Month: June 2012

The Weekly Standard has an article on the presidential election in Mexico this Sunday.  It expresses hope for a Peña Nieto administration.  He is a member of the PRI (political party) which has generally been a part of the problem in the past, but this article explains why it may not be the case.  I have never been a fan of the PRI in the past, but this year the PAN, who I have generally supported has put forward a pro-abortion candidate, Josefina Vazquez Mota. That is especially sad because it has been so closely tied to the Catholic church in the past.  I like the last paragraph in the article.  It says,

It’s true that many PRI officials would prefer to take Mexico backward. But there are major structural forces (both institutional and societal) standing in their way, and Peña Nieto has sent encouraging signals about his appetite for reform. The country he will govern is an increasingly confident democracy with a healthy economy. Even on the security front, there has been progress, despite the horrifying number of drug murders. As former DEA administrator Robert Bonner wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, President Calderón “will bequeath to his successor major successes against the cartels, newly invigorated institutions, and a sound strategy.” Let’s hope that Peña Nieto doesn’t waste his opportunity.

Day 310 of 1000

Andrew and I started a new project a couple of weeks back.  I have been wracking my brain to figure out how to make the whole thing interesting to people who are not completely entranced by all things technical which is probably about 95% (if not more) of the population.  We have engaged in some very good conversations about how we can do that.  The whole goal is to find a way for mom and pop stores to use cameras to provide better service (more personal, faster, cheaper) to their customers in a way that is not invasive.  It is a tough problem, but we think we have some ideas.

We are a long way from producing anything.  Before we can even start, we need to capture a ton of pictures and then try to figure out how those pictures can be useful to our target end-users.  Fortunately, we have plenty of people in our households who have opinions about that.  We even have a Mom and Pop store that will mount cameras for us so we can take test pictures.  Lorena would like to start such a store herself which we think is a stellar idea.  If we do that, maybe I can write something a little more interesting than the technical drivel that I have been writing over the last several months.

The image above, is a screenshot of what I have so far.  It does not do much, but it is a start!

Day 309 of 1000

We owe a great debt of gratitude to the Albany public school system.  We had such a bad experience with them that we were forced back into homeschool and we are very grateful to them for that.  A recent comment on our blog (you can find it here) from a couple considering homeschool in South Korea brought back those memories.  We did not really want or plan to homeschool, but we were forced into it.  It was one of the best things that happened to our little family.  We like to think we did our homeschool differently than other homeschoolers, but I think that is true for virtually all people who homeschool.  All we know is that after eight years of homeschool, we count it a major blessing that we were able to spend a dramatically greater amount of time with our children than would have been possible in any traditional school setting.

It has dawned on me that maybe it is good naratives that encourage and inspire others to find the thing that works well for the own families.  We do not have any illusion that what worked for us is the best thing for other people, too, but we are humbled and grateful that what we did worked for us.  The funny thing is that it was probably more important to our children that we were totally invested in finding the best way possible to educate them than the actual methods that we used.  They saw what was important to us and they embraced it because they knew we were doing it for them.

It is awesome to see that other people are thinking the same way we thought.  They will all do it very differently than us, but the doing is more important than the method.  What a gift it is to us when others read our narrative and are encouraged.

Day 308 of 1000

A certain Klaus Feidler was the sole source of a leak that was featured on Engadget a couple of days back.  Check it out here:  http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/21/did-sprint-just-spoil-a-white-htc-evo-4g-lte/

Day 300 of 1000

We had a great day today.  We do not know what the future will bring, but we know that we can eat shish kabobs today!

Day 299 of 1000

Lorena and I received this very big opportunity a couple of days ago.  We are excited about it.  We talk about it a lot.  In our talks, we try to look at the big pictures.  It is good for us to look at the big picture because, when we do, other ideas bubble up.  It is dawning on us that we will not have anyone in the house beside us and we are a little confused about what to do about it.  The kids will always need our help, but they are on their way to bigger things where Dad and Mom are pretty much in the way more than they are a help.  I am sure that period will end before too long, but it leaves us a little disconcerted.  We figure we have five years or so to do something very interesting, then we will need to anchor ourselves someplace close to the kids to be a help to them again.  It is really very exciting, but it is hard to know how to use the time properly.  I guess it just takes prayer and fatih.

Right in the middle of a new initiative to do some more interesting things and to reinvigorate my efforts on this blog, an opportunity has opened up to do something WAY exotic that, if Lorena and I decide to do it, will remove us completely from all these new initiatives and sweep us off to another part of the world.  It would be awesome for the blog, too, but in a way that I never would have anticipated.  We have not decided to do it yet, but we are giving it some very serious thought.  None of this would happen at all until the kids graduate from college, hopefully in the spring of 2014.  I cannot say to much, but will be reworking my development initiatives, changing Lorena’s education plan, and maybe even taking a class or two myself.  This is EXACTLY the thing to which I would have committed in less than a millisecond before I got married, but now I am old, have an understanding wife, kids, and lots of responsibilities.  Still that did not keep me from knowing I wanted to do it within a millisecond of the time the opportunity came up.  I will talk more about it when I can.

Day 296 of 1000

She is getting better and better.  I am enjoying this a LOT!  These are some sketches of some of her friends.  There are more to come.

Day 293 of 1000

My buddy Darren is on a roll!  He has me all inspired on getting back in shape again.  I may only be down 7-8 pounds, but he must be getting close to 80 pounds down!!!  He is not done yet, but he is looking GREAT!  Congratulations Darren!  Here are the before and after’s.

Day 291 of 1000

I worked from home today while Lorena ran around like a maniac trying to get immunization papers to NCSU so the kids would not have all their classes canceled and have to start all over putting their fall schedules together.  We got ominous notes from the Health Office at NCSU telling us that if we did not have our immunization records to them, they would cancel the classes and it would be almost impossible to get all the ones they had before because everyone who had their immunization records already in would have first pick.  She got most of it done, but we were all a wreck by the end of the day.  Right now, they tell us Christian needs a shot that we believe he does not really need so we got additional paperwork we will take to NCSU tomorrow.

In the meantime, I programmed all day on a very cool project that will have a pretty big impact on a pretty big industry that has its facilities by the beach in Wilmington, NC.  How sad is that.  I have to spend my day in Wilmington tomorrow.  It is a nice drive of only about two hours and I get good food along the way!  I wish I could be working on my side project, but there will not be time until I finish up some more of my GaugeCam stuff.  I probably will not get to write tomorrow because I will drive out early, drive in late, and work in-between.  We are having a barbecue tomorrow night with our Mexican buddies, so that will be good, but it does not give me much time to work on side projects.

Thanks Gene for inspiring me to write about this stuff.  I am going to start buying some new hardware in a bit to do the project and I will try to show some pictures here.

Day 289 of 1000

I would like to say I was too busy to write in my blog this last week, but it is not true.  It never takes more than a few minutes to write a few things and I could have written.  Still, it often takes much more than a few minutes to think of something to write.  I have been very busy, but, more than that, I have struggled with finding motivation to write about anything.  The main focus of this blog has been to talk about our homeschooling efforts with our kids.  That worked very, very well up until a couple of years ago when the kids entered community college.  As has been obvious to many, my blogging efforts since then have been less than stellar.  Now that the kids are both juniors at North Carolina State University, even though I have great joy that they are having some success, I am not so directly involved in their efforts, so there is less and less about which I have to write in that regard.

So that has left me with not so much motivation to write nor material about which to write.  Really, Lorena and I have been at loose ends.  We know at least one of the kids (and probably both) will be out of the house at grad school within two years so we are trying to figure out what to do next.  That can be pretty hard to do when there are too many options.  Lorena thinks she might want to start a business.  We know what she wants to do and we have some connection in the industry (food and beverage retail), so we have a plan to get her some experience.  In addition to that, we have some ideas for a very technical, machine vision product my buddy Andrew and I can do to help her with her business.  I plan to start talking about that here on a fairly regular basis.  It should be a lot of fun and it will require a TON of work.

On a side note, I am back on the wagon on my diet.  I am getting close to having lost ten pounds.  Woo-hoo!