January Plans

Apologies all ’round for the long respite from this blog. I have been preparing for the project by practicing many of the things that I’ve been planning to do. Now, with the new year approaching, it’s time for this to be rigorous on all fronts. So to make it formal, here are my lists for the month of January. I’m still working on a good format for how to present my checklists, but for now I’m going to break them into things that I will do daily (excepting Sunday), weekly, and monthly.

Daily

• Bible reading, prayer, and journaling
• Practice piano (30 minutes)
• Read for pleasure (30 minutes)
• Exercise (Monday, Wednesday, Friday)
• Eat well (3 servings fruit, 4 servings vegetables, 1 gallon water)

I’ve pretty much discussed all of these things to death, so no further explanation is really necessary. In fact, most of these things I’ve already been doing or trying to do. The Bible reading and exercising are the only ones that I haven’t really cheated on, but all that ends January 1.

Weekly

• 1 hour voice lesson
• 6 hours for software project
• Volunteer at orphanage
• Write 3 letters

Well, it turns out that I can’t take classes at the local community college at the cheap rate until I’ve been here for a year. Therefore, instead of taking classes there, I have arranged for private voice lessons. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to do, just a little more expensive. I don’t think that I’ve talked about my software project, and it’s not ready to talk about a whole lot anyway. At this stage, I am doing an extensive literature review of similar software to make sure I’m not wasting my time. More details once that is complete. The orphanage is something new that I’ve found in town. I love working with kids, and I really look forward to putting in some time there.

Monthly

• Significant weekend activity
• Do a Maker project
• Write an editorial or letter to the editor
• Arrange and record 1 a cappella song

I think that the only one of these that I should probably clarify is the definition of “Maker project.” If you aren’t aware of Make magazine or what is known as the “maker movement,” then it might be a little confusing. Generally the idea is that you build something from scratch or modify something. But the projects are more significant than simply a doorstop or painting something. I’m really not sure how to describe it now that I try, but this will be a perpetual monthly goal, so hopefully I can show it.

For the record, the daily list won’t start in earnest until January 4 for two reasons. First, it’s convenient to start at the beginning of a week. Second, I’ll be out of town until then for New Year’s in what will likely be my significant weekend activity for the month.

Merry Christmas Eve!

ToDo: Not Bore Readers to Tears

I’ve already discussed this a little bit, but anyone who reads this blog is doing me a big favor. Having people read this, it’s almost like I have promised them that I will try to attain these goals. It gives me someone to be accountable to for these things. The problem is that this falls apart a little bit if no one reads this blog. I witnessed this last month, when I neglected posting for about a week because no one was reading it and I made other things a priority. Well, if I bore anyone reading to tears, they ought not to read this blog anymore, and hence my accountability for success is gone. Of course, if that does happen, this functions as a journal, and I am accountable to myself, which might actually work once I get into the place where I have tangible things to do other than just a vague need to plan.

So I’m going to try to make this blog interesting. I don’t know – maybe I’ll tell stories, post pictures, share recipes, or link to other interesting things that I find. Maybe the comments will be interesting. Perhaps I can figure out a way for it to be interactive – a running poll on how far I have descended into insanity and inhumanity. Suggestions? What makes you want to read a blog?

To Do: Outdoor Activities

If you have never gone camping, you are (in my humble opinion) a sorely deprived individual. Surrounded by nature, you are enveloped in the beauty of the creation of God, by the evidence of His very existence, the complexity and majesty that logically cannot be random happenstance, nor the act of a purposeless and sourceless energy of chaos. To exert yourself in attaining a physical goal – a summit, a stream, a cliff face – is satisfying in a way that the largest piece of working software code can never provide.

Now, the highest point in my state is about 350 feet above sea level, so it may not be feasible to climb a mountain once a week. But a long bike ride, a rustic camping adventure, a kayak in difficult waters, or even a trip to a climbing gym (okay, technically not outdoors) are all a step in the right direction. So once a month, I will make some sort of outing of this nature. Preferably, it will involve spending the night in a temporary structure in the elements. There are few things for bringing you close to God like getting away from our pre-packaged, instant, selfish rat race of an existence and losing yourself in a creation not manufactured by human hands but set into motion when time began and still exquisitely balanced, beautiful, and elegant. God is a master designer, and I will spend time in his gallery.

Project: A Cappella CD

Okay, this one might have a little component of pride in it, but I think I can deal with that. Ever since I got to do some serious a cappella work in college and graduate school, I have listened to various songs and thought, “Man, I should arrange that for a cappella. It would sound awesome!” And indeed, most of them would, but my time and skill have been lacking to sit down and do it. Contemporary songs, Christian songs, all kinds of things. I have been practicing my vocal percussion, arranging things in my head, and compiling a list of songs, and it’s about time I did something about it.

So, by the end of the year, I’m shooting to have arranged and recorded at least ten songs that I can post somewhere online for free for other people’s enjoyment (read: amusement). I may or may not get sophisticated enough to write out sheet music for them, and if I do, it will be available. Chances are that I will be singing all the parts, so the arrangements may be lacking, but that should be okay. It’s just for fun.

ToDo: Plug Into Church

Proverbs 27:17 – “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.”

Galatians 6:2 – “Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ.”

…and many others.

Priority One: Find a church home in which I can find solid teaching, good fellowship, and a powerful men’s ministry

Priority Two: Plug into said church, volunteering with the children, participating in activities, joining a small group or two, and getting to know the congregation.

In the last place I lived, I had a great church. The teaching was powerful and challenging, the fellowship was excellent, we had a strong men’s ministry, and I volunteered watching over children up to about 2 years old. I was plugged in, I knew people, and I got together with people from church more often than just Sunday morning. I want that again. It is edifying, it is challenging, and it is powerful. I want to take it further. I want a close male friend such as is rare in this society now, who will hold me accountable and walk with me through the trials of this life. I want to become a leader in the church, to learn and share not from my own authority, but as God blesses me with wisdom. I want to serve beyond just what is convenient, but to have a heart for this city and bless it through my work in the church.

Now if I could just pick one…

Project: Share the Gospel

Okay, let me be clear here and say that I’m not going to make individual people into projects. I prefer instead to invest with love in the lives of people that I know and care about, invite them to church, and let God work on their hearts. I like to think that a few seeds have gotten planted through God’s work in me, but I have not been blessed to see any of them come to fruition.

What I am going to focus on doing is being bold about sharing the Gospel wherever I am. Not making opportunities, but taking them where they arise. Being bold in talking to friends about spiritual things, and similarly being bold in explaining what I believe and why I believe it. Writing copiously about things that God puts on my heart and sharing them with people who need to hear them. And, most uncomfortably, listening and obeying when God talks to me and tells me to do something that makes me squirm, like talk to a random stranger or stop to help someone when I have somewhere to be or give someone money who needs it without any guarantee that they will use it right. Of course, this is predicated on an ability to hear God’s voice when He calls me to something like that. He’s working on that…

ToDo: Piano

As I was growing up, my family had a grand piano. Not a concert grand, but for all I knew it might as well have been. The sound of that instrument was wonderful, and would resonate with my core even though I couldn’t play a single song. My mother was the only one in the house who knew how to play, and why she never had any of the children take lessons, I will never understand. Perhaps we were just too busy with all our other activities. Well, I think that it’s about time I remedied that.

This year, I will learn to play piano. Now, I can sit down, pick out notes, and slowly play a song by memorizing hand positions. I can play the first half of the first movement of “Moonlight Sonata” this way. But I want to be able to sit down and sight read a piece of music. I want to be able to fluidly play a blues bass line with my left hand and experiment with melodies on my right. I want to be able to do something different with my left and right hands that doesn’t simply involve holding down chords for a whole bar with one of them.

So, before the end of the year, I will be purchasing a nice digital keyboard (apartments and 20-something budgets do not support grand pianos), and establishing a regular practice schedule. It will probably be something in the realm of 30 minutes a day and I’ll stick it with my reading to make a full hour to block out.

Project: Chaotic Walkie-Talkies

Back in undergrad, I did this really cool project on the Lorenz attractor for a class called Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. The class was a ton of fun, so if you ever get a chance to study chaos mathematically, I highly recommend it. Without getting too technical, the Lorenz attractor is a three-variable chaotic function that is bounded for some subset of initial conditions; although it behaves chaotically, it will never depart from some envelope of space. As my project for that section of the class, I ended up studying a paper written by a mathematician who discovered that, by feeding the variables of one Lorenz attractor into another with different initial conditions, the two could be synchronized. I’m not going to get into the gory details here, but the essential concept is that all of a sudden, you can take two things that are chaotic and make one mimic the other with only partial input.

The fascinating application that the author proposed was encoding messages in audio signals. Take a Lorenz attractor with some initial conditions that create one variable with a consistently large amplitude. Now add to that variable the audio signal you wish to send. The variable should have sufficient amplitude that the audio is a relatively negligible addition to the amplitude. Send that signal. Because the function is chaotic, it will simply sound like noise in transit. However, on the other end, feed that variable into the appropriate part of a second Lorenz attractor. The two will synchronize, and you can mathematically back out what component of the signal sent is the chaotic part and what is the audio. I wrote a script to do it in Matlab that worked pretty well.

Now, ever since I did that project, I have wanted to implement the concept in circuitry. I think that I finally know enough to do so, and I would like to add it onto some existing walkie-talkies that I already have. This project will be one of my goals for completion by the end of the year, and should serve greatly to exercise my skills as an electrical engineer, which I only qualify as unofficially, but feel the need to justify nonetheless.

ToDo: Write Letters

Okay, so I’m a little old fashioned. But there’s something about a handwritten letter that is romantic – and not in the “when-a-man-loves-a-woman” sort of way. It means that someone cared enough about contacting you that they took time out of their day to find a sheet of paper and an envelope, put pen to paper, and physically send you a part of themselves. They leave on that paper their handwriting, their signature. If they have stationary, even that will reflect their personality. They went and found a stamp and put it in the mailbox, and even just those little bits more effort mean so much to me in a world of instant, fast, concise, and cheap.

So I’m going to show my friends that they mean that much to me. I’m going to buy nice paper and envelopes, good pens and ink, and a whole lot of stamps. I’m going to sit down regularly and write letters to my friends and family. I’m going to work on my penmanship to make it more legible and pleasant to look at. And hopefully they will get the message.

Project: NaNoWriMo

For those of you not already familiar, the odd word in the title of this post is the mashing together of the words “National Novel Writing Month,” which falls in November every year. And every November, hundreds of people all over the world take on the challenge through NaNoWriMo to write a 175-page/50,000 word novel in one month.

Yes, I have an idea, and yes, I plan to take a stab at it in November 2010. According to the spirit of the event, up to that time I can sketch, concept, and note all I want, but no actual writing will take place before the designated month. I have no illusions that by the end of the month I will actually have a novel worth much of anything. I will consider it a rousing success if I hit the word count goal. But it will be a start, and potentially something that I can flesh out into something worth binding and at least putting on my own shelf.