Chris' Updates

Last Thursday was my last day of class for the summer, and I'm glad to be finished with this Matrix Methods and Applications class. I was really looking forward to the applications, but it turned out to be all methods. Once again, I've learned a lot of math techniques and I'm left with no idea when they're useful. Brilliant. I don't have my grade back, but I'm pretty sure I passed at least. A couple of weeks ago, Ashley and I and some friends took a camping trip up to Kelly Dahl campground near Nederland. We did a lot of catching up, and a little hiking and geocaching. You can check out our photos on Picasa . We took Apollo, and he had a blast. It was great to get outdoors and remember that I can tear myself away from computers when I need to. I spend a lot of my time using my computers. Even when I go out around town, I have my G1, which has more processing power than our family's first computer, and constantly keeps me connected to the internet. When I...

Last week, Ashley and I finally got going on a project that we've been talking about even before I left last year. After Mike moved out last weekend, his bedroom was left empty, so it was perfect timing to empty our bedroom too and throw some paint on the walls. Ashley's mother loves to paint her rental property's interiors completely in ultra-pure gloss white, and it has been bugging Ashley for a long time. She says it's depressing to be around so much white. We've fixed that situation, painting our bedroom in green tones, and our new guest room in shades of red. It came out really well! We finished most of the painting in one day, which amazed me. The next day, Ashley shampooed the carpets in both rooms, so they're both nice and fresh. After all of that hard work, it was a little hard to get motivated for the camping trip, but we managed to get packed and drive up on Friday afternoon. We camped at the Cold Springs Campground in Roosevelt National Park, just ...

Oh gosh, it's been a while. Really sorry to ignore this for so long, but you can beleive I've been busy. School ended smoothly with the presentation of our project in Components, and the very next day I was on the road to New Mexico. I drove to Albuquerque to see Zach's track final, and I was rewarded to see him get 2nd place in both shotput and discus, both directly behind his good friend and team mate. I was also there for Mother's Day, so Mom, Dad, and I went geocaching and found a great little path. While I was gone, Ashley had surgery on a cyst, and I came back to Colorado to find her very much in pain still. The weeks that followed were pretty quiet. I started thinking about Annual Training coming up in June, but mostly I was catching up on some good old computer gaming. One day, Marcy and I installed a new bedroom window, so hopefully it will be more energy efficent and more bearable in the heat. I also had a few bus runs, shuttling a conference from their hotel ...

Ah, glorious spring break! A break from the norm. The first couple of days I spent relaxing, mostly computer gaming. Tuesday I set off for New Mexico to see the family. On the way down I listened to Ashley's Eragon book-on-CD, and quickly got hooked into that. I had just seen the movie on rental, and Ashley was right, the book was much better. Incidentally, I do agree with the sentiment that it's really a Harry Potter / Lord of the Rings ripoff, but it's entertaining and compelling all the same. I spent the next few days relaxing and hanging out with my family. They weren't on spring break, so I was alone for the midday most of the time. Wednesday I got down to Santa Fe with my mom, and we shopped around and visited Blue Corn , one of my favorites. We also started experimenting with her new scanner and scanning photos and negatives. She was interested in a program for organizing photos by tagging, so I did a little bit of research there. I found a wonderful little fre...

The week was fairly quiet. Tuesday between classes I decided to do a little geocaching around home, and went for a walk around Tom Frost Reservoir, which is near my house. Wednesday it decided to snow, and while it wasn't torrential, it was very slushy and made the roads very slick, so after my first class I drove back home and curled up with a book on C# (C-Sharp), a fairly new programming language. This weekend consisted of more bus training. Saturday we had Dine, Jordan and myself back with Dien the trainer. He took us around some very tight roundabouts to start off, and those were fun. Just as we were about to start some WillVill loops, we were called off of training to cover for a driver that had not shown up for her run. We drove down to Aurora, almost to the airport, to pick up a busload of middle schoolers for the basketball game at the Coors Event Center. The run is called Ralphie's Roundup, in which we pick up grade school kids from the Denver area and take them to se...

This past week I stumbled upon a relatively new sport called Geocaching . Basically, people have gone out into remote parks and forests and left caches (most are tupperware containers) filled with at least a log book, and have posted the latitude and longitude coordinates. The object is to use your own GPS receiver and go and find these caches. Sounds simple and boring, right? What if the cache is halfway up a sheer rock face, requiring climbing equipment? Or hidden underwater for a scuba diving adventure? OK, most caches are not quite this exciting. If nothing else, it's a fun way to get a family together for an activity. In Ashley's (slightly cynical) words, it gives hiking a point, a goal. Well, Thursday evening I came home to find my brand new GPS receiver waiting for me in a shipping box. I bought a Garmin eTrex (for a good bit less than the MSRP), a fairly low-end receiver. It doesn't have a lot of fancy features, but still good enough for hiking around the woods. Fr...