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.