Dystopian Paradise: There's no other place to be.

Something old, something new

2006-10-07T00:10:00.000-05:00

I mentioned in my last post that I was moving the blog. Well the truth is, I've created a permanent home for my blog (http://dystopianparadise.lifeatadistance.com/), but the format and content have all been moved over to there. I apologize for the downtime (if anyone even noticed), I didn't realize that Blogger would pull my content just as soon as I changed the publication of my site. I'll be moving all of this into Wordpress soon, in fact all future posts to this blog will be made at the lifeatadistance.com location, and using Wordpress.

Anyway, there's also something new, but most of you have probably already found that. Kassy & I have worked the past few days/weeks to put together http://www.LifeAtADistance.com to help us keep in touch with friends and family who are far away. We hope you enjoy the new site, and keep in touch, wherever you are.

Moving soon...

2006-10-05T23:56:00.000-05:00

Just the blog. That's why I've been away. Working on a new home. Got the domain name up, and hosting is running smoothly. I'll post more in a few days.

In search of a domain name

2006-09-01T22:30:00.000-05:00

If there's actually anyone reading this, I'm actively searching for a domain name for Kassy & I, or at least to host this blog and our photos on. I've come up with some cheesy names like rcandkassy.com, or johnsonfamily.com, but I'm trying to be more original than that. Any suggestions?

Swarm and stack my news

2006-08-31T22:42:00.000-05:00

So, I've been a big fan of Digg for some time now, although I go through effectively sinusoidal phases in the frequency of my visits. Yesterday I stumbled onto intriguing ways to visualize the data that's being collected by Digg.

Swarm & Stack are two ways Digg has created to show which articles are being "dugg" by users. Each has it's merit, but I think Swarm might be my favorite.

Swarm shows Digg users as they move from one Digg story to the next. This is interesting as you can follow the stream of conciousness of another human being as they read their news. Also, you can see stories that tend to congregate users around them if you watch long enough.

Stack has it's own quirks, as diggs fall from the top of the screen onto the story and pile up as you're watching. They stories are color coded for how many diggs they have, but as the stack grows taller you know that in the time you've been watching that this story has been dug much more than the others. It's something like viewing the acceleration of one story over another, something Digg has had in some form for quite some time.

I guess the things I found most interesting about all of this was the possibility of visually mining information. It's intriguing to me because Digg presents this information in two very easy to digest forms, and allows one of the human brain's most evolved functions, pattern recognition, to really show off.

P.S. I'm trying to get better at this. Let's see how long this lasts. :) Two days in a row.

Multitasking != ADD

2006-08-30T10:21:00.000-05:00

Please tell me that multitasking is not the same thing as ADD, because I was just looking at the list of books I'm currently reading, and well...Tell me if I'm crazy.

"V for Vendetta" - Alan Moore & David Lloyd (Just finished, technically)
"No Perfect People Allowed" - John Burke (our lead pastor, a book about our church's formation and growing a community of acceptance and love in the church)
"Getting Real" - 37 Signals (Business book on how to develop software better)
"The Parables of Jesus" - William Barclay (This is what our small group is reading right now, it's so-so)

That's about enough to kill a horse I'd think.

Obviously, by tomorrow, I mean next week

2006-08-08T22:39:00.000-05:00

So I finally grabbed the hard drive (after losing it for a few days), and started uploading photo's like crazy. The batch I uploaded tonight include shots from our time in Baden-Baden after Germany beat Argentina, traveling to Strasbourg to accidentally see the Tour de France, time in St. Goar & Lorelei with Andreas, and finally Heidelberg castle. These were the shots we tried to upload for the second batch during our trip.

Rather than do a shotgun of stories in this post, I'm just going to draw out one story for now. I may come back and tell others later, but for now, I want to talk about having the Tour de France dropped in our laps.

Originally, we had intended to travel to Baden-Baden for the day, and then in the evening move to Strasbourg, see a bit, and stay the night before traveling back to St. Goar to meet our friend Andreas. After arriving in Baden-Baden and relaxing in the mineral baths there for several hours, we came out just in time to catch the penalty kicks between Germany and Argentina. It was our first (of many) experience with European soccer celebrations. It was awesome! Basically, an instant parade erupted with cars, people, & flags. Here is where we learned of the first lessons on our trip. When there is soccer involved, don't expect buses to run on time (or at all).

We met a charming German couple who showed us around while we waited for the buses to start back up, always thinking full well that we'd travel on to Strasbourg that night. Fortunately this was not to be. After having a wonderful dinner with this couple, we barely made it into the hostel in time, but made it all the same. The next morning we got up and headed for Strasbourg, however, when the train pulled into the station it seemed unusually full, especially considering the previous train, in the opposite direction had taken fans toward the Englad soccer match later that day.

None the less, we boarded the train and headed off. Here we met a young American family who lived in Frankfurt and were also travelling to Strasbourg, and happened to mention some of the hullaballoo regarding doping on the eve of the Tour. When we started chatting about the Tour, and the fact that we we're from Austin, they pointed out to us the fact that we were in fact on our way (inadvertantly, and without any doing on our part) to the Tour de France.

So, after riding two extremely full, sweaty trains to Strasbourg, we got off, and set out to watch the prologue, which again couldn't have worked out any better had we tried, because in that stage the riders are staggered by one minute intervals. This means that there is a consistent stream of riders passing by, no matter where you are.

Ultimately, however, this was just the first of many opportunities for God to reveal what we were learning by going on this trip. I'll spend some more time really explaining what I mean by that soon, but suffice it to say for now, it changed our perception on a lot of things.

Back in black

2006-08-01T00:03:00.000-05:00

Got Kassy's new computer, so now I can get some time to upload more pictures. Yeah, we're way behind. Heck, I've been back 2 weeks now, and I haven't even posted to say so. Oh well. I'm saying it now. I'll post some photos tomorrow night.

'Til then!

1 week in...

2006-07-04T13:34:00.000-05:00

Internet cafes are common, but finding the time to stop is harder. We´re waiting for the Germany/Italy world cup game to start, so we thought we´d post an update. The link for the photos has been fixed, and new photos should be up shortly.

After several recommendations, we went to Baden-Baden and visited their spa. It is fed from natural hot springs, and it was a very nice relaxing day. That night Germany won the soccer match, moving on the quarter finals, and we were stuck in Baden-Baden celebrating the win. It was a very exciting evening.

We had planned to visit Strasbourg that night, but since we were stuck in Baden-Baden we put it off until the next day. Turns out the next day the Tour de France began in Strasbourg. It was very exciting, and a lot of fun to watch the prologue to the tour.

That night, we met up with an old friend from high school who now lives in Nuremberg. He met us in St. Goar, and the next day we visited Burg Rheinfels. At this castle they allow you to explore the tunnels beneath the walls, and to really get a feel for the fortress. It was very fun.

After visiting with him, he drove us by Loreley to see the great view of the Rhine river, and then on to our hostel for the night. That night we stayed in the tallest tower of Burg Rheinfels. With our room on the next to top floor we had a great view of the Rhine again. We wandered around the castle for a few more hours until it was dark, and then went inside for a beer. Inside, we met 4 Flemish gentleman who taught us a fun, international, game called "Ooops, Miss."

Finally, yesterday we went to Heidelberg to see a castle where an ancient relative of Kassy's was supposedly bestowed a position of nobility (von Hauser). The castle was amazing, and some actors were preparing a play for the upcoming castle festival. Kassy got some hilarious photos of them. Speaking of photos, the site is giving us trouble uploading new photos tonight, so we'll send some more up soon, but for now, it's time to go watch some füßball!

The beginning, it´s a very good place to start

2006-06-29T14:08:00.000-05:00

A rough start to be sure. We were delayed quite a bit getting into Newark and missed our flight to Köln by quite a bit. After getting into Newark around 9pm, we waited in a line to get a hotel and food vouchers from Continental. The hotel was decent, and Tuesday morning we headed back to Newark International Airport to get more vouchers because we were now booked on a flight on the 28th. After getting standby tickets for Tuesday, we headed in the city (NYC) for a quick 1 hr visit.

We managed to see Times Square, and the Empire State building, and definitely got the feel for NY life. It was great!

Tuesday at 6:45 we left for Germany, and once we arrived looked around a bit of Köln before heading to Cochem. We´ve decided to skip France, as it was going to make the trip too busy and quite a bit more expensive. We´re staying a second night here in Cochem tonight, and we really enjoyed hiking around the city and countryside today.

Tomorrow another Schlo§ (fortress or castle) and then into Koblenz. We´ll write again soon. See the pictures at the link below, we´ve added a few.

http://new.photos.yahoo.com/rcjohnson42/

Relaxing and re-packing

2006-06-24T20:40:00.000-05:00

Well, we're in MO relaxing. visiting family before we leave on Monday at 1pm. Still just a few things left to do, getting the final packing done, and picking up just a few last minute items. I jst sent the spam email to all our friends and family, and so I have to update this so that people expect reasonalby updated content. Nothing like social pressure to get someone to do something.

The biggest thing left to do is to capture our itenerary. so for those who haven't already heard it here it is. Of course, I could have just sent this link instead:

6/27 - Arrive in Cologne, Germany 8 am - Stay in Cochem, Germany
6/28 - 6/30 - Visiting France (somewhere)
7/1 - St Goar, Germany
7/2 - Bacharach, Germany
7/3 - 7/5 - Florence, Italy
7/6 - Venice, Italy
7/8 - Vienna, Austria
7/9 - Salzburg, Austria
7/10 - Fussen, Germany
7/11 - Somewhere around Wurzburg, Germany
7/12 - Cologne, Germany
7/13 - Depart for the US at 10am

Countdown...

2006-06-19T23:51:00.000-05:00

We leave in T-minus 60 hours and counting for a whilwind tour of central North America (home visiting friends and family) and central Europe (seeing the sights, maybe a friend). Not much to say except that this will likely devolve temporarily into my personal reflections on vacation, Europe, and rejuvenation, and of course: photos.

I was challenged by a friend the other day to discover just what God intended to show me while on this three week vacation, and I've decided to accept his challenge. I don't know exactly what the weeks have in store for me, but I'm excited to find out.

On a more techie note, we've bought a few new toys lately. First was Kassy's Canon 20D. A hefty investment for sure, but a very worthwhile purchase as it has brought her hours of enoyment already, and we haven't even left the country yet. Next was a Samsung external DVD burner, with LightScribe. Very fun, very handy, especially for the photo-bug. Finally, today we bought an external hard drive with a built in memory card reader, so that while we're in Europe Kassy can shoot gigs upon gigs of photos.

All of this was basically to say, watch this space for more news and photos from our trip.

Somewhere over the rainbow

2006-04-21T23:04:00.000-05:00

Scrubs is by far one of my favorite shows on TV right now, and has been for several seasons. I could talk about the excellent character development, or the unique ability to play with silly sitcom things (angelic music/hair blowing in the wind/ridiculous lighting), but after watching a rerun I'm reminded of what I like most: the incredible writing.

The episode, "My Way Home", is absolutely hilarious, and a great homage to "The Wizard of Oz." I say all of this to say, I can't wait until Scrubs is back on the air.

V is for Very Interesting

2006-04-19T22:51:00.000-05:00

I saw V is for Vendetta again last Friday night, at the Alamo no less, and again it ROCKED! There is so much to talk about with this movie, but I won't bore you with a complete run through of the plot. Suffice it to say that I find it very entertaining to be rooting for the the terrorist in this film.

On top of all of this, graphically, the Wachoski brothers have created a stunning film. The contrasts are clear between V and his accomplice Evey, and without a doubt in my mind Hugo Weaving has done a stellar job of acting given that he never shows even an inch of his real skin in this film. His ability to emote from behind the Guy Fawkes mask is so unmistakeable, so prevailing it's downright amazing.

If you haven't seen it yet, and you're not afraid of a film that will make you think about your role in this national process, and you aren't afraid of some very well done action sequences, I highly recommend V. Of course, you don't have to take my word for it...Take a look, it's in a book. A Reading Rainbow.

All work and no play...

2006-04-12T12:43:00.000-05:00

Makes Jack a dull boy, and an ever growing dullness in his blog. I've actually been doing stuff lately, just forgetting to blog about my adventures.

We're 2/3 of the way through Wedding Season '06, and so far both have been stellar. One was back near home in St. Clair, MO which made for a long weekend of driving, and a great chance to catch up with college friends we haven't seen in a few years. Good times.

The second was here around Austin, and allowed friends now living in New England to come back for a brief stint, and again Good Times.

I guess the biggest news for me is that I'm getting involved in baseball (before the post-season) this year, and have begun to really enjoy watching as the St. Louis Cardinals start out what I hope will be a stellar season, but only time will tell. 154 games to go, and counting.

Addiction, I know thy name, and it is Myspace

2006-02-23T21:19:00.000-06:00

OK, so those of you who know me, know full well that I have a caffeine problem, but I'm not willing to admit that yet, so I don't have to start down any recovery process (yet).

So a few months ago someone suggested creating a Myspace account for the Uprising and so on a whim, I created a page for myself. I found one of my friends there and added her. A few days later a friend living in Dallas found my page and added me. Then, nothing. I didn't do anything more than putting just a bit of basic info onto my page.

This past Wednesday, I found out how to change the look/feel of my page, and a whole bunch more friends, and now I know why this is referred to by many as Crackspace. The fun of finding other friends and linking to them, posting comments on their page, tracking down your favorite band and adding their music to your page will have you consistently coming back. Tweaking, adding to your bio, looking for more friends, it's all just too much fun.

I'm sure I'm not doing it justice...but I guess you just have to try it yourself.

On an unrelated note (to this post), I found yet another old friend on Myspace last night, and enjoyed reconnecting with him briefly over myspace messages. Hillarious!

Interesting phenomenon

2006-02-16T22:36:00.000-06:00

I talked to an old roomate tonight on the phone, regarding his wedding which I'm in. First of 3 weddings for Kassy & I this "season." Anyway, and so when I sit down at the computer, I decide to drop an email to an old friend my mom happened to run into recently, and had the presence of mind to get his email address.

I hammer out the typical here's what I've been up to over the last 8 years email, and ask him to do the same. Pop back to my inbox, and realize I haven't emailed another old friend. So away I go to catch up with this one too. Same basic email plus or minus church stuff/house stuff/etc, and I realize I have a whole host of old friends I need to email and catch up with. Anyway, so now I'm copying/pasting what was once a personal letter, and dropping it here and there to all sorts of old acquaintances, friends, etc hoping to hear what they've been up to.

If you're reading this and we haven't chatted in a while...post a comment here, and I'll drop you a line too!

Talk to you soon.

Nothing to say...but yet here I am typing anyways

2005-11-21T23:34:00.000-06:00

It's been two months and I figure I ought to catch you up, so here goes: "I've been working." That about sums it up. I've been putting in extra hours at work to finish a really big project for NI, but this blog isn't supposed to be about work, so I'll move on.

Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire was incredible. That was always my favorite book of the first four. I haven't tried to compare it to number Order of the Phoenix or Half Blood Prince. I'm not entirely sure how you do that sort of thing, since they build on eachother so much, it just doesn't seem fair. But this HP movie was far and away the best of the four so far. The acting was so much better, Fred & George are spectacular both in the books and in the movies, and they crack me up so much.

In the spirit of rambling through several topics, Thanksgiving is coming up, and we've got family staying with us for the week. It's been so great having family here in town, La Madeleine, Chuys, all the great food. It'll be a miracle if I don't gain an absolute ton of weight this holiday season.

Well, I need to crash. I've gotta be at work at 7:30 in the morning. Things are slowing down there, so hopefully I'll get some more time for this endeavor. Til then.

I have tasted the forbidden fruit...

2005-09-14T23:22:00.000-05:00

I bought an Apple product yesterday. My first ever. I'll give you all one guess what it is. Yep, given the slurry of press, and it's recent release it is probably completely obvious that I bought an iPod nano. Technically, I had purchased a iPod mini about two weeks ago, but I returned it (heh, less than 30 days. Yes!) and got the nano instead.

I was already in awe over the great interface that the iPod mini had, not to mention the functionality of having a 4GB hard drive that easily fit into my pocket. Now, I have all that plus a color screen (woot!), nearly 200% better battery life (double woot!), and it's ridiculously (~~shiny~~)tiny. I've been showing it off a bit (too much) at work, and nearly everyone who's seen/touched it has said that they want one, and several have vowed to get one soon.

This is the flash based MP3 player that the market has needed for quite some time. I'm sure the shuffle has it's place among some, but the nano has all of the shuffle's flash based goodness, plus a very usable screen. To give it some perspective the screen is almost identical in size/resolution to my cell phone's.

It's funny. The thing that finally caused me to cave and get an MP3 player, was in fact the driving factor into getting an iPod based player. Podcasting. If you haven't already fallen into this rabbit hole, I strongly suggest that you jump. Head first. Now!

Seriously, my drive time has moved away from meaningless banter between the gaggle of morning show radio program hosts, and to a system where I am delivered fresh content of my choice (how novel?!?) during my commute. No longer need I listen to theories on why Brad and Jennifer are calling it quits, instead I can learn about AJAX, new topics in Java, the skills of a successful manager, new gadgets that are just hitting the market, etc etc etc (the list goes on for quite some time).

In addition to all of this, there are quite a few Christian podcasts out there. So far, I'm not terribly impressed with any of them, but there is one, Dev4Gamers, that has been interesting occasionally. It's billed as "Devotions for Gamers," but I don't really see how it has anything to do with gaming. Ultimately, it's a very nice, short devotional that I typically listen to as I'm getting to the freeway. It just tends to remind me to focus my day on God, instead of myself, which I so often need reminding of.

To wrap this all up, I just want to add that I haven't "drank the Koolaid" just yet on the Apple products, although the Mac mini has caught my eye a couple of times. Only time will tell.

</post><Empty promise of next post/>

Attending NFJS conference

2005-08-12T09:46:00.000-05:00

I'll be attending the NFJS conference this weekend. I've been looking forward to it for several months, I really hope it will be a good chance to get caught up on the state of the industry in Java. I'll be blogging the conference along with a few coworkers. Really not much of an entry, but I wanted to mention it here.

Not much better, and no time for it now.

2005-08-11T00:28:00.000-05:00

Been really busy at work for the last few months, and it probably won't slow down until the end of the year. Although I did squeeze in a quick 1 week vacation to MO a few weeks ago, and that was very nice.

School's back in session, at least for Kassy that is. She's ecstatic to be teaching 6th grade math this year. She went through the RoboLab training, and I've asked to be her RoboLab volunteer, so basically, once a week I'll get to leave work early to go hang out with her and a batch of Middle school students and play with expensive Legos. Very fun!

To be completely honest the reason I'm posting right now is that I emailed a friend (Dan) and gave him a bit of a hard time aboutn having not posted lately, so I figured I'd better post something quick or he'd return the favor. There we go, check that one off the list. Next up: SLEEP!

Picking up where I left off.

2005-06-23T20:09:00.000-05:00

So, time to get back in the habit of this. I'm not sure how others remember to do this. I guess I should set up some sort of schedule on when I'm going to update it. I guess let's pick Thursday's. Now that Kassy's going to band practice on Thursday nights I have a few moments to myself, and I typically relax most of the night.

Well, I just finished watching the LOTR trilogy again the past few weeks, and I can' t believe how great those films are. I can't wait until I have "The Hobbit" to add to my collection. I don't know if others do this or not, but I have this weird habit of turning on a movie (or TV) when I'm trying to get some work done. I used to do this in college, and watched "Empire Records" so many times that I can honestly quote every single line in the movie from beginning to end, and my VHS cassette is somewhat worn out.

Lately I've been putting in crazy amounts of hours for work, and so I brought back this tradition, as a matter of fact I'm watching "Hit Me Baby One More Time", a show about one-hit wonders who come on the show, perform their classic hit and then their rendition of a popular song from today. The audience chooses their favorite performer, and the "winner" get's to direct $25,000 to the charity of their choice. I think it was/is originally a BBC program, as most any original TV in the States is anymore anyway.

Guess I need to get back into the habit, before I can take one topic and turn it entry, as opposed to giving you some stream of conciousness fluff. Anyway, I'll try. :)

Ditto

2005-04-21T23:06:00.000-05:00

Yeah, what I said last month still applies. Sorry. I'm honestly not so much apologizing to you as to myself. I've known for weeks that I needed to post, but just couldn't come up with anything original-ish.

In light of other current major announcments (here):

I'm graduating!

Hooray! I'll finally be done with school. I'm taking the final course of my Masters of Science in Information Science & Technology this semester. On May 14th I will have officially completed all of the requirements of the M.S. program through UMR, and will walk across the stage to receive my graduate degree. Needless to say, with things as busy as they are at work, a 3 hour distance education course that meets 2X per week, volunteering with the youth at church it's easy to miss out on some of the important things in life (like blogging, and friends impending weddings -- Sorry guys!).

Well, it's late, I'm tired, and it's almost the weekend, so crap-tacular ending and all: Good night.

Like everyone else...I'm lousy at this.

2005-03-14T21:24:00.000-06:00

However, I now have in my posession the new laptop I was hoping to get. I don't remember how many times I took my old Toshiba back to Best Buy, but they finally "lemon'ed" it out. I am now typing this entry on a brand new HP Pavillion zv5000. In a nutshell it has the new AMD 64 bit processor ( ~2 Ghz ), 512 MB of RAM, 1 MB L2 Cache, and 1600 Mhz system bus. It's a lot better than my poor little old 1.1 Ghz Celeron, 384 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive, and it shows it too.

Right now I'm looking to install Windows XP 64 bit edition and see what the future has in store.

Anyway, just wanted to share.

Worst. Post. Ever.

Blogging begins to pay off...

2005-01-26T23:11:00.000-06:00

Although I don't think anyone actually looks at this on any regular basis, aside from myself, I found out that Blogging was paying off yesterday. When I got back to my desk at lunch I noticed I had a voicemail (peculiar). I punched in my code and it said the voice mail was from some extention I had never heard before (more peculiar). I pressed the play button and immediately heard an old friend's voice over the line (very peculiar).

It seems that a friend of mine from college, whom I haven't talked to in nearly 2 years now (due almost entirely to my inability to keep up with long distance friendships) is coming to Austin for a few days and wanted to look me up. He tried several common friends to get my contact info, to no avail. Finally, he punched Richard Curtis Johnson into a search engine and found my blog. Noticing in my earliest post that I was working for NI he called up the front desk and asked to speak with me, and voila all my questions were answered.

Anyway, fun annecdote.

Strike one up for...somebody?!?

2005-01-13T21:47:00.000-06:00

Slashdot is covering an article on a judge in Georgia who ruled that the following statement on a sticker, placed in the front of Biology books was "unconstitutional": This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”

Few things wrong with this whole bit:

Evolution of man (not the type where moths turn black, and then white to match their surroundings), is just what the sticker says: a theory. There is no arguing with that, it cannot be proven to be true, therefore it is posited that man must have evolved from a lower being.
The statement makes no direct claims for any of the other theories on the existence of man, namely the most widely accepted "intelligent design", or creationism. The judge argued that, “[by] denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof, even though the sticker does not specifically reference any alternative theories.” This is hilarious to me, we have introduced religion into schools by encouraging students to think critically. (Watch out College English, you're next! You and your reading of Beowulf! Damnit, don't make me think!)
The desire of six parents and the ACLU to have this sticker loaded with "religious dogma" has trumped the free speech demands of 2000 parents interested in reminding children to think critically about something, and consider other sources (potentially those unaffilliated with the government) for more information on the theory of evolution.

<soapbox>I'm having to try very hard not to get into a big, hairy discussion on how this really reinforces the State mandated teaching of the religion of atheism. I'll be good this time. </soapbox>

Now, I'm sure since this was a lawsuit that someone won...I'm just not sure who.