JFM Journey

Our Real Estate agent just called. After 4 month of paperwork and heartburn, we now own our own house. It will still take us some time to move in, but it's ours now. Look for more posts on this topic soon.

This happens every so often. I get busy with other things and blogging takes a back seat for a while. This time it was the combination of a new job, Christmas (see new job and Buying a house.

Beth and I are buying our first house, and the sale will close by the end of the week. It is a cute 2 bed/2 bath halfplex in South Natomas. It has a small yard where Beth can play with her plants, a garage which we have promised to keep at least on car in, and a nice kitchen with more counter space.

Unfortunately, buying a house, especially buying one with help from the federal government, takes a lot of time and effort. We have had great helop from our real estate agent, Jennifer Hayes at Lyon Real Estate and Nancy Rich with Comstock Mortgage. This is a very difficult market to buy a house in, but if you can put in the effort, there are some really great deals. I enjoyed telling our landlady that we would be paying less per month for our mortgage then rent!

I have a lot of ideas in the post queue, and now that life has settled down I hope I can push a few more public. We will see.

The Gathering Storm is the 12th book in the Wheel of Time series begun by Robert Jordan with The Eye of the World nearly 20 years ago. Mr. Jordan passed away in 2007 without having completed his epic work. His widow and editor chose Brandon Sanderson to finish the story using detailed notes and partial manuscripts left by the late author. I have been reading this series sense 1998, and it has been an anxious four years waiting for the next installment.

This Review is Spoiler Free. At least as far as plot is concerned, I do intend to mention which characters are in the book however.

Day 3 of my third week of couch-to-5k workouts is now in the bag. So far I am enjoying getting back in shape. It has also been fun to follow other c25k runners on twitter and the forums. I got started with this whole thing when a number of Ruby programmer started talking about getting in shape with a program that assumed a couch-potato starting point. I have had a few insights sense I started and, I've modified the rules to fit with my style and needs.

Headlines this morning all were about Pres. Obama being announces as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. I actually heard about this on twitter where I was going to post my successful completion of week two of the Couch-to-5k program. Twitter is one of those great instant response tools for news like this. Most of those who felt the strongly enough to write 140 characters on the subject were not pleased nor for that matter was the Washington Post which was the top result on Google news when I looked.

I must admit I was surprised by the announcement as well. I voted for Mr. Obama because I agreed with him on a philosophical level more then a political one. I voted for a president who successfully had empowered the powerless. I voted for a leader who was committed to honest and effective diplomacy before the use of economic or military cohesion. I also voted for a leader who was ready to face the world as it is now not as it was at the end of WWII. I believe that the Nobel Committee voted for the same things.

Many people have rightly pointed out that Pres. Obama has not actually accomplished very much in the way of bringing world peace. The Nobel Peace Prize is however not given solely as a reward for peace making. Many of the recipients were given the award the contributions they made towards the cause of peace. A fine distinction I know but ask the 1994 Nobel Laureates about how the Israel/Palatine conflict is going. Or look at Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho who won the prize in 1973 for ending the Vietnam war.

Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, created the prize in his will in 1895. The explosive he created revolutionized mining, but also brought a whole new kind of terror to warfare. He wrote in his will that he wished to give a yearly award to:

The person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.

His hope was that he would be remembered for something other then the destruction his invention caused. Today the name Nobel is synonymous with the greatest achievements in Science and Literature. It is also firmly attached to the aspiration for peace. If the Nobel Committee can by its presentation of this prize focus the attention of the world on a person with both the authority and the desire to end conflict, and in doing so aid that cause, then it has indeed lived up to the high ideals of its founder.

Desk jobs are great. There is no heavy lifting, you get to work indoors with air conditioning, and you spend all day sitting and not moving. This of course leads to rapidly expanding waist lines and a loss of energy.

This week I am starting on a challenge called couch to 5k. It is a nine week program designed to get couch potatoes, such as I have become to the point where we can run 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) in 30 minutes. It takes a commitment to 30 minutes of exercise 3 days a week.

Two very exciting things happened at the vestry meeting last night. I am going to be getting a stipend (that means money coming in!) and I have been appointed to the vestry.

The vestry approved a $600 per month stipend for me as an intern. I have been covering the church front desk sense the vestry was forced to drop our Parish Administrator back from 40 hours a week to eight. She now only does the church books. The vestry had planned to hire an Office Administrator for 12 hours a week. I had agreed to fill in for a month while someone was found, and when it turned out that I could get the job done effectively, I agreed to stay on through the summer to help balance the church budget. My agreement ran through the end of September.

Perhaps it is a misplaced goal, however in the modern era we have been obsessed with the most efficient way to teach. With the least amount of time and effort, how can a teacher achieve the greatest proficiency? The currently accepted answer is to vary instruction based on learning modalities. Students are visual, auditory or tactile learners, so the conventional wisdom goes, ans a lesson that involves a certian mode of learning will be most effective in teaching a person of a similar mode.

According to Daniel T. Willingham the evidence just doesn't support this idea. In a piece in the Washington Post, Willingham suggests that what really determines how easily someone learns something is a combination of interest and how much related knowledge they already have.

Some lessons click with one child and not with another, but not because of an enduring bias or predisposition in the way the child learns. The lesson clicks or doesn’t because of the knowledge the child brought to the lesson, his interests, or other factors.

The first chapter of next installment of Robert Jordan's Epic fanticy series The Wheel of Time has been published on Tor's website. This is the first chance we have had as fans to read hybrid text written by Brandon Sanderson using notes and a partial manuscript left by the author before his death. The Gathering Storm is the first of three planned novels that will complete this nearly 20 year old series.

In this post I'm going to write about what I think of the sample text released. There will be spoilers below the fold so if you are waiting to read the whole book, don't click "Read More."

Before I head into spoiler country however, I will make a few general comments. First this is clearly The Wheel of Time. My concern that the series would drift away from its original plot to become fit the new authors vision of how the story ought to have been written are gone. Brandon Sanderson was a wonderful choice. He is not an author that is set in his story-line so strongly that he cannot adapt to someone eses. Having read every thing he has published to date, He shows remarkable flexibility in his work and unlike some fantasy authors is not stuck writing the same book over and over again with different casts and setting. He also ahs a strong sense of systematic magic. The use of the One Power in the Wheel of Time books was a marvle of consistency and rules. Sanderson excels at using such systems and in this regard even outstrips Jordan.

On the other hand Sanderson has a less refined quality to his word choice and style. A friend commented that some of his action scenes feel like they were made for Nintendo. The old southern aristocracy and slightly affected formalism of Jordan are replaced by the easy notes of a Gen-X'er from Utah. Sanderson is also not as confident in his readers ability to "get it" as Jordan. Robert Jordan was subtle to the point that many things slipped by most or all readers and that was ok. It added to the mystique. Sanderson on the other hand wants his readers to be in on the joke. Perhaps the hardest part of emulating Jordan for him has been the demands of utter secrecy and obscurity about the writing process and outcomes. As he says they are not his secrets, but he is anxious to share them in the one medium open to him -- the final books.

Some State Employees found that they just could not make it through the month with 24 hours of pay hacked out of the checks. To balance the California State Budget, the governor, as chief executive, furloughed most state employees for 3 Fridays each month. Today while volunteering for my church, I got an e-mail the food bank we support talking about a new trend of state employees asking for food aid. There is also an article in the Sacramento Bee about the situation.

I frankly think the state should be embarrassed that it is balancing the budget by sending its employees to food banks. This does not mean I thing cuts in staffing don't need to be made. The fact that the government has not fallen apart is proof that like most governmental agencies there is not a lot of slack in the system. On the other hand, this is effectively an unnegotiated pay cut of 14 percent. From personal experience, I know how hard it is to change lifestyles that dramatically and that quickly. We were lucky in that we had a financial cushion, and that a car was paid off a month ofter our 10% cut. Not everyone will be that lucky.