Month: January 2013 Page 1 of 2

Day 527 of 1000

Well, I got tired of waiting for the call from the auto body place and the insurance agent.  The pickup is totaled so I have to buy a new (to me) car.  I am thinking I will get the minimum possible to get to work and back.  It is always nice to have a new vehicle, but it never is much fun going through the process of buying one.  I wish I were better at this.  I have read about all kinds of techniques for “defeating” the sales guys and have even tried a few, but in the end, they all seem to be pretty obnoxious.  Maybe I will wait until I get back from Arizona.

Day 526 of 1000

Since I started taking volunteer work seriously over the last ten years or so, I have probably made greater advances in my career through volunteer work than any other way.  Things I have been able to add to my resume specifically because of volunteer work include Python, QT, QT Creator, R, Arduino programming, and I am sure there is some other stuff I am forgetting.  Over the next year or so it appears I will get two or three refereed journal articles for our research at the GaugeCam project at NCSU.  I am a big fan of volunteer work, not only as a way to contribute, but as a way to make friends and build community.  I hate to think I would perform volunteer work just for career advancement, but there is a utilitarian case that could be made for doing just that.

I drove Kelly and Christian to school this morning, dropping them off in front of the SAS building at NCSU at 8:15.  It is about a 40 minute drive at that time in the morning because of the traffic so we had time to have an interesting discussion about volunteering.  Yesterday afternoon I received a very interesting email from an accomplished person who wants to do some statistical analysis on some topics on which I have had great interest in the past.  Kelly was fascinated because she has followed these same topics and is, of course, a statistics major with an increasing skill set.

I really do not feel too qualified as a statistician although it is something I am working on and doing at my day job more and more all the time.  Kelly is much more skilled than I at this point.  But the beauty of volunteering is that there are generally more opportunities for people with lower levels of skills than in paid positions.  If, as in this case, you are doing it to help out without no expectation of pay, there is a joy to it that does not exist in a job where you have to show up, even if you love that job.  I do not know whether I will have the opportunity and/or time to take on this new volunteer work, but I do know that, if I did, I would get more benefit from it than I contributed.

The ride to school talk focused more on whether Kelly should go on to a one year professional Masters degree in analytics or a PhD program in statistics.  The challenge is that the Masters degrees in analytics are pretty expensive.  The program at NCSU cost $21,240 for tuition and fees.  She would make that money back fairly quickly, but it is still quite a bit of money and they easily place all their students in good jobs out of that program.  The average base salary for someone with no work experience who graduated from that program in 2012 was $77,100.  On the other hand, if she goes on to get a PhD, she will get paid a stipend while she gets her degree than make a good salary after that.  The issue is that if she becomes a stay at home wife and mother rather than try to be an uber professional woman which is what she would really like to do, how will each of these career paths hold up?

We talked about ways for her to contribute while she is not in the marketplace.  I think that whichever path she takes, volunteering on projects can help here contribute while it keeps her skills sharp and helps her to learn new stuff.  We will continue the discussion.

Day 525 of 1000

After getting permission to work from home for the day and talking to the insurance and auto repair people to get started on fixing the pickup, I started investigating methods to do perform non-linear regression on the data with which I am working for Quantum Catch.  Andrew has given me some clues with respect to different open source tools I could use, but I can see there will be a lot of learning before I will be able to do this very well.  I found this page on Simple Nonlinear Regression in R, but that led me to another page I had to read first.  I am sure there will be lots of detours I will have to take before I get the hang of all this.

I struggle with learning stuff that is that broad and filled with minutia, but I like it a lot.  It got me to thinking I should probably start looking at scripture in the same light that I look at these technical/work pursuits.  I like to read about the things that were going on in history at the times of the different events in the bible, but that is not really what I am talking about.  I mean, I think it is important and a joy for the light to go on in any kind of learning, so if I focus more of my time on scripture, I might struggle sometimes like with my technical pursuits, but I know the payoff is coming.  I need to think about how to put that all into practice.

My friend, Andrew B. was kind enough to spend most of the day with me yesterday to work on a problem I have at work for which his every growing knowledge of “big data” analytics is the perfect tool set.  He showed me how to do logistic regression and then showed me an open source toolset called Weka that is amazing in its simplicity, but extremely powerful.  Of course, I am not anywhere close to Andrew in any of this, but I have discovered a new world and that is ALWAYS a very good thing.  Give us fun new things to learn and we are happy.  THANKS ANDREW (again)!

Here is the video I used to learn how to do it:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7kpIBGEdkI

Here is my output:

Day 524 of 1000

We went to lunch today with our friends Tom and Sharon, originally from Michigan, but currently living in North Carolina and our other friends Mundo, Malena, Perla, and Sofia, originally from Mexico, but currently living in North Carolina.  It amazing how much we all have in common.  I wish I had a picture to commemorate the moment, but that can wait for next time.  The challenges of life don’t seem nearly as big when you have close friends who are on your side with the most imporant things in commom.  I am feeling pretty grateful and thankful right now and I am even grateful and thankful for that.

Day 523 of 1000

So many people have put impressive pictures of the new Hunt Engineering Library at NCSU, that there is no way I could do it justice.  All I have is the one minor flaw that I could find and I am sure it will go away soon, so I am glad I can document something that was not exactly perfect, because virtually everything else was exactly perfect.

One of the very cool new things I saw there was something called MicroTile.  I have no idea how it works, but it is amazing.  There are a number of video walls in the library made up of these incredible video tiles.  The whole library is so obnoxiously impressive, that it is hard to know where to even start, so I won’t.

Just let me say that I like it a lot.

Spun around when I got ice on a bridge on Wade Avenue heading toward NCSU to pick up Christian. No one hurt, but pretty bad damage to the pickup.

Day 522 of 1000

Kelly has no classes on Fridays.  NCSU, Wake Tech, and Bioptigen all close at new due to the incoming snow/ice storm this afternoon.  I drove Christian to school this morning (and saw the new Hunt Library from the outside).  All this means that I get to pick Christian up at 12:30 and go to lunch with him.  I love to do that!  We were kind of hoping for snow, but it looks like we will get some pretty nasty mix of sleet and snow.  It will be nice to be at home with the family for an entire afternoon and evening after having been out of town for so long.

Day 521 of 1000

My friend Ashavini, here at Bioptigen sent me an email that describes the collaboration we are doing with a couple of grad students and a professor from the Applied Math department at NCSU.  It is very cool because Christian worked here one summer and will have one of the professors teaching his class starting next week.  Right now, I am sitting typing at my desktop on an old keyboard that has the delete key in an odd place, so I keep hitting “delete” when I want to hit “end”.  My new docking station for my laptop and 27″ monitor are out to be delivered, so life will get really good in just a bit because I just saw a REAL keyboard over on a shelf that I can confiscate.

After my snit yesterday, I had a good and very positive talk with all the involved parties.  It all worked out great.  Not good, great.  Even though it is cathartic to do that sort of thing now and again, it does not serve one well to get into a snit (general because one chooses to be offended) even in the short term, let alone the long term.  One thing that worked well in all this is remembering that “a soft answer turneth away wrath.”

One of the really big benefits of attending North Carolina State is you get to rub elbows with the rich and famous. Christian was sitting in the Hill Library when he took this brilliant, high resolution photograph of a recent winner of some big name singing contest. I was very impressed with the quality of the photograph. There is no doubt about who he is.

Day 520 of 1000

Every now and then, less frequently than when we were in our homeschool years, some feel the need to tell us our kids need to be exposed to more and it is time for them to get out on their own.  All this in spite of the fact that they have traveled extensively on their own, been in college for three years, are regularly out of the country, have held jobs both for pay and as volunteers, played sports and music, and have a wide group of friends, literally around the world.  They are about a year and a half from moving three thousand miles away from home to go to graduate school yet many believe they are somehow sheltered and need to spend more time away from the family.

If I sound frustrated, I am.  Even though Kelly and Christian have done all this, they are still only 17 and 18 years old  They are getting killed this semester due to the difficulty of their current class load, probably the hardest they will face in their entire college career, both graduate and undergraduate..  I guess because they are in college, it is easy to believe they should be more independent although all their same age peers are still in high school and have parents that are trying to maintain a sense of family cohesiveness.  I have to spend two weeks in each of the next four or five months in Arizona and want to spend every minute possible with the family during this last litte while they live at home, so the last thing any of us want is to be apart when the time we have together is so limited.

It might be easier to understand if we had any confidence that the people who give such advice had any evidence in their own lives that such type of parental behavior is in any way beneficial.  But, based on what we know, we do not have that confidence.

Day 519 of 1000

Life is a blur.  I got home late last night.  I am grateful that my whole family showed up at the airport to pick me up even though they all had to get up very early this morning.  I started another new job today which is my old job at Bioptigen, but in a new, much nicer office.  We have overnight guests tonight and tomorrow night.  I think life will slow down a little by the weekend.  Then maybe I can go to lunch with my buddy Andrew, work out at the YMCA, and study, for the very first time at NCSU’s new Hunt Library.  I am REALLY looking forward to that.  I have a bunch of good material about which I could write, but no time.  I think one of the first things I want to do is put up a couple of short videos of my folks in the interviews I did while I was in Oregon, but that will have to wait until I have time to edit them.  Time will eventually be on my side, but maybe not in this life.

Day 518 of 1000

I spent the weekend in Portland with Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah.  I had no access to the internet, so I was unable to post anything here.  We had a great time.  Mostly we just hung out, ate too much, and went to meeting.  I was able to get the camera going and record some conversations about some of the events of Dad and Mom’s life, but mostly we just spent time together.  We recorded some small videos about Dad’s time at Fort Rucker in Alabama and about Mom’s early days as a pharmacist at Gerlock Drug Store in Eugene and before she was a pharmacist at Cottage Grove Drug Store.

Right now, I am sitting in the PDX airport waiting to catch a flight to Raleigh.  I won’t arrive there until late tonight.

Day 515 of 1000

I am sitting in Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport waiting to catch a plan to Portland.  I am very excited to get started on our history recording project.  I walked out of the house without the big kit I had prepared for the project, so I stopped by Fry’s Electronics in Phoenix and picked up a little Samsung HMX-QF20 camcorder.  It stores videos on an SD card, then transfers them via WiFi to wherever you want.  It does everything we want to do, is 1/4 the size of the other stuff, and way easier to use.

I am going to put up a little sign in Dad and Mom’s room explaining how to use the thing and how to load the results up to a dropbox account so we can start accumulating into something that is interesting to watch.  I have picked out two things I want to record while I am there and will work out the bugs in the process with those items.  Dad has a story from when he was in the Army in Alabama that had a big influence on me because he told it to me at a time when I was pretty down and out.  It says something about who he is.  As for Mom, I am going to try to talk to her about the influences in high school that made her decide to go to pharmacy school at Oregon State.

First things first, though.  We need to go out and buy some SD cards because that is what the camera uses to record the video.  We also need to buy a little tripod so we can have a stable image during the interviews.  We invite anyone who has some kind of interview they would like to do to pop me an email.  As soon as I get the procedure together, I will send it to whoever asks.

Hopefully, I will be able to post the first videos here in short order.

It is quite fortuitous that my current job requires me to figure out a bunch of stuff where the best too to do the job is statistics.  As part of my job, I downloaded the R programming language and R IDE called R Studio.  I have been watching YouTube videos on how to Factor Analysis, Principle Component Analysis, and other stuff I do not really understand.  I am going to go through some learning pain, but I have been hoping for the chance to do this for quite awhile.

Day 514 of 1000

I have always loved to read the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible.  I arrived there today in my current read through the Old Testament.  It is traditionally attributed to King Solomon and it seems like there are a lot of parallels to his life and what is going on in the world today.  Back then, the average man did not have access to as much free time and access to knowledge to pursue whatever whim the think might make them happy.  Since that is now available, it seems like a lot of people are attempting to acheive self-fulfillment in pleasure, fame, accumulation of knowledge, accumulation of wealth, and a lot of other vain pursuits.  Solomon rightly identified all these as vain pursuits.

How does this apply to “doing hard stuff”?  Well, the point I hammered home to the kids that it is not worth going to college unless you are going to do something that is both academically difficult and that will lead to a good job.  I think the reasons for that are self evident and will not go into that now.  I still think that is good advice, but my start into Ecclesiates helped me remember that even this is a vain pursuit if it is not accompanied by the admonition at the end of the book:

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.

The kids are probably in the hardest semester of their entire college career right now.  They have no time to do anything but study.  It consists of large volumes of work understanding very complex material–Mathematical Statistics, Analysis, Modern Algebra, programming, electrical engineering.  Hard, hard stuff.  It will help them get a good job.  I will probably help them build character and a work ethic.  The problem is that if it develops into pride of self, it is self defeating; it does not conform to the admonition.

Day 512 of 1000

I was pretty sad yesterday that I missed being with Lorena on her birthday.  Thankfully, our wonderful friends, Tom and Sharon, took Lorena, Kelly, and Christian to Dos Taquitos in Raleigh to celebrate.  Tom and Sharon have changed our North Carolina experience in a way we never would have expected two or three years ago.  We owe them a lot.  I talked to everyone on the drive home from the dinner.  I got a big kick out of a great little story Kelly told me so I had her write up and send to me.  Here it is.

So I got an email from my undergrad advisor telling all the stats majors about an afternoon lecture in SAS hall by some corporate statistical bigwig. I have seven hours off on Mondays so I decided to go for it and learn something!

Four o’clock rolled around and I walked up the five stories of SAS and got a great seat for the lecture in the middle of the statistical conference room. I looked around for some of my friends but recognized no one. More and more people entered and sat down but everyone looked 10 years older and unfamiliar. This went over my head. Its not like I know everyone in the department, and new friends in your field of study are always a good thing! But before I could introduce myself to the kids next to me, the speaker walked up to the front and began his lecture. It was about communicating as a statistician in a corporate world and it was super absorbing and fascinating. While he was talking, someone passed me the attendance sheet. I looked, but my name wasn’t on it. This is definitely a warning sign that you’re in the wrong place but the lecture was so good that this ALSO went over my head.  It was only when the speaker began randomly calling people out for questions in class that I began to wonder if maybe I was confused. And then he looked straight at me and asked: “In all your graduate school experience, how many times total would you estimate you’ve had to speak for an audience?”

I SHOULD have said I’m not in graduate school. But when you are a Chapman and three very handsome Ph.D candidates are looking back at you and the president of the ASA is sitting in the audience, you don’t always say what you’re supposed to.

“About 15 times!” I told him.

Turns out you CAN sell anything with confidence!! To my total surprise my adrenalin fueled blind estimate was not only feasible but also praiseworthy for evidence of my obviously prolific graduate level statistical communication. I was SO SMUG you guys. Insufferable. I think I even winked at one of the cute grad students while high on the fumes of smug. Life in the fast lane!

The proverbial fall came too soon!! Five minutes into my glory at getting away with it in a GRAD level lecture I twisted around in my seat for a stretch and spotted last semester’s freshman seminar’s TA who’s getting his masters in stats and knows very very VERY well that I am a lowly first-year. I could’ve melted and died on the spot!!!

Learned my lesson I guess.