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.
Day 801 of 1000
I have had a great, but very exhausting time over the last several months getting a new product ready for introduction early next year. The part I was supposed to play was pretty much complete at the beginning of October. I absolutely love the work I do. Part of that joy is in the schedule. Not only is it necessary to get it done, but to do it fast enough to hit a market window is part of the thrill. I was given a director level position that had to do with internal politics and the small size of the company which meant that, even though what was required was not at the center of my skill set, I was the only one old enough and experienced enough to handle both the technology and the internal and external political pressures required to do the job.
I finished that part of my job, so now I have been moved to a director level position that is exactly at the center of my experience. I will coordinate a world-wide team of consultants and collaborators to develop intellectual property in image processing and machine vision. It does not get better than that for someone like me. My new title is Director, Image Analysis. Sadly, though, technical and resources issues have raised their ugly head again. I am the only one with enough bandwidth and technical know-how to handle the shortfall. So, I am pulled back into to the 24-7 development fray until the end of the year and possibly through January. The good part is that my contribution will be mostly technical this time and not political.
I will love this. The down side is that I have already been doing it for a long time and I am pretty tired. I have never been this heavy (fat) in my life due to lack of exercise and eating on the road all the time. There is not much time to do anything other than write code, eat, and sleep. Maybe if I quit eating so much the fat problem would take care of itself. The project is very distributed so I work with people in Australia, India, China, and all over the US. That means my work day does not start at 8 and go to 5. I have phone and Skype calls all hours of the night and day. The only thing to do in situations like this is to just dive into it and enjoy it. I figure I can do that for two or three more months.
Then, I will have my dream job–working with the most talented people in the world in the field of machine vision and image processing and I get to pick my own team. Most of them are already on board.
Day 799 of 1000
I only have one more tuition payment before the kids graduate. They both registered for class in the last couple of days, so it will be arriving soon. I am feeling a little nostalgic about the thing. We warned the kids that registration for their last semester was something to be very carefully considered because it is necessary to get all the advisors, administrators, and professors aligned and in agreement that the classes taken are sufficient for graduation.
Here are their final courses:
| ECE 421 | Introduction to Signal Processing |
| MA 426 | Mathematical Analysis II |
| MA 513 | Introduction to Complex Variables* |
| MA 747 | Probability and Stochastic Processes II* |
*Graduate classes
| EC 302 | Intermediate Macroeconomics |
| ENG 332 | Communication for Business and Management |
| ST 431 | Introduction to Experimental Design |
| ST 432 | Introduction to Survey Sampling |
| ST 498 | Independent Studies in Statistics* |
| HESR 249 | Tennis |
*Undergraduate research
It will be very nice not have so much pain in that wallet area of my anatomy.
Here Comes the Sun (September 2010)
Classical Gas (recorded by Bryan–June 2010)
Day 798 of 1000
I was able to pick up a friend at the airport today. It was a joy to be with him. He is an encouragement just by his very existence and the course he has taken for his life. It is my hope that other people have someone in their life that they wish they could somehow repay, but do not have the means. It is a feeling that is humbling, but very, very good. Sometimes, I find myself in a particular set of circumstances where I want to be a help, but am unable to do it. It makes me want to work to get the circumstances right to be able to be a help more.
All of this made me think about my brother-in-law, Rigoberto and his wife Minita. I told my friend that I picked up from the airport about them. Recently, they had occasion to move to a place many hundreds of miles from where they were born and raised. Rigo moved because he got a better job, but there was something bigger going on. It turns out they found themselves in a place where they could be a very big help and encouragement to a lot of people and a huge example to their elementary school age children. They miss out on a ton of stuff that being close to grandparents and nuclear family might help, but would not be possible if they were not a long way from home on their own.
I know this all sounds a little cryptic, but I was reminded of the need to be humble enough, willing, and ready to go anywhere I am called. I do not know if this make any sense, but it seems like a lot more spiritual growth occurs when one is being a help then being helped. I suppose it might have something to do with ones stage of life, too, but, for me, I feel a pretty big need to be up and doing, now, while I have time and opportunity.
Update: The guercos in the picture are Christian and Kelly circa 2000.
Day 795 of 1000
I had a Skype conference with three people over four continents. The Technology Director called in from the corporate offices of our mother company in Australia. The manager who works for the Director and coordinates with Skyped in from India where he was traveling. The Data Analyst works from the China office and Skyped in from there. Of course, I am in Raleigh. How cool is that. The video and audio were both quite stellar. How cool is that.
Day 792 of 1000
I love everything about this article on the aptly named “Toilet Bowl” between Oregon State and the team never to be named in this blog. That game was compared to the Obama/Democrat government shutdown. Most of the Republicans, especially in the senate did not act with distinction either. I am not sure if I was at the particular game described in the article, but I could have been and have lots of friends who absolutely were there. In a state full of some of the best athletes in the world–mostly in track and field–it has not been a place where the football players have excelled even though they have gotten better over the last decade or so. Note that I do not count that team in the town next to Springfield as an Oregon team.
Day 791 of 1000
The following is the abstract for Kelly’s undergraduate research work. It is very cool that I am actually excited about this!
Evaluating the Ability of Drought Indices as Predictors of North Carolina Corn Yields
Corn is of growing importance to North Carolina’s agricultural economy. The ability to accurately predict corn yields per year under different different climate conditions is essential. The North Carolina State Climate Office (NCSCO) maintains seven separate drought indices that contain information on precipitation dating back to 1895 for each of the eight North Carolina climate divisions. Drought index data used spans the period from March through October for each year from 1981 to 2011, reflecting the normal growing season of corn in North Carolina. This study first attempts to determine if there is a correlation between drought and North Carolina corn yields over time, using North Carolina corn yield data from the USDA. The study will then attempt to determine which of the indices are the best predictors of corn yield per year for each climate division in the case of a correlation. If any strong corn yield predictors are found, expanding the drought indices’ predictive capabilities to other important North Carolina crop yields, such as tobacco or soybeans, could prove to be useful.
The only thing that might be cooler is if she were doing statistics on pork bellies. After all, this is North Carolina.
Day 790 of 1000
I spent the weekend helping the kids work on graduate school applications. It is a lot of work. One of Kelly’s required three essays with a fourth optional essay and a resume. There are a ton of GRE scores and official transcripts we have to get sent. Everything has to be complete within the next two or three months. While all this is going on, the kids have one of the hardest semesters of their career. I am going to make a spreadsheet to track whether we get everything done.
Day 786 of 1000
This is the fourth in a series of posts about how a mid-career Masters degree changed my life. I admire people who do an after work and weekends Masters degree so they can pay the rent and support the family, but I did not do it that way. I bailed out of my job and dived in full time after having spent ten years in the workforce. The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here.
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After ten years in industry, there were lots of good reasons for me to return to college at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) for a Masters Degree. Primarily, there was a professor there who wanted me to come for a specific reason. He was not just willing to have me come. There was a need for someone like me. That was huge. I had something to offer the Industrial Engineering program at UTEP because of my ten years of experience that other students who moved directly from their Bachelors degree did not. I was able to talk to people in the industrial sector around Texas and New Mexico as well as the Maquiladora sector in Ciudad Juarez, and Chihuahua in Mexico. Those ten years experience that to speak with the industrial base in ways that “fresh-outs” could not.
It turns out that our program was further reaching than even the industrial sector around El Paso. We ended up providing services and/or installing equipment in Israel, Singapore, and Monterrey, Mexico. Those services brought money and research opportunities to the University. The experience I gained representing UTEP in industry was, in some ways, more valuable than the classes I took. The bigger point is that anyone with ten years experience in the private sector, if they were working hard and paying attention, will have something significant to offer a University that will make the transition back to college much more palatable.
While UTEP is not one of the flagship universities of Texas like Texas A&M or University of Texas at Austin, it is a great regional university. It had exactly what I needed and it was not only willing to accept me as a student, but had a unique way to use my skills. When I first got there, I wondered whether I had made a big mistake, but the longer I stayed, the more I liked it. It was a super match for me and we actually were successful enough in our work that, when I finished my Masters degree, I was invited to Texas A&M to continue on to a PhD. I never availed myself of that opportunity, but UTEP allowed me to transition from a mediocre (in terms of grades) Bachelors degree to a top tier University in one step.
The bigger point is that finding a slot like this might take some serious investigation and a move to what might at first seem to be an odd place, but it is worth it to find a school that will not only accept you as a student, but has a professor with a desire for someone with your unique skills. The professor with a desire for your unique skills and a willingness to go to bat for you makes all the difference in the world both with respect to acceptance into a program and life as a student once you get there.
Here is an article in the Columbia Daily that does a pretty good job of describing what it is like to be a conservative on just about any secular or government college campus in America today. With regard to a previous article written on this topic, Jake Goldwasser writes the following:
…he talks about how once we leave Columbia we will leave the domain of constant self-congratulation and enter a world that is skeptical of our institution. It is not that professors collect empirical evidence to support liberal claims that makes the world sneer at places like Columbia. It is the self-righteous attitude, the certainty of conviction that comes from an institution whose purpose is to foster doubt and balanced discourse and critical thinking.
I appreciated the article in its effort to describe the reality of the undergraduate Ivy League world. Nevertheless, I think both this article and the one to which the above quotation refers, overestimate the level of accomplishment required to gain entrance to a liberal arts degree at an Ivy League school. Sadly, the level of knowledge attained by earning such a liberal arts degree is equally as suspect. The “real” world has figured out that ethnicity, money, connections, personal (politically correct) proclivities, ACT/SAT preparation classes, and checking the right social participation boxes is more important than real ability when applying to these schools, especially when it comes to liberal arts degrees. Many of us have too much experience dealing with the products of these institutions to consider them elite in any meaningfuly way.
Still, and I am sincere about this, thanks for trying to understand.
Day 785 of 1000
I spent more time in Prescott, Arizona over the last three months than at home with the family. That is because my company has given me responsibility to get images out of a new camera we designed. We were able to do that last Wednesday. Supposedly that would return me to a more sane schedule where I can fly to Prescott only one or two weeks per month for awhile. It also meant that I could quit working weekends until the next big product development cycle requires me to do this again. The bad news is that the work we did uncovered new “opportunities” which will require my apt attention. That means, my schedule will remain pretty much the same as before until the end of the year.
I love the work I do and really do not mind the hours because if I were not working on those technical things for which I get paid, I would probably be doing the same kind of thing on a volunteer or hobby project. It all works out OK because the kids are getting hammered from now until the end of the year with the toughest classes of their undergraduate degrees and the need to apply to graduate schools before the end fo the year. They both should have an easier go next semester, but not THAT much easier. I hope to have a schedule where I do not have to spend too many weekends away from home by then.
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