"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." –John 16:33

San Pedro Garza Garcia

Category: Work Page 1 of 8

Christian earns a challenge coin

Christian was given one of the coolest challenge coins ever for some of the research he has accomplished in his job. He got one from his professor when he was getting his PhD, but this seems like a much bigger deal. They gave it to him after and invited talk he gave on that research. He is scheduled to give and even more important talk in a few months. It really is amazing to see him performing at this level.

Valentine’s Day lunch

My wonderful bride is headed off down to Mexico to visit her mother who is having some medical issues. She and her brother Lynn are going to go over all aspects of their construction business, investigate plans for their next project, and most importantly, figure out how long it is going to take for Lynn’s crew to get our house on the hill in good enough shape so that we can go start spending a bunch more time down there. Lorena and I went to DQ for lunch to celebrate Valentine’s Day before she left. Notice she dressed all in red for the occasion and I wore my red Nebraska ball cap.

Bacteria imaging work

I am working through the weekend to finish some algorithms for a demo one of our sales people needs to do on Monday. The purpose of the demo is to show that we can measure bacteria in images with sufficient precision and enough features (contour roughness, 3-D, inferences, shape analysis, texture analysis, etc.) to inform the customers about the things they want to know including differentiation of bacteria types, size, growth rates, etc. Honestly, I love doing this kind of task. It seems like when there are “hair-on-fire” moments, ideas seem to percolate a bit more than at other times. I think that might be because as the results from one algorithm are available, the knowledge derived from that can inspire new ideas.

Bacteria and fungus weekend

We have a big demo coming up at my day job that has to do with the ability to measure different types of bacteria and one type of fungus in an time series of images. Of course, I have only gotten this one image so far, the whole time series is to follow soon, so the clock does not start ticking on the demo development until I have downloaded all the images. What that means is that I am almost certainly going to be working all weekend long, late into the night on these things. This probably should make me sad, but frankly, this stuff is really, really fun when one can get it to work and I am pretty much looking forward to the work–or at least the end product if I can get it right.

Working in DC

We met Kelly’s boyfriend, Adam for the first time, last night at a little party in her apartment. We plan to be together again tonight along with Adam’s aunt and uncle. It was a pleasant evening and we were very impressed. He seems to be a very thoughtful person, both in the sense of kindness and in the sense of consideration of ideas and situations. We are very much looking forward to the evening tonight, too. In the meantime, I have found a great place to work with a beautiful street-level view of Washington, D.C. in its fall/winter glory.

Christian presents his research

Christian is scheduled to present the research from his work to at the 2023 Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers (ACSSC 2023) this morning. The title of his presentation is “Online Null Adaption on a Digital Controllable Reflectarray Receiver.” He has been working on this work for quite a while now, but it is finished and he has now moved on to something new. He took the seven hour flight (SEVEN HOURS!!!!) from Boston to San Francisco, then drove down to the conference center in time for the first plenary talk yesterday. Of course, he stopped by In-N-Out for an “animal style” hamburger on the drive down.

Frank recommends wine

Back in the late 1990’s I worked for a company named ESI on a new product. There were problems with the product and I worked many hours, often through the night to resolve them. I was in a small group and was the only one who could do the work. I am not sure my boss even knew I was doing that. But my friend Frank, who worked in a completely different department on the other side of a very big building saw. I was getting pretty down about it and was not sure I would ever resolve the problem1. Right in the middle of all that, Frank showed up with a bottle of Duck Pond Pinot Noir wine from Dundee, Oregon, just up the road from where we lived, gave it to me and said my efforts were not going unnoticed. I appreciated that beyond words. I am not sure what year was the vintage, it might have been 1995, but it was amazing. I liked it so much that I asked him about it later. He told me that Duck Pond had always made a great bottle of Pinot Noir being located in the red hills of Dundee, but for some reason, that one year was just off the charts better than anything they had done before and it had not yet been discovered by the wine snobs. That weekend, I went out and bought a case of it. It took us several years to finish the whole case and every bottle was as amazing as the one Frank gave me. Lorena and I found a bottle of the 2021 vintage so we could share it with the family. We have no idea whether it is as good as the first bottle, but the memories were worth the price of purchae.

  1. With a little help from Frank and Mark, I eventually worked it out. ↩︎

Frank and Mark

I have been working with a couple of guys in different capacities for close to forty years. The last twenty years or so, I have used them as consultants for difficult machine vision work. I never would have imagined when I first met them that we would still be working together so many years later. They are both exceptionally talented machine vision algorithm developers. When I talk about Frank I say that he is pretty much the Mozart in our field, and he is. In addition to machine vision and among other things, Frank is a truffle hunter. He and a friend wrote a book titled “Field Guide to North American Truffles.” Mark, in a very different way, is just as talented. He got his Ph.D. in Physics from a co-author of Albert Einstein, has an Erdos number of 3, and is indispensable when it comes to the math of image processing. The synergy created when they work together is with par in the little technical world in which we live. I am amazed they still love to do this at 75 plus years of age and even more amazed that I get to do it with them. They are part of the reason I am loathe to retire anytime soon. Even more importantly, I am glad to call him my friend.

Christian is a scientist

I love this picture of Christian. This picture was taken when he was 20-years old and two years and change into his Ph.D. He had come to visit us when we were living in an apartment in Lewisville, Texas. During those years and even now, we see Christian in this mode. Thinking. It is hard to overstate the difficulty of the research program onto which he had embarked. The difficulty and importance of his work has accelerated since he received his appointment at MIT. His work is hard in ways that few people are equipped to understand. He is one of those few who are able to move between the development of difficult theoretical solutions to their implementation in mechanical and electrical hardware and the software that drives it all.

BIBLE: New Testament read #38 (New Living Translation) — Complete

Dr. Christian Chapman, 25

Christian hit a half century a couple of days ago. He got his PhD from a tier one university at 23 and now works at the pure research laboratory of an elite university on the East Coast. We are quite proud of him. It is a hard age, but he is navigating it well. In a few weeks I will be able to announce another accomplishment for him and for me. He is helping me with my retirement PhD effort and, believe it or not, with my day job.

Xubuntu 20.04

I am a big fan of Linux and, more particularly, a big fan of Xubuntu Linux. This is not a review of Xubuntu but an acknowledgement of my biennial struggle about when to replace the previous Long Term Support (LTS) release, Xubuntu 18.04 with the new release 20.04 that is scheduled to drop on April 23. I do not think I have made it more than half a day before I bite the bullet and make the change. This will be a pretty straightforward deal with the computer I use for my PhD work and our home computers, but my day job machine is another story. We have lots of heavy lifting going on and the setup of a development computer of any stripe (Linux, Windows, or apple) for the kind of work I am doing is often a challenge and generally takes at least half a day if I am really lucky. I could just install over the top of 18.04, but that kind of defeats the fun and I like the idea of completely cleaning out cruft every now and then, so I plan to wipe the hard drive. I will continue to run into stuff I forgot for a few more days or even weeks. This is true even though I write down all the stuff I need. New thing just keep popping up.

I am all Linux all the time at both work and home. For the first time ever, I have no reason to ever boot to Windows and we avoid allowing the plague known as apple into the house. The guys at work mostly use Ubuntu, but I really like Xubuntu, mostly because its use changes only minimally. I always look forward to a new release and this one is no exception.

Programming professional in Python

I cannot believe I am writing this blog post, but for a variety of reasons, I now spend about half my time programming in python. It is still pretty useless as a tool for doing the thing for which I normally get hired, but it is great as glue, for machine learning, and for other types of utility programming. As or solving hard machine vision and image processing problems–for that C++ is still the king for both speed of performance and speed of development. In both my day job and for my PhD research, I have a lot of the C++ vision code I need already coded up so it runs fast and does what I want. Now I need to make stuff play nicely with GUI programmers and other user so I am doing that in Python. The thing I hate to admit is that I really like it quite a lot and I CAN go faster with stuff like Scikit-Learn, matplotlib, and other great tools.

Angst is often unnecessary

I had heard that most people who work for someone else never quit worrying about getting fired. That is at least until they are forty, but probably until the day they retire or die. Today, I came to a point in some of my work where some of the problems I thought belonged to me were not really anything over which I had any control AND most of the people around me understood that. After the meeting where I arrived at that conclusion, I looked out the window and saw our magnificent Mt. Rainier. It is not any different than it has been since we arrived in Centralia and the same is true for my job. I am at the point in my work that if there is a problem in my domain and I cannot solve it, there are probably very few others that could either. That is more a product of longevity and experience than brilliance, but I need to remember that. People are almost never against me in these contexts, they just have their own burdens and their own angst about getting fired. I need to be on their side.

New video conference hardware

I am in a meeting right now with nine of my colleagues, most of whom are in the Boston area, but which also includes myself in Washington state, one guy in Colorado, and one guy in Utah. Everyone in the meeting is in a different location. In addition to the people in the meeting, the guy running the meeting is sharing his screen with information on the topic we are discussing. It works amazingly well. I regularly use three different video conference tools–Google Hangouts, Slack, and Zoom. Every now and then I also use WhatsApp and Skype, but that is mostly that is for personal stuff.

Over the last week, I got in a new microphone and speakers that have made these meetings a good chunk better. About a day after I got these new parts connected and working, my bluetooth headphones (Cowin E7) broke mechanically. This was pretty disappointing because I had been very careful with them, always carefully returning them to their case when they were not in use. I ordered another set of headphones (Plantronics this time) a couple of days. With the China virus, deliveries have slowed down pretty dramatically from Amazon and Walmart so they will not arrive until late in the week–probably Thursday. All my housemates have to listen to both ends my rather boring conference calls until they arrive.

Christian arrives in Boston

Christian flew into Boston yesterday afternoon to look for apartments before he starts work at MIT next week. We went to California Pizza–the same place we went when we looked for an apartment in Tempe when he started his PhD at Arizona State University. After dinner, I gave him a tour of Thrive Bioscience where I work. He liked it a lot. The part he liked best was the instruments I showed him that we build. He designed one of the most important algorithms we use in the growing of stem cells. It was really nice for him to be able to see where his algorithm is being used. It is hard to overstate how import was his work in this development.

Christian goes to work

Christian has been home with us for the last several weeks, but now it looks like he fleeing the nest. Actually he has been paying his own way since he left for his PhD when he was 18, but now, it feels like he is gone for good. When he was in school, we could squint our eyes and semi-believe he was not gone even though he really was. Now though, he does not really need us hardly at all. We like to think our cheer leading is something (and it probably is), but he is truly on his own and making his own way now.

He is now a scientist in the very best meaning of that word at one of the most prestigious institutions of science in the world. It is, in our humble yet biased, opinion much more that just MIT. It is the part of MIT solely dedicated to research, unencumbered with training new young minds, in the very areas Christian studied. We feel somewhat melancholy, but also grateful and humbled that Christian has made it to this level.

He will leave next week and almost certainly never come back except for visits. That is a good thing, but we are in somewhat of a state of melancholy.

Retirement clock

I have added a retirement clock to the sidebar of the blog. I am not sure things are going to actually play out in the way the retirement clock is planned, but God willing I hope to be moving from a full time direct employment position to a half-time contract position on or about May 2, 2012–28 months from now. Here is the clock:

Hopefully, this will allow me to spend half of my time working on my PhD, but who knows. More on all this as we go along.

Working from Arizona

This is the fig tree in Christian’s kitchen. He has been nourishing it faithfully for a long time and now has some figs to show for it. It has been a bit of a struggle because he has to take it to the lab so one of his friends there can take care of it whenever he travels. It is nice to be able to work remotely from Arizona in February. This is the first time I have really taken advantage of the opportunity, but I am really glad to be able to do it.

New office setup

With the office downstairs painted, I decided to rearrange the furniture so I could work a little more efficiently. The big screen on the right is connected to my main computer which only runs Linux. The screen on the left is connected to a computer I bought for $241 that runs both Linux Mint 19.1 and Windows 10. The Linux part is for the bean project and another project that uses a RealSense 3d imager. The Windows allows me to build programs without having to use a virtual machine to run Windows on my main Linux box. So far I like it really well. I am sure I will have to make some adjustments in the future, but it is a lot better than my previous, single computer setup.

Kelly: Big new stuff coming

Kelly is at the start of a new chapter in her life that will feature several months of chaos followed by something pretty big. The first step is to move to short-term housing for a few months. I have been sworn to secrecy on the rest. So, über-kid-helper Lorena is up in Seattle right now helping her pack. Tomorrow, I will go load up her sofa, her bed, some other furniture, and a bunch of boxes to haul down to Centralia for storage in our garage until she makes her move to the next (actually, very) big thing. I can hardly wait to be able to talk about it because it is a big deal.

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