I am not a big fan of “leadership” books. The people who write them and like to read them seem to know how to talk about leadership more than actually lead. It amazes me that Jesus admonished us to be followers. How did the whole leadership thing become such a diluted, universal mantra.
Betty Blonde #397 – 01/22/2010
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It is amazing to me that the best pictures of me are almost always on my drivers license. Lorena drove me down to Woodburn yesterday to get my license transferred from North Carolina to Oregon and I am amazed at the quality and speed of service we received there. They did a great job. Oregon is one of the few places where you have to take the “written” test (on a computer) to do the transfer. The whole process was actually quite pleasant. Lorena got her license changed in Lake Oswego where the service was very bad and very, very slow.
The other amazing thing is that they gave me me old, original drivers license number from when I was 15 years old. The equally amazing part is that I still remembered it.
Betty Blonde #396 – 01/21/2010
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Kelly is at her second annual American Marketing Association meeting, this year in Chicago! Chicago has a special place in my heart. I have flown through there a LOT over the years and have known a lot of people and good times in that great city. She met some great friends there, so some great sites and, above all, ate some truly great pizza. In the great Chicago versus New your pizza wars, I am definitely a Chicago partisan. I have to admit that I will NOT admit it when I am in New York–liking the pizza where you are is liking the barbecue where you are. It maximizes the food opportunities to like the food of the home team, wherever you are.
Chicago is where Grandpa Milo took me to my very first trade show in the Conrad Hilton Hotel Downtown. That is where we stayed, too. And, better than anything else, we went to Gino’s East for pizza. Some people say Giordanos is better, but I reject that out of hand. Tradition is not nothing and Gino’s has an ambiance of its own! To my Chicago friends, I salute you!
Betty Blonde #396 – 01/21/2010
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This photograph is of François working with a team from Texas A&M to install a water level camera in Harlingen, TX. It went very, very well. It is not complete yet, but images are flowing from the camera up to the GaugeCam server. Next steps are to calibrate the camera system and start plotting camera level. My buddy John from my previous job and Arizona and I are working on the next generation software for this project. If this goes well, there will be several other opportunities in Texas.
Technically, we are working on putting the software into a small embedded computer with a BeagleBone Black computer a camera and a cell phone connection. After that we plan to start working on commercializing both the software and the hardware. Up until now, the system has been, more or less, a lab project. As more and more people show interest, we need to harden the design to make it as robust as possible for field use and easy to maintain.
Betty Blonde #395 – 01/20/2010
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That is all.
Betty Blonde #394 – 01/19/2010
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An amazing thing happened yesterday. One of the managers at my work won a $5 Starbucks gift certificate for getting a correct answer on a safety question. In a classy move, he did a “guess the number” raffle with his team. About seven people participated. The number was 43. Two of the guessers got it right. We were pretty sure no one cheated. I was one of the guessers how picked 43. I picked it because 42 is the answer in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and I hate that pretentious, badly written tome so I one upped it to 43. What are the odds? My immediate thought is that my picking 43 was definitely not random. Actually, whether the reason for picking 43 was overt or subliminal, I am pretty confident the other two who picked it (the raffle organizer and the other guesser) did not pick it randomly either. But then what could be the cause?
Betty Blonde #393 – 01/18/2010
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My goal when I started tracking my Bible reading in 2006 was to systematically read through the Old Testament three times and the New Testament nine times before deciding what to do next. As of now, I am two-thirds of the way complete. I keep track of my reading here and do the vast bulk of my reading in the KJV using the Xiphos Bible software.
Betty Blonde #392 – 01/15/2010
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My old friend and college roommate, Warren Bone stayed with us this weekend. The kids call him Miss Turbone (think about it), an allusion to Dogs Don’t Tell Jokes. He has been after me to take him to visit Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah at their assisted living facility ever since we got back to Oregon. It was a gift to have him here. He stood up for me along with Bryan Joyce at my wedding–Mexico is better because you need TWO best men and I had the VERY best. He has been a consistent fixture in the life of the Chapman family since we met the fall of his freshman year (my sophomore year) at Oregon State University in 1974. We all consider him family.
More than almost anyone other than maybe Grandpas Lauro and Milo and Grandmas Conchita and Sarah, Warren is the one who showed up at our house for Christmas and Thanksgiving as well as the odd other times. Christianity and Christ are always at the very top of the list of things we discuss. It does not really matter if we last talked days ago or months ago, we are lifelong friends and took up where we left off. We have not always agreed on everything, although on the vast bulk of topics we rarely differ more than a picayune point or two. He is almost as redneck as Lorena and I. He would claim his more than in I, but, in that, he would be wrong.
He is our kids uncle in the best sense of that word. Looking forward to the next get-together.
Betty Blonde #391 – 01/14/2010
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Kelly and I are kindred spirits in that we regularly get accused of being overly enthusiastic. We talked on the phone about this very subject today. Overly enthusiastic. That is an oxymoron. One of the few really good things that came out of the 1960’s was the expression, “don’t harsh my mellow.” Precisely right. The bane to our existence are those who chose to curb their enthusiasm in a spirit deadening effort be cool, “in the know” or somehow superior to those who engaged in passionate behavior.
Those lukewarm souls who choose to act nonplussed about all things social are not only boring, but could very well be guilty of the attitude for which the Laodiceans were admonished in Revelation 3:14-17. Do not be lukewarm. Be passionate. Love life. Do not be relegated to that category of people who slouch through life throwing wet blankets on all joy.
Stick to your guns Kelly. Be enthusiastic. Be overly enthusiastic. The gnostics of buzzkill in no way have special knowledge about those things you know that animate your enthusiasm.
Betty Blonde #390 – 01/13/2010
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I installed Xubuntu Linux the day before yesterday on a brand new Windows 8.1 (dual boot). When I got home last night from our Bible study, I found a note on another computer telling me Windows 10 had downloaded and the computer was ready to be updated. I started the install, then went off and did something else for a bit. I think the whole process took my computer about half an hour. I tested a few things without any trouble–I will have to do that more extensively tonight, but it actually looks fine for my most important stuff. Neither of the installations were any trouble at all. They just worked.
What struck me as odd is that I can do just about everything I want to do on both the Linux box and Windows box without any trepidation or confusion. Both are intuitive and just do all the things I want to do. Even more odd, I do not care that much whether I am on one or the other. They really are just appliances to me. I do not know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. The days of extreme enthusiasm for one OS over another appear to be over for me. The only time I notice is when the computer does not do something I think it should. Now, my only considerations are utility and cost, in that order. It is like when I go older, I quit buying cars because they were really fast and looked fancy and started buying them based on comfort, price and utility.
Found a great little article on what to do right after Windows 10 is installed for the first time. I hate it that all these guys spy on us. Also, go to this page and opt-out of the personalized ads for “this” browser and opt-out of the personalized adds from your Microsoft account. If you do not do that, Microsoft will track way more stuff than you want them to track.
Betty Blonde #389 – 01/12/2010
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The “scratch and dent” computer I bought from the Dell Outlet website with a discount coupon arrived today. I think I got a screamin’ deal. I bought it because I needed a Linux computer for some contract work I am doing in the evenings to get one of my old employers over the hump with a product they are trying to get out. So I spent most of yesterday evening loading all the tools I need to do the development onto the new computer. That included Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, Qt/Qt Creator, OpenCV (finally moving to version 3!), a subversion client, etc., etc. I needed to build OpenCV in a specific way required by the application so I did that, too.
The upshot to all this is that I needed to sit and wait for things to finish downloading, installing and building. During that time, I found a great article about three phases through which civilizations pass: Barbaric, Vigorous and Decadent. Here is the premise of the article titled A Tour of Our Decadent Civilization on the Sultan Knish blog:
It’s easy to find examples of barbaric and decadent civilizations. We can find all the barbaric civilizations to suit an entire faculty’s worth of anthropologists in the Middle East. And then back home we can see the decadent civilization that employs their kind to bemoan the West.
Vigorous is what America used to be when it was moving west, producing at record rates and becoming a world power. Decadent is what it is becoming.
Christian and I had an interesting talk about all this on the phone a couple of nights ago. The thing that amazes me is that the vast bulk of people in America do not get it. In our conversation we attributed it to the fact that most people under the age of 30 get their information from Reddit, Slashdot, Comedy Central and Huffington Post while people over 30 get their information from Facebook.
I think we are partially right. People buy into the pseudo-scholarship of Richard Dawkins, Bart Ehrman, Marcus Borg, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris and the like who represent their false ideas based on personal agendas and/or ruminations way outside their fields of expertise. It makes its way into pop culture because it allows people license to live how they want in the moment rather than do the hard work and self denial based on morays driven by objective truth.
The conclusion of the matter is the same as it has always been. Our chunk of civilization in our time and place will wake up one way or the other. Unless there are changes, it will be a very rude awakening.
Betty Blonde #388 – 01/11/2010
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It is an inferno in Tempe where Christian is living this time of year and pretty miserable to be there. Lots of people ask him if he is enjoying his summer break and whether or not he is looking forward to going back to school in the fall. The reality is that, as a funded graduate student, he no longer really has a summer break. Summer breaks are now a thing of the past. He is a working stiff. In fact, he has worked harder this summer than he worked all year due to looming deadlines, the one in Boston already passed, but two more, his Qualification presentation this month and a conference paper and presentation in California in November. Add to that the fact that as many of the students who had the chance to leave town and get out of the heat did so and he had a pretty rough three months. Fortunately, that is about to come to the end when Fall semester starts and the kids arrive back to school. He also sent us this picture of the many, many lovebirds who have flocked into town. I think that is a good sign.
Betty Blonde #387 – 01/08/2010
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Lorena and I pick Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah up on Sundays to take them to church. It was nice to see Uncle Doug and Aunt Jean there at the assisted living home when we arrived yesterday. Aunt Julia had come a couple of days earlier because she went out of town this weekend. All of us kids, of course, brought food, the last thing any of us needed–including Grandpa Milo.
It is not an easy thing to navigate the issues associated with Alzheimer’s disease, but I am very grateful for siblings how are all fully engaged. Aunt Julia really carries the brunt of it. She is the one who gets called for the day-to-day issues, but she calls the rest of us whenever she needs help. Lorena and I visit two or three times per week for church. Doug does all the bookkeeping which takes a significant effort. Jean visits a lot and is Julia’s right arm.
The good news is they are in a good place and are happy. They are obviously eating quite well.
Betty Blonde #386 – 01/07/2010
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Grandpa Milo was born just a few weeks before the big stock market crash of 1929. He was the eighth of ten children and was born on the kitchen floor of Otis’s and Ethyl’s home in Saginaw, Oregon just a few years after the family had moved out from Lynch, Nebraska in 1925. Grandpa Milo was the first member of the family to be born in Oregon. We plan to pick him and Grandma Sarah up for church this morning (and afternoon) so hope to get a few pictures, maybe even with a birthday cake.
Betty Blonde #385 – 01/06/2010
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The picture to the right is of an old, piece of trash Dell Vostro 200 desktop computer that was cheap and incapable the day we got it. As can be well attested over the years of this blog, I have pieces of projects in various stages of completion and a ton of software to go with them. Now, I have a partner in crime. My buddy John, from my last job and I are embarking on a project that includes the new little BeagleBone Black computer we bought a couple of weeks ago. The idea is to develop some capability for embedded computers that will be both educational for John and I and to create something interesting.
So, for want of another idea and maybe because of our lack of creativity, we decided to start with something simple that might be a base for something bigger if we get this first thing to work. So, here is the plan. We want to put up a website that allows a user to click a button that takes a picture with a camera connected to the computer in the picture. Next, we want to get that same functionality running on the Beagle Bone at my buddies house in Arizona. A much more portable, cheaper computer makes the project much more interesting and a little bit more difficult. There are lots of ways of very simple ways to do precisely what we just said, but we want to put infrastructure in place to extend the ability of computers to do Machine Vision, sensor fusion and robotic control tasks.
When (and if) we get this done, we have an idea about what we want our webified cameras to do that is special. It is actually a little bit more ambitious than what I did for the GaugeCam project, but also a little bit more challenging. Truth be known, the GaugeCam project was very challenging because it had to be able to work 24/7 outdoors in any kind of weather or physical environment.
Betty Blonde #384 – 01/05/2010
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Lorena and I saw this beautiful moon out the window of our car as she drove me to work this morning. It was even bigger and lower in the sky than when I took this picture out the window of my work at DWFritz. Lorena mentioned Oregon would have a blue moon tonight. I looked that up and found that a blue moon is when the moon is full for a second time in a single month.
I do not know why these kinds of things seem to coincide with times when we are thinking deep thoughts. I am actually pretty sure it is the other way around, that I only notice stuff like this when I am in a time of contemplation. This time of reflection seems to be the trifecta of reflection on the meaning of life. Part of it is that all of us, Christian, Kelly, Lorena and I are within a few years, if the Lord gives us those years, of entry to new things and new places while the world seems to be in upheaval.
Of course, Kelly and Christian will graduate from college and go off to do whatever it they are given to do. Always, in the past, they had some next thing they wanted to accomplish that mostly had to do with school. Now, though, there will almost certainly no more school for them, at least as students. So many things are open to them, they have no idea what would be best to do. Since they are still a few years away from that, patience is the key, but that is hard when the next move will be to something they have never previously done.
The same is true for Lorena and I. We have, at most, a few more years to be close to my parents with their memory issues. Then it is on to something new–maybe even retirement for me. Maybe even in Mexico, but maybe not. It is hard not to think about it even though it is not at all knowable. Patience is the word of the day.
Betty Blonde #383 – 01/04/2010
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Our family discusses the subject of objective truth frequently. We have done so as a family for pretty close to a decade. As soon as the kids were old enough to understand the concept, we started to talk about it. The direction our culture is going is not friendly to those who want to live their lives in conformances to mandates placed on them by the objective reality of a Christian God. When the culture embraces the immorality of things like abortion, cohabitation outside of marriage and even the pursuit of fun in the form of sport, music, art and leisure at the expense of the pursuit of God and things God hates, lives get wasted and people suffer.
The hard part of this is that kids get beat up and ostracized culturally and socially as a result of their adherence to objective truth and the dictates it puts on their lives. Sometimes it is an active thing, but most of the time these kids get shuffled off to the side, ignored, derided and ridiculed. Some of us older people notice this. As children of the sixties, seventies and eighties, we went through it ourselves. The difference is that when we went through it, there were large swaths of culture who were on our side. I do not think that is true anymore. Culture is active in its derision of the good and of objective truth.
This is especially so in cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston and New York, but I think it has even seeped down into strongholds of morality in places like North Carolina, Texas and Arizona. Kids with access to the Internet tend to give credence to what they read on Reddit and other venues that tend toward the sophomoric, but with a hard edge of aggressive hedonism. The sad part of it all is that what they read on Reddit is often reinforced by what they are taught in school by people trained at educational institutions saturated in the very same vacuous philosophical pablum that upholds relative morality.
It is a hard thing to swim against the tide. I wish I knew better how to encourage those who do so.
Betty Blonde #382 – 01/01/2010
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Kelly bought her own car insurance yesterday and will register the Ford Fiesta in her own name later this week. Christian is doing the same this week with the Honda Accord. Lorena and I are now a one car family. The only remaining thing like this that connects to the kids is our family cell phone plan. Some might think it would be best for me to turn that over to the kids themselves, but they would be wrong. I told them that as a condition for their cell phone plan, they have to provide Lorena with tech support for her phone and tutoring for her community college. In my book that is an absolute steal. It would be a steal at twice the price!
Betty Blonde #381 – 12/31/2009
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I received a phone call from my friend John last night to inform me the founder of the Brien Holden had passed away. I worked with John for one of Brien Holden’s companies for a couple of years and spoke with Brien just a couple of times. He led a very interesting life and worked hard to improve the vision care of people who had very little opportunity for it. He actually did a lot of good and put an organization in place that should continue his work now that he is gone. I am pleased to have an affiliation with them and am very sorry for his loss. It just made me reflect on the shortness of life and the need to spend every minute possible in ways that will accrue to the good, especially to the eternal good.
I had a discussions today both with Kelly and with Christian on the subject of mentoring. I was very effectively mentored by someone who I do not think was even conscious they were doing it. I work with that gentleman to this day having brought him in at my current position for some consulting. He has been retired for a number of years now, but enjoys working on interesting projects and we are glad to have him. There are several people around the country I have tried to mentor with varying levels of success over the years. I have always been the better for it. Some of that mentoring worked out well over the weekend.
In the last couple of days I talked with a good friend about a business he is starting. It would be great to be able to participate with him in his business which I think is a good one, but after talking to him, I am not the guy they need. I was sorely tempted to try to do the work anyway, but I know two or three other guys who are profoundly better at what this business needs than myself. In the end, I made introductions and am looking forward to seeing who things develop. In thinking about it after the fact, I felt a sense of gratification that for once, I got the better of my pride and did the right thing. Not only will my friend’s business be the better off, I am better off myself. It is funny how that all works out when one does the right thing for a change.
Betty Blonde #380 – 12/30/2009
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