Month: July 2012 Page 1 of 2

Day of 345 of 1000

Christian and Kelly bust my chops on my pathetic photography skills.  I am sure they are right, but I love the quote by the fat rat in Ratatoullie:

Once you muscle your way past the gag reflex, all kinds of possibilities open up.

If you have no taste in art, then there are so many more pleasing things to see.  In that spirit, I am looking for a replacement header image for this web site.  I have tried several new ones over the last few days and there ain’t nobody happy in this household with my choices of photographs.  I just want people to know that the current header (two cats lounging on the hardwood floor) is merely another placeholder until I find approval and peace returns to the household.

Day 344 of 1000

I stretched my college years out way longer than made any sense.  Actually, it was pretty irresponsible and had ramifications for the rest of my life.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am very, very happy with the trajectory of my life.  I have amazing interesting work, have travelled the world, have a family that is way better than I deserve, etc., etc.  Still, I try to tell my kids that when your in school, your whole goal is to get out and go to work.  Even if, maybe especially if you want your career to be as a professor it seems like a good move to get through the school and go to work.  Work pays MUCH better than student life.

I separate all that from the concept of life-long learning.  I think one of my biggest regret is that I did not get more than one Masters degree.  A second, third, and fourth Masters degree is about the joy of learning, not punching a ticket.  I had an acquaintance who was a high school physics and chemistry teacher who just kept going back to school to get more degrees one class at a time after work.  He always liked to research, write, and defend a thesis with his degrees, too–none of that project stuff for him. He had a great life, a LOT of knowledge, lots of friends and opportunities just kept opening up to him because of all his knowledge, learning, and ability to share what he knew. 

Day 343 of 1000

The compressed summer semester drags on.  Kelly has spent the last three days fighting the temptation to browse Facebook, Pinterest, her web comic addiction, and the plethora of blogs that she reads.  I moved my computer downstairs for the weekend because it is so hot upstairs.  Kelly babysat on Friday night, but we spent all day Saturday, and every spare minute after Sunday morning meeting studying.  I worked on my day job work and Kelly studied.  Christian did not have it as bad, but he only has one more test on Wednesday while Kelly has a mid-term on Tuesday and a final on Thursday.  How ugly is that.  Kelly did not even have time to go to the YMCA to work out and that is unusual.

The test will be very, very hard and she needs to have the material down cold for Mathematical Statistics I next semester.  The next ten months are going to be pretty brutal, but all our school, up until now, has been leading to precisely this very difficult stretch.  Both the kids will need to remain very focused to pass some very hard classes–mathematical statistics, non-linear dynamics, real analysis, advance linear algebra, modern abstract algebra, design of experiments, etc., etc.  The easy stuff, Psychology, Literature, Speech, History, and all the other liberal arts are behind them.  I do not think these mathematical topics are easy for anyone.  They certainly were not easy for me.

Day 341 of 1000

I have a very cool day job. Right now I am working on application with lots of excellent toys. It includes two Imaging Source 5 mega-pixel cameras (a stunning value at a list price of only $419 which includes an industrial quality machined aluminum housing, strobe output, and trigger input), an Arduino Mega microcontroller, and a Symbol barcode scanner. I am programming it using the QT and OpenCV libraries in C++ with the QT Creator IDE.

The cameras and the Arduino work great.  Now I am bringing up the Symbol barcode reader.  This is just the kind of project the doctor ordered on a weekend when the kids will be studying for finals.  Should be lots of fun–and to think I get paid for this.

Day 340 of 1000

It is way to hot and humid to not be in a swimming pool this time of year.  It is even worse to be stuck in the house studying for finals.  Everything is so compressed there is no time to assimilate any of the material.  Kelly has a mid-term on Tuesday, a review day on Wednesday, and a final on Friday, all for just one class.  Temperatures are hot, tempers are short, and we need a break from each other, work, and school.  We just need to last one more week.

Day 337 of 1000

It seems like all I do lately is run back and forth between Raleigh and Charlotte.  I think I might have one more trip before the end of the month, but then I should be done until after the DNC.  There is so much driving in all this that I do not have much of a chance to work on anything other than my day job.  Good thing I like my day job.

Day 334 of 1000

About the same time we arrived in Raleigh, another fellow named Troy showed up.  He had just made a major career change and decided to go back to school to help facilitate that.  We met him at church and, because he was single (waiting to get married), we ate lunch with him pretty often.  We talked about school a lot.  It is amazing what he did.  It seems like he did everything exactly right, but it was a TON of work.  For the areas where he thought he was weak, he got a tutor.  When he was not sure exactly what he wanted to do for a living, he went and talked to several professors in each of several departments to find out exactly what they did.

Part way into the program, he decided he might want to go to graduate school.  He found out it was extremely helpful to have done undergraduate research so he went and got TWO undergraduate research projects in the two different departments in which he was interested.  He did unpaid work in a lot of it.  In the end, he could have studied in either department and they actually were competing between each other to get him.  The big take-aways from all this is that if you invest (do unpaid work with knowledge that it will turn into something good even if it is only new knowledge), work really hard, and just keep going, something good will happen.

The reason I thought about this today is because Christian and Kelly are currently in almost exactly the same place.  Troy has finished his prelims and is well into his dissertation research.  The amazing thing is that he started this process from literally nothing only five years ago.  I am grateful my kids got to watch the process and even more grateful for Troy’s example.

Day 333 of 1000

We are not quite to a year in our 1000 days, but we are one third of the way to meeting our goals which includes the kids’ undergraduate degrees and a few other things.  The amazing thing is that we are still on schedule.  We made an educational plan about 10 years ago and worked on it daily.  I never figured we would be able to keep up because it was pretty aggressive.  We are at least on schedule on everything, ahead on a lot of things, and way ahead on a few, fairly important things.  It is not time to celebrate yet, but we are getting closer.

Day 332 of 1000

Well, just as I stared getting a good base established for my the license plate program, work starts to stack up and a new project comes in that will prevent me from doing just about anything else but program from now through the end of the year.  I started at about 7 this morning and I am still going.  I am really glad I like my job and I like to program, but I can see myself starting to burn out a little toward Thanksgiving time.  The worst part about it is the kind of project only a vision engineer could love.  I know I was pushing the boredom boundaries with my license plate project, but in terms of snooze enducement, this project is in a class by itself.  Now I have to think of something new to make this blog relevant.  This seems to be one of those periods in life where the only thing it is possible to do is keep your head down and keep working.  There is an end to this thing though, so it makes it a lot more interesting.

Day 331 of 1000

My brother-in-law moved from Monterrey to Toluca to take a computer job there.  If you get a chance, look up the average temperature, rainfall, and humidity in that city.  It is truly amazing.  They call it the “Eternal Spring” because the temperature hangs roughly between 50 and 70 degrees F all year long.  It rains more in the summer than in the winter.  Rigo was telling us that, unlike Monterrey, it is almost never too hot to talk a long walk in Toluca.  You cannot not even make it between the house and the car without being drenched in sweat during most of the summer in Monterrey.  We are trying to think up an excuse to go down there for a visit.  It might even be nice to just stay there…

Day 330 of 1000

My room was upgraded to a two bedroom suite at my regular hotel here in Charlotte.  I am up here for one night because I have to visit a customer, but should be home tomorrow evening.  I got told that I better not plan on staying at this or any other hotel in or around Charlotte from August through mid-September because of the Democrat National Convention.  It is not like I enjoy being around that class of people anyway (political or democrat, take your pick).  I was told a lot of people are renting out rooms in their houses as there is such a dearth of places to stay.  I also got told that it would cost at least triple the normal cost to stay here during that time.  I hope that does not throw too much of a kink into my work.  There are one are two pretty big projects that are due up here during that time frame.