Providence seems to bring surprises at the most unexpected times. On Wednesday, December 30, my daughters and I arrived in Modesto to visit my family for the New Year's weekend. Upon my arrival, my sister handed me the local newspaper, folded open to the obituary page. It seems my high school choir director had lived her last years not too terribly far from Modesto, and had just passed into Glory. Her funeral was to be held the following day at the local cemetery.
My dad passed away in 1996, and it meant the world to me that people I had never met came forward to share their good experiences and memories of my father. They either did so by showing up at my mom's door, or by attending his service. After that experience, I realized that I wanted the families of those I know who died, always to know how special their loved one was to me. If I could not attend the service, I would try to send a card with a special story. So, it didn't take but a minute to decide to attend Mrs. Cothren's funeral.
Tonight, my three sisters and I sang at our local church for their annual Candlelight Christmas Eve Service. The song we chose to sing was "A Carol for Today". The song recounts the story of Christmas and asks us this challenging question: "Can we like the shepherds and angels say... Glory to God on high"? Christmas is not about Santa, presents, decorations, or even about visiting one's family. It's about God's incredible love for us. Love so strong that He was willing to come to earth as a baby to pay for our sins through his death and resurrection. So we on this night - as we should every night - praise God and say "Glory to God on High!"
National Instruments just announced that they have released the LabVIEW Education Edition software, which is focused on helping students learn how to program robots with software used in today's engineering industries.
For the past few months, I've had the privilege of beta testing this software as I learned more about LabVIEW. Having come from FIRST FLL, I had experience with both MINDSTORMS NXT-G and ROBOLAB, but LabVIEW was completely new to me. It's been really exciting to work on learning a new programming language. I feel that National Instruments and Tufts University did an outstanding job making the integration between FLL programming and FIRST programming easy.
This has been a really exciting experience for me and I definitely plan to continue learning LabVIEW.
Today, my sister and I rang in The Master's College 11th annual Bellfest, led by Artist in Residence Christine Anderson. (We're in the back row, at 1:19 on the video).
My sister and I had the double treat of ringing not only with our own church handbell choir, the Master's Hands, but also with Jubilation, one of the handbell choirs at The Master's College.
This is the last song that we rang. It was written by John F. Wade, arranged by Cynthia Dobrinski, and conducted by Christine Anderson.
I have only a few weeks left before my LabVIEW trial license expires, so I don't know if I will have time to create another video before it does. In any case, I really enjoyed working with LabVIEW and I met many friends along the way as I learned and shared what I was learning. I also had fun learning how to use Camtasia Studio to create the video tutorial as well.
(Disclaimer: I have permission to share this video, however, please note that the software I am using is still in beta and may look or work differently when it is released on November 9.)
Click on the link below to watch the tutorial video. (It's 11 minutes long.)
Today I took the time to play around with my Finale music composition software. Unfortunately, I bit off more than I could chew in trying to compose and arrange my own piece of music as I know very little about writing or arranging music. So, after two and a half hours of banging my head against the computer trying to create something playable, I was incredibly frustrated by the time I went to talk to my father.
My father listened to me as I told him all about my frustrations, then he suggested I try something different. He recommended taking the easiest children's song I could think of and arranging a simple piece - which I did. I chose the song "I've got the Joy Joy Joy Joy" by George Willis Cooke.
My Dad must have been in a ragtime mood because when I showed him my arrangement he challenged me to write something worthy of a ragtime pianist at Disneyland. I took his challenge and began to play around with it on the piano until I knew how I wanted it to sound. After that, the notes came easily and in twenty minutes I had finished my first ragtime piano duet. I hope you enjoy-joy-joy-joy this arrangement!
Providence seems to bring surprises at the most unexpected times. On Wednesday, December 30, my daughters and I arrived in Modesto to visit my family for the New Year's weekend. Upon my arrival, my sister handed me the local newspaper, folded open to the obituary page. It seems my high school choir director had lived her last years not too terribly far from Modesto, and had just passed into Glory. Her funeral was to be held the following day at the local cemetery. 
National Instruments 
For the past few months, I've had the privilege of beta testing this software as I learned more about LabVIEW. Having come from 
