Status Update

Okay, it has been a while since I last wrote, so I think it is about time go give a little update.

I am no longer in Hawaii. I September of last year I moved out to Oregon to start school at the University of Oregon. Originally I was planning on getting a Ph.D., but I decided that I am not convinced that I want to get a Ph.D. at UO, so now I am working on a Masters degree in Computer Science.

This semester I decided to take Artificial Intelligence, Distributed Systems, and Teaching Effectiveness. I have been enjoying all of the classes, but I have been busy writing a lot of programs. I think the most exciting so far has been my group project in Distributed Systems where I have been working on a network based game. The project is currently being hosted on Sourceforge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/netspacewar/ so that we get extra resources like a Subversion database for version control. It also makes it easier to make decisions about which software libraries to include when you know what the final license is before you release anything other than SVN exports.

In the Artificial Intelligence class I have written a few problem solving programs. Two programs I wrote are agents that play Connect 4. They both use different methods, one is a reflex agent and basically looks for situations where it can win or block the enemy, then places pieces there. The other is more advanced and uses reflex moves for things that make sense, but it also does some searching to see what moves will cause problems in the future. For my term project I plan to write a set of AI agents to play Nine Men's Morris. I think this will be a lot of fun.

In addition to taking classes, I am also teaching two classes at Northwest Christian University. I am teaching a Microsoft Office 2007 class and a Web Design class. Microsoft Office 2007 is interesting because it uses a new format to store data that is much like the Open Document Format that was standardized as ISO/IEC 26300:2006. Not that teaching this class is about file formats, but I just have more interest in office suite file formats. I still have my OpenOffice.org Utility Library project on Sourceforge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/ooolib/ and I enjoy playing with it every once in a while.

The Web Design class is fun, but it is a little bit difficult because I am limited by the syllabus. The syllabus was written by a previous teacher who have to leave suddenly, and I was given the teaching position with the instruction to follow the syllabus. Normally that would not be so bad, but the syllabus moves through the material too slowly and focuses on material that I think is mostly obsolete. I would really like to teach the students more of modern web design based more on things like JavaScript and less on things like frames and deprecated HTML tags, oh well. The class is still fun to teach.

My family is also doing well. We are all getting more used to Eugene, Oregon. Shannon and Latia are enjoying school at Yujin Gakuen, a public Japanese immersion school. Michael and Alexander enjoy playing at home and going to their playgroup. Akiko is excited because recently a fairly well known hula instructor has started teaching here in Eugene. Akiko is once again able to go to practice and enjoy learning.

Heavy Rains in Laie

Living in Hawaii I guess I should expect a little rain now and then. Since I live in a little town with a University in the middle, the University is the center of many peoples lives here. When the rain starts, one of the first places to really fill up is the large field in the front of the University. Almost instantly, the field starts filling with students who would rather play in a muddy field than at the beach.


While I do not exactly enjoy going out and playing in the mud, it is interesting to watch others get soaked. I expected it to continue raining for a little while longer, but the rain just did not stop. In some reports, there are claims that there were upwards of 22 inches of rain that dropped on this little community in just three days. Most of that was on the last day after the ground was already soaked.

Roads turned to rivers and had to be closed. Since Hawaii is full of anti-development activists, there is only one road around the island. Maybe people are worried that more roads will bring more people from the mainland, and their forests will be lost. What ever the reason, the main road, Kamehameha, was closed in many places.


Of course, it was not just the roads. If the roads were all we had to worry about, that would be fine. We have lost our roads before, it probably happens once a month when someone gets tired or drunk and there is a head on collision. That can close the roads for hours.

No, the waters started coming up, and started to invade the neighboring houses. Fortunately, I live on slightly higher ground, so the waters did not get to my place. I do feel sorry for those who have to get carpet cleaners and power washers to clean out the dirty water.


The community really helped drain the waters from the above house. They started to use the dumpsters to take the water to a nearby ditch and dump it. Pumps also helped. It hours to drop the water level the two feet that appeared in half the time.