Celebrate 100 Years of BSA...

With some gnomes!

Looks like they ran out of good ideas for making money off the centennial celebration. All kidding aside, I'm excited about the anniversary. There's a new handbook, BSA national is going on tour, and a good time to reflect on the past and press on into the future.

Night Frisbee

Last weekend I went camping and had a really good time. The best part was tossing the frisbee around late at night. To up the ante, the frisbee was black. It was fun trying to catch a near invisible disc flying at your head. Naturally there were the occasional collisions between scouts and plastic, but no serious harm came out of it.

Last night at Scouts we held elections for leadership positions. We also looked at some patrol patches for ideas for a new patrol name. Currently they are the Highlanders because we are the Highland ward. Here's the website we looked at. They narrowed it down to Flaming Flying Squirrels, Flaming Marshmallows, Ninjas, Purple Platypus, Duct Tape, and Spicy Tacos. Fun fun. It was good to see them excited. I'm hoping this will give them more of a reason to wear their scout uniforms.

Scout Camp

I was able to spend the whole week with my boys down in Hoosier National Forest at Camp Maumee. We had lots of fun even though our first day got off to a rough start. I forgot some important papers that we needed to check in so I had to drive back home and pick them up. (2 hour round trip) On top of that, a mile outside of camp, Bro Bixler's tire exploded. So the scouts were stuck for a bit while I went to pick up a tire while I got the papers. Oh, and during my 2 hour trip getting things we had an enormous downpour that flooded some streets in Bloomington. After that terrible first morning, things went really well. We went swimming in the lake, fished, and the boys worked hard on their merit badges. The bishop came to visit and wouldn't stand too near the boys because of the smell. It was good to get back home at the end of the week.

Open Source @ BSA - A Year Later

Last year this month, the Boy Scouts of America started an open source site at https://opensource.scouting.org/ You may notice that your browser won't open it automatically because there is a security certificate issue. I didn't really understand what the goal of the site was then and I'm still not quite sure I know now. I believe it's supposed to be a place where people can collaborate and create free software for BSA purposes. My first thought was an open source version of TroopMaster which tracks scout info, ranks, advancement, etc. I think that project was trying to get off the ground, but now I can't find it. I went to the news section just to see what was going on. The last (and first) post was an announcement the "The Boy Scouts have joined the Open Source Community" (posted May 9, 2008).

I don't know what I can do, but I'm going to try to see what I can contribute to their effort because free stuff is cool and useful free stuff is even cooler.