A Day in The Life of Scott Hamilton

My car broke down again. It has been giving me trouble off and on for about a month now, but who can blame it. I have over 230,000 miles on it. It runs great when it is running. I have a mechanic friend looking at it this time as the automatic choke is causing fuel system problems and I'm not that good with first generation fuel injector technology. Hopefully my old beat up Crown Vic will get fixed over the weekend and I'll have a working car again. If not, does anyone know where I can buy another cheap car to get me through another year?

Busy Life

I have been really busy lately with ministry, work, and kids. I have not posted anything to my own blog in months and apologies to anyone who was regularly reading. You can check out our ministry blog and http://lphcgeckos.blogspot.com.

Our Ministry has Chosen a New Name

We are now the Geckos (God Exalting Christian Kids Obediently Serving).  "Salvation so easy a kid can have it"  Check out our new blog site at http://lphcgeckos.blogspot.com

Just testing iPhone app

I just downloaded an iPhone app for updating my blog and thought it might be fun to try it out. So far it seems to work okay. I wanted something I could use to update my blog at soccer games for up to the minute stats. I hope this will work. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Banks are Crazy

I have been dealing with banks all day today and have determined that they are crazy.  One bank has my address as General Delivery.  I ask them to change it to my PO Box and was told that they would need to know my physical address to change my mailing address from General Delivery to a PO Box.  I just don't understand,  I have to go the post office to pick up my mail in either case, but I can have a General Delivery Address with no physical address, but a PO Box requires a physical address.Another bank has been paid the late fees on my payments for several months now, and have not credited any of them to my account.  They have $35 worth of late fees marked as unpaid.  Instead they have been applying the late fees to my principle.  When I ask them why, they said, they cannot mark late fees as paid until the account is current.  Which means simply that if I never pay any payments on time I will wind up owing them over $5000 in late fees at the end of loan even though I paid every single one of them.Like I said banks are crazy.

My poor Car has seen better days.

I have the latest news from the mechanic now.  After spending 3 days diagnosing the issues with the fuel system we came to find out that the real problem was that the timing chain had slipped a link, which is causing the fuel injectors to fire early, or late, I am not sure which.  This is causing the car to idle too fast when cold and barely idle when it is hot.We have to play with timing every time in order to get it to start depending on if the engine is hot of cold.  It looks like I will be spending a day or two in the garage replacing a timing chain in hopes that nothing else is wrong once I get that part completed.Anyone feel like spending a couple days with me under the hood of '84 Vic?

SuperComputing09

I had a really great time at SuperComputing09. I meet a lot of really great people doing the same kind of research that I am interested in. It really made me miss the research aspects of my last job. I say a miss the research aspects, but I don't miss the tight deadlines, and stress level of the job. I am definitely enjoying the flexibility and low stress of my current position.Probably the most interesting thing to me about the conference was that having been out of the research angle for two years, it seems that nothing has really changed in the HPC industry. There are a few new products and a few new tools for the programmer, but overall the industry seems at a standstill.There have been vast improvements in the speed and durability of the hardware, and a few improvements in UI design over the past two years, but as for great changes in technology, there appears to be nothing new on the horizon, which is disappointing at best.It seems that the computer industry has taken the same bad turn that the auto industry took 60-70 years ago. Just like the suto industry put their focus on the internal combustion engine and hasn't deviated from it, the computer industry is now focused on two main architectures, the Intel or AMD core processors, and the Nvidia or ATI graphics processors. I group them together because thought they are slightly different in design, they follow the same basic principles of design just like the Internal combustion engines, there is not much difference in design any more when it comes to computer hardware.I hope that some innovative company will try something unique in the years to come like Motorola's distributed clock architecture that vanished as MacOS moved to Intel.

New Kids Church Directors

Ange and I just became the new directors of the Kidz4Christ ministry at Licking Pentecostal Holiness Church. It has been a fascinating adventure over the last couple of months. We have seen the ministry grow from seven children in attendance to over thirty. This required a big change in how we operated our Wednesday night kids program.Two weeks ago we changed from having everyone in the same room doing craft, snacks, teaching, and worship to splitting into three groups. We began to open with worship and announcements, and then split into small groups for teaching, snacks, and crafts. This has made things so much easier for our group of leaders. For one thing we are working with less than 10 students in a group in stead of having 30 students in a classroom all talking at once. It has allowed us to get to know the kids better, and created a much better environment for learning.I am excited to see where God takes this as we move forward. I have to admit that this particular area of ministry is not where I saw myself. Especially since I am the one in charge of the worship service. I haven't played an instrument in 15 years, and the last instrument I played was tuba. I have never been a singer at all, and clearly have no real gifting for music. But in spite of it all God is doing a great work as I have seen the kids grow in their desire to worship.Keep us in your prayers as we keep moving forward in the ministry God has placed us.Scott

Hay is Finally In.

We finally got all the square bales into the barn loft. We have quite a few more round bales to cut, rake, bale, and move to the barn lot, but all that is tractor work. Tractor work is still a hot job, but it takes a lot less muscle to operate a tractor than to carry hay bales.I really enjoy working on the farm a lot, but I am glad I am not counting on it for my primary source of income. You don't realize how much mark-up there is on beef until you start working with cattle ranchers. They get around $1.00-$1.50 a pound live weight for the beef. All said and done around $1100 for the average beef cow. By the time this amount of beef reaches the store shelves it average $3.50 a pound. Of course you have to figure in that a few hundred pounds are waste products and there is cost involved in the butchering, but all in all the wholesalers and retailers make more off the beef than the original farmer.I would have to sell 50 head of beef to make my salary not counting the cost of grain, hay, and equipment maintenance. Mom's little farm sells way less than that. Probably the reason she has yet to see a profit from it in 10 years.Well that's enough ranting about the poor farmers who struggle to make the bills each year, yet are so necessary for our nations survival.

How Satan Uses Our Past.

I had an interesting thought last night while lying in bed. It was brought on by something my son Elijah said as he was trying to get too sleep. Yesterday was his birthday, and it brought to his mind the thoughts of friends that he left behind when we moved from West Virginia to Missouri. He was crying because he missed his old friends, and was failing to think of all the new friends he has made since moving here. After reminding him of his new friends, and how much fun he had over the weekend and on his birthday, he was able to get too sleep.I thought about how often dwelling on the past keeps me up at night, or causes me grief, and realized that this is a tactic that Satan uses to distract us from God's plans, God's provisions, God's love, and God's peace. I thought about the Israelites as they were leaving Egypt and remember their grumbling and complaining, most of it involved how things were better in Egypt. They of course were not better in Egypt, Satan just like us to think the past was better than the present to trick us into thinking that we made some mistake to anger God and now he has forsaken us, left us to solve our own problems.When we buy into this lie, we make extra trouble for ourselves as we spend much of our time trying to figure out how to fix the past rather than living in the present.I am going to try to live more in the present and dwell less on the past.