Day 538 of 1000
Our new North Carolina governor Pat McCrory believes higher education funding for particular classes and programs should be tied to whether they have any chance of giving the student a job.
In this article he says,
If you want to take a gender studies that’s fine, go to a private school and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.
I am pretty sad I did not make the Krispy Kreme Run this year. It was not the run part that I am sad about. For posterity, I need to note that Christian and Kelly made it for a second year and had a great time.
Day 537 of 1000
I got up this morning to a couple of inches of very dry snow on the ground here in Prescott. I did not want to get stuck in my hotel room all day so I headed out to the car and all most fell on my patootie, so went back into the hotel, had a little more breakfast, and checked the weather on my computer. They said it should warm up to 37° F today and the light snow should stop by noon so I decided to try again. The car windows had a lot of snow on them. When I knocked off the snow, the windows were clear; the snow is very dry. The roads really were not that slick either. The places where there was any snow left were packed snow, not ice, so it was not a bad drive down to the Prescott Valley Library.
I am now ensconsed at the library with its beautiful view out the second story windows. You can barely make out the mountains across the valley because the clouds are pretty low. It should get pretty nice by this afternoon, but, sadly, I will not be here because I left my computer’s power cable at the hotel. Add to that the fact that I cannot buy coffee because I do not have cash and the people that run the coffee shop use their iPhone to take credit cards, but forgot to bring it today. I hate Apple products.
Day 536 of 1000
I am getting to be one of the older guys at wherever I work. This is not one of those “there are two kinds of old technology guys” jokes, but there are two kinds of old guys:
I like to think I fit into the second category although I am not sure that is entirely true. It fits into the life-long learning educational model that we tried to ingrain in our kids during our homeschool years. Part of the problem with these categories is that not any of the technologies, processes, and methods are perfect and almost all of even the very best ones become obsolete pretty quickly. Add into that the fact that something that seemed like a great, innovative new idea at the time of its inception turns out to not have been such a great an idea in practice and a horrible idea when it gets older.
Part of the “fun” of my new job will be to produce a product from a technology that was mediocre (at best) when it was brand new, has not fared well since, and has a minute contingent of acolytes who still have the religion pushing it for all it is worth. In the end, these are all personal issues. This mediocre technology was used to develop something that is really pretty cool. If we can get past the personal allegiances and work together we can do something that is worthwhile and can actually make a pretty amazing social contribution.
Day 535 of 1000
…I am now the boss. I am not sure if that is good or bad.
Day 534 of 1000
Several times, when people find that I am from back east or from Oregon, they look at me and say something like, “I’m not like most other Arizonans, I’m much more liberal.” Two observations. First, the back east that I am from in North Carolina is not particularly liberal. In fact, it is pretty conservative. Of course, Oregon is very liberal up and down the Willamette Valley, but the people in the rest of the the state are pretty conservative. Second, I kind of know how they feel. When I lived in the Portland and Corvallis areas, I always felt the need to let people know that, just because I was there, I found the Oregon zeitgiest quite objectionable.
I have been doing a pretty good job of keeping my powder dry with respect to tinder box issues. One of the VP’s here is a big yoga guy. I am, to say the least, not a big fan of yoga. There are a couple of guys with pretty extreme environmental stances, Prescott is a fairly conservative town, but this little company seems to have kind of a new agey/liberal bent to it. It is giving me lots of practice at not speaking up when stuff is not that important. I am not perfect at it. I think most everyone understands about where I sit on the religious/political spectrum, but I also think I have done a little better than sometimes in the past when people looked at me a little like a rabid dog.
Day 533 of 1000
I have some new digs at my job in Prescott. It is the small office next door to the old digs. The place we are in now used to be a store front for a window shade store. We are all sitting in what would have been the showroom/reception office. The cooling, which is just fine right now, is two small swamp coolers. This summer, everyone doubts whether they will work very well. I actually like the office quite a lot because it is a lot quieter and we have both a window and a door that let in sunlight–the very thing that will work against us in the summer.
Day 532 of 1000
…now that I have a decent. Check out the kitchen and living room in my new hotel. Also, we are literally two minutes away from a Costco and a Trader Joes. No excuses for exercise either. They have a nice exercise room, pool, and spa.
Day 531 of 1000
This last month has been fairly insanely busy. After the holidays, I went out to Arizona for a couple of weeks, followed by a weekend trip to Oregon to visit my parents who have very recently moved into a memory care facility. That was too long to be away. I do not like to be away from the family on weekends, so two weekends in a row is definitely too much. Next time I go to visit my folks, I plan to go on the weekend between my two weeks stay in Arizona.
Fortunately, we had a normal, go to the library to study day yesterday. Normalcy is nice. I get on a plan this afternoon and will not be back with the family until the fifteenth.
Thank goodness for the Prescott Valley Library–a world class public library in anybody’s book. Amazingly, I would have say that, even though it is dramatically smaller, as a place to work on volunteer developer on fine side projects, it works for me just as well as the fabulous new Hunt Library at NCSU. Hopefully, I will be there this time next week. Just like biscuits and gravy at McDonald’s, there is something else Prescott Valley does not have. On the drive to the Hunt Library this morning, about a block before we got there, we passed the world headquarters of RedHat, one of the premier open source software companies in the world–right on the NCSU campus. SAS is there, too. NCSU is really doing some amazing things at their school. Just one example of this is their category leading Advanced Analytics Institute as a prototype for the rest of the world on how to prepare engineers for industry better than anyone else. Kudos.
Day 530 of 1000
Remember back when I was whining about the biscuits at McDonalds in Prescott Valley, Arizona? Well, we went to McDonalds in Cameron Village (Raleigh, North Carolina) close to the NCSU campus. Well, we went back to our favorite McDonalds in Raleigh (at Cameron Village) and got the biscuits and gravy. My suspicions were confirmed. First of all, they don’t even offer the biscuits with gravy in Prescott Valley and the biscuits the offer there are wildly less appetizing then those in Cameron Village. Enuf sed.
Day 529 of 1000
Well, we got our check today for my wreck last friday. I was actually a little surprised that the deemed the pickup “totaled”. I really liked that truck and very much would have liked to have had it repaired. As a person who likes to think he has the attitude, “like the stuff you are stuck doing because it really doesn’t do any good to not like it”, I REALLY do not like to shop for nor buy cars. This is all compounded by the fact that I am a big Dave Ramsey fan and do not like the idea of spending money on something for which I cannot pay cash.
So, because this is my second bad bad car incident in less than three years I have a choice. Do I buy a car for $5K that will get me where I want to go and spend the rest on paying off my now diminishing rapidly car loan or do I spring for a new car with a small payment in addition to the one I have left on the previous new car purchase. Throw Jon’s advice into the mix and I have quite the conundrum. In the end though, I think it is a no-brainer. I really need to think about how I am going to pay for the kids school for the next year or so, so I am pretty sure we are going to get an inexpensive used car and to from there.
So now we are down to logistics. I have to find a car, negotiate the price, figure out how to get it to a decent mechanic (if I knew a decent mechanic) to see if it is any good, get the insurance swapped, get the license tags swapped, and do this all while all three people who are capable of helping are trying to go to two different schools, church, and shopping on wildly different schedules while I am in Arizona. Maybe I should be thankful I am in Arizona. Honestly, I feel guilty that I cannot do all this myself, but I cannot. On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense not to buy anything until I get back.
That is what I am going to do. Wait until I get back. I will have the rental car in Arizona. The rest of the family will do what they always do and drive the mini-van to school, church, and shopping while I am gone. Then I can deal with it when I get home in a couple of weeks. Procrastination is my friend!
Day 527 of 1000
Well, I got tired of waiting for the call from the auto body place and the insurance agent. The pickup is totaled so I have to buy a new (to me) car. I am thinking I will get the minimum possible to get to work and back. It is always nice to have a new vehicle, but it never is much fun going through the process of buying one. I wish I were better at this. I have read about all kinds of techniques for “defeating” the sales guys and have even tried a few, but in the end, they all seem to be pretty obnoxious. Maybe I will wait until I get back from Arizona.
Day 526 of 1000
Since I started taking volunteer work seriously over the last ten years or so, I have probably made greater advances in my career through volunteer work than any other way. Things I have been able to add to my resume specifically because of volunteer work include Python, QT, QT Creator, R, Arduino programming, and I am sure there is some other stuff I am forgetting. Over the next year or so it appears I will get two or three refereed journal articles for our research at the GaugeCam project at NCSU. I am a big fan of volunteer work, not only as a way to contribute, but as a way to make friends and build community. I hate to think I would perform volunteer work just for career advancement, but there is a utilitarian case that could be made for doing just that.
I drove Kelly and Christian to school this morning, dropping them off in front of the SAS building at NCSU at 8:15. It is about a 40 minute drive at that time in the morning because of the traffic so we had time to have an interesting discussion about volunteering. Yesterday afternoon I received a very interesting email from an accomplished person who wants to do some statistical analysis on some topics on which I have had great interest in the past. Kelly was fascinated because she has followed these same topics and is, of course, a statistics major with an increasing skill set.
I really do not feel too qualified as a statistician although it is something I am working on and doing at my day job more and more all the time. Kelly is much more skilled than I at this point. But the beauty of volunteering is that there are generally more opportunities for people with lower levels of skills than in paid positions. If, as in this case, you are doing it to help out without no expectation of pay, there is a joy to it that does not exist in a job where you have to show up, even if you love that job. I do not know whether I will have the opportunity and/or time to take on this new volunteer work, but I do know that, if I did, I would get more benefit from it than I contributed.
The ride to school talk focused more on whether Kelly should go on to a one year professional Masters degree in analytics or a PhD program in statistics. The challenge is that the Masters degrees in analytics are pretty expensive. The program at NCSU cost $21,240 for tuition and fees. She would make that money back fairly quickly, but it is still quite a bit of money and they easily place all their students in good jobs out of that program. The average base salary for someone with no work experience who graduated from that program in 2012 was $77,100. On the other hand, if she goes on to get a PhD, she will get paid a stipend while she gets her degree than make a good salary after that. The issue is that if she becomes a stay at home wife and mother rather than try to be an uber professional woman which is what she would really like to do, how will each of these career paths hold up?
We talked about ways for her to contribute while she is not in the marketplace. I think that whichever path she takes, volunteering on projects can help here contribute while it keeps her skills sharp and helps her to learn new stuff. We will continue the discussion.
Day 525 of 1000
After getting permission to work from home for the day and talking to the insurance and auto repair people to get started on fixing the pickup, I started investigating methods to do perform non-linear regression on the data with which I am working for Quantum Catch. Andrew has given me some clues with respect to different open source tools I could use, but I can see there will be a lot of learning before I will be able to do this very well. I found this page on Simple Nonlinear Regression in R, but that led me to another page I had to read first. I am sure there will be lots of detours I will have to take before I get the hang of all this.
I struggle with learning stuff that is that broad and filled with minutia, but I like it a lot. It got me to thinking I should probably start looking at scripture in the same light that I look at these technical/work pursuits. I like to read about the things that were going on in history at the times of the different events in the bible, but that is not really what I am talking about. I mean, I think it is important and a joy for the light to go on in any kind of learning, so if I focus more of my time on scripture, I might struggle sometimes like with my technical pursuits, but I know the payoff is coming. I need to think about how to put that all into practice.
My friend, Andrew B. was kind enough to spend most of the day with me yesterday to work on a problem I have at work for which his every growing knowledge of “big data” analytics is the perfect tool set. He showed me how to do logistic regression and then showed me an open source toolset called Weka that is amazing in its simplicity, but extremely powerful. Of course, I am not anywhere close to Andrew in any of this, but I have discovered a new world and that is ALWAYS a very good thing. Give us fun new things to learn and we are happy. THANKS ANDREW (again)!
Here is the video I used to learn how to do it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7kpIBGEdkI
Here is my output:
Day 524 of 1000
We went to lunch today with our friends Tom and Sharon, originally from Michigan, but currently living in North Carolina and our other friends Mundo, Malena, Perla, and Sofia, originally from Mexico, but currently living in North Carolina. It amazing how much we all have in common. I wish I had a picture to commemorate the moment, but that can wait for next time. The challenges of life don’t seem nearly as big when you have close friends who are on your side with the most imporant things in commom. I am feeling pretty grateful and thankful right now and I am even grateful and thankful for that.
Day 523 of 1000
So many people have put impressive pictures of the new Hunt Engineering Library at NCSU, that there is no way I could do it justice. All I have is the one minor flaw that I could find and I am sure it will go away soon, so I am glad I can document something that was not exactly perfect, because virtually everything else was exactly perfect.
One of the very cool new things I saw there was something called MicroTile. I have no idea how it works, but it is amazing. There are a number of video walls in the library made up of these incredible video tiles. The whole library is so obnoxiously impressive, that it is hard to know where to even start, so I won’t.
Just let me say that I like it a lot.
Spun around when I got ice on a bridge on Wade Avenue heading toward NCSU to pick up Christian. No one hurt, but pretty bad damage to the pickup.
Day 522 of 1000
Kelly has no classes on Fridays. NCSU, Wake Tech, and Bioptigen all close at new due to the incoming snow/ice storm this afternoon. I drove Christian to school this morning (and saw the new Hunt Library from the outside). All this means that I get to pick Christian up at 12:30 and go to lunch with him. I love to do that! We were kind of hoping for snow, but it looks like we will get some pretty nasty mix of sleet and snow. It will be nice to be at home with the family for an entire afternoon and evening after having been out of town for so long.
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