Leaving for MTC. Back in 2 years.

The time has come. In fewer than six days, I will be on an airplane headed for Salt Lake City, Utah. From there I will take a shuttle to Provo, where I will enter the Missionary Training Center. After 9-12 weeks at the MTC, I will fly to Ukraine.

Following is my contact information while at the MTC and later in Ukraine.

While at the Provo, Utah MTC (until early April 2006):

• No phone or email. Only mail correspondence:
  

  Elder Christopher Matthew Haueter
  Ukraine Donetsk Mission
  Provo Missionary Training Center
  2005 N 900 E
  Provo, UT 84604

• You can also use dearelder.com for free. Just select "Provo MTC" as the mission, rather than "Ukraine Donetsk." See below for details.
  

While in Ukraine (April 2006 - Feb. 2008):

Email:

• Please feel free to email me at chrishaum@gmail.com.
• I will not be able to respond via email, so
• include your postal mailing address so I may respond by post.

Phone:

• Nope. No calls. Sorry! However, I would love to talk to you when I return to the U.S. in early 2008.

Mail:

1. The easiest (and free) way is through www.dearelder.com. Select "Ukraine Donetsk" from the drop-down list, and click the "Write a Missionary" button. Enter your name and return address and address the letter to Elder Chris Haueter. Enter your email address and mine. Then type (or copy and paste) your letter in the box and press "Send Letter." They will print the letter and put it in the pouch that my Church delivers weekly to my mission headquarters.
   
   
2. Send the letter directly to the pouch service.
   Warning: Please do not include anything but documents in your letter, or else the Church and I will get in trouble with the government of Ukraine. For example, paper prints/copies of photographs are OK, while original photos are not.
   

   Elder Christopher Matthew Haueter
   Ukraine Donetsk Mission
   P.O. Box 30150
   Salt Lake City, UT 84130-0150

3. Mail packages to the mission headquarters. For small packages of nominal value, the USPS will suffice.
   Warning: Clothing, food products, and other "dutiable merchandise" may not arrive intact or arrive at all. I may also be charged customs duties to receive dutiable items.
   

   Elder Christopher Matthew Haueter
   Ukraine Donetsk Mission
   Prospekt Bogdana Khmelnitskogo 67a
   83087 Donetsk
   Ukraine

That is about it. Please keep in touch! I would love to be kept up-to-date on the lives of my friends.

Cheers,
Elder Haueter

What is the pouch mail program?
The Church has established the Pouch Mail program to help families to communicate better with their missionaries in countries with poor mail systems. When you mail your letters to the Pouch Mail Department in Salt Lake City, the Church places all the letters bound for one mission in a big package and ships them to the mission through an express carrier service. When the letters arrive at the mission office in the destination country, the office Elders open the package of letters and distribute them to the Elders and Sisters throughout the mission.

How does DearElder.com work with the pouch mail department to get letters to the missionaries?
The Pouch Department only sends one package per week to each mission. In order for your letter to go out in a certain week's package, the letter must reach the Salt Lake City Pouch Mail Department by 5:00pm on Friday.
In order for DearElder.com to get your letter to the Pouch Mail Department by Friday at 5:00pm, we require you to submit your letter by Thursday at 12:00pm (MST). The Pouch Mail Department doesn't actually mail your letters until the following Tuesday.

Source: www.dearelder.com

No glaucoma here, just funky optic nerve attachment points...

I had an eye appointment today. My eyes were dilated, and a retinal tomograph was taken of each eye. Everything was statistically normal for my demographics.

I was especially pleased with the equipment and software used to generate each retinal tomograph. For each eye, I stared for a few seconds at a green dot beside a bright red laser array. The report for each eye, including measurements, charts, graphs, and a picture of each retina in the region of the optic nerve, was generated automatically and stored in my personal medical records. The next time I have the same examination done, the software will compare my previous results with the new ones, and statistically compare the progression to demographic norms to diagnose further. It even renders a 3D version of my retina, which can be zoomed in, rotated, etc.

Wow!
Such cool software!

OS (left eye):

OD (right eye):

Here is the description of the HRT3, the new model of Retinal Tomograph (the HRT2 was used at my air base hospital), found at http://www.heidelbergengineering.com:

Heidelberg Engineering Launches HRT3 to Facilitate

Early Glaucoma Diagnosis

New Device is Portable, Easy to Use and Can Analyze Glaucoma Progression

DOSSENHEIM, GERMANY Sept. 1, 2005 Heidelberg Engineering GmbH, the leading developer of laser diagnostics for ophthalmic applications, announced today the introduction of the Heidelberg Retina Tomograph 3 (HRT3), a newly-enhanced version of its flagship product for the assessment, diagnosis and management of glaucoma.

Like its predecessor, the HRT3 uses laser technology to produce a topographical image of a patient's optic nerve, providing an objective analysis of the structure's cup, rim and retinal nerve fiber layer. Optic disc topography has been found to be predictive of visual field loss according to a long term study published in the Journal of Glaucoma.

Heidelberg Engineering has incorporated several new features in the HRT3 in direct response to customer feedback. These include the Fast Check Glaucoma Probability Score, which is generated using an advanced form of artificial intelligence called a relevance vector machine. This sophisticated analysis provides a statistical probability of glaucoma using ethnic-specific databases. In addition, the software eliminates the need to draw contour lines or use reference planes and provides real-time feedback to assist the operator in acquiring a quality image.

"Optic disc assessment is more important than visual field loss as the earliest indicator of glaucoma," said Dr. Gerhard Zinser, managing director and head of R&D for Heidelberg Engineering. "For more than 10 years, optometrists and ophthalmologists have been using the HRT to analyze optic discs producing a wealth of longitudinal data. This data is confirming the role of our technology in early glaucoma detection."

The HRT3 monitors the patient's condition over time, comparing baseline images to follow-up examinations and highlighting areas of statistically significant progression. Monitoring progression is important in determining the course of treatment. The HRT3 is a portable, laptop-based system that can be placed in a compact carrying case. Heidelberg Engineering expects to begin shipping the new product in the last quarter of the year.

About Heidelberg Engineering, Inc.
Headquartered near Heidelberg, Germany, this privately-held company is the leader in light-based diagnostics for ophthalmic applications and has the world's largest installed base of laser imaging equipment. The company designs, manufactures and markets a variety of diagnostic instruments for application in retina, glaucoma and cornea diseases.

Mission Call!

I received my mission call today.

I have been called to serve in the [drumroll, please]

Ukraine Donetsk Mission.

My mission call:

Woohoo! I'm so happy!

Chris

Snow in Colorado

Well, it's snowing here in Colorado Springs. It began yesterday evening, and has continued unabated since; it is projected to end tomorrow and be sunny and warm by Wednesday. I ventured out into the cold to take some pictures of the snowy Colorado landscape. These pictures truly do not do justice to the pristine beauty of the Springs cloaked in fluffy white. I saw some scenes later today when I was without camera that would have made a grown man cry. Okay, maybe they wouldn't have, but they sure were wonderful sights to see. Here are some of the not-so wonderful pictures anyway for your viewing pleasure.

Waves in the snow, caused by the strong wind (strong enough that I had to brace myself to take these pictures).

Snow being blown from the tops of drifts.

An interesting pattern in the slush at the edge of my driveway.

The wind was strong enough to bend tree branches such as these.

A FedEx truck traversing the slushy wilderness.

This is the same boulevard pictured in my blog here. What a change.

Upward-growing ice crystals on a bush!

And finally, for contrast, some flowers I photographed only nine days earlier.

A New Thing

I might answer emails with blog entries more frequently now, such as I did in the last post. It seems like an easy way to keep everyone up to date, while still replying to the email as desired by its sender. I will still blog while on my mission, through email.

Chris

An Email to Karen

Karen dearest,

Ryan Burton visited ASMSA? Sweet! I thought he was still in Utahville moving giant farm sprinklers! Well, good news. I have my final Bishop interview on Thursday, my Stake President interview on Sunday, and I'll have my papers off by Monday the 17th! Then I should find out around the 27th where and when I am going for my mission! I just got back from a farewell for a guy from my ward here in Colorado Springs. His name is Kyle Jones, and he is leaving Tuesday for the Missionary Training Center, after which he will report to Tacoma, Washington! I was the official photographer at the farewell, and took around 100 pictures of him with families from our ward and also of people just mingling. That was fun. My brother, Chandler, is returning Friday from his mission in Vienna, Austria. We are going to go camping and do tons of other fun stuff, and I cannot wait to see him again and hang out with him! He's really going to show me up with his German, though. When he left, my German was far better, but I have not practiced in two years and he has done nothing but. Well, holla back; this communication thing you speak of sounds pretty good.

Cheers,
Chris

On 10/7/05, Karen Smith wrote:

So... I'm sitting in the library with one of my three favorite mormons boys (Ryan Burton, as apposed to the other two, Robert Shepherd and this one guy name Chris Haueter) and I thought, hum... I should send Chris a line to say, "hey!" So... this is a line... or well three, to say, "hey!" and I miss you and all that jazz. Just thinking of you. Hope you have a fantastic day/week until next time. (by the way, you should write back and then we could have this weird little thing called communication. It's pretty flippin sweet from what I hear!)

Alright. Love you, Happy Christmas~

Karen

Pictures of 1991

My father in Somalia while on a mission for the Air Force delivering aid to the starving Somalis:

My siblings and me viewing the video from which the above picture was extracted:

Ah, the early nineties; those were the days.

Chris

Words and Stuff...

No pictures today, just words. I was oh-so-politely reminded (Alyssa, erhem...) that I have not posted in a month. I really don't want to formulate complete paragraphs, so I'll copy Michael's style and write in a numbered list. Lazy slug am I.

1. This morning the Staples delivery dude showed up and handed me a big box. Guess what was in it? A Linksys PAP2 VOIP Phone Adapter (woohoo!) and 180 recordable DVDs, at a total cost of $89.76 before rebate, $39.76 after. I am a total nerd. I know.
   
   
2. I spent the ENTIRE day doing the following:
1. Unlocking the Vonage-branded PAP2 phone adapter for administrative control.
1. Flashing it twice with unlocking firmware using an TFTP server. It took me forever to realize that I wasn't actually updating the firmware, as I had the wrong IP address for the TFTP server! Once I had, unlocking the adapter took a matter of minutes.
2. Getting the unlocked phone adapter to make free phone calls.
1. Set up proper settings to use Voipbuster's SIP server.
2. It didn't work for several hours, until I found that I needed to also use a STUN server. So I did that, and finally had (drumroll, please)...
   
3. FREE calls to landlines and mobile phones in the US, Canada, and much of the EU, from a standard cordless telephone!
4. This means I will be calling a ton of people to test it out and chat!
   
5. Again, I know I am a nerd.
   
   
3. I am extremely excited about the coming weeks' happenings. These include:
• Oct. 12 - My brother Chandler is returning from his 24 months as a missionary in and around Vienna, Austria!
• Oct. 18 - I leave with Chandler and my mother for a lightning tour to visit family in California and Oregon. Before we leave, I submit my mission papers.
  
• Oct. 24-27 - I attend the 13th Foresight Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology: Advancing Beneficial Nanotechnology. This will be my second conference (the first was the Mars Society Conference in Boulder in August).
  
• Late Oct. - Should find my mission call in my mailbox.
• Dec. ? - View full-home Contour Crafting demonstration at USC. Woot!
  
• Late Dec. - Depart for mission; take over world.
  
  
4. Please feel free to contact me for much chatting pleasure; see my profile at top right for contact info!
   

Well, that about sums it up! Of course, I have also many much more interesting and crazy things going on (in my head and out). Get in touch with me and we'll chat!

Cheers,
Chris

The Infamous Fractal Butter

If you want to know the story, email me.

A Sluicy Adventure!

Click on the picture to go to my Flickr page, where you can follow the annotations to learn more about my sluicy adventure:

I was up in the mountains behind the Air Force Academy for one of my Dad's yearly mandatory departmental picnics. Rather than sitting around watching ducks, my brother, a dude named Dan, and I went adventuring.

Archival, organization, backup...

I spent the entire day organizing, backing up, and archiving my digital files, mostly from ASMS(A). I have completed both the laptop hard drive and my CD collection. I put everything on the hard drive under C:\Christopher\ and sorted my CDs into a music case (all black) and an archival case (black with yellow corner), and backed up CDs to hard drive that had no other copies. I copied the entire Christopher folder from the laptop hard drive to Le Fantasma, a 20GB hard drive I made portable after removing it from Dad's old computer. Now that everything is organized and backed up to a portable hard drive, tomorrow I will reformat the laptop, and set up a dual-boot with Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu Linux, for the best of both worlds.

The major problem I had today was separating the significant files from the insignificant ones. At ASMS(A), I saved in the same folders my in-progress and final product files. Since a good number of temporary files lead up to each final one, this made it hard to determine which files were worthy of archival and which weren't. I tried a bit to separate them, but I mostly just left them together, making more work for the person (me and/or my eventual posterity) who will eventually browse through these files. In the future, I will use two methods to make archival easier and the archives files more useful:

1. Rather than making new copies of files when I move from computer to computer, and having to manually reconcile the various file versions, I will store all works-in-progress in one always-available location (either network, thumb drive, or portable harddrive, but not all three), and spread about as few files as possible.
2. Once I have completed any given work-in-progress, I will save a final copy in both the working folder and in a highly organized "completed works" folder. The "completed works" folder will be backed up and archived more regularly than the working folders.
   

Digital clutter is not as visible as physical clutter, but it is clutter nonetheless, and reduces the findability of files and usability of storage systems. If I put a slight effort into keeping my files organized as I go, I will hopefully never again have to spend an entire day preparing them for backup and archival.

Fhew... now I can sleep.

Chris

Contour Crafting joy!

If you haven't heard of it, Contour Crafting is an awesome large-scale (i.e. building-sized) rapid-prototyping process being developed by Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California. The process uses robotic arms with actuated, interchangeable trowels, to "extrude" concrete, layer by layer, to make walls under computer numeric control. IMHO, this technology will devastate, or at least greatly upset, the construction AND real estate industries.

I worked for in the construction industry for nine days, until I had to retire because of exposure and a subsequent allergic reaction to a certain epoxy-based concrete-sealing chemical (Carboguard 451). Fortunately, the allergic reaction only occured on my forearms to the elbows. Upon reading the Material Safety Data Sheet for the chemical (online, mind you, not openly posted on the job site), I discovered that inhalation of the chemical's fumes can lead to a PERMANENT respiratory allergic reaction. Of course, I was never outfitted with a proper chemical respirator; the respirators provided were particulate-filtering only. Besides my work-related illness, I watched first-hand how utterly and completely inneficient the construction industry is. My boss must have walked across the 1/4-mile-wide construction site roughly six times per day to pick up various items he failed to bring with him the first time when he started a new task. Scheduling and efficient resource management were nonexistent. Huge items were shifted around by crane from space to space as the spots they were previously filling became needed. The wait for a crane to pick up an item could last several hours, and often stopped useful progress completely. Well, enough ranting. Back to the good stuff. :)

Press releases stated that the first automated whole-house construction test would take place in 2005, and would involve the complete construction, plumbing, and electricity-ing of a 2000-sq. ft. home in approximately 24 hours.

Expecting not to hear a reply, I contacted Dr. Khoshnevis, and asked him for both more details on the time of the test, and permission to attend it. He offered me both, and I now plan on attending the test in December, my missionary trainining center report date allowing. This experience has taught me:

1. There is no harm in asking; the worst answer is a "no."
2. If interested in a current development, contact those doing the developing, and see if you can become more involved.
3. When in doubt, err on the side of optimism that important people will respond to you.

I have included my original email, his response, and my follow-up:

Dr. Berok Khoshnevis,
University of Southern California:

Dear Professor Khoshnevis,

Since first reading about your "Contour Crafting" technique several years ago, I have paid very close attention to the developments in your research. I cannot overstate how amazingly efficient and revolutionary I believe this technology will be when fully developed. I read in one of the press releases that a full-scale, 2000-square-foot home is expected to be built within this year. As a soon-to-be freshman and C. Prescott Davis Scholar, majoring in applied mathematics and mechanical engineering at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University, I am watching your work closely, seeing as it will have a definite impact in my chosen career field in the near future. If you are willing or able to let me know, when will the first full-size attempt occur? Will it be open for viewing by interested students willing to make the trip?

Thanks for the time and consideration,
Chris Haueter

---

B. Khoshnevis	Mon, Aug 1, 2005 at 8:33 PM
To: chrishaum
Thanks, Chris, for your interest. I believe the best time to see the demo will be in December. You will be welcome to see it, but check with me when we get closer to that date. Behrokh "Berok" Khoshnevis, Professor Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90089-0193 Tel: (213) 740-4889 Fax: (213) 740-1120 http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~khoshnev [Quoted text hidden]

---

chrishaum	Mon, Aug 1, 2005 at 9:56 PM
Reply-To: chrishaum To: "B. Khoshnevis"
Professor Khoshnevis- That sounds great. I'll contact you again nearer December, perhaps sometime in November, to work out the specific details. Thank you very much for the opportunity to watch this momentous event, and I hope to see you there.

Feel Good Lists

Feel Good List No. 1 - UncleMaxSays.com
Feel Good List No. 2 - UncleMaxSays.com

I'm going to implement some of these to improve my approachability.

The Top Five (or so) Reasons I am a Dork...

Responding to Johann's tag and Michael's original mandate, I have decided to list the top five or so reasons I am a nerd....even though Johann misspelled my name as "Hauter."

1. I spent last Friday through Saturday at the Mars Society Conference in Boulder, Colorado. I mocked certain obviously ill-considered plans, such as the "sub-$10/lb maglev orbit-injection system." I had to keep myself from asking the lecturer how he planned on coping with the huge G-forces that would result from changing the direction of a multiple-ton sled by 45 degrees in a matter of seconds when it got to the exit ramp (or how it would not just crash through the ramp and explode). I debated with fellow conference-goers about the true significance of establishing a human presence on Mars, asked Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars, why he believed commercial space companies wouldn't be able to provide Mars travel in the near future, and ranted about how Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis' Contour Crafting technology (www.contourcrafting.org) will destroy the real estate industry within ten years.
2. Several nights ago I could not sleep, so I turned on the light and jotted down an idea in a notebook. Two hours and thirteen pages later, I had to force myself to go to sleep. The idea: a completely original economic system, based upon modular homes (through contour crafting), standardized appliances, trusted computing, and more which I cannot reveal. Patent pending.
   
3. I am currently reading K. Eric Drexler's 576-page textbook, Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation for fun.
4. Look at my Amazon.com wishlist. It speaks for itself. I actually bought several of these books, and was ashamed of the absolutely nerdly glee I felt upon receiving them.
5. I spend a lot of leisure time online, reading articles about new and upcoming technologies, the fledgling commercial spaceflight industry, nanotechnology developments, etc., etc. etc. I think, eat, sleep, and breathe technology, engineering, and science.
   
6. My mad hacker skills impress many. I am writing this post on a laptop that was given up for dead because of its age and broken CD drive; I restored it to better-than-new condition by installing Ubuntu Linux directly over my internet connection. I grok the Open Source movement and make telephone calls for free with Skype. I have developed a device to download every thought to a computer in realtime...just kidding. That would be awesome, though.

Need I say more?

Cheers,
Chris

It's a bright, bright, sunshiny day!

The beauty of Colorado clouds as they roll from mountains to valley is simply...impossible to describe. See for yourself:

360, baby.

The Front Range and my neighborhood, in 360-degree splendor.

A black hole is devouring my home!

A weird , stitched-together picture of my house...

Deferral granted!

I won't be attending Columbia until 2007. I'm going on a two-year religous mission first, at my own expense.

Я люблю деталь! Теперь я как раз водочка!

And just because I am a detail junkie, a close-up version of one of the bills...

Русская деньг, часть 2.

The other sides of the same Russian bills.