Day 811 of 1000
Kelly learned to draw pencil portraits when she was in homeschool, but her skills have advanced greatly since then. Here is her last watercolor.
Month: November 2013
This is just a brief note to record a very positive result on the GRE for both Kelly and Christian. They both should definitely be able to get into a good program. These scores are not everything, but in the really good schools they are a gatekeeper. Both kids are at a level where their scores will not be an impediment at all for the schools the wish to attend for there PhD’s. It was a huge worry before and now it is not.
Our meeting room for the San Francisco meetings was on the 26th floor (about in the middle) of a very large building, but features an incredible view of the San Francisco bay. In addition to that, it features a very unique view of the statues on the top of the building next door. I cannot imagine too many people have access to the view of these particular statues. They were a little bit cool, but also very creepy.
Here is an article on their meaning in from the LA Times.
Day 810 of 1000
I flew back to Phoenix yesterday morning after four days of frenetic activity in downtown San Francisco. We made lots of progress, but I am very happy to get back to life at a saner pace. I fly so much, I get bumped to first class on semi-regularly now. Something else new is that I have been tagged as TSA pre-check so getting through the security process is much easier now.
So I sat by a nice lady on the plane who has two children in high school. One of them loves math and plans to do an engineering degree in college. The other is great at math, but her mom is encouraging her to get a degree in film because she is so creative and has put up some amazing videos of her friends on Youtube. What is wrong with this picture? We were in a long enough conversation that it came out that our daughter, Kelly, is a quite good artist, but is also a pretty good mathematician. It came up that I discouraged Kelly from an undergraduate degree in anything in the liberal arts, but that she plans to do something that could very well use her art skills in her graduate work. My seatmate was a little bit offended and ended the conversation shortly after that. It was nice to get caught up on my reading after that.
Day 807 of 1000
Amazingly, Christian uses many of the same algorithms for his undergraduate research as I do for my day job. Christian created the image to the left. It is a normalized correlation response map used in the process of finding a pattern in an image. His work is very technical–some of the elements of his research requires deeper math skills than I normally use. It has been fun watching the work move forward.
Day 806 of 1000
We are working straight through with no breaks, but we have quite a view from the conference room where we are working on the 26th floor.
Looking out the window at Alcatraz
Transamerica Building
Day 805 of 1000
Today I fly to San Francisco for a three-day conference with some folks from China, India, Australia and Prescott. It should be very interesting. My friend Brad with whom I worked in a previous company starts work with us this week. We will meet in the airport and have dinner together tonight. I hope to take a picture or two, but I often spend all my time working so I do not get to see much other than the inside of an office, my hotel, and a few restaurants.
Day 804 of 1000
Lorena put this on facebook, but I needed to put it here too, for posterity.
Day 802 of 1000
The kids are getting closer in their progress through the graduate school application process to assurance of acceptance to programs they really want. It requires a lot of effort to apply to a lot of schools by everyone in the family. Of course the kids do most of the ground work while Lorena and I review statements and resumes, do lots of running around for transcripts and other documents, and, most of all moral support. It is amazing how much collaboration can take place these days using DropBox, Google Docs, Skype, and other such tools. The Lorena and the kids are also in their last round of mid-terms.
In the middle of all this, Lorena and I have to start figuring out where we are going to live next. If the kids both get into good programs out West we will move there as soon as we can sell the house. Christian has given some thought to staying at NCSU for an additional year–there is a fifth year Masters degree in the Applied Math program. If the decides to go West, then we are going to really have to scramble to figure out where we want to go and line everything up.