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July 13, 2014

This week has not been as stressful unlike the past couple weeks. My Business 101 class ended last Wednesday. That class was a hybrid online and on campus class, and these classes have a lot more work required than a normal on campus class. A few special things happened this week. I was chosen to be a BYUI coach for the Fall of 2014 Cross Country. Malcolm Hong, an administrator of LDS Single Friends, approached me as the administrator of the Mormon YSA Blog Spot to share the best content to their followers. The track banquet was put on last Thursday. My ward went to a retreat this weekend. I didn't stay the night because I had work to do modeling a replica for my Building Information Modeling class. I had a date with a girl named Camille. She Is the most virtuous and adorable woman that I met. I don't know, if I should write a paragraph on our relationship. It's too early. I hope that it develops well. We went to listen to the touring series of 18 songs newly composed by Daniel E. Gawthrop. That is pretty much the week. I believe that completed the last Architecture 100 test. Another exciting thing is that I was taught how to make my walls on REVIT textured according to the materials that it is constructed with. I am also reviving the Mormon YSA Blog Spot. My list is going on and on. Building a miniature house for my Framing systems class, I cut the sheathing for underneath the gables, and it turned out to be something funny.
One thing that I feel is that I always tell my roommate a story of achievement or failure each day. This week was full of successes. A story of a jog this week was something that I am proud of. I ran at least 3 times this week. On one of them I saw a girl as if she was on a run, but she was walking. I encouraged her to run, and she joined me. Our conversation was good, and it turned out that she insists on running each day even though she is injured. She is from Utah, and she usually gets injured because she doesn't run in the winter, and she has very high expectations for herself, when she starts in the summer, running as much as eleven miles. Did I say that I love teaching people? I asked about her philosophy on running, and she did not have any. She has a lot of peers that are avid runners, and she hears a lot of their knowledge about running. I taught her proper running form. She said that it is too much to think about, and it is because you are changing your bodies' running habit. I simply it to focus on landing on the balls of one's feet, and everything else will come naturally, if one understand proper running form. A runner’s feet should land below them; although, there is a philosophy that runners lengthens their stride by pushing his feet and leg placement forward. Momentum is built by pushing your body forward. Pushing forward comes from pushing your leg backward. If one lands on the front balls of their feet with the purpose to press backward, minimal momentum is lost, and impact is limited or redirected. When a runner lands on his heel, momentum is lost, and the impact is on the bone, ligaments, and tendons.
     I have been chosen to be a cross country coach! It was confirmed last week in an email, and I had a meeting with the coordinator yesterday. Yesterday is actually Wednesday, the 23rd of July, while the journal entry began on the 13th of  July. My influence and input is being felt for we counseled together. The main input that I put in was that I realized that the times of practice for each of the teams are in the evening, and it will get in the way of Family Home Evening. My suggestion was to meet all three of the teams together at 5 pm, since most Family Home Evenings are held at 7. Coincidentally a coach named Clairie was taking Naomi's space in her apartment yesterday, so I asked for her phone number. It is going to be interesting, figuring a good way to meet all three teams together. Maybe we should just go for a long run. Maybe we should go out for a 20 minute run to see the fastest runners duke it out.
     It has been a few weeks since Malcolm Hong has recruited me to join the LDS Single Friends Facebook page's administration. Working with Malcolm has been interesting because his tone is serious and semiprofessional. Today is the 24th of July.  I share two weekly articles from the single adult bloggers that I follow every Wednesday, which was yesterday. I keep the content that I share serious because it is his environment that he has cultivated in the page. I am currently on a flight home from Salt Lake City, Utah to Oakland, California. I say semiprofessional because he conducted an interview with me, and he wanted to edit my responses to answer in a way that he would like me to answer his questions. I have done many interviews, since I explored the profession of journalism, and I learned in my education that an individual is not supposed to influence the replies of the person that the one is interviewing. I refused to follow is editing skills because it is my voice. I am not going to say what he wants me to say in an interview. He insisted on me changing my replies, but I expect a high integrity in his effort of professionalism, teaching him journalism skills. I told him that journalist always edit out the parts of the interviewee's replies. If he wants more words of mine to work with, he can ask for me further questions for me to expound. He didn't need me to rewrite my answers. I expected him to write an article like normal journalism, quoting sections of my replies, but he edited out the parts of my replies. He kept the format as if it was my words. I told him that if he wants to skip parts of my interview put a '…'. I use to work aggressively to promote my page like him, but I nearly was expelled from Facebook for my efforts. I could continue because things cooled off, but I felt kind of spammy in my aggressive promotion. A new thing that I am doing is adding vloggers content from Youtubers to the Mormon YSA Blog Spot. I plan to introduce the most famous Youtubers that I found this weekend. I will probably continue exploring the social network more, but not now.
     The Track Banquet was disappointing as the rest of the season has been. They only had brownies and ice cream. It is usually bigger and actually a meal. Many of the rewards given out to the participants in Track and Field did not make sense. All of the coaches got recognized, and the people in my team were praised for being examples of the spirit of Ricks. These athletes were not even the fastest nor did they take admirable leadership roles. They were just average runners.
     The retreat for my ward was nice. It built a greater unity and fellowship among the members. We did ropes course type activities. The activity that I did had a pole that I climbed up; then, at the top I was expected to jump of letting the ropes carry me down. Most everyone before I climbed up the pole had little problems; however, I figured out how to climb up it effectively. When I reached the top, fear struck my soul because to stand on it. I had to push up with one foot on a wiggling pole, which was about twenty feet tall. It took me more time to develop the bravery to stand on the top; then, it took me to climb up the pole. Most everyone after me showed weakness too. The activities after were chill, but I don't have anything to say about them.
     I have been working on replicating a vacation home for my Building Information Modeling class, and I did not realize how much skill is required. My first attempt to do rendering of building that the class modeled were simple, but it took a lot more time for this second building. I did not give much time to the practice of lighting and rendering after I developed the exterior, interior, landscape, and arranged the entourage. I change what I replicated from



And it ended up like this. The abstract chandelier was new for people to conceive, but I would expect people would imagine it after thought. Some tips that the teacher gave me on the final rendering is to put interior lighting on to make the house more warm and inviting. He also said that I should put more mullions in the big arching windows because it would be hard to manufacture such a big piece of glass; plus, the glass might break because of the tensile stresses on the corner. I held the dishonor of displaying the interior as an incompletely rendered image because I could not figure out how to fix the background image. The teacher was going to grade the pictures on Wednesday, so he let me fix it. The problem that I had was that my background image would move from the expected draft rendering. The background image was placed in a different location according to the different pixel density of the rendering. 
You can see by the picture that the background picture is still funky. I thought that the landscaping was in the way of the picture, so I hid it from the view. I also forgot to hide the grass, so you can see that too.


Here is the landscape that I designed. These last two picture were the final rendering that I entered for grading for my class.

Here are the pictures that I got of my group building a miniature house. We worked together well, and our culture didn't take things too seriously. It was chill, and we enjoyed our time together. The sheathing story that I mentioned before was fun. Sheathing is nailing up the exterior finish material. I cut all the wood, covering the walls just below the roof and on the gables. When I was cutting them, I decided to cut them all at once instead of one at a time. When I returned with all the boards cut, I realized that I didn't number them, creating a puzzle for myself to know what boards go to which wall. Figuring out how the boards fit together was fun.






I have been building the Mormon YSA Blog Spot more, since we partnered with the LDS Single Friends. I am exploring other sources for more sources to share. I now have so much content that I am currently overwhelmed. I am following many people to let their examples share the Gospel with how they live their lives. I found this one guy named Jason Celaya that teaches dance, choreographing the cheerleaders of the Jazz NBA team once. I am unsure if I should quit sharing the content that is not popular. I may have too much content. I think that it is better to be inclusive and liberal showing the lives of the single adults than show only a few bloggers. If I am exclusive, I have an unknown agenda. My objective is uniting and promoting people's faith in Jesus Christ by promoting his disciples' blogs, for it is their personal ministry and example. One YouTube musician named Tiffany Alvord just celebrated getting 2 million likes on Facebook and 2 million subscribers on YouTube.
 I wrote this while I was hanging out at the beach, waiting for my two Japanese foreign student brothers yesterday, which was the 2nd of August. I will tell more about them in the next entry. I understand that jumping around in time is kind of confusing. I even wrote twice about how I am building the Mormon YSA Blog Spot with about a two week gap between them.


Comments

  1. Hi Alex, thanks for taking the time to answer my interview questions. As I've mentioned before, I asked you to rephrase some of your responses to avoid offending our target audience. As your strategic partner, it's my goal to present you and your blog spot in the best possible light. Building Zion requires unity, which is why we need to choose our words and how we present ourselves carefully. Thanks for your hard work and contribution in our partnership!

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