I stumbled on this video / slideshow made by a missionary who served in the same mission as I did:
I served there from 1993-1995. The slideshow brought back many great memories.
Another former missionary recently set up a group at Yahoo for those who served in this mission: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GermanyDresdenLDSMission/. It’s been fun to reconnect and reminisce.
Dave Ramsey recently posted a rant / essay on the politics of envy:
I have seen several elitist people on the talking-head channels make the statement lately that people making over $250,000 per year have a “moral imperative” to pay more in taxes to take care of the country’s problems. This is not only infuriating—it is economically, spiritually, and morally crazy!
Where in the world do these twits get off saying that Henry should be punished for his diligence? If you are John, where do you get off trying to take Henry’s hard-earned money away from him in the name of your misguided “fairness”? If you want to sit on the lake, drink beer, scratch your butt, and bass fish, that is perfectly fine with me. I am not against any of those activities and have engaged in some of them myself at one time or another. But you HAVE NO RIGHT to talk about “moral imperatives” about what other people have earned due to their diligence. That money is not yours! You want some money? Go earn some! Get up, leave the cave, kill something, and drag it home.
We are in a dangerous place in our country today. A segment of our population has decided that it is the government’s job to provide all of their protection, provision, and prosperity. This segment has figured out that government doesn’t have the money to give them everything they want, so somebody else has to pay for it. That is how the “politics of envy” was born. “Tax the rich” has become the mantra of the left, and this political season it has been falsely dubbed a “moral imperative.”
I highly recommend the the full article.
We got a simple little video camera back at Christmas, but I haven’t bothered to upload / post anything before now… I spent a few minutes to see what’s involved, so here goes — a couple today from Colin visiting for dinner:
A couple comments on the yard: we just had the old patio torn out and a new stamped-concrete patio poured. Next comes the deck where the old patio was, then hopefully a sprinkler system so we can finally grow grass consistently. It’s going to be a busy summer 
Last month I had the privilege of baptizing my second son, Trent. To me, it is one of the greatest joys I have as a father, and a great confirmation to me of the truthfulness of the restored Gospel — that I can administer to my own family through the power and authority of the priesthood.
That thought was also expressed by Elder Enrique R. Falabella of the Seventy:
The Church of Jesus Christ is a church of priests, “a royal priesthood, an holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9).
The restored Church gives to each home a priesthood holder with the power of God to bless. How many times I have been able to hear the soft, sweet voice of a little child at home say, “Daddy, could you give me a blessing?” and put my hands upon his or her head in moments of pain and difficulty and pronounce blessings of comfort and healing and see the power of the priesthood exercise its influence and the next day hear that little voice say, “Thanks, Daddy, I slept just fine last night.” We don’t need to go out looking for someone having that power—it is among us! What a blessing to be able to teach this principle to our children! This is the only church upon the earth which offers such a blessing to families.
A great opinion piece from P.J. O’Rourke: Fairness, Idealism, and Other Atrocities. A few of my favorite bits below.
On fairness:
Well, I am here to advocate for unfairness. I’ve got a 10-year-old at home. She’s always saying, “That’s not fair.” When she says this, I say, “Honey, you’re cute. That’s not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That’s not fair. You were born in America. That’s not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don’t start getting fair for you.” What we need is more income, even if it means a bigger income disparity gap.
On idealism:
Don’t chain yourself to a redwood tree. Instead, be a corporate lawyer and make $500,000 a year. No matter how much you cheat the IRS, you’ll still end up paying $100,000 in property, sales and excise taxes. That’s $100,000 to schools, sewers, roads, firefighters and police. You’ll be doing good for society. Does chaining yourself to a redwood tree do society $100,000 worth of good? Idealists are also bullies. The idealist says, “I care more about the redwood trees than you do. I care so much I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. It broke up my marriage. And because I care more than you do, I’m a better person. And because I’m the better person, I have the right to boss you around.”
What it really comes down to is this: go out and do something, make something, create value. That’s where real power and influence come from. If you want the people with power and influence to be aligned with the values you support, then make yourself one of those people.
It’s been a long time since I posted a general update. We’ve been busy. Most recently we built cars for the Pinewood Derby race. Trent is almost official in scouts, and Alec decided to make one, too, so we got to build three. It was rather involved trying to get them all done at once. At least they were all black…
For Easter we had a lot of fun decorating and hiding/finding eggs, as usual…
I made the mistake at one point of tossing one of Mark’s eggs into his basket. He immediately decided that throwing the eggs looked like much more fun than picking them up.
This past week we started the spring soccer season, with Caleb, Trent and Alec all playing again. Kim and I are team-coaching Alec’s team, which should be fun. We didn’t really account for Mark in planning how to run practices, however, so that will be an interesting challenge as always.
More photos from the last few months here:
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I work in Intel’s Itanium microprocessor design group. Our most recently completed project was the Tukwila processor. Intel’s Itanium line has not had a lot of positive press in it’s 10+ year history, due to delays, underwhelming performance and slow market adoption. Tukwila looks much better so far.
These are enterprise-grade microprocessors, not like your standard Pentium or Core Duo chip. This baby packs 2.05 billion transistors, the little switches that control all the logic, store memory and such. For comparison:
Intel 4004 (1971): 2300
Intel 8088 (1979): 29,000
Pentium (1993): 3,100,00
Pentium 4 (2000): 42,000,000
Core 2 Quad (2006): 582,000,000
Tukwila (2008): 2,050,000,000
I’m a geek, I think that’s cool.
My job, specifically, involves writing software used to design and test the billions of tiny wires that connect all those switches together. At least, that’s one part of my contribution to Tukwila.
Each one of these projects lasts 4-5 years all together, though I’m only involved in the first half of that (design before it gets manufactured). After the first manufacturing samples — actual silicon parts we can plug in and test — my focus shifts to the next project, Poulson in this case. Poulson is my 5th major project in the 11 years I’ve been with the group.
I actually rather enjoy the work I do. I work with great people on challenging projects, doing a combination of long-term strategic development and daily problem solving. The challenges change frequently as we try to push the envelope.
Only problem is, I don’t see myself doing the same thing for another 20-30 years. So now I’m trying to figure out what’s next… Stay tuned for that!
Tk::GraphViz v1.00 is now available on CPAN. Alternately, download it here.
This perl module uses the GraphViz graph visualization engine to display directed and undirected graphs within a Tk::Canvas. It makes it easy to bind actions to nodes and edges of the graph for interactive applications.
I thought this was extremely well done:
