The Ohio State Fair!
(C) Wed August 31 13:16:27 EDT 1999 Venturing Crew 369
|
Garage SaleJames D. CorderBoy Scouts of America, Venturing Crew 369 will be having their second annual Garage Sale Saturday October 2nd 8:00am to 3:00pm. Please bring your stuff to donate to the Church on Friday October 1st between 7:00pm & 11:00 Open HouseJames D. CorderTuesday September 14th 7:30p.m. Boy Scouts of America, Venturing Crew 369 will be having their Open House to interview potential members. 369 has room for 25 new students in their UNIX for Programmers Class. Membership is open to young men and women between 14 [and in high school] and 20 years of age. Cost is $25.00(1) a year. Interested members should send E-Mail to exp369@www.venturingbsa.com to request space for them and their parents. Thank youVenturing Crew 369Venturing Crew 369 would like to thank Ben & Janet Simms for their financial contribution to the program. Your kindness and generosity is deeply appreciated. |
|
Up-an-Coming Crew Expenses12/01/99 Crew Charter $30.00 12/01/99 Crew Insurance $175.00 12/31/99 Registration $335.00 Monthly The Adventure $75.00 Up-an-Coming Member Expenses09/01/99 Registration $25.00 09/28/99 Book $25.00 06/01/00 Summer Camp $175.00 |
||
When are you going to retire?James D. Corder
To begin, think with the end in mind. Ok, When are you going to retire. It is as simple as that. Pick a date! 30 years from now. Uck. But that is what most people think about. Why not at the age of 30? Now for the hard part: "HOW?" Many people dream of winning the lottery. All right, I must admit that I have been known to purchase a ticket or two in my life time. If it is over $24,000,000.00 and it is a nice day out, and I am at the bank, and I feel like walking next door to purchase a ticket. Side note: Are the odds between $1 in 40,000,000 and $100 in 40,000,000 so different that it is worth an extra $99?, I think not! I am willing to bet that many of the millionaire lottery winners are broke once the money stops coming in. Then what is the secrete? Self Discipline! Pay God first and you second taxes third and life last! Give your 10% to God [charitable giving] [15% to retirement] [pay your taxes] then with what ever is leftover you can live on! The problem is that nothing is ever left over:-( Then you will not miss it if it is taken out of your salary first! Even though the average income of our graduate is $60Kyr, I have chosen to work with $25Kyr the average wage of the American Household. Just as the Lottery Winners say "next year" the worker says I will worry about retirement next year. Unfortunately, due to the power of compounding interest, by missing the first year's investment of $3,750.00 it will cost you $61,685.00 30 years from now. Waiting two years will cost you $117,000.00. Start NOW! Start putting money away EVERY paycheck! |
It is all about DisciplineJames D. CorderThe Ohio Lottery $24,000,000.00
I know that you don't pay the 7.51%*2 SS taxes on the full amount, but it is a good starting point! If you won $24,000,000.00 in the Ohio Lottery you could take twenty six equal payments of $923,077.00 or one lump sum of $11,212,565.00.After 48.3 percent taxes you would have either $477,046.19 a year for 26 years or $5,794,653.59. Assuming you got 10% interest on your money, paid 48.32% in taxes, and gave 10% in charitable contributions and put half back into the principal to offset inflation, you would have either $9,861.50 or $119,787.08 in spendable income. If you do not have any self control the one lump sum is the best way to go. Put all the money in investments and live off the interest. If you could continue to work for another 8 years and put the money away and NOT touch the principal then payments are better. Unfortunately, most people know that they are going to get another large check next year and spend all of the principal. There is nothing left over at the end of the 26 years. Many of the lottery winners are now broke and not marketable in the job arena. Guess what. Your pay check is the same way. Far to many people think that they have many years left. They spend this weeks pay check knowing that next week is only seven days away. They go in debt for a house and car they can not afford. They max their credit cards out and ask for a higher limit. Start putting 15% of your income away every paycheck in a 401K or other investment vehicles, NOW! You will be amazed what it looks like 10 years form now. If you say you can't afford it, then how will you be able to afford to retire? |
The Ohio State FairJames D. CorderThe Ohio State Fair is more than an exhibition of our abilities. The Ohio State Fair gives our youth members an extremely rare chance to hone their communications skills. All day long total strangers from every walk of life come to our display and ask the youth about the 369 program. The youth must be able to converse with both the Computer Engineer and the technological neophyte. Many times simultaneously! Unfortunately, some people get their jollies by verbally attacking the youth in the Scouting Program. While 99.9% of the population is civil that one tenth of one percent makes the day interesting. I am EXTREAMLY proud of 369. They handled themselves with dignity and a level of professionalism that may corporations would give their Intellectual Properties to have. The overwhelming number of compliments that I received on behalf of the youth makes the time invested in the program well worth while! The youth had 30 minutes to build a multi platform, multi OS local area network. The display had to be up-an-running by 8:00am, continuously until 9:00pm. A 21" CG3 monitor was set up as a keyos displaying over 1,000 digital pictures of the Crew in action. On another 21" CG3 Sun Workstation the Crew Web Page was available for access by all Fair goers. The Crew had to rewrite all 3,500+ files to be self contained. Since this was a local area network, no outbound connections or links could be made. This was a major feet since 369's web page has over 28,000 links to other pages. Once again I would like to say how proud I am of 369!
More Fair Photos |
Perl Quick Shuffle ScriptHo-Sheng HsiaoI had a problem. I have a collection of MP3s stored on a computer, and I wanted to play them over the network. Players exist that takes a URL, then plays the MP3 while it streams across the network. For a personal collection, this has the advantage where my desktop computer does not have the capacity to hold my collection. However, the player I chose to use does not have a decent shuffling functionality. I just sorted through a few Perl documentation, and came up with this script. The idea is simple. Perl has a sort function. I suspect it uses a Quick Sort algorithm. But no matter -- the most important point is that Perl lets you define exactly what kind of a comparison you want to use. That is, the sorter does not need to know exactly what you are sorting, as long as you tell it if you can tell it any item is less than, greater than, or equal to any other item. This is called the comparison function. When we order a deck of cards, we want it in a specific order. When we want to shuffle a deck of cards, we don't really care what order it is in. In fact, we don't want there to be any order. So, simply, to shuffle a list without writing a whole lot of code, we can just use a random number generator as the comparison function.
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Create a random seed.
# (From PerlFunc man page)
srand ( time ^ $$ ^ unpack "%L*", `ps axww | gzip` );
# Read in a list from standard in
# and into F
while (<STDIN>) {
push @F, $_;
}
# Shuffle the list. This will give
# two values, forcing two items to
# be always greater than, less than,
# but not equal to. Shuffled list
# is dumped into NEW
@NEW = sort {
( rand 5 ) - 1.5
} @F;
# Print out the list to standard out
foreach $myline (@NEW) {
print $myline ;
}
In the first version, I used a comparison function of "rand 3 - 1" which would return -1, 0, and 1. The shuffled list that resulted was a nice random distribution at the beginning and end of the list. The middle section was still in the same (alphabetical) order. The current formula works a lot better. It forces a greater than or a less than (-1 and 1, respectively). This script took me about ten minutes to concoct. It is also incredibly inefficient. It goes through the list in three passes. Also, to make sure the list is thoroughly shuffled, I chained together several shuffles with pipes. This is somewhat inefficient, especially for the larger list. But since I'd rather enjoy listening to MP3s rather than spending my time figuring out how to write an efficient shuffle, it is actually an efficient use of my time (the computer is doing all the hard work). |
Tri-Creek Fall CamporeeRoy Case 235-7026The fall Camporee will take place from October 15-17 at Tar Hollow State Park. Contact Roy Case at 235-7026 for registration and further information. |
JOTA 1999Ben Hart benjh@worldnet.att.netAs always the Jamboree on the Air will be held the third week in October. In the 1998 JOTA, we had seven sites operating. The effort of those who operated a site was effective enough for Simon Kenton Council to be recognized worldwide. In the annual report, we had four photographs printed and two news articles. In addition, I have been asked to submit an article to be a chapter of a book entitled, "1999 Proceedings of the National Educational Workshop". It is not too early to start planning for your involvement. If you would like to be a part of JOTA `99, please contact me: |
State FairHo-Sheng HsiaoOn August 11th, we the Venturing Crew went to the State Fair. We were there to present to all visitors who we were, and provide an example of the Scouting program. The booth the members manned also hosted other youth groups -- for examples, 4H and Girl Scouts. What strikes me was the sheer diversity and number of organizations dedicated towards youth mentorship. The fair coordinators stuffed an entire pavillion wall to wall with booths. Though the crowd (or lack of crowds) could have been better, those who do visit us were usually facinated. We brought with us a stack of Sun IPCs. Two of them displayed our web page and a photo album. Another was suppose to drive the shell-based Merlin game. The terminals that were working the night before our exhibition refused to work in the morning after. So we made do with the Java Merlin. This wasn't our first exhibition at a conference or a fair. However, being this close to our First Nighter, it gave us youth members an opportunity to talk about our crew. This convention also gave us a chance to practice explaining to people what our Venturing Crew is about, and what the Venturing program is. Surprisingly, there are relatively few people who knows about Venturing. A chance to talk one-on-one with the fair-goers prepared me for the phone interviews with principals and counselors later during recruiting. Since it was often easier to talk to a person who is there, I would visualize talking to someone as if they were there, instead of on the other side of the phone line. As the advisors and our Boy Scouts exhibit leaders have commented, there were often visitors who came year after year to the fair just to see the Boy Scouts exhibit. One man came by and quickly had our group facinated with ancedotes and commentary. He was old, but he was also wise. He told us about his experiences as a soldier, and as a person in general. We learned something too, that day. All and all, this event gave me some positive experience -- a nice way to cap off the year before elections and First Nighter. |
State FairNeil CoplinEvery year when the State Fair rolls around, Boy Scouts set up their displays in the Lauche building. Every year, thousands of people pile into the fair. Every year, Boy Scouts will invite units to show off what they're doing. This year, we were the only Venture Crew to be invited. During our trip to the fair, we had two priorities. To keep people happy by paying attention to them, and to have a bunch of fun ourselves. Because of the number of people we had going to the fair, we were able to spend part of our day browsing around the fair. Free tickets to the fair is always something fun. While I'm not one to go on all the nauseating rides that they have at the fair, I loved the classic car show that they had there. I just wish I would have remembered to go see the pig races (because that is what the fair is all about!). For our display, we set up a tower of Sun IPCs. We had one of them running our web page, which a few people ended up browsing though. A second was running through our photo album, in order to show everyone what we've been up to. Unfortunatly, the other two ended up sitting idle, since the connection from the IPCs to the terminals didn't want to work. Computers aren't everything though, so we also had a copy of the book we teach from, scrapbooks from past years, and old copies of "The Adventure." In the end, we all had a blast. Much of the day, it was rather slow, so we had time to plan upcoming events. All of the people that we met were really interesting too. One of the people I talked too took his troop up to Canada for a fishing trip. He then did his 4H project on it, and he took home first prize. I can't wait till next year! The Ohio State FairJason CunnynghamThe States largest food court with side attractions is how I would best describe it. My personal favorite aspect of the fair was the car exhibit, which featured many beautiful old cars that had been refurbished to a level of quality that was awesome! My personal favorite being the Ford ThunderBirds which in my mind are the greatest of the classics. A fellow Scout convinced me that the best part of the fair was the pig races. We had a great time, I really thought that our booth was looking very nice. We had set up our web page to running on Sun Microsystems Solaris 7 and we had another Sun scrolling through pictures of Venturing Crew 369 in action. The only part of the fair that wasn't a blast was the aching feet after a day of standing around all day, but talking to fair goers made it all worth wile. |
Rivals Challenge UNIX ComputersJames D. CorderIn the 8/18/1999 Columbus Dispatch 8G an article by the same name from the Associated Press, proclaims that the new "eightway server" that links eight microprocessors to match the performance of the higher-priced computers will threaten the UNIX giant Sun Microsystems. This comment only goes to prove, once again, what technical neophytes are members of the press. Earlier this year Microsoft announced that they could support a 1 Terabyte Database but stated few people on the planet would ever need such a large file. Moreover, Intel still proclaims the speed of their chips in Mhz and thinks that 500Mhz is fast. In 1992 I build my fist "fourway server" a risc-chip based system running SunOS 4.1.3. In 1994 I build my first "twelveway server" a risc-chip based system running Solaris 2.4. Later that year I proposed to build a "sixtyfourway server" utilizing the new Cray-Sun server, later to be known as an E-10,000. In 1992 I was trained to program in Progress 4GL by a gentleman that maintained a 5 Terabyte Database. Later in my career I oversaw a staff that maintained a 12 Terabite Database. In the early `90s Digital Equipment came out with their 600Mhz Risc Chip. In the October 1998 issue of The Adventure(2) we talked about Sun Microsystems reaching the 1GHz speed and expect to reach the 1.5Ghz speed by 2002. Now I ask you, what is better an "8(500Mhz)-way" system or a "1,680(1Ghz)-way" system? Moreover, the RISC chip is 64bits while the Intel is 32bits. Therefore, the speed inside the chip is exponentially faster. While most neophytes think that clock speed of the chip is the end-all-be-all measurement of a computer capacity, true technoids know that it is the speed between I/O devices that truly slow down a system let-alone a network. Therefore, once again, Sun Microsystem has the Intel world beat with its Gigaplane(3),3.2 GB/sec. In my opinion, the only thing that Sun Microsystems has to worry about form the Intel world is the new "Beowulf" clusters. Unfortunately, most people will not hear about this since it runs under one of the 78 flavors of UNIX "Linux". And therefore, Microsoft will not use their wonderful marketing department to proclaim this new technology. "SGI(4)... today announced that it will install the company's first 128-processor Linux(R) cluster at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC)......Ohio scientists, educators and engineers can begin to use the state's largest Beowulf cluster as a starting point into scalable high-performance computing." Pixar(5) Selects Sun Microsystems as Exclusive Provider of Rendering Solution For `Toy Story 2' 120 Sun Enterprise(TM) 4500 Servers and 4.5 Terabyte Sun StorEdge(TM) Arrays Power Pixar's Newest Feature Film "We chose Sun as the rendering platform for our mission-critical film productions because their systems are reliable and easy to maintain,'' said Greg Brandeau, vice president of Computer Operations for Pixar Animation Studios. ``Using Sun technology and powerful CPUs, we're able to produce a richer, more complex film in a shorter amount of time.'' ``Pixar has been a loyal Sun customer since its first feature film, `Toy Story,''' said John Shoemaker, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Desktops and Server Systems, Sun Microsystems. ``What a thrill it is knowing that Sun technology is once again helping Pixar paint the silver screen with its amazing visions. Needless to say, we're big fans.'' With the Sun E4500 capacity of 14 CPUs each Pixar's Sun Farm will have the capacity to be a "1,680way server/cluster" New Battle In MessagingMicrosoft is expected to announce that Prodigy, Tribal Voice, and PeopleLink will become alias against AOL, which is refusing to allow MSN's subscribers to communicate with the 43 million users of its dominant service.WOW! It is good to see someone take on the MS Monopoly. Rumors within the UNIX world have always stated that some day they would begin to stop traffic of MicroSoft only networks across the UNIX based and controlled InterNet. In the past, UNIX based ISP have prevented pornographic sites and Spamming sites from crossing their routers and firewalls in attempt to provide a "better" environment for their users. Microsoft has for years prevented any standard that is not theirs from working on their platform. [See the JAVA legal battles with Sun Microsystems, and those of Explorer / Netscape]. This is the fist time, on a large scale, that someone has prevented a Microsoft standard from working within "their" standard. Who I feel sorry for are all the people that have bought into the Microsoft Only world and will someday have their E-Mail and/or web site traffic prevented to cross major backbones in the world. Ok, I am looking forward to that day:-) |
Secretary-TreasurerHo-Sheng HsiaoI have two main objectives this year for the Crew -- besides the personal achievement of obtaining the Ranger rank, First, I intend to expand the core responsibilities of the youth officers and leaders through executing my position as Secretary-Treasurer. Second, I want our Crew to provide leadership for the other Crews in the Simon Kenton Council -- mainly since there is a serious lack of youth Council-level leadership. Through our discussions, we the officers have agreed that our roles, as defined by our offices are all nice and well. Certainly, we should fulfill the duties and responsibilities of our job description -- the ones we write. However, none of us work in the way where we see our job as a "I do my part, you do yours." We form a team. A broader vision keeps us together, and often, our roles overlap each other. One assumes roles and responsibilities. I have the fortune to work with my colleagues, Bill Schanitz and Neil Coplin who understands this concept. The combination of the Treasurer is much the same. This includes accounting the fund raising handled by youth, and the temporary "Munchie Funds" during Munchie Nights or Pizza Nights. While the office of Secretary seem so much like paper pushing, that's hardly the case. Every organization has a legacy that provides it inertia. Though this inertia locks some established organizations into inflexibility, it also provides stability and longevity of the group. Specifically, I am starting with the minutes of our meetings. A written record available on the Web and Newsletters provides posterity. That's a lesson I learned in Summer Camp, one I fully intend to apply. Spoken words may fade; written words remain time and again. Having written records lead to my second objective. Often, when finding some activities to do, we really don't have many inspirations or ideas that hits you in your gut. Our Advisor has been there, and done many of the activities on our program. With all due respects, having your peers do something works on brains at a different level. There's a world of difference of following footsteps in the sand, and beating a track with someone besides you -- that someone may help, that someone may rival, that someone may hinder. I hope it is to help, and so I help. Thus, once our membership increases this year, and our core responsibilities expand, we would now have enough resources to be a resource for other Venturing Crews. This includes publicity at the Junior Acheivement and State Fair conventions. This also includes staging our own convention. While we're at it, those meetings that we've kept records of provide the basis for an online resource for other Venturing Crews. Each of us can trade ideas for programs, see and be seen. As the hosting Venturing Crew, we would present seminars and plan extra activities during the convention. But before that heppens, we youth have to bootstrap ourselves up to that next level. That. we'll keep in mind. |
Vice PresidentNei CoplinAs Vice President of the Crew this year, I have two main initiatives that I will be pushing in addition to my normal duties. The first is making sure that the youth in the group are active and having a good time. The second is getting the crew more involved with activities outside of the computer world. While I was just elected, these initiatives are still tangible dreams. It's a good thing that the people in the Crew are able to make our dreams come true. The first initiative is to make sure that the crew is active. Each crew member has responsibilities of writing an article and voting on the STWA each month. Often times they don't do this. I will try to find a way to make these responsibilities more enjoyable. I hope that getting the crew to do these responsibilities, they will realize that they are preparing them for the real world, where things will be expected of them, without them getting constant supervision. Keeping the youth active doesn't just mean having them do their responsibilities however. There is so much more to life than just work. We all plan to have a lot of fun. By making sure we have plenty of social events for the crew, we will be having a lot of fun. This means that I need to make sure these events are appealing to the members of the crew. The second initiative is to get the crew more involved with activities outside the computer world. This includes volunteer service, fund raisers, and the outdoors (we are Boy Scouts). Though we all like computers, there is so much else to do and that has to be done. I for one would like to see work toward advancement in the scouting ranks. We currently have three of us working on our Bronze Award, but I would like to see more people working for this achievement. It is this sort of advancement that shows that you have gained the skills employers are looking for. It is this that shows your dedication. Having people work towards their Ranger Award will be the focus of our outside computer activites. |
Footnotes |
This page has been accessed $pagecount"; ?> times. Since Wed Aufust 31 13:17:35 EDT 1999