This is an article that was featured on Slashdot recently. Many of you will have read it, but I’ll link to it here anyway. This is just yet another example of how amazing God’s design really is - when was the last time you wrote an app that patches itself each time it segfaults? And yet, the human heart can rebuild itself after suffering what doctors thought was irreparable damage.

It’s been a while since I posted on here. I haven’t had much to post, and life’s been pretty busy.

Last night I had a dream that I saw my grandfather on my dad’s side. Just 3 days after my fifth birthday, he died from colon cancer. We were on a lake, and he spent a bit of time trying to get a jetski working. We talked a lot, I offered to help out, and he expressed to me how much he felt like he wasn’t ready to die, even though he said he was in his mid-nineties. Which was odd, because if he was still alive today, he’d be 74-ish.

After changing places in a way that you often do in dreams, I found myself standing in my parents’ house talking to my dad, who is nearly the spitting image of Grandpa, expressing how I didn’t want to see Grandpa go again. Despite that it was a dream I remember actually feeling emotions - and I was crying, something I don’t do too often anymore.

Then just like that I flashed back to being with Grandpa, this time in a restaurant. I showed him a computer from the 21st century. It was Scribus, my tablet PC, showing an Enano-based web page, of course. I don’t know how he responded because right then I woke up. Even though it was a dream I feel like I really did meet him - like I remembered his personality and character from when I was younger, mixed in and age-progressed the mental image of my dad, and came up with a scenario that fit him perfectly. Your brain does weird things sometimes.

And I remember that I’m almost exactly like him. I’ve grown into an engineer, an entrepreneur. He was an engineer and a wizard at fixing things, just like all five of his sons, and he ran a light company called Fuhry, Inc. If you have an old Dodge or Chrysler check the lights in it. They’ll probably say Fuhry. If you have a chandelier in a house built in the ’80s, there’s a good chance it will say Fuhry on it.

I don’t often think of him because I was rather young when he died. This is the first time I’ve just randomly started thinking about him. Yet it’s hard for me to even type up this post without tearing up a little. A couple of days ago I visited my grandmother and she fussed about how disorganized and cluttered the workbench in her basement was. She took me down there and told me a lot about him, how he always had one of those mini-screw cabinets with like 40 different drawers, and he’d always keep every possible type of screw on hand, neatly organized into that box. I saw model airplane kits - one unopened - and something that was built exactly like a soldering iron, except it was huge. I wondered what the heck it was. He had all the tools of the trade - a multimeter, something that was beyond a doubt a soldering iron, every type of screwdriver. It wasn’t apparent to me at the time, but now it’s obvious - he was an electrical engineer. Just like at least 2 of his grandkids.

I still ask God why He allowed Grandpa to die when I was so young. As a Christian I know that everything is part of His holy will. Still, Grandpa was the man that shaped Dad’s and all of my uncles’ lives. They’re all really smart people. One’s a software engineer. One engineers Diebold bank machines. One is an aerodynamics whiz. My grandpa was all of those and then some. I imagine that as a kid I told Granpa the cliché “I wanna be just like you!” Yet somehow I ended up being the whole family’s 24/7 private tech support person, I attended a week-long airplane camp when I was 15, and am running a software consulting business.

I’m gonna cut this post short because my brain’s run out of things to say. Waking up in the middle of the night means you don’t get that much energy to work with, and I’ve been sitting here writing this post for over half an hour.

^ Just a little piece of my life and family history ^