Imagine a big, carpeted room with a large circle of tape in the middle of it.

In the circle are sweaty, straining men. Not a very pretty picture, is it?

This was the "guy's time" at the CRU Winter Retreat last weekend. First we had a free-for-all everyone-for-himself competition, and then they divided us up into groups of four.

Everyone was supposed to have at least one knee down at all times, unless you were yarding on someone, of course. The goal was to stay inside the circle. And during the group matches, if any one member was thrust outside, the whole team bit the dust. Thus, it behooved us to stay together.

It was a war!

My concept of camaraderie was refreshed and heightened, because in the second group match, I was under heavy attack, my body being yanked and tugged (to gentle of a word) all over the place. The only way I stayed in was holding on with all my strength to our biggest member. If it wasn't for him, I would've been out quickly. I desperately needed him in this battle. I couldn't have made it without him.

Our team ended up being eliminated in the middle of both matches, but I came away with camaraderie and accountability fresh on my mind. Those things, and several rug burns.

Abruptly changing the subject.

I'm almost speechless after perusing this website. Here's an example of the stuff these folks write about. I'm shaking my head.

Santa's Evil!

I mean, it's not good to lie to your children about Santa, but...this...?

This is truly remarkable.

A bishop of a Christian denomination (Episcopalian) said this: "If you must make a choice between heresy and schism, always choose heresy."

His name is Peter James Lee, and this is a quote from a speech he made. I don't know if there's any way this was taken out of context or anything, but it is absolutely unbelievable to me that that could be said by a Christian clergyman.

What do you have left? A group of people unified...for what? Peace and happiness? Based on what? Feelings?

Good luck.

So I'm participating in a research project.

Here's the official title: Scheduling of Jobs with Sequence-Dependent Setups on Unrelated Parallel Machines.

Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? Let's break it down.

"Scheduling of Jobs" is pretty straightforward. Imagine that you have several machines available to do jobs that come in periodically. The machines have different capabilities, which mean that one machine may be able to complete a certain job in less time than another machine.

"Sequence-Dependent Setups." This is one of the things that makes this original research. There are certainly set-up times associated with jobs. But "Sequence-Dependent" means that the setup time on a machine will be different depending on the previous job that machine processed. So if Machine1 just processed Job1, and was going to process Job2 next, there would be a setup time of, say, 3 minutes. But if Machine1 had just processed Job3, the setup time would be 5 minutes.

"Unrelated" means they're not identical, they have different capabilities. One machine may be able to process a certain job in 10 minutes, another machine may take 25 to do the same job, and another machine may not physically have the dimensions to handle the job.

All "Parallel" means is that the machines can process jobs at the same time, as opposed to a series relationship which would require that a job be done at one machine before another.

Oh yeah, another thing. Each job has a weight and a due date. If the weight is 3, it's very important. If the weight is 1, it's not a very high priority. The due date denotes when the job is supposed to be done.

My partner and I, with guidance from my professor, need to devise a solution that minimizes the total weighted tardiness. For instance, if a job was completed 3 days late and it had a weight of 2, it's total weighted tardiness would be 3 * 2 = 6.

Trust me, it's very fun stuff.

I'm a Mennonite, and so I have this environmental influence toward the practical. But I lean the other way. I love the theoretical and the analytical, the idea that we could model stuff in the real world with math, for instance.

Do you see what I mean when I say that this is a very high-level way of looking at a problem? It's far removed from actually getting down on the plant floor, getting greasy, setting the milling machine and running the aluminum through it. Do you even run aluminum through milling machines? I assume you can, though I don't have near enough knowledge or experience with milling machines to know.

That's the type of thing you'd study as a Manufacturing Engineer, which, though similar to Industrial Engineering, has a little more of a low-level feel to it.

Tom, is this elitest to you? It might seem sort of that way, because it's a very analytical way to solve a problem. The risk you run is not connecting with the people that are actually doing the work on the floor. They know so much more about the processes themselves. Operations Research people (or IEs) just take the data and form models that hopefully will aid the floor by giving them guidance in their decision-making.

This problem was influenced by a real-world situation at NASA, by the way.

What do you know for sure?

I know that I’m not the center of the universe.

But it sure feels like God is sort of guiding events in Byran’s favor.

I’ve been thinking about this thing of sharing my faith pretty seriously for quite awhile. And now, all of the sudden, stuff is happening to teach, challenge, and strengthen me in that area.

I’d come to the conclusion that I needed to be better equipped to share my faith.

So lo and behold I hear a great talk on the subject, I get some practical ideas from the speaker, and now…now there’s this “Slay the Giants” week at CRU where we’re encouraged to step out of our comfort zone and actually make some real goals about sharing our faith in the next week.

It’s very, very exciting. I can’t wait to see what God is going to do, even though when it comes right down to it, there will be some tough moments, some uncomfortable times for sure.

Then on the way home someone (was it God or Satan?) brought to mind an incident years ago where I was deceitful. I deflated like a cheap beach ball. My face literally flushed.

I just wonder if it was Satan.

If it was God, then I thank Him for bringing something that needed to be dealt with to my mind.

It’s sort of odd to think that I don’t know if a thought was from God or Satan. Sometimes my conscience—tending toward the oversensitive—makes me wonder about things like that. I really have no way of telling. Or maybe I do. I don’t know.

Two more midterms down.

The Visual Basic exam was pretty much as advertised. If you memorized well, you would probably do well. I did ok. I'm not really worried about that class. There's a lot of grad students and I think he does a different curve for the undergrads. I think there were something like 136 points on the test.

Prediction: 116 or 85%.

Design of experiments was fine. Great in fact. I could've aced it, but there were probably a couple of small things. There usually are.

Prediction: 97%.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen! It's time for another edition of "Predict-the-score-of-Byran's-exams"!

I took my Manufacturing Processes Exam this morning. I didn't finish it, I thought I had more time than I did and I was in no hurry at all when I should've been scrambling madly.

Out of 115 points, I left like 12 points blank, so there's about 10% right there.

Prediction: 93 or 81%.

When I think I bombed I usually end up doing better than I thought, so we'll hope for the best.

And the other thing, is I obsess about tests, especially of I perceive bombage. This, I think, goes back to a security issue for me. I care too much about my grades, my identity is wrapped up in them. So to think that I bombed a test borders on devastating. I literally have to reorient myself, get some perspective, and move forward.

In the past bombing tests has caused me to redouble my efforts in the class to try to make up for it. That'll probably happen again.

I just hate this feeling.

But it'll pass, it always has before.

I don't like small talk, at least in many situations. I find myself almost disdaining people as they engage in it. Like, c'mon people, it's obvious that all you're doing is posturing and putting your best--though unsteady--foot forward. It may be a pride issue for me, because it's like I try to detach myself and place myself above the small talkers.

Did I say, at some point in my life, that one thing I liked about engineering is that you don't have to memorize stuff? Then I guess software development is not engineering. Or maybe it's just the teacher.

But whatever the case, I've got a midterm in IE411 that is closed book, closed notes, not even a crib sheet. Just 8 modules of power point slides to do my best and memorize.

I'm borrowing liberally from a speaker I heard this weekend, Todd Langerveld:

There are several ways Christians typically react when faced with evil and lost souls around them.

Sometimes they're pushy. For instance, a group of people came to the heard of the OSU campus last term, waved signs and yelled that pretty much everybody (including Christians who went up to talk to them) were going to hell. One could question if this were even evangelism, but it at least was an attempt. "Pushy" might be the hell-fire-and-brimstone street preachers that are not afraid to get in one's face. This has its good points, because it realizes that the message of the Gospel is urgent and that we must be bold in proclaiming it. However, it has definite weak points too. You're going to turn many people off to your message if you don't respect the people you're trying to reach.

Then there's the other extreme that you could call "passive" evangelism. This is what many tend toward because they're so afraid of being "pushy." But it's probably just as bad. The mindset here is that "hey, we'll just live our lives in a Godly way and hope that people will see the difference and ask about our faith; then we'll tell them." This is what I gravitate toward. The strength in this is that we respect people, we don't force it on them by telling them stuff that they absolutely don't want to hear anyway. But it's weak regarding the urgency of the Gospel.

There is a happy medium, and it's what Mr. Langerveld proposed was the Biblical model. This takes the strengths of both extremes and minimizes their weaknesses.

I forget the passage he took this out of, but it was a Pauline epistle.

By the way, this is extremely exciting stuff to me, because I think it's going to open up places in my life that I've never tread before.

To sum it up:

1. We must pray that God will give us opportunities.
2. We must clearly speak the Gospel, the "mystery of Christ."
3. We must live "with wisdom toward outsiders."
4. We must speak with grace, seasoned with salt.

I asked him after the service about ways to actually initiate conversations with people that you know, and I'm excited about what he said. He likes the direct method. I'd almost given up on the idea that it was a good idea to directly initiate conversations about the Gospel with unbelievers. But I have renewed perspective.

I saw a girl in a little study desk thing in the library. She had a laptop and she was playing minesweeper. Then about 20 or 25 minutes later I went by there again. She was playing minesweeper. Again, or still.

Short and pithy. I'm looking for something short and pithy, because I've already spent too much time here at school not studying.

I got nothing.

I've got lots to say, but not the time to say it.

My life is like my room: a mess.

Not in the real bad sense of the word, just in the sense that it's not very tidy right now. Lots of loose ends, lots of things I need to do. I'm just getting further and further behind, it seems.

Good thing I don't have a girlfriend. Ha ha.

I just have this intuitive sense that they would require time of a person.

What an incredibly frazzling day.

And I was just telling someone this weekend that this term seemed a little less busy than usual. That's a joke.

There was a man, once, who was preparing for medical school at Oregon State. Med school had become a great, great desire of his heart, so much so that he was afraid that even if God told him to go a different direction he couldn’t. He almost felt like he was in too deep to back out. He had invested so much of his life, his time and effort into this endeavor. But see, there was no indication that God didn’t want him to go ahead with his plans.

But still, as a Christian, he was concerned about that, and he should have been.

I see myself in that scenario, to some extent. And I can see other areas of my life that I tend toward clenched fists as it were. Grades, sports.

It’s unfortunate when a person must make a choice between two or more good options.