Introducing the Adventurers of America

Adventurers of America logo

After a while of feeling disappointed that there wasn't something similar to Scouting for adults (besides volunteering with Scouting units, which is also very rewarding), I decided to create my own program.

The purposes of the Adventurers of America are:

• the promotion of volunteering time, money, and other means to the cause and purpose of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA),
• the improvement and personal development of its membership, and
• creating an environment for the sharing of ideas, pastimes, and virtues among adults.

In order to achieve these purposes, I created a set of badges that can be earned.  Each badge has 5 levels of proficiency, each with their own set of requirements.  This gives everyone the opportunity to explore new skills, as well as improve in them.

The current badges we have requirements for are:

• Camper
• Chef
• Runner
• Chess Player
• Cyclist
• Geocacher
• Hiker
• Golfer
• Mini golfer
• Bookworm
• Movie Buff
• Sports Fanatic
• Marksman
• Citizen
• Sailor
• Audiophile
• Believer

We are always looking for suggestions for new badge and updates to requirements, and have a few additional badges in the works. 

If the Adventurers of America seems like something you would like to participate in, please sign up here.

Additionally, we encourage folks to meet together to work on these requirements, especially the ones that are not already in your field of expertise.  To that end, we also register groups, which we call expeditions.  If you would like to start an expedition, either with people in your neighborhood, people at work, or even with friends across the country, please fill out an application for a expedition here.  Everyone who is not part of an expedition will become a member of the Independent Expedition, designed for those who don't have enough interested folks in their area.

Please contact me with any additional questions you have about the Adventurers of America.

I have a confession to make (or why I'm okay with the recent election)

My fellow Americans,

I write to you in the wake of the federal elections we held on Tuesday.  It appears as though Mr. Donald Trump will be chosen by the Electoral College as the next President of the United States.  I have seen strong, negative reactions to this news from some of the people I am privileged to associate with as I go about my day.

There are a couple of things I need to get off my chest, things that I don't feel could be done justice in the course of a typical conversation.  I'm writing this post to stay true to myself, and allow others to understand how I see things.  I've bolded them for your convenience.

First of all, I am a registered Republican.  Hopefully this doesn't come as a surprise to those who have sincerely listened to my opinions on political issues.  While I don't agree with everything the national party does, I feel that as a voter who is registered in Utah County, Utah, my ideals, beliefs, and values most closely align with the Republican platform, and that the discrepancies between how I think and the party platform are trivial.

You should also know that I have had to opportunity to vote for electors during three presidential elections.  The second big confession is that I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, the first year I was eligible to vote.  My 18-year-old self was trying to figure out exactly what my beliefs were, and how important each of them were.  In fact, I'm still trying to figure that out today.  In any case, I thought President Obama would do a better job than Senator McCain.

I was out of the country, serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for the first two years of Pres. Obama's service.  When I came home I began to think more about how I felt on certain issues.  By the time the 2012 election came around, I felt that Mr. Mitt Romney could do a better job than Pres. Obama.  However, as you all know, Mr. Romney did not win the presidency.

There was certainly a large helping of doom and gloom passed around a lot of Republican dinner tables that year.  The end of the world was near, and our country would soon fall apart.  Except that it didn't.  Yes, I was opposed to a lot of the policies Pres. Obama was in favor of.  But he was still the leader of our country, and over the next four years, I came to appreciate what that meant.

Now, in 2016, the candidate I thought would do the best job will again not be chosen as President.  It's probably because Mr. Evan McMullin ran as an independent candidate, among a large variety of factors.  Going into election night, all the polls suggested that Secretary Hillary Clinton would be chosen as our next president.  My next confession is that I felt relieved as I watched the likelihood of Sec. Clinton's election slowly diminish, and Mr. Trump's chances increase.  I disagree with Sec. Clinton on a majority of the issues.  This isn't to say that I think Mr. Trump is the candidate I think should be in office.  Remember, I think Mr. McMullin would do the best job.  But Mr. Trump has a lot of policies, at least the ones I could elucidate, that I agree with.

Now, for the lessons I hope people learn from reading this post.

1. When your candidate doesn't get elected it isn't the end of the world.  Pres. Obama received a second term in office, and America isn't that different from when he first was elected.  Our freedoms are still in place.
2. Americans support the president, because he is the president.  While I have disagree with some of the policy choices Pres. Obama has made, I still support our government.  In fact, when Pres. Obama has finished his term in January, he is welcome to my home for dinner.  I think we could find a lot of things to talk about that we agree on.  Because we're both Americans, and more importantly, we're both human beings.
3. Although Mr. Trump will be our next president, we need to support him in his office, just as we would support whoever we voted for.  You don't have to agree with everything he does in office, and you are allowed to express your opinions.  But in four years he'll have to account for the actions he's taken.  In the meantime, please be civil.  This election sure hasn't been and that's the change we need the most.

My fellow Americans, we are Americans.  We've endured a lot together, and we can endure the next four years.  In fact, we can endure them well.  

To my Californian friends, please don't leave us.  CalExit is not a solution to anything.  Americans don't give up and leave when their candidate doesn't win.  They stay involved in the political process, make their opinions known, and work together to make America a better place.

To my friends who would have been happier with Sec. Clinton as our next president, please don't leave us.  Americans stick together, through thick and thin.  We've survived as Civil War as a country, and we don't need to survive another.  Stay involved, keep voting, and contribute to the greatness of America.

Finally, to everyone, please continue to be the people in "We the people." America needs all of us.  Please don't let us down.

Patriotically yours,

Glen K Thurston

Citizen of the United States of America

Election Day is Coming, plus my semi-annual rant against (really in favor of) Daylight Saving Time

The time where we decide, not only who will head the executive branch of our federal government, but who will fill many other important positions in federal, state, and local governments is just around the corner.  Some people have already voted.  Maybe you have.  I'll avoid the awkward political discussion by simply urging you to vote.  Voting matters.  If you are eligible to vote, (citizen, non-felon in most states, etc.) do it.  If you want to know my opinion about who I think you should vote for, email me or something.

The other thing that's coming up is the end of Daylight Saving Time.  It's the magical time of the year where most of us set our clocks back an hour because the government says to.

Well, it's stupid.

There are plenty of reasons to just stick to one schedule.  Most of them are things that don't know how to read a clock, like cattle.  The reason that's a part of my reality now are my children.  They have no idea what time it is.  Ever.  I have a hard enough time convincing them that the lack of sunlight outside means it's time for bed.  They stick to their internal clocks.  For example, my 3-year-old son wakes up every day between 6:15 and 6:30.  He doesn't care what day of the week it is, if it's a holiday, or even what time he went to bed (unless we keep him up really late).  Can you imagine how frustrating March will be when I have to get him up an hour earlier than he's used to, just because some people thousands of miles away in the Capitol Building said we should?

I really don't care whether we're on Standard Time or Daylight Saving Time.  I just want to pick one and stick with it.  (Arizona and Hawaii are my role models in this situation.)  I prefer staying on DST year-round.  Why?  Because in the winter, there aren't enough daylight hours for it to matter which time we're on.  In the summer, there are so many daylight hours that it doesn't matter.  When it matters, near the equinoxes, I would rather go to work in the dark and play with my kids outside while the sun is shining.  But I'll sacrifice that if it means I don't have to switch my clock twice a year.

If you live in Utah, please encourage your state legislators to support my father's bill that would give voters the power to choose whether the state should opt out of DST.

This blog is a zombie -- you can't kill it. But this isn't a zombie post.

I feel like a zombie right now, but that's because I've been getting up early every day, either to get ready for church, or to go running, because I'm excited for college football (#GoCougs), or because the kids are awake.  I've got a lot of little projects that I keep cycling through during my free time, this blog being one of them, so I keep track of what's going on with Slack.

Slack is a program (kids these days would call it an app, but I'm old enough to remember when Windows 3.1 was what there was) that is designed to consolidate messaging between members of a team, like at a company or business.  I've taken the features available on the free version and turned it into my own private version of Facebook. See my previous post.

I wanted to show you how I use Slack, and invite you to join our Slack if you're interested.  Right now, the Slack is really centered around the things that I think are important, but you can help make it even better.

First of all, you should know that you can create more than one Slack "site."  So, on the left-hand side, in the green oval, you'll see that I have 3 Slack sites that I'm a part of.  One of them is from work (we mostly use it to share YouTube videos with each other, so that we can do research and not miss out on the nonsense that happens in the office), one is a personal one for my writing projects (like this blog, the novel I'm working on, my atrophying podcast, and my social media presence), and the third is my "public" Slack, which I'm hoping to use as my mini-Facebook.

Inside the red circle are the main channels within the Slack.  A channel is like a page within Facebook.  Kind of.  They're more like chat rooms.  All channels have to be in all lowercase (this is a stupid limitation) and begin with a #.  #announcements is the main channel on the Slack.  Everyone who will ever join the Slack is automatically added to #announcements.  We use it for... well, announcements.  Things like announcing new channels, welcoming new people to the Slack, explaining rules that are particular to our Slack, reporting on the progress of my other projects, and meta discussions about the Slack itself.

The other channels I have set up are mostly centered around discussion topics:

• #cfb is for college football, including the Top 25 ranking I do throughout the season (see my Twitter feed @gkthurston for more details).
• #photos is for sharing pictures that I don't want to be as public as they are on Twitter/FB.
• #pkmngo is for talking about Pokemon Go, mostly posting updates about which Pokemon we've caught.
• #politics is for political discussions.
• #running is for updates about my running activities, and to help keep myself motivated to run.
• #scripturestudy is for sharing insights that you find while reading the scriptures.  It helps me me even more motivated to study the scriptures.
• #sports is for discussion of all sports, though right now I just have a bot adding college football scores as they happen.
• #random is for discussions that don't fit anywhere else, like sharing funny videos.

I also have a series of channels that are location based.  The idea behind these is that when group members travel, they can post in the channel belonging to that area, and the Slack members who live there can give them advice about places to see, things to do, where to eat, and even set up a meet.  I'm currently subscribed to all of the location channels, and I'm the only one that really uses them.  But it's a good way to remind people of where and when I'll be.

You'll see that a lot of these things aren't information I want to be available to the general public, which makes it hard to decide who to add to the Slack.  So far, the problem has been solved by a lack of interest from others.  But I think a good minimum standard is people that I've met in real life and had a significant interaction with.

The last thing I'll write about is keeping up with the Slack.  It's designed to be a messaging program.  It's not very effective if people don't check it often.  But with the low amount of posts, it's not very rewarding to check the Slack constantly.  The best solution is to download the app on your phone (available on both Android and Apple as far as I know) and let it notify you when things happen.

Anyway, if you want to join the Slack, you have to be invited.  And you have to contact me to send you an invite.

Welcome to Slack

I don't know how many of you have heard of Slack. It's a platform designed for teams to work together on projects. I found out about Slack because they help sponsor a podcast I listen to.  After about a month of hearing ads for it, I thought I would just check it out to see what it does.  I made an account and now I'm using it as my own little personal version of Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Reddit.

A few of examples of projects I've been working on via Slack:

1. Writing a novel. I'm currently at >5000 words and my goal is ~50,000 words before I'll be ready to edit, fine-tune, etc. Slack has been useful for organizing my thoughts, and my brother has left me valuable feedback on Slack too. It leaves the Google Doc clear of meta discussion clutter, focusing only on editorial suggestions and the story itself in Google.

2. Running goals. I've been using it to help me keep track of my run times and distances. It's really nice to have a space where I can post stuff like that, and I know that my wife will see it.  And it keeps me accountable to my inner circle of friends and family.

3. My new fantasy football pick 'em league. Slack makes it really easy to survey people, on their own time, as well hold discussions on different topics, like college football.

I think that my favorite part of having a Slack (I actually have two now) is that I can post the things I want, without worrying about what people might think.  There's no pressure to like anything, I don't have to add people I've met once as friends, and people are free to join or leave any channel or discussion they want.  In this way, it's a lot like Reddit, except that I can control who gets to enter.  I can keep out all the crass language and not have to deal with it.  So, maybe it helps me be a dictator of my own little world. 

Anyway, after testing out Slack for a few months, I think I'm ready to let more people into my own social media platform and join the discussion I'm currently having with myself.  If you want an invite, please send me a message, tweet @gkthurston, or otherwise get a hold of me.  Give me an email address and then check your spam folder, since the invites come directly from Slack (there isn't another way to do it) and might look spammy to your filter.

Ye Olde Podcasting

Like I mentioned, I thought I would try my hand at podcasting.  So, here it is!  Just remember that you were probably going to waste these 6 minutes on Facebook anyway.

Here's to hopin' that there ends up being an Episode 2!  Enjoy!

I tapped this post out on Internet.

Hello friends.  It's been a while.  And the Blogger app still sucks.  Wish someone would get around to fixing that.

I guess I'm just going to write and let you read what I write.  No thinking, just writing.  Or "typing" in this case.  What do you call the way people input words on their phone? Maybe tapping is a more appropriate word. My name is Glen, and I'm a tapper.

We (relatively) recently went to Virginia for Spring Break.  The Mrs. served her mission in Virginia, so it was fun to visit some of the people she taught as a missionary.  Toddler Thor's favorite part was the water, both at the beach and at the temple. 

The most dissonant thing of the trip was coming home.  On our last day, we went to the beach and enjoyed the 80 degree weather.  We came home to snow, and it's actually snowing right now.  🌨  Being from Utah, you would think that I would be used to the extremes on weather, but I've found that there is thing called Spring that I'm rather fond of.

I'm trying to satisfy my desire to write, which is odd, since I've spent a large part of my life trying to avoid writing.  I think that I really just want to put something out into the world that could make someone's life better.  I'm trying to leave a lasting mark, so that people, besides my family, will know that I was alive and did awesome things.

The latest stressor in my life is being on student council.  I guess the political bug is going around our family, or maybe it's just been lying dormant.  In any case, I thought it would be a good idea to run, mostly because I hate segregated fees.  The frustrating part is that most of the money goes to things that don't benefit me.  And the increases in seg. fees are usually fueled by the Chancellor pushing some of the costs back into the fees, instead of cutting something from her budget.  So, my goal is to at least have them lower for graduate students, which is apparently a novel concept.  We already have separate tuition rates, so why not segregated fees?

Well, if you've made it this far, I guess you deserve a report on the novel I'm trying to write.  It's still going. Slowly.  Mostly because I haven't put much time towards it.  But I'm trying to put more time towards it.  Maybe over the summer after I'm done with classes (forever!) Also, I recently started listening to a podcast (I'm trendy!) which made me want to try my hand at it.  And for me, the planner, that means that I have to write a script beforehand. This incorporates more writing into my life. I guess my high school English teachers were right when they said writing was important.  For me, it's mostly another experiment in expressing myself.  So, look for that in the coming days (or years). 

Keep being awesome! 💂

Sabbath-Day Observance

Recently, Church leaders have placed an emphasis on better observance of the Sabbath.  Local leaders here in Wisconsin encouraged us to go home and discuss ways we can better observe the Sabbath as a family.

In our family, we already tried to make the Sabbath special by not watching sporting events on Sunday.  We decided to even further limit our television time on Sundays to only inspirational shows, eliminating our usual diet of shows like NCIS, The Flash, and Agents of SHIELD.  We felt that this would make the Sabbath stand out even more in our minds every week.  To help make this crazy goal more successful, we thought of alternate activities that would better help us remember the Savior on Sunday.  Here it is:

1. Read scriptures
2. Go to Church
3. Write in your journal
4. Call grandparents
5. Take a nap
6. Write a letter
7. Read a book
8. Have friends over for dinner
9. Plan the rest of the week
10. Do service
11. Blog
12. Play a board/card game
13. Watch BYUtv
14. Home teaching/visiting teaching
15. Call a friend (yes, on the telephone)
16. Draw a picture
17. Bear your testimony
18. Take a drive
19. Listen to sacred music
20. Bake cookies
21. Write a story
22. Be creative
23. Work on family history
24. Sing hymns & Primary songs
25. Crochet

Do you have any ideas to add to our list?

The Colley-Thurston Matrix

This past college football season I spent time developing a ranking system that would give good results, but still be based in some sort of mathematics.  One of the rankings I have followed in the past is the Colley Matrix Ranking.  It only takes into consideration the win-loss record of a team, and the schedule each team has played.  By storing this information in a matrix, it can simultaneously solve for a ranking of all the college football teams.

I decided to modify this approach, by incorporating the scores of each game.  One would think that if it was a close game, where a team lost by only one point, the two teams are actually fairly evenly matched, as opposed to a 42-point blowout, where the winning team is clearly much better than the losing team.  I also decided to curve the point differential, using the natural logarithm function.  This makes the difference between a 3-point loss and a 6-point loss more important than the difference between a 42-point loss and a 45-point loss.

The final rankings from the Colley-Thurston Matrix can be found here.  I'm looking forward to keeping track of this again next season.

New Year's Revolutions

I just counted, and I posted a total of 7 times during 2015.  That's a little sad, seeing as my goal was to post once a week.  Here's a breakdown of what's draining my writing reserve (I can only write so much, before I want to watch TV again):

• My journal (trying to write every day, but maybe getting once a week or so)
• This blog (trying to write every week, but maybe getting once a month or so)
• My short story/novel/work of fiction.  I don't know really know how long it's going to be.  It started out as a short story, but I thought I could do better.  Now the goal is 50,000 words, and to sell it as an eBook on Amazon.  Hopefully I'll remember to look for beta readers in the future.  As soon as I finish the first draft.  (3243 words down, 46757 to go)
• Twitter.  Surprisingly, it's easier to tweet funny things.  With only 140 characters, I don't feel the pressure of filling an entire screen with words.  Follow me (@gkthurston) for some of the random things I think about throughout the day, since that's apparently what Twitter is for.
• Facebook.  Posting on Facebook is somewhat of a rarity, but I can't resist commenting on articles and posts that declare pseudoscience as fact.

So, a summary of what's been happening since the last post:

• College football.  BYU lost to Utah in the Las Vegas Bowl 35-28.  And they almost sent the game into overtime.  It's more impressive if you remember that the score at the end of the first quarter was 35-0.
• More college football.  I developed an algorithm to rank the college football teams based on win-loss record and margin of victory.  It gave fairly reasonable results, and will be published for the last time this season following the National Championship Game.  (http://tinyurl.com/CTMatrixRank)
• The internet came through and helped pay for a rocking chair for my wife.  You internet folks are amazing!  Also, the rocking chair is optimal for feeding an infant.
• I agreed with something President Obama said. Here
• Sam helped ease us into sleep deprivation by having a fever for a long time, at one point high enough to warrant going to the emergency room.  And then I learned that the emergency room isn't a magical place where things get fixed, and they just want to make sure you're taking tylenol and ibuprofen, and staying hydrated.  Now I know.
• We welcomed a 8 lb. 14 oz. human into the world and named her Adelaide Ellen Louise.  And that's when the real sleep deprivation started.  
• My grandmother passed away the following morning.  That meant a spontaneous overnight trip to Utah for the funeral.  At least I got to fly first class on the way home and know what I"m paying extra for.
• Had family in town for Christmas and Addie's birth.  It was really fun to have my mom in town, and Sam loved playing with "Nona."  The in-laws also came, which meant delicious food and fun adventures.  Including looking for pie tins on Christmas Day with my father-in-law and finally ending up at Denny's for two pie tins, full of frozen pie.  Pie for dayz!

In conclusion, I like lists, I realize my writing style needs a lot of polishing with regards to storytelling, and here is a picture of our recently expanded family, with me looking like I'm 12.

No idea what I'm looking at, but it's 2016 now, so maybe the future.