Month: April 2012

Day 250 of 1000

Wow.  We are one fourth of the way through our one thousand day push.  We are all the way up to finals week in the kids last semester of community college.  It seems pretty amazing.  I continue to work hard on GaugeCam–we are getting close to some big stuff.  We have improved dramatically over the last couple of months.  You can see our live camera in the North Carolina Tidal Marsh here.  We are not as robust as we want to be in our algorithms yet, but we are getting much, much better.  We believe we are almost as good as competing technologies right now and should pass them up in terms of our ability to automatically measure water levels at very remote sites within the next month or two.  We should be able to build and deliver our first commercial beta cameras before the end of the summer.

Kelly, Lorena, and I have another project we want to pursue that has to do with coffee.  That’s right I said COFFEE!  It is a commercial venture that involves coffee!!! How much better does it get than that.  We will tell you more when we know more ourselves.

Day 248 of 1000

I talked to my friend and ex-business partner Ron Voorhees on the phone last night.  He is doing great.  Too great.  We always have lots of things to talk about–business, politics, sports, religion, and, best of all, he lets me brag about my kids and I love to hear about his amazingly atheletic grandkids.  Well, we got on the subject of health.  Ron has always been in better shape than me, but he told me back in February he was just not feeling so good so he decided to go on a health kick.  He has been working out hard and eating healthy foods since then–no sodas, lots of nuts, fruits, vegetables, very little read meat, lots of fish and chicken.  He does a few vitamins and he works out every day.  The upshot is that he has lost weight that he probably did not even need to lose, he feels great, and is in the best shape in years.  I have been half heartedly trying to do that myself here for about the same amount of time.  In spite of the fact that I am getting regular exercise, I am not going down because I eat like a pig (and enjoy that VERY much).  Well, I have decided I need to get back in the saddle.  I will start posting my weight again in May!

Day 244 of 1000

Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah called tonight to tell us they are coming for Kelly’s graduation.  Kelly will be graduating from both Wake Technical Comminity College with an Associate of Science college transfer degree and from the Chapman Family Homeschool with a high school diploma.  I think this would have been the first graduation my parents have ever missed.  To say my mother values education would be a wild understatement.  She was the first person in her family of many generations to get a bachelors degree.  Three of her four kids have Masters degrees and all of us have Bachelors degrees.  She has gone out of her way to be at every graduation of her children and her grandchildren.  Kelly and Christian will be the last ones to graduate and, even though they were here not too long ago, I cannot say I am surprised she is coming.  I am thankful for that.

Christian has enough hours to graduate from Community College, too, but he is missing a class in Ethics.  That is OK, because we have decided to graduate the kids chronologically anyway.  We will graduate Christian from high school in a couple of years when he is the right age.  If he plays his cards right, he can graduate with his Bachelors degree the same time he graduates from high school.

Dad has always been very supportive of our education in every way possible, but that is was a big deal for Mom made it a big deal for all us kids and we are the better for.  We are thankful you are coming Dad and Mom.

Day 243 of 1000

We went out and bought a grill today at Lowe’s. It is a nice one. We are getting ready for Kelly’s graduation party. Christian has promised to become the grill master, but I do not know if Lorena will let him near it. She likes it a LOT.

Day 237 of 1000

Christian and I went to our church meeting together without Lorena and Kelly (they have a bug of some kind).  Among other things, we talked about why strict materialism is not true.  One manifestation of that is the mind brain problem.  I could not explain the problem very well although I had read about it a little, so I looked up some stuff when I got home.  A guy I follow named Michael Egnor writes on the subject every now and then.  Here are three articles that describe his thoughts and why this is such a problem for materialists:

Here is a good one:  http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/06/the_hard_and_easy_problems_in006891.html
Here is another good one:  http://intelligent-sequences.blogspot.com/2008/06/turning-tables.html
Here is a third good one:  http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/10/the_battle_for_your_mind012701.html

That prompted me to run over to Egnor’s blog where the top article touched on the subject we discussed as well as a topic Kelly and I have discussed over the last few weeks:  The fact that sin is a black and white thing, not a gray thing.  Here is the money quote from Terry Pratchett as quoted by Elizabeth Scalia in an article that appeared in First Things:

“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.

“It’s a lot more complicated than that –”

“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes –”

“But they starts with thinking about people as things …”

Day 233 of 1000

Kelly told me about a website called fivethirtyeight.com a long time ago.  It came to my attention a couple days ago.  It is written by a statistics guy who used to be into baseball statistics, but decided to apply his skills to elections.  The upshot is that he was so good, the NY Times hired him to blog for them.  It inspired us to get back in the saddle and start studying the R programming language again.  We decided we would study a half an hour per night, but we had to figure out how to do it when I am Charlotte while Kelly is still back in Raleigh.  We decided to try to do it by sharing our desktop via Skype.  It was amazingly effective.  Hopefully, we will be able to start posting some interesting statistical graphics from our investigations.  It is very, very interesting.

Day 232 of 1000

The day I returned from Vancouver, Kelly received a letter from NCSU telling us that she had won a scholarship.  The same day, we turned down a very big scholarship for both Christian and Kelly from University of Idaho.  That was pretty sad.  We worked hard on the University of Idaho relationship, but NCSU is a much better school in both Statistics (SAS was started at NCSU) and Applied Mathematics, so we bit the bullet and released the scholarships to someone else.  In the end, the cost to go to NCSU will be cheaper than U Idaho because of the cost of living so it was the right thing to do, but it was still a little sad.

In the meantime, I came back from rainy, rainy Vancouver to the beautiful weather of springtime Raleigh, North Carolina.  I went to our fabulous Sunday morning meeting full of humble and odd people (including us), had a wonderful Easter dinner with good friends, started studying the R programming language with Kelly for a half an hour per night, arranged to get together for lunch with our buddy Andres, spent several hours discussing Christian’s plans for an application area for his Applied Math degree, and realized I have a great life here in North Carolina.  Then, this morning, I drove to Charlotte, did my job for several hours, and had a meeting at the end of the day that made me realize that I have a great job (for someone like me) doing something I love.

After all that, Kelly and I did our half hour of R study via Skype on a shared desktop.

Life is great.

Day 229 of 1000

Every year for the past eight years, I have had something I needed to do to finish up the homeschool year.  This will be my last year for that.  We will formally graduate Kelly from High School this year even though she will enter NCSU next year with enough credits to be a college Senior (Statistics)–it will probably take her a couple of years to graduate because of sequences she needs to get.  We will not celebrate Christian’s graduation from high school for another couple of years, but he will enter NCSU as a college Junior (Applied Mathematics).  Still, I am going to call the North Carolina DPNE to let them know he has fulfilled all of his high school graduation requirements so we do not have to fill out paperwork anymore.  This is all a pretty big change for us even though the change was pretty significant when the kids went to the Community College.  Now though, they are handling all the course registrations, applications, and planning on their own.  It is all very exciting.

It is nlce to be home from Canada.  North Carolina really is a happy place with great weather.  The raw beauty of Vancouver is quite impressive–it is not Oregon, but still very impressive, but Raleigh feels like home now and that was a great realization.

Day 225 of 1000

I got the right answer to an easy question for the win!  Woo-hoo!

Day 224 of 1000

Vancouver seems to have a lot in common with Portland.  What with the rainy weather, the goofy, lightly attended, student tuition protest for which the government was willing to shut down the streets, the moral ambiguity (legal prostitution, campaigns to legalize pot, etc.), lots of tattoos and piercing, Starbucks on every corner, and hipsters everywhere, If I squint my eyes, I feel like I am on a weekend visit to Portland from the provinces.  It is absolutely beautiful here.  There are mountains and large bodies of water everywhere.  Everything is green.  There are restaurants everywhere and they look great.  I KNOW I would love to live here in B.C., but definitively NOT in the city.

I sat by some high school kids when I visited a Starbucks and have seen a bunch of other ones walking around the city and in some of the stores.  I know my sample is small, but I am pretty sure I would chose to home school my children if I lived here.  That was reinforced by the protest, although it was so small, maybe my take-away should be that the VAST majority of students wanted to have anything to do with those losers.

The protest movement in Vancouver is just as pathetic as the Occupy Raleigh protest in North Carolina–at least today it was.  The above is an image of 75 or so students protesting tuition increases and chanting

Education is a right!
We will never give up the fight!

Notice the motorcycle cop on the left side of the photo.  None of the people to the left of him were participating in the rally.  They were actually blocking the traffic in downtown Vancouver for these yo-yo’s.  I bet there were no engineering, math, or other hard science majors in the crowd.  They were too busy at home studying.

It seems appropriate that it is April Fool’s Day today.

A little video:

Day 223 of 1000

It is very interesting to be in Vancouver again after a couple of visits here over twenty years ago.  First, it is a very, very beautiful city.

• Second, it is rainier and cooler (temperature-wise) city than Raleigh.  I was looking at some climate stuff on Portland to kill time in my hotel room and found a description of the rain patterns for Portland described as falling into three categories:  4 months of rain all the time, 4 months of rain 50% of the time, and 4 months of very dry weather.  That probably describes the climate here pretty well, too.  I actually like the cooler weather a lot.
• The center of the city of Vancouver is great.  One of the things I miss living out east is the quality and number of asian food options available in the Pacific Northwest.  There seem to be even MORE asian food options here in Vancouver than in Portland and Seattle and there are a LOT in both of those cities.
• There are turn lanes only on the busiest streets which is crazy.  Most of the main streets in this city of over 2 million people have only a yellow stripe down the middle of the road which stops all the traffic when anyone wants to make a left turn into an alley or other minor street.
• They have flashing green lights here about which I had no clue.  I looked it up on the internet and it appears that the flashing green lights mean something different in Vancouver than they do in other parts of Canada.

More later, hopefully with pictures.