We love North Carolina, but they are WAY out of their depth when it comes to organizing and/or participating in a running event, they need to send the organizers and participants out to Oregon to see how it is done.  That being said, the kids had fun and raised money for a good charity, which was the purpose of the race.  Still, people here really need to lighten up, have a good time, get into the event.  Still, the kids got their doughnuts (I refuse to use the word donut as if it is a real word), t-shirts, and bib.  I was particularly proud of Kelly.  She whistled, hollered, and winked at every cute guy in a gladiator suit that ran by.

I love my new job.  I am working on a new technology.  When I first started in field of Machine Vision in 1983, that technology was very new and intriguing.  Everyone knew it had a huge future, but because of the immaturity of the technology and the relatively slow speed of computers back then, it was hard to use it for even the easiests of task.  Computers improved, machine vision algorithms got more sophisticated and ran faster on better hardware, and within five years things really opened up.  Now, all the easy tasks have already been done.  That is why I have had such an enjoyable career.  I get to go around and try to make really hard stuff work.

I have enjoyed that a lot, but I forgot how much fun it was when the machine vision market was just starting to move.  This new technology on which I am working makes 3D measurements easy and cheap compared to how it used to be.  There is, again, a lot of low hanging fruit–easy jobs for this new technology–that have been waiting a decade for a solution because 2D machine vision technology just could not bear the burden of such difficulty.

The difference, this time, is that I am on the forefront of the development, not of the technology itself, but of the application of the technology.  It is very invigorating.  I got to work full time developing very interesting code and techniques.  Then I get to take that stuff out to solve problems for which people have been literally begging for a solution.  One engineer, last week, told me he had been trying to figure out a way to solve a hard problem in a very high-technology setting for 6-7 years.  His company had spent a lot of money trying to figure it out and had pretty much given up.  He thinks our technology will do the trick.

I am waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it might, but I will enjoy the ride until it does.

On Monday and Tuesday last week I drove from Raleigh to Charlotte and back.  On Wednesday I drove from Raleigh to Wilmington, NC to Elizabethtown, NC, and back to Ralieigh.  On Thursday, the biggest day, I drove from Raleigh to Roanoke, VA to Blacksburg, VA, and back to Raliegh.  I drove over 1500 miles, visited five customers, and spent my customary two days in the home office.  The driving got a little tedious, but I really enjoyed it.  I found out that Roanoke, VA is a beautiful city–at least it was beautiful the day I was there.  I think I am only going to have to drive this much for a month or two longer.  Then I will back off to a couple of trips per month.  That will be just about right.

I am not much of a “work at home” guy.  That I can get out of the house two to four days per week is a big deal for me.  When I go to the reduced travel schedule, I might work over at the library of one of our local colleges.  I like to have a little movement and noise around me when I work.  The last time we were in the Holly Springs Community Library, I found they no longer allow the drinking of coffee in the stacks.  Bad news.  We probably won’t go back.  The Cameron Village Library is still good with us coffee drinking readers, so that is still an option.

Inspired by fellow Oregonian stuck on the east coast, Smitty (his post this morning is stellar, CPAC-in’ Heat) and new-blogger Jon in Chile, Kelly and I have decided to try and up our game a little.  If Kelly keeps making posts (with drawings) like this one, she is going to continue to leave me in the dust.  Hilarious and well written.  I recommend it highly.

I am scheduled to put over 1000 miles on the pick-up this week.  This morning, I am writing from a McDonalds about a half an hour out of Roanoke, Virginia.  My understanding is that I will maintain this fairly crazy travel schedule through the end of March.  I have a trip to British Columbia the first week of April, then, hopefully, I will only need to make a couple of road trips per month.  I get a little bit fried from sitting in the pickup for so long with only restaurant food and very little exercise, but going out to meet customers, look at their machine vision applications, and try to find solutions is absolutely invigorating.  I am working on a bleeding edge technology to solve a new class of problems that have been waiting for a solution for a long time.

The solution involves the use of a regular machine vision camera (imagine an industrial, high quality webcam) which captures 2D images to create 3D images with the help of a line laser.  The technology has been around for a long time, but now a company has packaged it in a way that makes its use in generic applications very, very much easier than was ever possible before.  My company has given me license to develop a product around the new technology and I am enjoying it immensely.

In some much more interesting news, Lorena’s Microeconomics professor asked the whole class to prepare to draw some graphs that describe Microeconomics concepts on the whiteboard in front of the class.  He did a really bad job of describing the concepts so no one in the class was prepared to draw the graphs except Lorena.  Lorena was prepared because, when she could not figure out what to do, Christian showed her the Khan Academy Microeconomics videos.  She was the most prepared of the class, so the professor picked her first, then (according to Lorena) he with ridicule through two of the examples.  I was getting pretty exercised about the whole deal until she told me he was not really mean, just demanding and he did it to the whole class.

I am really sad that Lorena cannot draw like Kelly because it would be great to have a drawing of him for this blog post.  Lorena, if you read this, next time you are in class, take a surreptitious photo of your professors with your cell phone so Kelly can draw them for her (and my) blog posts.  Lorena describes the guy as a fat, bald guy with long hair who looks like he might be very comfortable on a Harley Davidson.  I like the guy already and wonder if he has any tattoos.

That Khan Academy thing reminded me I want to ask Kelly how many Linear Algebra videos she watched today.

Imitating The Other McCain, I find myself blogging from a McDonalds this morning.  I am on my way to Wilmington for a two hour visit for business.  On the way, there was a radio report about a study that shows that the use of Facebook is an indicator of low self esteem.  I believe it.  It says that people look at all the fun happy stuff people put up on Facebook–parties, dinners, sports events, etc.–and believe their own lives do not measure up.  The reality is that most people only put up the good stuff.  It is pretty easy to see some of the posers who put up their daily pictures of their “beautiful” lives, doing crossfit, going on “girl’s nights out”, talking about what they “deserve” as actualized women,  Still, even the best of us only wants to show the good stuff.

The thing that is great about Facebook is the ability to stay in touch with friends with whom it would be difficult to have frequent contact in any other way.  I love to hear grandparents brag about their grandkids, people who put up significant events like graduations and birthdays, deaths, sicknesses.  I really enjoy people who put up interesting things that like observations on pop culture or their football team.  That being said, narcissim and the me culture are magnified on Facebook.

Just a couple of notes today.  First and most important, our buddy Jon from Chile has a new blog.  You can find it here:  http://www.jonchile.com.  It is amazingly bilingual Spanish/English, fun to read and has great pictures.  I highly recommend it!

In addtion, I got some text messages today from Lorena and Kelly telling me school was shut down again for a “gun on campus/maniacal police activity” event.  I am glad everyone is moving on to NCSU soon.

The GaugeCam team met with Tom D. at NCSU yesterday to try to figure out how to commercialize our idea.  We had a pretty good brainstorming session.  All of us left the meeting with something to do so we can report back next week.  It is not like I do not have enough stuff to do already, but actually having something on the market in the next few months is a very fun thing to ponder.  We really do think we have found a niche.  I will post on GaugeCam and here as soon as we have things a little more carefull defined, but the first product will involve the ability to easily place cameras in very remote places where there is no hard wired nor close wireless connectivity nor power available, then receive a reliable stream of images displayed in a variety of user defined ways on a web stie.  Later, we will add some machine vision measurement capabilities to our setup, but for now, all we want to do is capture images for manual review.

Kelly is drawing again!  You can see it all here.  This makes me happy.  She is getting killed at school so we finally decided she did not have time to do a Betty Blonde comic strip every day.  That made us pretty sad.  She has such an interest college life magnified by her acute sense of what is interesting about the people with whom she spends her days that it is a shame she does not share that with others in her own unique way.

Finally, we came to the conclusion that she can draw up interesting caricatures, portraits, and written word studies while she is doodling in class or waiting for someone to pick her up.  So we are going to try to start posting some of that for awhile.  I LOVE the idea and think it will be great.  We had a great talk yesterday about the fundamental immorality of abortion and some other social ills.  I hope she writes about that, too.

I could not keep her from fashion if I wanted to, so I suppose she will blog about that, too.

UPDATE:  Kelly forcefully requested that I let everyone know that Betty Blonde is NOT dead and will spin back up as time avails.  It might be sooner.  It might be later.  It is definitely not over.

We are all driving a LOT these days.  I am working at least two days per week in Charlotte with some additional driving around the Carolinas and Virginia.  Lorena and Christian drive about forty minutes each way to Johnston Community College two days per week and we do all the normal drives to the grocery store and the YMCA.  Fortunately, that level of driving should diminsh fairly dramatically in 4-5 months.  At about that time, I will need to buy another car.  I cannot decide whether to give the kids the pick-up to drive to and from NCSU so I can get a cheaper car for my long drives or to give them the new (used) car to go to school and stick with the pickup.  I think I will probably give them the pickup.