Month: May 2009

I have not written on any of the projects we have on our plate for quite awhile because they have been in flux.  An opportunity has come up for me to help out with a project for a professor at Troy’s school (NCSU).  I had been trying to figure out how to combine the Volcano computer project (that is on hold right now because Mt. St. Helens is so quiet), Christian’s C++ programming, and our desire to do some robotics work.  The plan is for Troy to manage a small research program that involves a camera that looks at water.  His water blog is really a better place for a description of the progress we make on the project, but I will try to describe some of the work Christian and I do on this blog.  Our plan is to start putting some of the equipment together this weekend.

It is a very cool project.  The plan calls for three computers.  The first one is inside a camera that looks at an outdoor scene (or a scene in a lab made to look like an outdoor scene) of a body of water.  The second one is a webserver that wirelessly receives the images from the camera and hosts a website that can be viewed from the internet.  The third one controls some robotic devices that control pumps, water motion actuators, light controllers, and hardware to move the lights to create shadows and bright spots in the scene to see if the system can still work in varying conditions.

This weekend, Christian and I hope to put to gether the second computer.  We have everything we need for that computer.  We will put an Ubuntu based LAMP stack on it.  We will also try to get it up on the internet.  We have registered an internet address, so Troy will point that out as soon as we have it up and running and we decide we have something to show.  The camera should get here sometime next week, so the next step will be to figure out how to get it to transmit pictures to the website.  After all that is running, we will start putting the control computer together.

All our other projects are on hold (with the exception of the cat tower) while we work on this.  I will post some stuff here on how it is going and I am sure Christian will post some stuff about his parts of the project on NerdHow, but place where we will describe that is on Troy’s water blog.

I have been going to Mexico on a regular basis now for about twenty-five years.  I have a Mexican wife.  We have two kids.  We all speak Spanish fluently.  Mexican Spanish with a Norteño accent.  We have access to El Norte, the daily newspaper of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon which we read often.  I lived in Guadalajara for awhile, lectured in a good number of Mexican Universities from the ITESM system to the Instituto Tecnologico regional engineering university system.  I spent three years moving advanced manufacturing technology from the U.S. to maquiladora companies in Juarez and Chihuahua.  I have visited Guanajuato, Queretero, Bustamante, Allende, Morelia, Patzcuaro, Zamorra, Puerto Vallarta, San Luis Potosi, Cancun, and many other parts of Mexico.  I have visited Chapultapec Castle, Teotihuacan, and the Museum of Archeology in Mexico City.  One of my brothers-in-law runs his own business in Monterrey.  One of them runs the Latin American operations for a Fortune 500 company.  One works as an engineering manager for a large Mexican owned textile company.  One of them works as a project manager for an IT services company.  My father-in-law and mother-in-law are minor political functionaries in their town.  I have spent many, many hours talking with them about Mexican culture, politics, religion, and business.

After all that, I know that I am gringo.  Even though I love Mexico and really want to understand everything about it, I am still gringo.  There are some things I will never understand.  I was in a conversation with a fellow who has been going down to one location in Mexico each year for a month or so at a time for the last ten years or so.  He is an older man who has done an admirable job of learning the language.  He has lots of very strong opinions about Mexico and what would make Mexico better.  One of those ideas is that Mexico would be better off with a strong left-wing dictator.  I thought he was kidding when he told me.  He was not.  He reminded me a lot of the main stream media and the academic community.  He truly believed he knew things about which he had no clue.  People would suffer greatly if any of his ideas were implemented.  It is a condescending view toward the people of Mexico.  There are many sixties era types (young and old) who, having struggled with living productive lives in their own country, still believe they know what is best for people in a fundamentally different culture, with a very different history, and language.  It amazes me.

Long time no post is a good excuse to use bullet points!

• We’ve already planted a dozen things in our garden! A couple of weeks ago Mom and Christian and I bought two cherry tomato plants (yellow for Christian, grape for me) two normal tomato plants, lavendar and basil. Saturday afternoon, Dad and I went to the Wal-Mart and got cucumber, pepper, cantaloupe, carrot, beet, radish, zucchini, watermelon and chive seeds. Mom and I planted those on Saturday evening.  I even made cute little popsicle stick signs for them!!  I’m super excited for the plants to come up.  We still need lemon cucumbers, chard and lettuce, but I have no clue how we’re going to fit them in the boxes.
• I don’t know if it was just me, but I think that the special meeting we went to yesterday was one of the most amazing ever. Words really can’t describe how helpful it was to me. It’s embarrassing to say, but I usually listen on and off at meeting! 🙁 This time I took in the entire thing, and I am so so so thankful for that.
• Swimteam starts May 18!! We’ve already started talking to all our old friends.  Everyone is super excited!!
• I’m going to start a series of interviews with random friends and relatives for the blog. I think Grandma Conchita will be first, as she has a close-up look at swine flu in Mexico… 😉

I think that’s it. Thank goodness for bullet points!

On my drive into work this morning, I listened to a morning talk show guy interview a public school official who seemed to be quite smug.  The school district had just won an appeal to the state supreme court and won the right to force kids into year-round schools of the districts choice, even if it did not work out for the family.  A little later, I found an LA Times article on Slashdot about how difficult it is to fire bad teachers.  There was some horrific information in the article.  We lived through some of that same kind of horror when our children were in the Albany, Oregon public school system.  Some of it is even documented on this blog.  It was good to have some more confirmation that we made the right choice to homeschool.  The crazy part is that, in spite of the really weak academics and the horrendous socialization at both the schools in Oregon and the schools in our area of North Carolina, many parents praise them as great schools because they never took the time to figure out what is really going on.

That got me to thinking that it is kind of sad that most people decide to start homeschooling, not so much because they think homeschool is good.  They start homeschooling because the alternatives are so bad.  That was certainly true in our case.  We did not realize, until after we had done it for awhile, that homeschool was the very best option for our family on just about every measure.  Our kids were especially better off socially, but they were also better off academically and with respect to health and happiness.  Now that we have some experience, we do not think so much about having had to leave a bad school with bad teachers because we see the positive benefits of homeschooling daily.  Still it is good to have a reminder every now and then of why we stared in the first place.

This is one of those “I can hardly wait to the weekend” weeks.  Hopefully, we will be able to get caught up a little this weekend and enjoy our Special Meeting on Sunday with some great visiting speakers who have worked in some very foreign places, like Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Nebraska, and Minnesota!