Trey’s Blog

As you may or may not know, I’ve been actively camping with my daughter this past year, and it has been very exciting.  We are part of the YMCA program, Safari Princesses.  This being my first year I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it has been nothing short of great.  The people in our tribe are fantastic people and we all enjoy getting out to spend time with our daughters and giving them an opportunity to play freely.  Now that this program is over for this year, I started planning for the next season.  I found a good deal on a popup camper on Craigslist, and made the purchase.  My girls couldn’t be more eager to go on the next campout.  They’d be plenty happy camping in the driveway if I’d let them.  Anyway, what most new buyers don’t realize and old buyers already know is that you aren’t just buying the camper.  The are a lot of other expenses associated the purchase.  Besides the obvious license registration, there may be some sales taxes, storage costs, maintenance costs.  You’ll also find yourself needing to purchase items for camping you didn’t need before.  It adds a new level of complexity, but it sure makes ‘roughing it’ pretty comfortable.

First of all, let me state that I do not condone evading the police. I read this story today and it reminded me of a question I’ve had in the past, but never asked. Here is the story/scenario:

An innocent bystander was killed Tuesday morning during a high-speed chase in southeast Houston.

My question is this… would this innocent bystander still be alive had the police not been chasing this person? I know it seems obvious the person committed a crime and must be cited for that crime, but is that citation worth the life of those around the chase? I’m curious what you think. Let me know in the comments section.

It has been a while since my last post.  I’ve been busy camping with my girls and readying a business plan.  I should have more posts up shortly.

Let me premise by stating my daughter is deathly afraid of just about any pet, except fish, which could be a full post in itself.

My mother came over last night and we were discussing the death of a family pet, my grandmother’s 16 year-old cat. When it came time to explain to my daughter what happens to pets, we simply told her that pets go to heaven when they die. Ten seconds after we told her this, we realized that this may have just caused our daughter to be afraid of heaven due to her fear of pets. We had a good laugh about it, but I wonder if this is something to be concerned with later?

This will seem a little odd, but I was talking to my daughter the other day about the people living in our neighborhood and she asked who our neighbors were. She wanted to know if the people down the street were our neighbors. Honestly, I couldn’t come up with a logical answer to that question. Basically I couldn’t figure out what constitutes a neighbor. Most dictionaries state that a neighbor is someone living near or bordering you. Many people just use the word neighbor to describe people living next to them, then others call those same people ‘next door neighbors.’ So are the people down the street our neighbors? We are in a neighborhood after all. What I finally told my daughter was that the people bordering our house were our neighbors, and each house in our neighborhood has neighbors, so the collection of each of these neighbors makes up our neighborhood. So those ‘people down the street’ I mentioned earlier would be our neighbor’s neighbor’s … neighbor. Is that right? I don’t know, but that is what I’m sticking to until I’m convinced otherwise. Let me know what you think.

I’d also like to hear other stories where your children generated abstract thought in you.

In the past 2 weeks, I dove head first into the world of XML with XSL, and now I’ve found myself floating to the top. The fundamental reason for using these two together is to allow the retrieval of data from a data source, output it as XML, then apply the look and feel to it using XSLT and CSS. By keeping the data separate from the design, we are able to adjust the look and feel without bothering with the backend programming or data. When your company requires a Change Management process to publish code, this will be your best friend.

One issue I came across that others had also come across was the confusion of what XSL calls variables. Many programmers such as myself find ourselves upset when we cannot reassign values to these variables, but XSL intended for these variables to behave in the same way that variables do in a math equation. They don’t reassign. They get substituted as the problem is executed. While this seems easy enough to grasp, I still wasn’t happy with the fact that no website I visited offered the solution to what I needed accomplish. All they did was argue why XSL variables made sense or not.

In a loop, I was wanting to trigger a flag (variable) that would tell the program to do something different after that flag was raised. This is easy enough to do in most programming languages, but XSL is special in that way. Though not published anywhere easily found, the way around this is using recursion and passing your values through parameters rather than variables. In other words, you need call the template with a initial value for your flag, then call the template again from within the template with a new set of parameters, which reflect the change you wanted to make (to your flag). I have a sample XSLT here. You see near the end of the days template, I call the template again with new parameter values. I also removed the for-each because with the recursion it is not required for my project. Just make sure you program your recursion to end at a certain point, otherwise all of you programmer friends will laugh at you as your XSL gets caught in an infinite loop. I’ve done that enough that this time, I avoided it. I hope this helps others looking for the answer to how to reassign values when XSL variables won’t take them.

Despite not actually having any fast cars, I really do enjoy watching, driving, and hearing fast cars go fast. Most of them are out of my budget, so unless something major happens, I’ll likely never have a car with more than 200hp. Anyway, a lot of people out there like to put their cars to the test, Dyno test to be specific. Some of those people video tape these tests and put them online. Check out this drag-ready Mustang blowing 1200hp. Notice how the turbo charger blows loud enough to cancel out the engine noise.

Has anyone had an issue with creating a YouTube account? I have one, but a friend of mine is having an issue. She fills out the form to create the account, but then gets presented with the following error:

“Sorry. Based on the information you have submitted to us, you are ineligible to register for YouTube.com”

I thought this was very odd because nothing she put into the form as abnormal, deviant or criminal. What criteria do they use to determine who can and who cannot create an account? I’ve seen a large amount of videos on YouTube and there a lot of stupid stupid videos on there. How did those people get accounts?

See Imelda’s post here

I think the first thing I should mention here is that I live in Harris County, which surrounds Houston, TX and beyond.  With that said, I was wondering if we had the most amount of police coverage in the state or even the country.  The following are the police patrol cars that can be seen on the average commute around Houston:

• Houston Police
• Metro Police
• Harris County Sheriff
• Harris County Precinct Constable
• Texas State Trooper (Department of Public Safety)

Obviously they all have overlapping jurisdictions, but I thought it was odd that we can pass this many different officers on a single trip into town.  Is that normal for larger cities or counties?  That is my random thought of the day.

This is a very neat photography site where the photographer always seems to find the perfect moment to capture with lots of vivid color and beautiful landscapes. Well, they’ve just released a book in hardcover and softcover and I’ve put in my order. You too can get one here, but I recommend checking out the site first. If you like photography at all, then you’ll likely appreciate this work.

daily dose of imagery

I’m fully aware of the ‘No kid left behind’ campaign by the Bush Administration, but I do not like that fact that this implies that ‘no kid will get ahead.’ I’ve heard from many sources, mostly from school teachers and administrators, that around the second grade, most kids learning levels/skills will level off. Perhaps what they mean is that the children who are behind should be caught up by then, by what this also means is that the children who are excelling will be unchallenged until the rest of the herd catches up. Is this all they have to offer our kids who excel? I know many parents, like myself, may suffer from pride in our children, but it wasn’t until I heard the goals to be reached by the end of Kindergarten that I got worried. They mentioned children should know certain basic site words, be able to count to 100, and other such tasks. My daughter can do these things already, so this tells me that for the next 9 months, she’ll be relearning her ABCs, coloring pictures, and learning to count. She is not the only one in her class who is showing these signs of boredom. My wife and I know of at least one other student who is already capable of completing the tasks set as the goal for the year. Since she is in Kindergarten, my daughter must wait until Spring to be tested for the gifted and talented program, whatever it is called now, but that is not necessarily what I’m looking for in educating her. I’d presonally like to not label her while challenging her.

My daughter’s birthday falls only four days after the enrollment cutoff date of September 2. Because of this, she had to wait a year to be enrolled in Kindergarten. We felt she was more than ready and the Principal of the school would not allow us to enroll her earlier than her birthdate would allow. Here we are a year later and she is showing signs of first grade readiness. While other kids are learning how to write their names, she is reading and writing stories. This puts me in a position I didn’t want to be in because I’m not in favor of having children skip grades unless it is absolutely necessary. I simply wanted her to start Kindergarten when she was ready one year ago.  When I was young the cutoff date actually came closer to the start of school date, so it made a little moer sense, but I would also venture to guess that kids who showed signs of readiness were not told to wait their turn. Challenge our kids!

I’d love hear feedback on this. If I’m wrong, please provide me the proof so I can learn to be right.

Our wildlife sitings have been very far and few between since they finished the development behind our neighborhood. Today, my wife found these two baby bunnies in our backyard when she spooked them with the lawn mower. They attempted to run, but we caught them. Once they calmed down and realized we meant no harm, they sat pretty still. The kids loved the visit and the opportunity to pet these little bunnies. After looking where they were hiding out, I determined that they had made a little burrow of sorts under our swingset, so when we were finished with the petting zoo, we placed them near their burrow. See the pic for the full cuteness.