Performed Well

In three weeks from today, the country will have elected its next President - either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. As a Constitutional conservative, this election is the most discouraging one I've ever been a part of.  I paid attention to political pundits and news stories all throughout the primaries and the general election season, and I wanted so much to root for a principled conservative.  Instead, the choices are for two lifelong Democrats. On one side, Hillary Clinton has been caught in dozens of provable lies involving our national security, and she has used the her position as Secretary of State to accept bribes (through the Clinton Foundation and speaking engagements) for political favors from enemies of the United States. On the other side, Donald Trump is a Democrat running as a Republican, and I feel he has hijacked our party.  He has given more money to Democrats than Republicans his whole life and has always seen the world through the eyes of a pro-...

Disclaimer: this post will contain technical jargon, so my non-techie readers, I recommend you skip this one. As a JavaScript developer, my favorite working environment for the last 2+ years has been AngularJS -- a framework for building Single-Page Applications (SPAs). Almost as long as I've known about AngularJS, I've known that while the current version is 1.x, the team has been working on Angular 2, which will include many breaking changes.  Well over the past two or three weeks, I've been working to make the transition to Angular 2 just in time for the new release. And last Wednesday, it happened.  Angular 2 is officially out and this is anticipated to become the new standard for JavaScript single-page apps. On the surface, it's extremely impressive and cool.  But it is vastly different.  I never could have guessed just how different it would be.  Angular 2 uses TypeScript (a superset of ES6) which is compiled to JavaScript, so I'm not touchin...

Last weekend, my wife and two oldest children, Angel (11) and Tony (10) attended the funeral of 10-year-old Caleb Schwab.  I've known Caleb's father Kansas Representative Scott Schwab since I was a teenager in Clint Sprague's Youth Group (where Scott volunteered), and my wife was friends with Scott's wife (Caleb's mom) for years while we attended the same church. Caleb died instantly in a waterslide accident.  It's the kind of tragedy that no family could prepare for or anticipate.  Tens of thousands of people have ridden the same slide without issue.  We grieve for the loss of Caleb's life and for the years of pain this will cause his parents and three brothers. The funeral was beautiful.  Caleb's uncle spoke of life as a vapor, here one moment, gone the next.  We don't compare the length of one vapor with another because all of them are fleeting.  So it is with our lives.  Caleb lived his 10 years with honor and put his love for Jesus on dis...

After enduring the very trying experience of mid May this year (see my June 5 blog post), I determined to be more of a family man and less driven by outside pursuits.  I have been living a less busy life and spending a lot more time with the kids. Admittedly, I've also been spending more time playing video games (usually with them), and it gets surprising how fast the time can fly by while engaged in mindless activities like that. A recent example is that Tony and I discovered we both enjoy playing Pikmin 3 on the Wii U together and working toward personal record speed run times.  I bought a game capture device so that we can record our games and upload them to a site that collects speed run data on various games.  We don't have any delusions of being truly outstanding in challenges like this, but the act of creating the speed runs, I hope, will be a fun bonding experience for us and hopefully teach him a bit about video editing, commentary and confidence.  It's ...