Year: 2012 Page 3 of 11

Day 424 of 1000

Kelly was in the front of the Reince Priebus (chairman of the Republican National Committee) campaign event in the brickyard at NCSU earlier today.  She was photographed and filmed by several news organizations and interviewed by the local news radio station 680 WPTF.  They gave her a sign to hold during the talk and she even MADE EYE CONTACT with Reince!  It doesn’t get much better than that!  She is hardly even willing to talk to the rest of us plebians in the family now that she has elevated her game and obviously MUCH more sophisticated and important than us.

Day 423 of 1000

Yesterday, I left the house at about 6:00 AM and did not return until about 11:00 PM.  In between, I waited in a printing factory for people to finish stuff they should have had complete before I got there.  Our company will get paid for ten hours of work while only about three hours of work were performed.  The rest of my time was spent waiting.  That always makes me kind of sad.  Still, it was a nice day.  I spent quite a bit of time talking to a technician who wants to finish a bachelors degree in manufacturing engineering.  Tomorrow, I am going to visit a professor at a university that has an online manufacturing engineering program.  I am going to try to connect them up.

The chance to help someone was made all the more pleasureable by a visit to Lorena’s community college classroom by our bloviating democrat congressman, David Price.  I did not get the entire story straight, but it seems that this congressman visited Lorena’s particular classroom at Wake Tech to see if the students had any questions.  When they didn’t, the professor asked him a question that he could not answer, but still had to gall to pontificate irrationalities and waste everyone’s time.  When the congressman left the room, everyone congratulated the professor.

Day 421 of 1000

I just got off Skype with my mother-in-law, Conchita.  She just returned to Monterrey from Georgetown, Texas where she went to a church convention with Pepe and Nena, her brother-in-law and sister.  They had a great time.  It is pretty odd that Grandpa Lauro did not go along, but his mother is 95 years old and needs someone to be close by to help out, so I guess Lauro drew the short straw.

We talked for about twenty minutes.  I am always amazed at the community of Mexicans we know in Northern Mexico and Texas.  They are very, very closely knit and love to get together with each other.  That is the way it should be.  Community like that is to be valued greatly.  Some of our friends from North Carolina and Oregon went to the convention, too.  We are feeling pretty bad about not being there ourselves.  We are absolutely going to make our best effort to be there next year.

Day 420 of 1000

I have finally changed my mind on grits.  I have always prided myself on loving all kinds of food, but struggled more with grits than just about anything else.  Today, after meeting, we went to the elder and his wife’s (Tom and Sharon) house for dinner.  She served us shrimp grits.  WOW!  I had three servings!  I also learned that the best way to make Crème brûlée is with a blow torch.  These are very, very special people and not just because they are master chefs.  We are grateful that we get to be in church with them every Sunday (at least).

Day 419 of 1000

This morning Kelly got out all the materials she received at the NCSU career fair so that she could start responding to people. As she pulled stuff out of the shopping bag that held all the stuff that was handed to her, the little thing at the left fell out. It is a screwdriver set that she got from Lincoln Labs up in Massachusetts.  She was not really thinking of applying there, but the little tool set is so cool, she decided she would go ahead and throw her hat into the ring!

We agreed that just about the best way to decide which summer internship to take is to base it on the coolness of the stuff they give out at the career fair.  We think the speakers she got from Siemens still wins, but not by much.  I have been looking for an excuse to get in touch with my buddy, Evan, from Licoln Labs anyway.  I wonder if they have any need for statistics people?

Kelly is kind of sad because she needs to dress up for her first internship interview (with Target for a logistics position here in North Carolina) on Tuesday followed by the Business/Management career fair on Wednesday.  That is a lot of dressing up just to try to impress corporate HR types.  Still, I think she really likes the whole process.  A classical ENFP.

Update:  I was STRONGLY admonished just now.  Kelly has NO objections–none at ALL about dressing up two, three, or even seven days per week.  She is PASSIONATE about dressing to the nines!  ¡Mea culpa!  I KNEW that!

Day 418 of 1000

We watched the Paul Ryan vs. Joe Biden Vice Presidential debate on the internet last night (http://cspan.org).  We have always enjoyed presidential elections. I think the first to which we paid any attention as a family was the 2004 race between George W. Bush and John F. Kerry.  We wrote about it in this blog.  Kelly and Christian made some posters the night of the election, jumped up and down, and shouted slogans.  Kelly was certainly into it more than Christian, but Christian pays attention, too.

Politics and elections are Kelly’s sports.  The page of the notes are from her Linear Algebra class last February.  The Republican primary debates were going on and Kelly could not help herself.  She is a pretty good caricaturist and she spent a LOT of time drawing the different candidates in the margins of her notebook.  She did it enough that you can see significant improvements in her caricaturing skills from the beginning of the election to the end.

We are a very conservative family.  We spent a lot of time in homeschool studying the reasons we believe what we believe.  Something that fascinates me about our intrafamilial political positions is that Lorena is easily the most conservative of us all.  Someday I need to write about her thoughts on illegal immigration.

We plan vote early (they allow that in North Carolina–we vote at Wake Tech Community College) so we can make some popcorn, turn up the internet, and stay up late on November 6.

Day 412 of 1000

This is the last of the NCSU career fair stuff Kelly received.  There is probably more, but it is time to move on.  The range of companies at the fair was staggering–Lumber, electronics, software, pharmaceutical, furniture, construction, the government, medical device, automotive, etc., etc., etc.  Everyone needs engineers and technically capable employees.  That was my immediate thought when Kelly showed me the three pairs of footies she received from Hanes.  I should have thought that the textile industry would have a big presence at NCSU–the south has been the center of the world for textiles throughout much of its history.

Well, I never going to try that again. Christian had to work on his research project today on the Centennial Campus at NCSU. My plan was to work in the Hill Library on the main campus at NCSU and wait for him. That did not work out because, even though NCSU is on fall break, so there was no place to park. So, I decided I would run over to the Cameron Village Library. The things I learned there include the following:

• It is quite and attractive library
• You can drink coffee in the stacks (unlike the Holly Springs Library)
• The wireless is free, but not so good
• The coffee is expensive, but bad
• The environment really is not so bad if you do not need internet access
• It is not so easy to talk to the people at work in a library setting

I am going to need to avoid libraries as a regular places to work.  Early in my career, I thought work from home would be an awesome thing.  The first time I had an opportunity to work from home, I realized I am not really a work from home kind of guy.  I like to be in the same building with at least some of the people with whom I am working.  There are some limited things I can do better when I am completely isolated, but they are out-weighed by the benefits of working at work.  I think it is a personality thing.

The upshot, then, is that I will try to work from home when I cannot go to the office and I will only go to the library when I have a compelling reason like when I need some isolation for a week or so of coding.

Meanwhile, back at the NCSU career fair, Siemens gave out very impressive paper speakers and the NSA (a government agency spending OUR money) gave away very impressive red water bottles.  What does the company that really made business computing happen hand out?  Cloth shopping bags.  How weak is that.  They are trying to win the hearts of engineers with cloth shopping bags.  That would absolutely give me pause if I were looking for a job as a geek. 

Do I want to go to work with the company that either made speakers cheap enough (or was willing to spend the boat load of money) to hand them out to every engineer at a major university career fair or the company that had their HR department buy cheesy 15¢ cloth shopping bags from China?  It is a pretty sad commentary.

Day 410 of 1000

Lorena, Kelly, and I listened to the debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney last night.  Christian was too busy hacking together a new build for his Nook with a more recent Linux kernel.  I scanned a couple of the doodles from Kelly’s sketch book that she did during the debate.  She is still asleep (almost 9 AM) because it is the first day of something called Fall Break for Kelly, Christian, and Lorena.  I do not ever remember having a fall break when I was in college.  Maybe that is because I went mostly to schools with quarters while NCSU and Wake Tech both use a semester system.

I think Lorena and Kelly will hang out here most of the day, but Christian and I are going to be pretty busy.  Christian is going to run down to work with Dr. Kudenov at the Optical Sensing Lab at NCSU this afternoon.  Of course, I work, but I have a dentist appointment in the early afternoon after which I will run to the Hill Library at NCSU to do some programming for work while I wait for Christian to finish up.  I envy him the undergraduate work he is doing.  It is real science and engineering and all about discovery with a purpose.  The jury is still out, but it surely seems like he found a great project that will both teach him some tools and give him some great tools to help him in grad school.

On the days when I work from home, I spend most of the day working upstairs in the bonus room. As many of you read previously, Kelly has gone to a career fair the last couple of days.  She said they had given her some cool stuff, but I did not know the half of it.  Just now, I wandered down to the kitchen and noticed a bright red water bottle on the kitchen counter that she got from the National Security Agency.  She said the CIA was there, too.  I will check and see if there is some other stuff and report back.

I am truly amazed.  Siemens (the big German company) gave away speakers at the NCSU career fair.  I saw them when I came in from work last night.

I said to Kelly, “How cool is that?”

She said, “Well they are not that good.”

I let it slide.  Then this morning when Christian called me to tell me how he did on his Prob/Stat test (he did great), I asked him about them.

He said, “They are great, you ought to try them out.”

So I did.  They are great!  I might have only said they were just good, but they are also FREE.  They have a paperboard body, but they are perfect for tin-ear guys like me.  And they are FREE.  I am listening to the Eagles on Pandora right now.

Day 409 of 1000

I received a call from Kelly yesterday right after she entered the Engineering Career Fair at NCSU.  She was a little discouraged because there were so many students talking to all of the hundreds of companies looking for employees.  They were all in their suits with very impressive resumes and it seemed pretty hard to compete.  I told her to have fun–if nothing came out of it, that would be OK.  Worst case, the practice of talking about herself in search for a job would help her in the future.  She said OK, but still seemed pretty tentative.

I did not hear from her again for another three hours.  She got in some lines to talk with Intel, Caterpiller, and some smaller companies.  She was positiviely invigorated when she finally called.  Lots of people were interested in her resume, there were lots of internship, and it looks like she will be considered by a lot of people.  One guy came up and tapped on her shoulder when she was leaving the conference hall and said he noticed she was a statistics major and would she be interested in applying for an internship with their company.  He promised her an interview.

Kelly had such a good time, she thought she would give it another shot today.  She was all dressed up when she left the house.  The very cool part of the whole process was that she has a completely different vision of why she is in school after this fair.  She is fired up to get great grades, do an internship, and get on with life in a job.

Day 408 of 1000

Earlier this semester, Kelly received credit for two classes that were up in the air.  The first classes was CLEP Biology.  The course/test material had to be reviewed to assure the material covered was the same as is required for the NCSU equivalent course.  The second was Linear Algebra.  We are not sure why that was up in the air because she took it at the community college.  Maybe it is because of the course numbers–only MAT 280 at Wake Tech, MAT 405 at NCSU.  At any rate, both Kelly and Christian got credit for MAT 405 (the proofs based Linear Algebra class).

She was going to have to go to summer school to be able to graduate on time (Spring 2014) because of both a math and a science sequence requirement.  Now that she has both of those classes already complete, she has room in schedule for a summer internship if she can find one.  NCSU has a relatively amazing series of career fairs.  The two that apply to Kelly are the Engineering Fair which takes place today and tomorrow and the Business Fair which is on October 17.

Last night, I helped Kelly put together a resume.  We printed out a couple of dozen copies for her to hand out at the fair.  Lorena is going to run her some interview clothes and pick up her backpack.  It is all quite exciting.

Christian has already done a summer engineering internship.  The place where he worked, Bioptigen offered him a position this summer, too, but he needs to take one or two classes this summer, so he can graduate in Spring 2014.  He will be able to work on his undergraduate research project this summer.  It is very interesting and will help him build up his resume for grad school.  Hopefully he will be able to get another intership between his undergraduate degree and the start of grad school.

Day 407 of 1000

I spend about one-fourth of my time on the road these days.  The rest of the time, I spend at home, working up in the bonus room.  It used to be that I went off to work every morning while the rest of the family stayed home.  Now it is often the other way around.  Today, Lorena will be in school until about five so I will pick up the kids at NCSU when they get out a little after mid-day.

All this has me thinking about what will happen to the kids when they leave home in a little over a year and a half.  It might move out to a little more than that if the kids stay home for the summer, but it will be soon.  One of the big topics in our household over the years has been that the purpose of school is to learn something that will make you employable, get out as quickly as possible, and if you have a little fun a long that is OK, but not essential.

Having done the homeschool thing, one of our pet peeves is the idea that the experience of traditional school has any intrinsic value other than the preparation of the students to contribute to society.  We have given this a good deal of thought and discussion over the last several months because the kids are really not to far from the transition from college into either grad school and/or work when they will have to take even more responsibility for their finances, household, and all the things that have to do with living on their own.  Some of the topics include internships, leisure time (or, more importantly, the lack thereof when it comes to meeting responsibilities), and resumes.