It is time for our annual Paulson family reunion in Ocean Park, Washington. Once again we decide to pack up the travel trailer and head out of town the evening before. Instead of trying to head out early the next morning, we have found it much better to leave the night before — no matter how late. There are always last minute things you remember that delay leaving town.

I left work early and got home at 5pm. After packing all my electronics and hooking up the trailer to the Expedition, I thought I was about ready to leave. Then my dear wife asked if I had packed my clothes. Finishing that, I remembered a project that needed to be done but I had postponed, but now could not wait for our return. That project took me at least a 1/2 hour to finish. I had hoped we would get out a little earlier but we were actually on the road at 8pm and did not have to turn around for anything (like we did last week).

We drove down the interstate and pulled into Hood River for gas. I expected to pay more for gas here since it was on the interstate and was the only open gas station in town, but it was actually $3.85 per gallon or about 30 cents cheaper than it had been at home just hours earlier. As we got going again on the road the thunderstorm we had been awed by in the distance moved directly over our path and we had a surround-sound laser light show, with lightning bolts visible overhead in the moon roof as well as all around. Then the hail hit and sheets of rain.

We finally drove out of the rain and started talking about where to spend the night since it was almost midnight. No reason to pay for a campground. We usually will look for a Wal-Mart or somesuch but I noticed the exit sign for Multnomah Falls. This parking area is interesting as it is actually in the highway median, with interstate traffic zipping by on both sides. We parked in the RV area of the parking lot and I walked around the parking area quickly to see if there were any signs prohibitting overnight parking. Seeing none, we got ready for bed, locked the doors, and fell asleep to the sound of trucks wizzing by at 60mph.

We forgot about the train. At about 1 a.m. there was this loud blast from a train horn right outside our window. Seems that since the train crosses the old highway at that point, it must sound its horn — and sound it does. Luckily I was either too tired or it did not go by again till about 6 in the morning. At 8 Brendan, Kyle, and I took the dog for a walk up the trail. We would not have enough time to go to the top of the falls but I would at least get my blood pumping and have a sweat going before 9 am. Back at the trailer we had some breakfast and were headed toward the beach! Yay!

I had heard of 826 Valencia before, a pirate supply store (images) that acts as a ‘front’ for a one-on-one after school homework tutoring center for local kids. In the video below, Dave Eggers gives a history of the project, from its dismal start to its current success as well as how they came to sell pirate supplies. The tutoring center is in the back rooms of a store that is stocked with everything a pirate might need to sail the seven seas. Standard black eye patches plus pastel ones for evening attire, peg legs, replacement glass eyes, pirate maps, and even parrot food

The tutoring program has been so successful that there are now other ‘826 centers’ across the country, each with its own ‘front’. Other 826 projects include:

• 826NYC in Brooklyn features a superhero-themed supply store (images)
• 826 Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan is home to a robot supply and repair store (images)
• 826 Seattle hosts a space travel supply company (images)
• 826CHI is the location of The Boring Store, which sells spy supplies (images)
• 826LA has opened The Ecco Park Time Travel Mart (images)
• 826 Boston is home of the Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute and specializes in cryptozoology (images)

I will let him tell you more….

Since I linked to Dave Egger’s Pirate Store and Tutoring Center Ted Talk in the previous post, I figure this would be a good time to mention the TedTalk Podcast. According to the web site, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. The annual conference was started in 1984 to bring together people from those three worlds and has since broadened its scope.

More than a thousand people now attend — indeed, the event sells out a year in advance — and the content has expanded to include science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our world. Over four days, 50 speakers each take an 18-minute slot, and there are many shorter pieces of content, including music, performance and comedy. There are no breakout groups. Everyone shares the same experience. It shouldn’t work, but it does. It works because all of knowledge is connected. Every so often it makes sense to emerge from the trenches we dig for a living, and ascend to a 30,000-foot view, where we see, to our astonishment, an intricately interconnected whole.

The TED motto is “Ideas Worth Spreading” and since 2006 has been making the best talks and performances available for free online. Each week they make more of the talks available from their archive. I have found many of these talks very interesting and would definitely recommend them.

The following rss podcast feeds are available if you have an mp3 player:

• RSS: audio | video | high-res video
• iPod: audio | video | high-res video

I just finished listening to The Time Traveler’s podcast of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1992 (short) story “The Hammer of God” (mp3). I say short story because in 1993 Clarke expanded this story into a full novel of the same name. I guess it shows how lacking my science fiction reading has been that I could have missed a story like this.

Although I disagree with some of the story line, like the future fusion of Muslims and Christians into a single fundamentalist cult, the story of heroism still outshines these minor story points.

The story is from The Collected Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke read by Scott Brick with Gabrielle de Cuir and is podcast with permission of the publisher, AudioLiterature. The actual story starts 26 minutes into the podcast, but is preceeded by some interesting talks by the reader, Scott Brick, and the producer, Stefan Rudnicki. The podcast finishes with a speech Clarke gave during the 1965 Hugo ceremonies entitled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love Stanley Kubrick.” His tale of working with Kubrick on the film that wouldn’t be released till 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey and just minutes before Kubrick would be awarded the best dramatic presentation Hugo for the movie Dr. Strangelove (which I saw for the first time recently).

Podcast Home | Feed | iTunes

I checked out Cory Doctorow’s newest book, Little Brother from my library the other day and spent the next two days reading the book. The book’s web site gives this intro to the book:

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

I am not a book critic. I open a book if it is recommended and finish it if it keeps my attention. I finished the book so you know it kept my attention but the story was not fleshed out as well as it could have been. Although Marcus is looked up to as a ‘hacker’, in the story his exploits are really using and distributing tools developed by the real hackers. He knows how to use what others have developed, a great sign of leadership which I am sure he will be able to use well someday when he manages an office full of cubicle dwellers. All the underground tech stuff that is so ‘cool’ in the story has nothing to do with the final take down of the DHS. It is not bloggers or anything high tech but an long-time friend of his parents who breaks the story in a regular paper.

My other reservation is that the author felt the need to include two scenes that contain some sexually explicit matter. I know the arguments, (some) kids are doing it, it is real, they were careful (used condoms), etc. But if I recommend the book to a friend’s teenager, am I also endorsing this kind of teen activity? It therefore severely limits who I can recommend this book to and the disclaimers I must give if I do.

What kept my nose in the book was thinking through what I would be willing to do. We are slowly losing our freedoms in the name of security. What freedoms are we willing to give up in order to ‘feel’ more secure and are we really any more secure or is it just an illusion of security. At what point is active civil disobedience warranted and am I willing to suffer the consequences — especially if the government is unfettered to label any one they pick up an ‘enemy combatant’ and hold indefinitely?

I have previously listened to Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and have read his posts at Boing Boing where he is one of the co-editors. He has also worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and speaks out against DRM whenever he can. And Forbes magazine has included Doctorow on its Web Celeb 25 list, which gathers the Internet’s most influential figures in a given year, for the 2nd year in a row.

Besides being available in hard cover on line or at your local bookstore, the book is available for in a DRM FREE audio book and can be download the ebook for free.

Cool Photo of the Day

A while back Jës gave me permission to post his photos. This one caught my attention and ‘needed’ posting.

It is amazing that the Tri-Cities only gets about 6 inches of rain per year yet we have all this water. Thanks Jës!

Astronomy Cast humbly claims to take its listeners on a fact based journey through the cosmos. Astronomy is no longer just pointing a telescope at the sky and making observations. All of our ‘earthly’ sciences have a sister science in space The weekly podcast covers a wide range of astronomy topics using a format where an avid astronomy lover is able to explore the universe and our knowledge of it by asking questions and interacting directly with an astronomer.

The show is co-hosted by Fraser Cain, who publishes the site Universe Today, and Dr. Pamela L. Gay, a professor (SIUE) and blogger. The interaction between the enthusiast and scientist can not only hold the listeners attention but will entertain and educate the listener as the hosts share their passion for all things astronomical.

The show began in September 2006, and appears to not have missed a single weekly issue. It is worth going back and listening to back issues on the archives page if you get a chance.

Details

• Website: http://www.astronomycast.com
• RSS: http://www.astronomycast.com/podcast.xml
• Hosts: Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela L. Gay
• Started: September 2006
• Frequency: Every Monday
• Duration: 30 minutes

“You were married,” said the Spirit, “yet you did not find the fullness of life in your marriage?”

“Oh, dear, no,” she replied, with an indulgent scorn, “my marriage was a very incomplete affair.”

“And yet you were fond of your husband?”

“You have hit upon the exact word; I was fond of him, yes, just as I was fond of my grandmother, and the house that I was born in, and my old nurse. Oh, I was fond of him, and we were counted a very happy couple. But I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.”

“And your husband,” asked the Spirit, after a pause, “never got beyond the family sitting-room?”

“Never,” she returned, impatiently; “and the worst of it was that he was quite content to remain there. He thought it perfectly beautiful, and sometimes, when he was admiring its commonplace furniture, insignificant as the chairs and tables of a hotel parlor, I felt like crying out to him: ‘Fool, will you never guess that close at hand are rooms full of treasures and wonders, such as the eye of man hath not seen, rooms that no step has crossed, but that might be yours to live in, could you but find the handle of the door?’”

The excerpt above, from The Fullness of Life by Edith Wharton, is both beautiful and amazingly sad. I heard it for a second time while listening to the Audio Literature Odyssey podcast of the short story. I have never read any of Wharton’s works but this story not only entertains but makes me examine my own life. Do I love my wife ‘well’? OK, lets ask it in a better way, Can I love my wife “better”? I don’t even have to ask her that question, the answer is obvious. I am sure there are rooms I have not explored even after almost 30 years of marriage. As a matter of fact, just like this story, how much ‘exploring’ have I done lately? We all grow, adding rooms, alcoves, and other areas to our lives.

My job is to love my wife. To grow with her. To explore life together. And scripture commands it, check out

• Ephesians 5:25 - Give yourself up for your wife.
• Ephesians 5:28-33 - Love your wife as you love yourself.
• I Peter 3:7 - Honor your wife.
• Colossians 3:19 - Never be harsh with your wife.
• 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 - Your body belongs to your wife and hers to you.
• Hebrews 13:4 - Remain true to your wife and keep your marriage pure in every way.
• Proverbs 5:18-19 - Rejoice in your wife. Be intoxicated with her.
• Proverbs 31:28-29 - Praise your wife.
• Proverbs 18:22 - Be thankful for your wife and realize the favor you have received from God.
• Song of Solomon 4:7 - Tell your wife how captivated you are with her.
• Song of Solomon 7:1-8 - Let your wife know how much you enjoy her.

Give the story a listen and let me know what you think.

• Genre: Short Story
  
• Duration: 00:32:31 (about 30 minutes)
  
• File Size: 22.5 MB
  
• Download: The Fulness of Life by Edith Wharton - MP3

Recording Copyright 2006 Nikolle Doolin