Badge seminar

Here's 11-year-old Christopher's story of his first Boy Scout badge seminar.

Me and Mommy left Small Town on Saturday. It was October 25th, the day after Ghost Train in Monticello. When we reached the county seat, I got to ride in a German car for the first time; A black BMW! We soon got to Champaign. After a while, me and my new friend Terran headed to Space Exploration. The badge counseler, whose last name was Washburn, showed us a video of the Eagle landing on the Moon in '69!

Next, we designed our own unmanned missions and bases. I can't remember, but I think someone's base looked like a staircase!

My unmanned mission had an unmanned spacecraft called Rhea. Over Saturn, Rhea would launch a probe to collect samples frome the gas giant's rings. The probe was hexagon-shaped and had retractable landing struts, a grabber, and a shovel. When finished, the probe would return to Rhea, which would head back for Earth.

My base was named after the Dodge Stratus, which, as a coincidence, was the same model as the car Mr. Washburn drove! It showed the USS Enterprise docked near a building. Various droids were wandering around the base. An alien vessel based on a ship from a game John's played called Star Wings was battling the USS Federation.

Next, we built model rockets, with some difficulty. Then we went outside. Mr. Washburn set up a launch pad for the rockets. My first attempt was unsuccesfull, with the rocket making some smoke, but not going up. Then came the funny part. The nosecone popped off, activating the recovery system! Kind of like that last rocket failure in The Right Stuff. [see below. -Daddy] Terran had trouble too. His rocket didn't even smoke. We waited for a few minutes, but nothing happened. When my turn came again, the results were disastrous. My rocket took off. For a moment, I thought I'd get as good a landing as my SE class-mate Joshua. But only for a moment. When the pop-off came, the Wicked Streak promptly blew up! I was humiliated at first, but soon joined in the laughter. During the search for rocket pieces, I touched what I thought was the engine, but it turned to be a mushroom. Thinking it might be a poisonous one, I whizzed inside and washed my hands. The engine cap is still missing! That's the second thing I've lost at Boy Scouts. The first was a stocking cap at Ghost Train. Me and Terran were waiting for lunch later. At last, Mr. Crawford and Cole came from golf class. Cole got some stuff from a vehicle, a truck apparently, and shortly arrived. After a delicous lunch, I went to coin collecting. I was the only one in Troop 490 who didn't go to art. After the seminar, I had coins from Japan, Germany, Holland, Sweden, and Ireland. Bye.

Encyclopedist detection kit

To determine whether any of your kids are natural-born encyclopedists, install Mediawiki and turn them loose. This morning Sarah asked whether we could have a wikipedia about our family, a "Whitopedia". Knowing it would be fairly easy with Ubuntu, I said yes and spent a few minutes here and there running through the steps between other tasks. Now it's set up and Sarah and Christopher are both clacking away writing initial biographical entries on their computers (old castaways that handle Ubuntu just fine).

I set up mediawiki on my heavy-duty high-horsepower work computer and poked holes in its firewall for theirs. They can get to it by using my computer's name as a web address: http://ubuntu-home/wiki.

For googlers, that's MediaWiki 1.11.0 running under Ubuntu 7.04.