in my class, so Tara was like "Hey Juanito, you want to lead this song while I'm giving an interview?" and i was like "Duh, another step to my inevitable worldwide fame?" and did it. So we put the music on really quietly, and i led the song! And a song i'd never heard before! And then the same song again!

It was weird to hear mostly just the tap-tap-tap-tap of eight or so people salsa dancing on a hard wood floor.

I did post a video to the Face Book.

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:05:00 -0500

Whee! I'm still refining that dance. And it's a fun one!

Also, yesterday Karen said that she feels better! Woo the heck hoo!!!! I am really happy for her and for our poor household, which has been patiently tolerating my earnest attempts to take care of everything, and not doing a terribly good job... I think the house had reached a kind of balance of cleanliness and tidiness in various areas, with the front room, dining room, carpet room, and kitchen entering a kind of cycle of order. I'd need to cook, so the kitchen would get some attention. The laundry in the carpet room would threaten to swallow Graham, so it would get folded and "put away" (i don't know how Karen knows where folded clothes go. It's a mystery to me. My clothes are stacked, mostly randomly, on some shelves in the basement near the washing machine, which makes a great deal of sense to me).

I used a new technique of cleaning using mostly a broom. See, you start at one end of the house and start sweeping EVERYTHING into a pile. Discarded socks, facial tissues, books, coat hangers, crayons... the detritus of domesticity. Then the pile can be sorted, and much of it can be thrown away! And then your house is tolerably (to me) clean. It's like masking the task of cleaning house (which i'm not good at) as sweeping (which i am good at). I like sweeping. And mopping.

Our neighborhood

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:53:00 -0500

Yesterday (i don't remember why i didn't post... oh yeah, working on a computer) i took my kids on a walk "around the block". We didn't even make it around the block once. We stopped by some new neighbors' house, and hung out for about half an hour. They're cool! They listen to downtempo electronic music! So we'll be hanging out there from time to time.

And wow, i feel like i've been so busy. Poor Karen remains itchy and coughy and exhausted, so i'm trying to do as much of the stuff around the house as i can. Karen's being so gracious and thankful, and i hope she feels better soon!

Also, cats can be really cute.

WaanTube

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 20:12:00 -0500

Houston's circle

Dreadlock guide

Sun, 25 Jul 2004 00:45:00 -0500

I just told a couple people from camp how to do dreads, so here's a quick link to the article i posted a while back about locks. Nothing new, just a link. That's it.

Urban Literature

Wed, 19 May 2004 01:09:00 -0500

My critique of some works of Folk Art as seen in a nearby park.

Tymmdogg

Thu, 13 May 2004 13:25:00 -0500

The post from May 13th, third anniversary of Tim Wetzel's death. A chance to rejoice in the memories of his life, and look forward to seeing him again!

It's may thirteenth. Katrina turns three months old today, and it's the third anniversary of the passing of one of the best friends i've ever had, TIM WETZEL! Katrina's age is a reason to rejoice, and the opportunity i had to be part of Tim's life is also cause for rejoicing. We look forward with eager anticipation to when we'll see him again in heaven, so whevever i say "used to" or "was" i mean does and is, but not, you know, HERE, right now.

We met Tim at wedgwood. He worked at the boys unit right across the hall from where i work now, and did Young Life club with me. Tim and i met for real at Young Life club, where he and his twin brother Aaron (with whom i'd already become aquainted) were volunteer leaders. My first impression of him (them both, really) was probably the most common one: "TAAALLL!!! Baggy clothes. Hmm, bump on his chest...? Cool guys!" My very first foray into the realm of extremely ridiculously baggy jeans was when Tim let me wear some of his for the first YL club i was part of, where i was Guy (or "Man"), Dude and Dude's friend. They both told me i was a crackhead. Later that night, as Karen and i were leaving, i mentioned my computer, and Aaron was like "How fast?" and i was like, "I've got a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450MHz and a TNT2 video card" and he goes "Over-WHAT??? to HOW FAST???" and Aaron's and my friendship has been cemented ever since. Tim didn't like computers yet, so he kind of made fun of us that new years party (the 1999-2000 one) when we were all playing multiplayer games.dove and nails Karen knew Tim from working on the same campus, and she immediately liked him a very much amount, so when he came over to burn copies of his band Task At Hand's demo CD (music available here) she was of course fine with that. Eventually, Tim saw the folly of his "not liking computers" thing, and got an AMD K6-2 450MHz system with a Rage Pro Turbo AGP card backed up by a Voodoo2 PCI 3D-only card.
So then we started having little mini-LAN parties, where Karen and i would take our computers over to his apartment and connect to each other and play mostly Midtown Madness, but sometimes Unreal Tournament. He was always the best person to have at a LAN party, so friendly, patient, funny, and so on! I miss him a lot.

Right, so some of the most dear memories i have of Tim (Tymmdogg): he invented the term CYBERJOCK, which means "a person who is very good with computers, but is not a jerk about it, helping those less knowledgable with patience and courtesy, like a nice jock who is willing to help the less athletic but with computers, not sports." That sticker on the back of his van was the first cyberjock sticker ever, and he liked it a lot. We made it with silver retroreflective tape and black sign stickers. His tattoos were a permanent statement of his strong faith in God: the hebrew words for grace and emmanuel, a cross, a dove and nails, and a big old Jesus Fish or Icthus, which Dave Wildey did with a "jailhouse gun" that he made, and finally a trinity knot. Tim would use his body ink as a way to evangelize, particularly to those who seem magnetically attracted to tattoos and magnetically repulsed from church.

Another cherished memory was from a LAN party. Tim's cherished little brother, Richard, had a complete junk Acer computer with specs so pathetic, that typing them would seem obscene. We went upstairs to where Richard was already set up, and Tim went over and started disassembling his computer. I think he even started unscrewing the CD-ROM drive before Richard turned it off. Richard said "Uh, what are you doing?" and Tim told him, "Oh, can you power down your machine?" so Richard obliged. After removing the only parts worth anything, (CD-ROM, hard drive, memory, Voodoo2 video), Tim picked up the machine and carried it downstairs where - in front of Richard and all of us - Tim lobbed the computer into the air, watching it crash to the parking lot. Richard really liked having his Very Own Computer 'cause he was, like, twelve, so he repeated "Uh, what are you doing?" with a concerned grin on his face. I'm not sure when he deduced that there was something better in store, maybe when Tim handed him the baseball bat. Richard smashed and smashed, watching with glee as CMOS chips, chunks of circuit board and jagged wrinkled shards of metal flew through the air. Eventually a twisted chassis and box of microchips were all that was left, which went into the dumpster, and walking back upstairs rewarded Richard with a much faster system than he'd walked down with. I don't remember the details - it might have been a Celeron 566 that would do 850MHz. I put the parts together, and Tim, me, Rick Senior and Dave and maybe others chipped in to pay for the new hookup. Richard is still using the case today, although it looks somewhat different, and now contains a water cooling system. The look on Richard's face when he saw the new machine was absolutely amazing. I think i almost cried. Seriously.

That was one of Tim's favorite pictures of himself, because as he put it "I actually look cool!" Hmm... yeah, he always looked cool to those who knew him. He loved people. Karen told him once that she wished he'd quit smoking, because she wanted him to live to be really old. Tim told her that he wasn't going to die of smoking related disease, he was going to die doing something he loved. I guess God told him that much, because that's what happened.
He loved music as well, going everywhere with his guitar, and being part of a band for most of his adult life. Shade of Grace, Cephas (perhaps the most successful of his bands) and Task at Hand are the ones I know of. He recorded his first all-by-himself song, Music to Frag By (which should be Music by Which to Frag, but that was before my obsession with prepositions) with nothing but his super cool electric guitar and computer. He just kind of FIGURED IT OUT, which impressed me no end. He went on to make two VERY well done industrial mixes based on movies, Transformers, and Aliens. I've never met anyone who could figure stuff out like he could... i mean, i'm pretty good, but i never met myself. Heavy music really spoke to Tim. In his van, he'd crank really aggressive, fast tracks and just go nuts, pounding the wheel and saying "so much energy!" He really liked punk, particularly covers of 80's songs. John Denver was a favorite... Bill Maloney and the Vigilantes of Love were also a favorite... but more favorite. Tim introduced us all to Brian Regan, the funniest comic alive. I remember one Tuedsay night, Tim played some of Brian Regan's stuff, and Travis was seriously almost falling off his chair laughing so hard. I think he did fall off his chair one time.

I told some people at work today that it was the third anniversary of Tim's death, and they were very sympathetic. But i rejoice and praise God that i got to be part of Tim's life here on earth. Sure, i want him here still, and i would love to be able to have him know my kids and share in my life. But what we've got - all of us - is pretty amazing, and when we share it with others, we're taking part in what we shared with Tim - love, fellowship, Godliness... i dunno, maybe i'm not making much sense, but i think about Tim, and i'm glad, not sorrowful. Tim was an earnest follower of Jesus, a faithful friend, always honest, never hurtful, like, First Corinthians 13, the love chapter describes well the way Tim lived his life. I can only seek God's help to live my life the same way!

Juanito the Genious's Test to See if Your a Geenius too.

Tue, 04 May 2004 16:16:00 -0500

Go see!

IDE cable modification

Sun, 14 Mar 2004 00:55:00 -0500

Little article written a while ago. Humorous, Useful, Emotionally Available.

You almost certainly don't exist.

Tue, 09 Mar 2004 14:49:00 -0500

More accurately, you probably don't exist. Or: the chances of you existing as you are are infentesimlly small.

�What are you talking about, you weirdo?� I hear you say, but I intend to demonstrate mathematically that You Almost Certainly Don't Exist.
Before i even start, let me give MAD PROPS to Eric who shares at least half the credit for this. I could never have figured this out.
Ever since I heard of the Many Worlds model that solves some problems that face quantum physicists, I've been a fan of science fiction books and shows that explore the concept. There's a little promotion of a book by a physicist named Deutsch (in which you can find an error to which I enjoy drawing attention) that has a very brief explanation. In shows like Quantum Leap, Sliders, and Jet Li's The One, people leap to parallel universes and find copies of themselves and people they know from their own universe. This has always seemed ludicrous to me. Yeah, I know, the idea of jumping from universe to universe is also ludicrous, and even the concept of Many Worlds defies common sense, but suspending all those disbeliefs still left me with the conviction that the idea of parallel universes happening to produce identical (or even less likely - similar) people ludicrous. Another explanation of the theory may make the idea less ludicrous; that the Many Worlds are very close physically, and interact constantly, and the "yous" are duplicated across them all, or at least the ones closest by. Sounds a bit like branes.
Eric, my brother-in-law who shares credit for this article, is really smart and took a bunch of math classes in college. I SHOULD have taken math in school, but I tested out, and took tons of drawing classes instead, because that's pretty much all I did anyway to relieve boredom (and to show off). So when Eric was visiting here last weekend, I entreated him to help me figure the probability of any specific person existing. We've worked on statistical problems before (like, with Pass the Pigs but it looks like somebody already figured out those probabilities and posted a java version of the game) so i figured he'd be up to it, so we sat down with a couple sheets of paper and a calculator and a pen.
At first, I wanted to figure it out for the entire world population back till the time of Christ, but the numbers were going to be really, really large, and we didn't have access to any kind of population data, meaning no encyclopedias or computers were within reach of the kitchen table.

So, let's start:
Our problem:
What is the probability of a particular conception event within the population of the United States since the foundation of the country.

We made our assumptions - not intended to be accurate:

We'll look at the population of the USA starting at year 2000 � est. 270,000,000. Ignore immigration and emigration.
The population decreases as we look farther back, down to 1,000,000 people back in 1775. We made some simple guesses, as documented here.
There's one generation per 25 years, for a simple ten generations between (and including) 1775 and 2000.
One egg is released per month during a woman's childbearing years, which lasts 35 years, for a total of 420 available eggs.
Three million sperm are manufactured per day during a man's childbearing years, which lasts 60 years, for a total of 65,700,000,000 available sperm. 6.75x10⁸. Scientific notation will become useful now.
Everybody has a chance to producing offspring.

First, we had to find the probability of two people within the population coming together, which we calculated by dividing the population in half (no same-gender relationships, even though the USA is the gayest country) and squaring the result. This variable we'll call U for union.
Then, we had to find the probability of a specific egg-sperm combination. We multiplied the number of eggs by the number of sperm (fig2.), for a result of 2.7594x10¹³. This variable (although it doesn't vary) we'll call C for conception (that's as opposed to c, which is the speed of light.)
Next, we had to figure the value of U for each generation (the probability of two people coming together).
Then, we figured the total value of U for all ten generations, which we did by multiplying all the single-generation probabilities. We got 4.243x10¹⁴².
Finally, the probability of any one, specific person being conceived and born within the population of the United States since the countries founding is C times U, or 4.243x10¹⁴² x 2.7594x10¹³. This final number is 7.0024x10¹⁵⁵.
This is an astoundingly large number. There are about 10⁷⁸ many atoms in the universe, which meant that if you took each atom in the universe, turned each of them into a universe, you'd get 10¹⁵⁶ TOTAL ATOMS!!! That's pretty "close" to the odds against you existing. You know... as you are.

You have a one in 80 million chance of winning the 20 state Powerball Lottery. That's 8.0x10⁷. You are almost one and a half googol times more likely to win with one ticket than you were of being born, and you've already done that, so GO PLAY!!! (please don't).

Buying a Cheap PC

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 01:03:00 -0500

somewhat out of date, but... It's old.