Ryan Morlok’s Blog

If you haven’t already, download it here.

My diploma arrived at my parents house a couple days ago.  That puts the finishing touches on this thing I like to call my master’s degree.  They can’t take it back now. Ha! Suckers…

Despite not showing their best stuff in the last series of the seaon against the White Sox, the Twins managed to win the AL central title over Detroit.  The Twins won the last of the three game series with Chicago this afternoon, and then stuck around to watch the Tigers/Royals game.  The Royals made an incredible 3-run comeback to beat Detroit in 12 innings, which pushed the Twins to clinch the AL Central title.  Read more about it all here.

On another up note, Joe Mauer won the MLB batting title with an average of .347.  He edged out Jeter and Sanchez to become the first AL catcher to ever win the title.

After frequent complaints that my blog was “too boring” with “boring .NET stuff,” my wife Katy has decided to show me how it’s done.  She has launched here new blog: http://www.morlok.net/katy/  Since its launch 5 minutes ago, the frequency of the word ‘Puma’ has tripled on the internet.

I upgraded gallery this afternoon to gallery2 and things are pretty much finished.  I had to mod one of the themes slightly, and I’m still not completely happy with it, but things are fairly usable now.  I’m not going to alias http://www.morlok.net/gallery to the new site (http://www.morlok.net/gallery2) just yet, until I check to see how this is going to affect the pictures on my photo tributes.  The interface, with the current theme, is nice, but I’m sure I’ll be tweaking it more in the future.

Be aware, it may be a little slow to show the thumbnails at first.  Not all of the thumbnails were re-generated after my import from the old gallery.  After they’ve been viewed by someone once, things will be much faster.

Also, there were a few problems when importing pictures from my old gallery.  Currently, the only pictures that I’m aware of that aren’t there now is the full collection of pictures from Dusty and Laura’s wedding.  I’ll work to get that on there in the next few days.

I’ve done some house cleaning regarding my online calendars. Following my graduation this summer, the CSGSO and School calendars were no longer relevant. My web calendar viewer has been updated, but anyone subscribing to my iCal files directly may encounter some errors as I’ve remove the appropriate files. My current ics files are as follows:

• http://www.morlok.net/dav/RyanMorlokWork.ics
• http://www.morlok.net/dav/RyanMorlokHomePublic.ics
• http://www.morlok.net/dav/RyanMorlokChurch.ics
• http://www.morlok.net/dav/RyanMorlokACM.ics
• http://www.morlok.net/dav/RyanMorlokHockey.ics

After working with Dusty today to try to get his comments to be allowed without moderation, I just broke down and installed a new plugin to handle spam filtering. Before a comment is accepted, everyone is now required to fill out a field that asks a simple math question, such as “Please add 7 and 6″. In order to make the system accessible to all my readers, I’ve signed Steve up with a tutor to help him with his addition skills.

21 years, 3 months, 10 days, 12 seconds* of non-stop oppression from the American education system, and I am finally free. I depositted my thesis last Thursday at 4:00 p.m. CST. and for the first time in my life, no school has claims on my time. It feels good.

* OK, I made up the precision of those stats.

I dropped the final revision of the VBA book Dusty, Marsha, and I have been writing off at the publisher this afternoon. It’s great to get that project completed, so I can fully focus on my thesis. The book was the single largest writing project I’ve ever attempted. I probably did about 70% of the writing for it, which totals about 100 pages. Granted, there are a lot of screenshots and code fragments in there, but that’s still a bit of writing if you’ve ever sat down at the keyboard and tried to crank something like that out.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the project, we set out to write a book that teaches VBA programming in Microsoft Excel. There are other books like this out there, but this one is specifically targettted to the material taugh in CS 105, the course for which I’ve been a TA for the last 4 semesters. The goal of the project not give the students more material in the book than we teach in class, and to explain things in complementary ways.

If you’d like to view it, I’ve posted it here, though I’ll probably take down that link in a few days, as that version doesn’t contain any of the copyright stuff. I wrote chapters 1-7, Dusty wrote 8-10, and Marsha was the principle reviewer.

Ruth Thorsell died from cancer this morning. It’s been a really sad past few months to see her go from the life-filled musician she has been her whole life to someone who has been struggling to survive. Katy and my thoughts and prayers go out to the Thorsell family.

The past few years have really brought death back to my life after having it be noticeably absent for my first 20 years. In the past few years my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother have both died. Our family dog, Minnie, also passed away during that period. Comparing the experiences of these deaths really brings home the fact that dying is often painful. My Grandfather died from a variety of things, including what was later believed to be bone cancer. He had to be in a nursing home for the last few months of his life. Minnie was on a long trek downhill, which started with her going through spells where she couldn’t walk, getting to the point where she was having trouble breathing until we finally put her to sleep.

As a kid, I remember hearing about a pastor’s wife who died from cancer (she was also previously my choir director). At the time, it didn’t sound that bad, but looking back, I’m starting to realize what dying from cancer really means.

Thankfully, my Grandma Hove was the blissful exception. She was a little sick before she died, but it wasn’t anything that required going to the hospital (at least what she was experiencing the weeks before she died). She died quickly in her home, on her own terms, if such a thing exists with death.

Various times, I’ve had discussions about how I’d want to die. That’s a difficult question. You’re always forced to weight the opportunity to say goodbye to the people you love with the suffering that knowing that you are dying brings both you and them. I don’t know how I could make that decision, I guess that’s why it’s in God’s hands.

“We mourn, but not as those without hope.”