Day: March 4, 2009

Most days of the week, Mom, Christian and I head down to the YMCA and work out for 35 minutes on they elliptical machine. They are nice machines… you can plug in your age and weight and goals and lots of other things and there are many different programs you can use.  I don’t think it’s as great as swimming, but we all get a good workout.

A few weeks ago I started charting how far I went and how many calories I’d burned. Since I try to do a little more than I did the time before each day, it’s been super exciting to see the dramatic difference between the first day and the latest day.  My big goal right now is to get to 4 miles in 35 minutes (although I might make it 40 minutes). I’m getting an average of 3 and a half miles and 280 calories for 35 minutes, and that’s taken me a while so I’m not exactly sure how long it will take me to get up to my goal. But it’s been really fun going through it. Dad is going to help me put my chart onto the computer so it’ll be backed up and easier to access.
 
I’m REALLY looking forward to swimteam though! I want it to be here right now! Sign up day is on April 11th (in a little more than a month!), and it starts sometime in mid-May (2 and a half months!)  TOO LONG! 

Sigh…

I see a potential Betty Blonde storyline in this. 😉

With lots of friends going to college or studying hard in homeschool, I too often put the focus on other people.  I always harp on the kids about learning.  I try to be careful to make the very important distinction between learning and getting a degree, certificate, or diploma.  Degrees, certificates, and diplomas hold now value other than what is accrued to them by the societies within which they are honored.  They do say something about the process through which someone has passed to acquire them, but even that is diminished of late by grade inflation and the big push to get everyone through college.  I think the old 8th grade diploma became the high school diploma in the fifties and is the bachelor’s degree of our day.

At any rate, I am finishing up a big chunk of functionality for the product on which I work at my day job.  I will be moving on to a new chunk of functionality that will require me to have a deeper understanding of the math used to know things about the three dimensions of things in scenes of which we capture images.  We will take multiple images from different directions, light the scenes with different spectra, diffusion, and direction of light, and do some other tricks to try to get information on the third dimension of things from two dimensional images.  I know quite a bit about how to do that now, but need to do it at a precision and speed and with noisier images than I have ever worked in the past.  What that means is that I will need to start learning some new things.  It is math and it will be messy to learn, but I have been harping on the importance of learning until you die so much.  No it is time for me to put my money where my mouth is!

Note:  Here is an interesting article by one of my favorite authors that helps me remember why I need to study hard–I am not that smart.