I wish each of you health and happiness for you and your families as we start off in 2011, and when we look back on it a year from now I hope we will all see it as time well spent.
Time well spent? I can say, looking back on 2011, I got to spend a lot of time on things I love. Family, Scouting, and travel. What a year!
We started the year off by getting a new puppy! A two month old Rottweiler named Toby.
How did people run packs before e-mail? For that matter, how did they do it before text messages, cell phones, the internet, and social media?
Case in point: a few days ago I got an e-mail (on my phone) from one of our Den Leaders. It said “I think the Tiger Picnic is scheduled for the same day as the Elementary School’s Carnival Night”. So I looked up the number for the school office (on the internet via my phone) and gave them a call. After confirming that they were indeed scheduled for the same night, I looked at the pack calendar (still on my phone) and figured a week later was Memorial Day weekend so that was out. But a week earlier didn’t seem to have any conflicts.
So I called my Assistant Cubmaster (who was responsible for reserving the city park where we are having the picnic) and left him a voicemail saying that we were changing the date by a week. A couple of minutes later I got a text message from him that he got my message while he was at the city desk filling out the paperwork to reserve the park. Just in the nick of time!
So long story (sort of) short, all this wonderful technology helped fix a pack problem within minutes all while I was driving down the highway at 80 miles an hour. No, not really. I was in the lab at work. But imagine how much more problematic that would have been without these technologies.
Today I used quite a bit of these technologies to coordinate pack stuff:
I listened to the latest “An Hour A Week” podcast on my way to work. Do you want to know what a Blue and Gold Banquet can be? Listen to this. This is Rockstar Cub Scouting at it’s best.
I sent out an e-mail to every parent in the pack reminding them about our meeting next week.
I sent my sister **waves** the Annual Planning Meeting Document that I mentioned in yesterday’s post. She is on a mission to help keep a Pack in San Francisco on it’s feet after some not-so-helpful leaders (CM, CC, DLs, and others) are going to drop it and walk away after their kids get the AOL in May. They are making zero effort to make sure there is leadership in the pack after they go. Grrrr.
I added that same sister **waves again** to our Pack Leaders email distribution list so she can see how we do things. I also forwarded her the Leader’s Meeting notes from Wednesday.
I emailed my Unit Commissioner about the Outstanding Volunteer Awards that I submitted from our Pack for the District awards. Just wanted to make sure everything was in order.
If I waited one more day I could just write this as a weekly update. But then again, 14 2/7 weeks of scouting doesn’t sound nearly as cool as 100 days. I have been crazy swamped with work and scout related things. I haven’t had a chance to put it down here. Lets see if I can remember what I did for the last four days…
Day 28 (Monday) was my son’s Wolf den meeting. They all brought their collections to share. The collections ranged from rocks to foreign money to nerf guns or sports trophies. The den leader brought his collection of Star Wars figures from the 70′s that are still in the box. Amazing how it brought back memories of when I was that age. We had a great time and I enjoyed my night as a scout parent. Day 29 (Tuesday) was spent preparing for the Pack Leader’s meeting that was on Wednesday. I put together a handout to get everyone thinking about the Annual Pack Planning meeting that will be at the end of next month. Since the pack hasn’t done the planning meeting in the past (I assume the Cubmaster put most of it together) I wanted to explain what the goals were and how we were going to end up with a calendar and a budget.
To get the ideas flowing, I made a list of our pack activities for this year as a starting point for thinking about what they want to do next year. Here’s what we’ve been up to (or plan to):
Join Night (Aug)
Bomb Robot Presentation (Sept)
Family Camping Trip (Sept)
Trail Cleanup Service Project (Oct)
Pumpkin Carving (Oct)
Scouting for Food Service Project (Nov)
Pocket Flags (Nov)
Ice Skating Holiday Party (Dec)
Scales and Tails Lizard Show (Jan)
Pinewood Derby (Jan)
“Magic” Blue and Gold (Feb)
Trivia Game Show (Mar)
Campfire Pack Meeting (Apr)
Hunter’s Glen Service Project (May)
Tiger Picnic (May)
Jack Nicol Resident Camp (Jun)
Pack Hike (Jul)
Adams County Fair Parade (Jul)
I also included the Journey to Excellence criteria for next year, so everyone knew what was expected.
Day 30 (Wednesday) was the Pack Leader’s meeting at my house. It was a good meeting, and had a decent turn out of about 15 of the leaders within the Pack. Two dens were unrepresented and three committee members weren’t there, but it was also Ash Wednesday so I can see why we didn’t have the whole crew. During the meeting we reviewed the Blue and Gold and then looked at Pack meeting plans for the next three months. We also talked about our upcoming service project and the aforementioned Annual Planning Meeting.
There was some discussion about awarding belt loops and pins at the den level instead of at the pack meetings, and making a bigger production out of the ranks, religious awards, and things like LNT or Whittling Chip. The votes in favor were coming from the newer den leaders (Tiger/Wolf) while those that have been around a while (Bear/Webelos) were against the idea. Something tells we will be revisiting the topic before too long.
Day 31 (Thursday) was another crazy busy day at work, but I did get some Wood Badge prep things done. I got an email from the course scribe, outlining what we need to do for the pre-course meeting this weekend. I am still really excited about the training, it is going to be awesome! I just wish somebody would figure out what the actual course number is. I’ve seen it as all of the following so far:
WE5-61-11-1
WE5-61-1-11
W5-61-11-1
W5-61-1-11
Isn’t all of that supposed to be a national standard numbering thing now? Not that it is the end of the world, but it just one of the little detail things that I’ve noticed. I’m pretty sure it will have zero impact on what I learn. Just consider it some mental thumb-twiddling since I’m so excited but don’t have anything to do until Saturday.
The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club
Math is always portrayed as exacting and calculating, but there is a great need for those that deal with numbers on a regular basis to also have a sense for approximate answers. Throughout engineering school it is often referred to as “back of the envelope” calculation. Quick and dirty approximation that gives a sense of the exact answer.
A colleague pointed me to a class called “Street-Fighting Mathematics” over on the MIT Open Course Ware site. MIT OCW is a site with lecture notes, readings, exams and videos from quite a few classes. Now you have no excuse for sitting around doing nothing on a Friday night! Street-fighting Mathematics is taught by Sanjoy Mahajan, and it looks pretty well put together.
The course description reads:
This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis. Applications include mental calculation, solid geometry, musical intervals, logarithms, integration, infinite series, solitaire, and differential equations. (No epsilons or deltas are harmed by taking this course.)
Seems to be the thing everybody should review every once in a while. Here is your first assignment, now get to work!
While it something that I would not mind reading some day, I really only mention it so that I can link to the YouTube video of the lecture Pausch gave for the Last Lecture “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. Watch the whole thing, you will be a better person for it. The insights and clarity are not often available like this.
Well, I have been remiss in updating the blog recently, though I have lots of good reasons. Actually they all boil down to one: I have been too busy to post.
What have I been up to? Here is the summary in five lines:
Working like mad to finish my last semester of classes (only three weeks to go!).
Installed new optical tables and workbenches in the lab (I’ll do a virtual tour one of these days).
Took the Professional Engineering exam at the end of October (I think I passed, but will know for sure in late December).
Working out at Emerfit doing the CrossFit thing (the longest I have ever stuck to a workout plan, including basic training!).
Any remaining seconds in the day were filled with family stuff, and sometimes sleep.
Just to keep you entertained until I have more time to post interesting things, I point you to The Periodic Table of Videos, put together by the University of Nottingham. Check it out, if only for the great hairdo of academia (you’ll know it when you see it).
Below are a few of the images captured during the course, during the bullet lab. It consisted of taking still images with a 500 nanosecond strobe of (what else?) .22 bullets going through things. These were taken in a dark room with the camera shutter open, and a microphone trigger for the strobe. I re-hosted these and others in the general photography section of this site and in addition you can find them on the Edgerton Center Site, along with others from previous years.
As mentioned in the Cliff’s notes version regarding April, I spent a few days in Munich last month. It was part of the 10th International Conference on Hyperthermic Oncology. The trip was quick (yay for direct flights), and unfortunately the family didn’t get to join me. I did get to present a poster of one of the measurement tools we are using in my dissertation research, so that was a plus.
The conference venue was a hospital that was located about six or seven kilometers from the hotel, so I quickly learned the layout of the subway system in order to get back and forth each day. The hotel was close to the center of town, so there was a chance to see the Rathaus and wander around downtown each night.
Hmmm. It sure has been a while since I have posted! I seem to be missing the whole month of April. Sorry about that!
Things have been crazy, but I am still alive. So here’s the cliff notes version of April:
School
Work
I helped build a train track around the boy’s room.
School
Work
I went to Munich for a Hyperthermia Conference
School
Work
I gave a couple of presentations on protiens including measuring denaturing energy with an atomic force microscope and computational methods for simulating folding.
