Joy to Everyone

This is a little project by the BYU College of Fine Arts and Communications.  It shares a positive, uplifting message of Christlike love during this holiday season to help us remember that Christmas really is a Holy day.

Joy to Everyone This Christmas

Caught up

I now have the end of August 2008 as well as September, October and the beginning of November now posted... so I'm caught up, at least for now!

Here are the albums...

August 2008

September 2008

October 2008

November 2008

And some highlights!

From our trip to Oregon in September

Tyler on the "Frog Hopper" with his aunts

 

Boys swinging

 

Alex's birthday cake

 

Alex's "hood"

 

Halloween!

 

Brothers boxing on the Wii

We are fellow Americans

I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited.

Whatever our differences, we are fellow Americans. And please believe me when I say no association has ever meant more to me than that.

John McCain

I may not agree with President-elect Obama's politics, but, as Senator McCain reminds us, contention will not get is anywhere.

Packaging and Amazon Power

It is interesting that Amazon has this much power now, that they can basically start encouraging manufacturers to build smarter, online retailer-friendly, packaging. 

Amazon Frustration Free Packing

I can understand that the other packaging is more retail store friendly, but is definitely harder to deal with on many other levels and therefore makes little to no sense in a online retailer setting.

(Found via GeekDad)

Star Wars ABCs

Some of the references are a little obscure for those not really into Star Wars, but still fun if you know anything about the Star Wars universe.

Star Wars ABCs!

August Photos

As usual, some highlights here, but go to the album for the full set!

August 2008

Here is the quilt that Jennifer made for Julia's wedding.

Alex after the now infamous Addy Attack (the first one).

 

Tyler ready for the first football game of the season.

 

Tyler and I at the game.

 

boys, boys, boys

Well, Jennifer had her 20 week ultrasound today and, surprise, boy #3 will be joining the Clement family in February!

Interesting perspective on the current economic situation

This is, of course, a very partisan view of things, but offers an interesting perspective (that you probably won't see reported in the news... at least not on CNN) on the chain of events that got us to where we are today in our economy.

Click here if you can't see the embedded video below.

On the eve of the commencement of my thirtieth year...

(or the night before my 29th birthday), I have much to ponder, but that's probably not a whole lot different than normal. (I tend to over think things, the curse of an engineer's mind.)  While my 29th birthday is tomorrow, I've recently been more focused on my 30th birthday.  Some might say that your birthday is just another day (I've actually said it before too) or that a 30th birthday is just another birthday, but ticking off those days, months, years, decades is important and offers an opportunity to reflect on the past, present and future.  They represent milestones in our lives and should be remembered and celebrated.

An old envelope

I recently found a sealed envelope from 9 December 1993 as I was going through old papers.  I wasn't supposed to open it until 2004 so I guess I was a little late.  Inside was three sheets with a bunch of questions to find out the "Details of the Life and Times of Mike Clement".  It appears to have been part of some long forgotten early-morning Seminary class activity.

Some things remain the same:

• "My favorite color is: blue" which you can tell by my closet.
• "When I have nothing to do, I like thinking about: what I will do when I'm older" which is evidenced by this post.
• "The subject I enjoy most in school is: Orchestra or Art" which I wish I had more time to work on now.

Some things change as I, at the time, thought I'd major in "music or art".  That said, I also indicated when asked "What would you like your future posterity to understand about you at this point in your life?" I wrote "I'm indecisive about which career to pursue.  My life is sort of on a road coming to a crossroads."  A somewhat grand statement for a freshman in high school, but this was actually written shortly before I started really getting into computer programming which would go on to be my career and one of my passions.

When I'm thirty...

Number 17 was "When I am 30 yrs old, I hope to" to which I answered "be married, have kids and have a lot of money."  I've got the first two with a wonderful wife, two crazy and adorable boys and a baby on the way.  I guess I have a year to work on the third item :)

So what's next?  The hours turn to days turn to months turn to years so easily without taking inventory of where you are and where you want to be.  I've been writing and rewriting a list of goals in my head for a few months now, in particular a "before I'm 30" list.  I think I haven't put it in writing yet because I'm not sure I really want to commit to everything I want to do (a fear of failure).  In the meantime I feel like I've been drifting a bit.  I did accomplish one of the things I've had bouncing around which was to start a technical blog, but have neglected many other things and haven't even been very good about writing on that blog as I would have liked.  That said, I plan to use my birthday as an opportunity to write down a list of goals to get started on.  Some will be private goals, but some I will make public here to help me via peer pressure.  So look for a follow up post soon!

July Photos

Finished posting July photos. Here's a slideshow:

Some highlights include...

Super Alex

 

A trip to the planetarium

First ultrasound

 

Grandpa and Grandma Clement visiting

 

And the arrival of the Wii.

As usual, here is a link to the entire album!

July 2008

If you hadn't heard...

Clement baby number 3 is due February 22nd.  Gender coming soon...

A Very Dark Knight

Jennifer wanted to finish up Breaking Dawn tonight so I went to see The Dark Knight.  We tried to go see it two weeks ago but the showing we were going to was sold out when we got there about a half hour before the show.

About all I can say for the movie is "wow".  It captured pretty much everything I love about Batman, especially the Batman/Bruce Wayne struggle and the Batman/Joker relationship.

I highly recommend it, but it's pretty intense and dark the whole way through and some parts are a little bit disturbing so it's not for everyone (one review I heard said "Only see it if you can drive yourself there"), but I thought it was really well done.

Nerd, Geek or Dork?

My cousin Angela posted the results of the "Nerd, Geek or Dork?" quiz.  She turned out normal...  My result was as expected.  "You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd."  The full results along with some comparative analysis can be found at this page.  If you're too lazy to follow the link, here's the text from the results...

 

Your result for The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test...

Modern, Cool Nerd

For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd.

Nerds didn't use to be cool, but in the 90's that all changed. It used to be that, if you were a computer expert, you had to wear plaid or a pocket protector or suspenders or something that announced to the world that you couldn't quite fit in. Not anymore. Now, the intelligent and geeky have eked out for themselves a modicum of respect at the very least, and "geek is chic." The Modern, Cool Nerd is intelligent, knowledgable and always the person to call in a crisis (needing computer advice/an arcane bit of trivia knowledge). They are the one you want as your lifeline in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (or the one up there, winning the million bucks)!

Congratulations!

Software on the Side

I recently started a software development blog, Software on the Side.  Most of you probably won't be interested in it, but hopefully it'll be interesting to those of you that work in software.  Those that are possibly relevant I'll cross post here as well.

Rest of June and the 4th

I've posted the rest of the June photos and some from July... here are some of the highlights.

Alex being goofy.

Tyler showing off his new church shirt and tie.

We smoked some ribs and grilled some corn on the 4th... tasty!  This was the first time that I've tried doing ribs on the grill and they turned out pretty good.

Alex had a blue popsicle and stained his hands and mouth blue.

And here are links to the albums...

June 2008

July 2008

A Few Good Developers

Caselle (where I work) is hiring software developers.  Ignore the fact that it's not listed on the site yet.  These are new positions as we expand the development group.  Our existing code is in VB.NET but new code will be written in C#.  We're using Visual Studio 2008 and Subversion.  .NET experience is good, but not required... mostly we're looking for good software developers that have a good grasp of object oriented principles in whatever language and are willing to learn.  I've posted before about Caselle (After one week and After eight months) and some of the challenges that Caselle is facing.  A very important part of improving things is getting more good people in to help continue to turn and steady the ship.

We're currently in Spanish Fork but will be moving to the Novell campus in south Provo as soon as some final issues get worked out (hopefully in September).

In any case, if you are a software developer looking or if you know somebody that is, please contact me or leave a comment in this post and I'll answer any questions you might have and, if you're interested, get your resume.

On Power Supplies

My computer problems seem to end up being power supply problems... at least they're usually not catastrophic (to data anyway), but they are sometimes tricky to diagnose.  In any case, I wouldn't be writing about this if I hadn't had such a problem and wanted to share. :)

On Sunday the computer "wasn't working".  It appeared to be on but I couldn't get the display to come up.  So I rebooted and got a POST error about something being wrong with the CPU.  I wasn't too thrilled about that...

I waited a bit and tried again... this time it booted and then went into Windows, but then after a minute or so it "sort of" died back to the weird half dead state where it seemed to kinda be working.  I took some canned air and the canister vacuum and gave the inside of the case a good cleaning in hopes that maybe it was just some dust causing a problem... but that left me at the same spot.  I gave up for the night and planned to resume tonight.

All day I've been worried about my data... we've been thinking about using Jungle Disk to do offsite backup of some of our stuff, in particular our photos but hadn't gotten around to it... In any case, this event has made that a higher priority.  I'll post again in a few days once I have that set up and can give a decent review.

Back to the story... I resumed my diagnostics tonight.  This time it wouldn't start up at all... Not good.  But at this point I figured that it had to be the power supply though... or at least it was part of the puzzle.  I luckily had an old computer lying around and I hooked up its power supply to this computer (just the motherboard and main hard drive).  It looked a little like I was "jumping" it (like a car) since I didn't take the power supply out of the other computer but laid it down next to it and stretched the power cables over. 

After using the other power supply, everything seemed to work fine.  As a test, I used it to look up what stores were still open that would have a reasonably priced power supply.  The one in the other computer is older, doesn't have all the right cable endings and probably would end up being a little underpowered for what's in this computer.  Plus we were planning on setting it up for Tyler in place of the ten year old HP (yes, the one that Jeff got when he started his freshman year at BYU, with some upgrades along the way like more RAM and a better video card). 

Anyway, Circuit City is open until 10 (it was almost 9 at the time) and they had a decent deal on an Antec Basiq 500W power supply.  I ran out there to pick it up and that seems to have done the trick and everything is working fine now.  Hopefully this will prolong its life until we're ready to buy a new one.  Hooray!

Strawberry Days

Last Friday we went to the Strawberry Days carnival.  Last year we went and Tyler would only ride the carousel over and over again.  We were hoping that this year he would be more willing to go on more rides.  Which he did... to a point.  We tried to get him on the little rides that basically just go around in a circle (like a carousel but with little cars).  He wouldn't go and I was afraid that we were going to have a repeat of last year.  But it turned out that he was pretty much willing to go on anything that I could go on with him. So...

... he went on the ferris wheel with me which he actually enjoyed.  I was a little worried that once we got up there that he would start to freak out, but he thought it was a blast.

Tyler and Alex went on a carousel ride and then Alex went on the carousel again while Tyler went on the little roller coaster with me.

And then, of course, we got strawberries :)

I also posted some other photos.  Here's the album!

June 2008

Gospel Insight: Wordle

I don't know if this really goes as a "Gospel Insight" but thought it was fun and it involves Conference talks and it's my blog so I can do what I want :)

I found this fun toy online called Wordle via my friend Kurt's blog that allows you to feed it text and it then generates a word jumble based on what it judges to be the relative importance (I assume that it has to do with word frequency in the document as well as how common the word is in normal English).

Anyway, I fed it a pair of talks from last General Conference.  Click on the image for a larger view.

One of President Eyring's talks from last conference:

One of President Monson's talks from last conference:

Go build your own!

Download Firefox Today!

Firefox 3 was released today.  Go check it out at http://getfirefox.com/.  Firefox 1 and 2 were great, but this version is snappier (faster rendering) and uses less memory.  I've been using the release candidate for a week or so and it's been great.

The Mozilla Organization (the group behind Firefox) is trying to set a "world record" for the most downloads today so if you're using Firefox already, go download the new version today... and if you're not, go download it and try it out.

Rest of May Photos and some from June

Here are the rest of the May photos and the start of the June album.  As usual, some highlights and then links to the albums at the end.

Boys being silly.

 

Our visit to the Clark Planetarium.

 

Boys with popcicles

May 2008

June 2008

New Template

So I decided to finally go ahead and tweak the layout and design of the blog.  I've been wanting to go to a three column layout for a while but hadn't found a template that I liked.  This one is okay... we'll see if it sticks or not.  I like the three column layout but not necessarily the the colors yet (tweaked those from the default template) or the exact position of everything in the sidebars.  Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Gospel Insight: Ward Newsletter

In our ward the ward newsletter message rotates among the various organizations.  I recently got called as the Sunday School President in our ward (I was the 1st Counselor and the President moved out...) and this past month was the Sunday School's turn.  I thought I'd post what I wrote up...

We believe that governments were instituted of God for the benefit of man… (D&C 134:1)

The official position of the Church on political neutrality states that the Church does not “attempt to direct its members as to which candidate or party they should give their votes to.” Usually we focus on that part of the statement and neglect that another part of the statement says that the Church “encourage[s] its members to play a role as responsible citizens in their communities, including becoming informed about issues and voting in elections.”[1]

Many of the members of the Church have taken it a step beyond simply being informed and voting and have run for and attained political office at a various levels of government. For example, there are 16 Latter-day Saints in the United States Congress of both political parties. While not all of us have the inclination to pursue public office, we should all be “responsible citizens” and take the time to be informed about and be involved in government to the level that we’re able.

With the current economic situation, it is easy to want to place blame, to complain. I often catch myself complaining about some issue or another but Elder Maxwell stated, “Murmuring can also be noisy enough that it drowns out the various spiritual signals to us, signals which tell us in some cases to quit soaking ourselves indulgently in the hot tubs of self-pity!... Besides, brothers and sisters, if we were not carrying so much else, our crosses would be much lighter.”[2]

It is easy to sit on the sidelines and comment on what is going on, especially if that commentary is negative. It is much more difficult to get involved and be a part of a positive solution. Instead of complaining we should ensure that our words and deeds are “filled with faith and hope and charity, the three great Christian imperatives so desperately needed in the world today.”[3]

President Hinckley’s widely published book was titled “Standing for Something” not “Standing against Something”. We should ensure that our involvement with political issues should be done in a positive and respectful manner. We should build up, not tear down. We should encourage, not discourage. We should be for something, we shouldn’t be against something. We should be shining examples of what a Latter-day Saint is.

I bring this all up because this month Primary Elections will be held in Utah. Stand for something. Cast an informed vote.

---

[1] http://www.newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/public-issues/political-neutrality

[2] Neal A. Maxwell, “‘Murmur Not’,” Ensign, Nov 1989, 82

[3] Jeffrey R. Holland, “The Tongue of Angels,” Ensign, May 2007, 16–18

Concert in the Park

Where: 200 S 100 E Pleasant Grove, UT (see map below)

When: Sunday, June 1st, 2008 @ 7:30 pm

The Pleasant Grove Orchestra is the first in Pleasant Grove's Concert in the Park summer series.  The theme is "The American West" (or something like that).  We're playing a whole bunch of pieces including a few Aaron Copland (see photo) pieces (Hoedown, Saturday Night Waltz from Rodeo, Variations on a Shaker Theme from Appalachian Spring), Armed Forces Salute, Selections from Oklahoma and others.

This concert is held at the corner of 200 S and 100 E in Pleasant Grove at 7:30 pm on Sunday, June 1st. It's an outdoor concert unless the weather forces us inside the Rec Center but it looks like it should be a sunny pleasant evening.

I hope that some of you are able to make it as it should be a fun, family friendly concert.

 

 

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Photos Update

I've added some new photos in the month of May.

Here is our "Blue Steel" photo.

... and a link to the album...

May 2008

April Photos!

April photos are now available for your viewing pleasure. We have pretty silly adorable boys :)

April 2008

Family = Global Warming?

Global Warming - Latest Excuse for the War on the Family

Wow.

Caselle after 8 months

I had meant to write a post at 6 months, but that came and went. So this is a follow up to my Caselle After One Week post... at 8 months.

First, I'm still a Senior Software Engineer but in October was included in Caselle's Architect Team. This puts me on the group with the other senior developers. It allows me to give input into architecture and design decisions and responsibility over the base classes. I've found over the past months that the base classes have some design flaws. So one of the team's big efforts is to redesign these classes. The main goals are to improve the maintainability and improve performance. It should be a fun but intense project that should help Caselle a lot.

Second, the commute is still not bad. The purple car continues to make the trip every day. It still runs...

Third, the hours haven't been bad still. We were recently asked to up our hours in order to help work down the defect list that had been growing. I personally don't believe that upping hours is the "right" way to address the problem but the defect count has been going down. But it had started to turn down a few days before we were asked to up our hours. I think a renewed emphasis on the defect count would have achieved the same result. The other, longer term, part of the solution to the defect is the redesign project that I mentioned before. I've been going in an hour earlier which I hope to continue after the "crisis" has abated and then going home an hour earlier too.

In the plus column, they didn't take away 9/80s even though it's now a 9/90. Also they changed some of the time tracking policies for the salaried employees to be more lax. We still report on what we spend our time on, but we don't do clock in and clock out.

Fourth, Caselle has been a pretty good company to work at overall. Like all companies, there are good things and bad things, but the group of people is pretty solid and many of the issues that I saw when I started have been resolved. For those of you that are into software development: we're almost completely moved to VS2008 from VS2003, we moved from VSS to SVN, we're on CruiseControl.net for continuous integration and our build is now done via MSBuild instead of a batch file. For those of you that aren't into software development, those are all very good things.

So, things are going well. I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll be at Caselle for a while.

PG Orchestra Young Artists Concert

This Friday, April 25th is the Pleasant Grove Symphony's Young Artists Concert. It's at Pleasant Grove High School Auditorium (see the map below) at 7 pm. The soloists are local youth. We'll be playing a number of different pieces including:

Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Major, Allegramente

Vivaldi's Concerto for Violin in A Minor, Op. 3, No. 6, Allegro

Tchaikovsky's Marche Slave

And many others! It should be a great concert.

If you're not able to come to this one, the next concert is our Pops Concert on June 1st. More details to come...

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February and March Photos

Here are the albums for February and March.

February 2008

March 2008