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short review

I recently read On The Edge Of The Dark Edge of Darkness, by Andrew Peterson and I loved it. I'm anxiously awaiting the sequel to find out what happens to Janner, Tink and the others. Pick it up and read it, you won't regret it.

longer review

Ahhh, songwriters - the poets of this modern era. My favorite, unequivocally, is Andrew Peterson. There's something about the timeliness of each of his songs that always seems to hit me just at the correct stage of life. I think he's literally living about two years ahead of me. "The Chasing Song" and "Nothing to say" came about in 2000, just about the time my wife and I were getting ready to go overseas. The lyrics spoke volumes to me and ministered directly to me. Then, in 2003, his "Family Man" brought tears to my eyes as we were trying to plan a family and make some hard decisions about life. 2005 brought his "Far Country" and a multitude of songs yearning for another place and time amid the business of modern life. As you can see, I'm a fan of his work and can say his songs have really affected the way I live.

I know this is an odd way to begin a book review, but I say all this to help you realize my fear upon hearing he was going to write a novel aimed at children. What if it was awful? What if I was completely bored with the whole thing? One man shouldn't be able to write life changing songs AND entertaining books. That's too much talent for one person. I was wrong. The guy's a talented genius.

On The Edge Of The Dark Edge of Darkness is a fun, entertaining, read with constant ups and downs that kept me interested. It's one of those books you start reading and all of a sudden, you're done and disappointed that the last page crept up on you.

From the beginning the characters were engaging and believable. Through a series of short tales with multiple points of excitement, the entire world is introduced in a way that kept me, the reader, always curious and wanting to read "just one more page" before putting it down.

My only complaint was that the book did seem to end quite abruptly, but for this genre of children's adventure, that's quite acceptable as it's obvious this is a series and there will be more to the tale.

I believe the story actually comes from a series of bedtime stories that the author told his kids, and as such it's a lot of fun and would be a great bedtime story book to read a chapter or two each night to children. The bad guys are bad, but not too bad. The good guys are obviously good, and the overtones are wholesome. I loved it.

Overall Recommendation?

Go get it and read it to your kids. They, and you, will love it.

BarCampAustinIII will be held this weekend (Mar 7th-8th, 2008).

I mention it here mainly to say that I won't be attending it, as I'll be in College Station at a Graduate Invitational for TAMU. I'm still trying to do that grad school thing...

Here's a link for more info and here's the most excellent logo:

My father passed away on Thursday, Feb 21 2008. That's one week ago, today.

In the last week, I've spent more time in his apartment than in the last five years combined. He was a man that loved to play guitar, loved looking at pictures of his kids, and loved to hang out at Walmart to flirt with the girls who worked there (all 50 years his younger, btw). He was a nice guy and everyone that met him liked him.

I'd like to say that I did the whole sackcloth and wailing thing, but honestly, I've struggled with how to mourn. He and I were never really close. My earliest childhood memories of him are vague at best. I'm not really a poignant sort of guy, so I'll just say that burying a parent, even one that I don't feel "raised" me is a difficult thing to deal with.

One nice thing about all this - I got to see family members that I'd not seen in years. It's odd to me that in our society today, that funerals seem to be the "family reunions" we all pine for but never work to accomplish.

Last night, we had the privilege of attending a concert at our church. I wish I had more time to write a glowing review, but I'm pretty crunched at work, so I'll be quite succinct. Ready?

best. concert. ever.

Andrew Peterson, Bebo Norman, Andy Osenga, and others (note to self - add "others" later) spent the first half of the show doing a concert in the round. Five very talented and passionate artist/songwriters basically had fun up on stage and let us peek in on what's it like to see our God's world through a poet's eyes. The second half of the show was the Christmas story, but the way it should always be told. The music started in Genesis of the Older Testament and worked it's way forward through time and the Bible. As Sarah put it through teary eyes, "Why don't more Christmas stories have Christ's birth as the crescendo?!" In essence, there was a buildup of music concerning the thread of Christ woven throughout prophesy.

It was a spectacular night. I wish I had the gift of words to share how my heart was touched, my ears tickled, and my intellect pleased. I say "Thank You!" to the artists. Thank you for a night of worship and for giving me hope that Christian music will not continue to digress into the popular yet meaningless.

I live in a suburban HOA controlled neighborhood just north of Austin. This means I have to mow my lawn or I get nasty letters from the home owners association telling me that my inability to mow my lawn as frequently as my retired neighbor (hi Dennis) causes the HOA to be ugly. The letters aren't so bad, but I secretly think they club a baby seal each time they send me a letter, so for the sake of the baby seals, I try to mow my lawn.

As I'm mowing my lawn, I frequently wonder to myself if I'm doing it the optimal way. Should I start near the sidewalk and work my way across the yard vertically? Does going horizontally from the side of my house really make a difference?

I began to think of this issue in an algorithmically (is that a word?) manner after about the 5th time I'd mowed it. This is my first home, I figure I have 30 years of lawns ahead of me. NOW is the time to solve this issue for every house I may own in the future.

After much thought (and sunny days behind the push mower) I realized I needed to treat the yard as a graph of nodes, where each node represents a certain chunk of the yard. Video games do this with tiles and will use something like Djikstra's shortest path to determine object collision. This is close, but I wanted something more like Prim's Spanning Tree, which will hit every node in the graph. Unfortunately, a spanning tree isn't the precise answer either. I really needed something more like a trail through my graph that minimized or didn't repeat any node visitations, because why would I wish to mow portions of my lawn twice? The spanning tree may cover every node in the cheapest overall way, but doesn't guarantee me the fastest/cheapest way through the tree w/o repeating edges (connections between nodes) or nodes.

So, here's what I've got so far. If you look at the picture below, it's sort of a simplistic view of my front yard, just broken up into tiles.

Above, the tiles A-I are nodes, or just blocks of yard that require mowing. If you notice the "bone" shaped object spread across nodes A-F, that's some landscaping bricks and other plants that I don't mow over (at least not when the wife's looking...). The blue lines are edges between the nodes linking possible entries into that node from other nodes. If you notice, I can get to node B from node A, but not any other node. That's because the landscaping blocks it. Also, I can get to node E from F and H only, again, due to landscaping. Btw, you may be wondering what about diagonal edges - well, good question. The answer is that I'm just lazy and didn't feel like drawing those -- meaning they could be used also.

Below is a more traditional way of viewing a graph. Each node below has a corresponding node in teh tiles image above and the same edges (or connections to other nodes).

I think in my next post, I'll go into why a spanning tree won't really work, and a possible way I'm thinking of getting around the issues.

keep in mind the practical application and limitations here. Each node in the yard will have a "cost" associated with it. Maybe the grass is higher there.. who knows. Also, each entrance into a node and corresponding exit also has a cost. It's preferable to turn the mower 90 degrees instead of 180 degrees, etc. So If i constantly enter a node and do a uturn to get out of it, that's sub-optimal. For these reasons, I need a different way of calculating the costs associated with entering a node.

Granted, there could be a solution for this problem already and I've not found it in my (limited) googling. This is the kind of problem I think most about while I'm pushing the mower, I haven't spent a great deal of time looking for algorithms so far.... perhaps I'll also do a quick survey of those as well for the next post.

Anyway, this is just the initial presentation of a problem I've been pondering a while, and decided to share. Hope you enjoy thinking about it now, as well, and happy mowing!