John Colton's blog

Sounds like something Mythbusters should test out. :-) JSC

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080721/od_nm/bugs_odd_dc

Man blows up apartment spraying for bugs?

Mon Jul 21, 1:35 PM ET

NEW YORK, July 21 - A New Jersey man trying to exterminate insects in his apartment blew it up instead, the New York Daily News reported on Monday.

Isias Vidal Maceda was unhurt in the incident, but 80 percent of his apartment was destroyed, Eatontown, New Jersey police told the newspaper.

The accident occurred as Maceda was spraying for pests in his kitchen. Somehow the bug spray ignited a blast that blew out the apartment's front windows and triggered a fire that quickly spread, the newspaper said.

Police told the newspaper that the Saturday blaze also caused smoke damage to the apartment above

(Final post of the "Summer activities - pictures!" series)

Part 6, cont.: Bryce Canyon National Park

Part 6b. Day 2 - Hike down into the amphitheater

This morning we decided to hike down into the main amphitheater. Good choice! On the one hand, it was amazing to see the massive rock formations up close and personal, towering above us. On the other hand, it was also amazing to see the greenery appearing out of nowhere, and to hear bird calls down at the botton.

You can see part of the path we had to take down to the bottom. We used the "Navajo Trail", which was a loop that took just under an hour and a half. Where's Waldo? Emily and I are hiding in this picture.
I think this was the most outstanding view of the hike, and possibly of the entire trip. We got to the bottom of the dry/dusty/barren hunk of red rock, and suddenly found this tree growing in a crevice. It was very tall! (Emily: "That's the tallest tree I've ever seen!") And not a branch on the tree until the top.

Here's another panorama shot. For intructions on how to view it, if you need them, see the "Cedar Breaks" post.

This was a cool-looking tree, a bristlecone pine, I believe. One weird thing about the hike, though, is that we discovered it's apparently tradition to place stacks of rocks whereever they can be made to balance. I'd estimate that we saw about two hundred stacks of rocks like the two in this picture.
Almost back to the top! The prominent formation in the left center is "Thor's Hammer".

And for the final picture: another panorama. :-) (Again, for intructions on how to view the panorama shots, see the "Cedar Breaks" post.)

Part 6: Bryce Canyon National Park

After Zion, we drove to Bryce Canyon National Park. As a kid, I liked it more than Zion, for whatever reason. It was still quite impressive, but I think I liked Zion better this time around.

Part 6a. Day 1

We got there Saturday afternoon/evening. We looked/drove around, took pictures, and listened to a ranger's tour. Bryce Canyon was quite a bit like Cedar Breaks, in that you drive around the rim of a natural amphitheater and look down on it.



This almost looks like a sand castle with some sticks, doesn't it? But those are full-sized trees, of course.

Part 5, cont.: Zion National Park

Part 5c. Canyon Overlook Trail

On Friday we met a family who lived near the park, and they said that the best hike in the whole park is the "Canyon Overlook Trail", which starts right after the car tunnel going from the main entrance towards the east entrance to the park. (The tunnel itself, and the drive up to it, was amazing in its own right.) So, I decided that we needed to do it. My dad (with his bum knee) also braved the trail.

There's our van on the top right! My mom remained behind, so many of the van doors are open.

Here we are at the top! (The other guy in the picture was just another tourist. He seemed to be doing many of the same things we were, at the same times.)

This is the view from the overlook! You can see the windy road going up to the aforementioned tunnel. Somehow the road seemed a lot steeper as we were driving on it.

Part 5, cont.: Zion National Park

Part 5b. Riverside Walk

The Riverside walk is a paved path along the river which formed the canyon (the Virgin River). It goes about a mile, then stops. When the path stops, you can keep going if you wish by wading in the water, crossing from side to side until the canyon gets so narrow that the paths on the side(s) vanish. Leslie and Emily braved the entire trail with me. We went until the water got too deep for Leslie and Emily to wade.

We had to keep moving, because about 200 Japanese tourists were right on our heels! :-)

Resting on the way back... this is a nice spot where Pauline waited for us until she lost patience.

Part 5: Zion National Park

I remember going to Zion National Park as a kid (7 years old, probably), and not being especially impressed. I guess 30 years changes a guy. :-)

Three hikes that I thought were especially cool this time around were Weeping Rock, Riverside Walk, and the Canyon Overlook Trail.

Part 5a. Weeping Rock

We did the Weeping Rock trail first. It's just a short hike to a place where water drips out of a section of rock. They said that the water was 800-1200 years old--it takes that long from the rainfall for the water to seep through the semi-porous rock.

Part 4: Tuacahn

We went to 2 shows at Tuacahn: Les Miserables on Thurs night, and The Sound of Music on Friday night. The Sound of Music was just "OK", but Les Miserables was amazing and inspiring. I was very impressed with all aspects of the show.

Tuacahn is in a very unique setting. It's nestled up in a corner of a red rock canyon with interesting rock formations lining the way there..



We thought this rock looked like Jabba the Hut.

Part 3: Cedar Breaks

We just got back from an amazing trip to Southern Utah with my parents. We stayed in St. George for a couple of nights, went to a couple of shows at Tuacahn, visited Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park, etc.

On the way we stopped by Cedar Breaks National Monument.





This is a cool panorama shot I did by "stitching" a bunch of pictures together. If your browser is like mine (IE 6), clicking on the image will bring up a slightly larger version of the picture, but still not too large. This is because the browser automatically resizes the image to fit entirely in the window. However, if you hold the mouse over the image, a button with four arrows will appear in the lower right hand corner of the image. Click on the button, and you'll see the full size image. Scroll horizontally to see the panorama in all its glory.

Part 2: 4th of July

We went to downtown Provo for the parade(*) and other 4th of July activities. One such activity was the annual hot air balloon launch early in the morning. It was cool!

(The one that looks like an acorn is really Smokey the Bear.)






(*) The parade kind of happened by accident. We thought it was starting later than it actually did, so ended up seeing it unexpectedly as we walked to our car. It worked out well--we saw the parade at twice the regular speed, due to the combined relative motion.

Time to catch up on some of our summer activities. I'll have to do this in sections.

Part 1: Lagoon

Back in June I took a day off of work and took the girls (minus Pauline) to Lagoon, the amusement park about an hour away.

Leslie was tall enough to go on every single ride--by herself, even. She kept on saying things like, "Wow, I can't believe I can go on every single ride! If you left me here by myself, I could go on rides all day!"

Emily was tall enough to do all but a couple of rides. Many of them required an adult to go with her, but some did not. Here's one she went on by herself: the Bat roller coaster. (I opted out of this one, due to a bout of motion sickness induced by a previous ride.)I was amazed--Leslie and Emily did every single scary ride they were allowed to go on. They set the stage early, by going on Wicked right off the bat...despite a couple of tense moments in line where each of them had second and third thoughts.

(This is not us.)

Here we are, just after going on the Spider.
Leslie went on the "real" version of this, called the Rocket, but Emily was too little. So the two of them went on the small version together.

My parents asked all their kids to write a family history with some emphasis on notable accomplishments, to help Lee Roderick who is writing a biography of my grandfather. I think they just wanted a few paragraphs, but this is what I came up with.
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A Brief History of the John & Pauline Colton family – written July 2008 by John S. Colton

To move quickly through the beginnings of my (John’s) life: I was born in St. Louis in 1970, then moved to Connecticut, moved to Maryland, moved to Austria, and then moved back to Maryland in 1981. I attended the American International School (A.I.S.) in Vienna, and Lakewood Elementary, Robert Frost Junior High, and Thomas S. Wootton High School in Maryland. While in Junior High my parents decided I should get a job, so I started delivering newspapers (the Washington Post) before school. At least they “put their money where their mouth was”, and one or both of them helped me out with the job very consistently over the next five years—even when it was before the early morning seminary class at the church and we had to get up at 5:15 am or so. I did very well in high school, graduating among the top in my class, taking 6 A.P. classes, and being active in band (playing trumpet), the math team, “It’s Academic” (a Jeopardy-like quiz bowl), and the annual Physics Olympics.

As a result of academic success, a good application essay, and some good interviews I earned a Presidential “Ezra Taft Benson” scholarship to BYU in 1988. That is BYU’s top academic scholarship: 4-years at 150% tuition. I like to call it my “foosball scholarship”, because during one of the evenings in the week-long scholarship competition a partner and I went undefeated in foosball (table soccer) for a couple of hours. When asked on the closing interview what the highlight of the week had been, I pointed to the evening of foosball fun. When asked what the low point had been, I said, “Waking up the next morning being unable to move my wrists!” I joke about that being the reason I got the scholarship, but I do think displaying a sense of humor in a somewhat competitive environment impressed the interviewers.

After one year of BYU, I left on an LDS church mission to Munich, Germany. I never actually served in Munich, but did spend 3-6 months in each of five cities around southern Germany: Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Offenburg, Erlangen, Freiburg, and Mannheim. In Mannheim I was called specifically to work with American military servicemen and their families; in the other places, I taught the gospel to Germans… and Africans, and Eastern Europeans, and other Americans. The mission was a life-changing event. I learned to be thankful for what I had. I learned to care about people—from all backgrounds. I learned how to work my tail off. I learned what the gospel was about, what the church was about, and I learned the difference between the two. I gained a deep testimony about the inspiration of church leaders in one area when I had a somewhat lazy senior companion who wanted to sit in our apartment more than we should have. I read about ten to twenty years of back issues of the Ensign magazine over the course of two months, and could see with 20-20 hindsight how inspired the counsel from church leaders had been.

Pauline and I met at BYU the week after I got off my mission; she remembers that I was still rubbing my eyes from the jetlag. Pauline was from Idaho; her parents had moved there when she was six. Before that she lived in California for six years and Utah for a few weeks (she was born in Provo). She moved to Idaho in first grade, mid-year, and remembers the second half of first grade in Idaho was a lot easier than the first half had been in California. Aside from an accident where (as a toddler) she fell through a closed window, Pauline led a fairly uneventful life. She worked at a number of jobs while in high school: receptionist for a Musak provider, assistant for an engineering group at Hewlett-Packard, house cleaner, babysitter, and so forth. She also graduated among the top in her high school class and won a scholarship to BYU (Trustee’s scholarship: 4 years, 100% tuition). She majored in statistics, and with my own major in physics we’ve decided it’s a good thing our children don’t have lisps.

We began dating during the Fall 1991 semester, about two months after we met, and we got engaged shortly after that. We were married on May 1, 1992. Pauline continued at BYU for one more year before graduating with her B.S. degree in Statistics; I graduated the year after that with B.S. degrees in Physics and Mathematics. Pauline worked for the BYU Financial Aid department during that final year.

After BYU, we moved to California where I started graduate school at U.C. Berkeley in Physics, in 1994. Leslie and Emily were born in Berkeley, in 1996 and 2000 respectively. At Berkeley I studied experimental solid state physics, with Peter Yu as my research advisor. Pauline worked for two years at two different companies in San Francisco (liking the second one, Technology Assessment Group, far more than the first), but after Leslie was born she decided to be a full-time mom. In Dec 2000 I graduated with my Ph.D. and we moved to Maryland. I was named a “National Academies/National Research Council research fellow”, which involved a 2-3 year post-doctoral research position at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Tom Kennedy was my research advisor there. After two and a half years in Maryland, we moved to La Crosse, Wisconsin where I got a job as a faculty member at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

At UW-La Crosse, I learned how to balance the teaching and research expectations of a faculty member, and was successful in both. I was awarded several external research grants totaling about $500,000; this was very unusual at a university like UW-L whose primary mission was teaching. One of the highlights of my teaching career there was when I was named a “Wisconsin Teaching Fellow”; this was a prestigious teaching award program funded by the University of Wisconsin system, and only about one individual per university in the system (13 universities) could be named a fellow each year. My department was also part of an even more prestigious award: the Regents Teaching Excellence Award. This was only awarded annually to a single department in the entire University of Wisconsin system. (Caveat: although I was part of the group that received the award, a lot of it was based on the progress the department had made in the years before I arrived.)

While in La Crosse, I joined the La Crosse Chamber Chorale, an excellent community chorus directed by Paul Rusterholz. We practiced weekly, and had concerts four or five times a year. It was a lot of fun, and in addition to letting me meet a lot of quality people from around town, it really helped increase my overall musicality. I was asked to be on the board of directors, and served as Vice President during my final year there. Pauline also found many ways to become involved in the community, such as by volunteering at North Woods Elementary school and by taking classes and workshops in watercolor painting. Leslie and Emily had a great experience in La Crosse as well and we were all a bit sad when the time to move came.

But the time did come: in Fall 2006 I was contacted by an acquaintance in BYU’s Physics Department. He told me that I should apply for a position they had open. After asking myself, “Is there any set of circumstances that would lead me to accept a job at BYU?”, I decided that there was and so I should apply. They liked my application well enough to invite me for an interview, and they liked my interview well enough to offer me a job. After a lot of thought and prayer, we decided to accept the job and move to Utah. Among the factors that helped make our decision were these: much closer to family, better students for me to teach, less of a teaching load (hopefully leading to a more balanced life), a bit of a pay raise, and a more stable university financial climate overall.

One thing about living in Utah is that we miss feeling needed to help the church run—whereas in many of our other situations our volunteer service in the church was indispensible, here we are much more just “part of the crowd”. Nevertheless, we do what we can to help out, even if it’s not quite on the same level as in other places. Here is a brief run-down on our church service: In California I served as the Ward Mission Leader and the Executive Secretary for many years. Pauline was in the Relief Society presidency for a time. In Maryland, I was the Elders Quorum President; Pauline was the Primary President, and later a counselor in the Young Women’s Presidency. In La Crosse I was the Ward Mission Leader again, and then a counselor in the Branch Presidency. I also got to play organ for the sacrament service fairly often, and I directed the ward choir. Pauline was the Sunday School Gospel Doctrine teacher, and also served for a time as the Primary music leader (which, perhaps surprisingly, she really loved). Here in Utah, I am now the Sunday School President and Pauline is the Relief Society Secretary.

As we tell people, “we’ve lived on both coasts and in the middle”, so we’ve done our fair share of moving around. We hope to break the trend, and be here in Utah for a long while.

I wrote this for a thread on the RARB forum, entitled Favorite jaw-dropping a cappella tracks. Since this has quite a bit of biographical info, I decided to post it here to my blog as well.

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[Warning, lengthy post alert]

As evidenced from my compilation a couple of posts ago, I like this thread a lot. After thinking about the topic seriously over the past couple of weeks, and after browsing through my entire a cappella collection with this topic in mind, I’m now going to post my own list of jaw-dropping songs. Sorry about the length. And please forgive the personal reminisces. When selecting my songs, I tried to keep the original post in mind: “it's that moment where you forget you're standing/sitting/breathing/anything, and the only thing going through your mind is what you're hearing. Big eyes, open mouth.”

So these are not just songs I liked a lot, but songs that made me say, “Did I really just hear that? Wow! Let me listen to that again. And again.” I’d say that I literally listened to over half of these back-to-back-to-back on first hearing.

Originally I was going to restrict my list to 10 tracks. I found that to be impossible. Then I decided to restrict it to 10 groups. I found that almost do-able—as long as I lumped all the ones from BOCA CDs into a single entry. :-)

So here you go, listed more or less chronologically based on when I first heard the group. Albums where I heard the songs are given in parentheses.

1. The Nylons. My real introduction to contemporary a cappella came as a college freshman in 1988-1989 with the Nylons albums Happy Together and Seamless, and then a few months later, One Size Fits All and The Nylons (self-titled album). Here are the Nylons’ songs that really made me drop my jaw:
Rock & Roll Lullabye (The Nylons)
Up On The Roof (The Nylons, and also on Seamless)
Because (Because) – 20 times better than the King’s Singers cover of this song. I heard the King’s Singers version first and thought I didn’t like the song. Go figure!
Will You Still Love Me (Because) – One of the best songs ever written, the Nylon’s version stacks up well against the Roberta Flack and Carole King versions I also love.

2. The King’s Singers. I heard the King’s Singers before I heard the Nylons (my parents were fans), but I didn’t really know they did more contemporary songs until a friend told me about Good Vibrations. I got the album in ~1992, was suitably impressed, and the rest was history. I now own 16 King’s Singers albums, probably the most I own of any single group in my entire CD collections. Out of all the songs on all the albums, these ones deserve special mention:
Father to Son (Good Vibrations)
Down to the River to Pray (Six) – Six is a great album, and cheap to download since there only six tracks. Blackbird is also an amazing song from the album, but this is the one that continues to make my jaw drop.
April Come She Will (Simple Gifts) – Original song from Simon & Garfunkel Sounds of Silence album
Always A Woman (Simple Gifts) – All current a cappella arrangers should listen to this version of this Billy Joel song. Immediately. It’s amazing.

3. The California Golden Overtones. My introduction to collegiate a cappella came a couple of years into my graduate studies at UC Berkeley (physics) when I discovered The California Golden Overtones’ free weekly outdoor concerts. I was blown away, and started attending so many of their concerts (free and otherwise) that my wife started referring to them as my “girlfriends”.
Dreams (Bear All) – I just about freaked out my cousin when the original version of this song came on the radio. I hadn’t heard the original before, but I started shouting “I know this song!”, and started singing along.
House That Jack Built (live) – The only live song on my entire list, sadly their recording on Bear All doesn’t do it justice. I blame the producer. Come to think of it, most of the albums I have from the Overtones and the U.C. Men’s Octet suffer from production problems. What’s up with that? But anyway, they killed this song in several performances I saw, I believe even winning a “best soloist” award in one ICCA regional competition.

4. UC Men’s Octet. The Golden Overtones introduced me to the U.C. Men’s Octet (the Men’s Octet opened for them at a concert). Then I became a weekly attendee at the free weekly outdoor concerts of the Men’s Octet as well.
Baby One More Time (Octopella). Wow. The passion. And I’m not even a Britney Spears fan at all.
The Promise/A Little Respect (Gold) – I usually hate medleys, but does a merge count as a medley? Anyway, I loved both of these original songs--from my senior year in high school, how could I not? :-)--and was floored when the Men’s Octet combined them. In all the years I had heard the two songs separately, I had never seen this coming.

5. Rockapella. I thought I knew what Rockapella was about from Carmen Sandiego, and assumed they were just another Nylons wanna-be group. Wrong! I went to a concert in ~2004 and was blown away at how up-tempo and energetic everything was. Then I bought a few CDs, and continued to be blown away by some of the songs. In other news, why is there just one “p” in their name?
Moments of You (Don't Tell Me You Do) – More than any other song, this one says “Rockapella” to me.
Jenny Come Away (Smilin’) – This must be in the top 10 or maybe even top 5 of “songs that get stuck in my head”.
Shambala (Smilin’)

6. BOCA. After years of coveting it, I finally bought the “BOCA Mega Box”, which I think included all the BOCA albums through 2005. I expected something like the Overtones and Men’s Octet CDs that I had--the Men’s Octet was a recent two-time ICCA National Champion and hence I assumed among the best in collegiate a cappella. They probably are in live performances, but not in recorded a cappella. My jaw dropped when I heard how much better the production was on nearly all of the BOCA songs than on my CDs from the Cal groups. That was my introduction to the larger world of collegiate a cappella
Insomniac – Virginia Gentlemen (BOCA 2) – This gets my nod for the most jaw-dropping collegiate a cappella track ever. It is nearly perfect. [already mentioned in this thread]
Angel - Wheaton Gentleman Callers (BOCA 1997)
Go Rest High On That Mountain – Emory No Strings Attached (BOCA 1997)
Yellow – On The Rocks, Oregon (BOCA 2004)
Fix You – James Madison Exit 245 (BOCA 2007) [already mentioned in this thread]
Telephone Message – Brown Derbies (BOCA Humor) – about 5 seconds into this track, I said “What the…? This is the Mentos song!” I actually used it on my answering machine for about a year. Probably a copyright violation there, sorry about that!
The 12.5 Days of Christmas – Washington U Pikers (BOCA Humor) – I was in a community choir (mostly classical a cappella), and tried to get our director to have us do this for our Christmas concert. He declined. :-(

7. Acappella. On a short list for “worst name for an a cappella group”, Acappella blew me away when I discovered them in 2006 through emusic.com. I had no idea that Christian a cappella like this existed. If you are not familiar with them, picture Rockapella with a Christ-centered message...with (in my opinion) even better voices/blend/tuning than Rockapella. If you are Christian and also a fan of contemporary a cappella, you need to discover this group for yourself. Here are four songs in particular that continue to blow me away:
O Wretched Man – Acappella (All That I Need)
He’s Gonna Let You Know – Acappella (Act of God)
House of Praise – Acappella (Act of God)
Let’s Show And Tell – Acappella (Act of God)

8. Rescue. I discovered Rescue about the same time I did Acappella, and some of their songs made my jaw drop as well. Both groups are very similar in style and content; overall I prefer Acappella, but Rescue is amazing at times as well, such as in these four tracks:
Mary Did You Know (The First Christmas)
Rescue (Rescue) – self-titled track on self-titled album… it had better be good! And it is; this one must vie for my “most consecutive listens upon first hearing” award. The version on Reunion Live might be even better though.
Shine On Us (Two Thousand Years Ago)
Please Come (Before the Throne)

9. Noteworthy (BYU). When I found out that I was moving to BYU in 2007, and that Noteworthy had just won the ICCA competition, I had to get their album. I was floored, and these three songs are the primary reason why:
How Great Thou Art (On the Horizon) - The first verse is pretty boring, but when the soloist comes in to start the second verse with a slightly different melody, it’s just magic from then on.
Never Gonna Get It (On the Horizon) – For me, this song vies with Insomniac as “the perfect collegiate a cappella track”. It’s got it all—lots of energy, fabulous harmonies, a driving beat, etc. Wow.
When I Think About Angels (On the Horizon) – Another one for the “songs that most get stuck in your head” list.

10. Vocal Point (BYU). In the last year, I’ve purchased a number of Vocal Point albums as well, but it wasn’t until their last album, Nonstop, that I found myself being as impressed as I was at Noteworthy’s On the Horizon. These were my two most jaw-dropping tracks on the album.
Bigger Than My Body (Nonstop)
Superstition (Nonstop)


Honorable Mention: Eclipse and The Blenders. Sorry guys, I decided to cut the list to 10 groups! Otherwise you’d each have a couple of tracks.

Teaser: There’s one other group I’ll add to the list before too long, but I can’t comment on them yet because I was an official RARB reviewer for their album but the review hasn’t yet appeared.

If you made it this far, then thanks for reading! Comments welcome.

Another one of my RARB reviews is now published:
http://www.rarb.org/reviews/834.html