A Curious Instrument

There has been yet another school shooting and the media is hard at work to blame guns for this violence. Again, as I have said previously, one solution for these sorts of tragedies is a family decision to keep children away from systemically dangerous "targets" like schools. Lisa and I made a choice early in our marriage to school our children ourselves as much as we could contrive. Part of our reason to live in the frontiers of New Mexico is the strong homeschooling tradition here and the "hands-off" approach the state government is forced to have about a parent's educational choices for their own children. We were able to take advantage of wonderfully "alternative" schooling opportunities, such as The Learning Center at House Schools, that we were able to find close by. We made conscious choices about the lives of our children and I feel these have paid off enormously. Please, alongside the mass call for turning schools and communities into gun...

There is great power in copyright and its licensing. Careful that your chosen license doesn't take over your life! I am a BSD or Berkeley Software Distribution license devotee. I am also a classical liberal that just wants to be left alone most of the time. I know, I have met RMS and much of my recent living has been made from Linux , but the BSD license is the license that is most likely to allow me to be creative without fretting licensing defense. Some attempt to say that their work has been "dedicated to the public domain " to gain peace in the creative act. I enjoy public domain works, but there is no ready way to dedicate something to the public domain now that the Berne Convention insinuates copyright at the time of production. Public domain says there is no copyright, no owner, and therefore no one can grant its lack of license. Public domain work can only be expired from a previous copyright, or a product of the US Government , which was established as a ...

We are just finished days of celebrating Hanukkah and are getting ready for Christmas Day at our home.  I wish all of you joy during these days and hope you take some time to reconnect with your family during this sometimes hectic season! I am grateful for my heritage in two traditions, celebrating God's love for us in two related ways, through miracles that we all enjoy and through the coming of the Messiah in the person of Jesus Christ! We celebrate the blessing of a miracle that came to the Jews as they rededicated themselves and their Temple to the worship of God. Even more so, we celebrate the coming of the Christ who would save us from death and give us the opportunity to be forgiven of our sins and join him alongside God as a worthy heir of all things. What marvelous gifts to us all! If I seem hard or even harsh, it is because I want to see each of you in that blessed state in the future. I want to get there as well and I say and do things calculated to accomplish this f...

Did I offend some of you with my last post? Are you perhaps feeling offended on behalf of someone else like a good social justice warrior? Can I offer you some forgiveness? Not understanding, I made a couple of turns in my life and made some choices. I was a very lucky person - I chose to follow some unspoken advice at very pivotal moments in my life and I stumbled, somewhat accidentally, upon a wonderful road and a miraculous journey that has brought me indescribable joy.  I was timid and shy and didn't have lots of friends as a young man and I can only say that, in a strange way, these things saved me from the confusion and heartache that floods over our times. So many people are searching for real happiness and true meaning - I practically tripped over it years ago and I stuck with it without really knowing what I had found. I look back on my marriage and my family and I was just doing what my parents had done and their parents and their parents before that. None of them were ...

This is an essay I wrote a while back. The topic was divisive at the time (to say the least) and every time I bring it up, I usually lose a portion of my readers. The times since I wrote this have become far stranger and the terms seem even more archaic than they were five years ago. It is probably about time to alienate some folks. I just didn't want to do it too early and have readers think that this is my subject for the whole website . It is something I am happy to be passionate about, but certainly not the only thing. I wanted to get it said and frankly out of the way at this point, to reduce confusion about how I feel about such things. For those of you that will walk away, I accept your strident emotional and philosophical immaturity... Let's begin with the concept of "ideal" and how that relates to marriage, something most of us will involve ourselves in for most of our lives, if we have a desire to obtain a greater portion of joy and happiness in our lives...

"Cleave to your wife and no other." There is no better thing a man can do for his children than to devote himself to the love and care for their mother. Becoming a father is pathetically easy - irresponsible boys become such through mindless copulation. Being a good husband is a much heavier commitment - you have to get some girl to actually agree to this, over and over again, for the long term. It is easy to get the "love" of your dependent children - they have little choice in the matter. Does the young child easily turn their back on the hand that provides bed and bread? Mothering alone tend toward over-protection and smothering. Fathers alone tend toward distance and premature independence. The best results comes from a combination of both, applied as mother begins and father finishes. Being a good father requires devotion first to a sustaining love of your wife and then dedication to the preparation of your children for their future roles as husbands and ...

I am doing some adjunct teaching this year and I find myself with mixed feelings about it. I find myself falling into the trap of being an English teacher, as all of the work is written. I wrote this to the students today and I thought it might be interesting to others as well. As you are now working on your term papers, I feel the need to say a few things about research, source material, and doing things "right". Some of you seem to be opening up Google, typing in the title of your "research" and basically restating the "click-bait" pablum that passes for technology "journalism". These should not be passed off as business-grade research in anything to which you attach your name. I hope you have a little more regard for your productive output and how you look professionally. Internet "Best of...", "Ten Ways..", or "Twelve Tips..." articles, if read at all, should be the absolute beginning of your research effo...