We got our explosion on film. It was actually a little bit of a challenge. We never tested the full setup, which was probably a bad decision. Our first two explosions looked great, but they lacked the deep percussive thud that we really wanted for the audio. So we scrambled around for an hour to dig up some boxes and things to go back to our big boom setup. In the end, we got what we wanted. Unfortunately, I have not seen the final production. But here's a frame from the footage from the day:
Campus-wise, I spent most of Thursday packing up my office. We're supposed to move into the new building sometime during the summer, but we don't know exactly when. So packing up now saves stress of waking up one morning and finding out that we're supposed to move that afternoon. This is especially true since I'm teaching a couple classes.
One class I'm teaching is just a real analysis course. We're teaching this for a few students who are off-sequence and really just need to take this before we would normally offer it next. That class will be interesting because I'm using a structure I've never used before. When I taught the class in the Fall (2014), I had my lectures recorded. It was really recorded for the students in the class then, but since we've got the video, I'm going to give it to the students in this class. This is a flipped classroom model, in which all of the passive learning portion is done outside of the class so that our times meeting together will be about working on problems. The students are all approximately at the same level, so there's not going to be one person who does all the work and the rest just ride the coattails. I'm hoping to leverage this situation into a good experience for all of them, where they actually get a true collaborative experience for problem-solving.
The other class I'm teaching is the robotics course. It's amazing to me how this went from not even being on my radar to reality in about 5 months. We bought a few thousand dollars' worth of equipment, and starting tomorrow I'm going to be teaching students about robotics. I checked enrollment today, and it's only 3 students. I had about 6-7 students express a real interest in the course, so I'm not sure what exactly is going on with that. But even we've only got 3 students, I don't care. We're going forward with the class and we're going to play around with robots and make people jealous.
In the back of my mind, I've got an ambition to run a summer robotics program next summer for middle school students. There's a high school that runs one for about $200 for the week. I think that since we're a college, we can probably run it for about $300-$350 for the week (4 hours/day for 5 days). If this goes well, it will provide us with another income stream to pursue other types of programs. I'm actually interested in buying the kit I'm considering for that for myself. It's only $300. However, the downside is that I don't know how much time I have to play with it. It would be something I'd play with at home on the weekends, kind of like several years ago when I made a little car with rack-and-pinion steering out of the Lego Mindstorm kit.
I had an interesting experience with the air conditioner unit. Daniel mentioned one evening that the house was warm during the day. The A/C was on, but it wasn't cooling down. A couple summers ago, the A/C went out completely and we spent several days staying over at a friend's house. At that time, I was on a home warranty program, and they were able to fix it. And my hope was to squeeze out a good 4-5 years out of it before it needed more repairs, so I cancelled the warranty. Also, the money in and the usage out of it wasn't at the right level for that to be financially reasonable anymore. I have a large enough emergency fund that I'd be able to swing the price of anything that needs to be fixed, which is kind of the turning point for many insurance-like products.
Unfortunately, the hope of a worry-free A/C unit for many years did was unfulfilled. The guy who came out and inspected it felt that it would probably need to be replaced. The unit itself is over 20 years old, as it's the original unit that was installed when the house was built. That's not an unreasonable lifespan for an A/C unit. I was somewhat resigned to this, but was also going to do due diligence and get a second opinion. In the process, one of the part time math instructors said that he knew a guy who worked on A/C units on the side. I must admit that I hesitated a bit, but went with it anyway. The guy came out (with his dad -- who was just visiting from Hawaii), and he was able to fix it for me for $250. That's way better than the $6000 or so that was estimated for replacement. He also gave it a quick check and said that it's actually in very good shape. He gave me a couple maintenance tips, told me a couple other things to watch out for, and said that he's be willing to come out and work on it if it goes out again. So that's a big win for me.
Church stuff is getting close to the big move. We've only got two Sundays left in the main room before construction begins. That means that a lot of stuff needs to be packed up and moved around in order to give the construction guys a clean space to work with. I'm going to be helping out with packing up some of the stage stuff next week.
We've also got a bit of turnover that's about to happen. One of our long time church office persons is changing jobs. It's not based on any particular workplace environment issue, but simply a matter of money. Church office staff simply don't earn a lot of money at a church of our size. We're also losing our youth director. So that's going to create space for a very interesting change at both the administrative level and the leadership level. It seems like a great chance to redefine the systems and structures to help the church transition from the smallish church that it is to the largish church it wants to be. So we'll see what happens there.
The Oaxaca team is starting to come together. It's only a couple months away, and we're trying to get everyone together for a little bit of training and relationship building. I hope that this happens soon, because the time is going to slip away quickly. This evening, I played around with some sky lanterns that I bought off the internet. The directions on this thing made absolutely no sense.
Wishing light operating instructions:Yes, it ended with "Wishingoh" followed by a bunch of dashes. Fortunately, it's not hard to work with if you understand the basic principle of what it's supposed to do and how it's supposed to work. There's a paper/wax block that you light to generate the heat, and then you just have to hold the lantern in a way that maximizes the distance between the flame and the tissue paper lantern. After a few minutes, the air on the inside gets warm enough that it starts to rise. At this point in my experiment, I doused the flame (because letting a floating ball of fire go in a residential neighborhood is probably a bad idea). But I don't see any reason that this shouldn't work in Oaxaca.
1: After the distribution of fuel to packaging equipment Kong Cross wire in the side of the field again deduction presses The fuel-pressure lock firmly.
2: A person Xu Yuanlight take up a Top; Another person fuel ignited the four angle.
3: Wait for that the heat enough light, lanterns person lest loose A top hand,changes grips under the light to encircle, Has when the lifting force may let go releases for flying.
4: XuYuan light rose slowly the sky, do not forget Wishingoh----
About a month ago, someone at church started a conversation with me on a topic that I've been meaning to mention for a while. The basic story is that this guy stopped me in the church lobby before small group to engage with me on the young earth creationism question. we talked for about 15 minutes or so. But then he followed up by continuing the conversation on Facebook for about a week or so. I don't mind the conversation itself, except that he exhibited all of the worst types of problems that discussing this tends to have. I gave him links to statements from Westminster Seminary, referred him to books on the subject, explained the earlier theological positions of Anselm and Augustine (who both believed that creation happened in a single, instantaneous moment), but he was not willing to engage in any of that information. The most mind-boggling of them all was his insistence that I provide him a position from a Christian Theologian. Apparently, Westminster Seminary wasn't good enough, so I provided him a link to an article by Charles Hummel. (Charles Hummel is the former director of InterVaristy Christian Fellowship, he earned his Masters in Theology from Wheaton, and he is the author of several Christian books and Bible studies.) His response was to tell me that he was still waiting for something from a Christian theologian.
This type of conversation frustrates me not so much because I either agree or disagree with the conclusion (for the record, I think that interpreting Genesis 1 as a literal 6 days is very likely an error), but rather the simple unwillingness to actually engage the mind to actually discuss it. He kept calling a "verbal joust" which really sounds to me like he wanted to argue for arguments' sake. In the middle of the conversation, he said he would give me the last word, but then continued the conversation. It kind of showed all of the things that show why Christians are not doing well in the public square these days. The intellectual attitude of "God said it -- I believe it -- That settles it" basically makes Christians look willfully ignorant. I don't see the end in sight for this particular element, but I can hope that it's there somewhere.
That's going to be it for tonight. I can't think of anything else that's going on that's worth talking about.
