Day 784 of 1000
We had a great weekend in Georgetown, Texas visiting friends and family from Mexico. There was even a contingent of other Mexcians from North Carolina. Lorena and I are sitting in the airport in Austin waiting to catch a flight back to Raleigh and the daily grind. We really wish we could have taken the kids, but that will have to wait until next year.
Day 781 of 1000
Lorena will be out of communication unti Monday afternoon at a church convention. We are looking forward to listening to lots of good stuff, eating well, and seeing family and old friends. It will all be in Spanish. Not a bad way to celebrate our 21st wedding anniversary.
Faith is the art of holding on to things in spite of your changing moods and circumstances. — C. S. Lewis
I am getting old enough now that I am learning to distinguish between true doubt and just discouragement. Fortunately, doubt these days is way more infrequent than discouragement and discouragement has more to do with normal swings in mood and maybe even my blood-sugar level than any thing that could even approximate a rational reason for discouragement. Well, that is, other than my own weakness and misunderstands. It is not that the discouragement and doubt is not real, it is (maybe) that I have increased faith and know how to weather those periods better.
(h.t. Billy Squibs)
Day 780 of 1000
Lorena and I got married en the “El Tio” event center/restaurant 21 years ago today. We are meeting in Austin this weekend to go to a church event. Lorena’s father, mother, and some other family members will be there. I am thankful for Lorena and thankful for the family into which I married. I will probably be out of contact for a day or two.
Day 779 of 1000
I tremendously enjoyed seeing all these little guys all over the place here in Colorado. I got this picture right outside the door of the engineering consulting firm I have been visiting. It is in a very busy commercial development.
Day 778 of 1000
Today we captured the first recognizable images of the retina of an eye at work. We have been working on it for almost a year. After work, one of the other engineers and I went out for a steak to celebrate. On the drive back to the Westin (not a fan), I saw a sign on the side of the said “No cruising” as in Cruising the Gut, like on Willamette Street in Eugene or Sandy Boulevard in Portland or Main Street on virtually any small town in America back in the 60’s. What a perfect time for an American Graffiti moment.
I got co-opted into running up to Arvada, Colorado from Prescott, Arizona this afternoon. On the bus ride from the rental car return to the airport, I got to listen to two immigrants with fairly thick accents talk to each other about the way to get ahead in America. It was a very enlightening conversation. Both of them said it is essential to get an education. The reason for the education was not the education itself, but how, in America, it could really open up job opportunities. One of them talked about his sister who was studying to be a nurse. The bus driver talked about his brother who came here with a Bachelors degree from his home country to study for a Masters degree.
He was an engineer and (I love this quote) and as an indicator of his brothers great success, he said, “He drives a brand new Ford Mustang.”
The other guy was in awe. He said, “Wow.”
They talked about various community college options, a six month program that would allow the bus driver to advance in his current job. It was all about the job. I am on board with that. I believe learning for learning’s sake is a good thing, but learning so you can put beans on the table is even better. Actually, they can be the same thing a lot of the time. It was all quite motivating. I left the bus inspired.
Day 777 of 1000
Aunt Julia had a birthday last week. I wrote her an email note. We both marveled out how good it is to be in our 50’s. I never would have imagined that I would enjoy this age so much. I kind of get the sense that the 60’s will be even better. This is especially true as our kids get to the end of their teen years and struggle to figure out what they should do, where they should go, the whole marriage thing, how to make a living, whether to continue their education, and etc., and etc. and etc. That is a great time to be alive, too, but much harder in many, many ways. Happy Birthday Aunt Julia.
P.S. This picture is not really a picture from this birthday. I found it, thought it looked good and needed something for this blog post. Who knows when or where it was taken.
LinkedIn is a pretty good business tool. I use it quite a lot to communicate with old colleagues and investigate opportunities. As the kids approach college graduation, I have encouraged them to build their LinkedIn profile. Kelly changed her profile picture and the page is really starting to take shape. You can click here to see it.
Day 776 of 1000
There is an interesting article over at The Numbers Guy blog at the Wall Street Journal titled Government Shutdown’s Price Tag. It basically says whatever number the government calculates as the cost of the shutdown is just wrong. He talks about how badly the calculation was done during the last two shutdowns and what it is impossible and worthless to even try (Hint: The U.S. economy is about the same complexity as the weather). There are a couple of other things that make Obama’s shutdown even more expensive that are of the Obama’s own making. Beside the greater amount of money Obama spends to keep people out of parks than it would cost just operate as usual, there is a good chance the Democrats will pay the furloughed government workers for services NOT rendered. From the article:
There is one other big variable to economic impact: What happens if Congress chooses not to award back pay to furloughed workers? After every prior shutdown, Congress has made up the withheld salary. “If the current situation lingers for several weeks, I suspect this Congress will be less willing to offer that pay,” Mr. LeBas said. “The multibillion price tag for doing so is more meaningful today in a deficit-conscious world, than it was almost 18 years ago.”
Whatever number is selected as the cost of Obama’s shutdown will almost certainly be used to blame the people who were actually trying to remedy the situation.
Day 775 of 1000
This a picture Kelly snapped while at work at the fabulous new NCSU Hunt Library today. As I am stuck out in Prescott without the family working through the weekend, I got a little melancholy. Lorena, the kids and I started going down to the NCSU Hill Library (the old one) when the kids started community college three and a half years. At first it was fun because we got to watch the posturing and histrionics of the college kids while Lorena, Kelly, and Christian studied and I worked on volunteer research for NCSU.
When the kids moved on from community college to NCSU, we continued to go about every other Saturday, but now it was even more fun because the kids were part of the drama. Then, at the beginning of 2013 the best college library in the world opened over on the Centenniel campus. Now, we only have a few short months to go to the library together. I want to enjoy every chance I get to be with the kids before they go off to graduate school in the west. Fortunately, the plan is for me to be home for a couple of weeks after this trip and I plan to make the most of it. I am very thankful that they still do not mind if I tag along.
Day 774 of 1000
I was scheduled to make a two day trip to Denver next week, but it got cancelled so I can stay here and program something that is essentially similar to a video game with a robot attached. If I am going to be stuck in a hotel away from my family, I would rather do that than travel around the country. I found a very cool new college library to visit, but it is at a school full of fundamentalist liberals, so I think the general public is not welcome there. Kind of like the federal government. Obama shuts down the government and then does not allow people use stuff that is normally free and is not paid with money taken by force from the American people by the government. Amazing how that works.
Day 773 of 1000
We have some challenges at my work that require me to make an unscheduled trip to Denver for a couple of days next week. It needs to be done and I am the best one to do it. One of our vendors has really not met their commitment, so we have to pick up the slack. One of the people who works for the vendor has caused lots of delays. Because he is not willing to try to make adjustments for his lack of performance, we will have to put a man in his mid-eighties on an airplane to deal with the problem. An unwillingness to at least make an attempt to do the right thing when it will cause grief for the people you have let down is pretty egregious.
Kelly was in a situation at her summer internship where she thought she had fallen behind in her work. She was tasked to learn some pretty complicated materials and she just did not understand it as well as she should. Her future tasks depended on the new knowledge. I asked her how long it would take to learn the material. She told me she could do it in three or four hours. I told her she should consider going into work the coming Saturday. Because it was a place that needed a security clearance, she had to ask permission. When she called her supervisor to make the request, her administrator told her it was not permitted for interns. The administrator laughed a little after Kelly asked the question.
Kelly was a little embarrassed when the administrator laughed. She did not find out until later that the laughter was because her direct supervisor who needed her to learn the new material was sitting beside the administrator when Kelly made the call. They had gotten a kick out of her desire to go the extra mile. Kelly’s boss mentioned it to her the following Monday and thanked her for the attempt. He assured her she was doing just fine. Both the administator and the director of the division brought it up with Kelly during her exit interview. A willingness to go the extra mile is worth it. It does get noticed. Unwillingness gets noticed, too.
Day 772 of 1000
I logged for one summer in North Idaho while I was in college. Though I had worked in sawmills a lot, I found the logging culture both different and interesting. There seemed to be a constant flame war going on about which cork boots were best (White is the brand I remember). There were also continuous arguments about chainsaws (Stihl, Husqvarna, etc.), the “right” way to file you saw chain (whether to do it yourself or have someone else do it), and a million other work and tool related subjects. It is really not much different in the world of of programming. There is always a struggle to get everyone on the same page with respect to programming languages, development environments, debuggers, hardware, etc., etc.
I got a kick out of the seventh item on this list in an article at Simply Statistics. It points to an article about using something called Hadoop to deal with “big data” problems. I am just starting to learn more about different statistical tools, so it was great to be able to glean information about tools that are new to me from this article like pandas and scalding. The pop-culture element of the article is the reason I thought to right about it here. The disdain with which the author writes about Hadoop is more than matched in the comments section below the post. I especially like an aside written by one of the commenters in response to a commenter before him who extolled the virtues of language named Erlang while hammering everything else:
[Edit: I have had a poke around, and you appear to have a bit of a history of trolling and flaming-anything-that-isn’t Erlang, so if you don’t mind, I will take your criticism with a grain of salt.]
Christian and I discuss this kind of thing pretty regularly. It is hard not to get caught up in the religious wars. It is something I have to fight on a regular basis. In industry it is critical to do what is best for the company. Sometimes that means reuse of a really, really bad code base to get something to market quickly. Sometimes it means using almost dead cult languages like Delphi and Haskell (see, I still have some religion) that have little penetration in the real world. As I get older I realize there is nothing new under the sun. Before there were chain-saw arguments, I am sure there were axe arguments.
We love Monterrey. Lorena’s brother, Jorge, sent a link to this great video about that beautiful city. It is really even better than this video shows. Except the cheesy Yoga thing.
My buddy John at work told me to go look at donotcall.gov. The image below is what was there. Make sure you do not call donotcall. They are shut down. On the one hand, it gives great joy that the government is shut down so they do not waste as much of my money nor spend it on evil and objectionable things. Shutting down the government is about the only thing Barack Obama, Harry Reid and the Democrats have ever done for which I have been thankful. I wish the Republicans would have thought of doing this. On the other hand, this is one of the few government services that was actually worth it.
Day 771 of 1000
Kelly went to her first job fair at NCSU last year. She was not wildly excited about the idea as she said none of the other students took it too seriously. Actually, she pretty seriously drug her feet, but in the end she dressed up very professionally, we updated and beautified her resume, and she went. When she went, she was wiped out–it really is hard work to work a big job fair. She said she was a little skeptical, but that changed to outright enthusiasm after she got four interviews and three job offers. This year, she does not need the job fair as badly as last, because she has a standing offer for internship work at the JHU-APL. Still she plans to spend some quality time there.
Kelly’s experience helped Christian a lot. He is pretty fired up. Last summer, he did research, so he was not looking for an internship. This year, he wore his suit to school today, has an armful of updated resumes, and plans to spend several hours working the floor. I am looking forward to hearing how it goes.
Day 770 of 1000
There is a post over at the Simply Statistics blog that talks about an interactive programming environment for the R statistical programming language called swirl. I have decided to download this when I am back in my Hotel room tonight (I am working in Prescott, AZ this week) and report what I find. It is amazing how important statistics has become in the work I do in machine vision. The last four jobs (including this one) is loaded with it. I just sent a set of data off to members of our team in Australia and China because we do not have anyone here yet who can handle it. I suspect, I will be hiring a data science consultant to pick up some small projects, soon, but believe we will be hiring a fulltime data scientist within two or three years just to consume the data we produce in my group. I need to start studying R and Weka to get enough knowledge to hire well. I would like to learn SAS and JMP, too. Kelly says JMP is not so expensive, so we might start with that. Fortunately, I have some data scientist friends who are capable of helping me.
Day 769 of 1000
We love community colleges. In spite of our dedication to getting our kids through Big State U and on into grad school, we believe that if there is going to be a long term future for mass public post secondary education, it will be centered around community colleges. Some are fortunate to live within driving distance of a state four year college, but almost all of America is within a half hour drive of a first rate community college. They do a great job right now at training people for jobs in auto repair, dental assisting, welding, electronic technician work, bookkeeping, and so many other great fields where people can make a great living.
They also are great in preparing people for entry into four year schools. We believe that these four year schools will start to get more distributed. When that happens, the community college will be great places to proctor sit-down exams, on-sight seminars, and a plethora of other activities associated with the delivery of distributed classes. They currently work with Big State U to coordinate classes and even perform some research, but we see that collaboration getting bigger as pressure is added to drive cost out of higher education.
With that as a backdrop, you will understand when I was excited about an opportunity I have been given to write a two semester community college course in Machine Vision. I will write the course plan, develop computer programs, and help do some “train the trainer” sessions to get the thing going. I think it will take at least a year given my current schedule to have anything ready to go, but it is an exciting new opportunity that I believe I will enjoy thoroughly. I will keep you posted.
We hit another milestone today in the kids education. They took a GRE practice test two weeks ago and are scheduled to take the real thing at 1:00 PM this afternoon. It is hard to believe we have come this far in time and place from when we started homeschool with Kelly in the first grade in Oregon in 1999. Now both the kids have to take the Graduate Record Exam (college entrance exam) so they can start applying to graduate schools next month. We plan to celebrate, maybe at Chick-fil-A.
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