Mormonism 101

I heart economics

Something about economics just fascinates me lately. After reading books like Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, andFreakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.),I find the concepts extremely interesting now even though I went on record to say that economics was my least favorite subject in school.


Here are a couple of fun videos about two schools of economic thought from John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich August Hayek

An Apostle's Easter Thoughts on Christ

Audio clips from one of my favorite General Conference talks last week, with scenes from the final days of the life of Jesus Christ. Great little video clip!

Our Video Christmas Card

We have created a video Christmas card this year, since we're not sending one out. Merry Christmas everyone!

http://firstlewisbaby.blogspot.com/2008/12/our-christmas-video-card.html

How many five year olds could you take in a fight?

30

B-17

Time to get back to blogging

Despite what I read in this WikiHow article about reasons to not blog, it's time to break out the virtual pen and start blogging again.

To refute a couple of the points in that article, I think that blogging does a body good, whether people read it or not. The article says that no one will ever find your blog and it's just like writing a journal that is not online but then goes on to say that anything you post online can come back to haunt you and everybody can see it. Seems a little contradictory to me.

But I think it's good for people to articulate thoughts, even with the fear that everybody can see it and could criticize what you blog, it helps to put the brain on paper. Plus, a little criticism and feedback is a good thing.

Anyway, there were a few good ideas in the article: contributing to a wiki, commenting on other people's blogs, the pain of reading a random blog on a daily basis, etc.

But for me, it's time to make time for blogging. Maybe not for the good of anyone else but me.

Vacation to Pennsylvania (Days 1-3)

We finally made it out east to visit my brother and his family in Pennsylvania. They have spent the past year living in the small rural town of Summerville which is about 2 hours out of Pittsburgh. I'm not kidding about the rural thing... or the small part of that last sentence. Summerville is a town of about 300, there are farms all around, and we have even passed some Amish people in their horse and buggy. We were also able to visit Punxsutawny and the famous groundhog site.

One of the biggest attractions out here, besides family of course, is the beautiful country, rolling hills, and greenery. There aren't really mountains to speak of, but the thick, green, mossy groves have been so scenic, especially for us coming from the desert land of Utah.

Another fun part of the trip thus far has been our nephew, Ty. He turns two on July 4th, and is at such a cute stage of life right now. He has a pretty good little vocabulary and little phrases, but he likes to stick with his favorites like: Weis (meaning Trish), Wado (water), puball (football), and other cute little sayings. He hasn't hit the terrible two's yet and is at a really fun age. He laughs a lot and loves to be outside, usually throwing rocks, playing with balls, or trying to smash bugs with his plastic golf clubs.

My brother and his wife Erica have been wonderful hosts for us. We have been fed well and have really enjoyed our first couple of days in Pennsylvania so far.

Disneyland trip

Time to get back into blogging...

I'll start with a brief report of our trip to Disneyland and Southern Calironia.

We were in much need of a Spring Break trip while Trish was off track from school, so we headed south. Unfortunately, or fortunately (depending on how you look at it), it didn't turn out to be so sunny. So on the down side, it wasn't that warm, we got rained on a bit, didn't swim at the beach, and don't have much of a tan to show off. But on the good side of it, we had a great couple days of short lines at Disneyland. The cool weather and rain kept the big crowds away and that opened up the park for us to enjoy. We hit most of the big rides several times. Using our 2-day park hopper pass, we got back and forth to California Adventures and Disneyland to definitely get our fill of rides. Great time.

We still made it out to the beach...
we visited Crystal Cove State Park, Laguna Beach, and Huntington Beach.

We also visited Universal Studios...
saw the Hollywood sign, rode some more rides, saw some cool movie sets and special effects stuff. Pretty cool!

And we made it out to a Yanees vs. Angels baseball game

Tickets? $15 a piece

Parking across the street from the stadium? $20

2 hot dogs and a small soda? $9.50

Seeing the Yankees lose? Priceless

Overall, we had a great time. It was a lot of driving and the weather wasn't what we hoped it would be. We definitely enjoyed a few days of vacation though.

World's biggest burger

http://www.dennysbeerbarrelpub.com/burger.htm

Warning, not for the faint of heart! This looks delicious and is wonderfully presented. Bugers are some of the best tasting works of art, and here's proof.

First Success of 2006!

Great news from the Lewis' house and the first real success of the new year: Trish found my car keys that had been lost for about a month in the cracks of the couch cusions.

Things like this only happen in the movies. I never lose my keys. I have always put them on the key holder in our kitchen, I keep good track of them, but for some reason lost them about a month ago. Luckily, I had a spare set for my car and wasn't hurting for transportation. But missing were my little Leatherman, my USB jumpDrive, my Chicago Bears keychain, my fingernail clippers, and my chapstick (yes that is a lot to have on a key chain with only 2 keys).

But yesterday, my wonderful wife found them stuck between the couch cusions in our family room. I can already tell, 2006 is going to be a great year.

Colin's Column Book Club: Band of Brothers

The next book in our continuing series of our World War II history study is Band of Brothers. The author, Stephen E. Ambrose, is the same guy who wrote our first book Pegasus Bridge. I'm not kidding you, I will probably read everything he has written. He's that good.

Although we haven't finished reading Omaha Beach, we are taking a small detour for this one. A co-worker recommended the HBO mini series that was made from this book. So as I started watching the mini-series I became completely enthrawled with the story.

The story follows the 101st airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest. The men of Easy Company were all volunteers for the "Screaming Eagles" parachute regiment. We open up with the men in training at Camp Toccoa. They're soon shipped off to England to prepare for their role in the D-Day invasion. The rest of the story follows their involvement in numerous other battles, seemingly many of the major assignments and tough missions.

But the book and mini-series are more than just a historical record of what E Company accomplished. It is a first person view from the front lines, a broader perspective from the eyes of the officers. It is a tale of the drama and emotion of watching your best friends get blown up right in front of you. It details the hardship and misery of defending a line out of a foxhole in freezing temperatures with little to eat, no winter clothing, and fear of mortar shells. Ambrose does a wonderful job depicting the daily trials of the soldiers using first person accounts and incredible narrative.

I'm only about half way through the book and I've seen 8 of the 10 episodes from the mini-series. But I donated blood yesterday and almost passed out (another story of it's own) for the first time in my life because of the impact this story has had on me. I'm not kidding, I have thanked the Lord a little extra every time I have a warm meal and can wake up in a warm bed because of what I have seen and learned through this.

I'm not trying to go all ethical and serious on y'all, but the book and mini-seris are that good. I am always impressed with the ability of historians to piece together everything (even 60+ years later) to recreate the events. Ambrose has a great writing style that is both easy to read and intriguing at the same time. This is a great, great story and Ambrose and HBO have done an incredible job telling it.

(Disclaimer: Although the HBO mini-series is listed as "unrated" it has a lot of violence, obviously, and typical military speak. Be warned.)

-------------------------------
Other Related Links:
Screaming Eagle Vetrans Website - http://www.screamingeagle.org/
Lock 'n Load: Band of Heroes Wargame - http://www.locknloadgame.com/

ColinCam is back and better than ever!

ColinCam is back! I found a better site to host the ftp action of the image. It works much better now. I'll tweak the html and javascript to see if I can make the refresh cleaner or something. I'll see if I can run it at work tomorrow too.

Check it out: http://colinkun.fasthost4all.com/colincam.html

Park Pointe Ward Pinewood Derby

Friday night was our Elder's Quorum Pinewood Derby. I was in charge of organizing and promoting the event. I think we ended up with about 8 cars in the stock class, and 5 for the modified. Most of the modified car makers also made stock class cars, so we had about 12 participants overall.

We saw all kinds of shapes and colors, and almost everyone was using a different lubricant for their wheels. I chose the standard powdered graphite.

Mine is the green race car in the middle next to the car with the chicken broth strapped on top. I bought a pre-cut car from Robert's Craft store for about $8, sanded, and painted it with the only color of spray paint we had.

We used a point system and did 3 heats of three cars each. First place got 3 points, Second place 2 points, third place three points and raced so that everyone got three races. We then seeded the teams 1-8 according to their points. I ended up with the 5th seed.

From there, we did a bracket style elmination tournament matching up two cars at a time for a best of three races winner. My car was the only lower seeded vehicle to win one race, but unfortunately, we did not allow any lubricating between the races and my car fizzled and lost in a very narrow rubber match.

We had trophies for the winners. Ribbons for the modified class winners. And we did certificates for every participant. The modified class got a little intense because the makers had worked a lot harder to build their vehicles and there weren't really any rules. All ended well, but it got a little tense.

Fun time all around. I think we'll try again next year and hope to get more participants.

Post Halloween Candy Myth Test

Another fun link:

http://encarta.msn.com/quiz_196/Tricky_treats.html

Hmm, only 4 out of 10. Not very good. See how you do! Myth or no myth, candy is delicious.

Email Blender

If blogs aren't for anything else, they're at least good for a place to post links for interesting web sites. Here's another one: http://emailblender.com/

Fun stuff, yet again.

Colin's Column Book Club: Omaha Beach: D-Day, June 6, 1944

This month's book club selection is another from the World War II genre. Currently, our course of study is focusing on the European theater, primarily the D-Day invasion.

Beginning today, Tuesday, with the Preface and first couple of chapters, we will investigate and discuss the book periodically but without a set schedule.

Of course, comments are always welcome.

Colin's Column Book Club: Pegasus Bridge

I posted recently about my history kick, and part of that kick has involved browsing the history section at Borders and a run to the West Jordan library. Here's one that I found and highly recommend:

Title: Pegasus Bride: June 6, 1944
Author: Stephen E. Ambrose

This book is about a lesser known event that occured as the first victory on D-Day. Major John Howard lead an attack and seizure of two bridges behind enemy lines that proved to be vital for the invasion of Normandy. I join the many who have at least heard of and know about the D-Day invasions at Sword , Omaha, Gold, and Utah Beaches. D-Day is known as the single largest air/sea invasion in the history of the world and put the Allies in a position to move cross continent and push Germany back, eventually closing in on Berlin and taking Hitler's army out of the war.

However, the battle at Pegasus Bridge is a relatively unknow piece of that D-Day invasion. This book does an incredible job setting the scene for the battle, taking the reader through the training of soldiers, explaining the background of many of the key individuals involved, and even minute by minute detail of the actual landing of gliders and capture of the bridges.

I haven't read anything else by Ambrose, but you can bet I've got more of his books on hold at the library. This book was very well written, organized, and detailed. It was a nice 200 pages that moved quickly, never dulled, and captured the moment very well. I don't have any kind of thumbs up, 3 star, 1-10 rating or anything... but I really really enjoyed this book. Another thing about this book that made it nice, although very detailed and descriptive, the vulgarity and gory details that we are very aware of were left out for the benefit of the reader. Clean, concise, captivating, and just an all around great book.

My history kick

I can't quite place the exact beginning, but somewhere in the past couple weeks I have started up on this history kick. I think it started as a result of three different triggers: browsing a war book at Borders, finding a page from my grandpa's own war journal, and coming to the realization that I know very little about some of the most important things that have happened in this world.

Every time I need a break from work, I head across the street to Borders. Not too far away, but enough to get a little walk, some fresh air, and then the variety of items to browse and play with are enough to keep me entertained. But one day, I stumbled upon a book in the discount section called "Turning the Tide of War: 50 battles that changed the course of modern history." Very interesting summaries of specific battles, complete with diagrams, maps, etc. I found it all very intriguing because I really didn't know that much about most of those wars.

Sometime around that day (possibly before Borders, possibly after) I was rumaging through old papers in a box, mostly old elementary school art projects, old reports, stuff I hope to show my kids one day. But I found on the back of one of my sketches (a picture of my fictitional comic book character: eXtinguisher) a detailed account from a World War II vetrans' experience flying a B-52 bomber named the "Vicious Virgin." Intrigued by it and figuring it must be my grandfather's journal/memoir, I asked my dad if any such document existed. Regrettedly, he said nothing that he knows of, but he wishes he had obtained something like it before Grandpa died. Confused, I asked my dad what Grandpa's plane was named and immediately started a family mystery when my dad confirmed that indeed, Grandpa's plane was the Vicious Virgin. Now the hunt in on to find out where my found page had come from. Something exists, somewhere, and it is something my dad did not know about.

Between these two events an overriding feeling of ignorance hung over me. There's a heck of a lot of history that I know virtually nothing about, and should learn. Added to that feeling, a friend recommended a new historical war board game to me, Memoir '44. I've now got a full fledge history hunger, particularly World War II. Off to the local library, google.com, and my mom and dad's basement.

The end of a short era

Well, my short time in a corner office with a beautiful view out the window has come to an abrubt hault. Apparently, we are rearranging offices a bit and that means I'm out of my spacious corner cube. I'll need to snap a few pictures out the window to remember this view. It's always sad when the best view I'll probably ever have from my work place comes and goes at such a young age.

I'm moving now to a cramped little cubicle that is within site of a window, but about an eighth the size of this current one. Oh well... it was nice while it lasted and I knew it wasn't permanent.

Pictures to come soon.