Glad I finally found this Using OpenDNS with Windows Home Server.

Pleasure Reading: Finished Destined for an Early Grave (Night Huntress, Book 4) by Jeaniene Frost. It was a fun read. Say 3.0 out of 5. It was definitely better than At Grave's End (Night Huntress, Book 3), but it is still a rather distant 3rd to the first two books in the series. (My favorite is One Foot in the Grave (Night Huntress, Book 2)). Some of the plot was strained, but there is enough new character development and interesting loose ends to make it worth getting book 5, whenever that comes out. The author was successful in that regard. Cat had a rough book, and she was a lot less funny in this book, almost needy and psychotically bitchy. Okay, so she was that in the other books, but the humor in the first two books, especially the self deprecating kind, took a lot of the edge off. This one, unlike Grave's End, at least provided some plausible reason for some of it, but I do miss the funny interactions.  I like that the author is willing to have Cat and Bones progress, and move from their current jobs / locations / friends. I hope it keeps the series from becoming too static. She also seems to be willing to kill off interesting almost core characters.

Home School for Me

PE: Sun Mowed Lawn, 1 hr of walking

Reading: Outlined Matthew 7;14-12:22

Other Stuff

I finished listening to Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America. I give it 2 of 5 stars. Frankly, I didn’t really like it. I struggled through it, but is normally doesn’t take me most of a month to listen to a book. I just never really cared about the story or the characters. The narrator may have been part of the problem, but not the whole problem. There was an anti-Christian, pro-Darwin bias, and none of the Christian Pastors remotely resemble my experience. They were cartoonish stereotypes. Deacon Hollingshead and Major Lampert for example. These in my face biases certainly prevented a strong empathy with the main characters.  I also found the action, while perhaps realistic, not at all interesting.

I read Richelle Mead’s Thorn Queen (Dark Swan, Book 2). I liked it, but this is a hard book for me.  Id’ give it 3.5 of 5 stars. Eugenie is an interesting character, and she faced some very hard challenges and choices. For me, reading fantasy often involves imagining that I am in that world, facing those experiences. This one had experiences and choices I just don’t like thinking about. It seemed to me to be a much darker book that the first, with many fewer touches of humor and lightness than Storm Born (Dark Swan, Book 1). Reflecting after I read them, I don’t feel the male characters are all that well developed. In some ways, I don’t really see why Eugenie loves the men she loves, so the choices she makes are somewhat inexplicable.

This last point is actually a big problem I have with a lot of the Urban Fantasy. Richelle Mead, Rachel Caine, Stephanie Meyer, Karen Chance and Carrie Vaughn all have strong funny women who seem to just love pretty boys. They give no real reason why the girl should feel that way. Contrast this with Anne Bishop or Lois McMaster Bujold, where the bond between the man and women is well explained, and which then explains the joys and pain in the couples.

For the ones I don’t think do well, I wonder if it is a limitation of the first person point of view story telling. The narrator has an imperfect view of the world. This also leads to a one sided view of the relationship, that can make the man (because all of the leads in the books are women) weak or dominating/abusive. Perhaps this may explain some more of my problems with Julian Comstock, as it was first person P.O.V. I do like a lot of first person P.O.V., though, such as Dashiell Hammett mysteries, Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs Novels, Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan Novels, Patricia Brigg’s Mercy Thompson Novels and Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse Novels.

Hmm, you know, none of these have stupid characters. Maybe that’s why the others don’t work for me. For example in Thorn Queen, I don’t understand why Kiyo made the choice he did. It just didn’t make any sense, based on who or what he was as described in the book. He didn’t kill someone at a certain point, and he had killed others throughout the first two books. It was stupid.

Home School for Me

I think this is how I want to tag these updates.

On Wednesday, progressed through Matthew 4:1 - 7:13. On Thursday morning, I did day 2 of my weight training. I am very sore today.

I should try to find a way to record my workouts. I just don't like the idea of tables and such, it is too hard to edit.

NOTE TO SELF: see if there is a way to add Custom CSS for new class, so that I can format my workout results.

Other Stuff

It has been a long week.

This has been a difficult week to start the education: we had Vacation Bible School, so the rest of the family was up and out hours earlier than normal. The elder boys motor started running early each day and just would not stop. I think the fine folks running VBS need to rethink the 'throwing candy to youngsters' right before sending them home. The changed hours, and the the hepped up on sugar boys really took a lot out of my wife this week, so the quiet part of the evening have started later.

Rather than study, I took the easy way out and reread Patricia Briggs Alpha & Omega (orginally release in On the Prowl collection) and Cry Wolf. Last night, just checking my amazon recomendations, I found that the second book in Richelle Mead's Dark Swan series, Thorn Queen, was FREE for my Kindle. It isn't even out in stores yet. I didn't quite finish rereading Storm Born, and I may do that before I get too much farther into Thorn Queen.

I saw on Carrie Vaughn's blog that some of the first Kitty Norville novels will be out in audio format soon, and read by one of my favorite narrators, Marguerite Gavin, who does most of Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan series. This is outstanding news! I will save up some of my audible credits to get these.

Home school for me

Yesterday I did:

• PE (weight training, and I am getting more sore by the minute)
• I setup a wiki at wikia.
• Started transcribing my Matthew 1 -3 outline to the wiki.

Today,

• I finished transcribing the Matthew 1 -3 outline to the wiki
• I will read more in Matthew 
• I will read more in The Well Educated Mind
• I will go for a 30 min walk

Already, I am not doing so great sticking to my schedule. I am encouraged that I am easily putting the time in, not grinding away time in front of the computer. I may have to drop back to just the Bible, TWEM and PE though. I am beat. Some of that is the exercise, and some is extended hours I am putting in at work.

I started the Wiki so that I can capture my reading notes, and have the ability to connect and expand them over time. My first page is the outline I created for Matthew 1 - 3. My online common place book (what is a common place book?) will live at CommonPlaceBook.wikia.com for now.

I suppose it is slightly less than optimal to have it so public, but my work blocks my home domain, so I don't have access to my wiki at home, and wiki uses MediaWiki so I can export it from wiki later and import it into my personal wiki. If I could get anyone else to read with me, the shared wiki would actually be a pretty neat idea, as we could have a collaborative common place book.

Leave comment if you are interested!

Awkward Family Photos

And for the record, there is no possible way I would cooperate with this letter.

Home School for Me

PE

Jogged on treadmill 30 mins @ 5.9 MPH, topped out at 7.6 for 2 mins, walked a few minutes @ 3.9 MPH.

Reading

Read Chapters 1 & 2 of  The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

Bible

Read Matthew Chapters 1 – 3

Reflections

I was disappointed in the PE, but overall, I am happy with day 1. I have a nice outline of Matthew 1 –3 which I may post later (if I can figure out a simple way to transcribe an outline into a blog post).

I really need to not get depressed about my physical conditioning. I have neglected it for too long, and I long for what I used to do. I need to relax, and do the grammar phase, and not jump to far to fast.

The reading was a pleasure, but I was tempted to less meaty reading (rereading The Sharing Knife: Horizon (The Sharing Knife, Book 4)). I will still reread this at some point, but not now.

According to Mrs. Susan Wise Bauer, I should not spread myself thing, and limit myself to one topic at a time, and of course her book should be topic #1. I see the sense in that, except some of my topics are not reading, or are directed to current topics. But still, the point she makes, don't bite off more than you can chew, you need to work up to large involved topics and getting into the habit of consistent improvement in small time increments is more useful than sprinting full out for a week, then tearing a hamstring, are valid.

I have 4 topics that I really need to work on:

1. Bible
2. Husband
3. Reading
4. Physical Fitness

I really don't see a point to postponing any of these, and I can sort of make a case that only the Reading will occur as part of  classical (self-)education. I am going to approach all of these as Grammar Stage activities. That is, for reading, the 'WHAT DID I READ?'. I am not going to deviate too much from that. Not going to work too hard on 'WHY DID THAT HAPPEN?' or 'WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO BE LEARNING/WHAT DID IT MEAN?' For PE, that should translate to just following some basic, preplanned training routines to get stronger & more flexible.

So here is what I am doing to do for the next 6 weeks:

PE - Weight Training, M-W-F, Walking Sat, Sun, Jogging at least one day a week
Reading- The Well Educated Mind, prerequisites like vocabulary, phonics and grammar, MTuWTh
Bible - Reading the whole New Testament MTuThF
Husband - Reading Finding the Mind of a Woman F,Sat,Sun

The plan is still light on details, but I am happy with the high level outline.

I need to focus, to have some objectives in my reading / learning. I know I do best with the structure of a class, but without necessarily needing a teacher. I had a great thought:  set up some classes I can take on my own! Setting aside the curriculum and stuff, the first question that I should answer is, What subjects do I want to study?

Subjects I want to learn more about (with books I already have listed in the topic). This does duplicate much of my earlier post, but grouped and organized better:

• Spiritual Ideals
  • The Bible
  • Quieting a Noisy Soul Kit: Overcoming Guilt, Anxiety, Anger, and Despair
  • Changed Into His Image: God's Plan for Transforming Your Life, Taking Time To Change: An Interactive Study Guide For Changed Into His Image
• How to be a better father
  • The Five Love Languages of Children
  • Raising Godly children
  • Homeschooling/Teaching my sons (The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home (Third Edition)
  • Coaching/Playing sports with my sons
• How to be a better husband
  • Discovering The Mind Of A Woman: The Key To Becoming A Strong And Irresistible Husband Is...
• Classic Literature
  • Don Quixote
  • The Faerie Queene: Book One (Bk. 1)
  • The Pilgrim's Progress (Oxford World's Classics)
  • The Canterbury Tales: Nine Tales and the General Prologue (Norton Critical Editions)
• Reading / Learning Skills
  • Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware (Pragmatic Programmers)
  • Vocabulary
  • Phonics
  • How to Read a Book (A Touchstone book)
  • The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had
• Programming
  • Test Driven Design/Development
  • Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (Robert C. Martin Series)
  • Productive Practices (The Productive Programmer (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly), The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master)
  • Improving existing code (Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series), Refactoring to Patterns (Addison-Wesley Signature Series), Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Robert C. Martin Series))
  • Windows development / Windows Home Server Plugins
  • Design Patterns (Head First Design Patterns)
• Web / Graphic Design
  • Head First Web Design
  • Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual
• Physical Education
• Drawing / Art
• Science Fiction / Urban Fantasy
• Discrete Mathematics
• Algorithms
• Cooking

Now I just need to divide these up into classes. It seems pretty obvious which I am most interested in. I still need to take some core classes to help me overall.

Then I need to decide on my electives, the length of the session, and the goals / topics for the actual session. This is turning into a pretty ambitious plan.

I think I need to consider some goals / rules on what makes up a balanced set of classes.

Top 10 Endearing Habits of a Geeky Spouse

Let us compare the spouse and self (caps/darker color implies a more emphatic rating):

Which endearing habits of a geeky spouse apply

Habit	Me	Spouse
Always having access to caffeine	YES	YES*
Being romantic in unusual ways	yes	NO
Finding the best deals in grocery stores	yes	YES
Watching, quoting and generally loving the Muppets	NO	NO
Not being glued to the TV when a sports event is on	no	NO
Having a lot of hand-me-down gadgets that are still perfectly good	YES	yes
Owning lots of really good, though not mainstream, books	YES	yes**
Being really good at finding things that go missing	no	no
Providing technical support to friends and family	YES	NO
Cooking	yes	yes

* She 'drinks' a lot of coffee in the sense that she makes it and walks around with it until it gets cold, but it is 'Available'
** Mostly history books.

Upgraded my original blog, In Theory there is no Practice. What a PITA that was. I am glad I am fairly proficient at this computer crap, because I am not sure I can even explain what I needed to do to update it. But there you go, eh? I even managed to have it import my livejournal posts into it (ITTINP is a wordpress blog hosted on my very own computer...)

Bear with me, please. I am going to be thinking out loud. I have a lot on my mind, and am feeling overwhelmed.
I am reading more than 5 books concurrently, because I am not able to focus. Reading may be too strong a verb.

I am rereading Storm Born, Dreams Made Flesh (Black Jewels, Book 5), and The Shadow Queen (Black Jewels, Book 7). I am also reading Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware (Pragmatic Programmers), Test Driven Development: By Example (Addison-Wesley Signature Series), The Productive Programmer (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)), Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (Robert C. Martin Series), and just got Head First Web Design. I need to study Discovering The Mind Of A Woman: The Key To Becoming A Strong And Irresistible Husband Is.… and The Five Love Languages of Children. Some side projects that I should be delving into, but haven’t, are The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home (3rd Ed.) and The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had. And of course, the Bible.

It should be obvious that I cannot really be getting much out of any of these. I am rereading the Black Jewels books because I like them, they are upbeat and they seem to be filling a need in my heart for some good thoughts. I am rereading Storm Born because the second book in the series is due out soon, and I wanted to refresh my memory of the first book. The programming books, I am ‘reading’ to help me with work. Honestly, I am having a great deal of trouble really getting into any of them extensively. I have been sampling sections, not systematically reading them. The two relationship books are to help me be a better husband and father. I really want to improve my classical background, and have a 4 year old we are preparing to home school.

I have no real plan for any of this. That is changing. The purpose of this post is to begin the planning / organizing process. The first step is to define the problem.

I want to increase understanding of

• The Bible
• classical works
• concepts and skills for computer programming (my profession)
• childhood education
• relationships (wife and child)

Will you join with me as I document my personal travels from unfocused, prodigious wishes to organized, self-directed personal education achievements?

Cool, thanks!

Listening to: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America I am about 25% through it, into Act 2 of 5. Regarding specifically the audio version of the book, I don't really like the narrator, Scott Brick. He narrated Spin also. In both books, I find him very too dispassionate and almost dull. I am not sure this is the intent of the author. I like the stories much better than his narration. I am more sensitive to this because of a Neil Gaiman blog post on reading books aloud. OT, I may have already said this, but I love author read books, and Neil Gaiman's Stardust and Neverwhere are in the top three. (Note to Self: list the best read books I have heard, especially books where the narration made the audio version BETTER than the written version).

Not long ago, I noticed a post from Instapundit about an interesting article that describes how a lot of new novels are moving away from expecting the singularity/transcendence of human kind. My initial thoughts are this is not new, per se. Off the top of my head, Planet of the Apes, Logan's Run and the like have existed to provide a counter point to Foundation, Dune, and others.

Some interesting thoughts while writing this post:

• How utopian and dystopian SF view the singularity
• How post-Apocalytic SF views the singularity
• What kinds of apocalypse are referred to in post-Apocalyptic SF (plague, nuclear, peak oil, alien invasion)

One of the things I don’t really like about editing blog posts is ALWAYS having to compose the post in the web browser editor (TinyMCE?)

Yes, I know there are other editors (Hello, McFly! I’m writing a post using one to test it out).

Seems okay so far. The preview feature is Nice! It splices the body in over a previous entry. I hope the html renders properly.

Playing with the embedded images is quite nice, at least compared to MCE.

 

Menu has some interesting tools, the spelling / grammar checker seems competent, though I rarely use 6-bit words anymore.

 

I will try editor for this for a while (at least a week or two).

Listening:
David Drake's RCN Series 3.0-3.5 of 5 stars for each book. Overall series is probably 3.5. Enjoyable once through, but I will definitely get the next one.
Jim Butcher's Codex Alera Series 4.0 of for stars for each book as a stand alone, but overall series is 4.5. Anxiously awaiting First Lord's Fury in Nov/Dec.
Robert J. Sawyer's WWW:Wake 3.5 of 5 stars. I liked it, but I doubt I would listen to it again. I will get the next in the trilogy.
Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy 3.5 of 5 stars.  I liked it a lot, but I am a little biased because I got some spoilers from the next two books, and I find it hard to remain enthusiastic given the direction of the series. At the same time, apparently there will be 6 books for Rose, and perhaps there will be time for redemption. I'll at least check to see what happens in book 4 before bailing on the series.

In Progress: Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander. I read this book once a few years ago, but I am hoping the audio version helps me get into the details more.

Reading:
Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy. 4.0 of 5 for books 1 and 2, going to start book 3 today. I think the series is probably a 4.0 at this point, but the conclusion could raise it up. I do like the pacing and the characters.

Some Tech Books
- Clean Code (Kindle) 4.5 of 5.0. Several of the essays really made me think, but a few were just 'Meh', but that is more because of what I am interested in / working on than a real criticism of the quality. It may be unfair to downgrade it, but for me when 20% of the book just doesn't matter, it is hard to give it a 5.
- Test Driven Development No real opinion yet.
- Refactoring (rereading parts) 5.0 of 5.0.  I love this book. Each time I read through it (ore even just chapters), I pick up some interesting ideas.


This is just off the top of my head.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Just finished listening to Kim Harrison's White Witch, Black Curse. I really liked it, say 4.5 of 5 stars. I am not sure why, but I really get into her books. I care about Rachel and the people around (Jenks, Ivy, Edden, Marshal, Kisten, etc). Among the first person stories, I think only Patricia Briggs does that for me, and even then not quite as well (but I really do like the Mercy Thompson books, so this is not a dis). Other authors, who use god P.O.V. or mixed (switching P.O.V. among characters) do engender that kind of involvement, especially Lois Bujold and Anne Bishop.

Also, her books jsut have really well done action and pacing. Just want to find out what happens next. Now I have to wait to find out about the chrsyalis, Pierce, the Pandora's Charm, the shunning, and Ivy's soul. And that's just off the top of my head.

Kindle: Finished: Audio:
Next  in play list: 

Finished a bunch of books, but haven't written about them.

Listened: Heart of Stone, House of Cards, Hands of Flames all by C. E. Murphy. I really like all of them. 4 of 5 stars for each one. I really liked the characters, including the minor one. I hope the trilogy is not the end of the stories with this group of characters / this world.

Read: Alpha and Omega by Patricia Briggs, which is a novella in the On the Prowl Anthology. Alpha and Omega is the novella intro to Cry Wolf, which I liked. I reread Cry Wolf afterwards; I really like it more because it made so much more sense.

Haven't finished any new Kindle books.