Thursday in Roanoke while Lorena fights Microeconomics battles

Day 157 of 1000

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.