Cub Scout Fun Day

Getting involved with the Boy Scouts/Cub Scouts organization is a little overwhelming at first. There's a structure about it that you have to catch on to, for example first graders are at the first level which is Tiger Cubs, and all year you work on projects and skills to get up to the next level, which is Wolves for second graders. You earn patches, awards, etc. as you work on different things and when you have enough, you move up. There are individual things, things you do with one parent, and whole family activities. This is actually a lot of incentive for John, because the patches, beads, awards, etc. that you earn are displayed on your Cub Scout shirt. All the boys seem to really like this and they are proud of the different things they have learned. Our Tiger Den leaders are a husband and wife whose son is also in the group. They seem like really nice people and they have gone out of their way to make sure John is included in everything (since the other boys are St. Matt's students and he's the only UPS student).

So, I am figuring out that over the course of the year, you can go to different Cub Scout events and activities which are all geared toward the boys learning these different skills and things. The great part about it is, they are all family events and siblings can participate too. It ends up being a really fun time where parents cheer on their kids, work on things together, and in the end the boys earn their patches and stuff.

Let me tell you that the Cub Scouts understands boys. This Sunday we went to one of these scout family events and the activities were: sling shots, archery, bb guns, 50 yard dash, time yourself on sit ups and push ups, and softball distance throwing. John was in six year old I-think-I'm-a-superhero heaven. There was no competition, all the boys were focused on their own abilities which was also great.

The most hilarious and unanticipated part of the event: Lucy shooting a bb gun.

Ready For School

Papa gifted John and Lucy with matching red sweaters embroidered with their names. They both love these sweaters and have been begging me to wear them to school. Since it has been in the 80's here since school started, I've had to say no. But this morning it was only in the 50's, and a high of only 63 today. So, they both got to wear their sweaters. They decided to both wear jeans so they would be matching. I fear it will not be much longer that John and Lucy want to match each other at school.

The Kids Love to Play...

...chess! Kevin taught them how to play and both are really enjoying it. They understand the way each piece moves and play it a little more like checkers, with the goal of getting all the other person's pieces off the board, rather than capturing the king. They have been playing every day after dinner while Ikey Boo gets his bath and nursing. We all played a lot over the weekend.

I have to admit that in the 11 years I have known Kevin, I have never beaten him at chess. I came close once. I think. (He's super good at it.)

Choo Choo!

This is a perfect example of the kind of games Lucy loves to play. She loves to set things up and create environments, she likes to make a restaurant or a school or things like that. On this particular afternoon she made a train. She arranged it in her room with as many seats for her "babies" as she could find. Isaac was lucky enough to be the train conductor, and as you can see he's thrilled about that.

Raingutter Regatta

John is a Cub Scout now and his first scouting event was the Raingutter Regatta last Sunday. He and I worked on a little wooden boat all week. He chose colors and we painted it red and silver together. He added some American flag stickers and glued on the other parts. It was a great opportunity for us to work on a project together and for John to feel confident about his ideas and his abilities to paint and build the boat. It was a great chance for me, as a parent, to practice that restraint and patience that parents need when their kids are learning new skills and doing things their way. Of course I wanted to "fix" the little spots where the paint wasn't quite right, or reapply the crooked stickers, etc. But I didn't and was so glad that in the end John's boat turned out just the way he wanted it to be.

Here's a photo of John racing his boat, with his favorite buddy Allen cheering him on in the background!

Power of Boo

So I'm slowly but surely working my way to my masters degree. This semester's class is all about parallel processing. I'm doing an image processing project based on JPEG2000. Believe me it's way cooler than it sounds. If you watch a movie on a "digital projector" at the theater, you are watching JPEG2000.

So to wrap my head around the problem I wrote a program that reduces images to smaller and smaller sizes using the Discrete Wavelet Transform, also much cooler than it sounds.

I needed a good test image so I got one of Isaac sleeping. Each image is a square, and twice the width of the previous one. Here are the results from the bottom up.

The cutest possible one pixel image:




The cutest possible 16 element matrix:







This is the most interesting one to me. This image contains only 0.1% of the pixels of the final image, but I think most people would say "That is a face". Our human ability to identify faces is amazing.










The optimally cute 1 Megapixel image.

How Did Your Guy Do?

So glad the first presidential debate went on as planned last night. Recovered from my bad day eating Chinese food laying on our bed while watching.
How do you think your candidate did? Post in the comments. I thought both were strong. I did not like how McCain would not look at Obama. I thought it was standoffish. I also did not like how neither were willing to talk about what programs they might have to set aside if the bailout goes through. It seems both candidates are freaked out about the current economic state of affairs, and I guess rightly so. I thought both were compelling when discussing foreign policy. I did not think there was a clear winner and I was glad to see it (mostly) focused on issues and not too much politicking.

It struck me last night, when I thought about the magnitude of the issues being discussed...nuclear war with Iran, billions of dollars being spent to save the economy from collapsing...that you have to be mostly insane to want the job of president. I'd be like, you know what? Just forget it. I can't handle this. I want a Starbucks and a bubble bath.