Hawk, Fox, and Foxconn

During the last week, I've noticed we've had more frequent visits from a hawk. I saw him eating something in the neighbor's pine tree, swooping out of our cottonwoods, and leaving pigeon feathers beneath those same trees. This weekend, I saw the hawk attacked by three crows. He sought shelter in our cottonwoods until the crows moved out of the area. During a chance encounter with a sort of ornithologist at a friend's birthday, I came to think that our guest hawk is a red-tailed hawk, just like I always saw back in Oregon. I didn't know they were out here. I also learned that great horned owls are jerks; the whole lot of them. Huh.

I've also spent this last week reading through the monthly surge of magazines. Tonight I set aside mustard recipes from Sunset and dove into my WIRED and National Geographic magazines. The latter had a really interesting article about domestication of animals, namely a Russian experiment with breeding foxes for domesticity. It's a fascinating read, and now I wonder about the feasibility of having a fox as a pet.

A fox of a different sort was the subject of one of two good articles about gadget manufacturing in China. The first article is about the working conditions at Foxconn's factories in China that make the iPhone. It's pretty interesting, but the article that grabbed my attention was the one about the shift of manufacturing back to United States. Brendan Koerner's article "Made in America" talks about the downsides of offshoring for a company's bottom line and image. The shift is to bring manufacturing to the US in order to manage quality better and get to market faster, as well as to better protect your intellectual property. It's a hopeful article, although the caveat is that most of the US manufacturing will be done by robots. But by gum, they'll be American robots ... which will be made where? Anyway, it was a surprisingly engaging article, especially for something about manufacturing processes. It's nice to see some more in depth, thoughtful articles from WIRED, which has trended towards fluff pieces, blurbs, and crime stories recently.

Ambrosia For One

I've been trying to be better about my eating habits. Often after dinner I am struck by a desire for something more to eat. I know enough to avoid desserts, but I usually hit up the snack drawer with its Lara bars or I hit the yogurt, neither of which are exactly low calories. I've been rediscovering oranges, though. They hit the spot. They're sweet enough to sate that desire and flavorful enough to satisfy.

Today I decided to embellish the simple orange by chopping and toasting a handful of almonds, slicing up the orange, mixing that up and sprinkling with shredded coconut. It's a little bowlful of ambrosia, though without the cream. I think I've found a new dessert substitute. Yum.

The Couch on the Ceiling

I'm a bit loosey-goosey right now, so there will be little in terms of structure and coherence. This weekend we helped Josh and Kara move into a new apartment. And that's when the couch ended up on the ceiling. The stairs into the new apartment are exceptionally tight. We carried boxes up them, bookshelves up them, and mattresses up them. The couch however was the challenge. It pretty much was exactly the width of the stairway, and with a railing or a door, well, things got trickier.

In the process of trying to maneuver the couch through the door at the top of the stairs, we got it up over the railing and were trying to turn it, when we ran out of room to work. The couch became wedged, and was upside down, on the ceiling, and stayed there without anyone holding it up there. It was rather stuck. Eventually we were able to pry it out and get it through, but it was looking a bit grim for a while. I don't think the couch is making the next move.

After a well-deserved shower and rest, I made us some meat loaf, mushrooms, and some horseradish mashed potatoes. The potatoes were the main focus, in order to use up a 10 pound bag, and turned out rather well. The horseradish is just at the right amount. Now my belly is full, I'm tired, and showered. No productivity can come of this.

Not As Advertised

I'm typing on laptop number 4 now. The keyboard on number 3 had a gimpy space bar, so I took it in to get it repaired. The rest of the laptop was fine, so I wanted just to get that space bar repaired. Yet here I am with almost a completely new laptop. Rather than try to swap the keyboard from another laptop into laptop #3, they swapped the hard drive from #3 into laptop #4. So far, in the minutes I've been using it, #4 seems solid and the best of the bunch so far. Hopefully this is the end of my bad run of luck with these laptops. Still, despite the mainly glowing reviews of this brand and model (HP dv7-4285dx), I would not recommend it. This many problems in a row is hard to attribute to coincidence or bad luck.

Another thing I gave a try to was the Blackberry Stereo Gateway. I received one for free as part of my participation in some of the promotion for the free Playbook giveaway. Essentially the stereo gateway turns your stereo into Bluetooth headphones for your phone. You play music from your phone over the stereo. This is a great use for my little radio in the kitchen. If I want to play uninterrupted music, I have to play it off of my XBox and the TV or off one of the computers down in the office. That's not great if you're up in the kitchen or dining room. So now I can use my phone to play tunes over the stereo, which is particularly great if, like me, you have an unlimited data plan and Pandora on your phone.

The problem is, the Bluetooth connection is not great. If I set my phone close to the stereo, it plays with only a few hiccups. However, if I bring my phone over to the dining room table, the hiccups become unbearable. If I'm going to have to leave my phone over by the stereo to get good playback, I figured I might as well plug it in. And that's what I did. I used the Stereo Gateway's cable to plug my phone directly into my stereo, and now I can have streaming music any time. I will say in Blackberry's defense that the device does ask for a Blackberry phone with a particular software version, so I will withhold judgment until I try it with my Playbook. Until then, I'll be enjoying music from my phone over the radio.

A New Arc

Naruto Shippuuden is finally out of its filler arc and is back to the story. I'm really impressed with the developments in this new story arc so far. Naruto's message has mainly been the normal anime blather about being true to yourself, never letting your friends down, and never giving up. Yawn. It mainly was some spectacular fights punctuated by pep talks. But now, now Naruto is going in some interesting directions.

Looking back, I can see this shift in direction starting back in the story arc with Naruto's friend Shikamaru losing his master. It started addressing what it means to lose someone very important in your life and how it affects a person. Shikamaru addresses it with a cunning revenge plan. That germ of an idea has carried on through the story arcs as loss becomes more central and personal to Naruto until the break of the storyline before the most recent spate of filler content. At the end of that arc, Naruto has come to the point where he has a chance to exact revenge for his loss, but is confronted by the despair that the seemingly unbreakable cycle of vengeance and hatred produces. He is challenged by the main antagonist to come up with some way to break this cycle. In an act of mercy and forgiveness, Naruto changes the heart of the antagonist and ends up saving the lives of his friends and fellow villagers. That's still pretty pat. Just forgive and (yay) everyone's healed.

But now in this new arc, the series is going further. One of Naruto's friends, Sasuke, in his own quest for vengeance has caused serious loss and a thirst for vengeance in people from another village. Naruto asks them to forgive, and they say that's a nice sentiment, but what do we do with our hatred and rage and thirst for justice? Naruto says they can beat him up instead of exacting justice on his friend. But the show acknowledges that is not enough. The people from the other village are stilled ticked off despite Naruto's selfless act, and rightfully so. The question it asks now is: when our sense of justice cries out and we are asked to forgive, what can we do with our rage? How can we forgive when justice cries out for vengeance and punishment?

Unfortunately, I'm guessing the show is not heading towards the Christian answer of forgiving as we are forgiven by Christ who takes the world's deserved punishment on himself instead. I suppose Naruto's offer taking the punishment himself mirrors this a bit, but without the sense that we all are transgressors who have hurt others and we all need forgiveness. Still, I am curious to see where the character growth goes and whether the current story arc will continue searching for answers beyond platitudes.

Yes. I Can Hear You Now

The temperature on my phone says it is 1 degree outside. I am glad that I managed to shovel my driveway before darkness fell in balmy 7 degree temperatures. Somehow I did not do my normally thorough job on the driveway. I can't imagine why.

I want to tell you about a book that is changing my life. The book is Can You Hear Me? by Brad Jersak. The book is about discerning the voice of God, listening to it, meeting with Him, and entering into a conversation with Him. My prayer life has been improving so much since reading this book. In fact, I am on my second go round with the book. I generally don't re-read books. I could probably count my re-reads on my fingers. This re-read is warranted by a couple factors. One, the anecdotes Jersak shares in the book are encouraging examples of how God is moving and working miraculously today. Two, the book provides good exercises and reminders of ways to help us hear God and trust Him.

The book has some fairly standard approaches, but also swings into more Pentecostal territory. There are some things that raise my eyebrows, even when they are backed up by scripture. At the end of most sections, he provides some things to try out. The key to this book is actually trying these things out. You can't read this book and gloss over these sections, as I am prone to do. Try out the exercises and you'll be surprised at the results.

The key things that this book seems to do differently is that it encourages using imagery in prayer, and letting God speak to you through your imagination. It also encourages the necessary step of applying discernment to what you see and hear. For me, this works so well because words alone are seldom enough to occupy my mind and it scampers off bunny trails and soars on flights of fancy. My prayers have been lists prayed at God, not a conversation with God. By mixing in the visuals, this helps my mind and heart to focus. In my prayer, I have experienced some powerful bursts of emotion and the healing of old hurts. It's really cool.

If you would like to add depth to your prayer life or totally resurrect it, this book would definitely be worth a try. Jen says you can read it until you get freaked out. I heartily recommend this book.

Another couple things I am excited about are two websites that I've been recently introduced to. One is Grooveshark. It's a free music streaming site with an awesomely extensive library. I've found some obscure stuff on there. I'll be using it for previewing albums before I buy them and making playlists of stuff I like, but not enough to buy. The other is Foodily (Food I Love You), which aggregates results from various recipe sites and presents them in a excellent format. I've already found a couple of recipes I want to try just from searching for things I have had a hard time finding before.

Happy Appy

After spending my Christmas vacation mainly plying away at getting an app ready for the Blackberry App World, I'm happy to say that my app got accepted, and I will be getting a free Blackberry Playbook when it comes out. Not only that, but I also created and submitted a different version of my app to Adobe's InMarket. That version runs on the desktop. It got accepted there too, so that nets me a free code-signing certificate. I like this free expensive stuff thing!

So, now that my app is in the marketplace and available, let's talk about it. My app is called Floorplan. It is sort of a mini CAD program that allows you to draw out your floorplan and then drag furniture around it. It allows you to figure out where you're going to put your furniture before you actually try to move it. Beats lugging that sleeper sofa around several times. The grid right now allows you to draw furniture to scale.

Right now it is pretty minimal in its functionality. I want to add in a lot of functionality, but we will see how much I work on it now that the contest deadline is no longer looming in front of me. I should note that the deadline has been moved to March 15th. Yeah, maybe I'm a little bitter that the deadline changed, making my Christmas sacrifice unnecessary, but I'm sure that a free Playbook will help assuage my wounded pride.

So why don't you download it, put it on your desktop, and tell me what you think? By the way, if you get a message that says that it has a version of AIR that is no longer supported, before you install the app, you need to download and install the most recent version of AIR (2.5.1) here: http://get.adobe.com/air/.