Day 199 0f 1000
The high mucky-mucky of the Truth Has a Chance blog and my old roommate back when we were both thin and had hair (well, Warren still has hair), is dropping in for a weekend visit this weekend. Hopefully, a picture or two will follow. We are going to do some very high level consulting on blogging, football, and other important topics. Maybe he can get me kicked off center on my blogging habits (or lack thereof).
Day 193 of 1000
Kelly and Christian both went to see their advisers for the very first time. Both of them found out that they are in good shape to graduate in two more years. Both the kids worked out their schedules and got buy-in from their advisers along with permission to take a summer class called Foundations of Advanced Math (a proofs class that prepares them for Real Analysis). It will be a hard slog because many of the classes are so difficult for the both of them, but hey both definitely have a shot to graduate by Spring 2014.
Day 188 of 1000
My entire family lives in Portland. It IS the most beautiful city in the country. Here is a GREAT, article from someone who knows, about some of the reasons it is such a train wreck: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/insufferable-portland_631919.html.
Day 180 of 1000
My admiration for the unsurpassed beauty of the state of Oregon does not diminish my admiration for the beauty of Virginia and the Carolinas. I have been criss-crossing all three states continually since the beginning of January to the tune of about $1500 of car reimbursement per month at 45¢ per mile. It looks like I will be running in this mode through April or May. I hope I slow down after that, but I have been thoroughly enjoying the places I visit and the people I meet.
I gave a talk on my research and development work to a group of engineers and technicians at a large French tire company near Columbia, South Carolina on Thursday. It made me think of one of my favorite characters in all of literature, the ugly American (a retired American engineer trying to help out in a fictional Southeast Asian country) from the book, the Ugly American. I met engineers from the U.S., France, Columbian (Medellin–how cool is that. He even complimented me on my Spanish.), and Puerto Rico (The University of Mayaguez where our friend Carlos B. studied). There are no cultural barriers when engineers are talking together about technology and solving problems.
I will contnue to write as often as possible. I am accumulating some good material and I need to get it written down before I forget it.
Day 176 of 1000
I feel very sorry for people who do not “get” Oregon. That includes the people who live in places like Lake Oswego and Cary (sister cities in spirit, decadence, and tackiness–the people in those towns are not from there even if they are, if you know what I mean). Oregon is a state of mind and today is Oregon’s birthday. My great, great grandfather had lived in Oregon for thirteen years before she became a state on Valentine’s Day of 1959 1859. It is, without question, the most beautiful state in the union. Even though it has been, to a large extent, controlled by people from California and the East Coast, the state of Oregon and the spirit of Oregon live on in the eastern and southern parts of the state. We are very, very sad that we are not there now, but we are very happy that Kelly and Christian are will get their degrees at the wonderful NCSU, then head back out west to HOME! The flowers that accompany this blog are dedicated to Lorena, Valentine’s Day, and the enlightened people who “get” the true spirit of Oregon. Only 824 days to go.
Now if I could only get a link to the Oregon rock theme “I Can’t Go Home“.
Day 170 of 1000
We used the tire rotation machine Christian made for me day before yesterday at my work this morning. The pictures came out great. We will use the apparatus for a big demo with a large tire manufacturer tomorrow. Very cool. Right now I am at a McDonalds in the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina. I have an hour to kill until I meet one of the sales guys at a customer site to do some more demonstrations of the software I am writing. This is all very fun, but so much driving is not my favorite part of this job.
Day 169 of 1000
In my day job, I am working on a product that performs three dimensional scans of all kinds of stuff with a product called a Gocator made by a company in British Columbia named LMI. There are a ton of tire companies around here that want to look at their tires with 3D machine vision, so we needed a demo. Christian came to the rescue by building up a tire presentation system with his Lego NXT set. It works great. The tires that came with the kit have tread and raised lettering on the sidewalls, just like real tires.
It works like a champ. I will talk to my boss this afternoon about buying two or three sets to use for demos. Maybe I can get Christian a job building demo stuff for us!
Day 167 of 1000
We have subscribed to World Magazine for over 15 years. We liked it so much, for awhile, Kelly decided she wanted to be journalist. That passed, but we are still very big fans of the magazine. The main reason we are such big fans is because Marvin Olasky is the Editor in Chief and a great writer. I think the reason we like him so much is because of his humility. He wrote and article in the latest issue of World about some events where he truly worked for good over a decade ago. The thing that is strinking about the article is that Olasky realizes he might have been more effective if he had not been so confrontational in what he did and collegial in his efforts to engage with the other people involved.
It really made me want to be a better person through more humility and kindliness. It is not even about being right. It is about doing things according to God’s will. I am very thankful I had parents who would let me slide a little if I was doing things with the right attitude, but hammered me hard, even if I was getting stuff right, but with a bad attitude. Olasky manages to descirbe that exact concept and how he has succeeded and failed at it in a way that makes one want to improve. We will be up for renewal in October. Of course, we will do the max allowed.
Day 166 of 1000
We love North Carolina, but they are WAY out of their depth when it comes to organizing and/or participating in a running event, they need to send the organizers and participants out to Oregon to see how it is done. That being said, the kids had fun and raised money for a good charity, which was the purpose of the race. Still, people here really need to lighten up, have a good time, get into the event. Still, the kids got their doughnuts (I refuse to use the word donut as if it is a real word), t-shirts, and bib. I was particularly proud of Kelly. She whistled, hollered, and winked at every cute guy in a gladiator suit that ran by.
Day 164 of 1000
I love my new job. I am working on a new technology. When I first started in field of Machine Vision in 1983, that technology was very new and intriguing. Everyone knew it had a huge future, but because of the immaturity of the technology and the relatively slow speed of computers back then, it was hard to use it for even the easiests of task. Computers improved, machine vision algorithms got more sophisticated and ran faster on better hardware, and within five years things really opened up. Now, all the easy tasks have already been done. That is why I have had such an enjoyable career. I get to go around and try to make really hard stuff work.
I have enjoyed that a lot, but I forgot how much fun it was when the machine vision market was just starting to move. This new technology on which I am working makes 3D measurements easy and cheap compared to how it used to be. There is, again, a lot of low hanging fruit–easy jobs for this new technology–that have been waiting a decade for a solution because 2D machine vision technology just could not bear the burden of such difficulty.
The difference, this time, is that I am on the forefront of the development, not of the technology itself, but of the application of the technology. It is very invigorating. I got to work full time developing very interesting code and techniques. Then I get to take that stuff out to solve problems for which people have been literally begging for a solution. One engineer, last week, told me he had been trying to figure out a way to solve a hard problem in a very high-technology setting for 6-7 years. His company had spent a lot of money trying to figure it out and had pretty much given up. He thinks our technology will do the trick.
I am waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it might, but I will enjoy the ride until it does.
Day 160 of 1000
On Monday and Tuesday last week I drove from Raleigh to Charlotte and back. On Wednesday I drove from Raleigh to Wilmington, NC to Elizabethtown, NC, and back to Ralieigh. On Thursday, the biggest day, I drove from Raleigh to Roanoke, VA to Blacksburg, VA, and back to Raliegh. I drove over 1500 miles, visited five customers, and spent my customary two days in the home office. The driving got a little tedious, but I really enjoyed it. I found out that Roanoke, VA is a beautiful city–at least it was beautiful the day I was there. I think I am only going to have to drive this much for a month or two longer. Then I will back off to a couple of trips per month. That will be just about right.
I am not much of a “work at home” guy. That I can get out of the house two to four days per week is a big deal for me. When I go to the reduced travel schedule, I might work over at the library of one of our local colleges. I like to have a little movement and noise around me when I work. The last time we were in the Holly Springs Community Library, I found they no longer allow the drinking of coffee in the stacks. Bad news. We probably won’t go back. The Cameron Village Library is still good with us coffee drinking readers, so that is still an option.
Day 158 of 1000
I
nspired by fellow Oregonian stuck on the east coast, Smitty (his post this morning is stellar, CPAC-in’ Heat) and new-blogger Jon in Chile, Kelly and I have decided to try and up our game a little. If Kelly keeps making posts (with drawings) like this one, she is going to continue to leave me in the dust. Hilarious and well written. I recommend it highly.
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.
Day 156 of 1000
Imitating The Other McCain, I find myself blogging from a McDonalds this morning. I am on my way to Wilmington for a two hour visit for business. On the way, there was a radio report about a study that shows that the use of Facebook is an indicator of low self esteem. I believe it. It says that people look at all the fun happy stuff people put up on Facebook–parties, dinners, sports events, etc.–and believe their own lives do not measure up. The reality is that most people only put up the good stuff. It is pretty easy to see some of the posers who put up their daily pictures of their “beautiful” lives, doing crossfit, going on “girl’s nights out”, talking about what they “deserve” as actualized women, Still, even the best of us only wants to show the good stuff.
The thing that is great about Facebook is the ability to stay in touch with friends with whom it would be difficult to have frequent contact in any other way. I love to hear grandparents brag about their grandkids, people who put up significant events like graduations and birthdays, deaths, sicknesses. I really enjoy people who put up interesting things that like observations on pop culture or their football team. That being said, narcissim and the me culture are magnified on Facebook.
Day 155 of 1000
Just a couple of notes today. First and most important, our buddy Jon from Chile has a new blog. You can find it here: http://www.jonchile.com. It is amazingly bilingual Spanish/English, fun to read and has great pictures. I highly recommend it!
In addtion, I got some text messages today from Lorena and Kelly telling me school was shut down again for a “gun on campus/maniacal police activity” event. I am glad everyone is moving on to NCSU soon.
Day 153 of 1000
The GaugeCam team met with Tom D. at NCSU yesterday to try to figure out how to commercialize our idea. We had a pretty good brainstorming session. All of us left the meeting with something to do so we can report back next week. It is not like I do not have enough stuff to do already, but actually having something on the market in the next few months is a very fun thing to ponder. We really do think we have found a niche. I will post on GaugeCam and here as soon as we have things a little more carefull defined, but the first product will involve the ability to easily place cameras in very remote places where there is no hard wired nor close wireless connectivity nor power available, then receive a reliable stream of images displayed in a variety of user defined ways on a web stie. Later, we will add some machine vision measurement capabilities to our setup, but for now, all we want to do is capture images for manual review.
Day 152 of 1000
Kelly is drawing again! You can see it all here. 
This makes me happy. She is getting killed at school so we finally decided she did not have time to do a Betty Blonde comic strip every day. That made us pretty sad. She has such an interest college life magnified by her acute sense of what is interesting about the people with whom she spends her days that it is a shame she does not share that with others in her own unique way.
Finally, we came to the conclusion that she can draw up interesting caricatures, portraits, and written word studies while she is doodling in class or waiting for someone to pick her up. So we are going to try to start posting some of that for awhile. I LOVE the idea and think it will be great. We had a great talk yesterday about the fundamental immorality of abortion and some other social ills. I hope she writes about that, too.
I could not keep her from fashion if I wanted to, so I suppose she will blog about that, too.
UPDATE: Kelly forcefully requested that I let everyone know that Betty Blonde is NOT dead and will spin back up as time avails. It might be sooner. It might be later. It is definitely not over.
Day 151 of 1000 (207.3 lbs)
We are all driving a LOT these days. I am working at least two days per week in Charlotte with some additional driving around the Carolinas and Virginia. Lorena and Christian drive about forty minutes each way to Johnston Community College two days per week and we do all the normal drives to the grocery store and the YMCA. Fortunately, that level of driving should diminsh fairly dramatically in 4-5 months. At about that time, I will need to buy another car. I cannot decide whether to give the kids the pick-up to drive to and from NCSU so I can get a cheaper car for my long drives or to give them the new (used) car to go to school and stick with the pickup. I think I will probably give them the pickup.
Day 150 of 1000
A good buddy of mine who was hugely influential in my loving Mexico and Spanish so much is thinking about blogging about a big trip. That is a FABULOUS idea. It is especially fabulous right now because the webhosting service, FatCow.com Christian uses for his new stellar Nerdhow.net blog has a special going: $3.97 per month for a year. TruthHasAChance.com is also hosted there. It is a great way to keep track of a lot of things like trips and special events or to talk about your hobby, work, or family, but I find it helps me to be more thoughtful by forcing me to consider something to write every day. I try to write well and write fast at the same time. It is kind of like my latest weightloss stunt–if I I want to hold my feet to the fire, a good way to do that is to do it in front of everyone.
Sometimes when I am angry, frustrated, or tired, I sit down to write about it, blast out something mean-spirited and hurtful, read what I wrote, then start over because I am ashamed. I am almost always more ashamed for my thoughts and bad spirit than I am for the fact that someone might read what I am writing. That makes me step back, choose to have a better spirit, and write something that edifies. It also helps me focus my thoughts and make decisions about what to do next. Over time, it has helped me not to dive into things without considering them a little more carefully because I have taken the time to write stuff down in a structured way.
Mostly I write this blog for me and to have a record our family and friends will enjoy later, but it is very, very cool when other people join the fray. I have friends I have never met face to face. I am astonished that some people are so much more thoughtful than I had anticipated and I am ashamed about that, too!
See, shaming myself into losing weight might be a good strategy for me.
Not much else to say.
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