Year: 2016 Page 10 of 13

Today I received an email from my blog hosting service notifying me that I had some things in the inner sanctum of the blog software and content that looked like malware so I spent fifteen minutes and cleaned it all up. While I was at it, it dawned on my that I should check to see exactly long I have been blogging. My first blog post was a couple of service providers ago on April 6, 2004 in Albany, Oregon. Kelly was 10 years old and Christian was eight. They were just finishing up their fourth and second grade years of government school. We were toward the end of the process of deciding we should homeschool, not so much because we knew much about that or thought it was a great thing (we do now), but because the local government school in Albany was so bad. That consumed a lot of our time and thought at the time.

Twelve years later, the kids are ensconced in graduate school in Washington and Arizona, Lorena and I live in Texas and our worries are of the same magnitude, but of different challenges. I have struggled to figure out what to write here since the kids graduated from North Carolina State U. I still struggle, but it helps me to write some of this stuff out on the blog. I appreciate everyone who has read, commented and stayed in contact over the years. I hope I can keep it alive another dozen or so.

I got the electrocardiogram going last night. GaugeCam is going on hold for a bit to meet some commitments on this thing. Beside that, it is really fun. The next part of this project will be to replace what appears to be an abandoned Windows project from which I got the above screenshot with a Linux project so I can have more control over the signals.

I finished reading II Kings in the Bible this morning. It was the part about when the Kingdom of Judah transitioned from evil kings to one of the greatest good kings, Josiah, then back to more evil kings which led to their captivity in Babylon. It is interesting that Judah had been so evil that even when Josiah spent his reign destroying evil and upholding good, God told him, through his prophets that Josiah would be fine in his time, but that judgment would come to Judah after he was gone. There certainly seemed to be some analogies to our life here in the United States, not to mention Europe and the rest of the world. We will soon have a new president here, but even if we get a good one, it feels like it is too little too late. Is my generation as evil as those evil generations and kings in Judah and Israel described in Kings and Chronicles in the Bible? It probably is.

Nebraska Furniture Mart delivered our new sofa bed this morning. We are all set for visitors! Lorena claims it is very comfortable. I look forward to testing that myself.

I have always been a skeptic when it comes to neo-Darwinism’s molecules to man fairytale. I found a very interesting article titled Wistar and DNA Day: A Fifty-Year Fuse Under Neo-Darwinism that describes a meeting that took place fifty years ago called the Wistar Institute conference on “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution.” The article and two accompanying videos describe the issues much better than I could, but in a nutshell, a bunch of highly qualified physics and engineering professors from elite universities decided they would take a look at neo-Darwinism to see if it passed muster with respect to the math. They invited their colleagues from the Biology departments.

The proceedings of the event appear to be available for free if you do a search for “PDF” along with the title of the conference. My understanding is that the actually papers that came out of the conference were interesting, but the discussion recorded in the proceedings are even more so. To suggest that the discussions between the biologists and the engineers/physicists was vigorous might be understating the acrimony between the two groups. There are two videos in the article. I just post one here that gives a sense for what this is all about, but both of them are worth a look:

The article also points to another article titled Intelligent Design Aside, from Templeton Foundation to the Royal Society, Darwinism Is Under Siege about an upcoming conference in a similar vein to the Wistar conference. Neither of these conferences engage at all with Intelligent Design, just the inadequacy of the current thinking among proponents of neo-Darwinism.

Yesterday I order an electrocardiograph kit for $75. It includes the electrocardiogram electronics, the Arduino embedded computer that receives the signals from the EKG and converts them to something more usable for viewing, analysis and archiving. It also includes the cables I need to hook it up to people and to another computer. I really do not want to hook the EKG up to another computer with a cable. I want to use Bluetooth, so I bought another $99 computer from NewEgg and the Bluetooth accessories I need to talk to the EKG embedded computer. This should be educational.

This is a picture taken from my desk chair in my office in Lewisville. These people are treating me very well and I am enjoying the work immensely. There is an amazing opportunity to contribute to a great product that helps people avoid injury. It does that by employing exactly the kind of technology I love to develop. What a great new job. Maybe the other shoe will drop soon, but it is great so far. This is the first time I have had an office with a door outside of my house in, well, ever.

I had a great time yesterday getting my new computer up and running on Xubuntu. It is amazing how little the look and feel changed be 15.10 and 16.04 LTS. It all just seems very solid. After all these years hearing Linux was finally ready for the desktop when it really was behind the curve, for me that is no longer true. Part of that might be that in all my trying to get stuff to work, I have learned enough to make it do what I want, but whatever it is, I am very comfortable with this newest version of Xubuntu and am thankful to be off of Windows (and especially Apple). It is nice to be able to exercise the kind of control over your environment you want as opposed to what Windows and Apple demand.

The new Xubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) release 16.04 comes out today. I was all fired up about it because of what I wrote yesterday–I have a brand new computer waiting to be used. It came as a Windows box and will be my first computer (as a professional anyway) that I will have set up as a pure Linux computer. No dual boot required. So the problem is, and I should have known this, that when they said today was the release date, they did not mean at the stroke of midnight. So, I get to wait until, at the earliest, 2100 UTC which is 4 PM my time before I can even start downloading it. The servers will probably be getting hammered, so the download will be slow which means I probably won’t get to start on this thing until tomorrow morning. So instead of having some fun for a day, I get to just write code, which is not so bad either, but I do that every day.

My new job is absolutely great. The IT manager brought me my new computer, exactly what I wanted with exactly the screen I wanted. Tomorrow, the new LTS Ubuntu comes out so I will be able to install the Xubuntu version of that. that. I never do anything on a Windows (and, of course never on an Apple product). It is all Linux all the time. The problem on which I work is a hard one–really a series of related problems. I have complete control over the technical aspects of the problem and have already been able to provide some relief. I write embedded code for kiosk style computers. It is amazing fun and I am grateful for the opportunity. My only fear is that I will get the problem solved to the level needed by the business and will be done. That is a good thing, but the likelihood of a follow-on job this good is small. Maybe these guys will find me more problems. They said they will.

We love Kiwi, the remaining twin cat sister, but this picture gave me pause. That cat is way too comfortable because she has a nice warm shelf on which to sit after her dinner (at precisely 5:00 PM every evening). The reason she is not sitting at an uncomfortable incline is because I eat to much and do not get enough exercise. Every night after work, I put together a snack and sit down to the computer to work on side jobs and volunteer project that I love. I love them because they are mostly about learning new stuff and being a help for worthy causes.

What is not so fun is eating lower quantities of less interesting food and getting out of my chair to exercise. Well, I have gotten to the point where I realize exercise and a good diet are no longer optional. Maybe this picture was just the thing I need to give me a wake-up call and get me off  center to do something about all this.

My whole life, I have been nothing more than a working stiff. I go to the work in the morning, come home after work and a very specific amount of money makes it to my bank account a couple of times per month. There have been very rare events when money would come in that was unexpected due to profit sharing, bonuses or largess (almost always from my father). That never caused much pain at tax time, because, while the amounts were significant to us, they were chump change in terms of their tax ramifications. Now though, because I am an engineer, accidentally in a field that is much in demand, I have opportunities to do consulting work. Last year, I did more than normal to help some people out of binds and to earn a some extra money.

I said all that to say that tax day this year was more painful than it needed to be because of poor planning on my part. Of course I am irritated because of the tax levels, but that is kind of a universal complaint. When I was writing the checks, Lorena and I talked about the fact that, if one has to pay more taxes, it is because they made more money. In my case, I got caught up on some stuff, but I am not sure the pain of all that extra work was worth it. If I did not love my work so much, it certainly would not have been worth it. This year, it does not appear I will be able to do much of anything on the side, but in many ways that is a very good thing. If I ever do that again, I certainly intend to manage the whole thing differently.

The beginnings of the new Beaglebone Black based GaugeCam software have finally made it to the internet. I have it up on our dev site right now. As soon as I have it a little further along with a camera hooked up and some of the basic functionality working I will let everyone know where it is.

The GaugeCam team is currently in talks about how we want to move forward with this project, especially with regard to whether we want to Open Source the software or keep the whole project commercial. We are still several months away from making any decision about that kind of thing, but it would be nice to get this camera based water level measurement tool into the hands of more people who might be able to use it.

I spent last evening working on the Beaglebone Black embedded computer for our GaugeCam project. I set the computer up to run on the home network, then installed Subversion, Qt Creator, OpenCV, Wt and Boost–the libraries I use to develop the application. It worked, but it worked so slowly I have decided to rethink the whole thing. Tonight and tomorrow, I am going to try to get a cross compiler going so that I can do all my development on my home computer, then just download the program to the Beaglebone. It dawned on me that the Beaglebone might not have the horsepower we need to run the GaugeCam application. If that is true I will have to rethink this whole thing, but I am going to do some testing to see whether it meets our need. The Beaglebone Black is an amazing little computer with great documentation and a very active user community. I still have a lot of hope that it will work.

There is a great community college where Lorena will have a good chance to finish her degree within six minutes of our apartment. There was never any doubt about that. The system of community colleges in the United States is, along with the homeschool movement, the greatest educational hope for our country. Pretty much everything else about our educational systems are either bad or getting that way rapidly.

Lorena will almost certainly wait until the Fall to get started, but that means I will have to find a project to keep me busy and out of trouble while she studies. I think she could probably finish up within three or four semesters at one or two classes per semester. I think that will give me the time I need to finish up with the current phase of our GaugeCam project. She is checking the whole thing out and plans to start getting all her transcripts sent to the right place today. So far, she has been to five different community colleges–three in Oregon and two in North Carolina. This will be her first in Texas.

A brand new Beaglebone Black embedded computer arrived to our apartment yesterday. I plan to use it on our GaugeCam project. I would like to say it is for work or business, but there is no money in it and stuff like this is so much fun it is pretty hard to call it work. I have talked about some of my projects over the years on this blog, but I have never really explained in any detail what it is, exactly, that I am doing. I am going to take a stab at changing that with this project. At GaugeCam, we put small cameras out in very remote places (e.g. the tidal marsh of North Carolina) to measure the height of water in streams, lakes and other bodies of water. The problem out in places like that is the lack of power and connectivity (no Wifi), so we have to get our power from solar panels connected to batteries. The problem is compounded by the fact that we need to run the cameras 24/7–the solar panels do not work at night. Until now, we have communicated the images back to our internet server where they can be seen via cell phone connection and the server can calculate how high is the water in the scene. For some locations, not even that is available so we will eventually have to figure out how to transmit the images via satellite. We have a working system that does now.

What is new is that we want to turn all the cameras in the field into web servers. To do that the cameras need to be able to calculate the height of image, form a web page and serve the web page–something, as was just mentioned that is currently being done up on the server. That is the goal. We will see if we can make it happen.

There are lots of good reasons to move from Oregon to Texas. There is the fact that Texas has no state income tax nor does it have an outrageously high minimum wage that kills off small businesses. There is still a sense that individual liberty, morality and responsibility mean something and are not on the wane as in many, more liberal parts of the country. Honestly, I am very glad to be here. We have reengaged with old friends and made new ones during the short time we have been back.

For me, there is nothing like being in Texas to make me realize who I am and, especially, from where I come. I am an enthusiastic fan of Texas, its people and everything about it, but I say that as an outsider.  Even though I have lived in Texas two different times for several years both as a student and as a working engineer, I am an Oregonian, heart and soul. What makes me sad about this is that the Oregon from whence I came no longer exists or, if it does, it is well hidden. Maybe I feel this way because my last couple of stints in Oregon were in places, Portland and Corvallis, whose cultures have coarsened greatly in my lifetime.

We are here in Texas to be closer to Lorena’s mother in Northern Mexico. We are not sure where we will land for retirement because so many things are in flux with the kids and aging parents, but Dallas is a fine retirement place.  There are great people here. We are close to our beloved Monterrey. The food fits us to a T.  The weather is acceptable. The mountains, ocean and vegetation are less so, but I will trade that for a government that stays in its place and does not dictate immorality any day.