USS Iowa
Saturday, December 17th, 2011
While at VIH rehearsal one Tuesday night, during break, a quartet was practicing the national anthem. I thought it was rather unusual and wondered if they had been invited to sing at a basketball or hockey game or something - they said they had been invited to sing at an inauguration of the USS Iowa the next day on December 7 (the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor).I had known the Iowa was in the mothball fleet in Suisun Bay for many years (after seeing the New Jersey the year before, I wondered was was ever going to happen to the Iowa). Amazingly, even with the glacial speed of government bureaucracy, they managed to finally decide to pull the Iowa out of the mothball fleet and make it a museum ship in LA.
During last week's total lunar eclipse (which I woke up at 5 am to see - the last one in 3 years), the tide was high enough to tow the battleship over the sandbars to get it to Richmond where it would be stationed for a few months for cleanup before being towed to LA.
It was opened to the public the next weekend, and I felt privileged to be able to walk on the deck and stand alongside the massive 16-inch guns after so many years that the great ship had been wasting away in hibernation. I have also signed up to be a volunteer to be able to come back in the next couple months to help with some of the restoration work - a wonderful way to bring back a piece of history.
Total Lunar Eclipse
Saturday, December 10th, 2011
This morning we were blessed to witness a total lunar eclipse. I heard on the news the previous evening that the eclipse was happening and it was going to be right before sunrise - I was already planning on waking early for a long hike to Pt Reyes, so I figured it wouldn't be too hard to get up another 1/2 hr earlier to witness the spectacle in the sky.They said this would be our last chance in 3 years to see a total lunar eclipse (without traveling somewhere around the world), so I had 2 alarms set as to not miss it. The eclipse was already in progress as I drove the 3 minutes to Don Edwards park. The roads were quiet as I drove, but the small parking lot was already full with other early risers. The clouds cleared in time for us to enjoy the show - yay!
The darkened moon was reflected on the still waters of the bay as a few ducks waddled along. It's interesting how people for centuries believed that a dragon or spirit in the heavens was eating the moon, and how people in ancient civilizations studied diligently studied the skies and could predict such events for thousands of years. I'm looking forward to the annular eclipse on May 20.
The boneyard
Friday, November 25th, 2011
Over Thanksgiving we visited the "boneyard" near Tucson AZ - it is a huge field in the desert with 4000 old military aircraft that have either been mothballed, decommissioned, or being retrofitted with better parts. Since the nature of warfare has changed throughout the decades, many of these great war machines have fallen obsolete. We came to a section of the boneyard where dozens of old P-3's were parked. My dad flew P-3's for many years in the Navy as I was growing up, hunting for Russian submarines during the Cold war. Seeing a P-3 always made me proud of my dad. I wondered if he had flown any of those P-3's we drove by. Since the P-3 Orion is being replaced by the P-8 Poseidon, many of these P-3's may never fly again. (the P-8 is basically a 737-800 commercial airliner - not very interesting, but they get the job done).
Seeing the old aircraft and watching them be disassembled for parts gave me a strong sense of our own mortality. Nothing lasts forever - seeing how even what we considered great will come to an end. It's not too often that I think about death and what would come after death, so seeing death in such a visual way on a large scale brought a sense of urgency to my decision to follow Christ. I know God brings about every experience for a reason, and I want to be able to point all those things toward worship of Him.
Silicon boule
Monday, November 14th, 2011
A couple months back, I took a stroll through the Intel museum in Santa Clara - one of their big exhibits was a 12-inch pure silicon boule grown from a single crystal. Perfection even down to the atomic level.I was struck by how much silicon has changed our lives in the last decade, with computers, the internet, cell phones, online stores, and solar technology revolutionizing our existence. It's brought out the best in us as well as the worst in humanity. It's enabled internet scams, rampant pornography and breaches of personal privacy, but it's also brought people together, created jobs and opened a vast wealth of knowledge for all to enjoy. It's spurred revolutions in the Middle East and enabled us to share the gospel and love of Christ.
And to prove the point about how silicon has changed our lives, almost as a tribute to the whole idea, I found a wonderful piece of silicon someone was selling on eBay!
Gilroy hot springs clean-up
Saturday, September 10th, 2011
A couple months ago while on a trip to the Eastern Sierra, I ran across an old abandoned hot springs resort called Fales Hot Springs. The main pool was cracked and in fairly major disrepair. The bathhouses were crumbling and much of the rest of the facility showed signs of abandonment. Although it was not going to be opened to the public, it was encouraging to see a family who had recently bought the property and were planning on restoring it for their use.I had known for a while about a local hot springs resort at Gilroy Hot Springs - near one of the entrances to Henry Coe state park. They announced on their Facebook page they were having volunteer camp-out weekends, where people could come, do restoration work, explore the facility, and best of all, use the hot springs.
For me, it was more than just getting to use the springs - it was an opportunity to bring back the memories of the past and allow a future generation to enjoy the same joys as people long ago. The simple pleasures of the soothing hot mineral water in a natural setting. I've enjoyed opportunities to do some of these restoration projects recently - I'm reminded of the verse about Jesus that "he came to seek and save what was lost".
Seeing the decay of the place was disheartening. But the hardest part about the effects of the abandonment was not the natural decay of roofs rotting and the ground settling, but the man-made decay of graffiti and vandalism. Large rocks had been thrown through the beautiful windows of the bathhouse as if people didn't have anything better to do. Without God and a shared sense of morality, I felt that society can decay very rapidly. I'm glad the even just for a weekend, we could work to reverse some of this decay at the hot springs and restore some of the happy times of years ago.
My first HTML5 application
Thursday, April 7th, 2011
Today I learned some of the wonders of HTML5 - maybe the new revolutionary standard of web design. I wonder if this is going to render Flash obsolete? I've been playing with a bunch of "Buckyballs" magnets recently, and through the inspiration of one of my coworkers, on one of our "hack-day" project days as work, I made this fun Octahedron using a free 3-D openGL library all coded in JavaScript in HTML5. It may be a bit resource-intensive, but it is worth it!
Cool answer to an interview question
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010One of the brain-teasers given to me during a recent job application was to enumerate all the legal combinations of n pairs of parenthesis. For example if n=3 you have ((())), (())(), ()(()), (()()), ()()().
It is possible to come up with a general solution in PHP:
function catalan($n) {
if ($n == 0) return array("");
$res = array();
for ($i = 0; $i < $n; $i ++)
foreach (catalan($i) as $pre)
foreach (catalan($n-$i-1) as $post)
$res[] = $pre . "(" . $post . ")";
return $res;
}
$n = ($argv[1] != null) ? $argv[1] : 5; // default
foreach(catalan($n) as $combo)
echo "combination $combo\n";