31 May 2009

Birthday

Happy Birthday to a few special people:

Bekah Farber - I've known Bekah since we were wee little children in Southeast Asia. She is a smart, creative, beautiful person who loves the Lord. Obviously, she's pretty special if she has found it in her to put up with me for more than 25 years.

Roland Morgan - I have no idea exactly when I met Roland, but we were both undergrads at Biola and encountered one another at some point between 1996 and 1999. If you had told me then that I would still be keeping in touch with Roland and value his friendship and advice, I would have thought you were nuts. It just goes to show that life never turns out as one might expect.

And now for something completely different

Check out this link of an optical illusion.

I see it spinning both ways, and can switch it back and forth at will. Sometimes it flips of its own accord, though. Oddly, it tries to go clockwise more than the other direction, indicating that I am more right-brained. Most people would probably peg me as a left-brained person, though.

Adventures

Well, I've been here for six weeks now, so I figure it's time to 'fess up to those who might read my blog but do not yet know: I am now living in central Ohio. Yes, despite being a dyed-in-the-wool California girl, I have moved to the Midwest, nearly to the East Coast. And yes, it is like being in a completely different country:
It is lush and green here.
There is no traffic.
People speak with a slight drawl, and are generally friendly and polite.
There is nothing, anywhere, written in Spanish.

I have gainful employment, and I love it. [Please pray that paperwork and logistics will work out so it can be permanent; I'm still a contractor right now.] It is related to the kind of work I did at the old Humongous Anonymous Technical Company, but it is for a different company. I already knew and even worked with some of the people here! I get to do a lot of math stuff, and physics.

I don't have any friends yet, and I will admit that I've been lonely a lot. However, I have found a church that has seemed to be a good fit for me, and have started meeting people there. Naters is doing so well! He has taken to daycare wonderfully, and of course, the daycare workers love him to pieces and wish all their charges were like him.

I believe I will continue to see God's goodness.

26 May 2009

WoW Rap

My WoW video posts have gotten only one positive response (thanks, Bob!), but I like them, so I will continue to post them. So phooey on the rest of you!

I think this is hilarious. Most of you probably won't, because it's full of inside jokes. ...Enjoy it anyway.

River Tam FTW!!

It looks as though River Tam will win the vote (facing down, in her final round, Dr. House) for Most Badass (their word, not mine!) TV Character of All Time. Obviously, a tiny tail-kicking ESP-sporting genius girl should easily take out a mere human, even if he does wield both cane and sarcasm with deadly precision.

25 May 2009

Memorial Day

Yesterday was Memorial Day, and Nathan and I were fortunate enough to be invited to a barbecue at the home of some friends. It was mostly people from their church family, plus a few assorted relatives, but everyone was so nice and made us feel welcome. By the end of the day, I was wearing Sweet Baby Ray's all the way down one pant leg. Nathan was soaking wet, covered in Dorito dust, with bbq sauce all over his face and even behind his ear, and whipped cream in his hair. In other words, it was a total success.

On a more serious note, Memorial Day is intended to memorialize people who died in service to the United States of America. I don't know anyone who died that way, but I do have family who lived that way.
World War II:
Thomas Price
Frank Trigg
Olaf Feely
Vietnam War:
John Price
Middle Eastern Conflict:
Daniel Price
Timothy Bicker

We also honor civilian contributors to the nation's service. Many civilian defense workers may not be facing down a rifle, but there is always the high risk of carpal tunnel distress, paper cuts, MISS (Mathematics-Induced Stress Syndrome), etc. But seriously, desk jockeys work hard and get little recognition!

24 May 2009

WoW Dancing

There are countless videos about the WoW characters' various dances. Each race and sex has their own dances: most are based on real dance styles, many of them are immediately recognizable. This is a better-than-average vid showing toons dancing with footage of the dance source material. They are very well synched, and the vidder even took the effort to put the WoW animation in costumes to closely match the originals whenever possible.



Unfortunately, this does not include all the dances, but only the ones for which the vidder could find appropriate clips. For more information, see here.

23 May 2009

That's the World of Warcraft That You Play

Yet another entry in my never-ending quest to cull through the Youtube dross and then bring you the very best in humorous, creative, or interesting World of Warcraft videos. This is a classic, and it's funny because it's (mostly) true!

"Hunter: You don't need anything but your pet--send him in, scattershot, and then feign death!"

22 May 2009

Regrets

I spent most of the day yesterday bemoaning the fact that I failed to take either linear algebra or differential equations when I had the opportunities. Does anyone else have this problem?

The thing is, I neglected those classes because I didn't need them for my degree (in physical sciences, interdisciplinary), and had insufficient motivation to pursue them after I graduated from my undergrad. I was pretty done with math after third semester calculus. I did just fine in the course, but it just sort of lost me in the translation from classroom to life. Usually I'm pretty good at understanding that relationship, but multivariable vector calc just did not do it for me. I said to myself, "Self," I said, "when math stops having any ACTUAL NUMBERS and just has Greek letters and operators, that's where I stop, too."

So, naturally, 10 years after I've graduated with my bachelors degree, I am now working heavily with matrices and vectors, doing complicated calculations and translations among varying three-dimensional reference frames.

13 May 2009

Who's the Tank

A classic reworking of a classic routine.



Honestly, I think this is funnier than the original. The set-up crayoned sketches, starting at 2:08, really do it for me.

I don't even play WoW anymore, but I find WoW videos so amusing!

12 May 2009

All Things Are Better in Koine

You know it!

Switched at Birth!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090511/ap_on_re_us/us_switched_at_birth

Creepy! And but for the grace of God, there I might have been...

It's a little-known fact that I was SWITCHED AT BIRTH. Totally true!! They switched me with another baby at the hospital right after I was born. Fortunately, my mother was on top of things, and since the other baby was a Hispanic male, the error was not too hard to catch. But still... *shudder*