Zellwood Corn Festival

On Saturday, we went to the Zellwood Corn Festival. The Festival is held every year in Zellwood, Florida. They serve "all the sweet corn you can eat" and line up several Christian bands. Originally, Steven Curtis Chapman was scheduled to perform, but his friend Michael W. Smith came to take his place. The Chapman's lost their 5 year old daughter Maria in a tragic accident the previous Wednesday. This video is a fitting tribute to her.



In honor of the Chapman's, we signed a huge banner and also laid carnations on a table, with a pledge to pray for them. I didn't get a photo of the banner, but here are some of the carnations (many more were laid on the table after I took this photo).



One of the performers was Chris Sligh of American Idol fame. He was quite good and I even recognized a few of his songs from our local Christian station - Z88.3.



We had some fun with the kids "racing" each other on some of the tractors they had on display. These tractors are used in the Zellwood tractor pulls during the summer months.



Joshua looks right at home on this John Deere.



It was hot and humid, although there was a breeze that made it more bearable. We sat on these chairs for a few hours, listening to various bands and periodically walking around to see the craft booths and grab food. When it got close to the time when Michael W. Smith was going to perform, Kim saw lightning and decided we needed to pack up. It ended up pouring for over an hour before they decided to cancel the rest of the show . Maybe next time...



We went to Cypress Gardens on Sunday afternoon, but I didn't get any photos. I'll have to take care of that next time we go.

Peace and blessings,
John

Pray for Myanmar and China!

Stephanie Duffee put together this slide show of photos and text from the recent natural disasters in Myanmar and China. The presentation is almost 7 minutes, but well worth it. The last slide lists several prayer topics. We prayed through this list as a group on the evening of 5/22 and the next morning we heard that Myanmar was allowing foreign aid workers into the country - the first item on our prayer list!

Thank you Scott and Stephanie for organizing this.

Peace and blessings,
John

Click in the lower right corner to switch to full screen.

Black Belts, Mother's Day, and a Soldier's Homecoming

I pulled a few pictures off my camera from the last month, so I thought this would be a good time to catch you up on our activities. Rather than put these photos in separate blog entries, I decided to combine them into one.

In April, we received our Black Belt recommended through the American Taekwondo Association, which means we are now eligible for our 1^st Degree Black Belts. This has been a 2 year journey for us, so it's exciting to be close to achieving this milestone. We started down this path so that I could do something fun with the children. We have learned several traditional Taekwondo forms, many different kicks, self defense, board breaks, and how to use weapons like the bow staff and nunchucks. I'm looking forward to continuing toward our 2nd Degree.

Last week was Mother's Day and my daughters wanted to honor their Mom by throwing a party. Their idea was to decorate in a Hawaiian theme since Hawaii is one of her favorite places (we went to Oahu and Big Island for her 40th birthday). The girls helped me get the decorations and organize. We also purchased her a mango tree since she loves adding mangoes to her homemade smoothies. I grilled marinated chicken and pineapple for her and she loved it.

There were two funny things about the party. The first was that the day before, Kim looked me straight in the eye and told me she wanted to wear her Hawaiian dress to church. Now she had no idea we were doing this. Does she read minds or what?! The second thing that happened was we had to set up right after church while Kim went to the mall so that she could come home and be surprised. We were literally running around the house frantically getting everything ready and in the process I burned myself on the grill. Then I went inside to help make the smoothies and we panicked and let the smoothie maker overflow one of the cups because we couldn't turn it off. It was hilarious because Mom's do this stuff every day and even with 4 of us we still couldn't get it done.

Last night we threw a party for our good friends, the Nobles. CAPT Chaplain Jason Nobles and his family were in town for a welcome home party. Jason returned from Ramadi on April 1st. It was a huge blessing to hear Jason's testimony of answered prayer. Not only did God protect him while there, but he was able to share the gospel with many Soldiers. Please remember to pray for the Nobles as they head to their next assignment in South Carolina.

It is hot here in Orlando as we look forward to the rainy season. It's been a while since we've had rain, so much of the grass is withering. It certainly makes you appreciate the rain when you don't have it.

Peace and blessings,
John

Tour of the UCF Computer Vision Lab

On Monday I went on a tour of the University of Central Florida's (UCF) Computer Vision Lab. Our office is just down the street from UCF and at least half of the people in the office are UCF grads (I'm in the minority - a University of Maryland grad). The purpose of the tour was to talk to some of the students and professors to determine what areas we could collaborate on in the future.

In the photo above, I'm standing next to my division manager, Matt Kraus. We are in front of UCF's entry into the DARPA Urban Challenge (see their page for more photos). Their car is called, interestingly enough, Knight Rider (UCF is home to the Golden Knights in case you aren't aware).

In the photo below, you can see some of the instrumentation they used. On the front of the car are a couple of LIDAR scanners to scan the road, making sure the car stays on track and also is aware of obstacles. The center front of the car has a radar detector that they used to detect oncoming vehicles to help navigate intersections. On top of the car are more LIDAR scanners, a GPS for navigation, and some other gadgets whose purpose I do not recall. They have several rack servers inside to run the instrumentation and control the vehicle.

OK, so those of you who have no idea what the DARPA Urban Challenge was, DARPA offered $2 million to the team whose car could autonomously navigate a 60 mile course in less than 6 hours. The cars were required to obey all traffic rules (no speeding, legally passing, merging into traffic, negotiating intersections, etc.). You read that correctly - autonomously means that the car is driving itself. Carnegie Mellon won the competition in just over 4 hours. UCF, operating on a very small budget, made it 2 hours through the course and then went off track due to a bug in the GPS system.


Actually, the car was on the last part of the tour. The first part of our tour was of the Computer Vision Lab. The students are involved in some very interesting projects, such as an image tracking application that can track a target (person or vehicle). One use for the technology is to locate a person or vehicle in a video feed and track it's movement for surveillance purposes. I'm looking for opportunities to work with them on upcoming projects.

Peace and blessings,
John

I leave for Burundi, Africa on July 23rd for a 2 week mission trip. We will fly out of Orlando on United to Dulles airport and then we take Ethiopian Air to Addis, Ababa. We stay overnight in Addis and then travel to Bujumbura, Burudi.

While there, I will be teaching a 2 day Peacemaking seminar where I will teach a group of pastors principles of conflict resolution. The teaching materials come from Peacemaker Ministries. I was able to have the lesson translated into the native language, which will make it easier for the translators. I have only taught with a translator once before, while in Haiti, and that was a short lesson, so this will be an entirely new experience for me.

We will also be helping stucco some of the new homes that have been built. The photos below show what the mud brick homes look like. During rainy season, these homes do not stand up well to the elements, so our goal is to stucco them with cement to protect them from the rain.

We will also have the opportunity to meet with church leaders, people living in the area, and with some of the government leaders. Our main purpose there is to bring hope to people who represent one of the poorest countries in the world. Burundi is at the bottom of the list in terms of per capita GDP.

I have decided to trust God for my expenses for the trip, which will run about $3000 for the airfare, food, lodging, vaccinations, and other expenses. The airfare alone is $2190. I had planned to use part of my refund from the tax stimulus checks the government is sending out to pay for the airfare. To my surprise, I checked my savings account today, and the IRS deposited $2100 into my account! I don't think it's a coincidence that the amount is almost exactly what I need for airfare.

More importantly, Kim and I have been raising money to pay for the pastor's transportation costs, food, lodging, translation, and conference rental fee for the 2 day conference. The average cost per pastor is $80. So far we have raised over $1400. There is no cap on the number of pastors we can invite, so any additional money that comes in will automatically go toward bringing more pastors to the Peacemaker's Conference.

Thank you for your prayers and support.

Peace and blessings,
John

Vaccinations (ouch!) and New Photos

I'm getting ready for my trip to Burundi, Africa on July 23rd. One of the requirements for going on the trip is getting up-to-date on vaccinations. In fact, they won't even let you in the country without the yellow fever vaccine. So today I went to get yellow fever (a live vaccine!), Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis), and my first round of Hep B. I also had the doctor give me a prescription for malaria pills and some typhoid fever pills. The doc went through the list of do's and don'ts - like don't swim there because they have parasites, be careful what you eat, drink only bottled water, etc. I've been to Haiti twice, so I try to take this seriously. I have known people who have gotten very sick in these countries, so it's not something for us weak immune system Americans to take lightly. I got sick both times I was in Haiti.

In case you are not sure where Burundi is, I included a map below. I'll blog some more as I get closer to leaving. By the way, the Tdap hurt the worst. My arm still hurts from the shot. The other two didn't seem to affect me. The good news is that I'm OK for 10 more years!




On another subject, I have a photo to share. The photo below is of Elizabeth (14), Joshua (8) and Andrea (11). Joshua is 44 pounds now and he is gradually gaining weight and getting taller. Andrea turns 12 next Monday.


Tomorrow I have 2 phone interviews with potential new hires, a third phone interview on Friday, and I have a candidate coming in for an interview probably next week. I'm trying to fill 3 positions in my group. I need people with solid programming skills and physics/math experience. The work involves developing real-time physics effects for game-based training applications and live training systems for the Army. It's all cutting edge, very exciting work. You can search our jobs here. My open jobs are CFD-120, CFD-126 and CFD-127.

Peace and blessings,
John

Living in the Small

This is a thought that has been ruminating in my head for a while now. The thought is, why does it seem like day to day nothing really changes in life and then one day, something big happens? After pondering this thought for a while, I have come to the conclusion that this is God's way of developing faithfulness in us. If we are willing to live faithfully day by day, even when life throws us a curve ball, eventually we will see change. Sometimes that change comes in big ways.

I have come to call this "Living in the Small". I think we tend to relish the idea of "living in the large", which I translate as having everything go well with our finances, getting our way in life, never having any trouble. I call it this because it strikes me that we make ourselves out to be larger than life, more important than anyone around us. In contrast, Living in the Small means being faithful to whatever God has called us to do, regardless of how difficult it seems at the time. It means forsaking our own interests at times to serve God and others.

The whole idea of being rewarded for living faithfully is well supported in scripture. I've been studying Proverbs for a couple of months now, and I wrote down a few scriptures that say it better than I can -

"The plans of the diligent lead surely to advantage." Prov 21:5
"A faithful man will abound with blessings." Prov 28:20
"He who trusts in the Lord will prosper" Prov 28:25

I think Solomon knew what he was talking about. Instead of getting discouraged when life moves along slowly and nothing seems to change, I'm going to remember these verses and purposefully live faithfully day by day, knowing that things will change.

Peace and blessings,
John