Month: September 2007

Well, I survived the big code review.  A really nice, bright guy with a Ph.D. from MIT and twelve years experience in the field was there as an independent auditor as well as Ann Rogers (who I really think knows more about this sort of thing than the auditor).  Both of them gave us a major thumbs up on what we are doing.  It was really kind of a relief, because no one in the company really understands a lot about machine vision.  The people in my group, John, Evan, and Ya, as well as my boss Prasant, probably understand the most, but we moved fast in the review because there was so much to cover in only two hours.  We three vision people were pretty much talking a foreign language to most of the people there.  Now maybe they know how I feel when they are talking about Raman spectroscopy.  I am going to have a pretty ugly next three months because the delivery schedule is so compressed, but after that, I hope to have a little breathing room.  I am really enjoying this, but when we get to the end of it, it will be nice to have a week on the beach in Mexico followed by getting serious about finding a house in the area to buy.

Contrary to what I had initially thought, the whole family was able to get together with Ann Rogers last night for dinner at Salsa Fresh.  It was very, very good and we enjoyed our selves very much.  We really hope that Siri will be able to come out with Ann next time if she comes again.  She is here for a big meeting we are having at my company to review the work I have been doing here for the last four months.  It will be a little bit of a nail biter, but I am pretty well prepared.

Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah get here tomorrow!!

Bryan, I am stuck at -10.  What is the bad news?

My colleague from Oregon, Ann Rogers is coming to North Carolina to sit in a review of the work I am doing here as a consultant.  Lorena, Kelly, Christian, and I were going to pick her up at the airport this evening to take her to a vegetarian Indian food restaurant.  We were very excited about it and thought it would be a nice surprise for Ann.  It is looking, though, like my boss wants to meet with her to talk about the project when we were going to do that.  Asi es la vida.  Well, we should get to see her tomorrow for breakfast anyway.  It is pretty disappointing.  The kids were dying to me Ann’s daughter Siri.  I surely hope they can do this again soon.

I do not know if I have commented here about Ann other than just peripherally.  She is AMAZINGLY like Jean.  They are both vegetarians, graduated from University of Portland one year apart in electrical engineering, are hiker athletes (when they are not chasing their kids), cut their hair the same way, and have many, many other things in common.  The amazing thing is that even though they graduated from the same school in the same major that generally has very few women only one year apart, they never met each other.  We are going to have to remedy that someday!

I have been thinking about the verses in Matthew 22 where Jesus spoke about those who were bidden to a wedding but would not come.  They all had excuses.  Then, at the wedding, one of the guests who came after the second invitation did not have on a wedding garment.  The thing we really need to be wearing as a wedding garment is a good spirit.  So there are two things for which we are responsible.  One:  We should never make excuses, rather we should do the right thing when we are asked to do it.  Two:  It is not enough just to do the right thing.  If we are doing the right thing, but with the wrong spirit, we are every bit as much worthy of punishment.

Then, I thought of the verses in Luke 14 where Jesus tells people to always take the lowest place.  The best way to assure that we will have the lowest place is to take the high place.  If we take the high place, we are wrong.  “For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”

Finally, there are some verses in Luke 16 where the Pharisees derided Jesus.  He responded by telling them that answering back to the things for which Jesus admonished them by trying to justify themselves was an abomination to God.  God knows our hearts and does not want us to respond to admonition by trying to justify ourselves; rather he wants us acknowledge our state and repent.

I know I am not innocent of these things.

After work last night, we did nothing other than work through a little homeschool, talk, and eat dinner.  Lorena bought me a nice cake for which I broke my diet pretty badly.  I cannot think of a better way to have spend my fifty-second birthday.  After the conventions, we are hoping to get settled into our routine again.  As soon as things calm down a little Christian and I can start posting on our next big project; We are going to make a cat tower.  In addition, he is working on his next claymation.  In the meantime, Kelly is writing a ballad.  She has an awesome start on the lyrics, but has not had a chance yet to work on the music.  I am hoping she will let us post it up here when she finishes it.

We got back from Shelby convention last night at about 6:00 PM.  We were going to do a bunch of homeschool stuff, but instead of that, we ended up sitting around the table in the nook talking together as a family for about an hour.  It was very, very nice.  Kelly played and talked with all her new friends at convention just like last time.  Christian did, too, but his friend  Hunter was not there, so I do not think it was really the same for him.  Now that convention is over, we are really starting to get into the swing of homeschool.  Our friend Rebekah from Texas called last night to compare homeschool notes and she gave us some ideas about how we might improve our program a little.  They are heading off to Texas convention in about a week so they will have a little bit of a break from their homeschool for a few days.  It will be great to get them out here for a week soon so they can meet the professing homeschool kids in North Carolina.

Where are you in this Bryan?  I am catching up.  We are headed to convention this weekend in Shelby.  I have at least another couple of weeks of intensity at work, but hope to start posting better posts here shortly.

This is Kelly and Christian’s cousin Lynncito dressed up as the Mexican patriot Allende for a celebration at his school for Mexico’s Independence Day on September 16.  That is his father Tio Lynn beside him with the glasses.

We got a call a couple of days ago, informing us that Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah are coming to visit us on September 29.  We are very much looking forward to having them here.  Grandma Sarah will spoil the kids and go shopping with Lorena.  Grandpa Milo is going to visit one of Quality Corners’ customers, but more importantly, he is going to teach the kids how to make sushi and help Christian make a custom designed cat tower for Rubix and Kiwi.  We are also hoping that he will teach the kids how to make those really fancy frosting roses that he used to make to put on wedding cakes.  I will have a pretty heavy work load until the end of September, but I am hoping to have at least a little time with them.

With all the long hours I have been working, I needed the weekend to catch up with homeschool and the family.  I ended up going in early and working on Saturday morning, but the rest of the weekend was family and homeschool stuff.  We got caught up on some of the homeschool, but there is still more to go.  We really need to stay current on the math because the topics are getting more advanced daily.  Kelly will start Intermediate Algebra (Algebra II) and Christian will start Elementary Algebra (Algebra I) in October.  It is a lot of work and repetition, but we are sticking to it and making good progress.  The next thing on which we need to focus is the science program.  It is a fabulous program and we want to get the most out of it that we can.  The history and literature are so fun and interesting that they kind of take care of themselves, so we are moving along and making what I believe is good progress.

Bryan, I am down 10 again and riding a bullet.  I know you are way ahead, but I am on a roll.  What is your number?  I am going to try to get the progress bars going again.

In spite of the fun Bryan is making of me, I am still in the competition.  He may be down a lot now, but just wait until the REAL number comes in on Friday.  I am burning the midnight oil for awhile.  Right after I finished Kelly and Christian’s math corrections last night, I got a telephone call to come back into work so I had to be there until about 2:30 AM.  I kind of enjoy that kind of thing when there is a hard problem to solve.  We are right in the middle of it right now.  It is pretty tiring, but will be greatly rewarding if we can solve the problem.

Well, yesterday, I got a note from my good buddy Jerry at my old job. We had a standing bet to see who was going to get down to 200 lbs. We had two quarters taped to the wall. Winner take all. I am very said to say that the only thing in the note was the following haiku:

I spent the weekend in a place that used to be called Cid, North Carolina, but now it seems that it is just a wide spot in the road somewhere between Lexington and Denton. It was a beautiful weekend. It was a great weekend where we were reacquainted with some old friends and made lots and lots of new ones at one of our annual church conventions. One of the really fun things about the place was that many of the rocks found in that area are naturally formed cubes. I am not just talking about cubes that are kind of in the form of a cube, these are rocks that are about 20-30 millimeters to the side and form precise sharp little 90 degree corners. Amazing. Christian said he remembers reading about rocks like that in one of his geology books. I hope he can find something about them, because it looks almost like these are not natural, but just little gray rock dice cubes without any dots on them.

I was considering about our commemorative gathering and I ran into a couple of things.  Warren, Curt, and Susan should especially check these out. Maybe now that we are livin’ in the South again (not just South of Corvallis), we ought to spin our commemorative gathering back up. We still have time to plan for February.

We had a really nice birthday dinner of sheesh kabobs followed by the opening of some very cool presents, the singing of happy birthday, and the eating of cake last night. Christian’s was a memorable birth. He was born in Tualatin, Oregon early in the morning as one of the most beautiful sunrises in the history of the world shown through an east facing hospital window. He had lot and lots of beautiful black hair; probably not as much as his mother whose hair they say was already down to her shoulders at the time of her birth. It was a great time for reflection and to think about what we want to do next. The big decision right now is whether we want to build a more advanced version of the hovercraft we finished last weekend or save our pennies and buy a kit that we can build together over the winter. Both of them would be great options. The other issue is that one of Christian’s birthday presents was a subscription to the hard copy edition of Make Magazine. There are TONS of way cool projects in it. The hard part is going to be to stick to our project until we finish it without getting distracted by something else.

Lorena and the kids are taking off to convention this afternoon. I have to stay here and work until Friday night. I am hoping to get some work done on my Linux projects to kill the time while they are gone.

Just in time for his birthday (He is eleven today, he will be twelve tomorrow), Christian has gotten his hovercraft up and running!  Here it is.  ¡Buen provecho!

What a great three-day weekend.  We had to make major revisions on the hovercraft, but it worked like a champ.  We took some great videos of both the making of the hovercraft and of Christian riding it down the street, but ran into some technical glitches when we tried to put them up on YouTube.  As soon as we get that all worked out, we will send out an email and post links to where Christian is planning to put the videos on his blog.  It was WAY fun.  We need to find a way to mount the leaf blower on the hovercraft because Christian just holds it now.  Then we need to attach a rope to it so we can pull it around.  After that all works out, we are planning to go ahead and get a kit to put together.

The rest of the weekend was pretty cool, too.  Yesterday afternoon, we stopped at what looked like a Burger-King or some other fast food restaurant made over to be a fast food North Carolina barbeque joint.  When we went in, it was very clean.  Lorena ordered barbeque chicken and I ordered broasted chicken.  Both of them were great.  The lady that served us told us we missed out because their specialty was barbeque pork.  We are looking forward to getting back there to try it very soon.  It is just a single store barbeque place in Apex named Dixie Belle.  I hope they turn into a chain someday.  We would especially like to take Trisha, Bryan, and Mr. Bone there when they come to visit us.  We even might take the Waldos if they are not too snooty from eating all that New York City food!

On another hopeful note, after my inspirational morning at the Holly Springs Public Library, I spent the afternoon working on getting a bunch of vision code up and going in Linux on my laptop.  I had never quite figured out how to program very well in the Linux environment, so I finally took the bull by the horns and just hammered away at it until I got it.  It is going GREAT now.  I think I need one more session like that to be more effective with the debugger, but I am on my way now.  I got my main buffer and filter class going along with the ability to load and save images.  The next big step is to add a GTK+ GUI to the thing and I will be off and running.

Awhile back, I bought a $449 computer with Microsoft Windows XP on it for Lorena to be able to talk via Skype with her mother in Mexico.  I immediately installed Ubuntu Linux.  I think I we were at Dapper Drake at the time and I have to admit that I struggled a little to get all the hardware going.  Since then, I have did upgrades through Edgy Eft and Feisty Fawn.  It got easier each time.  I will be installing Gutsy Gibbon sometime toward the end of October.  I cannot imagine the torture I would have to endure if I had to do that with a Windows computer, but I am actually lookng forward to the new installs because they get easier every time I do them.  I know part of it is because of my movement up the learning curve, but part of it is that Linux, in general and Ubuntu in particular, just keeps getting better and better.

At any rate, some way cool things have been happening over the last little while that rarely happened to me in the past.  The first was that I found out the new V.P. of Engineering at my new job here in the Research Triangle Park area in North Carolina is running several Ubuntu boxes at home as file and internet servers.  The really big thing we have in common is that both of us have money burning a hole in our pocket waiting for the first under $200 Linux laptop to come out.  $201 is not good enough, so both of us have great hope for the new $199 Asus Xandros laptops to arrive.  We will buy them the first day they are available.  I will probably play with it for awhile, then start working on getting Ubuntu installed on it.  When it is possible to get a laptop computer with a camera and microphone for cruising the web, watchubg movies, Skype, writing papers, instant messaging, and all that sort of thing for less than the cost of a Palm TX or most smart cellphones, it surely feels like a sea change is taking place.  The funny deal is that the Asus computer is really small.  I actually think that the small screen helps them.  This computer does not feel like your grandfather’s PDA.

The other way cool thing happened this morning.  I am writing this as I sit in my easy chair with attached coffee table at the Holly Springs, North Carolina Public Library.  I am drinking my cup of gourmet coffee in the library as I write.  I know I have talked about this often, but it does not really get any less cool with time.  I forgot to turn down the volume on my laptop so a guy with two little kids nearby heard the Ubuntu boot tune when I fired up the computer.  Before he walked out, he came by and asked me if this was one of the new Dell Ubuntu laptops.  I told him my story (see above).  He told me he had been running Ubuntu for quite awhile now and was looking forward to Gutsy Gibbon, too.  I really feel some kind of momentum is being established here.