Friday, December 28, 2012

2012/2013 State of the Me Address!!

Time to get my house in order -- figuratively and literally!!!

Before re-reading last year's post, I was thinking that I hadn't done very well on my goals -- but actually it looks like I did quite well overall! Let's review:

  • Just Keep Swimming: Passed with flying colors!!
  • Work harder at helping my kids develop good study habits so that they'll eventually do their homework on their own: Well, at least my sweetie and I have developed good habits of making sure the kids get their homework done. And the kids themselves are making progress on their study habits, ever so slowly...
  • Encourage their independence in other age-appropriate ways: We did very well on this one. We got Nico a phone and his own key and public transportation ticket, and now he can ride on the tram and bus by himself!! This is a little ahead of the schedule we'd originally planned for him (that he can ride the tram by himself when he's 12 -- he's actually 11), but he demonstrated that he was really ready for it. And this is the kid who's famous for frantically searching for his adult supervisors if they go out of his sight for 20 seconds -- big improvement!!
  • Continue to get my stuff in order in preparation for moving to a new apartment: Better than that -- I actually succeeded in moving to the new apartment!! I'm not quite done organizing everything yet (a critical component of the basement shelves I'm building was out of stock, grr), but we'll be truly installed before the end of January. And -- unlike our previous apartment -- we've actually installed lamps instead of leaving light-bulbs on wires hanging from the ceiling, yay!!!
  • I have some things I'd like to write for Main Street Plaza: Whatever I was planning to write, I'm sure I wrote it, and then I went one better -- I actually configured my own Linux server to host Main Street Plaza and my other sites!! My sites may not look like much at the moment, but it's like with organizing the apartment: you have to organize the cellar first before you can start on the parts that people can see. So this is a work in progress, but it is making real progress.
  • Attend Sunstone: This one went great!! I had a blast!! As you may recall, I co-organized two panels and presented on a third -- plus launched Mormon Alumni Association Books, and I've put up a place-holder on my server for the website. My only regret is that I didn't have as much time as I would have liked just to hang out and talk to friends.
  • Keep studying German: This is the one I did the worst on. I would have to say that over the year 2012, if anything I regressed in my confidence in carrying on a conversation in German (which hit its high point while I was at German camp in the Summer of 2011). I feel like I've been adding to my latent knowledge and understanding of German, though (reading stuff all the time and contemplating novel words and grammatical constructions), and if I focus on it in 2013 (as I plan to), this may be my year to really bloom!! It's weird to think that I've been here in Switzerland for five years now (only two less than the time I lived in France), and I still don't speak German as well as I spoke French from the beginning of when I moved to France, twelve years ago... This will be my year, though, to get on the ball!

Overall, I feel like 2012 was a successful year for laying groundwork. I have the back-end of Main Street Plaza, and can build it into the site I want it to be. We've bought and moved into the apartment that we want to settle in -- until retirement if all goes according to plan.

And now 2013 will be the year of building something!! :D

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Happy Christmas to all!!

I think I may finally have to end my series on Christmas specials. :(

In the canon of Christmas specials that I used to watch every year as a kid, there was one left that I was planning to write about this year ("Frosty the Snowman"), but after racking my brain for a few weeks, I couldn't think of anything I wanted to say about it. The others were all thought-provoking in different ways (click on my Christmas label to see them), but I guess now I'm left scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Anyway, this has been an incredibly busy holiday season for me. We just moved to a new apartment on the 14th, and then the following weekend (a couple of days before Christmas), I hosted the Christmas dinner party of the ex-Mormons of Switzerland: 17 people and three dogs!!

Fortunately, everybody brought food. In fact, each household individually brought enough food for the whole group, so we had some fantastic leftovers! :D Holly's pumpkin-curry soup played a key role.

And, in case unpacking and getting moved-in and decorating (and shopping) for Christmas weren't enough to do, at my real job we released our new product just before everyone started the Christmas holiday Friday night -- a very cool new educational software package to help kids who have difficulty in mathematics. (The English and French versions are also done, and they'll be officially released in January.)

All of this is my excuse for why I didn't have time to follow up on figuring out this strange Germanic tradition of having the baby Jesus bring kids Christmas presents, and how that can work exactly...

I'll try to have more insights on it by next year! :D

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!!!

Friday, November 23, 2012

More reader praise for ExMormon!!

This is from an email a reader sent me. I'm posting it here to my blog with permission:

I just wanted to tell you that I've just read Exmormon and that I've liked it a lot. It feels so realistic that I had to remember that you must have fictionalized parts of the story, and that anyway you couldn't have been each of the different narrators :-)

Also, I was actually surprised to find the story so engrossing, since I'm not usually so much into "people" stories (I'm more for the sf, "big ideas" kind). My initial interest was in the deconversion / leaving-religion-and-what-this-entails aspect of it, but I soon found myself simply caring about the characters and wanting desperately to find them again in each new story. I think you've written your book very well. Anyway, once I've finally started to read it, I couldn't put it down (can one say this for a pdf file?) and it was over in a couple of sittings. So thanks a lot! Now I'm suggesting to my wife to read it, too.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Rethinking Economics 2: Lessons from Switzerland!!

See here for part 1 on the private sector vs. the public sector.

Reading a post on a favorite blog, I learned that the far-right wing news outlet World News Daily recently wrote an article praising Switzerland and Sweden for having strong economies despite the current economic problems throughout the developed world.

Said the WND author: "Other governments could learn something." I agree wholeheartedly. I have learned some fantastic ideas from observing how things are done in Switzerland!! Mostly a simple point that absolutely can and should be applied elsewhere.

First off, what I learned is totally outside the box of the current Republican-Democrat polarized thinking in the United States today. WND naturally looks for interpretations from inside its ideological box -- but even on face-value that's a little absurd. Sure the Swiss political system is economically right-wing by European standards (though, still, practically flaming communists by American standards), but Sweden? Does there exist a country that is more Socialist? Clearly what we learn can't be simply that the Republicans' ideas are right and the Democrats' are wrong (or vice-versa). Maybe it's something else!

Now, I don't know much about Sweden, but Ed Brayton (linked above) points out that while they have low public debt, they also have one of the highest effective tax rates in the world, so maybe the lesson is to actually pay for government spending rather than repeatedly borrowing in order to cut taxes again...? Seems as good an interpretation as any. But, anyway, back to the country I know something about: Switzerland.

Before attempting to apply the Swiss model, it's important to understand the ways in which Switzerland is unique. The key point is that Switzerland is a tiny country with a ton of money. And the fact that the country is relatively less socialist than its neighbors is in large part the result of the wealth rather than the cause. How Switzerland became wealthy is a long and complicated story -- I'll just mention that the highly lucrative and questionable banking industry played a non-negligible role, and staying neutral during WWII didn't hurt either.

Then, when more people have the means to find their own individual solutions to things (like quality child-care and early-childhood education, for example), there's less push to find common solutions. So, for example, if you have small children and don't happen to be wealthy, you're better off in neighboring France.

But the interesting part of Switzerland's story isn't so much where the wealth originally came from as what they've done with it.

Switzerland supports an astonishing amount of scientific research. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) gets more than a billion Francs per year (a Franc is about a dollar), and several other universities in Switzerland have comparable budgets. In addition to hosting CERN (a multi-national nuclear physics research organization), there's also the Paul Scherrer Institute (which I have toured) -- full of particle accelerators as well.

The research performed at these institutions gets applied in real-world practical applications. For example, the Paul Scherrer Institute studies proton therapy, which is better than traditional radiation therapy for certain types of tumors. Additionally, ETH provides assistance for people to start their own companies based on research done there. I've seen how effective their programs are -- I work for one such company. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Also, remember how amazed I was by French public transportation? Well, Swiss public transportation is even better. If you haven't lived it, I can hardly describe how quick and convenient it is to go anywhere in the country (including wilderness) without ever getting behind the wheel of a car.

Additionally, Switzerland is a world leader in healthy, organic, sustainable agriculture, and a trend-setter in terms of buying local, seasonal foods (or, failing that, buying fair trade items).

In the US, economic health is constantly viewed in terms of consumer spending. But most of these consumer goods we're talking about are fundamentally disposable, and typically aren't even produced in the US. A wise economist once said that you don't pay people to dig holes and fill them back in again just to fuel the economy.

Suppose that one country (say, Finland) chooses to make education the top priority, and turns "teacher" into a highly-respected, well-paid, coveted position. Suppose another country (say, Germany) chooses to create incentives to power the country with solar energy. Suppose another country (say, Switzerland) funds world-class science research institutions, plus a super-efficient rail network, and creates incentives for sustainable agriculture. Suppose another country (do I need to name names here?) chooses to buy a mountain of junk from China.

All of these purchases fuel their respective countries' economies.

But at the end of the day, one of these countries has a highly-educated populace. One of these countries has extensive renewable power (and all of the security that goes with it). One of these countries has a robust and innovative tech industry, not to mention highly efficient transportation and a clean environment. And one of these countries has an enormous landfill and massive debt to China.

That's what I learned from Switzerland.

The US needs to stop seeing spending for the sake of spending as a good thing -- especially going into debt to do it. America's children would be better off if the American people could find the political will to make it a priority to spend wisely for the future.

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Rethinking economics 1: the private sector is the only true sector

Blogger Brent (of "A Mormon in the Cheap Seats") wrote an excellent post for faithful Mormons about how social services for the poor in the US are more about levelling the playing field than about creating dependency. While I agree with his main points, one thing that has repeatedly struck me about recent American political discourse is that discussion of government social spending has been framed almost exclusively in terms of helping the poor (and whether they deserve it, etc.). Yes, keeping people from starving on the streets is an important component of functioning modern society -- but it's not the only role played by the public sector.

Let's take a step back and talk about some basic economics. In a modern society, most goods and services are provided either by the private sector (individuals, corporations, private organizations) or the public sector (government, at the local, state, or national level). Each of these two sectors has its advantages and disadvantages (as I discussed here). Any good American can tell you that there are plenty of goods and services that are produced a lot more efficiently by the private sector, motivated by private profits. However, it seems like most Americans are unwilling or unable to accept that there exist critical goods and services that can be provided better by the public sector.

I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out. I think the classic example from economics 101 is the lighthouse. In a costal city, no private individual or corporation profits enough from the lighthouse to pay the entire cost of building it, but the entire city profits from the trade that is made possible by affording ships safe access to the local harbor.

A modern society has a lot of lighthouses (metaphorically speaking). Scientific research is a big one. Technology a cornerstone of modern industry, and scientific research drives technological advances. However, the private sector is horrible at scientific research because the profitable kind is the kind that sets out to prove "my product works and is safe". I assume that I don't have to explain that if you set out to prove a pre-selected conclusion, at best you will get something that superficially resembles science, but without the accuracy.

Another lighthouse is education. A modern society benefits from having an educated populace. However, there are (at least) two big ideological obstacles to having successful public education in the United States. The first is that people seem to believe that public education is some sort of "entitlement" -- which, in Americanspeak, means "Some free-loader getting undeserved money, goods, or services on somebody else's dime." The second is a pervasive American belief that the government can never do anything right.

This belief is so pervasive that many Americans aren't even aware that it is an assumption that they are making. For example, if the government provides some service badly (say, for example, public transportation) many Americans will immediately conclude that the problem is that the government is inherently incompetent -- rather than looking beyond that idea for other causes for the particular problem, or looking for examples of other governments that have provided the same service well (for possible ideas to emulate).

It surprises me how many people take it as an unquestioned article of faith that "we need to cut the government smaller." Regardless of what the problem is, that's always the solution. Now, certainly, there exist countries that absolutely would benefit from cutting their government smaller. But in the United States, after many decades of acting on this belief, maybe more random hacking at it (solely for the purpose of making it smaller) isn't helpful. Why not change to insisting on competence? Insisting that what the government does, it should do it well.

I know that "government regulation" is a dirty word in American English. But I would like to make the radical suggestion that while it's possible for government regulations to be done badly (causing inefficiency), it's also possible for government regulations to be done well -- achieving desirable goals for your society.

I saw an interesting illustration of this idea in a recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek. (Why was I reading Bloomberg Businessweek? Somebody left a copy of it in the train, and it turned out to be surprisingly interesting...) Anyway, the thing that struck me in the article was that in the US, government regulations are/were preventing people who want solar energy from installing it, whereas government regulations in Germany were instrumental in building a huge (largely private) investment in a solar network that is cost-effective, despite Germany not being a particularly sunny country. And the US public utility companies looking out for their short-term profits were a large part of the problem, so privatizing (a popular solution to government inefficiency) would do the opposite of helping. It's time to expect government competence instead.

How did Americans come to believe that the private sector is the only true sector? Here's my guess:

The cold war had a huge impact on American thought. A lot of what it means to be American is tied up in being the opposite of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union crumbled from within, it was almost universally interpreted by Americans as proof that the American way is the right way and the Soviet way was the wrong way. And this leads many people to the conclusion that the public sector is always wrong and the profit-driven private sector is the only true sector of the economy. (A secondary/related factor: too many educated people mistaking Ayn Rand novels for Economics textbooks instead of taking an actual Economics course.)

The problem with that logic is that just because having the entire economy run by a centralized public sector doesn't work, that doesn't imply that having the private sector run the whole economy does work. The culprit may well be a lack of balance. Indeed, the US seems dead set on becoming the example to illustrate that leaning too far in the other direction doesn't work either.

See also part 2: Lessons from Switzerland!!

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Nerd-hobby time again!!!







Thursday, October 04, 2012








Saturday, September 22, 2012

How to understand Israel from comic books alone













Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Children's memories of childhood

The other day Nico and Leo were talking about what they remember about living in Bordeaux. They were both born in Bordeaux, and lived there until they were 6 and 4 (respectively). Now they're 11 and 9 -- and soon we'll hit the five-year anniversary of our move to Switzerland.

Leo said he only remembered three things from Bordeaux: (1) The chocolate croissants (this is one of the most fantastic things about living in France -- every Saturday and Sunday morning we would walk a couple of blocks to the local bakery and get a big bag of fresh-baked croissants and a loaf of bread), (2) The dog-poop that we always had to watch out for on our way to the bakery (this was pretty memorable for me, too, see merde, alors !), and (3) That we had a toy house inside our house. In the kids' room we had one of those plastic toy houses that's big enough for little kids to play inside, but gave it to friends when we moved to Switzerland. I don't have a picture of it, but here are some pictures of our old house.

Nico remembered a little more. He said he vaguely remembered his school (though he couldn't remember any of his teachers or friends), and he remembered the local crêperie where we used to go to have crêpes for dinner. (Then he remarked that he can't wait until we go to Paris again so we can have crêpes with whipped cream.)

It's very cute when they ask about what happened when they were little. When Nico was barely old enough to walk and talk, he loved cars. We would walk all around Bordeaux looking at all the different cars, and Nico could identify a number of different makes and models. Now, not so much, but the one constant has been that he loves anything that has a long list of different variations that he can draw elaborate charts of.

Leo asked me a few months ago what he was like as a baby, and I told him (truthfully) that he was a hugging maniac. He was the sweetest, calmest baby in the world as long as I was holding and cuddling him, but he absolutely would not tolerate being put down by himself even for a second. Fortunately, when he was a tiny baby, I had the opportunity to work from home (writing my first Java book), and Leo was resting on me essentially the whole time I was working on it. And he has remained incredibly affectionate to this day. He's the huggingest little 9-year-old boy you can imagine.

I feel like I should go through all of our old family photos and make an album of them. One weird problem of the digital photo age is that all our photos are in some hard-drive somewhere, and the kids almost never see them. They'd probably remember their earlier adventures better if they were reinforced with photos.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

The only thing worse than people talking about you is people not talking about you...

My mom used to say that anyway -- and that's the attitude I'm taking towards some news I discovered the other day. Apparently there's a new journal of Mormon Apologetics, and they devoted some space in their inaugural issue to calling my blogs "childish rubbish" and "bit raunchy and as lacking intellectual content."

Hard to believe they bother to publish claims like that about little ol' me? Well, you can read all about it on my latest Main Street Plaza post.

And -- for those of you who aren't interested in such frivolity -- I uploaded another episode of the Star Trek series I starred in!!! This is a funny one involving a Tholian plot to steal my pet hamster:

Tuesday, August 21, 2012






Here's my assessment of the posts on the list:






Sunday, August 12, 2012

Back in Switzerland, and back to my usual fun!!





Monday, July 30, 2012

My Vagina Testimony!!












That's your cue to take a drink.






Monday, July 23, 2012

Fun at Camp Quest Minnesota!!

It's time for Summer camp, and I just got a chance to visit Camp Quest Minnesota!!

Camp Quest is a week-long secular camp for kids, full of friendship, fun, and learning -- this year's Minnesota theme is the ocean, especially the deep sea! The Chaplain wrote a good post explaining what Camp Quest is all about, so to avoid repeating what she wrote, I'll mention a few points I learned on the tour I got from the director Jeannette (who, BTW, was kind enough to mention that she read and liked my book):

Camp Quest Minnesota is one of the first Camp Quest locations. They get campers from all over North America, but lately a higher proportion are local since more camps have been opening. Nonetheless, the Minnesota chapter just keeps expanding -- this year they had more than 50 campers, essentially filling the camp to capacity.

I asked if they'd perhaps move to a bigger location, but they're happy with the current facility, the Voyageur Environmental Center (which runs its own camp for kids for the rest of the Summer). Instead, they'll probably expand to offer two separate weeks of camp.

Now, you may have heard that "Camp Quest was specifically designed for children of Unitarians, atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, humanists, or whatever terms might be applied to those who maintain a naturalistic, not supernaturalistic, world view." Jeannette mentioned her pet peeve is that the press constantly labels it an "atheist camp" (which probably causes some people to imagine it is some sort of indoctrination camp, parallel to Jesus Camp).

However, it is not an atheist camp, it is a secular camp -- which means the kids are encouraged to choose their own labels or choose not to label themselves as they see fit. They are encouraged to develop critical thinking skills and also develop respect and friendship for people they may not entirely agree with. The bottom line is curiosity -- encouraging young minds to explore!!

OK, so I'm wearing an atheist T-shirt in this one -- but I'm on vacation, and it was the only clean shirt I had left!

My kids liked it too -- I may be sending them here in a couple of years.

Though I hope the bear is not representative of what they'll run into here...

Opening up these sorts of camps around the country (plus some international) isn't free -- there are big start-up costs in addition to the standard operating costs. That's why we're having a fund-raising competition again this year -- PZ Myers vs. the horde!!

Last year the horde won -- and as part of the bet, I was supposed to get my Mormon relatives to sing some select tunes from The Book of Mormon (the musical) during our big family reunion.

Unfortunately, it didn't work out because we didn't have the community center rented long enough to do a sing-along after the talent show. So, my apologies for not following through -- and I hope to make up for it by helping raise some more money for Camp Quest this year. Please consider making a donation!

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

My great big Mormon family reunion!!!


This isn't even everybody.





My "talent" was designing this fab reunion T-shirt


Yellow team rules!!



This is everybody.

Thursday, July 05, 2012

Save the humans!!

"Save the Planet" -- as a rallying cry for environmentalism -- has got to be one of the most tragic cases of mis-branding I know of.

When there's a choice between things you want or need now vs. "the planet" or "the environment", it's too easy to say "I don't care that much whether this or that species goes extinct," or "the planet can fend for itself."

The thing is, though that "the planet" isn't really in danger. It's going to keep revolving around the Sun regardless of what we do. "Life on Earth" will too. Even in the worst-case scenarios, we humans almost certainly won't manage to wipe out all life.

All human life -- all of the planet's potential to support human life -- well, that's a different story.

One of the most amazing and wonderful things about the human species is our capacity to think about the future, and to make decisions based on their consequences.

But are we good enough at it to save ourselves?

Saturday, June 30, 2012

For want of a common language




Here's another quick story to illustrate:




















Sunday, June 03, 2012

Whatever will I do with you, tube...?






Thursday, May 17, 2012

Me on Star Trek -- Again!!




Here are the first three:



Sunday, May 06, 2012


If you click on my parenting category, you'll see that we've had various adventures explaining religion to our kids. (In a nutshell, it's not a topic that we have reason to talk about often, but we don't want it to be a grand mystery to our kids.)

The other day, I was on a walk with Leo, and he turned to me with a question:

"Mom, why is Julius Caesar so important that they started the calendar on his birthday?"

My first reaction was: "Wha....? What are you talking about?"

Then it hit me. We've been reading a lot of Asterix comics lately, and they famously all start with the same page, explaining that the year is 50 B.C. -- which in French is "the year 50 before J.C.." Julius Caesar is an important character in the series (the leader of the known world the story is set in), and he's sometimes called by his initials "J.C."

So, I started racking my brain, trying to think of how to explain the whole Christian calendar thing. "Well, you see, Leo, the 'J.C.' of the calendar isn't actually Julius Caesar..." I began.

"Haha, I know! It's Jesus Christ!! Hahahahahahaha!"


Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Minecraft Challenge: Griefers 1, me 0...

Sorry to keep posting about Minecraft -- I don't want to make a separate Minecraft blog, so if you're not into Minecraft, just scroll past this one...

Ever since I discovered Minecraft, I keep feeling tempted to set myself different challenges!! And most of them have worked out, but not all. For example:

1. Modify the Minecraft server program so that it has the features I want.

This went quite well -- if you're interested in what features I added, I'll list them at the bottom of this post.

2. Design an attractive building.

You can build anything you can imagine (as long as your imagination is limited to a cubic grid of cubes...), but it's surprisingly tricky to design a building that's not butt-ugly. So I took up the challenge, and think I did fairly well. You can judge the results for yourself on this video that I posted earlier.

3. figure out how to make videos of myself and my kids playing Minecraft, and upload them to YouTube.

This one kind of goes without saying, see above.

4. Design a fortress that is difficult to attack.

Given the peculiarities of Minecraft (eg. it's easy-peasy to chop through walls), the strategies for building a castle in Minecraft are different from the strategies one uses when making a real castle. My brain kept involuntarily wandering back to this question: If I were playing on a faction, or "capture the flag" or something like that, how could I design my castle so that my team would win?

The crazy thing about this is that I would probably never play such a game (because I don't enjoy competitive or strategy games), plus I'm a something of a pacifist, so I'm ambivalent about making war into a game. But somehow my brain hit upon this as an engineering puzzle, and there's basically nothing I love more than engineering puzzles!! My brain could not rest until I'd solved it. Again, you can judge the results I posted to YouTube.

5. Outwit the griefers on an open server on the Internet.

This one was something of an engineering puzzle that got stuck in my head, too. Here's how it works:

There isn't one big, official Minecraft server out there -- to play multiplayer, different individuals set up their own servers for people to join. Often people make a server that's open to anyone, and post the address on the Internet. The problem is that there are lots of people who make a game of giving people grief (hence the name "griefers"). Their game is to go to open servers and do as much damage as possible to buildings and structures that other people spent lots of time making.

I wanted to see if I could log onto the Wild, Wild West of one of these servers and succeed in making myself a little home where I could gather and produce the supplies I need. And maybe start trading and sharing items with other players once I got myself set up. Part of the challenge was that I'd never really spent any time playing on any setting other than "peaceful" (i.e. no monsters and your character doesn't need food), so I wasn't even used to dealing with monsters.

My plan against the griefers was simple: Instead of building an obvious house in the village with the rest of the players, I'd go up into the mountains and dig myself a hole in the face of a cliff. Cover the entrance with dirt instead of using a door. After all, griefers can't attack what they can't find!! Brilliant, huh?

Can you find my house in this picture???

Unfortunately, my plan had one fatal flaw: Everyone else on the server was getting repeatedly griefed. And the admins responded by repeatedly rolling the world data back to an earlier state, before the griefers arrived.

This ended up being a big problem for me on the server that I randomly chose. Because of the time-zone thing (I'm in Europe and I think the other players are mostly in North America), the backup was done at exactly the wrong time for me. The Americans would work on their buildings, the admins would make a back-up, and go to bed. Then I'd wake up and play a little in the morning. Then the griefers would come and wreck stuff. Then the admins would wake up and say "OMG, griefers!!!" and roll the server back to the backup. Thus, the Americans' progress was saved and mine was repeatedly deleted.

** Edit ** I just looked at the server's website, and apparently it's UK-based! Maybe I'm just the only Minecraft player in the world who's a morning person? lol. So scratch "American" in the above and replace it with "night people". ;)

I had done one fairly complex (but necessary) improvement to my cliff-house just before the first roll-back. I logged on the next day to find my improvement undone. "No matter," thought I, "I'll redo it." So I redid it, and it was even better the second time, so I was fine with it.

The next day, I logged in and again found myself right back to where I was before making the renovation!!! It was like being in the movie Groundhog Day!!

"Well, I'll try one more time," thought I. My home improvement wasn't done quite as neatly as the previous one, but I added a whole bunch of new stuff, and gathered some great new items. I thought it was up there long enough to get backed-up, so I invited my son to join me on the server, and I set up some stuff for him in my cliff-house as well, so he could play there with the other kids.

I was arranging the place to get it just right for my son when I saw some very ominous discussion appear on the screen. An admin was arguing with someone, and accusing them of griefing. Then I saw the automated announcement that the server was going down....

Then I reconnected to the server....


It was Groundhog Day again!!!!!

All of my beautiful cave-house improvements, and all of my supplies that I'd gathered, disappeared!! My character was again transported back in time.

So, the griefers won. They wanted to destroy stuff that other people spent time working on, and they succeeded quite nicely. I concluded that, no, I can't outsmart the griefers and survive on the Wild West of a server where I can't control when the back-ups get made.


Bonus: The features of my home server mod!

  • "/freebie" command: Once per (Minecraft) day, you can get one pack of a random number of random items.
  • Pumpkin Scuba!! If you put a pumpkin on your head, you can stay underwater as long as you want without drowning!
  • Teleportation commands (ideas copied from mods made by other people): /sethome, /home, /back, /ascend, /descend, plus requests to teleport to other players.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Fun with toys -- Lego vs. Minecraft!!!

As you may know, I love Legos, and lately I've gotten totally hooked on Minecraft!!! And it's no coincidence. I just got done writing an article for my professional (video game programming blog) analyzing Lego's failed massive multiplayer online game, compared with Minecraft -- which is the game Lego wishes they'd made: Minecraft: Why Lego Group are kicking themselves about now…

I spent an unbelievable amount of time contemplating strategies for constructing a fortress that could withstand an attack -- for use when playing castle siege with friends. Then I made a video about it:

Here's an example of playing castle siege with my kids:

And here are some Minecraft videos that my kids directed on their own. Leo's video:

And Nico's:

Ok, we probably could be spending our time more constructively -- but we're having fun!!!

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Dream Diary

Back when I was pregnant with my first baby, and when he was very small, I kept a dream diary for about a year.

This was largely because I'm fascinated by the way the rules of the dream universe differ from the rules of reality universe (things can suddenly transform, and your objectives can suddenly change, and yet the dream universe rules aren't totally arbitrary). Plus I had the fantasy of writing a dream-universe graphic novel, a bit along the lines of Little Nemo in Slumberland.

Then, going back to work (and having a fixed wake-up-and-get-to-the-office time) kind of put a stop to taking the time to remember what I dreamed.

Lately, I've tried to start one up again, with some success, but I've met with some obstacles:

For one thing, a lot of my dreams are so embarrassing that I don't even want to write them down. Yeah, I know that the advantage of leaving Mormonism is that your journal is for yourself and not for the scriptures of the angels, but still! I don't want to feel like I have to burn my dream diary well in advance of my death to avoid having it read by posterity...

Secondly, all of my somewhat-less-embarrassing dreams seem to involve missing flights! It's weird!!! I don't think I fly that often, so I can't figure out why every other dream I remember seems to be about how I lost the info about where and when I need to go to catch XYZ flight to wherever, and maybe I can't get to the airport in time, etc....


Sunday, April 08, 2012

Joanna and me









Wednesday, April 04, 2012

Here's what has been sucking up my time lately...

I've got a big, cool (but slightly procrastinatable) project I'm working on, so, naturally, I spent the whole day Saturday going "Just a little more Minecraft... OK, just a leeeetle wee bit more Minecraft...."

One Minecraft challenge that I set for myself was to try to make an attractive building design, given the constraint that it has to be made of stacked cubes. I decided to avoid making any flat rectangular walls since I noticed that the scenery can be fairly attractive, and it's composed of surfaces that aren't flat.

Here's a video of me giving a tour of my palace:

I don't want to dismiss this as a total waste of time because it involves spending time with Leo, doing something he enjoys. I posted some of Nico's videos the other day; Here's Leo's video:

Monday, April 02, 2012

Baby's first YouTube video...

Life is pretty exciting here on the parenting frontier known as the Internet!! Today's challenge is what to do about kids who want to express their creativity by directing their own YouTube videos, based on YouTube videos they like to watch. And they don't want to set them to private because they want to get comments from viewers like the other kids who post stuff to YouTube...

Here's the philosophy I'm going with: I've told them that the #1 rule of posting anything to the open Internet (either on a blog or on YouTube) is not to give any identity information at all, ever. Don't say where you live, and pick a handle to use instead of your name. Does that seem reasonable? Any other ideas?

My son came up with the following two videos. As you can probably tell, he did them all by himself, with no help from me. (OK, well, I helped him a little bit to transfer his drawings from TuxPaint to iMovie.)

Not bad, huh?

He'd really like some votes for team captains on his "Battle for Idiotic Money" show, so if you have a YouTube account, and are willing to leave a nice comment, that would be great!! (Please don't write anything mean and make me turn his videos private.)

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Great new reviews of ExMormon, wow!!



I also found another cool review on Amazon here:



Saturday, February 11, 2012

People who are different than me

They are so dang hard to understand!!!

Here's an inspiring example of getting it, though:











Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Vote (for me!) in the 2011 Brodies!!




Monday, January 30, 2012

Swiss Post-Mo Club: Getting Better and Better!

We just had a fantastic ice-skating-and-fondue party with three new families! How'd this happen?

Shortly after moving to Switzerland, I signed up as the contact/coordinator of the Switzerland chapter of the post-Mormon organization. But, really, it was mostly just me and two other couples (who didn't even meet through post-Mormon), so it kind of wavered between being "the Swiss post-Mo club" and being a handful of people who happened to be friends with each other. Once in a blue moon someone would visit from the US, and we'd have an actual ex-Mormon gathering.

Then someone emailed me about the group, and I saved his name to include in the next exmo event. Some months later, another person emailed me -- this time a mom with kids in my area, and I met her and posted about it on post-Mo. Then, another family who had recently moved to Switzerland saw that, and here we are.

The conversation was amazing!! We had a group of people who had never (or barely) met before, yet we immediately had so much in common and so much to talk about!

The funny part was that -- by crazy coincidence -- our group got on the same bus with some Mormon missionaries!! No joke!

I tried to make polite conversation with one of them (I'm always curious about the situation with Switzerland not letting any more American mishies in), but I'm afraid I may have made a bad impression. I don't bear them any ill will -- honestly, I thought it was cool that we happened to run into another bunch of people who have this exotic culture in common with us, and I'd be more than happy to have a friendly chat with them.

I have to teach my kids a little better manners though. I'd been chatting with mishie #1 for a few minutes when my son Nico suddenly said (full voice) "Mom!! That guy's a Mormon missionary!" (They learned about missionaries from the Book of Mormon musical.)

Then, as we were getting off the bus, Nico kept talking about the mishies. Later we had a discussion about talking about people who are standing right there and can hear what you're saying, the appropriateness or lack thereof, etc.

Anyway, the event was great fun, and we're definitely planning get together again!!

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Just another weekend in Paris!

One of my complaints about moving from Bordeaux to Zurich was the relative (in)convenience in getting to Paris. Bordeaux is three hours from Paris by TGV, with trains every hour. Zurich, OTOH, was more than five hours from Paris. But now we have a new TGV route, cutting the trip down to four hours!! (Still not quite like in Bordeaux, but getting there!) So, when my husband had a conference to attend in France, I took the opportunity to gather up the kids and meet him in Paris for the weekend!

Naturally, the kids were thrilled because they got Bey Blades as their being-good-on-the-train treat. Fortunately that wasn't the only cool part:

Here Leo's pouting because his daddy just told him that he can't go on the ferris wheel.

And here he is happy -- right after riding the ferris wheel. Nico and Leo are both showing off the little souvenir Eiffel Towers their daddy bought them.

Leo also enjoyed riding the merry-go-round of extinct and endangered animals.

To keep it balanced, here's a cute picture of Nico too.

And the obligatory picture on the Paris Metro!

This picture reminded me of this other picture from long ago:

They grow up, but they stay the same in so many cute ways! When they were little, we used to take them out and run them around the fountain to get their energy out, and it's still a fun way to have a race!

I found another space invader to add to my collection.

And discovered that my sweetie has quite a knack for dramatic reading!!

A fun trip overall -- I can't wait to do it again!!