Roots

Ironman.

2010-11-25T08:19:00.000-08:00

I know its been several months since I've written anything here. Life has actually changed quite a bit, and I plan to get to that with a later post. But for now I wanted to share the experience I had of completing my first Ironman race. I don't think I've ever written a race report (a somewhat common practice for endurance athletes), but this event was so huge and the circumstances surrounding it so substantial that it would be a shame to never record any of it. So here we go.

Pre-race

As I mentioned in an earlier post in March, I had registered for Ironman Arizona. The race was to take place on November 21st, 2010. For a variety of reasons that I will get into in a later post, unfortunately I was severely undertrained for this event. I'd even go so far as to say that I was out of shape by the time race week rolled around. But I had already committed myself to this race and there was no way I was going to back out of it. I joked around with my friends that an Ironman itself wasn't challenging enough for me so I had to do one off of practically no training. But the truth was I felt very anxious about it as I had no idea how my body was going to react to something as grueling as an Ironman triathlon when I had grew to be so lethargic.

My friend Mike and I drove from Austin to my mother's home in Gilbert Arizona on Wednesday the 17th. At that time I think it had been three weeks since I had ridden my bike, four weeks since I swam (other than once the week before), and I had only been getting in around one short run a week. Thursday morning we went for a 45 minute run and I surprisingly felt pretty good on it, which gave me a little more confidence that I would survive the coming ordeal on Sunday. Thursday afternoon we went to pickup our race packets and stopped by some local tri shops to pick up on some final items that we needed for the race (mostly nutrition). Late Friday afternoon we drove down and parked near the race site, then went for about an hour ride on the bike course. The ride felt awesome. It was flat and fast and despite not being on my bike for so long, I felt great on that ride. After the ride we got body marked at the race site and then took our bikes back to the car.

We were parked in an open lot behind some condos near Mill Avenue and the Arizona State University campus. We had a race dinner nearby to attend and Mike was really concerned about leaving our bikes there as they might get stolen, even though they would be locked to the bike rack. I wasn't concerned about that at all, but agreed that we should drive around and find a safer spot to park in. We ended up parking at a metered spot along Mill Avenue, a really busy and lively street in Tempe. We both felt the bikes would be safer there because there would be so many people around. Mike still felt worried though, and decided to take the race wheels off his bike and stick them in the trunk, since the race wheels were not locked when they were on the bike (even though the bikes were locked to the car). I didn't have race wheels on my bike so we just left my wheels on.

Now at the end of September I had bought a new bike, a Cervelo P3, specifically for this race. I had fallen in love with that bike from the first day I rode it and fell in love with it all over again each time I went for another ride. That morning I had washed it, lubed it, and done all the final checks it needed to be ready on race day. It was also a rather expensive bike, $3,500 to be exact. Anyway, we headed out for the dinner (the food sucked IMO) and headed back to the car a couple hours later. As we got closer I started feeling really anxious for some reason and wanted to make sure that both of our bikes were okay. And when the car was finally right in front of us, I could not believe what I saw. The bike lock had been cut at the cable and my bike was gone without a trace. The bike and components that I spent nearly $4,000 on, had only owned for 7 weeks, and 36 hours before the start of my first Ironman had been stolen. Fortunately Mike's bike was still on the rack, even though it was clean for the taking as well. Of course we called the police, filed a report, and I talked to people around the area that I could. Obviously I was upset about my awesome bike being stolen, but of more pressing concern on my mind was finding an alternative bike for the race on Sunday.

Saturday morning came and the plan was to get in a quick swim and then go around the race site talking to people and trying to find a bike I could borrow for the race. I also had to get replacement stickers for whatever bike I took, since I had already put the race stickers on my bike before it was stolen. I ended up not getting in that swim because I forgot to bring my timing chip, but honestly I did not care too much (the water was freezing and I was not looking forward to getting in there anyway). Instead I started talking with officials, shop owners, and athletes in the area to see what my options were. I found three people that were willing to loan me their bikes, and I ended up borrowing a Quintana Roo Caliente from an Austin area triathlete who was in town for the race but not doing the race. As soon as I grabbed that from him, I took it over to someone I had met at the Ironman bike shop tent and he helped me change out the pedals, tune it up, and adjust the bike to fit me properly. After that was done I checked it in along with my transition bags and left the site. I didn't bother with taking it out for a test ride because I saw no point to it. Regardless of how good or bad it was, I was going to ride that bike 112 miles the next day and that's all there was to it. As soon as I got that taken care of, I headed straight home, did some final race prep work, and took it easy the rest of the day. It was the most hectic pre-race day I've ever had, but I was happy to know that I had taken care of everything I needed to for the morning.

That night just before I was going to bed, I got a call from the Tempe Police Department. They informed me that they had arrested the thief who stole my bike. He was caught in the act of stealing another one and had confessed to stealing mine the previous evening. He turned out to be a crack addict with prior theft convictions. Unfortunately he had already sold my bike for $100 (which almost insults me to see my $3,500 bike traded for so little). So the police were still trying to locate the whereabouts of my bike. So that was some great news to receive the night before my big race.

It was difficult to set a goal for this race since I wouldn't exactly be "racing" it but rather just "completing" it given how poor my training was and what condition my body was in. My primary goal was just to finish the race under the 17 hour cut off no matter what, and then I was thinking I could finish anywhere between the 12 hour and 14 hour mark. Going into the race my strategy (if you can call it that) was to just take it slow and easy. If I tried to race the way I normally do, I could exhaust my body prematurely and I might not make it to the finish at all.

Swim

Nothing spectacular or crazy happened on race morning. Everything pretty much went according to plan, although I was a bit late getting into the water. The water temperature that day was somewhere between 58-61 degrees Fahrenheit, so I wasn't exactly excited to jump in and tread water for 10-15 minutes while waiting for the start. But I did make a big mistake when I did jump in. It was still really dark out (even darker with my tinted goggles on) and I didn't jump far enough away from the dock. I ended up cutting my foot on the side of the concrete wall. I didn't have time to worry about that though, and the water was cold enough that the pain quickly numbed anyway. Despite being toward the back when I jumped in, I actually managed to get a pretty good spot near the front on the outside. That's where I usually try to position myself for triathlon races as I really hate coming in contact with other people in the water and fighting for position. I knew that the swim start was going to be really rough though, since there were nearly 2,500 athletes in the water all around me.

Before I knew it the cannon fired and we were off. Within about 15 seconds I started having a minor panic attack. There were people all around me, flailing their arms and legs. I took hits from every direction and couldn't do anything about it. In particular there was a really heavy guy on my right side that had to be at least 200 pounds and his big arms kept coming down and hitting me on the head or pushing me on the back. I was literally sinking from the force this guy was putting on me. But I just tried my best to stay calm, keep breathing, and keep moving forward however I could. After about 10-15 minutes, the field had cleared and I was finally able to swim on water instead of on bodies. Once I established my rhythm, the swim was a breeze. I felt like it went by really fast, and I actually did not feel cold in the water at all. Even when I first jumped into the water I wasn't that cold. There were some times where traffic would get congested, especially around the turns on the course. I just did my best to stay out of the way of the other swimmers so I could focus on just myself and not concern myself with them. Swimming on the outside added a little distance for me and I wasn't really able to draft off of anyone, but I didn't care. After surviving that first 10-15 minutes of hell I didn't want to have anything to do with anyone else in the water.

I made it through the swim with relative ease though. I thought my arms would be very sore after that since I hadn't been swimming that much, but they barely bothered me at all. I had projected that it would probably take me an hour and thirty minutes to finish the swim, and my estimate was pretty close to my actual finish time of 1:31:44 (2:25/100m pace). My normal swim pace for a good race is usually around 1:40/100m, which would have me finishing around 1:05:00.

Here's a video of the swim start that morning that I found on youtube. I know I'm somewhere in that video close to the camera and somewhere near the front. That's the mess of bodies I had to deal with in the swim that caused me to have a minor freak out.

Ironman Arizona 2010 Swim Start

T1

T1 was actually one of the scariest parts of the race for me. As I got my wetsuit stripped off and started running through transition, my body was so cold that I couldn't feel a single thing. I ran through there as fast as I could to try and warm up. When I got into the changing tent, I quickly dried off with a towel and put on all my bike clothes. But I was still freezing to death. I was shaking so hard I was having trouble doing anything. I tried to fuel up but didn't really have the stomach for it at that point. One of the volunteers saw my condition and put a foil blanket around me and started rubbing my bike trying to warm me up. It had only a minor effect. I spent a long time in T1 just trying to warm my body up enough so I could feel comfortable enough to get on the bike without shaking so hard that I would fall over.

I looked down at my foot with my cycling sock on and noticed there was blood staining it. I took my sock off and remembered that I cut my foot as I jumped into the water. I had been so cold and numb that I completely forgot about it. This was my first time looking at the wound. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't anything minor either. I could tell that it was going to be trouble on the run, but though that it should be okay for the bike. I got it treated by the medic in T1 because the sooner I had it taken care of, the better I'd be off for the run and there was no reason to really rush through and ignore it. I was still shaking when I left T1, but I was getting impatient with waiting for my body to stop and I had already spent a long period of time there. (I wasn't really trying for time anyway).

One thing that sort of depressed me when I left T1 was that there were so few bikes left in the transition by the time I hopped on. I had never in my life gotten to T1 and seen so few bikes still racked. But I tried not to let it get me down and just told myself to stick to the plan: slow and easy. I estimated in the race that I spent about 20 minutes in transition and once again, my accuracy was right on. T1 time: 20:11.

Bike

Now on to the real challenge. A 112 mile bike on legs that have hardly ridden a bike at all in a month, and that were experiencing a brand new bike for the first time. The bike course was three loops and I decided to just take the first way out as easy as I could to try and allow my body some time to adjust to it. Fortunately I didn't feel cold on the bike and soon my body stopped shaking entirely. I had bought bottled water with sport tops for this race as I don't like to use my normal bottles and be forced to ditch them on the course. Unfortunately the bottle cages on the bike were a little too big, and around mile 3 one of my bottles filled with Pure Sport was launched from my rear bottle mounts. It wasn't a huge loss though as I knew I'd be able to pick up other bottles at the aid stations on the course.

Going out on the first loop was tougher than I thought it would be. It was a lot more difficult than the ride we had done on the course just two days before. The wind was not friendly to any aspiring Ironmen that day and it was extremely rough after the turn around, when we were forced to fight back either a strong headwind or deal with a strong crosswind. I believe the winds were between 15-20MPH that day. That made the bike portion of the race a lot tougher than it would have been on a calmer day. There were also scattered rainstorms that hit the course. They weren't too bad (I've definitely ridden in worse rain), but they were a bit of an annoyance to deal with.

The first 25 miles of the bike were really tough on my body. I was having issues with the bike I had borrowed. My back, arms, and groin were all aching extremely bad for the first quarter or so of the bike. I also felt the need to urinate after making the first turnaround to head back to the transition area. I had promised the owner of the bike that I had borrowed that I would not pee on his bike (as many Ironman athletes do). And even if I was riding my own bike, I wasn't planning to do that simply because I didn't feel comfortable doing so. Around mile 28 I stopped at a porta potty. This was actually a poor stopping point I chose as there was a long line and only a single stall. So I had to stand in line for several minutes waiting to use the facility. I fueled up while I was waiting to make the best use of the time I had. After about 5 minutes of waiting I finally got in, did my business, and was back on the road.

And here's where the second "hitch" of my race started. I had only planned that I would need to use the bathroom once, maybe twice for the entire bike section of the course. But by the time I had finished, I had used the bathroom five times. And each time was usually accompanied with a wait of a few minutes to get in and some extra time to grab nutrition products and refuel. I don't know why I had to pee so much that day, but I did. At least I knew I was keeping myself hydrated. I wasn't comfortable using the rear bottle cages on that bike (I hadn't even practiced that much with the rear cages on my own bike), so I pretty much did bottle change outs whenever I was stopped waiting for a restroom. The stops also helped my body to take a break from all the aching that was going on from riding on an unfamiliar bike, although the aching actually got better from that painful first 25 miles.

By the time I was on my third and final loop of the course it was getting a little lonely out there. Most of the other cyclists had already finished while I was still behind. The combination of a slow swim + a long T1 + numerous bathroom stops were really setting me back, but I just kept telling myself that this isn't a race (at least not for me) and the goal was to just finish in one piece. The final loop of the bike hurt the most as my legs were feeling pretty fatigued now, especially from fighting against the wind. I was relieved to roll back into the transition area and finally get back into some familiar gear (my running shoes). I had projected that the bike would take me something like 6 hours, but I spent so much time in bathroom lines I estimated I lost between 45-60 minutes there alone. My bike time turned out to be a humbling 7:05:12, or a 15.8 MPH pace. Ouch. I usually ride between 20-22.5 MPH in a typical triathlon, and that's on my old road bike. I didn't have a bike computer or even a watch though so I had no idea how long I was out on the course for.

T2

As soon as I got into T2 the first thing I did was go to the restroom (again). I used this time to fuel up and give my legs a short break. I felt like my nutrition was actually serving me very well because I didn't feel very tired at all. But in both of the half Ironman races I've done my legs cramped up really bad when I got out onto the run and I was afraid of the same thing happening here. My legs were feeling fatigued so I had no idea what was going to happen when I stepped out onto that course. After getting some food into me I sucked it up and headed out of there. T2 time: 18:52.

Run

I couldn't believe those first few steps I took. I felt absolutely fantastic heading out onto the run. I estimated I was doing somewhere between a 7:00 and 7:30 run pace. I didn't have a watch though so I had no idea (the battery for my running watch died just a couple days prior to the race and I didn't bother getting it fixed). But by the time I had finished the first two miles I felt a strong need to poop, so I stopped at the next aid station to use the restroom. Only...I couldn't poop. I tried really hard because I felt like I had to but nothing would come out. I gave up after a couple minutes and continued running. A couple miles later I stopped again...and failed again. Around mile 5 I caught up with someone I had briefly met on the bike course who was from Austin. He was walking and I was in no hurry (still 21+ miles to go...) so I decided to walk with him and talk for a while. We walked for quite a ways and had a nice chat and talked about both of our situations in the race. He actually advised that I continue trying to poop and I took his advice for the next 8 miles or so. Finally though I just gave up and kept running. I did experience occasional stomach pains during the run which sometimes forced me to stop and walk it off, but they weren't too bad nor too frequent. Being constipated in a marathon run sure is no fun though.

I did walk certain parts of the race, most notably I'd walk through most of the aid stations and walk up any major uphills (I was afraid of my quads giving out on me since they were already exhausted from the bike). But I ran most of the course and I ran it well. I was probably averaging around a 7:00-7:15 pace when I was running I'd say. On the third and final loop of the run again the course became deserted as most people were finishing. It got a little chilly, but I didn't feel cold and didn't have to put on extra clothing or anything (which was good, because I didn't put anything like that in my special needs bag). The final loop was the hardest as even though my body was still properly fueled, my muscles were fatigued from the day (not to mention the whole "not training" thing I did in the months before the race). I started having to walk more frequently for the final 10K, but I saved enough so that I could pretty much run the entire last mile and sprint in to the finish. Originally I was hoping to complete the run in around 4 hours, but all of the bathroom stops and walking added quite a bit of time onto that. My run time was 5:12:50 with an average pace of 11:57/mi. Again: ouch. The marathon I ran back in February was a 3:17, so to go almost two hours slower than that hurt my pride a bit.

Finish

I sprinted through the finish and was absolutely elated to be done. Mike found me right as I finished and I got some pizza and sat down to eat. My mom had already taken care of collecting all my transition bags and returning my borrowed bike, which I was very thankful for because I really didn't want to worry about that. She really did a great job of supporting me that day and in the days prior to the race, even if she annoyed me with her pestering from time to time. It was nice to have someone there supporting like that, which is something I've never had in any race I've done before. After sitting for 15 minutes my legs stopped working and I had great difficulty walking. My mom helped me to the car and drove me back home.

When I got home I took off my running shoes and once again my sock was stained with blood (I had changed socks in T2). The wound on my foot had gotten much worse from when I last looked at it. The cuts weren't deep, but they were very broad and stretched from the middle of my big toe down past the knuckle. It honestly didn't hurt at all during the run (I didn't even notice it), and looking at it now I had no idea how it did not bother me or cause me severe pain. Below is a picture of what it looked like the next morning. Its a little difficult to see because its blurry, but that gives you an idea of what its like. I traveled 140.6 miles on that foot and I have no idea how I did it with no complaints.

I thought that I was going to sleep like a rock that night, but somehow after only being asleep for 3-4 hours I woke up and my body was on fire. I felt like I had a fever and my entire body was burning up, even after I threw off all of my blankets. I was actually scared because I didn't know what was happening to me, but after about half an hour it calmed down and I was able to get back to sleep. I think it was just my body freaking out because it didn't know how to absorb all that shock from that long day.

The next day I woke up so sore I could barely move a muscle. Which is probably how it should be. I started loosing up over the duration of the day and by the afternoon of the next day I was pretty much back to normal. But my foot wound still bothers me a lot. It causes discomfort and pain, especially when I try to move my foot in any way. Its almost like all the pain I should have felt during the race is now coming back to haunt me. But it will heal in time, as all injuries do.

I had been dreading this race for such a long period of time as I realized just how out of shape I was letting myself get. But I have no regrets about starting and finishing that day. The most important thing is I learned a lot from that race and this experience is going to be invaluable for me for the next Ironman race I do. And I'll use this sobering experience to train properly for the next race. :) My total finish time was 14:28:48, which I guess isn't too bad for someone who was not in shape and who had to face all the unexpected challenges that I encountered for that day. Without a doubt I know that I can do much much better than that, and it will be up to me to prove that next time.

What's Wrong With Engineering Interviews -- Part I

2010-03-20T05:03:00.000-07:00

This past week has been a crazy one. I don't know how it happened or why it happened, but starting Monday morning I had a good number of recruiters calling me, e-mailing me, and asking if I would be considered in about a dozen different jobs. And ironically enough, all of these jobs sounded like something I would be interested in doing because they were mostly Linux related. I had been searching (though not that hard) for Linux software engineering jobs for months and couldn't find anything promising so I found it odd that suddenly all these Linux jobs were falling in my lap.

I'm happy to report that I did get an offer from one of these positions, which I accepted. Its a short-term contract that will only last a few weeks but the contracting agency I'm employed by should be able to keep me busy with more opportunities after that. I think giving contracting work is a good opportunity for me because I'm still unsure of what I would like to do for my career and being exposed to a variety of different companies, responsibilities, and technologies should help me to get closer to finding an answer to that. And perhaps best of all, I'll be able to gain a wide array of experience much more rapidly than if I were to sit stagnant in the same corporate job for several years. So I think this is ultimately the right choice for me, for now.

One immediate drawback though deals with health insurance. I've been without health insurance for almost a year now, since I left my previous job. So I was looking forward to having it again, but then I learned that the provider for my contracting agency is Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS). I was "insured" by these bastards under my father's plan when I was in graduate school. When I fell ill and experienced all those psychological and physical problems I spoke about so many years ago, they denied me coverage again, and again, and again. Always coming up with a new bullshit excuse for why they shouldn't have to cover me (such as "you're not a full time student", even though I submitted proof that I was). So when I needed health care the most, they tossed me aside. Now I've looked at their plans and the minimum deductible is $1,500, which I doubt I would spend through in a normal year. So what's the point in getting health insurance? Yes, I realize that the purpose of having health insurance is "in case something happens". But guess what? Something happened to me when I was under BCBS in the past and I ended up having to pay everything out of pocket anyway. Being insured under BCBS is not going to give me much in terms of comfort or security, and I am sickened at the idea of giving that evil corporation a single dime of my money. So I'm undecided as to whether I'm going to enroll in their health benefits program. I might try to seek out better insurance on my own (if it exists), although I know that's probably a lot more expensive to purchase individually than through your employer (and in my opinion, that is wrong).

All of that talk aside, what I really wanted to discuss in this post is what I perceive to be the problems concerning the way that engineering interviews are conducted. As you can imagine, I had a lot of interviews this past week (both on the phone and in person). I did well in all of them so I'm not bitter or anything, but I found some of the questions I was asked to be inappropriate. For those of you who are not engineers, engineers (at least in my discipline) are subject to a little something called technical questions. The primary purpose of technical questions is to figure out if the interviewee is actually competent in the material that their background education and experience highlights. There are many different types of technical questions as well. Some may cover your knowledge of basic/core concepts while others test your analytical problem solving abilities. I'm going to use an analogy to give you an idea of what this is like. Lets say a banker is interviewing for a job at a local branch. After the common Q&A between the interviewer and interviewee over the contents of the resume and past experience, the interviewer then proceeds to ask the interviewee the following technical questions.

1) What is a deposit?

2) Explain to me the concept of currency.

3) What are the trade-offs between a barter system and a monetary system and which do you prefer?

4) Give me a specific historical example of hyper inflation, including dates, the inflation rate, the cause of the inflation, and the response(s) of the bank(s) involved.

5) A customer comes in wishing to open a new savings account with a $500 deposit. The customer continues to make a $25 deposit each month and withdraws $100 every year after the account has been opened. The account accrues monthly interest at a rate of 0.25% when the value of the account is less than $1,000 and the interest rate increases by 0.01% for every additional $1,000 that the account is valued at. What is the total value of the account after 64 months? (You may not use a calculator or computer to solve this problem)

6) You are blind and need five pairs of matching colored socks for a trip. Your sock drawer has a total of one hundred socks of five different sets of colors. Each colored set has at least five pairs of socks. What is the minimum number of socks you need to take from that drawer to ensure that you have at least five pairs of matching colored socks?

Sounds like a fun interview, doesn't it? I tried to come up with a good sample of the types of technical questions I and other software engineers are typically asked in an interview. Let me give you a brief explanation of the above questions.

1) Defining a Basic/Core Concepts
This is such a basic question its almost insulting. You (presumably) have at least a bachelor's degree in your field from a respected university and years of experience on your resume. Yet they insist on asking a question that you learned your freshman year of college. Its ridiculous, isn't it?

2) Explaining a Basic/Core Concept
This is another easy question, but its a little awkward. You know what a currency is, but perhaps you're having a difficult time coming up with a proper explanation for it because its something so fundamental in society that you've never had to explain it to anyone before (except maybe a young child). So you may fumble around with words and try to explain it as best you can.

3) Historical Irrelevancy
An odd question. They want you to analyze something that is only of historical relevance to your position (banking) but is pretty much guaranteed to not be applicable in any way to the work that you'll be doing.

4) Demonstration of Esoteric Knowledge
Now we get into the bizarre realm. They are asking you for a specific example of a situation that you may come across in your job, but are unlikely to. You may have studied something like this years and years ago when you were still a college student, but you've likely forgotten about it by now since its not knowledge that you applied on a regular basis.

5) Practical Problems in Impractical Situations
Now you're asked to do a task that seems a lot more applicable to your job, but they strip away any and all tools that you'd always use to do that job. What does this prove? That you can still do your job during a power outage?

6) Puzzles
The example question I asked above I have actually been asked in an interview. In fact, it was asked of me in my very first engineering interview and caught me completely by surprise since I hadn't yet been enlightened to the joys of technical questions in an engineering interview. These types of questions are completely irrelevant to the job you are interviewing for and only serve to test your general problem solving skills.

This post is already long and I'm just getting started, so I'll finish here for today and continue with a part II post another time. I'll be going over some of the recent questions I've had, the formats in which I was asked those questions, and analyze what questions I felt were useful (for the interviewer) and what questions I felt served absolutely no purpose other than to irritate me enough to blog about it.

Five Months Later...Life is Great

2010-03-10T03:46:00.000-08:00

Its been a long time since my last post. I didn't forget about my blog or anything. I just never updated it due to being either too lazy or too busy. But let's spend this time recapping what's happened in life since that time. Here we go.

October 2009 ended with completing my second Half Ironman and concluding my second triathlon season. That race went well despite suffering numerous problems from start to finish, like getting kicked in the face and having my goggles knocked off within the first 5 minutes of the swim. I was happy with the result though and I enjoyed the race more than I did last year. Before the end of tri season I was already working on my next goal, completing the Austin Distance Challenge, which is a series of seven races from a 10K up to a full marathon throughout the fall and winter months. Before my half ironman race I already completed the first two races in the series at a distance of 12K and 10K. The 10K race I ran I set a personal record by over two minutes, which I was really excited about.

In November I ran my first half marathon in San Antonio. Well, technically it might have been my third half marathon, since there's a half marathon run in the final leg of a half ironman. But this was my first time running a half marathon race that didn't have anything other than running to it. It was also my first time staying overnight in a hotel for a race away from home, something I think I'll be doing more often in the future. I will have to say though that I had to learn the hard way how to race these longer distances. In San Antonio I started out at a blistering (but comfortable) pace that put me at sub 20 minutes for the first 5K and sub 41 minutes for the first 10K. I totally ran out of steam in the last mile of that race and I was hurting bad, but I still finished in 1:30:48, which I was pretty pleased with. What was amazing about that race was the sheer number of people in it. I finished in 150th place overall of over 30,000 runners. That's right: thirty thousand runners. And that doesn't even count the few extra thousand runners who did the full marathon that day.

The week before Thanksgiving I visited my mother who lives in Gilbert Arizona, part of the Phoenix metropolitan area. In addition to visiting family that week, I had one other very special purpose behind this trip: Ironman Arizona. I've had my eye on this race for over a year. In fact I intended to register last year, but at that time I didn't realize that Ironman races sell out within hours or minutes after online registration opens. I learned that volunteers get priority registration at Ironman events, and since Ironman Arizona was less than a week before Thanksgiving it just worked out perfectly for me. So I volunteered there both at packet pickup and at one of the run aid stations. I also got the opportunity to study the course, the race, and get some training time in. I have to say that Tempe Town Lake was the coldest water I think I have ever swam in and I am not looking too forward to jumping in there again. But it was a great race to watch and the atmosphere was unlike anything I've ever felt before. It just felt so epic, with so many people pouring in so much time into this single day in their lives. There were motivational signs, chalk writings, and crowds everywhere. And yes, I am now officially registered for my first Ironman race to occur in November 2010. I've got a few months left to get in the best shape of my life!

Since the only racing I was doing after October for the next few months was running, that's pretty much all I did. It was nice to take a break from the continual struggle between wondering whether I should swim, bike, or run on a given training day, but I quickly grew anxious for the next season and wanted to do another triathlon right away. December marked the furthest I've ever ran in my life, getting in a 20 mile and then a 22 mile run. My training was going great until that 22 miler, when somehow my right achilles heel just exploded on me. I took an ice bath after that long run (my first one since high school 10 years ago) and did everything I could but it wasn't enough. The pain was so bad that I was broken and unable to run. Well, I could have ran but I didn't want to develop severe injuries over the winter and then start the next tri season with a beaten-up body. So I took a couple days off, that turned into a few days, that turned into two weeks. Two weeks with almost no exercise. I could have done some cross-training, but I was just lazy.

I sunk into a depression at the end of December and throughout the first part of January for a few reasons. First, I missed triathlon training that much that it affected me emotionally. Second, I couldn't run due to this annoying injury that just appeared out of nowhere with no warning whatsoever. And third, I felt like I didn't have any direction or purpose to my life at the time. I was still unemployed and hadn't found the type of job I want, I wasn't in school or doing anything productive other than keeping my body in shape, and I just fell into a rut. I started playing video games a lot, which is something I have a habit of doing when I get depressed or don't have a social life (sadly I admit that I don't have much of one). Its a self-replicated cycle, because playing games too much makes me depressed, which only makes me play games more to forget about being depressed. Pathetic, I know. During this time of 3-4 weeks I experienced many feelings and symptoms that I had during my fight with my anxiety disorder as a graduate student, which made me recall details about that experience and the hell I went through then. Fortunately, I later managed to get my head back on my shoulders and I feel great about myself now. But that's jumping too far ahead. Lets go back to the end of 2009.

At the end of December I interviewed for a software engineering job at UT Austin. This was the first job I was really interested in since I left my last job in April 2009. The interview lasted a full 8 hour day and I met with perhaps 10 different people on the project, from engineers to astronomers to managers. It was a little different than what I was used to, but not so different that it was unfamiliar. The interview went great (I thought) but I fumbled at the end. They decided to save all of the technical questions for the end of the day, when my mind was feeling a bit weary from the last 6 hours. I hate technical questions, really. I mean I have an undergraduate and graduate degree from two of the top ranked engineering universities in the entire world and I've been successful at two full time engineering positions in addition to being an active member of the open source community and founding and leading my own project. Why does it matter that I can't tell you off the top of my head what the standard signature is for a pointer to a method of a C++ class? I know the answer: because somehow people seem to sleaze their way through college and work by relying on others instead of being diligent with their own studies and work. I know because I've observed and worked with some of them. But I still find technical questions irritating, especially because they're often the weakest point in my interview. Anyway, the technical questions I was asked weren't too difficult, but I gave poor/incorrect answers to a small number of them because I was so anxious to spit out an answer that I didn't take the time that I should have to really think through the problem. This happens to me sometimes in interviews and I need to work on it. Well a week later I am told that neither myself nor the 4-5 other people that they interviewed were hired. They decided that they wanted to have another round of interviewing candidates but would still consider me, basically not giving me a yes or a no. A couple months later I learned through UT's system that they hired someone (I was told that they'd keep me informed but I guess they forgot). So it was disappointing, but I wasn't exactly holding out hope that they'd reconsider me anyway.

Now on to January. I start my first race of 2010 with a 20 mile race on January 10th. I had barely run or done any exercise for two weeks prior to this race and my achilles injury wasn't completely gone either, so I went into this one not feeling very positive. What I had learned from my training runs is that I can run for a few miles just fine, but my achilles starts acting up after maybe 7-8 miles and it really kills me. So my plan for this race was to go out at a speedy pace and get as far as I could before the pain disabled me. The race happened to be on a freezing cold day too, below 20F, easily making it the coldest race I ever ran. Well I held a 7:00 minute pace for 9 miles, which was as long as I could. And then I fell not due to my foot injury, but to exhaustion. My legs were practically suffering from atrophy due to all my non-exercise (mostly composed of sitting in a chair and playing video games all day) and I really paid the price. I only got slower and had to walk more and more as the miles wore on. The last 5 miles especially were sheer torture for me. Cardiovascularly I felt fine, but my leg muscles were so fatigued they could barely support me. It was a horrible race for me. So bad that it knocked me back from 2nd place to something like 6th place in my age group in the Austin Distance Challenge rankings. That sucked, but I was glad that it was over. Surprisingly, my achilles didn't bother me one iota that race. So the good news was that I was healed. The bad news was that I was out of shape, with a little over a month remaining before my first marathon.

After that race I started coming out of my depression. I got working on Hero of Allacrost again, that open source game project I founded oh so many years ago in June 2004, a few months before I first started writing to this blog. I had repeatedly tried to get myself back into working on it, as I had been lacking motivation/interest for some time, but it just wasn't happening. Then suddenly one day, it did. And since then I have been working on this project like crazy. It feels great, and I've helped our team to accomplish so much in such a short time of a few weeks. About a week and a half ago we made our first release since 2008. It's an unstable beta, but its also the best thing we've ever released in my opinion. I may comment more about this project and my roll in it in another post, but for now I'll leave it at that.

Toward the end of January I had another half marathon race (my third, as I had one in November and December last year). It was two weeks after that awful 20 miler race, but I had renewed energy and my body wasn't making any complaints so I went into it feeling good, though definitely still not 100%. Friday night before the race I did a swim workout and some light weightlifting, then went to the grocery store. And then it happened. I still don't understand what "it" was, but suddenly my right foot started hurting so bad I couldn't even stand on it. I was baffled. I was shopping and I got injured? I thought I must have just temporarily sprained a muscle somehow, but it was still there the next day. I had a friend come in to town that weekend and we did a lot of walking, which was painful. I was not happy with my situation at all. Sunday morning was race day and my foot pain was worse than ever. I couldn't do my usual warm up run because it hurt so much. I even avoided standing on it because it hurt. This particular race had a start delay of almost an hour due to high winds knocking over police barricades and making the course unsafe, so I had to stand there, on one leg, wondering what was going to happen to me. I was prepared for the likely possibility that I might DNF (not finish). Finally the race starts and the first mile is torture. I was wincing in pain with every single step. I took it out really slow and easy. Then at about mile 1.5 my foot started to feel a little better and so I started to go a little faster. And the pain gradually subsided and eventually I was able to run my normal pace. I did have a few instances where the pain suddenly came back strong if I landed on my foot wrong and I was also unable to make sharp right turns, but other than that I was good to go. I had a great race after that. Actually thanks to that injury, I managed to run that race in negative splits (a good running strategy where you run your last half of the race faster than your first). I'm still not sure what that injury was all about, but within another couple of weeks it was gone for good.

Then came February, and on Valentine's Day my first marathon. Due to these wacky injuries I had been having, I was nowhere near the shape I wanted to or should have been in coming into this race. But as in life, things don't always go your way and you have to make the best of what you got. One thing I had learned was that races tended to go my way if I started out slower than my goal pace and then sped up along the way. If I went out too fast in a race, I would die well before the finish and end the race on a bad note. I had run the entire marathon course (not all at once, but in two pieces) during my training so I had a strategy for every section of the race. I have to say my strategy worked well and things were looking good. Unfortunately though I just didn't have the endurance for a full marathon in me and starting with mile 19, I started to falter. But I still had enough left in me to finish those last 7 miles with dignity. My total finish time was 3:17:54, but I wasn't too upset about it. In fact, immediately after crossing that finish line I knew that I wanted to do another. I knew that if I trained properly and diligently and didn't let these injuries put me down, I'd be able to cut off 10 minutes or more. I don't know when my next marathon will be yet though, and I've backed off of running those long distances for now as tri season training has officially begun for me at the conclusion of this marathon.

Its March now. I'm starting to feel pretty anxious about still not having a job. Next month will mark the one year anniversary of resigning from my last position. Money isn't a problem yet, but I find myself wanting to buy things I want/need but having enough sense to know that I should only be spending my money on essentials right now like food, gas, and rent. I'm also so happy and busy working on Allacrost that part of me doesn't want to get a job now, which will greatly reduce the amount of time I have to spend on one of my favorite hobbies. I had an interview earlier today for a job I'm really interested in, but unfortunately even though the interview went well the likelihood of me getting the job is low since I am missing experience with some of the libraries and toolsets that they are using. But we'll see. I might actually work on the project pro bono if I don't get hired. I really do need to get on the ball and be more proactive about job searching and not restricting myself to non-corporate jobs. I don't feel I have the luxury of time anymore to wait around. I do get contacted by recruiters maybe once or twice a week, but usually I'm not interested in what they're selling.

So I guess I'll start to wrap this up. Its 5:30 in the morning and I was unable to sleep last night, hence why I decided to kill time by writing to my neglected blog. I've been on a really weird sleeping schedule and even I don't know when I will fall asleep now. 2010 is going to be a year of many firsts for me. Next month I'm riding in the MS150, a 150 mile bike ride to raise money and awareness for multiple sclerosis research. If you'd like to make a US tax deductible donation to help me raise money for this cause, I'd greatly appreciate any help you can give! I've heard of this cause for some time and finally decided its time to do it. I've already finished my first marathon last month. Before summer begins I plan to complete my first century, which is a 100-mile bike ride (the 150 mile ride for MS150 is split across two days). And then of course in November I'll be competing in my first Ironman. This is going to be a big, successful year for me I can already feel it. And not just with regard to athletics either. Oh, and in case you were wondering yes I still have many things to remark upon and criticize regarding religion. I've actually found a lot more material and continue to study and learn all that I can so you can expect many of those things to show up on here soon. I'll try to write here more frequently than I have in the past few months, but I'm not making any guarantees! Thanks for reading.

Short Films on Atheism

2009-10-10T13:55:00.000-07:00

I mentioned before that I had collected a series of short films and video clips covering atheism, religion, and science. This post contains the first half of that collection that focus on atheism.

Atheism: Jonathon Miller's Brief History of Disbelief

This hour long BBC documentary examines atheism in a very different way than other films and books that I've studied. It doesn't really try to promote atheism, it simply seeks to explain its causes. I wrote down in my notes that this film takes a very philosophical approach to belief. It also discusses some of the consequences of belief, visiting Ground Zero in New York City. It also addresses the history of religion in America, providing concrete evidence that many of the founding fathers were not religious men at all.

The God Who Wasn't There - The History of the Gospels

This clip is from the documentary film "The God Who Wasn't There", which I watched in full earlier this year. This particular section discusses the history of the gospels, how the story of Jesus fits into the known historical framework, and a comparison of Jesus and Christianity to older heroes and legends in folklore and mythology. I enjoyed the film and would recommend it to others, even though I recall that I had some reservations about it. The contents of this clip I think contain my favorite discussions in the film.

The Root of All Evil? - The God Delusion
Part 1

Part 2

This film features Richard Dawkins discussing the perils of religion. He also analyzes the stark differences between scientific inquiry and dogmatic faith. I personally find it immensely interesting, even though it does have some rather provocative moments. Dawkins visits fundamentalist Christian gatherings in America, speaks to Jews and Muslims in the Middle East, and visits various religious leaders in London. In the second part, the discussion turns to childhood indoctrination and an analysis of the contents of the Christian bible, particularly focusing on morality.

If Atheist Ruled the World

Finally is this humorous and terrifying video. These guys read out aloud text directly from online Christian fundamentalist forums. This stuff is absolutely unbelievable. It really scares me to think that there are people out there in this world with these sorts of warped views and opinions.

"Might Makes Right" Argument and Personal Experiences

2009-10-05T08:37:00.000-07:00

I realized that there were two clips where I appeared on The Atheist Experience that I forgot to share on here. If you recall I shared one clip where I called in back in March. There was a second discussion to that phone call that I neglected to mention, and I also called in a second time a few weeks later to discuss another topic. Those videos are embedded below.

In this video I ask the hosts how Christians can make the claim that their god is always good and always loving when there are so, so many atrocious and vengeful acts in the bible. I think this is really at the core of what really upsets me. How people can say their god is good, and then when I point to some horrible action of their god they don't abandon or question their position, but simply retain this dogmatic mindset and make excuses and special pleading for why it was okay or even correct for their god to do that. The hosts and I have a great discussion on this topic so definitely give this clip a listen.

Here I share a couple of personal experiences I've had that I think a religious person could easily have misinterpreted. Most importantly I demonstrate that the human brain is fallible and often subject to error. Due to an accident I had in the past, I became a lucid dreamer and my dreams can be so real to me that at times I have difficulty distinguishing whether an event happened in real life or happened in a dream.

In the later half of the video I then challenge one of the hosts who said that he thinks personal experience is a good reason to believe in a god. Using my earlier example as support, I disagree with that stance. We have a nice discussion about the subject. It did somewhat upset me at the end of the clip though when the host accused me of being dogmatic and automatically discrediting personal experience. I don't think I am dogmatic about this or anything. If I was, I'd surely change that belief because I hate dogma, as I've expressed here many times before.

Finally, here's a list of all the video clips from the Atheist Experience that I shared on my blog earlier this year (not including the ones where I called in). Remember that when I selected all the videos for this list, my criteria for selection were based on the value it would have for my discussions with my religious friend. They were never intended to convert/de-convert her, but merely to get her to think, to question, and to evaluate her own beliefs. But most importantly, I wanted to have a discussion with her about what was said and analyzed in these videos. Maybe you will be able to make use of this list in the way that I was never able to. I also chose the ordered these clips carefully, saving the more controversial/upsetting clips for last.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSdXxFBTwRg
God's Plan For Atheists - On emotional attachments to the church and religious beliefs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBjmZKyHL_w
The Bible As A Moral Guide Book - Morality of humans, immoral acts in the bible

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRRdw6AzJUE
The Bible As A Historical Record - Why is the bible absolutely correct?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq9BaG1MJsg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBZdY70aJnQ
Important Message From God To All Atheists - Damnation rant, believing in God, why to worship a hateful God

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-WoKnRqngg
Religion Makes This World A Better Place - On the good and evil in people projected through religion, homosexuality issues, thinking and believing for yourself

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gY2To0cxV0
The Problem of Evil - why does god allow evil to exist in the world

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KlhaEJnQiw
The Bible Is Just A Book - Why eye witness accounts of Jesus are nowhere outside the bible?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbEWBgAUuPk
Sin As A Religious Control Mechanism - Speaks for itself, only first ~4 minutes

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2289849961485182777 (view from 6:00-35:00)
A dialog on what motivates people to believe in Christianity, reasons for beliefs, reasons for disbelief, and touches on young Earth creationism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NcTjLJAan8
Jesus' Resurrection & Problems with the Bible

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAWCFSpd3AQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo1BAXuLAco
Dogmatic Religious Mindsets - On why it is hard for people to escape religious mindsets and why dogmatic beliefs are wrong because they limit critical thinking

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7513047079004228304&hl=en (view from 1:14:00-end)
Atheist Experience #503: Responding to Christian apologists - On reasoned arguments, God's immorality, old vs new testament, picking and choosing parts of the bible, focusing on only the positive parts of the bible...very similar to our arguments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxmy7cUMGE4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNCRlaSLLk4
Atheist Experience #578: A great conversation with a Christian on why people are more moral than God

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Evidence to Convince Me of a God

2009-09-25T19:38:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking lately about what it would take to convince me that a God exists. I've spoken with and listened to many believers who have offered all kinds of different evidence that they think are sufficient justification for proof that their god exists. Obviously, the evidence they shared was insufficient for me to believe in their god. I keep an open mind when listening to believers, but it can be difficult at times because I am disappointed again and again by flawed or otherwise invalid arguments. Each and every person has different standards of evidence for believing in the same thing, so there is no single piece of evidence that would convince everyone of any particular thing, especially for something as nebulous as an invisible god character. So I asked myself "What evidence could a believer offer me that I would accept as sufficient for me to believe in their particular god?".

This is actually trickier to answer than it sounds. The simplest answer, and also the answer that would be most likely to convince me, would be that this god reveal himself to me physically. I want to see it, whatever "it" really is. But its unfortunate that believers tell me that their worshiped god doesn't want to provide this kind of evidence to anyone (even though Christians claim that their god once walked on this Earth as Jesus...lucky for the people who lived in those times). There's this odd "faith" aspect. Gods don't want to present you with concrete evidence of their existence, but want to give you just a taste and then you have to "just believe" from there. ***coughBULLSHITcough*** Ahem, excuse me. The answer to the question I am asking myself I formulated upon the following assumptions of whatever the true god (or gods) really are:

The true god is omniscient
The true god is omnipotent
The true god is omnibenevolent
The true god does not wish to provide concrete evidence of its existence to anyone, asking us to rely on "faith"

First, allow me to note that if all of these criteria are true, I should already be a believer. This god would know what evidence I require to believe without relying on me making this blog post (omniscient), it would be capable of providing me that evidence (omnipotent), and it should want to provide me that evidence because its such a nice guy/girl/thing (omnibenevolent) and I've asked very kindly and sincerely multiple times before. Yet it has not done so, nor has it done so for billions of other people on the planet, which can only leave me asking "why the wait?". The answer that makes the most sense to me is that no such god exists, or at least if there is one then its either not omniscient, not omnipotent, or/and not omnibenevolent.

Tyler's Divine Evidence Test

Alright, now let me share with you the answer I came up with. First, you will require a human partner to do this. That partner must be a believer and they should make the claim that they've communicated with the divine at least once before. The test involves asking three simple questions. Only if all three questions are answered correctly will it be sufficient for me to believe in their god. The god must use the partner as a means to communicate the answer to you (in other words, you ask the question, the god tells your partner the answer, and the partner says the answer). With me so far? Okay, here are the three questions.

Question 1. I am now thinking of an experience from my childhood. Please tell me what this experience was.
It works best if you recall something uncommon/unobvious to reduce the likelihood that your partner simply guesses correctly. It should be something that you have never shared with anyone, or with only very few people (and certainly not with your partner).

Question 2. Please tell me the answer to the following mathematical constant/equation.
This is one that you will need to have either memorized the answer for or have it written down on a card beforehand. For example, "tell me the value of the golden ratio constant in base 19 up to 10 decimal places". Obviously, your partner should not be allowed time to calculate or research this answer. You should exercise extra caution if your partner happens to be an autistic savant.

Question 3. "....."
Don't ask this one with your mouth. Ask it inside your head. It could be anything at all, but should not be something obvious to guess. If you know a foreign language I would recommend that the answer be in another language, especially if your partner does not know that language. For example, I might ask in my head "How do you say 'black cat' in Japanese?".

There it is! If any believer can answer these three questions for me, I would become a believer in their god. If anyone reading this would like to be my partner for this test, I would love to try it with you. I think its fair game in asking for evidence, but not "concrete" evidence, from the god/gods and I would still have to rely on "faith" to fully believe. Now just to throw this out there, passing this test still does not serve as proof of a god because, after all, if the partner has some psychic mind-reading ability they would be able to pass this test with ease regardless of whether or not a god exists. But I don't believe in psychic powers, and I'm willing to overlook this technicality. I should also note that this should be done with direct questions and direct answers. There is no repeating the question once asked. The partner is not allowed to ask any questions of their own. The non-believer should not feed any "clues" to their partner at all (this is how psychics trick you into thinking that they are speaking with your dead relatives). Once asked, you should keep your mouth shut until the partner answers and then tell them they are either correct or incorrect (or you could ask all three questions and wait to tell them the results at the end).

I will admit that I am skeptical that anyone would pass this test, or even pass a single question, and in fact it wouldn't surprise me if no one is willing to take the challenge with me. Here are some of the apologetic answers I'm anticipating I would/will hear if a believer fails to pass the test as my partner.

The evidence that this would provide is too strong and my god won't provide it.

Too much evidence, not enough faith...darnit!
He's telling me the answers, but I'm not hearing god correctly.

Isn't god supposed to be infallible?
He's not telling me the answers, so he must have some reason.

The ever-annoying "he's mysterious" argument.

Personally I think asking for the answers to three simple questions is a very reasonable request. Ball's in your court, oh mighty creator.

Picking and Choosing Your Moral Code

2009-09-22T09:12:00.000-07:00

I saved the best for last. These two clips are the final in the list I had made to share with my religious friend, and they also happen to be my favorites.

This is episode #503 of the Atheist Experience. The topic is on responding to apologists. The portion of this episode that I want to focus on is in the last fifteen minutes or so, but feel free to watch the entire episode. Go to the 1:14:00 mark to listen to a great conversation between the hosts and a Christian caller.

The discussion here eventually turns to biblical inerrancy and morality. When the host points out some of the deplorable acts of god and his immoral laws in the old testament, the caller claims that those things no longer apply and that those laws were to "train up" the people of ancient times. The host knocks her argument out of the water by making three important points.

In the bible, god says that he us unchanging and therefore if something was morally correct in the past, it should be morally correct today
Jesus himself in the new testament says that not a single aspect of the old laws will be changed (Matthew 5:18)
The caller believes that the ten commandments are binding today, yet those are written in the old testament

This is a great example of how many believers are guilty of picking and choosing from their religious text. They focus on only the positive parts of their doctrine that make them personally feel good. And they ignore (or choose to remain ignorant) of all of the horrific acts and commands. Here's a nice long list of cruelty and violence found in the Christian bible. It says to kill children, kill those who commit adultery, kill non believers (hey, that's me!), kill homosexuals, cut off the hand of a woman if she touches a man's genitalia, etc. Now why do you think Christians ignore all of those commandments? Probably because they don't want to follow them, because an average human being is much more moral than this psychopathic deity character that so many millions of people worship. It makes no sense to me. But I suppose I would rather have them pick and choose and only focus on the good stuff than try to live out what the bible says word for word. But I still find it really, really annoying when believers pick and choose parts of their doctrine that they like and ignore everything else.

This is another Christian caller and the discussion in these clips focuses on the morality of human beings and god. Moral superiority and inferiority, justification of adequate punishment for misdeeds, biblical portrayal of the nature of god, and thoughts on hell. I don't have much to add here because I think this video needs no commentary. I do share the host's frustration and disappointment with the caller. He seems like a very nice, very decent guy and he just doesn't have the balls to oppose his religious dogma. The last two thirds of the second clip are a passionate rant by the host on the caller's reluctance to be honest with his feelings.

Well, that's it! I finally finished posting all of these clips. I'm going to make another post later that has every single one of these clips embedded to make it easy to reference. I also have a lot of other videos I found related to these discussions that I'll share in another large post. But I'm not going to analyze and discuss each of them like I have done so here. Most of them are long documentaries, but they really taught me a lot and gave me some interesting perspectives on the matter. Thanks for sharing in all this material with me and I hope that you thought about the topics and gained something out of it!

Truth and Dogma

2009-09-16T08:20:00.000-07:00

This clips talks about problems in the Christian bible, which including conflicting accounts, contradictions, later additions and forgeries, and more. Particularly the hosts focus on the tale of the resurrection of Jesus. I don't have much to add here in way of commentary. I selected this clip for my friend because she believes in biblical inerrancy. While I never can and will never claim that I can disprove her god (or any god), I can confidently state that there are errors (many errors) in the bible based on nothing more than elementary logic and reason.

By the way, if you are interested in biblical truths and how scholars go about determining what the original books of the bible really said, I recommend you read Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart Ehlman. I read this novel a few weeks ago and I loved it. It is a very interesting read and I learned many things I didn't know about Christianity, religious history, and textual criticism. And the book is not anti-Christian or pro-atheism by any means at all. I think it presents a very unbiased, unprejudiced analysis and I recommend it for both believers and non-believers.

This clip, split into two videos, discusses dogmatic religious mindsets. The host, Matt, makes a very interesting observation about how gods have gotten less and less specific over time. Many early religions, such as Greek mythology, had many very specific gods fulfilling very specific purposes in the world, such as bringing out the sun or controlling the seas. Religion seems to have "evolved" (pun intended) into the worship of less gods that are extremely ill-defined. Most believers around the world today are monotheists (believe in and worship only a single god). When they tell me that their god is good and I find an example of an evil action their god was said to have done in their holy text, I usually get an answer like "well he's mysterious".

The discussion continues with the caller noting that when you destroy a religious, dogmatic mindset (due to overwhelming evidence), it seems that the believer will just replace it with another dogma. The co-host Jenn adds that she thinks its because these people have some sort of "childish need for certainty in their lives", which is a view that I happen to agree with. Science will never be able to tell us everything and I happily admit that I don't know everything, including the fact that I don't know if there are any gods or not. I just don't believe that any exist. But belief in something and knowledge of something (including claiming to know) are very different. Perhaps people cling to religious dogma because they are afraid of not knowing what happens after they die (I would argue that no one knows that actually), or afraid of not having an all powerful being in the sky that's always looking out for them. I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes by Carl Sagan. A view that I concur strongly with.

For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

In the second part, Matt goes on to discuss how his position on his atheism would change when/if he is presented with extraordinary evidence to support an extraordinary claim for some supernatural power. Personally I think that anyone, whether they are a theist, atheist, or something else, who would deny or reject sufficient contradictory evidence to their stance is a complete and utter fool. Any ideological system, whether religious, political, or something else makes any sort of statement that the believer is not allowed to question its views or assertions should be immediately questioned. For me, whenever I am told not to question something it immediately sets off my "bullshit sensor" and I am much, much less likely to believe whatever it is I'm being told not to question.

I may have mentioned this earlier this year when I started my posts on religion. But my enemy is not religion. I have identified my enemy as dogma. I've come to reason and believe that dogma is responsible for so many evils in this world. Its responsible for the massacre of millions throughout religious wars like the Crusades. Its responsible for medical doctors being murdered in cold blood for practicing abortions. Its responsible for terrorists flying airplanes into buildings and bombings across the world every day. Its responsible for the merciless torture and slaughter of Jewish and other minority groups at the hands of Nazi Germany. There is nothing, nothing positive about enslaving your mind to anything or anyone, regardless of whether that force is good, evil, or something in between. Part of the reason I continue to write about religious topics in my blog is for the hope that by doing so, maybe I can weaken dogma's cold grip on people just a little bit more. Dogma isn't going to disappear overnight and it probably will always exist in some form somewhere, but that's no reason for me to not even attempt to defeat it.

Finish What You Start

2009-09-04T09:44:00.000-07:00

Lately instead of posting to my own blog, I've been reading and commenting on others. In particular I've been pretty active at the Atheist Experience blog. I had a great discussion with others in a couple recent posts there. The first post was a discussion about the moral/ethical implications actions of professed gods. I made the first comment to that post so if you're interested, read it through and follow where the discussion led (there was at least one theist who participated in the dialogue). Also in that post someone shared a quiz called "Religion 101" which I enjoyed. I don't agree with the wording, fairness, or relevance of some of the questions on there, but in general I think its great. The quiz can be found here. I have a Christian friend I've been having some religious discussions with off and on in the past few weeks and I'd like to ask if she would mind taking it and then we can have a discussion about the answers that she selected. The second post I commented on was about the "end times" doctrine in Christianity found in the Book of Revelation. The original topic was a discussion of how sick and disturbing it is to see believers actually express their desire for the end of the world to come and to observe all the non-believers suffering in agony, but the discussion in the comments went all over the place.

If you recall, earlier this year I mentioned that I had put together a selection of various video clips from The Atheist Experience that I wanted to watch together with my religious friend. And when our discussions broke down and she no longer wished to talk about the subject anymore, I started sharing the clips on my blog. The last time I shared a clip was way back in March and I'm not even half way through my list, so I need to finish what I started. Here's the next clip in the series on how the concept of "sin" is a control mechanism. In my notes I wrote to watch only the first four minutes and thus will only comment on that length, but feel free to watch the entire 10 minute clip.

The commentary by the co-host Don is rather acerbic, but I do think he makes an interesting conjecture on how sin is used to exploit people, and how ridiculous the concept of original sin is. If you don't know, original sin is the idea that you are guilty for all the "sinful" actions of your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etcetra all the way back to the original two human beings, Adam and Eve (of course, I don't believe that two homo sapiens spontaneously popped into existence from nothing in the first place). I don't have much else to add here.

Link to google video (Sorry, blogger isn't accepting the embed code for some reason)

This is actually a full 90 minute episode, not a single clip. The portion of this episode I want to discuss is the segment from 6:00 to 35:00. Yes, its nearly 30 minutes long. In my notes I wrote that this segment is about the following. "A dialog on what motivates people to believe in Christianity, reasons for beliefs, reasons for disbelief, and touches on young Earth creationism". At 12:00, the hosts discuss a Christian blogger who told atheists why they are atheists, and gave two reasons (both reasons he gave require the atheist to believe in God). I've seen this many times before, on both sides of the aisle. Rather than listen to why the other person believes or disbelieves in something, they assert their own reasons on that person and assert them. Sometimes they do this because its easy for them to refute. Sometimes they do it because it makes them feel more comfortable about their own beliefs. But regardless of why they do this, its wrong for them to do so. The hosts also mention that some people, such as Ray Comfort, claim that there are no atheists. Rather those that call themselves atheists do believe in a god (particularly his god), but are in denial about it or reject the god for some reason. Its quite an ignorant assertion.

Between about 14:00 and 22:00, the hosts divulge into a good summary of the difference between theism, gnosticism, and weak/strong atheism. Around 24:00 the co-host Tracie provides a great example of contrast between the reaction of two fundamentalist Christians when they are presented with conflicting evidence that the Earth is 6,000 - 10,000 years old. One believer is open-minded at looking at the scientific evidence and as a result, becomes convinced that that particular belief they hold was wrong. The other is adamant that nothing can nor ever will change their beliefs. The latter believer is the type that I have serious problems. They proudly boast about being close minded and either uniformly reject or ignore contradictory evidence. Regardless of what you believe or disbelieve, whether its gods, UFOs, or political ideology, I think it is a horribly awful thing to be dogmatic and close minded to contradictory arguments, evidence, and opinions. And religion, particularly many forms of fundamentalism, are excellent and promoting this maligned view.

Future Direction

2009-08-02T09:35:00.000-07:00

The past two months have been productive. I got a ton of work done on Allacrost, read a few books, and trained like a maniac. Since my last post I've competed in 11 different races. Yeah, I'm getting slightly crazy about it. I didn't get any work done for my iPhone development though. I'm not very motivated to do it since I don't really need the money right now and I'm pretty sure its not something that I want to do long-term as a career. At this point I'm not certain if I'll continue working on it or not. Its been nearly four months now since I quit my job at National Instruments. I can scarcely believe that so much time has gone by already.

I met an incredible woman last week. She and I have a lot in common and I like her a lot. I hope that she becomes someone very special in my life and I in hers, but time will tell. One of the many traits that I admire about her is her drive. She knows what she wants to do with her life, what she has to do to get there, and works very hard to achieve that goal. And I am envious of her for that. I used to be in the same circumstance, and it made me very happy and very fulfilled to live every day knowing that I was getting closer to my own goal. But as I got closer to it (I'm talking about my years in grad school here), I came to realize that what I thought was my ideal profession wasn't really what I wanted. I had wanted to be a university professor, but as I got to know the lives of professors better throughout my years at UT Austin I realized that it was not right for me. To be a good professor you have to work so long and so hard and devote nearly your entire life to your research. One professor I still keep in touch with works something ridiculous on the order of 80-100 hours every week. I couldn't do that. I'm too eclectic in my interests and activities and I strive to maintain a healthy balance in my life. I want to enjoy my work and I want to work hard at it, but I don't want my life to be totally consumed with my work.

When this woman shared with me what she is planning to do with her life, I began to think a lot more about my own plans for the future. What do I want to do? Who do I want to be? What sort of career do I want to pursue? The rest of this post is going to be about trying to answer these questions.

The Ideal Job
"What would be your ideal job?". This is a question that I am asked quite often lately. Here are the properties that my ideal job would have, ordered from most to least important.

Extremely intellectually challenging
I want to design elegant solutions to solve difficult problems.
A great degree of creativity
I am a very creative person and I feel that I need to have creative freedom in my work to be happy.
Flexible schedule
I really need to have the flexibility in my work schedule. I don't think I could handle strict working hours well because of my training.
Promotes learning new things
I love to learn and I want my job to require me to continually learn and grow. It would be great if I was required to study many different areas (history, music, art, culture, etc.) and not just learning new technologies.
A good work-life balance
I want to put in my hours for the week and be done. I don't want to have to take my work home every night or be expected to put in (paid or unpaid) overtime on a regular basis. And I don't want my boss calling me and bothering me when I'm at home.
Beneficial to society
I want to feel like what I do is making a difference in the world. I don't want the purpose of my existence to be to help a corporation turn a profit.
Ethically sound
I won't work for an entity that I feel has poor business ethics, like Microsoft or Intel. I'm a good person and I want to do good things. I don't want to help or be a contributing factor to a corporation that I view as evil.
No Windows
I know this is a strange one, but I don't want to work in a Windows environment. I just don't like using Windows and I feel that it hampers my productivity because its so closed and proprietary (not to mention it annoys the crap out of me as just a standard user). I would love it if I could work in Linux, although I'd be fine with OS X too. Any POSIX compliant environment would satisfy me really.
Open source
This one is more icing on the cake for me. I would love it if the work I did was available under an open source license. I like being able to share what I do with the world rather than having to lock away and hide my work in a proprietary safe of sorts. This also includes being able to work with open source technologies and tools, which I am familiar and enjoy working with.

I honestly wonder if such a job even exists in this world. My last job only met criteria #3, #5, and #7 on that list (33%). In the past six months I have found a very small number of jobs that come close to meeting all of my criteria. I am pretty sure that I am just going to have to compromise and pick a job that comes as close as possible to meeting my ideal. With that in mind, here are some possibilities that I have been presented with or have been considering recently.

Military Scientist/Engineer
Almost all of the cool/interesting job offers in the Austin area that I've come across have been related to military technology. These jobs were either working as a contractor or researcher for a company or lab on what sounded like some very cool and interesting problems. But I have a moral dilemma here. I want my work to be for the betterment of life, not for the destruction of it. I'm an idealist but also a realist, and I realize that this type of work is necessary and that there are people willing to do it. But I don't know if I want to have even a largely indirect impact on taking a human life.

Missing criteria: #2, #6, and maybe #3, #4

Game Developer
In the past year or two I've received a small number of requests from local game companies in the area for an interview, no doubt due to my work on Allacrost. When I was younger I actually wanted to be a game designer and went to college with that in mind. A game developer is a very demanding occupation, however. I often hear of developers having to put in insane amounts of hours, literally living at the office especially during "crunch time" a few months prior to a product's release. This is extremely undesirable for me, and remains the top reason why I have avoided becoming a professional game developer. I have no doubt that the work will be intellectually challenging and will allow me to learn many different things (this is why I work on Allacrost in the first place), but I don't think I would have the same feeling of achievement and satisfaction from developing a game than say, doing research that advances science.

Missing criteria: #5, #6, #9 and maybe #3, #8

Research Scientist/Engineer
Mmm, I love that title. It sounds so hot. Often when I describe my ideal job its something dealing in research. I think I would love it if I could do something like developing simulators and other software tools for scientists and researchers. For example, modeling chemical and biological reactions, creating data analysis/visualization software, geological simulations, etc. Working as this sort of assistant among various fields of science, engineering, and perhaps other fields would definitely allow me to achieve my goal of learning. That's a specific example anyway. One problem is that many of these types of jobs require a PhD, something which I currently lack. Its not easy for me to find a good position that is local in Austin, that's the major problem with it that I face. I'm also concerned about what type of demand would be required for such a position.

Missing criteria: maybe #3, #5, #8

Large Engineering Firm
This is the type of work I did at my last two jobs. I don't think I'm cut out to be a corporate drone, at least it hasn't worked out well for me so far. I'm mentioning it here though because it still remains the easiest way for me to get a job, just not the easiest way for me to be happy with my job. I do have an interest at working for nVidia (who I interviewed with a couple of years ago, though it didn't work out). They have an office near my home and I think I'd have the opportunity to learn a lot in that company, but the Austin office is small and I think the type of work I'm really interested in at that company is located at their headquarters in California.

Missing criteria: #2, #9 and maybe additionally #4, #8

Small Start-up
I've also been considering perhaps working for a smaller, young company to see if that type of environment suits me better. But I hear that many small start-ups are full of workaholics, which makes sense. I would imagine you'd have to work really hard to compete with the larger, more established businesses. I also wonder about whether or not I could be creative in such an environment, since I would imagine the goal of a small business is to merely survive and avoid unnecessary risks. My feelings toward working at such a job right now lean slightly negative, although if I find the right one I would give it a shot.

Missing criteria: #2, #5 and maybe #3, #4, #8

Entrepreneurship
Of course if the job I want to do doesn't exist, I could always start my own business and create it. I've given this idea some thought as far back as 2006 and I have hung on to a few ideas that I have for what type of business I could start and how it would be run. I've managed a "business" of sorts online with Allacrost for over five years and I've been pretty successful at that. But there are a few major problems with this option. The first is time. I know that if I pursue this option, its going to require me to work a lot harder and a lot longer than any of the others, which has a good chance of ruining my desired work-life balance. The second is risk. The business may fail and I may end up with a large debt to pay off (I hate owing money), and if so this would force me to get a job to pay off that debt which I may or may not like. And another downside is that if I own and run this business, its very likely that I'll spend my time managing the business instead of working on the interesting problems myself. That would defeat the purpose of my creating the business in the first place, since I'd be doing work that I didn't enjoy but enabling others to have my "ideal job". Yes, the irony is thick here. Its not completely off the table, but its not something I'm likely to pursue unless I find evidence or a convincing argument or two for pursuing this route.

Missing criteria: #5 and maybe #3

Moving Away
This isn't a perspective job, but is something I've been considering for the purpose of finding a job that I am happy working at. Maybe I should be more willing to move away from Austin so that I can cast a wider net in the job market? A couple weeks from now will mark my five year anniversary living in this great city. I live by the mantra that I shouldn't just settle down and get comfortable in one place for the rest of my life. I should continually uproot myself, shake things up, and live a life full of diversity and challenge.

But its so hard to even think about moving away from here for a number of reasons. I love Austin. Of all the cities I've lived in it is by far my favorite. The triathlon scene out here is great too and has become a major part of my life. I'm worried that if I move to a new area (especially if the climate is colder), it will be more difficult for me to enjoy this sport that I love. And I just met someone too. You might say "So what? You'll meet someone else wherever you move to". That might be true, but its so difficult for me to find a woman that I really like and really enjoy being with. I know its kind of silly to factor this into the equation having only known her for a week, but if things go well and I get a job offer outside of Austin several weeks from now its going to be a big consideration.

Possible places I've been thinking I'd like to move to include (in no particular order): Portland Oregon, California, Germany, Switzerland, and New Zealand. Actually New Zealand is probably out of the running now because I don't believe there is a wealth of jobs in my specialty over there. Really anywhere in Europe would be nice. I appreciate the European lifestyle much more so than I do the American mindset (this might be a subject for me to blog about another time). It would be a little nerve wracking to move to a non-English speaking country, but it would motivate me to learn another language and I think it would be a great experience.

Graduate School (again)
This is not a long-term solution/career (obviously, although if it was feasible I wouldn't mind being a student forever). Of course this is something that I've mentioned before and I still consider it. I feel that getting a PhD could help me in finding that elusive ideal job, or at least something close to it. But its such a significant investment of my time and energy. I've been a grad student so I know what its like. I'm afraid that if I go back to school, I'll have to give up other things that I love. Specifically, I'm afraid of not being able to seriously train and compete in races because I won't have the time to do so anymore. I already gave up athletics for six years of my life and I don't want to have to give it up a second time.

But if I do choose grad school, I have to decide where and what to study. I'm not sure if I want to go back to UT Austin. Its a nice school, but I still have a bitter taste in my mouth from my experience there. Studying in Europe sounds like a great idea, and I hear that over there they treat graduate students more like human beings and less like.....well, American grad students. I'm not sure if I want to study computer engineering anymore either. Neuroscience is still a really attractive option to me, although I need to be more familiar with what it means to do neuroscience research. If I could use my knowledge and skills in computer engineering and apply that to neuroscience, I think I could become some kind of intellectual bad ass. :)

Decisions
There are a lot of decisions I have to make and a lot of directions I can move myself in. I guess its nice to have the freedom to make this choice, but I do often miss the days where I already knew what the best path for me to take was. Writing this has helped me organize my thoughts and feelings about the matter though. And I also realize that the perfect job isn't going to be looking for me. I have to be proactive about my options and see what I can do. If I had to choose one of these options right now, I think I'd go with research scientist.

That's all for now. If you have any suggestions/advice for me as far as career move, I'd love for you to share it. Thanks!

Lazy May

2009-05-31T20:48:00.000-07:00

May came and went surprisingly fast. I fell into a lazy slump this month, although I'm not sure why. That's why I haven't been writing any posts. I spent most of my time reading and consuming various media. I need to return to being productive though and I hope to resume that tomorrow.

One part of my life that I was not lazy about was my training. Yup, its triathlon season again and I'm glad its here. I'm training on my own this year. It can be difficult to motivate myself some days and I don't really have much of a training plan. I just try to get in a good amount of running, cycling, and swimming every week. I usually adjust my workouts each day according to how I feel. If I feel good, I'll do a little more and push a little harder. If I feel bad, I'll cut the workout I had thought about doing by as much as 50%, change to another discipline, or even just decide to take the day off. So far its been working out pretty well. I've remained injury free since March and I'm faster in running and swimming this year than last. I'll be focusing on cycling a lot more this month because its my greatest weakness right now.

Last Monday I did my first triathlon race of the season, CapTexTri. Last year this was also the first triathlon race that I ever did, so it was a nice way to celebrate my "triathlete anniversary". The race went pretty well, as I expected it too. I did the sprint distance (750m swim, 20km bike, 5km run), the same distance I did last year. I chose to do the sprint instead of the olympic distance because I didn't feel my training had quite prepared me well enough for that distance and I had a few different injuries and illnesses that had affected my training in the last few weeks. I also won my age division last year and I was hoping to defend my title and repeat that performance.

After the race started, I was confused during the swim portion of the race because I thought I had become a much better swimmer, but I found myself unable to catch many people in my swim wave. Last year I was first out of the water and during the race I thought I was around 10th place (I was actually 6th I later discovered). That hurt my confidence right from the beginning. The bike portion was okay, but I knew I should be going faster. I just haven't been developing the right muscle groups enough. I got passed by fewer than 10 people on the bike. Coming off the bike into transition I was neck and neck with another guy in my age group. As we started the run, he bolted out and was running hard. I was having difficulty shifting gears and I tried to minimize the gap between us. After the first mile my legs finally came around and I settled into a good pace. I eventually overtook that guy in another half mile (I talked to him afterwards and learned that he cramped up). I felt really good on the run, almost to the point where I felt like I wanted to do another lap and make the run a 10K instead of a 5K. I picked up the pace as the finish came in sight and sprinted in the final chute, and some guy next to me followed up and we pushed each other in. Less than a minute after finishing I threw up (gee, that's twice this year out of three races I've done), but I felt great.

My total time was 1:14:48, almost 5 minutes faster than my time last year of 1:19:27. So I was very pleased about that, although I was hoping to break 1:10 this race. I have a lot of room to grow on the bike and if I can do that, then it shouldn't be too difficult to do. The disappointment came when I looked through the results and found that I placed 4th in my age group, just one place short of a podium finish and an award. That kind of sucks because part of the reason I did the sprint distance was I wanted to get another trophy this year. It just goes to show how much more competitive my age group was this year. My time last year would have earned me a sobbering 13th place this year.

Here's a link to the results of my age group: Race Results
Here's some pictures from this race and others I've done so far this year: Facebook Album

Well that's all I have to share for now. Staring tomorrow I'm going to get my butt back in gear and being productive with my time, which will include more posts here. I have a couple of book reviews to share as well so look forward to that.

The Crazy Things People Will Do For Their God

2009-04-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

I've been reading posts on the Atheist Experience blog for the past couple of months now. There is one that Tracie (one of the hosts on the show) made a few weeks ago that I wanted to share and comment on.

Is Religion Beneficial to Society?

Tracie's post analyzes the thought process of religious believers who are willing to personal commit or condone atrocities such as genocide, murdering their own child, etc. if their god commands it. This is something that resonated strongly with me because, if you recall, my religious friend said she was perfectly willing to go into an elementary school and murder all the children there if her god commanded her to. It totally shocked me that she said this, and it still does. Below are some selected quotes from that post that I think are worth emphasizing, but really I recommend that you read the entire article.

And I would follow that section with all the letters we get from adherents telling us that their religion is good, who after a few exchanges say that mass genocide, mass infanticide, suicide-mass-murder, rape, slavery and child sacrifice are all morally acceptable if, and only if, a god tells you to do these things.

Religion can take a human being who is willing to condemn an action as immoral in a particular circumstance, and get them to say that same action is moral in that same circumstance, if a god says to do it.

Someone might want revenge on Hitler to the point of hoping for a merciless, vengeful eternity of torture. But an average child? Or even an average adult? It’s hard to believe anyone would say that any of our friends and neighbors should be deserving of torture for ten minutes, let alone eternity?

There is something unnerving about living in a society where the predominant religion is one that can make a standard, normal human assert that atrocities should never be committed—except when god says to commit them.

There are many interesting comments to this article as well. I made some comments of my own there and talked about my religious friend, her willingness to commit murder for her god, and her response to my question of how is she different than a jihadist. (Her answer was "they're not really talking to god"). Here are some good responses I got to that from other comment writers.

cipher:
The sad thing is that Tyler's friend could easily have said, "If I heard the voice of God telling me to murder children, I'd assume that I was losing my mind" - but that wouldn't occur to most of them. It seems more reasonable to them to say, "Why, yes, I'd murder children."

tracieh:
Actually they do say things like “god would never say that.” But it's just too easy to point to all the times their god is described to have had people do these things in their own Bibles. Then you say, “You mean this god?”

tracieh:
I agree that it is unbelievable to see that they will say it outright--sometimes without a moment's hesitation. But god is always right—so killing children becomes right if god says to do it. That’s how "god" works in people's heads.

tracieh:
She’d "really" be killing for _god_, but they are killing because they’re deluded about what they think god is (i.e., their god isn't the "real" god). So, they’re not justified. It’s only justified if you do it for the "real" god. And since her religion is the "real" one and theirs is "false"—they’d be terrorists, and she’d be a martyr. Funny, though, how that works both ways, right?

I really, really wish I could ask my religious friend to read this post and all of the comments. If she ever agrees to talk to me about her faith again (although I doubt she will) this is going to be one of the first things I want her to read along with my earlier post about belief in hell.

Reasons for Resignation

2009-04-15T10:25:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, April 10th, was my final day of work at National Instruments. I was overwhelmed with a bittersweet feeling in those final two weeks. I still think its a great company and a wonderful place to work. Above all else, I really like all of the people I met and worked with there. It was very difficult for me to make the decision to leave because of that. I was employed at that company for only 18 months, from October 2007 to April 2009. I'm going to address everything that led up to my decision to leave and the reasons why I ultimately did leave. First I'll start with an outline of my job history including why I took the job in the first place, then I'll explain what factors caused me to leave

History

Pre-Employment
I had interviews with three different groups at NI. After those interviews I was asked to rank them in order of my preference. I ranked the Instrument Control Software group as my number one choice and eventually that's the group that I ended up working in. I chose them because they did device driver development, an area of computer engineering that I was not very familiar with. At that time I wanted to do something new to explore my interests and see if it was something that I liked doing. Plus I had been working on Allacrost so much at the time that I really didn't want to do even more application development than I was already doing.

Oct 2007 - Nov 2007: Training
My first two months or so were all training, which was fine. I was pretty shocked when I first learned that I'd spend an entire eight consecutive weeks in training before I'd even start working. The training itself was fine, although later I came to realize that very little of what I learned in training applied to my job. Only about one quarter of the time I spent in training was useful to me at my position, but the training I was enrolled in was directed toward applications engineers (a form of tech support). It wasn't particularly well suited for a research and development engineer like myself in my opinion.

Dec 2007 - April 2008: Application Development
When my real work first started I learned that I would be the only engineer in my group that would be working on VXI for the time being, which had me a little concerned. My first assignment was addressing problems in an internal automated test suite for our VXI driver. The primary issue was that it didn't work on systems with hyper-threading or multiple CPUs and we were developing a new embedded controller (VXIpc-882) with a dual-core processor. The code itself was almost as old as I was (over 20 years) and we even had to use a very old operating system (Windows 3.11) and version of our software to perform this test. The test was very cumbersome to setup and user error was a common occurrence, while error reporting mechanisms were nearly non-existant. The code reflected the state of the application. It was poorly written, poorly documented, and poorly designed. My job was to re-write this application with a proper design, utilizing proper synchronization mechanisms, provide the user with a better interface, and better documentation and error reporting. Working with/rewriting old software was not a foreign experience to me and I was content for the time being. However, I had joined this team with the expectation of working with others and learning driver development. Almost six months into the job I still had virtually no exposure to any of this. I told myself to be patient and that it would get better soon.

May 2008 - Oct 2008: Testing
The next several months were testing. Testing, testing, testing, and testing again. I did nothing but run tests and analyze problems that occurred during those tests. This period was very annoying because it was so tedious and unchallenging. Someone with only a high school diploma could have done my job during this period of time. I found the work almost insulting when it caused me to ask myself "I struggled through 2.5 years of grad school for this?". Even more frustrating were the actions we took when a test failed. Instead of fixing the problem or even finding the exact source of the problem in some cases, we'd either run the test again and hope that it worked, or I would be asked to add a hack to the test application that I wrote to circumvent the problem. I voiced my strong opposition to this policy on more than one occasion. Because the VXI team was so small (it was mostly me) and fixing each problem could take weeks or months for one bug resolution, the replies that I received were "we agree with you, but we don't have the resources to do that". I understand of course, but that still didn't make me like the situation that I found myself in. I anxiously awaited the end of this testing and the new release of our driver software. Once again, I told myself to be patient and to expect things to get better.

Nov 2008 - Jan 2009: Research
After we released the new version of our driver, I finally got to do something related to driver work. I investigated potential problems and solutions in providing a new feature for one of our existing products. This too, though, was a disappointment. First I leveraged a similar but unrelated software product our code produced and was told the changes to make to get it to work for our product. Then it was a matter of me reading through Microsoft's documention (sometimes acceptable, sometimes incomplete, and sometime hidious) to find the answer to "Can we do X?" or "How does Y function?". I produced a prototype solution as a proof-of-concept that was the only highlight of this otherwise uinteresting work.

During this peroid of time, I also came to learn just how badly written our driver software was. The code did not conform to any standard, there was very little documentation, and the design principles it employed were downright blaspemous. I've never seen the concept of inheritance applied in such a disasterious manner. I was totally ready to dive in and begin fixing it. It needed to be re-written from scratch just as the test application I had worked on was. But to do this all by myself with no driver development experience and little help from the existing code base would have taken me years. The company wasn't willing to invest additional resources to truly fix the root of the problem. A good analogy would be applying bandaids and ice packs to a man with broken bones and internal bleeding. That's what the company wished to continue doing, and from a business perspective it makes sense because additional investment in this area isn't likely to produce a profit. But knowing that didn't make me like my situation any better.

Feb 2009 - Apr 2009: Vista Support
The next few months after that I worked on making our software compatible with Windows Vista. Sometimes the work was bearable, but overall it was just frustrating. I still wasn't doing anything related to driver development, and by this point I didn't want to anymore. Any "driver development" in VXI I understood to be just fixing a bug in a really bad mess of code. Even looking through the code was extremely frustrating because it made no sense at all and the nonsense was never explained anywhere. My tech lead explained to me that the only good way to fix a bug in this driver was to walk through the code with a debugger and look at the call stack to figure out what was going on because it was such a tangled mess of spagetti that you couldn't understand it just by looking at it. I tried looking at it anyway and found that he was absolutely correct. I also learned that VXI software development was being moved to our Shanghai office by the year's end (read: my job was being outsourced). That provided me with some relief knowing I wouldn't be stuck doing this for much longer. But still there really wasn't anything in my group that I thought was interesting and would enjoy doing. During my final few months my manager also let me spend 50% of my time on a research project with another group to see if that would be something that I would enjoy. I found it interesting, but it wasn't something that I would have liked to do on a permanent basis.

The Decision
Ultimately, these are the factors that forced me to consider leaving my job.

I was working by myself most of the time
My job was often intellectually unchallenging for me
The majority of my responsibilities were supporting a legacy product
I didn't find my work interesting

The final point was what put the last nail in the coffin for me. Its somewhat ironic, because at my last job at Freescale, I hated the company but loved my work. Then with National Instruments, I loved the company but hated my work. This position helped me realize how important it was for me to enjoy what I was doing at my job.

I started thinking about leaving around November last year and made my resume public to see if any good job positions came my way. In early January, I revealed to my manager that I was considering quitting and that I had already started looking for another job. My manager made a great effort and addressing what he could of these issues after I shared them with him. He suggested that I talk to some other groups in the company to see if I would be interested in their line of work. I did talk with a few other groups earlier this year, but unfortunately due to the hard economic times no one had an opening. As the disappointing days of work dragged on, it remained unknown when I would be able to do an internal transfer to a different position or when another exciting job opportunity would come my way.

During each "phase" of my employment I often thought like this: "I don't like what I'm doing right now, but if I am patient it will be finished and I'll move on to something better". Its ironic because when talking with my boss' boss about my job concerns during my final weeks, he pointed out that VXI software was moving to Shanghai and that things would get better. But that knowledge wasn't enough for me. I was sick of waiting around hoping things would get better instead of being able to take action and make the situation better myself. And that is what ultimately lead me to resign, even though I did not have another position lined up. Life is too short to spend it doing something you don't like.

Next Time
Now that I have much more free time you can expect that I'll be blogging more regularly. Next time I'll talk about what my plan is for employment/income and what type of job I am looking for. To highlight the goal of finding work that is interesting, I'm planning a retrospective analysis of my interests as they have changed over a period of time. I also have a lot more to talk about regarding religion. In fact I'm only half way through that set of video clips I've been sharing. So look forward to all of that.

A New Direction

2009-03-31T19:36:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a break from my religion/science blogging this post to talk about life. Actually I've been wondering lately if I should start a new blog dedicated to the topic of religion since I write about it so much lately. Right now I don't think I will, but if the readers of this blog tell me that they are only interested in a specific topic that could influence me to do so.

Anyway, other than my studies on religion and science there isn't a whole lot for me to comment on right now. Sadly I admit that my time spent on Allacrost has fell to almost nothing. An upgrade cycle I did back in February somehow rendered my Linux images unbootable and I haven't had the time and motivation to fix that yet, so that's a major contributing factor. I hope to get it fixed in a couple weeks and slowly get back into the swing of things, but I realize now that I have other interests and hobbies outside of Allacrost and I don't think its feasible for me to dedicate myself to that project at the level that I did for so many years. I'll continue working on it until the final release or until my death, whichever comes first. :)

I've been struggling to get back into good shape for triathlon season. I've mostly been focusing on my running now that I have custom orthotics and shin splints don't seem to be a problem at all for me anymore (YAY). But I've been plagued with some sort of problem in my throat for nearly two months that has left me with a chronic cough. The doctor said he thought it was a bacterial infection and the medicines he prescribed worked great, but as soon as they ran out it came back. I coughed so hard that I actually damaged my ribcage and its pretty painful. So the coughing and damaged ribs really hindered my training in a big way. So I wasn't in top shape for the Capital 10K race which I ran last Sunday. It was disappointing because I had been looking forward to that race for an entire year.

That race last Sunday, by the way, was the one year anniversary of my return to competitive athletics. The race itself went better than I expected to and I actually beat my time last year by a little over a minute. I finished at 40:59.4, which is 6:36/mile pace. I think the reason I did so well was because I ran it smart, conserved my energy, and ran negative splits (last year I ran the first half of the race too fast and died in the last half). I didn't take my splits, but I know my first mile was 6:50 so that means I definitely sped up as the race went on. As I was on the final stretch, I knew the 41:00 mark was coming up and I wanted to beat it, so I sprinted as hard as I could for about 10 or 15 seconds. And then about 20-30 seconds after I finished, I threw up. And I mean I really puked my guts out. I threw up at three different places in the finish area (all off to the side). It felt good because I know when that happens, it means I really pushed myself beyond my body's limit. I haven't done a post-race puking since my last race in high school in early 2000, where I ran the 2-mile race at the regional track meet in a personal best of 10:24 (I think I PRed that race by 12-20 seconds).

And now an important announcement. I've decided to leave my current job. In this economy I know its a bit crazy to do that, but I am financially stable and I feel confident enough to make this move. The reason I decided to do this was largely because I'm not interested in the work I'm doing there. It was a really hard decision to make because I love the company and the people, but I'm still pretty miserable when I have to spend 40 hours a week doing something that I don't enjoy and that is not intellectually challenging for me. My manager (who has been totally awesome about this) helped me try to find other work in the company to see if there was another group I could transfer to where I could find my niche, but even after looking around and working temporarily with another group it just wasn't happening. My last day is April 10th (next Friday).

So what do I do now? Well I don't have anything lined up yet, even though I've kept my resume posted for the past four months or so. I've been keeping an eye out but I just didn't find anything that really fit my interests and my preferred technologies. I really want to go back to a Linux development environment. I hate dealing with Microsoft, Windows, and all of their crap. Sadly, the best positions that I have found that meet what I'm looking for have been with defence contract agencies. I'm a bit apprehensive about designing "tools of war", but I've decided that if another defence opportunity presents itself to me, I might as well interview and see what happens. I'd prefer that the results of my work go to the betterment of life, not the destruction of it (I know that defence is a necessary industry and war/conflict is unavoidable, but I would like to avoid having a part in it if I can). I'd really like to work for a research lab or institution and help design software to enable scientists and engineers to better do their jobs. That way, I can also learn about another field. I would really love to be able to design simulators. Biological, chemical, structural, electrical, any kind of simulator really.

But I'm not limiting myself to just a typical job either. I had dinner with my friend Hari a few weeks ago and he actually proposed that I try out working for myself as an iphone game developer. Apparently there's a lot of money in that if you develop a popular game. It sounds simple enough and I think I'm easily capable of doing that work on my own, so I think I'm likely to look into it and give it a shot. If I can make a living that way, be my own boss, and not have to put a ton of time into it, I think that would be great. I could spend more time and effort dedicated to causes that I care about that way. I've also considered going back to school to get my PhD, either in computer engineering or possibly in another field like neuroscience or psychics. My primary concern with returning to grad school life though is how much time working on my PhD will consume. If you recall some of my posts from my grad school days, they were not happy times for me. I got physically and mentally sick from working myself to the bone every day without respite. I started a thread on the PhD comics forum asking about time commiments in different majors.

I'm also open to the idea of moving away from Austin if the right school or job opportunity presents itself to me. I love Austin a lot and it is difficult for me to part with it, but a part of me feels like I should not stay in place for too long. I need to shake things up every few years and intentionally put myself in a new environment where I am not comfortable. I don't want to live in a bubble called Austin, or anything else, for the rest of my adult life. I've been considering California or perhaps somewhere in Europe, perhaps Germany. I don't know German but its a language that I would like to learn one day. I could try Japan too, but I don't know if that country would be a good fit for me to live in. I'll visit it someday to be sure, but living there is another matter entirely.

Anyway that's my life for now. Hopefully my life will become more interesting as I leave my current job and I'll provide more frequenent updates on happenings in the near future.

I believe you're going to hell...and I hope I'm wrong.

2009-03-27T18:38:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about the concept of hell a lot lately. I would like for you to think about it too, especially if you are a believer in some form of hell. First lets take a brief look at what hell is, at least in general without getting too far into specifics or different religious explanations.

What is hell?
Hell is a place that human "souls" go to after their mortal life on Earth ends. No other species on Earth, at least according to most mainstream monotheistic religions, is at risk of going there.

What happens in hell?
You are subjected to the ultimate form of torture. Your "soul body" will burn in a lake of fire. You will be tortured and mutilated and suffer the most unimaginable suffering from the moment you die for all eternity. There will not exist a single moment of respite from this continuous torment.

What factors determine whether or not I will go to hell?
It varies according to which belief system you adhere too. But according to my religious friend, you can go to hell for either of these two conditions. (1) You do not accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior (ie, you are not a Christian). (2) God will judge your life and if you did not "follow his rules" as he outlines in the bible well enough, then he damns you to hell. Muslims, from what I know, believe all non-Muslims go to hell but I'm not sure if any other conditions apply.

Once I'm in hell, how do I get out or make my situation any better?
You can do nothing to change your fate after you die. Once you're in hell, you will stay there for all eternity. God will not forgive you and will not show a single ounce of mercy for you no matter who you are, no matter how apologetic you are, and no matter how much you are suffering and crying out in pain asking for mercy. He will allow it to continue. Forever.

Where did hell come from?
Like all things, God made the decision to create it. He deemed the existence of hell, of eternal torture, a necessary and just thing.

How many people living today are destined to go to hell?

Let's provide an estimate how many people are going to go to hell, shall we? Well, the answer of course depends on which religion is correct. (Most) Christians say that all non-Christians are going to hell while (most) Muslims say that all non-Muslims are going to hell. For the sake of keeping this short, we will consider just these two religions. Also because I'm not God and can't judge whether someone is a "proper" Christian or Muslim and doesn't deserve hell, I'll just say for the sake of argument that 100% of persons of the correct faith are not going to hell. I'm also going to ignore denominations and just assume that both Catholic and Protestant, Shiite and Sunni, etc. are all not going to hell (even though many of these denominations believe that this is not true). So lets take a look here. The graph below is from adherents.com and lists an estimated distribution of the world based on religion.

Now according to cia.gov, the human population of the world is somewhere in the ballpark of 6,706,993,152 people, or 6.7 billion. As a comparison, the population of the United States is approximately 307,212,123 people, or 0.307 billion people. The US population accounts for 4.58% of the current world population.

If the 66% of the population that is non-Christian world is damned to hell, that's 4,426,615,480 people, or 4.4 billion. 4.4 billion people are deserving of eternal torture and punishment according to mainstream Christian belief. And if we assume that Allah is the one true God instead of the Christian one, looking at the 79% of the non-Muslim world we have 5,298,524,590 or 5.3 billion on the verge of eternal damnation. To put that in perspective, if the Christian teachings are true then a quantity of people that is over 14.4 times that of the current population of the United States is deserving of the worst suffering imaginable, forever (the number of non-Muslim damned is 17.2 times).

Holy crap!!! I thought your god was supposed to be a loving and merciful character? How is it that so many people sing praise to Jesus (who is God) or Allah and say nothing but wonderful things about them when they surely realize that of the number of people who are currently living on this Earth, he is sending 4.4 b-i-l-l-i-o-n of them to be tortured for eternity simply because they don't believe in him? I am having trouble finding the correct ways to express the seriousness of this. Lets think about the horrors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. About 2.2 billion people on Earth believe that the other 4.4 billion deserve a punishment that is far, far, far, FAR worse than what those poor, innocent Jewish and other minority victims suffered. Furthermore they deserve to suffer in that state for all eternity without a shred of hope for temporary respite, not even being allowed a second death. If Jesus is justified in torturing those who are "inferior" for not believing in him, why don't I ever hear Christians making the claim that Adolf Hitler was justified in his actions during the Holocaust? Is the only difference because Jesus is a God while Hitler was merely a man? Does that mean that there is a different set of morals and justified actions for a God than a man? If God is justified in everything that He does, does that imply that the more powerful or knowledgeable a being is, the more correct their seemingly unethical actions would be?

I know that what I am about to say may cause a lot of Christians, Muslims, and people of other faiths to become furious but I will say it anyway. If the god (Jesus, Allah, Yahweh) in your religion is going to send all non-believers of your faith to be tortured for eternity without respite, then your god is much worse than Adolf Hitler. And much worse than Joseph Stalin. And much worse than Mao Zedong. Your god is much worse than all three of those genocidal mass murderers combined. I would love if someone could explain this and convince me why I am incorrect about what I just said.

Coping with a belief of hell

Why do people continue to hold on to the beliefs that all others who do not share their faith are going to be damned with eternal torture? Isn't it distressing to them? I haven't met all 4.4 billion people of the non-Christians nor have I met all 5.3 billion people that are non-Muslims, but I am willing to wager that a large majority of them are good, decent people and I'm sure that nearly everyone would agree with me on that. If I personally held that belief that those people deserve to be tortured, I would be devastated! I generally care about other people, including those that I've never met. My mission in life is to do what I can to make the world a better place for both the people living on this Earth now and for those who will live long after I am dead (and burning in hell?). I think I can understand better now those people of faith who make it their mission to convert as many people over to their belief system as possible, so long as they are doing so because they genuinely believe that these (innocent?) people would otherwise be tortured by their "loving" god (add sarcasm). But not all missionaries have that sort of altruistic intention in mind I'm sure.

I also think I now have a better understanding of the grief that must exist in a religious family when a close friend or family member rejects the teachings that they have shared. I grow more thankful every day that I did not grow up in such a family, because I know it would be so much harder for me to be who I am. Having become close friends with a religious person was hard enough on me. When she told me that she believed that I was going to hell, despite having nothing but positive things to say about me at that time, it really did hurt. And it was also very confusing and difficult for me to accept. How does she cope with that belief if she cares about me? How does she also respect my right to believe or not believe what I choose and not try to actively convert me? (I'm glad that she doesn't try that by the way). Is it just something that she doesn't think about? Does she avoid becoming emotionally attached to any person who she believes is going to hell? I wish I could ask her these things.

Is hell something that people deserve?

Whether my religious friend or another person believes that I and X billion number of other humans on the planet are going to suffer from a state of eternal torture upon death is one matter. I think that a question that many believers fail to ask themselves (and should) is "Do these people deserve that?". Lets examine three possible responses.

"Yes, I believe you deserve to go to hell for not sharing my belief."
Well then I wonder how your position is any different from Hitler, as incendiary as that may sound. Hitler believed that all Jews and other groups should be thrown in concentration camps, starved, beaten, and murdered en masse. You believe that all non-Christians/non-Muslims/etc. should be thrown in a lake of fire, tortured, mutilated, and tormented for all eternity. You both believe that certain groups of people deserve this inhumane, unimaginable level of punishment and suffering.

"I don't know, that's God's will."
But you still believe that these people will go to hell, right? So obviously your god thinks that they deserve to go to hell. And because your god is infinitely more powerful, more knowledgeable, and more benevolent than you (really?), you are just willing to default to his/her/its decision and respond "Yeah, that's cool with me". Personally, in some ways I find this answer to be almost more insulting than just saying yes. Perhaps you feel guilty, so you want to avoid the question and shift the blame to your god. After all, this is his judgment, right? Have you ever considered questioning his judgment? Have you ever considered saying to your god "Hey, I disagree with you torturing these billions and billions of people for eternity and I think you should stop"? If you haven't, then why the hell not?

"No, I don't think that you deserve that simply for not sharing my faith."
Great! You are more moral than the god that you worship. You are not alone either, because most human beings are as well. I know that if I was a god, I sure wouldn't be putting these people through so much suffering for not believing in me. Especially if I was the sort of god that wanted people to believe in me based on "faith", or belief without evidence.

I believe that you are going to hell, and I hope that I am wrong about that.

Everything I've said builds to this final pressing question that I've been pondering for the past week. If people genuinely hold this belief about hell, why do I never hear anyone say "I believe that you are going to hell, and I hope that I am wrong about that"? Do they really want to be correct that 4.4 billion or 5.3 billion of their fellow human inhabitants of Earth are going to hell, to be greeted by the screams of the billions more already there and to be followed by the trillions who will die later? I have been told that I am going to hell countless times throughout my life, yet not one person has expressed any sort of remorse about that belief. They've never told me that they wished that particular belief that they held was not true. Does that mean that they want it to be true?

I'd guess "probably not", at least for most decent and caring human beings. So why don't they abandon it? Why is religion this "all or none" deal to so many people? Can you not continue to believe in God while rejecting the belief in hell? Can you not believe in a heaven if you do not believe in a hell? Many people have already rejected many aspects of their belief system, whether they realize it or not. I have yet to meet a Christian who adheres to Deuteronomy 21:18-21, which states that you should stone your unruly children to death. (I've also yet to meet a person who does not admit that they were not unruly at some point during their childhood). I could list dozens, perhaps hundreds of examples like this that you would reject, I promise you.

If from the bottom of your heart of hearts you believe that I am going to hell, that will always make me sad. Even more so if you are a beloved person to me. But I hope that you'll at least have given the idea of hell some thought. And maybe, just maybe, you'll say to me one day "I believe that you are going to hell...and I hope that I am wrong".

On the Historical Veracity of Jesus

2009-03-17T17:44:00.000-07:00

The historical veracity behind Christianity (or any religion) could be an entire book and I suspect that I will write more posts questioning the historical evidence for events described in the bible. But for now I'll share this video clip form my on going series.

The caller is rather annoying and close minded in my opinion. He repeatedly asserts that the bible is more than just a book, asserts that his religion is a fact, asserts that all other religions are false, asserts that the hosts are going to hell, and providers zero evidence to back up that his assertions are facts. He just does not get it. I like what Don (the host on the left) says towards the end: "If you are going to make an extraordinary claim, you need to have extraordinary evidence to back that up". I couldn't agree more. When I'm told that there was a man who lived 2,000 years ago who could walk on water, cure any ailment instantly without even touching the patient, was resurrected and rose many others from the dead for a fun zombie get-together in town. Sorry if I'm skeptical of all that when the only place it is written is within the bible.

I'm not saying that a man named Jesus Christ never existed. I'm skeptical about whether he did exist, but he may have. Or his character may have been based off of another real person of that time, and that person may have indeed claimed to be the son of God and was crucified. From what I have studied, many people during those times (and even many people today) claimed to be the Messiah. I'm much much more skeptical that he was the son of God and had all of these supernatural abilities, especially when I can't find any mention of these miracles outside of the bible or other religious writings. The bible repeatedly says "Jesus performed miracle X, and word spread throughout the countryside about his deed". Do you really think that if someone had cured a blind man that no one would have written about it? That no historical scholar would have gotten word about it and rushed to see it for himself?

I haven't done a comprehensive study on the historicity of Jesus (yet), but I did find this page on GotQuestions.org: Historical Evidence of Jesus Christ. The give a number of secular sources there that they claim support that Jesus existed. I haven't looked at these sources myself yet, but I hope to get around to it eventually and make up my own mind. Re-read that last sentence. Rather than continuing to believe what I always have, I am open to looking at evidence that may contradict my lack of belief. How many Christians or religious people would honestly do that? How many care enough about whether their beliefs are true or not to do that? Not many from my experience. I think the approach I am taking is the best one to find out what is true and what is not. And that's what I care about. I want to believe what I think is most likely to be true, not what I most wish or hope to be true (and by the way, I don't particularly wish or hope that no Gods exist).

One of the things that the GotQuestions page mentions is the sacking of the temple of Jerusalem and Israel by the Romans in 70 AD (which did in fact happen). They hypothesize that much of the evidence and many of the eye witnesses of Jesus were killed during this time. Do you really think that every single one of the thousands of witnesses to Jesus were slaughtered in this attack? Ancient Israel is a large area of the middle east, especially in those times when transportation was much slower. And there were nearly four decades that had passed since Jesus' death. If there was sufficient evidence, sure much of it may have been destroyed in that attack, but I find it near improbable to claim that all of it was. Again though, this is something that I plan to research more by myself sometime in the future. Until then, I will happily retain my skeptical position.

Of Heaven and Hell

2009-03-15T10:47:00.000-07:00

I had some interesting discussions with my religious friend a while back about the Christian heaven and hell. After I read several chapters in the bible, I formulated several questions for her. This was a while back so I don't remember her specific answers, but I'll try my best to represent her views accurately.

Question
The book says heaven is perfect bliss and happiness, etc. But it also goes on to suggest that there are different "levels" of admittance into heaven. That depending on your faith and what you've done in your mortal life, you will be either greater in heaven or lesser in heaven. This is illogical. Heaven can not be perfect if there are to be levels of distinction. That implies that there are "less than perfect" parts of heaven, which would imply that these "lesser" heavens are not true heaven at all.

Her response
We can't know what heaven is like and I honestly don't know the answer to this question.

My thoughts
I appreciated the fact that she was willing to admit that she didn't know and can not know. But my question still stands. If the bible can make these claims about having "greater" treasures in heaven and also claim that heaven is perfect bliss, that seems logically incorrect to me. I was joking with my friend that if she and I both made it to heaven, she'd be perfectly happy with the giant golden palace given to her by God and I'd be perfectly happy with the little lump of coal God gave me. :)

Question
What are the absolute requirements for being "admitted" into heaven according to Christian teachings? List them for me because I'm confused.

Her response
1) Accept Jesus as your personal lord and savior*
2) God will judge you when you die and He is the only one that can decide whether you go to heaven or hell

My thoughts
I think I also brought up Jewish people, because obviously they don't accept Jesus. I think she said that they still get to go to heaven because they are bound under the old "agreement" with God. And if God is the ultimate judge, you could follow every single commandment (not just the 10, but the hundreds of commands God gives in the bible) and still not get in because He's an ass. My friend, who is a great person and a devout Christian, could be joining me in hell because she doesn't condemn me for being a non-believer, or she doesn't drag people to the edge of town and stone them to death for being gay/disobedient/etc. Of course everyone would prefer to believe that God is merciful and grants many more people into heaven than he rejects, but we can't know that to be true. He might be a hard-ass and a biblical literalist. After all, he was the one who allegedly wrote those religious texts.

Question
So God sent us Jesus because we couldn't be saved without him. But he didn't send him until 4000 years after he created man. Does that mean that every person prior to Jesus' lifetime went to hell?

Her response
Romans 4:1-3 and Romans 5:12-21

My thoughts
I forgot what she answered personally. I just read those verses she cited for me and I still don't know the answer to the question, but my guess is that the answer is "no".

Question
What about people born into native tribes that never even had the opportunity to read a bible, or meet a Christian, or even know what Christianity was? Are they all sinners that are going to hell? What wrong did they commit?

Her response
She had actually spoken about this with her former pastor and they both agreed that these tribes would get to go to heaven.

My thoughts
She has no basis for her answer other than she thinks it fits God's character. She wants to believe that God is good and thus wants to believe that he wouldn't condemn these people who haven't been exposed to Christianity. With religion, it seems to me that many people are biased in there beliefs because they believe to be true what they wish to be true, which is not a good way to determine what is true and what is not. Wishing for something to be true does not make it so.

Another thought is, what if a Christian minister came to the village and began preaching the word? What if the villagers, cemented in with their pagan beliefs, refused to accept the minister's claims as true? Do they know go to hell for not accepting Jesus? If not, at what point is one "exposed" enough to Christian teachings that their rejection of those teachings merit them eternal damnation? What about myself? Have I been exposed enough that I deserve to go to hell? Maybe I wasn't damned before because I knew so little about Christianity, but am damned now that I have undertaken a serious study of it and rejected these claims as false? If that were the case, wouldn't it be better to not expose anyone to Christianity at all? That way they are guaranteed at having a shot of going to heaven (recall, my friend is convinced that I am guaranteed to go to hell).

Question
What about children who died very young, before they had a chance to become Christian or be baptized? Are they going to hell too? Is it a sin to be born?

Her response
Honestly I can't recall. But I'm pretty dang sure that she said they would go to heaven.

My thoughts
It certainly seems that they would, since "sin" is something that we all inherit from our genealogy. I can't imagine going into a hospital and visiting the newborn area and pointing at all the days-old infants and shouting "Repent, ye evil sinners! Thou shalt be cast into the fires of hell!". Honestly, who on Earth and in their right mind could think that babies are born guilty? That's all Christianity seems to be to me. Its putting everyone on some big guilt trip for being who they are and continually having to ask forgiveness merely for being human and having faults like all other creatures. God was the one who allegedly created you with all your faults, so instead of asking forgiveness from him for being an imperfect sinner why don't you try condemning him for making you an imperfect sinner?

Question
Is heaven a place of eternal happiness, peace, and bliss? Can you really be forever happy there with God when you are up there and know that myself and many other people you've known in your mortal life are in hell, being tortured and burned and mutilated every moment of every day for the rest of eternity? Do you just "forget" about the people you knew in your life that went to hell, or do you just not care for them anymore? How can you be happy by yourself up in heaven knowing that people you once cared for are suffering in hell for all eternity?

Her response
Her answer again was that she can not know what happens when she gets to heaven.

My thoughts
Again I commend her honest response. Personally I think I asked a great question with this though. In heaven, you either lose all empathy with those you knew in life or you forget all of the souls that you once knew who are burning and suffering in hell. Or here's the third option: hell does not exist. Many Christians actually do disbelieve in hell (and for good reasons I might add). And if hell doesn't exist, maybe heaven doesn't exist either? And if heaven doesn't exist, how about going a step further and admitting that your God doesn't exist?

I know one thing for certain. If I was in heaven, I would be unhappy knowing that so many of my friends throughout life were being subjected to never-ending torture, and I would go up to God and tell him to stop it. I'd like to see a Christian agree with me on that, but I doubt many will. For to question or disagree with God is just something that they can't even contemplate doing.

The Problem of Evil and the Problem of Hell

2009-03-10T19:15:00.000-07:00

Ah, the problem of evil. One of my personal favorite topics of religion. This clip discusses an e-mail that a theist sent in to the show to provide an answer for the problem. For those too lazy to click the link and read the wikipedia article, the problem can be summarized as this: if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, then why does evil exist in this world? During my studies I learned of a wonderful philosopher of ancient Greece, Epicurus (341 BCE - 270 BCE). Epicurus presented the following conjecture.

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”

I won't comment too much on this clip because I think it pretty much speaks for itself. One of the arguments rhat the theist presents is that God asks us to bear suffering in our lives but the eternity we will spend in heaven (or hell) makes up for it. Don, the guy to the left, then brings up an excellent point. "Isn't that what they told the 9/11 attackers?" Exactly. These terrorists were so convinced of the prospect of this superior afterlife that they were totally willing to end their mortal lives, as well as the lives of thousands of innocents along with them. This is why strong beliefs in unverified theological propositions is dangerous to the believer and dangerous to others. Don't even try and say that its just Muslims either. Christianity has the blood of millions of innocent people on its hands as well, and I imagine many other religions share the same guilt.

Another problem related to the problem of evil is the problem of hell. I like this argument even better. It is very similar to the problem of evil: if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, why does hell exist? Why did He decide to create hell and to send souls there? Is the idea of hell compatible with a creator that is omnibenevolent? I certainly think it is not. I reject God's omnibenevolence outright. The reason being is the problem of evil, the problem of hell, and all of the atrocious and immoral acts that God commits Himself in the bible, asks others to perform for him in the bible, and such actions of others that he condones in the bible. If God does exist, he is not omnibenevolent. I perceive the Christian God to be much more evil than good. Same with the Jewish God (Yahweh) and the Muslim God (Allah). Sorry other religions, I don't know enough about your god/gods to provide my own opinion on whether or not they are good or evil beings.

I had some interesting discussions with my religious friend about heaven and hell during one of our meetings (this was before our falling out of course). In fact, I think that I will share those in my next post.

Religion's Role in World Improvement and Homosexuality

2009-03-09T18:45:00.000-07:00

This video is about religion's role in making the world a better or worse place. The hosts say that religion, or something like religion, is required to make good people do bad things. I wouldn't go so far as to say its the fault of religion. I believe that it is the fault of dogma. It is the fault of holding an unwavering position that the person holds and refuses to question or challenge it. Regardless of what dogma it is that one holds, regardless of whether it is good or bad, is unhealthy and unsafe in my opinion. Remember, my dear friend who I have great respect for and is an excellent person is willing to kill children if given the order. That is sickening to hear and it disgusts me, especially when it comes from someone as great as she.

Here's the thing. Every one of these religions have different beliefs. They can't possibly all be right, but they can all be wrong.

I like that statement. In fact, in the past couple of days I've been trying to hypothesize how believers, including my close friend, regard religions other than their own. (I'd like to speak to some of them, but I don't have any theists in my life that I think would be comfortable talking about this). A small part of the reason for my atheism is because I look at all religions, not just one. I look at the different beliefs, the dogmatic claims they make, the truths that they assert without evidence, and the testimonials given by followers of each faith. Whenever anyone has a "personal experience" with their God, why is it that it is always the God that they worship? Why don't Muslims hear from the Christian God, or Christians hear the word of Allah? (I'm sure there are a few cases where one heard the God of another religion, but such cases are a minority I presume).

The topic then turns to homosexuality and the caller states that his church teaches that it is wrong because God made people to have children. I really like how Matt (the host on the right) responds to that. He basically asks the caller to think for himself, and to question whether it is morally or ethically acceptable to condemn homosexuals. If his only justification is hearsay from his preacher or indirectly from his God (written in the bible), then he has pretty bad justification for holding that position. I agree completely. When you are accepting an argument or statement from someone else, you need to have good reasons for doing so. I admit that I trust many things that scientists say because I've studied and participated in the scientific process, and I have confidence in the results it produces. Its not the product of one scientist, but of many. And that community together weeds out the false theories and evidence so that they can be as certain as possible that the views of modern science are correct.

On the contrary, if you believe in a single person (your pastor) and you believe everything he says is absolutely true, what if one day he suffers a stroke or mental disorder and starts spouting nonsense that is not true? For example, what if he claimed that God said all homosexuals should be stoned to death and that it was the responsibility of every member of that church to follow that command? Would you still accept his statement verbatim and not question it? Oh and by the way, God did say that! "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." - Leviticus 20:13. If I was a theist, unless I received the word from God himself, I would not accept what others told me that God did or did not say. How can I know that what they perceived was true? They could be lying, they could be misinterpreting what God actually said, or they could just be completely nuts.

Toward the end of the video the caller says that if everyone was homosexuals, humanity would end. The hosts make an excellent point that even were that so, how would that make it immoral or unethical? I really like what Tracie (host on the left) follows up with. "If the next generation were all women, would that mean that it is then wrong to be a woman?". Kudos to her for that great point. While I'm on the subject, I should mention that I am a strong supporter of gay rights and its not because I am an atheist. Its because I looked at how gays are discriminated (especially by religious people...hmmm) and decided that was wrong. It was wrong in the exact same way that African Americans were discriminated against and that women were discriminated against. (I say "were", but really a lot of that discrimination sadly continues to this day). I would also like to point out that religion, again, was a significant factor for the discrimination of all three of those demographics. Religion makes the world a better place, right?

Various Topics on the Christian God

2009-03-08T09:05:00.000-07:00

I took a bit of a break from blogging this last week. It really takes a lot of time and effort to blog about these topics, look up information, formulate arguments, etc. Plus I think now that the major conflict with my friend is over, I'm a little bit less enthusiastic about this. But I'll continue writing about it for as long as I see fit. At least I promise to finish my collection of videos from the atheist experience.

Which brings me to my next clip which comes in two parts. This one is a little light hearted and poking fun at things, but I have a strong agreement to many of the views that the hosts present in this video. There's not much to comment on for the first 4-5 minutes of this clip, although that's probably the most amusing part of the video. I'll punctuate several points in the video by the time that they occur.

Part 1.

@ 4:45 - What are you going to do when you die and you find out that all of this [God] is true?
I would then believe. Its as simple as that. I'll be surprised then of course, because I think that the evidence strongly suggests that the bible is false in many many different areas. But what I would like to turn around and ask a Christian is "What are you going to die and find out that your religion is not the correct one?". Maybe the Muslims are right. Maybe the Hindus are right. And guess what, you Christians can then join me in whatever version of hell the correct religion may prescribe and we can have a lengthy discussion about it then.

@5:15 - If the God that exists is the one spoken about in the bible, I still would not worship him.
I agree with this statement. If God is all powerful and chooses to exterminate life that is "incorrect" (such as is written in Noah's Ark), I would not worship that God. I would condemn that God for his immoral and unjust acts towards life. I don't care if he "created everything". Life is not something to be toyed with. If I have a child, does that give me the right to stone them to death for being disrespectful to me? Does it give me the right to kill them at my whim? "I created you, and I can end you" is an immoral stance. But for some reason, Christians seem to think that its okay that God can do that. I will not worship something that I do not respect, even if I believe that it exists. And if I find out that God exists someday (the God written in the bible), I will no longer be an atheist, but I also won't be a Christian. I will be a theist who believes in a petty, jealous, unjust, immoral diety.

But that doesn't mean I won't try talking to him. I'll try to convince him that the things he has done and is doing are wrong. I don't care that he's omnipotent or omniscient. If he thinks that he is right and that committing genocide and infanticide and accepting human sacrifices are all good, then he has a lot of explaining to do to me before I'm ready to worship him. He has the power to convince me and he knows how to do it, so don't tell me that its my fault for being a lowly human who can't understand his great plan.

@ 5:25 - You're born guilty because of something your ancestors did.
I reject this as well because it just isn't right. All these infants are born into the world guilty of the crimes of their parents, their grandparents, and so on? If some man or woman ever committed some atrocious wrongdoing to me, for example killing someone I hold close, is it right for me to blame it on their 2 month old infant? That's ridiculous! We are all born innocent, not guilty. I reject such a system where I have to continually apologize to God, the only perfect being, for being imperfect. He made me imperfect as he made all other life imperfect, so shouldn't he be apologizing to me for making me less than perfect and thus making me "guilty"?

@ 7:35 - I'm God and I created everything. Including hell.
This is another item that boggles my mind when trying to understand how Christians can believe that God is good. He created the system of heaven and hell. He decided that he will not provide concrete evidence of his existence because he wants people to believe in him on "faith". And those who look at the evidence, examine arguments, and come to a well-reasoned and rational conclusion that this God probably doesn't exist are to be punished. And by punished he means tortured, burned, mutilated, and put through the most unimaginable suffering for all eternity, with absolutely no hope of forgiveness. Some Christians have probably thought this through themselves because quite a number actually do not believe in hell at all. It probably came down to them having to chose between rejecting the notion that their God is good and rejecting the notion of hell.

Part 2.

@ 0:55 - What will you say to God after you die? I'll say that I was honest in my thinking.
Exactly. If it is a crime for me to be honest about what I think and believe? Belief in something like a God is not so easy as to say "I believe and I accept this as true". I could say that, but the words would be meaningless because I don't actually believe it is true nor do I feel it is true. Is that my fault? Am I wrong to have such high standards in believing in some invisible all-powerful being that created me and loves me and is present with me at all times? Even the 10 commandments say thou shalt not lie, so should I lie and say that I believe in God when I really don't? I could convince everyone that I do, except for God of course because he knows what I really think about him.

@ 2:30 - Would you lock your children up in a basement and torture them forever for not loving you?
Many Christians like to provide the analogy of human is to God as child is to parent. When I say I don't believe in God and don't understand why he would punish me as severely as he said he would for no believing, I often hear the argument "well imagine if you had a child that you loved and they didn't respect you or believe in you, how would that make you feel?" Disappointed at the very least, devastated at the most. But if we're going to go there, how does the act of torturing and burning and raping my non-believing child for eternity justify itself? Especially when I want my child to believe in me, find me, and form a relationship with me but I am absolutely not going to prove my existence to the child? That's a horrible God and I hope that he does not exist.

Agree to Disagree

2009-02-26T20:27:00.000-08:00

My friend and I got together last Thursday evening and discussed what had happened between us and where our friendship should go from here. We spoke for a little over two hours and thus I'm not going to go into every little detail here. We actually did discuss religion and science a little bit although I wasn't intending too. We only discussed it where absolutely necessary to clarify a viewpoint. There were some moments where each of us became a little emotional. So here's what happened...

She Said
I asked her to start by telling me how she felt about everything. She explained to me that she was upset that I was so consistently "negative" about her beliefs. (I wasn't meaning to be negative, I was just skeptical). She was upset that nearly all of the questions I asked and remarks I made were in this light. In one of my e-mails I said something to the effect of "I don't mention the positive things because we already agree there, so there's not much to discuss". In hindsight, I think that was a mistake on my part. When I went to church with her she asked me what I thought of it and I started by telling her the things that I agree with before getting into the things that I disagree with. I should have tried to be more like that throughout the entire discussion, though it was difficult for me to agree with events that were said to have taken place nearly 2000 years ago. I could have at least agreed on some of the principals taught in the bible, because I do agree with a good number of those. She also said that she arrived at the (false) impression that I was having "fun" with her, pointing out contentious issues about her faith. I told her that absolutely was not the case and that I never at any point intended to upset her.

So throughout my "negative" questioning of her faith for several weeks, she was getting more and more upset about it. The day of our falling out she was at work (where she often has to deal with many rude people) and it was a combination of what I said at that moment, the ongoing negativity, and what was going on at work that caused her to have the outburst that she did. It was the straw that broke the camel's back. I was somewhat relieved to hear all that, because she reacted in a way that totally shocked me and I didn't understand. Because she had all that pent up frustration towards me, it makes much more sense that she acted the way that she did. So then I asked her why didn't she let me know how she felt before this event happened. She said it was a flaw in her personality to hide those sorts of feelings, which I can perfectly understand because I used to be the same way. So we both agreed that that was something that she should have done.

One of the things that she said that somewhat surprised me was that she was more upset at my follow-up e-mail the night after the falling out. I had carefully crafted that e-mail to try and be as sensitive as possible and to explain why I had said the things I did, and I even gave her an example of how my thought process works. Particularly, she was upset because I said in that e-mail that I was disappointed that she never asked me any questions. I wanted her to ask me questions so that she could better understand where I was coming from and thus better be able to communicate how she thought and felt to me. She told me that she simply didn't have any questions, as there is no "doctrine" of atheism to question and I had been telling her how I felt through our discussions as well. I do find it a little strange that she had absolutely no questions for me at all and part of me thinks that our discussions would have gone better if she did ask me questions, but its too late for that now. I also still don't really understand how my saying that I was disappointed she never asked me any questions could make her upset.

He Said
Then it was my turn to talk. I told her how I felt sad because there were now things that we could not share together. I explained how some of her beliefs actually hurt me (like how she thinks I'm going to hell) and that I had been fine up until now because I was at least able to talk to her about them. I told her my opinion that some of her beliefs that she holds are actually detrimental to the well-being of herself and those around her. (For example, the statement "I would kill children for God" and "Evolution is just a theory"). I also told her that I had been writing to this blog for the last month about all of these things and I also talked about calling in to the Atheist Experience TV show and talking about our falling out. I told her how to find the blog and video clips in case she was ever interested in reading/watching them.

Then I presented her with a couple of analogies. Both analogies were to illustrate to her how I feel. The first was a role-reversal analogy where I was convinced that eating a diet full of trans fats and sugars was healthy for you and she was trying to convince me that it was not. The second was where I contracted a horrible disease but refused to see a doctor because I didn't trust doctors, and instead asked for a carpenter to give me medical advice. Both analogies were used to explain to her the fallacies of relying on a non-scientist like Carl Baugh (a creationist "scientist" who I've mentioned before) to explain science to her. Fortunately, what I found out was that my perception of her infatuation with Carl Baugh and his Creation Evidence Museum was not an infatuation at all. During our discussions, she had recalled hearing about him once and noticed that he had some "science-like" explanations on his site, so without looking at them too deeply herself she had referred me to them for an explanation. So she wasn't apologetic towards him at all and didn't necessarily believe that what he said was the truth, which made me breathe a deep sigh of relief because her acceptance of his pseudoscience that I had falsely perceived was probably the issue that I was most upset about.

The other major issue I had been upset about was her willingness to do anything for God, regardless of how immoral it would be otherwise. I explained to her just how sick it makes me feel when I recall her saying she would murder children if asked by God, and I told her I hoped that she could understand why I feel that way. She pointed out that it was highly unlikely that that would ever happen and I immediately agreed her, but pointed out that we agreed on that for different reasons. I agreed because I don't think God exists, and she agreed because she thinks God is a wonderful being. That led us to discuss the bible a little bit, and I pointed out to her again that God does murder children (and nearly the entire world) so if the bible is accurate and true, then it is not so unlikely that he would ask. I explained to her that as a person who had never read the bible and never believed in or perceived some sort of invisible all-powerful being, reading the bible is a rather horrifying experience. I asked her to try throwing out her preconceived notions of God and his greatness next time she reads the bible, and if she can do that she'll understand why I reacted towards it in the way that I did.

Philosophy of Thought
At one point my friend provided me with her own analogy asking how I would feel if she began questioning something about my life. She used exercise in her example because she knows that's something important to me. She asked "What if I told you I think you're dumb wasting all of your time with exercise, wouldn't that upset you?". But I told her no, it wouldn't upset me at all. In fact I'd like to hear more about why you or anyone would feel that way. And I think we realized then that this was the core of why our discussions went as badly as they did. We have different philosophies of thinking and understanding the truth.

In my philosophy, I like to look at everything and examine all viewpoints, arguments, and evidence. My beliefs are based on these things, but my beliefs are not permanent. If new valid evidence or a well-reasoned argument comes along, I will evaluate it and if necessary, change my beliefs accordingly. I do this because I want to hold as many true beliefs as possible, and hold as few false beliefs as possible. I think the best way to know the truth is to look at everything and continually analyze and evaluate things. And I feel I should never dogmatically hold myself to believing something as true. On the contrary, my friend has already decided what she believes is true. She is not interested in finding out about other arguments and evidence that may insert doubt into her beliefs. She doesn't want people to question her position, while on the contrary I do.

So I think this was the central problem between us. I was treating her in the same way that I would like to be treated by asking questions and looking at evidence that contradicts her stance. On the other hand, she was treating me in the same way that she would like to be treated by not questioning any of my positions. So I was frustrating her and she was frustrating me. Some of the people I had spoken too just prior before our meeting told me that we need to "agree to disagree", but I told them that I don't think I'm capable of that in this case. I'm sure that other people can't "agree to disagree" with others as well on topics that are important to them, such as racism (can you "agree to disagree" when you find out your friend is a member of the KKK?). My stance here is "I will agree to disagree if I understand why it is that you disagree with me". And I think I got my reason for why she disagreed with me because of our different philosophies of thought.

At least I can now understand why she would hold her beliefs with this philosophy. I think I have been around so many analytical thinkers (engineers/scientists) in the last few years that I forgot that there are people who think in different manners. I still do disagree with that philosophy of thought though. I feel that it is an absolutely horrible way to find out what is true. If you intentionally make yourself close-minded and don't look at outside opinions and evidence, how could you ever know whether or not you are right? I think I'll elaborate on truth and thought in a later post.

Conclusions
So after we both laid it all out, I brought up the question of whether or not our friendship should continue. (There are some other issues between us besides religion, but that's not interesting enough to share here). We decided that our friendship should continue, that we both want it continue, and that we won't revisit this topic. But I made sure to tell her before I left that I would be always willing to talk about anything with her, although if we decide to talk about this again in the future we should probably first talk about how we're going to talk about it...@_@

The discussion went much better than I thought it was going to. We also shared some casual conversation and had a few great laughs together during the discussion. I left feeling much better about the situation with my friend than I have felt in the past month. I only wish that we had this discussion much earlier.

Countdown to the Reconcilliation

2009-02-25T19:50:00.000-08:00

Exciting news to share. Tomorrow evening I am set to meet with my religious friend to talk about the future of our friendship. Its going to be a little tough for me to talk about since I'm sure it will be an emotional dialog and since I am no longer allowed to speak of her beliefs. I have a few important things I want to say to her but some of those things I am unsure of whether or not they should be said at all (they may serve no useful purpose). I'll decide during our discussion about which of those more controversial thoughts/feelings I should share with her. I've preempted the discussion by asking her to please be as honest and open as possible about this and to not hold any of her thoughts or feelings back regardless of how painful they may be to her or to me. I know that's kind of ironic to ask that because I actually am planning on holding some things back, but she continues to get upset when I am honest with her about something I disagree with so I don't really know what to do about that other than just not bring up anything contentious.

I may not have time to write a post after our discussion tomorrow night so hopefully I'll get around to sharing the results on Friday. No video clip to share tonight, but I do want to share something that popped into my head the other day. I asked myself "If God exists, does He really love me?". I thought about this long and hard, based on what properties I "know" about the Christian God and did a logical assessment of this question to see if I could arrive at an answer, or at least get close to one. Here's my logical analysis in a bulleted list format, first with several assumptions stated.

Assumption A: God exists
Assumption B: God is omniscient (knows everything)
Assumption C: God is omnipotent (able to do anything)
Assumption D: God is omnibenevolent (possesses infinite benevolence)
Assumption E: All humans who do not believe in God will go to hell for all eternity (also: hell exists)

I do not believe in God, primarily because of a lack of evidence to support the claim that He exists. (And contradictory to what some theists might think, I am totally willing to change my mind if I am provided sufficient evidence to believe).
Because of God's omniscience, He knows precisely what it would take for me to become a believer
Because of God's omnipotence, He is in no way prohibited from providing me with the proof I need
Because of God's omnibenevolence, He should desire for me to become a believer so that I would not go to hell (which by the way, this omnibenevolent being created).
God has not shown me sufficient evidence to support His existence, although many others around the world claim that he has revealed Himself to them in a manner sufficient for them to believe.
Therefore one or more of the five assumptions must be false, or some other condition I am unaware about is in effect (explained below).

Analysis of False Assumptions

Lets take a look at these one at a time. If assumption A is false and God does not exist, then all of the other assumptions are also false. Pretty simple, although not a nice outcome for everyone who does believe.

If assumption B is false and God is not all-knowing, then the reason God hasn't revealed himself to me is that he doesn't know how to convince me that he is real. This concept seems a little silly to me though that he can be all-powerful but not all-knowing. If he had the power to make me believe in Him, then why wouldn't he do it? Oh that's right, its because he's omnibenevolent and loves his creations so much that he gave us free will. Including the free will to damn ourselves and suffer eternal torment and torture after death. Speaking personally, I wouldn't exactly call that love...especially since he can change the rules (he is God after all) so I wouldn't go to hell at all.

If assumption C is false and God is not all-powerful, God knows what I need to believe and wants me to believe so that I can be "saved", but is unable to. That kind of sucks. I mean, he had the power to create the universe and everything in it, right? But he doesn't have the power to provide sufficient evidence of His existence to an open-minded human being like myself? Seems kind of far fetched to think that only this assumption is false.

If assumption D is false and God is not omnibenevolent, well then that would pretty much say right there that God does not love me. You know, I think it actually makes a lot of sense if this assumption is false. I mean, God created hell just like he created heaven, Earth, and absolutely everything right? Well what purpose does an omnibenevolent creator have for making a place like hell where people suffer infinite punishment for finite "crimes" in their mortal life (where that crime can be as simple as not believing in the right God)? That doesn't seem like the actions of an omnibenevolent God, or even a good God. That seems like the behavior of an evil, vengeful, immoral God. But again that's just my opinion.

If assumption E is false and hell does not exist, then maybe God doesn't really care what we believe at all if he's not going to punish anyone after death. If E is false, that may also indicate that heaven does not exist, or it may not. I heard in a recent Pew poll that a surprisingly disproportionate number of people believed in heaven but not in hell (more believed in heaven than believed in hell). I also heard that many Christians do not believe that atheists will go to hell either (phew, hope they're right about that one!). I really wish I had a link to these poll results but I haven't been able to find it yet, I just heard about it on a recent episode of The Atheist Experience. I'll talk about it in a future post though, and I'll be sure to find the link then. Anyway, if E is false then that would explain how God could be both willing and able to prove his existence to me, loves me, but has not provided me with the evidence that I require.

Like I said one or more of these five assumptions should be false, so which one is it? Well obviously I'm biased into thinking it is assumption A (and hence all the rest), but I don't want to let my personal bias effect this, so for sake of argument lets say that assumption A holds true. Assumption B's falsehood doesn't make much sense and neither does assumption C. In fact, thinking about it both B and C seem to be kind of intertwined with one another. How can you be all-knowing without being all-powerful, or vice-versa? So lets rule both of those out. That leaves us with D and E. Assumption D could lead us to conclude that God is not a good God, or at least does not possess infinite kindness, which is why he doesn't love me and why I'm going to go to hell as a result. Assumption E means simply that there is no hell, leaving only heaven or a non-existent state after mortal death (or possibly reincarnation or another option, but lets keep it simple and say its one or the other). So God may know that I'm already going to have the same fate as his followers after my death, and since He sees me living a happy life he feels no need to prove Himself to me (although it would still be nice of him if He did). My personal opinion in the order of most likely to be the false assumption to the least likely is: A - D - E - B - C.

Possible Apologetic Counterpoints

Now the falsehoods of those assumptions couldn't possibly explain everything and I'm sure a Christian apologist would be quick to jump in and "correct" my logic. So what are some alternative options for this answer? Well, one could be that God will provide evidence of Himself to me eventually, but just hasn't yet. To which I would respond, what's the wait? There are millions of people younger than I am that he has already proven Himself too. Especially for Him to hold back now, when I am taking a serious look at these sorts of questions, doesn't seem very fair to me. But hey what do I know, I'm only human.

Another argument might be that its not God's fault, but rather it is my fault. Its my fault for setting my standards too high. Really? So I should lower my standards to believe in something without sufficient evidence? If that's the case, then I should be just as ready to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Allah, Shiva, Zeus, etc.. One page I looked through on GotQuestions.org was addressing the question of whether or not there is evidence of God. I didn't read the entire response but I do remember reading a line that said (paraphrasing) "God wants us to believe in him on faith". So, he doesn't want to provide evidence of his existence, yet expects us to believe anyway or otherwise we face the worst punishment possibly imaginable. Well, that's going to be a problem for me. And I reject the notion that it is my fault that I have high standards for what I believe and what I don't believe. After all, before God even made the "rule" that you go to hell if you don't believe in him, he knew that I would eventually be born into this world and I would reject this notion that I have to believe in something without sufficient evidence.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm sure there are some other arguments a good apologist could come up with, but those were the two that I immediately thought of. Well I ended up talking a lot more about this little hypothetical situation than I intended too, but oh well. Wish me luck (or pray I guess, if that's your thing) for my discussion with my friend tomorrow evening!

Biblical Interpretations and History

2009-02-24T19:49:00.000-08:00

Now back to my Atheist Experience video clips. This one is on the biblical interpretations and accepting the bible as a true and accurate historical record of events.

This clip begins with the caller and the hosts debating over how one can know whether or not their interpretation of the bible is "correct". By correct, I mean the intrepretation is how God intended that to be read. Matt (guy on the right) makes a great point when he notices that the caller fitting his preconceptions of what God is before analyzing the text and deciding on his own interpretation.

I think this is a problem for many believers. If you have a preconception of what God is and you apply that when reading the bible, quite naturally you will either consciously or subconsciously try to "fit" the words of the bible to your image of God. That is not a good way to read the bible, or any book, in my opinion. For example, I could tell you that Adolf Hitler was this great guy who was trying to build this perfect society and the world just didn't understand him. If I convinced someone of that and then they went and read Mein Kampf, it would be unsurprising that the reader who is predisposed to believe that Hitler was a good person would interpret his racism and antisemitism as "oh he doesn't really mean it as harshly as he said it" or "well he's likely right that the Jewish people are conspiring against us". God murders and tortures many many people in the bible but these immoral deeds get overlooked by Christians who say "well he didn't really kill them like that" or "well they deserved it or it must have been for the greater good". Hopefully the analogy I provided here makes sense, I realize that it wasn't a great one.

What people need to do when reading any text (including divine scripture) is to approach it with an open mind and an unbiased conscious. When I read the bible recently, I was not convinced that the portrayal of the Christian God was neither good nor evil for I had never read the bible or been preached to. If anything, I was perhaps influenced a tad into believing that He was a good, just God since many of my friends and associates in life have been believers and that's what they agreed upon. But after reading it for myself and seeing God commit all these immoral acts, I just could not accept that this God was a good person. After all, this is a God who tortures, burns, mutilates, and brings misery upon countless souls over the ages for "offenses" as petty as not believing in God himself or being a homosexual. I would like to think that God is good (who wouldn't?), but my reasoning tells me that if the bible is true to the letter, then he is an evil deity not worthy of my worship.

Anyway, the discussion in the video then turns to how can one know whether or not the bible is a true historical record. The caller believes it "on faith" to be true. I really like it when Matt says the following.

The only thing that should be used to accept whether or not a claim is true is evidence to support the claim. Not a lack of evidence to prove it wrong.

This is another great point. Just because I can't disprove God doesn't mean that God exists. It is impossible to disprove a negative. I can't disprove that aliens have visited Earth. I can't disprove that Big Foot is not real. I can't disprove that every flower has a fairy that watches over it as it grows. But what I can do is examine alleged evidence to support the claim that "X is true" and use what scientific or historical means to examine the evidence. If that evidence has significant flaws or is insufficient to prove the claim, then it is correct for me to say "I reject your claim that X is true based on the insufficient/flawed evidence that you have provided me with". A lot of believers have this distorted sense of logic that "you can't disprove God, therefore He must exist" while turning around and saying "you can't disprove that evolution is false, therefore it is false". That's just ridiculous, and that kind of thought process needs to stop.

That's all for tonight.

Some Religious Humor

2009-02-23T08:54:00.000-08:00

I've been talking about some very serious issues in the past several days, so I thought it would be nice to have a post with some humor and a more laid back discussion. I watched the movie Religulous this weekend. It was very entertaining, had some great comedic moments, and also had a touch of sad seriousness. I was a little sad it didn't cover more religions though. It covered Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Mormonism. I recommend seeing it regardless of your beliefs. Its both entertaining and I bet you'll learn a thing or two.

This is a video clip from George Carlin's stand-up act. I know its not meant to be taken seriously, but I think he makes a very good point about sun worship. Worship of the sun makes more sense to me than worship of some invisible being whose existence can not be verified. Everyone can see or feel the sun. We know for a scientific fact that were in not for the sun, we could not exist. Indeed, many ancient civilizations did worship the sun, or attribute some personification to the sun and worshiped that. Perhaps the reason that people don't worship the sun now is that we know the sun is nothing but a star. A big giant ball of burning gas that will eventually run out of fuel and its existence will cease (as well as all life on Earth). Kind of sucks when you compare it to the Abrahamic personal God who is an intelligent being and cares very deeply about every tiny aspect of your life, loves you no matter what, and is always ready to forgive you for being you.

Finally here is a funny clip I found this morning. This is from a new Comedy Central show called Important Things with Demteri Martin. It is a fake advertisement for a new rat extermination product that uses religious differences to cause rat colonies to self-annihilate one another. The punchline at the end is especially ironic. "And I can feel good about it [killing the rats] because they are dying for something that they believe in".

Important Things with Demetri MartinWed 10:30pm / 9:30c

Power - Creedocide

Joke of the Day
Stand-Up Comedy

Free Online Games
More Funny Videos

The Bible as a Source for Morality

2009-02-19T17:52:00.000-08:00

This video is about morality in the bible. A lot of religious people mistakenly think that morals come from God. Considering I've been an atheist my entire life and I'm a very moral person, that clearly proves them wrong. The truth of the matter is, in both the Old and New Testaments there are scores of absolutely immoral and atrocious acts done by God either directly or indirectly (though his followers), or human acts that God condones. For example, God decides to kill nearly all of his creations via the flood described in the story of Noah's Ark. At about the 2:50 mark, Russel (the co-host to the left) makes a great point about people dismissing some of what is written in the Old Testament, but accept other parts (like the Ten Commandments). This "picking and choosing" from the bible is something that I don't understand in Christians. Jesus himself says that he did not come to refute the old laws, but to fulfill the prophecies (yet he went on to break many of those old laws anyway). I would quote the biblical passages if I could recall them off the top of my head, but I forgot where exactly I read it. But I'll talk about "picking and choosing" from the bible at another time.

Here is another short clip related to this subject.

The whole argument that "morality comes from God" is a non sequitur. On what basis do people make this claim? It is true that the bible states that "God says these things are good and these things are bad", but that doesn't make them moral! The bible is filled with tons of immoral teachings! I won't bother to give you a long list of examples but here's one: stone your unruly children to death if they do not listen to you. I think we would all agree that killing your children for not listening to you is immoral. Even if the bible did contain nothing but good moral advice, that still doesn't mean that morals come from God. Until about a couple months ago, I had never read the bible (except for some small excerpts from Genesis as a teenager). And yet all my family and friends would say that I am a moral person. I am kind to others, treat all living things with respect, volunteer my time and money, and make an honest effort to make this world a better place in my everyday life.

So where did my morals come from? Were they "revealed" to me by God without me knowing it? No. My morals come from thinking how I would like to be treated as a person and treating others in that way. They come from reading the stories of both great and infamous figures of the past such as Martin Luther King, Adolf Hitler, Ghandi, and Joseph Stalin. I look at these important figures of history and decide for myself "Hey, MLK was a good guy who tried to make the world a better place and I want to be like him. Hitler was an evil man who killed many innocent people because of an ambition towards an ideology and I should strive to never be like this person". I think that we all operate in the same way or a similar way, even if people don't acknowledge it. Otherwise we'd have Christians torturing and killing people (including each other) for petty offenses. If you think that you need to keep believing in a God and the bible so that you don't go on a immoral spree of rape, theft, and murder, then I hope you continue to go to church every single day. But moreso, I hope that you realize that the absence of a God would do nothing (or perhaps very little) to change your morality as a person.

Emotional Attachments to the Church

2009-02-17T19:24:00.000-08:00

As I said in an earlier post, I collected several video clips from the Atheist Experience to share with my religious friend so that we could watch and discuss them together, and hopefully come to a better understanding of one another. Unfortunately we never got around to watching a single clip because our conversation ended before we could get around to it. I put a lot of effort into compiling this arrangement of clips and it would be a waste not to share them, so for my next several posts I will share these clips one at a time and comment on them.

This first video is on emotional attachments to the church.

The atheist caller in this video was raised by a very religious Christian family and he discusses how emotionally upset his mother becomes when she is unable to "win her son back for Christ". She believes that he is going to go to hell and it hurts her emotionally. The caller mentions the single "unforgivable sin" mentioned in the bible, which is denial of the holy spirit. I've read this in the bible myself. It is found in Matthew 12:31-32 (and repeated in Mark 3:29 and Luke 12:10), and these are the words spoken there by Jesus Christ himself.

And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.

For those who are lacking in understanding of Christian beliefs, "Son of Man" refers to Jesus himself. I still don't understand why its okay to speak against Jesus but not okay to speak against the holy spirit. The "holy trinity" in Christianity is the father (God), the son (Jesus), and the holy spirit. Somehow all three of these entities actually are God, but I guess they are different manifestations of Him? I don't know. It doesn't make much sense to me so consult a preacher.

Back to the subject. Matt and Don (the show hosts) make a good point about how religious persons are so emotionally attached to their beliefs that many times trying to approach a logical argument with these people just goes over their heads. I have sometimes felt the same way when talking to my own friend. When I present a logical argument that she does not want to have (say, about why she believes God is not immoral) she usually will fail to give me a response to my question or try to change the subject. But I always try to make sure to thank and praise her when she does give me a legitimate and logical answer to a question I have. Those are the kinds of responses that I need in order to understand. I am a logical person and a rational thinker, its just how I work. Providing some emotional plee such as "but Jesus died for your sins!" doesn't move me an inch (my friend never said this to me, but others have).

First of all, I'm still not convinced that Jesus ever existed. I would need historical documents outside of the bible that would lead me to believe that he did, and I am planning to do that research myself in the near future (I already have a list of sources to investigate). Second, even if I conclude he exists, I'm not convinced that he is a manifestation of God (assuming here that God does exist, although I obviously don't believe that claim to be true). Jesus Christ performed miracles such as creating matter from nothing, instantly healing the sick by touching them, etc. Furthermore every time he performs some miracle, the bible specifically states that word of his deed spreads throughout the countryside. So why are there no writings external to the bible about these miracles? There were historians during those days, so why didn't anyone ever catch word and investigate and write down what they found? Third, I reject the Christian principal that I (nor any other human) was born into this world guilty. I find it ridiculous that I am guilty for the "sins" of my father and my mother, their parents, and so on back as far as humanity goes. Newborns are innocent, and I welcome any debate where someone would like to argue otherwise. And finally, many other people have died for me in the past. Brave men and women gave their lives to protect the freedoms that I now cherish. Brave men and women struggled in the civil rights movement so that I and others could all have the same liberties and privileges. If I'm going to honor the dead who have died for me, then I would rather honor these people. After all, when Jesus died he got to be resurrected before going up to heaven and ruling the universe. Those normal humans gave their only shot at life for me and for all future generations, and though many of them may be in heaven now too, many of them are also now in hell. At least, assuming that heaven and hell do exist.

Matt then talks about his own family (who are religious) and how they have mutually agreed not to discuss this anymore because its non-productive. My own friend stopped talking to me about this even though I want to continue discussing it, so we've sort of come to the same conclusion at this point even though it was not a mutual decision. But it is different because Matt and the caller's family are trying to convert them back to their religion, where as my friend never did that. I merely wanted to understand why she believed what she did, and at some point she wanted me to understand as well, although I don't know whether or not she still feels this way. Family is not something you can just cut away due to religious differences, but friends are. And although I do not want to end our friendship over this, I know that it is a very real possibility.

This video, along with some other stories I've heard in my studies, have made me very grateful that I was not raised in a religious family nor pressured to believe or disbelieve in any thing. Were that the case, both I and my family would be going through the same pains I imagine.

Why I Believe

2009-02-16T16:15:00.000-08:00

I want to throw out a little disclaimer before I start getting into the real meat of this religious discussion. I realize that religion and gods and beliefs are a sensitive subject for many people. I further realize that there is no way that I can prevent offending someone. But what I can do is try to be as respectful as possible and to always be willing to discuss what I have said in my blog. So if you read something here and you take offense to it, leave a note in the comments telling me so. But also make sure to tell me why you were offended. I am completely willing and open to have a conversation about what I write and why I write it. So please likewise be willing and open to having that conversation with me when you disagree.

I have stated before that I believe in science and do not believe in any religion that involves some supernatural phenomenon. Why do I believe in science? Why do I trust scientists and not religious preachers when I want to understand the truth about the world?

Evidence
First and foremost, scientific understanding is based on evidence. What we can measure, what we can demonstrate, and what results we can reproduce. Scientists don't just sit around thinking about how something works, get an idea, and then seek to find evidence to support their idea. On the contrary, they seek evidence to disprove their idea. Sometimes they find evidence (or lack of evidence) that doesn't completely disprove the idea, but discredits it to a degree. And in their work, they make sure to point this type of evidence out to others so that they can evaluate it as well. But if they find that the total accumulation of experiments and evidence supports their theory, they will write up a scientific paper summarizing their findings. This paper is submitted to a journal, a conference, or some other venue where other scientists with equal credentials can review the work. These scientists then too seek out to disprove the author's theory. They will criticize and analyze it to a pedantic degree, perhaps pointing out experiments that were not done in the original work that they feel should be done. They will reproduce the experiments in their own laboratories to examine if they get the same results. And if no scientist can come up with evidence that completely debunks the theory and the theory is the best explanation that anyone can come up with to explain how something works, then that theory is accepted as a scientific fact. But at the same time it is still also a scientific theory, a theory that currently does the best job at explaining the observable fact. This can be confusing to a layman, which explains why some people think evolution is simply a theory. But the truth is that evolution is both a scientific theory and a scientific fact.

In case you missed it, the process of a scientist coming up with a hypothesis, testing it, measuring results, and having those results scrutinized by other qualified individuals is known as the scientific method. I believe that it is the best way for us as a species to find out answers to the world we live in and the universe that we exist in. Providing and testing explanations for new evidence that we discover is the best way to learn the truth about that evidence. For the most part, religion has it backwards. Religion provides an answer, then tries to find evidence to match that answer and discredit any evidence that conflicts with that answer. So called creation science is a blasphemous label against science. And yes, I realize the irony in using the adjective blasphemous here :). It is a pseudo-science, a want-to-be science that will not and can never be true science. The reason is because creation "scientists" have already made up their mind about what they believe are the answers to the questions they seek. Rather than being objective and open about it, they fervently seek out only evidence that supports their answers and try to hide, obscure, or explain away that evidence which serves to discredit their answer. That is why no creation science efforts will ever hold any acceptance within the greater scientific community.

Furthermore, I place my trust in the results of the scientific process. I do so because I know that even if one or a few scientists are "bad apples" who want to prove their theory true even when the evidence indicates it to be false, there are a thousand fold more scientists who will see the flaws in their work and will not accept their theory as fact until those flaws are addressed. I myself have been a part of this process and I have learned to respect it. While in academia I submitted scientific papers and had them reviewed. Some were accepted and others were rejected. And when they were rejected, I was provided with explanations from the reviewers on why they were rejected. I too have been a reviewer of many papers. Some of the better and more sound ones I accepted, while the ones which were weak or significantly flawed I rejected (and gave legitimate reasons why I rejected them). Contrary to what I imagine my religious friend believes, I am much more harsh in my criticism of scientific papers than I am on any particular belief system.

Trust
The issue of trust is very important, and could merit its own post. I am not an expert in evolutionary biology, geology, chemistry, or theoretical physics. In fact, I am a non-expert in pretty much every scientific discipline, and only consider myself to be a well-educated and interested reader of science. I don't have the time, energy, nor lifespan to devote my entire being to seeking out answers to everything in life by myself. So I have to ask myself "Who do I trust to give me those answers?". I've already laid out my reasons for why I trust science, and I think that I have very good reasons for trusting them. So why then, does my religious friend distrust science and instead trusts in the bible?

I'll probably never know the answer to that question since she is no longer willing to discuss it with me. I have never asked her why she believes in God, because I honestly don't care whether she does or not. I do care when her belief in God prevents her from forming relationships, when it causes her to be willing to commit murder of innocents, and when it causes her to deny scientific evidence and accept false truths. During our first discussion I pointed out to her that the bible had over 40 authors and three languages, and that some of the old Christian scripture (such as the Gospel of Thomas) were not included in the compilation of the New Testament. So I asked her "Why do you believe in the bible? Why do you believe it is the inerrant word of God from the man himself?". Especially since we can not verify who a single author of the bible was. Her answer baffled me.

"I don't know, I just do."

Seriously? This is the book that she, at some point, decided to believe in and follow to the letter. And when asked why she believed that, she couldn't provide an answer? I honestly find it to be ridiculous! So in the e-mail that I sent to her after she became upset with me for my disagreements with her church's philosophy on marriage and sex, I pointed out to her the following verse in the bible, 1 Peter 3:15.

But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect,

I implored her to stay true to the bible and provide me with a real explanation. In her e-mail response (which was also the last time I had any real communication with her, about a month ago), she told me she understood that her response then was not an acceptable answer and attached a testimonial about her life as a believer and why she believes in God. Well, that's fine and all. But I never asked her why she believed in God. I asked her why she believes that the bible is the work of God and not the work of men. I know that she trusts in God, but I don't know how she can likewise trust that the bible is inerrant and is the word of God. There are many Christians who don't believe that it is, so I am infinitely curious as to why she does believe that. I have my own speculations about the answer, which I may share at a later time.

Anyway I am getting off topic. I've stated why I trust science and why I distrust "creation science", but why do I distrust religion? Well the answer is pretty simple really. It again boils down to evidence and dogmatic beliefs about the truth. I find no credible evidence of an invisible being that penetrates everything and everyone, influences the universe at every location and every instance of time, and cares infinitely about me as a person. I am willing to listen to evidence that people can provide me, but just because I don't know an answer to something doesn't mean that suddenly "God fills the gap". Ancient civilizations used to think that gods pulled the sun across the sky until gravitational theory was well understood. So you see, God filled the gap back then too. Just because we currently do not have a good scientific explanation for some phenomenon that we witness does not mean we should automatically attribute its workings to some mythical being.

The answer to why I distrust religion is that it asserts that it knows what is true without evidence to support their claims. Time and time again, religion has shown to stand in the way of real truth. Just look to the Catholic church's prosecution of Galileo Galilei for seeing the evidence that the Earth revolves around the sun, instead of vice versa. It took centuries for the church to formally vindicate this innocent man from his "crime" of promoting this scientific truth. Any body, religious or otherwise, that would try to hide such evidence (as the church banned his book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems) automatically loses any crediblity with me as a promoter of truth and understanding. The fundamentalist Christian movement, not learning the mistakes of the past, are now repeating the same dire mistake with Charles Darwin and evolution. They would seek to erase the scientific truth, or at least "muddy the waters" as much as possible to make the public doubt this truth. And what's worse is that they target the children, trying to insert intelligent design into schools as if it were a scientifically valid theory that holds equal validity with evolution. It doesn't. It is a theological belief with no evidence to support it. In my own observations, I noticed that the ID movement expends much more energy trying to discredit evolutionary theory than trying to prove their own theory (if you can call it a theory). Even if evolution were disproven (nearly impossible given the massive amounts of fossil, genetic, and modern evidence) it does not automatically mean that the story of creationism is true.

Wow, I am really bad at staying on topic. I think I am just going to quit here and now before I diverge again into some other tangent. But to summarize the main points in my post:

I believe in science because it uses existing evidence to formulate theories to explain the evidence.
I disbelieve in "creation science" because it asserts a single theory as true and then seeks evidence to support it (and ignores evidence that refutes it).
I trust in the scientific method because it prevents bad science from being written as true.
I still do not have an answer about why my religious friend believes in the bible and trusts it to be the inerrant word of God.
Just because we can not currently provide an explaination for some phenomenon very well does not automatically prove the existence of a higher power.
The church has in the past, and does currently, try to hide and distort scientific evidence that contradicts their dogmatic ideologies, which is one reason why I distrust them.
I distrust any institiution, religious or otherwise, that asserts a dogmatic idea as truth and fact, especially when they fail to provide sufficient evidence to support that claim.

Cause and Effect

2009-02-14T20:45:00.000-08:00

In this post I'll discuss what happened as a result of this recent experience of mine. What were the bad things that happened, what were the good things that happened, and why did I decide to begin writing about this in my blog?

The Bad
Its pretty obvious what the most negative consequence of these discussions was. My friendship with this girl has taken severe damage and it remains to be seen whether we can salvage it. I don't want to belittle this point, because this alone makes me very very sad. I got closer to this girl than I could have ever imagined. I typically don't form close relationships with people because I have a hard time finding friends that I really connect with. She is the one friend I have in Austin who I felt completely comfortable with. I felt like I could talk about anything with her and do everything with her. I really, really value my friendship with her and she's a very important person in my life. It makes me sad to think that religion could tear us apart forever. Even if that is not the case, I doubt that we will ever be as close as we once were.

I'm not so sure I feel entirely comfortable around her anymore as well. Her admission that she would kill young children if God commanded her too really scares me. I thought about this carefully and during an online chat once I told her I wasn't sure that I could feel comfortable around her anymore. She asked why, and I cited her earlier admission and said "What if God commanded you to kill me? How can I feel comfortable knowing that you wouldn't even question that command?". (She never responded to this question so I don't know her answer). There are numerous examples in the bible where God commands people to kill those close to them, including parents sacrificing their children. If God would accept the blood of the innocent, he surely has no problem asking my faithful friend to extinguish a blasphemer such as myself. Of course I don't believe in God so I don't think that he will ever tell my friend to kill me. I raised the point as more of a hypothetical question. Because if I did believe in God, then I may have good reason to fear my friend.

And her YEC stance makes me greatly uncomfortable as well. I've been thinking very deeply and philosophically about this lately. My friend and I have a list of activities to do around the Austin area. A couple of those things were to go exploring the local historical cave sites and to go star gazing. But can I really appreciate doing those activities with a friend who believes the earth is only a few thousands years old? If that were the case, most of the stars in the sky should not exist. If that were the case, then there's no way that she could appreciate the millions of years of erosion and geological formations in those caves. I can't imagine viewing the universe in the same way as a YEC does. For example, if I'm touring a beautiful garden with a friend and this friend says "Wow, look at all the fairies in this garden!". I don't see the fairies but my friend insists that they are there, making the flowers beautiful and taking care of them. Are we really appreciating the same garden? Can I appreciate nature and the stars and history with such a friend?

The Good
There are, however, many unexpected good results of this too. The best one is that my thirst for knowledge and understanding has been revived. When graduate school ended back in December 2006 I had to take so many months to recover from my anxiety disorder. By the time I was feeling back to normal, I just no longer really cared to learn anything anymore. But now that feeling is back and it is just as strong as it was before I became a graduate student. My passion to learn really drives me in life and I am very thankful to have it back again.

I have learned so much in the past two months it is incredible. Initially all that I was learning was about Christianity and the Bible. As I was reading the bible though, I began to wonder how true the stories in it were. For example, the book of Matthew discusses King Herod of Judea under the Roman Empire. This king really did exist. Matthew describes how Herod heard that the Messiah (Jesus) had been born in his lands and ordered that all infants two years or younger be killed (see massacre of the infants). Jesus and his human parents fled to Egypt to escape this massacre. The problem with that story is that Herod had a personal historian who kept detailed records of his days. Although Herod committed many awful acts as King according to his own historian, there is nothing in these records that describe the massacre of the infants. Furthermore, there is very good evidence that King Herod died in the year 4BC, 4 years before the birth of Jesus Christ. I've learned a lot of history about the times which are mentioned in the bibles.

After talking to my friend and learning about her YEC stance, I began re-evaluating my own stance. I do believe in evolution, and I do believe that the universe is billions, not thousands, of years old. But why do I believe that? What evidence support my beliefs? Am I justified in my beliefs? These questions led me to go back and re-discover the answers that I once found, evaluated, and decided were true. I've studied biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, cosmology, palentology, archaelogy, and history. And I'll share the things that I have learned through my studies in future posts, and justify why I hold the views that I do.

I've also been learning about religion in general, not just Christianity. My roommate (also an atheist) took a couple courses on religion during his college years and lent me the textbooks that he studied. I've studied them to try to understand why people hold the beliefs that they do. Why do some people reject science and historical evidence when they conflict with their beliefs? What role does our childhood experiences play in what we believe as adults? I've started looking into psychology and sociology to find these answers. I have my own hypotheses about these answers, which I will share in future posts. I do hope to share them when I have better knowledge of the human mind and childhood development.

Another positive benefit I've gained from this experience is awareness. I am more aware of (what I consider to be) some of the dangerous beliefs that some religious people hold. I can no longer afford to be naive about these people, because their views do affect my life both directly and indirectly. I'm aware now that as an atheist, I belong to the most distrusted group in America. In the past I've been somewhat of a "hidden" atheist. I didn't tell people that I was an atheist unless they ask or unless it is relevant information to share. That's probably why I haven't experienced a lot of discrimination from believers that other atheists have experienced. I've decided to be more open about being an atheist and to do my part to try and dispel the negative stigma about atheism. Like everything else, I'll discuss discrimination and atheism in a future post.

The Effect
So why have I decided to start blogging about all this? The main reason is because I've learned so much and prepared so many questions for my friend, and now I can't share them with her anymore because I agreed to not speak about religion or her beliefs anymore. All these thoughts in my head that I was going to share with her suddenly had no where to go, and it was driving me crazy. Thus, I decided to share them in my blog because I need to get them out of my head!

A secondary reason is to raise education and awareness about these sorts of questions that are so fundamental to our lives. I'm speaking to both atheists and religious people in this respect. If someone decides to accept or reject a viewpoint, I want them to have well supported and intelligent reasons in doing so. Education is something that I think our society doesn't respect enough here in the United States and across all other nations. And I do blame religion in part for playing a role in making people less educated and less enlightened about the world and the reality in which we live.

I realize that being on my blog and avaiable in the public domain, my friend has the access and opportunity to read what I have to say here. I'm not going to force my blog entries down her throat, but I will tell her that what I think and feel is available here. It will be up to her whether or not she chooses to read what I have to say, but I hope that she does. But I don't want her or anyone else to mistakenly think that I am writing these postings specifically for her because that is not the case. Using this blog to indirectly share my thoughts with my friend is a teriary reason for why I write.

That's all for now. Next time I think I'll discuss why it is that I trust science and likewise distrust religion.

A New Friend: Part II

2009-02-10T16:56:00.000-08:00

Picking up where I left off in my last post, I had just talked to my friend about her beliefs and began reading through the bible that she lent me. My single motivation for doing this was because I wanted to understand her beliefs. She was (and still is) a close and dear friend to me, and I felt I should at least know about this aspect of her life that was so important to her. I read through the bible and other materials I read/saw online, I began constructing a list of my own observations and questions for her based on what I read.

About a week after our first talk, we decided to spend Saturday together going to a yoga class, getting lunch, and going for an afternoon walk/run. It was nice and we both had a lot of fun together like we usually do. We didn't talk about religion scarcely at all (I didn't want to and I don't think she wanted to either then), but during lunch she did ask me a sudden question. "Do you believe in evolution?". I was somewhat surprised, but I answered that yes, I did. (I can't remember clearly if she then asked me why I believe it, but if she did I'm sure I responded because all of the scientific evidence and studies have shown it to be true). Naturally I asked her the same question in response, and she said that no, she didn't. I inquired why not and she replied "Because it contradicts the bible". This was the second shock I received when talking to her about her beliefs. First she displays an absolute devotion to God, even if it means killing innocent children. Then she uses an ancient text which can not be verified by any means as true as her reason for rejecting a near universally accepted modern scientific theory. That's about the extent of our conversation about evolution that day (I wasn't going to debate her on it right then and there). Little did I know just how far down the rabbit hole would lead our talks from there.

After that day I did some research about Christian views on evolution. What I read lead me to believe that my friend was a young Earth creationist (YEC). I knew that many evangelical Christians held this view, but I would have never imagined that my friend was an evangelical nor that she would hold this opinion that the universe was created no later than 10,000 years ago. I had not confirmed that she was a YEC, but I was afraid that it was likely to be true. As an engineer and a science enthusiast, I know off-hand of many, many pieces of evidence for why our universe and the Earth are billions of years old (I'll devote separate blog posts about this later). I can't even imagine how one can live with a YEC view. So many books that I've read on ancient history, chemistry, genetics, and theoretical physics simply could not be true if our universe was this old. Yes, it is true in fact that YECs reject any evidence that shows our universe to be as old as the evidence suggests. From the wikipedia article on YEC:

YEC is normally characterized as opposing evolution, though it also opposes many claims and theories in the fields of physics and chemistry (especially absolute dating methods), geology, astronomy, cosmology, molecular biology, genomics, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology and any other fields of science that have developed theories or made claims incompatible with the Young Earth version of world history.

About a week later, we had our second talk. And I did confirm that she was a YEC, and further that she believed that man and dinosaur once lived on the Earth at the same time. To begin I had just general thoughts and questions for her, nothing too controversial. But one of the points I tried to hit home is "If the bible is literal and true as you believe it is, how can you believe God is good when he allows so much suffering and causes so much suffering directly himself in the bible?". I don't remember what her response was. Actually I can't remember how much we talked about this at all. She printed up copies of the questions I sent her and I later found out that several things I had asked in the online document that I shared with here were not in her printouts. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, it is certainly plausible that she printed out the document before I was finished with it (I was still adding questions to it just a few hours before our arranged meeting time). But I never got around to confirming with her if that was the case, or if she somehow felt the questions were inappropriate. Anyway, I won't go into every single question and response during this talk we had (although in my later blog posts I'll touch on specific examples from it). But I did want to share what was said about evolution.

When we began talking about it my initial question to her (IIRC) was that how can she say that its false when there is so much evidence to support her. Her answer was a man by the name of Carl Baugh, a YEC who runs a "Creationism Museum" here in Texas. I had snuck a peek at her answers prior to our meeting and since I had never heard of the man, I looked him up on Wikipedia. The consensus against him was damning. He claims to have evidence of man and dinosaur existing together, but all professional scientists and archaeologists who have visited him and viewed his evidence all came to the same conclusion: it is false. I won't go into the details, but read the wikipedia article about him and the associated links if you care to. I pointed this out to her and her initial defense of him was that I read Wikipedia "which anyone can edit to say whatever". I gave her that point, but later I did read many of the references in the wikipedia article (to external and professional websites) which said the same thing the article did. Big surprise. And what came out her mouth next saddened me greatly.

"But evolution is just a theory!"

Just a theory? Forget talking about evolution, my friend was failing to demonstrate that she understood the scientific method! (She's not a scientist, but she does have a bachelor's degree, graduated with high honors, and studied nutrition, which is at least based on science). I went into a long, passionate, spirited explanation about why I trust science and why I trust the conclusions of scientists. I explained that science isn't about trying to prove that your idea is right, but trying to prove it to yourself that it is wrong. And when you can't prove it wrong, you write down what you think, what you did to test it, and what you observed in your tests. You sent that paper to other scientists, who then also try to prove you wrong. If they are able to reproduce your results in their own experiments and not find any critical flaws in your method, then they keep scrutinizing it and looking for weaknesses (and every scientific does have weaknesses, including gravity). But even with the weaknesses if its still producing reliable and predictable results, thats when we accept it and say "this is true as far as we know and to all the lengths we went to try and disprove it". She didn't have a response for any of this that I recall, but I do remember the look on her face. Its very difficult for me to put her expression it into words, but the feeling I got from her was "she is understanding and acknowledging that what I am saying makes sense".

We concluded that night with deciding that we needed more time to talk. I suggested that perhaps next time she could ask me questions about what I think and what I believe, because it wasn't fair for me to keep asking her all the time. She expressed a great disinterest in doing so, to my disappointment. So instead I suggested that next time instead of me asking questions, we could watch some video clips together and discuss them. During my studies I came across a local TV show in Austin called The Atheist Experience, which has a lot of great dialog about atheists, religion, separation of church and state, science, beliefs, and related matters. Its also a call in show where people can talk about whatever is on their minds. Most of their 90 minute shows (and several minute clips from those shows) are hosted on Google Video. I'll share many of the best clips in my later posts.

Before she agreed to watch these videos with me, she asked if I would be willing to go to church with her. To which I said "Of course, I'd be happy to". So that was our deal. A couple of weeks passed before I attended church with her, and I don't think we ever hung out or did anything fun between the end of our second talk and me going to church. We did talk online almost everyday (we chat while we're both at work sometimes). I was feverishly researching and reading and learning new things during this period and I was getting rather anxious about it because I had accumulated so many things I wanted to ask her and talk with her about, but she's a pretty busy person and doesn't have a lot of time to spare. So I started talking to her about these things a little bit here and there online. She told me that she felt I was attacking her beliefs with some of my questions and I told her that I was not. I was merely asking critical questions (like I would of anything else) and letting her know how I felt and how I interpreted readings from her bible so that she could better know my position and thus it would hopefully be easier for her to explain her beliefs to me. So things were starting to get a little tense at this point.

Then came Sunday, and I went to church with her. I hadn't been to church in almost 10 years (and I had only been two times before that, both to Catholic churches). I went with an open mind (as I always do for everything). The sermon was about sex and marriage. There were a few parts that I agreed with, but many more parts that I disagreed with strongly. After the service I thought that we'd sit down and talk about it but she was too tired and had to work early in the morning. But she did ask me what I think, and I told her honestly and directly. She just kind of sat there with a curled lower lip and nodded her head, then told me she was happy that I went. The next day we were chatting over IM once again and we came on the subject again after talking for a couple hours. I went into more detail about what I disagreed with and why I disagreed with it. i also recalled a study on U.S. divorce rates for different faith groups (found here). I found this study well over two months ago while I was doing some curious investigation into divorce trends (note: this was before I even sent the e-mail to my friend discussing religion). I wanted to provide this evidence to support my stance, because any claim (I feel) should have this kind of support so that its not just an uneducated opinion, but a reinforced position on an issue. She got very upset at me when I pointed out that the divorce rate for atheists/agnostics (and all other religions and denominations of Christianity) had significantly lower divorce rates than fundamentalist non-denominational Christians. She then said she's through talking about this with me and logged offline before I could offer an explanation. Later that evening I wrote her an e-mail apologizing that I upset her, and explained why I did what I did. She responded by accepting my apology, but stood defiant about not talking to me about her beliefs any longer in any form. I responded and told her I would respect her wishes and never speak nor ask of them again unless she changed her mind.

I have spoken to a lot of different people of a lot of different faiths and backgrounds (Christian and non-Christian) to get their opinions. I questioned if what I did was the right thing, because certainly at the time I didn't think it was wrong to share evidence of my claim with her, nor did I feel like I was attacking her belief. I was just demonstrating a constructive criticism and expressing my disapproval of it (particularly, I was speaking with regards to the idea of gender roles in a marriage, which was probably what I disagreed with most at the church sermon). In fact, I even called in to The Atheist Experience and told them this, and asked there opinion of it. The video clip is embedded below, watch it.

That's the end of this story (so far). Its been two weeks now. I called her once (and got her voice mail) and asked what her thoughts were about the future of our friendship. (Does she want to continue to be friends, or not?). She responded with a brief e-mail saying that she's been busy but will eventually respond to me. She's out of town for the next week so I won't hear back from her until she gets back I imagine. Next time I think I'll talk about what has happened to me as a result of this experience (both the good and the bad) and why I decided to start writing in my blog about it.

A New Friend

2009-02-09T19:45:00.001-08:00

Now on to the subject of why I started writing about religion in my blog, and the continuation of my story as an atheist. Back around June last year, I met a girl online who lived in my local area. My first impression was that we shared may interests and had many of the same ideas and philosophies about life. This is pretty rare as I am a very different person than most others in my generation (I'm sure I'll post about that eventually, but not now). One thing that I did notice that was different between us is that she seemed to be a very religious Christian and didn't know that I was an atheist. So I told her I was an atheist and asked if that would be a problem for her. She said no, but that it meant we could only be friends. I didn't think much of that response and at the time I was only thinking about friendship, so I said that was fine with me.

Well over the course of the last several months I got to know her pretty well. I always had a great time whenever I hung out with her. Over time I ended up opening myself completely to her, because I felt totally comfortable around her and wasn't afraid to share everything. We constructed lists of things to do around the area, places to go eat together, and so on. It felt really good because I don't really have any close friends that I feel comfortable hanging out with and doing whatever. I have plenty of friends from work/training, but there's no one I can really call up at any given moment and say "hey, lets go hang out" and not have it be awkward. We became really close friends, and continued to grow closer all the time. Naturally, I started to have feelings beyond friendship for her. I mean she is a great girl. She's smart, fun, cute, and someone I can talk to about anything with. As my feelings for her grew stronger and I knew that they were not going to go away, I had to tell her. But her initial statement of "we can just be friends" still lingered in my mind. So first I wanted to ask her about that.

And I did ask her in an e-mail I sent over the winter holidays. I wanted to ask her in person, but we never got around to having any serious discussions at the time (whenever we were together we were too busy having fun). I certainly didn't want to let her know my feelings over e-mail though, so I attached that question (along with several others) in an e-mail about my views on religion. I also asked her if she thought that I was going to hell for being an atheist. (I also pointed out that I am a good person, I donate time and money to charities and I try to make the world a better place every day). This is what she said.

Yes, I do believe that if you do not believe in God, heaven, and accept Jesus as your Savior, you will go to hell. As hard as that is to say to you because you are a great friend and I would not want that for you, yes it is what I believe. No preacher has to tell me that either. I believe int he bible, and the bible states that is what happens.

I've been told before that I'm going to hell. Several times by several different people in fact. But it surprisingly hurt me when she said it. It hurt because she's such a close friend that I care about so much, and for her to think that I am deserving of the ultimate and eternal suffering, of never-ending torture and torment just breaks my heart. But hey, I suppose not believing in God is as bad as say, murdering millions of innocent people like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin? (Note I'm being sarcastic). And when I asked her if her statement that she could only date other Christians was something that her church promotes, is her personal belief, or is just a preference she had this to say.

Yes, I have tried dating people who are not of similar religous views, and it does not work. I want a partner with the same beliefs so we can share, learn, and grow together. Plus, I believe God intended it that way. For a man and a woman to have that in common, to build a stronger partnership. My belief is such a huge part of my life, that I do not think I could (anymore, now that I am older and dont want to date just for fun) be in a relationship that could not share that with me. Plus, I want someone to go to church with and experience everything with.

Obviously I was disappointed by her response, but it was not unexpected. I understood and accepted her reasoning. (Although I had explained in my e-mail to her that if I married a religious woman, I would be willing to go to service with her on special occasions like Christmas or Passover). What I did not understand nor accept was "God intended it that way". Really? What a sad world it would be if people never dated nor associated with people outside of their religion. Does God really want this for people? Curious to know, I went to the best source for answers. The Bible. A book I have never read before (well, I read a little bit of Genesis when I was studying a theory about the merging of scientific evidence with creationism). And I found some Christian websites to help me find where in the bible it says that God intended it that way, along with an explanation of why it says that. The best site I found was GotQuestions.org, which has a pretty nice repository of information and responses (although I disagree with a lot of their logical explanations on there). And the best answer I got for my question on why God forbids Christians to date/marry non-Christians is right here. Specifically this bible verse told me all that I needed to know.

2 Corinithians 6:14-18
Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: "I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people." "Therefore come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you." "I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty."

Here's how I interpreted this verse: "Don't marry unbelievers. They are evil, wicked beings and you have nothing in common with them. Be separate from them, they are dirty". I was devastated. Did my friend really think of me in this way? Did she secretly hide these thoughts that I am an evil person? Until I read that I would have never imagined that that was the case. From that point I went nuts. I started reading as much material as I could find on Christian beliefs, and reading more bits and snippets from the bible trying to understand this line of thinking.

The next week we were both back in town and I had told her I had something very serious I wanted to talk about in person. So one night I went over to her apartment and I laid it all out. I told her my feelings for her, told her about my hidden intention in that e-mail I sent her about religion, read that verse from the bible that I found so upsetting, and asked her "Do you think I am evil?". She told me no, which relieved me. But I still didn't understand how she could not believe that I was evil (which is God's reason why she should not date someone like me) and yet still believe that God says she shouldn't date me. She pulled out a bible and explained that "oh well that was in the old days when non-Christians were evil" or something to that effect. She also gave a second answer which I can't recall (this was a pretty emotional discussion for both of us). I started asking her more questions. She seemed to be willing to do anything that God asked her to so I asked her a hypothetical question that I firmly believed she would say no to. I asked "If God appeared before you, proved to you that he was the one true God, and then gave you a subautomatic machine gun and told you to go walk into the nearest elementary school and kill as many children as you could, would you do it?".

Her initial response was "Well God would never do that". Wrong answer. If you believe the bible to be inerrant, then you can't deny that God has killed millions of people (and animals) in the past, including asking humans to kill other humans, even their close family members. I didn't point that out to her at the time (because I didn't know this yet), but I pressed my question again. Her answer was "Yes, I would". I was in complete shock. I unquestionably expected her to say no. She's a kind and sweet girl and I could never imagine her killing anyone at the behest of anyone else, not even God. My reaction was to ask her "Then how does that make you any different than a jihadist? After all they are believing that they are to kill because God has instructed them to do so". Her answer was "Well they're not really talking to God". Which I responded with "And how do you know that? What provides you with the means to think that you are talking with God and they are not?". She had no real response for that, and I think we got onto another topic.

So I felt better about knowing that she didn't think I was evil, but I was still deeply disturbed at her willingness to commit murder. Obviously. Who wouldn't be disturbed by that? She lent me a bible for "new believers" to read and study so that I could better understand her beliefs, and we agreed to have a second meeting and talk some more. So I did read. I read the 50 page introduction in the book that "summarized" the Christian way and Christian teachings. Then I proceeded to read through the book of Matthew and Mark, to be followed by John and Luke. For our second meeting I agreed to send her my questions in advance so that she had adequate time to prepare a response to each of them instead of being put on the spot. But this post is getting too long already, so I'll continue it next time. I'll also include a video that I'm in talks about this subject, so look forward to it!

An Atheist's Perspective on Religion

2009-02-07T11:23:00.000-08:00

Before I continue with the story I started in my last post, first I want to talk about some of my own views about religion. I'd like to consider myself "moderately" tolerant of other's beliefs. In general I really don't care what people believe, with a few exceptions. I do however care about why they believe what they do. I think that there are good reasons to hold a belief (evidence, experience, research) and bad reasons to hold a belief (indoctrination, dogmatism, fear). Regardless of what people believe, I do acknowledge that people have a right to believe whatever they want in this country (guaranteed by the first amendment to the US Constitution), to the extent that their beliefs do not infringe on other people's rights and beliefs.

There are some things that religions and religious people teach/practice that I feel are wrong. These are the "exceptions" I mentioned about my tolerance in other's beliefs. I'll explain what those exceptions are now.

1. Conversion
I think that "passive" conversion is totally acceptable. Sharing what you believe with others and casually inviting someone to attend your service is fine with me. But I think that actively "hunting down" the non-believers to try and save them is wrong. If they are unsure about their beliefs and you want to provide them with your perspective, I feel that is acceptable. But if someone is firmly settled and content with their beliefs and a person attempts to aggressively "uproot" them without sufficient reason, I think that's wrong. What then, is a sufficient reason? Well for example, Jehovah's Witnesses do not accept blood transfusions and that means they are much more likely to die as a result of an accident. People should be free to believe what they will (within reason) and one shouldn't try to enforce their beliefs on others. I categorically disagree with any religion who teaches its followers that their mission is to convert as many people as possible to share in their belief system.

2. Condemnation
This kind of goes along with conversion. A common example I hear is "you need to become a Christian or you'll burn in hell!". This is insulting and threatening. If you want to believe that I'll go to hell, that's just fine. But you don't have to shout it at me, remind me of it constantly, and use it to try to convince me to change what I believe. Especially if you can't even justify why you believe I'm going to hell. The usual justification I get is "because the bible says so". Well why should I believe the bible is true? "Because it is the word of God." How can one know that it is the word of God? "...I just believe that it is." A belief based on faith and not evidence is not sufficient means to justify why I should change my beliefs to match yours.

3. Justification
By justification, I mean justification for atrocious, racist, immoral acts on family, humanity, animals, or even oneself. The most obvious and modern example of this is radical Islamic terrorism. But sadly this stretches far, far back in our history. The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, the list is depressingly long. I think its so sad that for so many centuries humans have used their religion to justify murder, rape, torture, slavery (yes, Christians once used their own bible to support slavery), and genocide. I know that religion does a lot of good for a lot of people and overall I'd like to think that it has a net positive effect on the world, but the negative consequences of religion are so great and so numerous that its hard for me to convince myself that that is true.

4. Infringement of Rights
What I mean by this is denying people of other genders, sexual orientations, etc. some of the rights that you allow yourself to have. The most prominent and recent example that comes to mind is gay marriage. On TV and in the news I see again and again people who want to make gay marriage illegal because they believe that their religion condemns it. I am a strong supporter of gay rights and gay marriage (or civil unions, or whatever you want to call it) and believe firmly that gay couples should be afforded all the same civil rights and liberties as heterosexual couples. But people often vote against such legislation simply because "the bible says that being gay is wrong". That statement is true, and is also irrelevant. This is not a Christian nation. We have no state sponsored religion. Even to those Christians who hold that prejudicial belief that God does not support homosexuality, I say that should not be justification for you to vote against their rights and their happiness. "All men (and women) are created equal" in this nation, even if your God disagrees with that.

In other religions like Islam, the rights of women are basically non-existent. On Google Video the other day I came across a video of some Arabic men discussing the proper way to beat your wife. In one country (I believe the United Arab Emirates, but I forgot the source where I read this) the only thing women are allowed to own is their jewelry. Everything else they have, including themselves, are the property of men. They are basically slaves to their fathers, husbands, etc. And its not just Islam, Christians used to be like this as well. To marry a girl, you had to ask permission from her father for him to "transfer his rights" of the woman to you. I think that is so horrible. I've been learning more about the history of women's rights lately and the more I learn, the more disturbed I am that this used to be the norm in the world.

5. Dogma and Denials of Contradictory Evidence
If someone wants to believe that flowers grow because invisible fairies are there to pull the flowers up from the ground, I'll look at you weird but it won't really bother me. However if I find and provide evidence that flowers grow through natural means (cell mitosis) and that person denies, ignores, or attempts to explain away that evidence with something ridiculous (like, oh but it contradicts X, which I dogmatically believe to be true), then I have a problem. I have a problem because I care about the people in my life, and for that matter I care about every human being on this Earth. Categorically denying/ignoring every scrap of evidence against your beliefs simply because you are scared to find out that your beliefs may not be entirely true is unhealthy for your intelligence and reasoning. It becomes an even greater problem when those people start trying to enforce that such beliefs lacking scientific evidence should be taught to children in public classrooms (see intelligent design).

To that extent, my problem is not just with denial of contradictory evidence, but with all dogma, religious and non-religious. To assert that something is absolute truth and that any and all evidence that contradicts that truth is false is very harmful to your personal well-being. I simply can not wrap my head around this. I believe there is no God. However I am willing to change my mind if I am provided with sufficient evidence that proves that God exists. Sufficient evidence is not a 2,000 year old text and "everything you experience in life". However, there are many Christians and other religious people that even when you provide them sufficient evidence, they do not change their minds. They are in a sense trapped inside a mental prison, completely unable to look at the world objectively and rationally with a healthy amount of skepticism. There are those who claim that our universe is no older than 6,000-10,000 years old and who deny evidence of evolution simply because they believe the bible is a literal and true record of what happened. So called young Earth creationists I do have issues with, because even provided with evidence many of them will not change their minds (yet they expect me to change my mind when they provide me with "evidence" of the existence of their God), or they will simply deny/ignore such evidence.

It is the dogma and denial of evidence exception in my tolerance of beliefs that has ultimately led me to do research, begin these writings, and to express my own views and opinions. In my next post I'll continue with the second part of my personal story, including some video clips where I appear. Stay tuned.

Confessions of an Atheist

2009-02-04T19:18:00.000-08:00

Before I begin my long series of writings about religion, science, and other matters I thought it would be best to state who I am and what I believe. I imagine that many of my friends do not know this, but I am an atheist. I always have been. I was raised in a completely non-religious household but not an atheist household. As a child I never thought about things like how did the world come to be because I didn't care. Who would? As a kid all I wanted to do was have fun and play all day. I never talked to my parents or other relatives about their beliefs and they never talked to me about them either. I can't even remember a single conversation with any childhood friends about church or God. Thus, I was allowed to mature without anyone telling me what to believe or influencing me one way or another. For that, I'm very thankful to my parents raising me the way that they did and for my childhood to be void of any coercion about one belief system or another. In fact, it wasn't until last week that I found out that my mother is agnostic (by asking her on the phone) and I still don't know what my father considers himself.

My first true encounter with religion was around the age of 15. I had made a lot of new friends during high school and many of them were religious, attending church service every Sunday. I didn't think much of it then, but I was a little curious about it. When I was about 16, one of my closer friends invited me to come to her church with her one summer day. I happily agreed to, not because I was seeking to believe or looking for answers to life, but simply because I wanted to have that type of experience at least once. She was Catholic. I sat through the service, but I didn't really like anything about it. She invited me to come again with her next week but I told her thanks for inviting this time, but I'm really not interested in coming again. A few months later we were driving somewhere once and suddenly she asked me if I don't believe in God, what did I believe? I told her that I don't believe because I can neither see, hear, smell, touch, or taste God and that meant to me that God does not exist. If anything, I felt that in a way each person was their own God because they are in ultimate control of their own lives. She laughed at my response and called it stupid. She said I was contradicting myself. But she never (to my memory) told me why she thought it was stupid or in what way I was contradictory. I felt mildly insulted at her comment, but I quickly let it go because at that time it wasn't worth arguing about to me.

A few months after that the same girl started constantly begging me to go back to church with her. She now attended a new "cooler" church and thought I would dig it as much as she did. I repeatedly declined her request for several weeks until one day she was absolutely adamant about going together. Finally I agreed and told her "I have to be back home right after its over because I have homework I still need to finish for school tomorrow". She said that was fine. She picked me up and the two of us along with her little brother went to this new church. And it was much different. It was less formal and "holy" (for lack of a better word) and more casual and lovey-dovey. I also saw another mutual friend of ours and her family. There was a lot of hugging and touching, which I didn't particularly dislike but I found it odd to be intimate in that way with complete strangers. In the end it left a better impression on me than my first church attendance, but I still didn't really warm up to it (nor did it sway me into believing in any thing in any way). After service was over my friend then told me that there was an after-service party at the church for young people and said lets go. I told her flat out "no" because I had to go home and finish my homework. She refused to take me home, and I refused to go to the party. Eventually she just went off to the party without me and I went to wait in her truck. After half an hour or so she finally came to the truck (and it had actually started raining while I was outside waiting, how ironic). Before I could open my mouth to express my anger about the fact that she broke her promise to me, she opened hers and she was pissed at me. She was so very upset that I didn't go to her church party (and in hindsight, that party was probably the reason why she wanted me to go so badly that particular day). Well after that experience our friendship declined greatly. It was clear to me that she was just trying to convert me to her faith and that she was not willing to accept me for who I was and what I believed. There was a mutual interest for both of us in becoming more than just friends, but that had no chance of materializing after I had this experience. To this day I still keep in touch with her from time to time though.

My senior year of high school was an "awakening" of sorts for me. I had developed a really strong interest in reading, learning, and knowing as much as I possibly could. I craved knowledge immensely, and I started reading all kinds of books. In particular, I developed a strong interest in theoretical physics and studied books written by Albert Einstein and Steven Hawking. I found the subject fascinating, especially when they justified their theories with evidence and provided rational explanations for why our universe operates in the manner that it does. This is probably why I was never turned on by church sermons. The sermons never explained things, they just said "God is like this." and "You should not do that (because God said so)." But they never provided tangible evidence to support their claims or rational arguments for why a person should obey these sorts of commands. I also studied biology and genetics and other scientific topics in my spare time up through my first semester or so of college. After that, I was too busy with my classes to continue my independent studies. The same story applied for my graduate school years, and by the time I graduated in December 2006 I was too exhausted physically and mentally to hop right back into it (if you doubt me, go back and read my blog entries from around that time).

And it wasn't until mid-2008 that religion became a factor in my life again. But I'll save that for my next blog post, because that's the beginning of a much different story. Also at a later time I'll go into some of the exact reasons of why I am an atheist as well as my general thoughts about and toward other religions. Until then, enjoy the image below.

2008 Was Great

2009-02-02T17:22:00.000-08:00

Hurray, I'm finally getting back to updating my blog again! I had intended to update it after finishing my half ironman race in early October but just never got around to it. I did manage to squeeze in another small aquathlon in mid-September before my big race though. I actually did the exact same aquathlon the previous month of August and although I did pretty well then, the timers screwed up and gave me a very, very slow running time (its hand timed, not chip timed). Well this time I did even better than last and they didn't screw up my time, and I actually ended up getting 3rd place overall! I was feeling pretty happy about that.

I felt more nervous than usual going into the half ironman, primarily because at my last long race I had lost consciousness and didn't finish. Surprisingly enough, the water was cold enough (just barely) to make it wetsuit legal, which made me happy because I love swimming in my wetsuit. Its like my safety blanket for the water. :) The swim went pretty well, although at one of the two turns I didn't turn sharply enough and ended up swimming pretty far off course. The bike was fast and furious for the first 15 miles or so. There were many good cyclists out there pushing hard and they brought me along with them. What I was worried about, and rightly so, for the bike stage were the aid stations. I had never practiced grabbing water or food while on the bike before and my coordination/balance on a bike is pretty bad to begin with. Sure enough, at the first of four aid stations I didn't slow down enough and missed my initial grab for a water bottle. The next 3 water bottles were all lined up like ducks in a row, and I couldn't avoid them so I just smashed into them one at a time with my helmet and water sprayed everywhere. It was pretty funny. I did manage to grab one successfully towards the end of that station thanks to a spirited aid worker who ran alongside my bike to make it easier for me.

But the race went downhill from here. For some reason, my back started to fail on me. Its happened to me before, both in training and in races. I think it happens when I just push myself too hard. At about mile 20 the pain was so strong that I knew there was no way I could keep even my average pace for another 36 miles. At that point I just decided to let it all go, not worry about trying to place high in my age group, and just relax and enjoy the ride. So I did. Although it still really sucked to see so many people pass me on the bike that I knew I could destroy on a good day. It was a slow ride, but still painful. But because I was taking it so easy, I felt very, very energized for the run.

But the run wasn't too great either. Apparently my nutrition intake on the bike wasn't the best (not enough electrolytes or something). I had the worst leg cramps that I have ever felt in my entire life. After about a mile and a half into the half marathon I thought "maybe I'll stop and stretch it out and it will get better". WRONG! When I pulled my leg back to stretch my quardracept it felt like all the muscles in my leg just exploded. Forget running, for a brief moment I could barely walk or stand on that leg. It was awful. So through trial and error I found that I could generally run for about a quarter to a half a mile before the cramps came got so bad that I couldn't run anymore. So I'd run, then walk and recover. And then run, and then walk and recover. And I repeated that process. But when I ran (especially towards the end of the race) I was flying. I'm talking like low 6-minute pace. I had so much energy from taking it easy on the bike and having plenty of recovery from walking and through the aid stations. It was really frustrating for me to feel so energetic in the middle of a competition, and yet my body was unable to respond to me.

But I finished. I didn't pass out, I didn't die, and I finished. And you know what, that was good enough for me. There will be other races for me to be all about guts and glory. It felt nice to release myself of that for once. I was planning to do a 10K race a couple weeks after the half iron, but I backed out of that because my body was just too destroyed to keep going. Not from the half iron really, but from the entire season. I started my training in October 2007 (without really even intending to do a half ironman, or even do a triathlon at that point) and I finished with my first half iron in October 2008. It felt good to accomplish something personal. Something outside of academia and outside of work. Something for me.

So lets see, in November I of course was very, very happy when Obama won the presidency. Its only been a couple weeks into his administration so far so its too early to judge, but I believe that good things will come in the future. November and December of last year were kind of lazy months for me. I was going to take only 2-4 weeks off from training, but I ended up taking more like 8-9 weeks off. It took my body longer to recover than I thought it would, but thankfully I'm back to 100% now after running for several weeks. No shin splints or other injuries, it feels awesome. Because I took off so much time, I backed out of doing the Austin marathon again (I feel so guilty about this...its the third time now that I said I was going to do it and then ended up not doing it). Right now I'm focusing mostly on my running since triathlon season is still a few months away. I'm looking forward to seeing how much I improve this year in my competitions. All in all, 2008 was a great year for me in both racing and in life.

Work hasn't been so great lately though. I've been getting more frustrated and annoyed with my job. And for a variety of good, valid reasons. Its unchallenging because I hardly do any design or coding. I mostly investigate whether X API provided by Y company is capable of implementing Z feature. Its unmotivating because I work pretty much by myself as the only fulltime VXI software engineer in the entire company. Its unfulfilling because even though the driver software sucks, I can do little to change it because rather than fix the core of our problems, the company is content to patch little problems one by one. I could go on and on, but I won't. One day a couple months ago I got so frustrated that I actually left work early because I couldn't take it anymore, then went on a long "rage run" to decompress. It was that event which made me say "I can't do this anymore" and I have since started looking for a new position. I've found plenty to be sure and have recruiters contacting me quite a bit (although not so much recently), but I am being very picky about my next job, and not just settling for whatever. After all, what purpose is there in leaving one crappy job for another? I may talk more about this situation in a later post.

I worked on Allacrost quite a bit toward the end of the year but then I got side tracked with something unexpected. Its difficult to explain fully the situation because it is rather complex. What I will say is that it deals with some fundamental questions about life and about learning from others who have different perspectives than your own. Without even realizing it, my emotional attachment to someone has led me to a sort of new awakening. In the past six weeks I have studied and learned so much about so many things. History, science, psychology, sociology, and religion. I've gained or reaffirmed so many views about various matters, and unfortunately I've recently been left with no one else to express them to. I've been nearly possesed by this and I need to get these ideas out of my head, so I'll be using this blog as a means of expressing and recording those views. I plan for this to pretty much take over my blog for at least the near future, but the good news is that I'll definitely be more motivated to blog often. Maybe even daily depending on how things go. So stay tuned. There is much for me to say.

Unwelcome Compromise

2008-09-10T12:10:00.000-07:00

Alright, now on to Allacrost. If you keep up with the site news at all, you'll see that we've been rather sluggish this year. So sluggish, in fact, that at least once we've been accused of being a dead project (we are not though, not by a long shot). A lot of the people on our team have been not outputting nearly as much as they usually do. Especially myself. This year has been the first real break that I have had from Allacrost since I started this project over four years ago, and for a while it felt really good. Now I feel guilty when I ignore Allacrost and instead choose to spend my time watching Netflix movies or playing games with my little free time. I can't speak for everyone else, but I know there are three reasons why my time to spend on Allacrost has diminished by so much.

First, my training takes up a lot of my time. I'll spend anywhere from 1.5 to 3 hours a day exercising (not including travel time, socializing, etc.) and I usually workout 6 days a week. Many times I'll workout in both before and after work, so those days are even tougher. Allacrost used to be my primary hobby for many years but I've just replaced it with something else (for better and for worse). The second reason is work. In my past job I used to write code all day so when I came home, often I was sick of programming and it was the last thing that I wanted to do. So since I hardly do any programming at my job lately, I thought to myself "hey, I'll come home and won't be burnt out on programming!". Wrong. My work is so demotivating and my days at work are so long and boring that when I come home I just feel lazy and lethargic. I think work is actually making me a little depressed as well. The third reason is I've been having trouble maintaining my Debian system. I run Debian unstable, so I guess I can't complain too much. I didn't update my system software for a long time but finally did it a few months ago and decided to install a new kernel. Well, I couldn't get the ndiswrapper to work for my USB wireless device (even though it worked and continues to work fine in the old kernel) and I had problems with nvidia's graphics drivers as well. I spent nearly half of my Saturday trying to get those two to work once and made almost no progress, it was very frustrating. To make matters worse, the upgrade broke the graphics drivers in my older kernel, and I can't get them working again because that software isn't available anymore in the Debian packaging system (AFAIK). I've also had headaches with hardware, including a dying (in a very loud and annoying fashion) north bus fan on my motherboard, which I replaced with a passive heat sink (that I had to modify with a hacksaw to get it to fit with my graphics card) and I think its not quite enough, because now occasionally my system will randomly freeze up in a very bad way and I have to restart my system. I've been considering extreme solutions such as buying new hardware or installing Ubuntu over Debian, but I haven't made up my mind yet. I really want my system to be more quiet though...when I built it years ago I tried to choose components to make it as silent as possible but it is still definitely loud. I can still work on Allacrost on my laptop of course (running Ubuntu), but I hate working on my laptop (ergonomic issues with it).

Anyway enough of those issues. So we've been on the cusp of our next release for Allacrost for like two months now. There's just not a lot of motivation on the team right now and we have been really taking our sweet time with this one. Its kind of annoying actually. I'm not sure if I'm correct here, but I've been thinking that maybe I'm the reason that the rest of the team has been slow and unproductive. I am the leader of the team, and I've been so detached from Allacrost for a good part of this year that I don't know what people are working on, or who some of the new people are, or things like that. So I think that my actions (or rather the lack of them) has led everyone else to feel decreasingly motivated about Allacrost and things just kind of gradually slipped away. Even though I'd like to resume the commanding leadership role that I used to have, I don't know if I have the capacity to do that if I'm also working and training my butt off. I've been trying to encourage some other people to step up into being leaders so that our team can continue to function well even when I'm gone, but its difficult.

One thing that I think would really help our team out in a phenomenal way is to have a team manager. We've had three team managers in the past (all of which have left the team). They've all been a great help in their own way, but none of them have really stepped up the way I hoped they would. I really want a manager who lives up to that title. Our previous managers have been more like "support personnel", helping with the website and other miscellaneous stuff. I want a manager who organizes people, sets priorities, organizes content, leads design discussions, etc. I know its hard for someone completely new to the project to step up to such a role, but I still hope that we can find such a person someday. I know the manager of the FIFE project, barracuda (who also visits our IRC channel quite often), and he is exactly for FIFE what I want our manager to be for Allacrost. We are currently without a manager, so after we get our next release out I think we'll probably solicit for such a position. If we can get an outstanding manager (or managers) and have other leaders on the team live up to their roles, I think our team will be in awesome shape.

Content production has been slow lately too although our main composer, Ryan, has been producing a lot of new music lately. I almost feel bad sometimes because he has produced so much music for this game over the past four years, and yet so far we have very little game in which to present his works. The programming team made a decision a while back to stop messing around with our engine so much. Our engine is still incomplete, but its in good enough shape that it can do most of what we need. Much of our time last year was spent working on the engine, which is great and all but it doesn't really do much to help progress of the game in the short term. We've decided that instead we're going to be more focused on our short-term objectives. We know what features we need implemented for our next release, and we're going to do exactly what is needed to implement that feature. That may require us to go into the engine sometime to add support for something, but for the most part we'll be working on code for the actual game.

For the past couple of days I've been working on Allacrost a lot while I'm on my vacation. And let me tell you it feels really good to be working so hard on this project again. I've been working on the map mode code and fixing some issues in there and preparing it for additional features that we'll need in the near future. Its exciting to work on challenging design problems again (something that has been mostly absent from my job). My motivation to work on Allacrost has increased nearly ten fold in less than two days, its amazing. I wake up each morning and get right to work on it without even thinking. I'm hoping that this feeling will last past my vacation and that I can make a full comeback into Allacrost. If that happens, I hope that other people on the team will follow my return.

Well that's about all I have to say about Allacrost. Now back to writing code. :)

Victory and Defeat

2008-09-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

So my race season has come quite aways since my last post. So far this year I've done one 10K run, five triathlons, one duathlon, one aquathlon, and one open water swim race. It feels kind of cool to be a more dynamic athlete than just a runner, which is how I competed in years prior to this one. I've done well enough to win a few medals and trophies in these races as well. In less than a month I'll be doing a half ironman, which is a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, and 13.1 mile (half marathon) run. I'm looking at this upcoming race as something completely different, and unlike my other races my goal isn't to win....its just to survive. That will be my last triathlon for this year and I'm kind of looking forward to the season being over so I can recover myself a bit. Other races I have coming up are a 5K run, another aquathlon, and a 10K run. Next year I'm going to do the Austin marathon (which I've trained for twice in the past, but got too injured both times to go through with it). I'll do a half marathon race before that as well. Anyway let me focus on what's been going right and what sucks.

Swimming was what I thought would be the biggest challenge for me going into triathlon, but it really hasn't been. I'm a pretty decent swimmer and I've done very well in the swim leg of several of my races. What I hate about it though is that I'm so inconsistent in my results. The pace they report in races is the average time it took you to swim 100 meters. My fastest pace was a 1:30 I swam at that aquathlon, and my slowest pace has been a 2:10 I swam at one of my triathlons. There are things that definitely make me faster or slower on the swim, the big one usually being getting in a bad position relative to the other swimmers and ending up trapped behind a pack of really slow swimmers. But I can't *feel* how fast I'm going when I swim. At the last race I did on Labor Day I thought I was having a fairly fast swim, and later when I looked at the results my pace was 1:55, and that was even with me wearing a wetsuit. I was not happy with that time at all. I was expecting to swim around or below 1:40. And during swimming efficiency is so crucial that I constantly have to check myself and think things like "Are my hips high enough? Are my arms entering the water at the right distance and angle? Are my legs kicking too little or too hard? Are my hands and fingers shaped correctly?". The list goes on. Its not too bad, just annoying sometimes.

The biggest problem I have with cycling are my technical skills. Things like making turns, mounting/dismounting, or taking in fluids on the bike are major challenges for me. I can go fast and straight on the bike but that's about it. I've been slowly teaching myself to do more and more though. My last race was the first time I've used aerobars in a race and I really think they helped me a lot. But I still feel kind of nervous whenever I'm on the bike because my balance is pretty bad. My biggest strength on the bike though is hill climbing. In a race whenever there's a hill, I always blow by at least a couple different cyclists. But sometimes I leave my bike in too high of a gear when going uphill, and after doing that a few times my lower back begins to spasm and eventually destroys me. I've had this happen to me in one race and I've been battling back problems on the bike occasionally ever since. I like cycling though, its a lot of fun. Especially when you're going fast, although going too fast (on downhills) can scare me enough that I end up riding the brake a lot.

Running what was got me into triathlons in the first place. Specifically, I have a history of shin splints and that constant injury prevented me from running as much as I would like to, which brought me to cross training via cycling and swimming, which naturally turned me into a triathlete. Even though I've been running less through my triathlon training, my shins have still hurt enough to cause me major problems throughout the year. I finally got fed up with it and a few weeks ago, went to get fitted for custom orthotics for my running shoes. They've been a great help so far and the pain in my running legs continues to drop more and more. Although I've had enough injuries in other areas that it might just be I notice the other areas hurting more than the shins lately. :/ After triathlon season is over though, I'm going to turn my focus back to purely running for a while, and I'm looking forward to that.

Earlier this week something horrible happened to me which has never happened in any race I've ever done. The race was the Austin Triathlon and I signed up for the Olympic distance, which was a 1500 meter swim, 25 mile bike, and 10K run. I thought everything was going fine during the race. I felt sluggish on the run, but that's nothing unusual for me. With about 400 meters, or less than 100 seconds, left in the race, I suddenly lost consciousness and collapsed. About 15 minutes later I woke up in the medical tent, and couldn't remember a thing about what happened. The last thing I remembered was about another 400 meters back from where I passed out. My memory was in a horrible state. I couldn't remember a lot of things, like people's names, or my own phone number. I couldn't do math either (I was trying to calculate what time I would have finished based on the progression of events). I was really upset when they told me I didn't finish the race, because I have always finished every race no matter what. It upset me enough that I cried a little and was having trouble accepting what happened. In fact I *still* have trouble accepting what happened, because I felt fine on the run. I wasn't feeling dehydrated, or exhausted, or too hot, or anything like that. And I also didn't have any damage from when I fell on the pavement. When the medics got to me my body temperature was 104F, which is a really dangerous state to be in (according to Wikipedia). Once I regained consciousness I felt fine, other than being a little freaked out about the memory loss. I wanted to get up and leave but they made me stay there lying down for what felt like forever. So yeah, I was pretty disappointed with the outcome of that race, especially because I was expecting it to be a really good race for me. But its a learning experience I suppose.

Well that sums up my race season up pretty well. If I wrote these posts more often I'd go into more detail about the specific results and outcomes of each of my races, but that's way too much for a single post. Next time I'll be talking about Allacrost, so look for that in another 2-3 days.

Life Update

2008-09-05T19:47:00.000-07:00

I'm on vacation for the next week and finally able to catch up on my blog. I'll be in Vancouver Washington visiting some family for the next few days, and I'm looking forward to the cooler weather and not having to waste my life at my job for a week. As you can imagine I have a lot to catch up on, so instead of trying to do it all in one gigantic post I'll split it up over a few different ones over the course of my vacation. For this first post, I'll just talk about life in general. In the next few days I'll talk about how my racing season has been going and about Allacrost.

So outside of exercising, life isn't all that exciting. I'm really starting to hate going to work everyday. Not because I hate the people, or the culture, or the environment...but because I hate the work I do itself. Now the reason I took this job in the first place was because I wanted to gain experience in developing driver software, but I've been working at NI for almost a year now and have made almost no progress toward that goal. My first eight months or so were spent in training (somewhat irrelevant training) and rewriting a test application for VXI that was written in the late 80s and had seen little progress since then. That code base was undocumented and not understood by anyone, so it took me a long time to dissect it and figure out what it was trying to do and how I could re-write it. The application itself was actually moderately complicated as well. (It was a multi-threaded app so there were a lot of synchronization and timing issues to deal with). I didn't mind working on that so much, because I got to actually develop code and design a solution.

But nowadays, I loathe my work. The VXI driver software has a lot of issues with it. To name a few:

All the people who developed the driver and who have experience with it have long since left the group or left the company
The driver stack consists of multiple layers which are tightly coupled together (too tightly IMO), which makes it difficult to understand an individual component by itself
Documentation on how the driver works is very incomplete in some areas, and non-existent in most others
The software design is poor, making it very difficult and very frustrating to understand

Even worse, my job isn't really to develop driver software as I was expecting it to be. Its to take this very buggy, poorly written code and make minor improvements and fix the hundreds of bugs filed against it. I describe my job as a "software maintainence engineer", or the equivalent of keeping an old, dying person on life support for as long as possible. Sounds enthralling, I know. We have an upcoming release of our driver which changed probably less than 20 lines of code (none of which were by me) and supports one new controller. This seemingly simple change requires months and months of testing to get out the door (every release seems to be like this). While I have no complaints about thorough testing, I do have complaints over the fact that the other part of my job is to do most of it myself. I do have one software technician working with me on testing though, so its nice to have someone to share the pain with (he hates it just as much as I do). But I find it utterly ridiculous that months of my time are being spent following instructions step-by-step written down on a piece of paper. I became an engineer and went to graduate school because I wanted my work to be interesting and challenging. A freaking high school kid could do this testing as well as I could. My group has made it known that we don't like the testing situation and our managers (whom I have the highest respect and regard for) are trying to do what they can about this, but the fact is that I work in a group that mostly maintains "legacy" products and software so the company doesn't really care to invest in the resources that we would like to have.

So as a result, I've become more and more cynical and disinterested in my job. I love everything else about the company, but the disinterest and dislike of my work continues to drain me. I'm very unmotivated these days and that feeling is bleeding outside of work into my personal life as well. I submitted my bi-annual review earlier this week and laid everything out, stopping just short of saying "if my situation doesn't improve, I highly expect to leave the group and/or the company in the near future". I mean really, I took the job for driver development experience and I'm not really getting any of it, so I'm having trouble finding reasons to stay in my current position.

Outside of work my life has been pretty bland. I go to the movies or out to eat with people sometimes, but not much else. I did meet a great girl named Kristina a few weeks ago though and we've made a list of things we want to do in Austin. The only problem is she and I are both pretty busy so its hard for us to find time to get together and do these things. (By the way the relationship is purely platonic). Because my training and racing takes up so much of my free time, I haven't been able to visit the animal shelter much lately. Hmm, I watched a lot of the the Olympics (I never watch sports by the way) and enjoyed those 2-3 weeks. I kind of wish they went on longer. I've also been keeping up with politics this year for the first time in my life. I can point to two people who got me into this: George W Bush and Barack Obama. Bush got me interested because I look at him and what he's done and couldn't help to wonder "How on earth did such a man get elected to the presidency not once but *twice* by the people of this country?". Obama I started to learn about a few months before he announced his candidacy for the 2008 election. I really respect him for who he is and what he stands for. Unlike the Bush administration, Obama seems genuinely interested in helping all Americans, not just friends in high places.

So yeah, I'm totally an Obama supporter. I've even made a few donations to his campaign, which is the first time I've ever contributed anything to a politician. But I really, -really- want him to be our next president. If I had more time and energy I wouldn't be adverse to helping his campaign in other ways as well. The thing that entices me the most about Obama is something that most people would never think of and probably don't care about. Its the manner in which he makes decisions and works with people. I read a great piece in some Chicago-area newspaper a while back (I'd link it if I could remember) that spoke about how Obama was incredibly inquisitive about a matter in which he didn't have a lot of expertise in. I think he analyzes an argument or a problem much like a good engineer would to be honest (almost amazing that he's a lawyer then, haha). And he's not just trying to push his own agenda, I believe he sincerely wishes to work with republicans and conservatives to arrive at a compromise. Contrast that to Bush who does asinine things like vetoing bills to provide health care for poor children because he's paranoid about the uprising of social medicine. And like Abraham Lincoln, I believe Obama will put not just liberals and democrats in his administration, but those whom disagree with him as well. I think that is an excellent idea and I have a lot of respect for a man willing to do something like that.

Anyway I'll end on that note. See you next time.

A new me

2008-06-01T15:00:00.000-07:00

Surprise surprise, I put off updating my blog for several months. I've really made some significant changes to my lifestyle and daily routine this year. Before I went to college, I never thought of myself as a nerd, or as a very studious person at all. In high school, I was an athlete. And that's all that mattered to me back then. But after my first year at Purdue when I discovered how interesting (and difficult, and time-consuming) my studies were, that side of me went away. It took two degrees and seven years before I would have enough time to resume this hobby of mine.

Particularly I'm talking about running, as I did cross country and track in high school. But I haven't been training the same that I used to. I used to just run run run and run some more, but I always get injured doing that. I started going to the gym near daily in November of last year and I've been keeping it up ever since. This time around, I limited my running and did cross training before I got injured. I would spend time on the exercise bike, swimming in the lap pool, and doing a lot of weight lifting. This training routine naturally led me to something, but I'll get to that a little later. In spite of all my precautions, I still ended up getting shin splints (as I usually do) pretty bad. But I was able to fall back easily on my cross-training when I needed to back off of running. In the past few years, I'd usually start running, then get shin splints bad enough to where running sucked and I had to stop, then I'd get out of shape again. So this made things a bit easier for me. And on March 30th, I ran my first race in over 7.5 years, the Austin Statesman 10K (a pretty large race). I finished in 42:02.5 (6:45 mile pace), which got me 29th place out of 430 in my age division and 169th out of 6567 overall. So I guess that's not too bad. The last race I ran was in 2000 though and it was a much harder and longer course, and I managed a 6:15 pace in that race to get first place there. So I'm not as fast as I used to be (yet).

Around the same time that I ran that race, I started a triathlon training program at my gym. I had been thinking about doing a triathlon for a while, since my cross training kind of naturally pulled me in that direction, and it seems like such a cool sport. I have zero experience as a cyclist (I didn't even have a bicycle) and only amateur experience as a swimmer, so it was all pretty intimidating at first. But it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, and once I got use to it the training has been a lot of fun. It also helped that there was a girl there who had pretty much the same background, experience, and intimidations as me (in fact, she also ran the statesman 10K race). I also found out how expensive this sport is, especially compared to running. The cost of all the gear and training over the past three months has added up to about $2,500. Its all been worth it though. A couple weeks ago I did my first triathlon race, CapTexTri.

For reference, a triathlon consists of swim, bike, and run stages in that order. Since this race was my first one, I did the sprint distance, which is a 750 meter swim (slightly less than half a mile), a 12.5 mile bike, and a 3.1 mile run. There was also an olympic distance, which was double the distance in each stage, and a shorter distance. The race started at 7AM, but not everyone started at the same time. They put people in groups according to their age division and the distance that they were doing. My race didn't get started until about 9:45. The swim went surprisingly well for me. Most people freak out, but I just told myself to relax and just get through it. That mentality worked for me, because I was the first person in my heat out of the water. It was really disorienting coming off of swimming and having to run to the transition area. It took me about half a mile on the bike before my head started feeling straight again. The bike stage was awesome. There were a TON of people on the course (which was a loop you had to do 1, 2, or 4 times) and I easily passed about 90% of the people I came across. There were a few cyclists there that were hammering down hard though and passed me like I was standing still. Unfortunately even though I'm pretty fast on the bike, I lack....technical abilities. For example, like being able to grab my water bottle while moving. So by the time I finished the bike stage, I was feeling pretty dehydrated, and it showed on the run. It was incredibly hot out by the time I got to the run and I was completely exhausted from the first step. I think a lot of what slowed me down was mental, not physical though. So anyway, I finished having no idea how well I did since there were people all over the course. When I went to look at the unofficial results, it said I got second place in my division. But my swim time was really messed up (it said I spent almost 3 horus in the swim stage, which was not true). I went to the awards ceremony not really knowing whether I really got 2nd or not. After waiting forever they got to announcing my division. I waited anxiously as they announced the person who got 3rd... then the person who got 2nd....wasn't my name. So I thought to myself "crap!", but then they announced the person who placed first and they said my name. So yeah, I won first place in my age division (out of 66, which apparently is a lot) in my very first triathlon, not bad huh? :) CapTexTri was also a pretty big race, one of the biggest in triathlon history I heard them say on race day. I learned that I qualified for the national age division championships later this year, which I may consider competint in (although I expect my ass to get handed to me there).

My plan is to do one triathlon race a month until October. In October I'm going to do a half ironman (which is a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, and 13.3 mile run). I'll probably do a few running races in between as well. The downside of all this training is all the time it takes. For the first time ever, I've taken a long leave of absence from Allacrost. I think I deserved/needed it though, since I've been working my ass off on that project for over 3 years. I'm finally ready to get back into it though. I miss it, actually. So that's about it. The rest of life has been pretty much unremarkable since my last post. Work has been okay. I'm not really excited about what I'm working on, but at least its not stressful. See ya next time.

I'm not very good at this... -- part II

2008-01-05T22:23:00.000-08:00

In this post I'll talk about how things have been going with regards to Allacrost. In short: pretty darn good. If you keep up with Allacrost news at all you'll know that we made our third demo release around December 10th. Probably the best part about reaching that milestone is how much more mature the game engine code is now. Particularly the video and audio engines are pretty darn solid. We didn't intend to work on the engine so much for this release (and its a large part of the reason why the release happened much later than we were hoping for). It just sort of happened.....mostly because I started mucking around in the video engine and ended up re-writing half of it, and then someone else took our new audio engine code with an OpenAL back end and integrated it into the main SVN trunk. I'd like to get a bit technical with what exactly was done in this area for a bit, so if you don't care about that kind of stuff then skip it :)

First the video engine. The main problem with it was that when the first full version of it was completed long ago (I think over 2 years ago actually), it was not done very well. Some parts of the design were very clever, but others were more dirty hacks than anything. The major problems I had to rectify were as follows below. Keep in mind that I have virtually no experience with graphics programming or OpenGL, so this was very much a learning experience for me.

1) Sparse comments -- a lot of things were ill-explained, or not explained at all. Other places had comments that were just plain confusing.

2) Code standard -- a large part of the code did not conform to our code standard. To give the original programmer credit, we hadn't really finalized our code standard by the time he was mostly finished with this. I asked him to go back and make it conform to the standard after his work was finished, but he left before even starting on that.

3) Bad design -- some parts were absolutely horrible. For example, the code to draw an image was implemented in the GameVideo class (the main singleton class for the engine) rather than the image classes themselves. Another example (which was incredibly difficult for me to rectify) was that all image classes were designed to contain 1-n "image elements" to support creating composite images (ie, representing an image formed from multiple images in the game). This really, really complicated the image code far more than it should have been. My solution to this was to allow our abstract "ImageDescriptor" class (which is our most basic type of image class in the engine) to represent an image element for the new CompositeImage class that I wrote, which is what is now used to support those types of images.

It was that third point that really took the most work to fix. I think I spent something like 6-8 weeks working on the video engine, and I didn't even finish working on all of it. I worked the most in the image and texture management code, which is really the "core" of the engine and what all the other parts of the engine build upon. Thus, it was the most painful to revamp. I also did some work in the text rendering code and GUI code, but those areas still need some additional work. I'm glad that all of this is behind us now, because it really was something that needed to be done (because the old design made expanding upon the engine insanely more difficult), but I got really aggravated at some points and focused my anger towards the person who originally wrote it. This person (who I shall not name) came on the team about two years ago, when we had an OpenGL graphics engine that was extremely rudimentary and could barely do anything. He really did an awesome job at providing us a full-featured engine at a record pace (around two months) so we were extremely grateful to him. I now realize the reason he was able to do it so fast is that he really skipped out on commenting, design, extendability, etc. I had originally told this person to focus on providing a really solid core for the engine (ie images and texture management, which is what I re-wrote), but he ignored my plea and went right into producing particle engines, distortion meshes, and all kinds of advanced graphics which we have not even been able to make use of yet. Worse still, a lot of those advanced features depended on the existing state of the graphics engine to work, so they will pretty much have to be scrapped now since I'm sure they don't work. After this person had finished all their work on the graphics engine, I asked him to go back and make it conform to the code standard, add comments, etc. and he left the team shortly after that (coincidence? maybe...). Anyway, the lesson I learned from all this: don't allow our programmers to do quick-and-dirty jobs because it takes such a large amount of time and effort to clean up their mess later.

Now the audio engine was also a bit of a pain in the ass, but it didn't absorb as much time as the video engine did. A completely new audio engine was written by one of our top programmers (who unfortunately had to move out of the country and left the team as a result). This version utilized OpenAL as our audio library, instead of the SDL_mixer library that was used for our 0.2.0 release. I had written an OpenAL library myself about two years ago, but there were a ton of problems with it because OpenAL is.....not very nice in many ways. For example, the code base for Windows, OS X, and Linux versions of this library are all entirely different...there's no common code! As you can imagine, this leads to quite a few problems in providing a cross-platform solution. We didn't have too many problems with that this time because we chose not to use ALUT (an OpenAL utility toolkit library) and instead implemented our own WAV and Vorbis file loaders directly. I think this engine is pretty solid now. In the near future we'll be adding distance attenuation (audio sources that get louder the closer you are to them) and customized looping playback of specified sections. This is actually the *fourth* rewrite of the audio engine. The first one I wrote with SDL_mixer, then wrote one using OpenAL, another SDL_mixer one when OpenAL was too buggy, and finally back to OpenAL again. I actually wanted to avoid using OpenAL again, but we can't implement the features we require with SDL_mixer, and there doesn't seem to be any better free audio library out there (we looked hard...couldn't find anything that seemed better than OpenAL). So I guess we're stuck with it.

Looking to the future, if you've read the main site at www.allacrost.org you'll notice that we're now working on demo 1.0.0. I'm really excited about this release (much more so than our other three releases). This is going to be the original demo that I wanted to have as our first release, but we weren't anywhere near ready for something like this 18 months ago and we needed to get an initial release out, so 0.1.0 was very under featured. The part I think I'm most excited about is that this demo will actually have a story and a plot to follow. With regards to most games, what motivates me to continue playing the game is to find out what happens next. I'm all about the story, and likewise Allacrost will have a strong emphasis on the story as well. Most of the programming work for this release is going to be in the actual game code, and only a small amount in the engine. I find writing game code to be more fun, because its easier to see the results of your work and get instant gratification for it. I'm really concerned about the artwork demand for this release though; I have a feeling that artwork might be the bottleneck for this particular release.

Anyway, that's all I have to comment on about Allacrost for now. Next week I'll talk about how my life in general has been going.

I'm really bad at this...

2007-12-24T08:04:00.000-08:00

I tried to update my blog earlier this month, but could never find the time to do so. There's a lot that happened in the past 10 weeks that I want to talk about, but rather than try to do that all in one post, I'm going to split it up between two or three posts. I'm blogging from the Chicago O'Hare airport right now, while waiting to board my flight to Toronto. This year will be my first Canadian Christmas. :) (I actually wrote most of this blog post a week ago, but didn't have time to finish it until tonight).

First I'll talk about my new job and how that's been. I was absolutely shocked to learn on my first day that I would first be going through about six weeks of training. I had zero training when I started working at Freescale, so already it was a huge change. Training didn't start until next Monday though, so for my first week I pretty much did nothing but read and help validate some bug fixes. I learned that the name of the group I am is PXI/VXI/Instrument Control software. PXI and VXI are both bus interfaces that are extensions to existing bus protocols (PCI and VME respectively) for instrumentation purposes. I learned that initially I will be working on VXI driver software. VXI is pretty darn old and PXI has pretty much replaced it, but entities like the government (who are really slow to change) still use it extensively. I'll talk about VXI more later.

So my second week was all orientation and training. This is when I met the people that I would be doing my training with. Most were fresh out of college, but there were a couple of people that finished grad school. Our start group had plenty of outings together, and it was nice getting to know some new people. Anyway, the training was mostly technical and taught us about the companies products (hardware and software) and how to use them. The first two weeks we spent learning LabVIEW, which is a graphical programming language. I had heard of it at UT Austin, but never used it. Its nice for quick prototyping, but I find it aggravating to use. You write your "program" by finding the functional blocks you want to use in a standard graphical menu (and it can be difficult to find what you want), then wire up the blocks accordingly. I prefer a text-based language anyday, but I do like LabVIEWs ability to very easily and very quickly provide a GUI for the end-user, which is always a pain to do in text-based languages. At least now I have a new programming language to add to my resume. :)

The following three weeks involved taking courses in areas that were a little more hardware focused. GPIB (another old but common bus protocol), Serial, DAQ (data acquisition devices and techniques), signal conditioning, and so on. Overall I found the training incredibly easy (and hence, boring). I always finished the exercises with a copious amount of time to spare, especially the LabVIEW/programming ones. And some material taught in the lectures I already knew (linear circuit analysis for example), or stuff that I consciously chose not to remember (like what the SCXI-1009 device is for....that's something I look up in a reference manual). I actually spent a lot of my class time reading Wikipedia and posting on the Allacrost forums during the more boring and slow parts of the classes I took. I guess it was kind of nice because everything was so easy, but I was ready to hit the ground running when I started my job. At the end of my first six weeks I still hadn't written any code, except for trivial exercises in LabVIEW.

The next two weeks were what I had been dreading the most: technical phone support. That's right. As part of R&D training, you work two weeks as an applications engineer (AE), which is basically glorified tech support. I was one of three R&D people in my start group, and the other 14 or so people were hired into AE. Hired AEs are part of an "engineering leadership program" (ELP), where they get a ton of more training, experience with the company products and customers, and decided on what direction they wanted to move up in the company (to R&D, Sales, Marketing, etc). Most of the AEs in my start group expressed wanting to go into sales or marketing and only very few to R&D, which I found disturbing. I playfully labeled those people as "traitors" to their study (engineering/science).

Back to my time in phone support. I, like all others in my start group, were placed in supporting our "core" products, which include LabVIEW, GPIB, and DAQ. I was honestly terrified for my first few calls, but I got the hang of things after that and it wasn't so bad. The people I spoke to were all engineers or scientists or had at least some technical aptitude, so it wasn't like I was dealing with people that couldn't get their CD drive to work after putting a pancake in there. I had five hour phone shifts each day of the week, and the other three hours were for researching solutions for the customers. My first couple of calls were the hardest because they were from people asking me pre-sales questions (e.g., I want to do X and Y, what products should I buy to do this?). The other questions I got were mostly people having trouble with LabVIEW or device driver software, and I was able to resolve those pretty quickly. The AE department is made pretty much entirely of young, new college graduates, and it made it totally not feel like work. People shoot rubber bands at each other everywhere, ride scooters around the office floor, watch YouTube videos, and even play LAN games while at work (I played Warcraft 3 and Quake III: Arena with my neighbors a couple days). So being in AE really isn't too bad.

Finally, two months after my start date, I was able to move back to my R&D desk and begin my real job. Ironically, none of the training I took involved the VXI/PXI products that I would be developing, which I found kind of...odd. So really the next week or two were also kind of like training for me. I learned about the software architecture for VXI device drivers, ran some tests and benchmarks to validate new pre-releases of software, and went through documenting and cleaning up an ancient test suite for VXI devices. I still haven't begun any "real" coding yet, which is really driving me up the wall, but I'm getting close to being there. :)

As for what VXI is, it is basically a different kind of PC that was designed with instrumentation in mind. When I say that, I mean the ability to measure, analyze, and output a variety of digital and analog signals basically. It consists of a few things:

A chassis where you insert cards (think of a PCI card on your PC, but maybe 5x bigger).
A number of VXI devices (the cards), one of which is the "controller"
Software drivers for the controller that allows the user to communicate with it, usually via a PC

So my job is pretty much centered around development and maintenance of that third bullet, the driver software. The chassis and devices for this stuff are really massive. The pictures give you a small idea of what I mean. The first one is of a VXI chassis, and the other two are of VXI controllers. Some of the controllers take up two slots, and these ones typically have an entire PC built on them. Hard drive, PS2 ports, USB, firewire, monitor, ethernet, the whole works.

So anyway back to what I do. I've actually done very little coding at this point, which is pretty disappointing to me. I don't think it will continue being this way, so I'm just going to wait and see how it goes. Right now I'm working on fixing up a very old (circa early 90s) test suite for the VXI driver software and doing some bug fixing and validation related to that.

I'm surprised that I managed to rattle on this long about just my job. Well that's all I have to share for today. I'll post again in about a week about how things have been going with Allacrost, so check back in 2008. Happy New Year!

2007-10-07T17:25:00.000-07:00

Wow, so its been almost 4 months since my last update. Allow me to recollect on all the events that have occurred since then.

Progress on Allacrost has been a bit bumpy. My motivation went sky high after the release of our last demo because I could finally get around to fixing some things that I wasn't allowed to touch before (because it would delay the demo). I have re-written a significant portion of our engine since then. I made heavy changes to our scripting engine API and added some new features there, greatly expanded upon a very nifty SystemTimer class that makes it much easier for us to synchronize certain events, got our new audio engine up to acceptable status when it was added into our repository, greatly improved the back end for a lot of the battle code, added some small but very cool new features to map mode, and for the past month I've been re-designing a large part of the video engine. The video engine is especially frustrating to me, because the person who did most of the work on it in the past ignored my pleas to make its foundation solid and well featured, and instead moved right onto doing things like a particle engine and distortion meshes. The code he wrote was also not consistent with our code standard, not commented well, and generally had some major design faults. Anyway, I and some others have been working our tails off to finally fix all those things, and we're getting close. But because of all this engine work that we have done, we've greatly delayed our next release. So that sucks, but this had to be done sooner or later so at least its over with. We've also had to address shortages in our programming team as some of our core people haven't been available for several weeks (some even months), and that also really hurt our progress.

Now back to real life. Unfortunately sometime in late July I think, I stopped going to the gym and working out. I didn't intend for it to happen, but I just started getting bored working out alone all the time. I really need to find a group of people that I can train and possibly compete with regularly for me to commit myself to being active again. It also didn't help that I had a major eczema breakout on my hands and feet for about a month or more. First I got it on my hands, then it subsided and went to my feet (where I lost so much skin that sometimes I couldn't walk without limping), then it resurfaced on my hands again, and now finally its mostly gone on my hands, but I think my feet are breaking out once more. Seriously, it blows. I've been applying prescription cream I got from the dermatologist a few years ago and also a therapeutic lotion, but they haven't helped much. And what makes my condition even worse is physical contact with cardboard, which dries out my skin even further.

But contact with cardboard couldn't be avoided, because in mid September my roommate and I moved to a new house that he bought, along with one of my roommate's friends who moved in as well. The day where we did most of the heavy moving was the worst; by night my hands were so red that they looked like big stoplights (remarked a girl who helped us move). And getting cleaning agents on my hands by accident when cleaning the old house really didn't help the situation either. But anyway, the new house is awesome and I love it. My major complaint with the old house was the upstairs was always 15 degrees hotter than the downstairs, no matter what the thermostat was set to. My computer room was upstairs, thus I was hot and bothered most of the time at the old house. I also now have one big room instead of two small rooms, and the rent is 66% of what it used to be, so I'm happy about the move in every aspect.

I continued to be lazy and uninspired about finding a job for the first couple of months since my last post. Mostly because I couldn't find any jobs that I read the description and said "I want to do that!". I used the sites dice.com and eventually also monster.com to try and find my ideal job, but didn't have much luck there. I really wanted to work at nVidia because I'm interested in graphics and GPUs (mostly because I know hardly anything about them), so I put most of my effort to applying there. It took them like a month to finally contact me after I had applied online, called the local Austin office several times (and got a voice recording), and had a couple people that work there that I vaguely know submit my resume. My first phone interview with them was just basically a "placement" interview for them to figure out what I was interested in doing. To pass that step, I had to complete a coding homework assignment that they gave me that involved generating and freeing aligned memory addresses in C. Next I had a nother phone interview that went pretty well I thought. They granted me a third on-site interview (which was still not the final interview!), but I blew it on that one. The guy went straight to the white board with me and asked technical questions (I don't think he even read my resume). I was asked to reverse the order of words in a C string without using any temporary storage, and I totally screwed that one up; partially because I'm not used to low-level C stuff like that, and partially because I prepared to be interviewed by the CUDA group which I was told I would be, but instead was interviewed by the OS X OpenGL driver group (I don't know OS X, OpenGL, nor driver programming BTW, so I was basically screwed before I got there). So that was somewhat depressing, but I got over it.

Next I interviewed at National Instruments, where my roommate works. My first on-site interview there went well, and they invited me back for a second interview to last (nearly) the full day. At the same time I also had a phone interview with PayPal that went well, but I really didn't want to work for them because I feel that they are an unethical company and that's a big red X in my book (poor ethics is the same reason I didn't want to work for Intel). My full day interview at NI was excellent, and I was elated to be asked C++ questions instead of low-level C or general programming questions (C++ is my biggest strength by far, thanks to Allacrost and my thesis). They gave me an offer which I accepted, and my first day of work is tomorrow. I actually managed to remain unemployed for about 11 months (and I'm just about out of money now.....I payed rent with an IOU note), but I'm glad to be going back to work. Hopefully something there will inspire me and get my excited about what I'm doing with my life again. I'll be working in the Instrument Control group doing low level device driver development it seems, so I'm happy to be doing a different type of programming than what I already do every day (high-level application development).

And so that is pretty much my life for the past four months. Hopefully my next post here will come before 2008 ;)

Waves of Code

2007-06-19T08:14:00.000-07:00

I swam with that open water group again last night. We went to a different area of Lake Travis, "Hippie Hollow", because it has a longer swim area than the place we went to last week. This site also happens to permit public nudity, so that was a little... awkward. It wasn't too bad though; there were only a couple naked guys hanging around and they weren't swinging their dicks around in the air or anything. ;) Anyway, it was really windy yesterday so the water was choppy as hell. My form completely fell apart because I wasn't used to this type of swimming and I started freaking out because when I'd come up for air, sometimes I'd just get a big wave in my face instead. I eventually reverted to my old "panic style" of swimming, which involves keeping my head above the water at all costs while doing free style. It was fun fighting for my life while trying to get a workout in though. :) All together I swam about 1200 meters last night (3/4s of a mile).

I don't know what happened, but on Sunday I started writing some code and for the first time in months, programming felt fun to me again. So fun in fact, that I am having trouble stopping myself and its somewhat getting in the way of my training. I added two new features to the video engine, loading menu skins from multi images and adding support for allowing multiple menu skins to be used at once. Since yesterday I've been performing major surgery on the battle code (it needed it... badly). Basically I'm wrapping up the GUI display and update code for a couple menu windows into their own classes, which makes the primary battle class much smaller and easier to understand. I'm really happy that I enjoy coding again, because I had honestly been forcing myself to program for the last couple of months to get our release out for Allacrost. We had a meeting over the weekend and decided on a small number of features that we would add to the game and then make a new release. We're trying to make our release cycle shorter while still introducing enough new features and content to make each release significantly improved over the last. We've been trying to recruit a lot of new people to the programming team to help speed up development efforts, but so far we haven't received very many applications (compared to what we are used to anyway), which is honestly somewhat disappointing. I don't know if we chose a bad time of the year or if our game looks too "finished" now in the eyes of someone who takes a glance at it.

My dreams are consistently vivid and somewhat exhausting these days. I'm actually starting to wish for nights were I don't dream, because sometimes I wake up after having fought in some war, or had some other major traumatic life event I had to struggle through. Even though physically those things didn't happen, they feel real to my mind, and the psychological stress I experience when I'm asleep often leaves me feeling burnt out by the time I wake up. Who knew sleeping could make me so exhausted? :) Seriously though, its becoming quite a bother. Once I find a new job and get on health insurance again, I might consider talking with a psychologist or someone else about this if it becomes a bigger problem. Speaking of jobs, I need to begin seriously looking for one now that our latest release is finished (I told myself and others that I wouldn't get a job until after that happened). I was going to start looking last week, but I was wrapped up with the aftermath of our release so I put it off to this week, but now I have my head wrapped in code and I can't stop (plus I kind of need to get this battle code commit out the door ASAP, because no one else can work on the battle code while I'm working on these large changes). Anyway, time to get back to the code =D

And... I'm back

2007-06-12T22:36:00.000-07:00

So the last two months have been reasonably eventful (for me anyway). Yes, I'm still unemployed, but I can't get these damn recruiters to leave me alone. I get a call/e-mail from one nearly every weekday and I'm getting sick of re-telling my life story to them. I'll be looking for a job soon though, and I'm hoping that I'll find something I don't detest by the end of this month.

At the end of April I became a member at Lifetime fitness and ever since, I've been spending more and more time at the gym. One of the first things I did there was take a fitness assessment test that tells you your "body age" compared to your chronological age by measuring your VO2 max, strength, flexibility, and body composition. I did fairly well and my body age was 18 years old (my chronological age is 24). So that made me kind of happy to hear that. :) I spent most of May focusing on my weak point, body strength, but I also started cycling in addition to running. Towards the end of the month, I started swimming too, which has been a difficult challenge for me because...well, I like to breathe when I'm working out. :) Over the past 3 weeks I've been self-teaching myself how to front-crawl properly and I've come pretty far in such a short time. Now I can easily do bi-lateral breathing (turning your head to the left and right for breaths of air) rather than always trying to keep my head out of the water. The furthest I've swam in a day so far has been about 0.8 miles.

Yesterday my roommate (who is a cyclist and occasional triathlete) invited me to go swim in open water with a bunch of people that meet weekly to go swim. I went and it was fun, although a little freaky since I haven't properly learned how to sight. Most days if I'm not tired, I try to do two forms of cardio, but today I went all out and did three. I swam for half a mile, cycled for 12.4 miles, ran over 3 miles, and did about an hour of weightlifting. Needless to say, I'm totally exhausted as I write this right now, but in a good way :) Even though I won't be anywhere near race condition by the time it comes, I'm thinking of doing a 5K race on or around July 16th, which will be my 25th birthday. It is to be my official "come back" into the world of competitive sports. (For those that don't know, back in high school I ran cross country and track and I loved racing more than anything at that time). My roommate is trying to convince me to do a triathlon, and I actually think I want to do one too, although not until after I get comfortably back into running races again. Plus the way my training routine is going, its almost like I am already becoming a triathlete. ^_^

A couple days ago we finished our second release for Hero of Allacrost. Its a major improvement over the first demo we released in October last year. So far we've seen a pretty good stream of publicity and positive feedback. The most important thing about this demo, in my opinion at least, is that now our code base is mature enough that it is extremely easy to build onto what we already have. I re-wrote some major subsystems of the code after our first release, particularly I re-designed that map code nearly from scratch (to add free range movement support among other things) and I re-wrote the global code, which is the code that manages all of the data that different portions of the game share (characters, inventory, skills, that sort of thing). I haven't announced this on our site yet, but the plan from here is to make smaller, more periodic releases that add a small number of features/improvements over the previous release. We're also going to start a recruitment hunt tomorrow to increase the number of programmers and artists on our team to help speed up production. Needless to say, its an important turning point for our project (which is now 3 years old by the way).

Well I'm exhausted and need to get some sleep. Tyler out.

Torpidity

2007-04-11T18:20:00.000-07:00

I've been back in Austin for a few weeks now. I quickly and unwillingly got back into my usual routine of doing nothing all day long. Again, the problem is that I have no goals or anything to pursue in my life right now, and so I become more and more apathetic about everything. Allacrost was making excellent progress and we were hoping to get another demo ready to release near the end of March, but in the last week we've stagnated and things aren't getting done. Part of it is a small number of critical bugs that are affecting a lot of areas of the code right now. Another part of it (at least for me) is that I am getting tired of feeling lonely on the coding side of things. I mean, there are still people working on the code and making significant progress in some places, but I have just been all over the code base lately fixing everything from improving engine deficiencies to mode implementation to documentation, and part of the reason I've been all over the place is that several people aren't putting in the effort and doing their part (some for valid reasons, others for unknown reasons). We'll get the demo out eventually (we're pretty close to being there in several aspects), and the sooner the better because I want to get this release behind us and take a short break from coding.

I haven't really been looking for jobs lately either. I decided a few weeks back that I wasn't going to take a job until after this demo is released. I did recently post my resume on dice.com (and got a call this afternoon from a recruiter, in fact), and a couple days ago I also applied to another job at Applied Research Labs as a Research Scientist. I'm not sure if its a position I'd like, but I figure it wouldn't hurt to apply. Oh, and I got a $900 medical bill for all of my "am I insane?" doctor visits last year (my problem turned out to be a severe anxiety disorder, if you may recall). My insurance, Blue Cross Blue Shield, decided not to be very much help. They falsely claimed that two office visits occurred when my insurance had already expired, and one study interpretation they didn't cover anything at all for no apparent reason. Screw them. I hate insurance companies. So now I get to go yell at them on the phone for a few hours, which I'm sure both they and I will love...

Hmmm, what else. Oh, I'm currently writing an article covering the basics of intellectual property law. I decided to write it because on gamedev.net (a popular game development website) there are numerous people/projects that blatantly infringe on a company's IP, either through their own ignorance or misunderstanding of the law. I got sick of it, so I decided to write this article and refer others to it when I discover possible infringement (after all, its easier to fix the problem sooner instead of later). I've also been running off and on for the last few weeks. I need to suck it up and start getting serious about getting in shape, because I have no excuse not to be right now.

In the last week though, a very different problem presented itself. My dreaming has gone absolutely out of control. I don't know what on Earth triggered it, but each night I have multiple incredible dreams, where I'm playing on a football team, fighting in a war, protesting for civil rights, you name it. I've been meeting and talking with a lot of people that I know in real-life in my dreams too, both from the present and the past. Now don't get me wrong, the dreams are awesome. They are so much more exciting and fulfilling than my real life is currently. But they are literally eating away at me with regards to sleep. I end up entranced by my dream and will sleep for 10-13 hours and setting my alarm isn't helping to solve the problem. I continue waking up in the mid-afternoon instead of the early morning. And because I'm a lucid dreamer and I experience so much in my dreams, when I wake up I'm already mentally exhausted from everything that I worked/fought for in my dream, which leaves me torpid throughout the day.

I only hope that this deep dreaming problem of mine subsides soon, before I'm drawn even further into the world of my own subconscious. Although that world is infinitely better than the world I live in now, its not real, and its not healthy to be attached to something like that.

Recovery

2007-03-07T22:06:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since my last post. I left Phoenix and went back to Austin on January 24th. I had hoped at that time that I would be getting back on my feet quickly, but I feel into an oblivion of laziness. It was pathetic how little I did throughout most of February. I mostly played video games and watched anime and slept. I also did something evil: I installed Windows XP onto my home computer again. I haven't had Windows installed on any of my machines for almost 3 years, but I finally did it. The only reason I installed Windows was so that I could play some of the old computer games that I rightfully own, because wine doesn't usually work that well, and my free copy of VMware was being stupid and wouldn't recognize the proper kernel headers when I tried to build the module, even though I made absolutely certain that it was pointing to the right headers. So, I decided to put my spare hard drive to use and dedicated it entirely to a NTFS partition, and now I dual-boot Windows and Linux. I only play games in Windows and nothing else, since that's all that its good for as far as I'm concerned. I thankfully haven't had any problems with viruses or malware destroying my machine (so far), which I think is because of the hardware firewall enabled on my router.

Anyway, my recovery rating topped out at about 80% about 10 days ago, but it has started to drop back into the 70s again (damn engineering has made me so quantitatively minded). I am very relaxed these days (too relaxed, in fact) and not suffering from anxiety problems anymore, but there are two things that I am painfully missing: drive and energy. I think the reason I have no energy is precisely because I have no drive, so if I can get my drive back I think I'll finally be myself again. But its harder said than done. I am not motivated to do anything anymore. Its weird, I still -want- to do things, but its like I can't. Things like: find a job, clean my house, exercise on a regular basis, make the world a better place, etc. I'm just really confused as to what course of action I'm supposed to take now. Before there was always a clear goal (a degree to obtain) and a clear path to get there, but my primary goal is so vague now I don't know how to achieve it and feel successful. My goal is, and has been for a long time, to make a positive, recognized, and lasting impact on the world. Right now my best path to that goal is through Allacrost, but for some reason I just can't keep myself motivated for more than a few days at a time. The thing is, there's not a single thing in this world that I clearly and naturally excel at. I'm just pretty good in many many things, and furthermore I like those many things and so I want to do them more. But I don't know where to focus myself right now. Should I read more books? Should I make myself gain more knowledge? Should I continue to hone my programming skills? Should I pick up drawing once again? Should I resume my unfinished self-taught piano lessons from 2-3 years ago? Should I master the Japanese language? Should I train myself physically and resume competitive racing once more? These are all things that I bounce back and forth between on a daily basis, and all of the things I mentioned I wish to pursue. But I don't have the energy to devote myself to all of them right now, because I don't have a clear goal to pursue. It feels like I'm stagnating myself going in this circle.

In other news, Allacrost has been making some good progress in the past 2 weeks, although there was a lot of inactivity last month. We've hired 3 new programmers, a composer, and a couple of new artists have been contributing lately as well. After I re-wrote the map code from scratch in January, I started working on the script engine and made excellent progress in figuring out how to provide a communication channel between the engine (C++) and our scripts (Lua) that is a pivotal turning point for the programming side of things. I've also re-designed much of the "global" code, which represents things such as items, weapons, armor, inventory management, characters, enemies, and party management. I'm finished with that for the time being, and now I'm getting myself back into the map code.

I also did manage to apply for one (and only one) job last month. It was a software developer position at Applied Research Laboratories in Austin. The position was for the design of sonar data analysis and visualization software, which sounded really cool to me. It was kind of a PITA to apply because they required official transcripts, a statement of interest, and three contacts, which took a good amount of time to round all that up. Unfortunately, I think that right after they got all my info they must have hired someone, because I saw the position was pulled from the job listings page just a few days later. I honestly don't even know what type of job I want at this point. I don't think I'd be happy in another microprocessor design job, but who knows. I just want to enjoy my job and not let all the stupid management and bureaucratic crap make me angry and frustrated like it did back at Freescale.

Anyway, I've rambled on about nothing for long enough. I really should make it a habit to update this blog more often so I don't try to talk about a million things in every post I make. :p Thanks for reading.

A Gamer's Return

2007-01-20T01:10:00.000-08:00

During my time in Phoenix I have started playing video games somewhat regularly, which is something that I haven't done in about 4 years (because I didn't have time to). My brother has Windows XP on his computer, so I occasionally borrow it for a bit to play some of the games he has installed on his computer. I also brought my Playstation 2 along with a stack of 4-5 unfinished RPG games I have bought, but I haven't been playing them too much. Anyway, here are my thoughts on the games that I have played over my break.

Half-Life 2
This is a truly amazing games in all aspects. Graphics, physics (which are amazing to me), gameplay, and even (thank god!) the story were superb. It is so much fun to play, but a little disappointing that there is not a multiplayer online mode like there was in the original Half-Life (yes, I know there's Counter-Strike: Source but I'll get to that). The only other irritation is the hellacious long load times between levels. I could go to the kitchen, grab myself a snack, and come back to the computer and it would *still* not be ready. My brother has pretty decent hardware on his machine too, so I'm a little shocked at how long the loading time of these games have become. They are long enough that they can really disrupt the atmosphere of the game, which is very unfortunate in my opinion.

I actually played this game last year too, but near the end of the game I came upon a part of it that I could not pass. No, I mean I literally could not pass it; There was a bug in the game that caused it to freeze up and crash whenever I got to that point. It seems that Valve has fixed the bug in a patch, because I was able to successfully get past that point and complete the game without any problems this time. I was a little disappointed with the ending to the game though.

Counter-Strike: Source
I played the original Counter-Strike quite a lot during my first three years as an undergraduate. This version seems to play very similar to the original (for better or worse), with the addition of highly upgraded graphics and physics, two new guns, some changes to the buy system, and...not much else. Its still a great game like the original, it was just a bit surprising to me that it is just an upgrade over the original rather than a new game. Also, it took me some time to get to the point where I didn't suck. :) (I used to be quite good at the original CS).

One thing that bothered me very much with the game was the people I played with. Many of them were immature idiots. Some of them were in their early teens, which made me feel a bit awkward being 10+ years older than them. Some of them had very offensive images in their "spray-paints", mostly of pornographic nature. If conservative parents thought the "hot coffee" secret in Grand Theft Auto was bad, I can't imagine how berserk they'd be if they caught what was happening in CS games. There's voice-chat in the game of course, and in one game a person on my team would continually play a very loud, annoying tone which was broadcast to the rest of us and pissed the entire team off. We couldn't kick or ban the guy, nor could we kill him. Anyway, the point is: it sucks playing with assholes.

Battlefield 2042
I only played this game very briefly, but for the most part was not too impressed. There were tons, and I mean *tons* of bugs with this game. Enough that for certain patches, my brother said that the game was virtually unplayable for him. I didn't have very much time to understand the game, but I found the game hard to pick up (and I've played many FPS games before).

Star Craft
What, Star Craft? Didn't that game come out in 1998 or something? You're damn right it did, and its still an awesome game. I played many online SC games on Battle.net (which I haven't done since 2000 I think) and it was a lot of fun, even though I got my ass stomped a lot. Once I started getting semi-decent though, it almost became addicting. I played 10 hours straight the other night and I had a blast doing it. There are some annoyances with playing online though. The servers are mass populated with Koreans, which aren't the most fluent English speakers in the world. It makes it rather difficult when you're partnered with a Korean or two since you have virtually no way of communicating with each other. There were a lot of idiot jerks playing this game as well. Sometimes they would incessantly make immature sexual comments, racist comments, berate homosexuals, etc. When it got very bad, I would politely ask that they cease insulting whatever demographic they were, telling them that I did not care to hear those types of things and that we should just play the game. Luckly, that usually seemed to shut them up.

One thing that I didn't like then and still don't like now about SC online is that just about everyone plays only one of two maps: "Big Game Hunters" or "Fastest Map Possible", which are resource intensive maps. I wish that people would embrace playing more of the official game maps as those, IMO, are much more fun since there's more strategy required.

Final Fantasy XII
I bought this game shortly before I left Austin. There are some very good things about it, and also some very bad things. What I found most disappointing of all, and what is preventing me from feeling any desire to play this game, is that the story is a piece of shit. Not the story itself really, but the manner in which it is told. Dialogue scenes between characters are completely disjointed. There is virtually no character development and I don't even understand why 4 out of 6 of the main characters are even there. The only two characters that have motivation to take this quest are Ashe (princess who wants to restore her fallen kingdom to glory) and Basch (sworn knight who wishes to fight to get his kingdom back). The other four characters seem to be doing nothing more than "tagging along for the ride", and I hate that. This game has helped me to understand that the real reason I enjoy role-playing games, the real reward that I seek in them, is the telling of the story. I play the game to find out what happens next, but in FFXII I don't care what happens next because it either makes no sense, or its just completely random "oh, we need to go to the Feywood now".

I've put in about 50 hours into this game and I just continually feel no enjoyment out of playing it. I also feel that the game is much too complicated for its own good, which has made me realize another important fact about game design: "simple is good". I've taken this lesson to heart with some of the features I've proposed putting into Allacrost lately.

-----

I fly back to Austin in just four more days. Its hard to believe I've been here a month: I still don't "feel the correct passage of time". Its hard to explain what I mean, but essentially I don't feel time moving forward, and I don't feel days passing (it has been this way for me even before I graduated in December). But when I get back, I think I'm going to install Windows XP on a backup hard drive that I have laying around unused so I can play games again. I just don't want to deal with the headaches associated with playing games on Linux through wine or cedega or whatever, especially when I'm sure I have one or two Windows CDs laying around somewhere. I'm also making fantastic progress on Allacrost lately, but I'll save that for another post since this one is already quite verbose (hah, that rhymed).

New Year

2007-01-03T13:15:00.000-08:00

I had a concurrent nightmare about grad school my first two nights of the new year. In this dream, I suddenly discovered that I didn't meet the course requirements to graduate just yet, so I had to take 3 more classes, which I was pretty depressed about in the dream. One class was some crazy mathematics class on differential vector calculus or some esoteric topic like that, another was digital signal processing, and the last was some neuroscience class. Why these specific courses were required by my degree, I have no idea. When I woke up both mornings it took me well over 10 minutes to realize what I had just experienced was a dream, and that I am truly and absolutely finished with grad school. But you know what? I still don't feel like I'm 100% done, because I have no document or status that says "yes, you graduated". They don't mail degrees out for another week or two! Seriously, what school can you graduate from but still not know for weeks after if you really graduated or not?

Luckily I didn't have that nightmare three nights in a row. Last night I had a series of some very strange and very interesting dreams. I don't recall them very well, but in one of them I was at some track and three girls came up and started singing to me in unison while holding giant beer mugs in each hand. The song they sang told me that they wanted me to go to Louisiana with them so that they could take a picture of me and strawberry lemonade (why we had to go to Louisiana to do this, I had no idea). Then after they finished their song, they pored the contents of their mugs on my bare feet, which became covered in red, yellow, and purple yogurt. Yes, that's right. I have dreams about girls singing to me about strawberry lemonade while poring yogurt on my feet. No, its not some sick fetish that I've been hiding.

I've started working on Allacrost hard-core again, which feels really good. I did some work cleaning up the scripting engine, then I started working on the new map mode design, I've been mopping up the sloppy mess that we call our video engine, and I've been writing more of the story as well. I'm well enough now that I can do a decent job with these things, but my mind still is foggy so its more difficult for me than it should be. The map code I'm exciting to do a complete re-design of, because the old code was getting awfully messy. The biggest changes I'm doing to it right now are adding in support for free-range movement to replace our old tile-movement. Basically what this means is: you can walk more freely rather than being forced to walk only from tile to tile. It's a little tougher to code than tile-based movement, but it will be worth it. The video engine is pissing me off though. The code in there is just so messy and it doesn't follow the code standard very well at all. The data types used don't make sense half the time (using floats to represent the number of pixels, for instance) and its just generally frustrating. The video engine works and works well, to be sure, but when it comes time to modify it or add new features, it can be a nightmare.

Well one of my resolution's for the new year is to stop using my blog as an ad-hoc "emo Tyler diary", so I'll just say that I'm feeling much better after two weeks at home, but still have a ways to go. :)

Respite for the Soul

2006-12-25T11:36:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, recovering from the past two years is sure taking its time. After I turned in my thesis, I felt a periodic relief over that weekend. However, the next ten or so days felt continually stressful to me, even though there was almost nothing significant for me to stress myself over. I continually sought ways to escape from the intense fear and worry that I suffered day after day, usually though a combination of sleeping, running, video games, and watching anime. But perhaps the best medicine I have discovered is that of companionship. Simply going out, socializing with friends, and enjoying a more normal existence has done wonders for quelling my anxiety. A week ago while I was still in Austin I was hanging out with friends for the entire day, going to a brunch party, shopping, watching a movie at a friend's house, watching another movie at the Alamo.....I honestly can not remember the last time that I spent the entire day out of my house and with other people. I've decided that I'm going to make an effort to get out with friends more (once a day when possible).

I drove back to Phoenix from Austin on the 20th with a friend from high school (who is now a grad student at UT). We left at about 8:30AM Austin time and arrived at midnight Phoenix time, so it was about 14.5 hours to travel just over 1,000 miles. It was long, but it was surprisingly relaxing compared to taking a shorter 2 hour flight. Its nice being home, but its really cold here compared to what it was like when I left Austin. It doesn't help that my mom insists on not turning on the heat in the house (she claims that she can't afford it). I've made a lot of good progress in reducing my stress in the past five days, but I still have a long way to go. What frustrates me most of all is that I finally have loads of time to work on Allacrost, but I don't have a proper state of mind to work on it. Its really sad to admit, but my abilities in writing, reading, programming, drawing, and hell, everything are incredibly lower than what I am normally capable of.

Which brings me to my next point: I think graduate school did made me worse in more ways than it has made me better. I've been analyzing this over and over in the back of my head over the past couple of weeks. First, the good things. After finishing graduate school, I can now state with confidence that I am more intelligent than I was before. That is really the only solid positive I can find. Now as for the negative, in my current state I am now: less creative, less articulate, more selfish (I had to become selfish to survive, even though I hate being selfish), less empathetic, less emotional (emotions are good things: you should treasure them if you have them), more anxious, less ambitious, less motivated, more cynical, and the list just goes on. Basically: I think that I've become more intelligent at the expense of every other aspect about who I am becoming worsened. If I had the opportunity to take my degree and somehow trade it in to get back all of the things that I have lost, I would do so without a second thought. Isn't that sad? Isn't that really, really sad? This whole experience has almost driven me to reconsider practicing as an engineer and seek another field of interest. Hell, what am I talking about? That already happened a year ago when I applied to the damn school of neuroscience! Looking back at my actions then, I can clearly see that a significant portion of what motivated to do that back then was because I was seeking an escape from my present. I'm still very interested in the subject mind you, just not to the degree where I would actively pursue an education in the field.

On a more random topic, I'd like to discuss my dreaming as of late. In the past week, and especially since I've come back home, my dreaming has become unbelievably more deep with each passing night. What do I mean by deep? I mean that the world constructed by my subconcious is ever more real and tangible. Every time that I wake up, it takes me about 10-15 minutes to reconstruct the experience that is reality. I have to re-realize who I truly am, and accept that all of the experiences I have had were nothing more than fragments of a virtual world that I unknowingly constructed around myself. Suprisingly, I'm sleeping about a normal 8 hours of sleep a night. But every time I wake up I feel like I've been in a coma for weeks. Even more perplexing to me is that even though these dreams are nearly more real than they have ever been, I can't remember much when I wake up. I do know that each dream I've had in the past week has had me centered around a different major conflict. The memories I have of the past week of dreams are few and scattered, but I remember in one there was a princess, and in another I had given up engineering to become an actor (which I was talented at, in the dream at least). Perhaps I should make it a habit to record my dreams when I wake up so that I can actively recall the events that transpired. I do not dislike these dreams. Oh no, I much prefer living in my various dream worlds than in the real world presently. Sometimes I ponder to myself that if I could, would I opt to sleep for the rest of my life, with the conscious decision that I was living in my dreams? Or would the guilt of completely neglecting the going ons of the outside world overwhelm me? I have been unable to find my answer.

And Just Like That, Its Over

2006-12-10T18:48:00.000-08:00

On Friday, December 8th 2006, I walked into the UT Austin graduate school office, with a pile of signed forms clinched tightly in one arm along with a CD containing my thesis. I wrote my name down on a list, and waited in the office for about 20 minutes with half a dozen other anxious looking would-be graduates. During those 20 minutes, I was practically frozen in both body and mind. I just blankly stared at the floor, not knowing what I should be thinking. When my name was called, I rigidly stood up and walked with an older gentleman, a thesis/degree evaluator, into his back office. He looked over my forms to make sure that all the right signatures were in all the right places, and then took my CD and inserted it into his iMac to make sure that it met all the formatting requirements. The graduate school had "highly recommended" getting your thesis evaluated long prior to the deadline, but I didn't finish formatting mine until the night before, so I didn't have much of a choice. I was frozen in fear while he carefully looked all 106 pages of the document over (in fact, I still have a feeling of anxiety thinking about this moment), for this day was the last day to submit a thesis. If he didn't give his approval, I didn't know what on earth I could do about it...

Thankfully, he said it looked perfect, "exactly like a thesis should look like" in his own words. He then followed by mentioning that it is very rare for a person to have their thesis pass on its first evaluation, which made me feel like I swallowed a smooth stone that was the size of a large chicken egg. He clipped my forms and my thesis CD together and congradulated me. I thanked him politely, and walked out of the graduate studies office. The first thing I thought was "that's it?". For two and a half years, I've been constatntly fighting to stay afloat through a hellish struggle, the likes of which I could have never imagined. And then, just like that, it all ended. It seemed too simple, too easy. The climax of such a long and enduring battle should have been more dramatic, more signifcant. But as I walked out that office, I started laughing, almost in an evil genius sort of way, because I was now, officially, a graduate school graduate. As I walked out the front steps of the main building on campus, I stood above an overcast scene of downtown Austin, with the state captial building towering in front. I stared at that scene for a good minute and seared it into my memory. I'm sure that my eyes will never forget what I saw that day.

I chose not to attend the commencement ceremonies. I had no family visiting me for the occasion, and I didn't know anyone else who was graduating this December. I regret it only slightly, because I'm sure it would have felt damn nice to put on those graduation robes, and crisply snatch away that which I have rightfully earned. Perhaps that is the dramatic climatic ending I was hoping for? No matter. I bought myself a 2006 tassle as a momento at least, to hang next to my 2000 (high school) and 2004 (bachelor's) tassles.

Its amazing how much lighter my body is now. It feels like a 20 ton weight has been lifted off my back after being bound to me for nearly 2 years. I've lived this weekend in a constant state of disbelief. Somehow, a part of me believes that I'm still in that firey pit of hell, and that some other seemingly impossible task (or combination of tasks as is usually my case) is going to fall into my lap. But slowly, I think I'm subconciously starting to accept the truth. For whatever reason, I've been sleeping very deeply ever since I graduated. The dreams I have in that state of deep sleep are.....phenomenal to say the least. I can only remember bits and pieces, but they are very long stories where I assume a different role and struggle in a different way. Maybe I'm still fighting subconciously, I don't know.

So, what am I going to do now that I have absolutely no commitments to anyone or anything? I don't know, live a little maybe? I'm starting by cleaning up things in my life, and throwing away that which I no longer need. I had about 50 print-outs of academic papers that I've read over the past two years, which I had originally intended to file away, but I said screw it. I don't need this dead weight anymore, so I recycled them all instead. I'm also cleaning up all the junk that has accumulated on my hard drives over the past two years, since I never had a breathing moment to clean them. After all this cleaning is over, I'm going to attempt to build a social life once again. I really, really need to get out more and have fun with people my age for once. Not only do I deserve it and desire it, but it would be good medicine for my recovery as well. It goes without saying, but of course I'm going to work on Allacrost a lot now that I can finally afford to. I'm going to go home and see my friends and family in Phoenix for 3-4 weeks over the winter holiday as well.

Well that's enough rambling on about life from me. My brain is still pretty fried, to a degree that it really makes my writing a horribly poor read (compared to my usual ability anyway). I'm not really thinking about the long term too much yet, but I'll most likely seek an engineering job somewhere in Austin in the future (I don't wish to move out of the city right now). One thing I know for sure though is that I need a new goal, a new purpose for moving forward. I just don't know where to find that goal right now, or what form it is going to be in. But for the time being, I'm just going to continue to use as little of my brain as I can.

The End?

2006-11-29T14:48:00.000-08:00

As always, too many things have happened in the last month for me to write down. I finished the first draft of all of my thesis chapters yesterday and it feels really, really good to have that done. Currently it is 112 pages long, but I might trim a few pages when I polish it off and present my final draft. The thesis itself wasn't so bad, but rather it was finding the motivation/capacity to work on it. After that little spurt of anger I talked about in my last post, my mind and body almost completely shut down. It's so hard for me to think about...well, anything really right now. So imagine what its like to try and write nearly your entire master's thesis in that state of mind. Yeah, it sucks.

About two weeks ago I was unable to sleep one night (which has been happening to me about once a week lately), and I decided in the late hours of that night that I would quit my job at Freescale. Well, actually I guess quit would be a misnomer. Its more like I'm not starting my job there full-time. My anxiety overload was responsible for two thirds of that decision (which was caused mostly because of my job), and the other third was because I just don't enjoy working there. After all, why would I start a job that I know I'm not going to like? So, that leaves me with very few commitments remaining this year. I have to finish my thesis, take a midterm exam, give a presentation, and write a term paper (the latter two are also my thesis work). Only then will I have re-obtained my personal freedom. I'm going to spend between 1-3 months doing whatever the hell I want before I start looking for a new job. Luckly, I can afford the luxury of time for once in my life.

I've been thinking hard about a lot of deep things lately. Two years ago, I had a clear purpose and the will to pursue the path that I wanted to take. But now, I'm back to square one. I've been asking myself over and over "So, what do I do now with the rest of my life?". The only hint to that answer that I think I've found is that I want to create something. I want to use my own hands, and my own mind, and create something to share with the world. But I don't know what the subject of creation is. Is it an engineering marvel? A novel? A revolution? Is it Allacrost (which by the way, I've been taking a long break from to finish my thesis)?

What makes finding the answer to this question most difficult is that I can't find enjoyment in anything anymore. Seriously. All the things that I used to like to do, don't bring me any feelings of happiness or make me content right now. They just annoy me further because deep down I feel like I do still like them, but I just can't feel anything from them. On days when I have nothing to do (correction: don't feel like doing what I should be doing), I just laze around, browse the internet, or (like today) desperately try all kinds of things in a pathetic attempt to squeeze out one tiny feeling of happiness. Its a pretty sad state that I am in. But hopefully, all that I need to do is find a means to relax and get myself back to normal, and then these things will become a part of a troubled past that I'll use to move forward.

The Camel's Straw

2006-10-31T19:22:00.000-08:00

I know its very unordinary for me to blog two days in a row, but I'm so angry right now I thought that maybe writing down what I'm feeling would make me feel better. My boss(es) are really pissing the hell out of me lately, enough so that I'm having trouble sleeping because I am this consuming ball of rage right now. Its kind of hard to set the context for why I am feeling what I am feeling, but I'll try anyway.

As I said before, back over the summer there were some major major issues with some software I was trying to use for my thesis work. I spent all summer working with various people trying to resolve the problems as they popped up one after another, before finally resigning myself to not using it and omitting that set of experiments from my thesis altogether. Of course I wasted so many weeks over the summer on this problem that I ahd to delay my graduation for a semester, which I was not happy about. There was also a guy from India that was supposed to be helping me with this, but due to various difficulties, he produced absolutely nothing useful for me and just ended up wasting my time.

Anyway, so there have been at least two distinct instances now where my boss gets this really condescending tone toward me and tells me that I "better graduate this December". When he says that I become infuriated because if its anyone's fault that I didn't graduate in August, its HIS. He doesn't seem to remember me telling him that there were all these problems with our existing software and that's the reason why I didn't graduate. Hell, as far as I know he's not even doing anything to address those problems. After all, I suppose it wouldn't be good if HIS bosses found out, would it? Instead our team just keeps plugging along, while relying on this crumbling foundation of shit. And then this week (while on my leave of absence), I went in to work to do some experiments and I get asked if I can attend the Monday morning conference calls. I was a little miffed that I was asked that, so I politely replied "Nope, sorry. I'm not being paid right now and I'm only here to work on things that I need to finish for my thesis, nothing more.". But I get talked to about that, and got told some crap that I have an "obligation in my continuing relationship with Freescale to finish the projects to which I was assigned". Seriously, what kind of bullshit is that? I'm an unsalaried employee there, hence I am unexempt from the provisions of the US Fair Labor Standards Act, and they want me to do work for free? Screw that man.

I am already considering finding another job, either within Freescale or elsewhere. That's pretty freaking sad considering that I haven't even begun working there full-time yet. I don't want to work a job that just leaves me coming home feeling extremely stressed and angry every night, that's not what I want. I want a job that I enjoy doing, and that I can feel good about. Money really doesn't matter to me, but happiness does. I had a really tough time going to sleep last night because I was so pissed about all this (and ended up being 15 minutes late for my class as a result), and I have a feeling that tonight might turn out the same way. Ironic isn't it, that I am more stressed/angry about my job when I am on a leave of absence than when I am actually there?

Light in the Tunnel

2006-10-30T14:33:00.000-08:00

I was reading over my last post that I made less than two months ago, and it feels like all of those things were a distant memory now. My life is in such a high gear right now, I feel so much different right now than I did back in September, its amazing. Anyway, I guess I'll try to sort out the events of the past six odd weeks in chronological order.

Allacrost saw its first playable demo released on October 3rd. I really wish that it could have been in a more "fun" state, but we are still without a strong art development team, and our programming team had/has a couple holes in it as well. Regardless, it was more well-received than I thought it would be, which is always a good thing. :) One thing that has really amazed me is how quickly Allacrost has self-propagated itself on the internet. I see all kinds of sites that I've never heard of that now host our demo on their own servers, write short summaries about it (in several languages), etc. Who knew advertising would be so easy! ^_^

Anyway, I visited Phoenix for a brief period of time back in late September/early October because I had a free ticket. Unfortunately I got sick right before I left, so I was incapacitated for the 3-4 days that I was there. Still, I enjoyed getting away even for a little while, and I was able to visit a couple of friends that I haven't spoken to in a while. I still haven't quite recovered from being sick either; I have been coughing for about a month now. I would love to see the doctor, but I'm uninsured right now because....well it's a long story that I don't want to get into, but its for stupid reasons that aren't my fault. In a week I'll be able to get on Freescale's insurance plan though, so its all good.

I'm enjoying my class a lot, and I'm learning a lot in it too. We had the first midterm about two weeks ago and after it was over, I felt really good. Not because I think I did really good on the exam, but because I finally feel like I have a good grasp of the concepts in modern microarchitecture that I have been unable to learn for the past two years. So I'm definitely happy that I decided to take this class, even though I don't need it to get my degree. I've also made some good friends as a result of that class as well. Even more remarkably, two of them are female! I haven't made a female friend since...jeez, I guess it would have to have been 6 years now. That's pathetic!!! And to think that in high school almost all of my good friends were girls.....EE really does change a man. :(

My thesis is coming along as well. I finished the first (of five) chapters last night and I think that as long as I have all of my results, I can finish a rough draft in two weeks. Hopefully that gives my comittee enough time. I feel bad about taking so long to get this thesis to them, but I was just lacking motivation (and I wasn't being medicated for my anxiety disorder for quite some time as well). When I have to spend all day studying and working at my job, when I come home at night the last thing I want to do is more work, you know? Speaking of that, I stepped down from my role in Allacrost temporarily until I can finish my thesis. Things have been really slow with Allacrost this month, but they typically are for us this time of year because a lot of people are busy with classes, etc. Also I took a leave of absence from my job starting this week because I don't have time to work on anything other than my thesis at this point. I'm growing more and more unhappy with my job there, for a number of reasons.

Well it looks like I'm on the final stretch now. As long as any major disasters don't happen, in exactly six weeks from today, I will start working my full-time job and graduate from my life of misery. I'm actually not looking forward to graduation (if you can believe that), because I don't see myself becomming any happier as a result of that. After all, my start date at work is the Monday after classes end!!! I can't believe the things I get myself into sometimes...

Heroes and Happenings

2006-09-07T00:13:00.000-07:00

Well my third Fall semester as a graduate student began last week. It was a little depressing, because I shoul dhave been done with my degree already. But it was also a little refreshing, because for the first time in a year I felt like a real student again. I'm taking one class, Advanced Computer Architecture, which so far has been great. It feels good to be studying the subject that I came to this university for in the first place, and for once I'm in the correct state-of-mind to absorb this knowledge. Its been a ton of reading so far though, which is a weak point for me. I also went back to work today after my 3-week hiatus. My return was celebrated by my co-workers by mutating my cube with all transparent panels, putting in trees and signs to try to pass me off as an "animal exhibit", and other quips such as a large sign that said "Don't feed the intern". Is this what they call tough love? (-_-)

Anyway my plan this semester is to stay on campus all day Tuesday and Thursday to attend lecture, study, and work on my thesis (in theory anyway), and also to exercise and work out more. MWF I'll be working at Freescale. It looks like I might have a more sane schedule this term (at least that's what I'm hoping), so I'm going to try and enjoy my last semester instead of living in a world of hurt like I have for the past two years. Part of me is really reluctant to graduate though: it wants me to remain a student and pursue a PhD, while the other part of me feels exactly the opposite. So I'm really torn in two these days.

Allacrost has seen incredible things in the past week as well, with a new website, new content, and new screenshots released (shown below). Actually most of these things we've had for a long time, but we kept them under the covers until we were ready to bust out. Actually we were originally planning to release our first playable demo along with the new site + screenshots, but some of the key people that we needed to deliver for this release to happen were unavailable for one reason or another, so finally the team decided to release what we have and recruit more people so that the release can become a reality. We've had a lot of programmer applications in the past few days, but only one artist application, which is upsetting to me. Its so hard to find artists, even when our game looks as good and viable as it is. Actually I'm a little concerned now that people have really high expectations for the demo after seeing those screenshots (based on all of the things they have said), so now I'm a little apprehensive about releasing the demo in the state that it's in and failing to meet those expectations. Not that we're going to let that stop us from releasing the demo though. The demo is coming closer and closer to being ready though, so I hope that we can see it released very soon. :)