Category: General Page 22 of 116

Day 364 of 1000

Our favorite Mexican restaurant here in the Raleigh area is a place called Tacos Mexico in Fuquay-Varina.  It would be just a run of the mill Mexican food place if it were not for the fact that they serve their food with hand made corn tortillas, they have a friendly, efficient wait staff, and they have very interesting signs announcing job opportunities by the front door.  The first time we noticed the signs was when they were advertising for a “chipera“.  I saw and asked Lorena what was a “chipera“?  She said she had no idea and she is a native Spanish speaker, so that was a little weird.  Kelly did not know either.  We stood there for after about a minutes scratching our heads.  I was about to stick my head in the door and ask because we were pretty curious.  Then Christian started laughing.

He said, “I know what it means!”

We all said, “What?!??”

He said, “The person that passes out the chips!”

We thought that was probably one of the best pochisms we had ever heard.

Today, we noticed that they are looking for una mesera de buena presentación.  We think that means they want to hire a good looking waitress.  Maybe Jon can explain it to us.

Day 363 of 1000

Lorena, Kelly, and Christian visited the Packapalooza event today on a closed off Hillsborough Street by the North Carolina State University campus. NCSU is celebrating the 125th year of its founding on March 7, 1887. It is a land grant, sea grant, space grant school and easily the best University in North Carolina if not the world (I am giving them my money, so I might as well drink the Kool-Aid)! Kelly bought a turkey leg and was gracious enough to give me a bite. What a great way to kick off the school year.

Day 361 of 1000

I am back after a week of frenetic activity.  Today is the kids’ first day as full time students at NCSU.  Lorena started back taking a couple of classes yesterday at Wake Tech.  I have been to Texas and all over North Carolina.  Tonight I go home and will be glad to be there for a few weeks because there are no hotel rooms available in Charlotte because of the Democrat National Convention.

Day 352 of 1000

Day 351 of 1000

I went to work today at a place in Charlotte.  A good chunk of the work they do will be outsourced to the Dominican Republic because the product they make is for use in the tobacco industry, so it gets taxed heavily here, but not in the DR.  It seems kind of crazy, but these taxes make their manufacture in the US uncompetitive.  A bunch of people here in the U.S. will lose their jobs specifically because of this tax.  It was pretty sad.

Day 350 of 1000

I have to leave the family at home while I run off to Charlotte for a couple of days.  I am going to play with my Arduino for some of those days.  I love my job.

We have a church potluck tomorrow morning.  When we were driving home from the White Oak Mall today we talked about what we should make and all agreed that Lorena should try to copy our friend Tatyana’s potato recipe.  She made it for us for dinner one evening and it was awesome.  We are sure it will not turn out as good as Tatyana’s, but we are hoping for the best.

Deroy Murdock at National Review Online explains where the idea that so called “public schools” are really government schools with every bad connotation possible.  Read the article which describes what the incomparable Milton Friedman had to say about it here.  We homeschooled and were very happy with that. Still, we never had any illusion that homeschooling was for everyone, but firmly believe that government schools are not the answer as is attested to by abysmal government school standardized test scores compared to those earned by homeschoolers.  I love the final paragraph of the article and plan to honor Milton Friedman in that way:

Americans who miss Dr. Milton Friedman can honor his memory and continue his excellent work in modernizing American education. They can abandon the term “public schools” and adopt the phrase “government schools.” While plenty more needs to be done to rescue the American classroom, each of us effortlessly can take this small step forward.

Day of 345 of 1000

Christian and Kelly bust my chops on my pathetic photography skills.  I am sure they are right, but I love the quote by the fat rat in Ratatoullie:

Once you muscle your way past the gag reflex, all kinds of possibilities open up.

If you have no taste in art, then there are so many more pleasing things to see.  In that spirit, I am looking for a replacement header image for this web site.  I have tried several new ones over the last few days and there ain’t nobody happy in this household with my choices of photographs.  I just want people to know that the current header (two cats lounging on the hardwood floor) is merely another placeholder until I find approval and peace returns to the household.

Day 344 of 1000

I stretched my college years out way longer than made any sense.  Actually, it was pretty irresponsible and had ramifications for the rest of my life.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am very, very happy with the trajectory of my life.  I have amazing interesting work, have travelled the world, have a family that is way better than I deserve, etc., etc.  Still, I try to tell my kids that when your in school, your whole goal is to get out and go to work.  Even if, maybe especially if you want your career to be as a professor it seems like a good move to get through the school and go to work.  Work pays MUCH better than student life.

I separate all that from the concept of life-long learning.  I think one of my biggest regret is that I did not get more than one Masters degree.  A second, third, and fourth Masters degree is about the joy of learning, not punching a ticket.  I had an acquaintance who was a high school physics and chemistry teacher who just kept going back to school to get more degrees one class at a time after work.  He always liked to research, write, and defend a thesis with his degrees, too–none of that project stuff for him. He had a great life, a LOT of knowledge, lots of friends and opportunities just kept opening up to him because of all his knowledge, learning, and ability to share what he knew. 

Day 343 of 1000

The compressed summer semester drags on.  Kelly has spent the last three days fighting the temptation to browse Facebook, Pinterest, her web comic addiction, and the plethora of blogs that she reads.  I moved my computer downstairs for the weekend because it is so hot upstairs.  Kelly babysat on Friday night, but we spent all day Saturday, and every spare minute after Sunday morning meeting studying.  I worked on my day job work and Kelly studied.  Christian did not have it as bad, but he only has one more test on Wednesday while Kelly has a mid-term on Tuesday and a final on Thursday.  How ugly is that.  Kelly did not even have time to go to the YMCA to work out and that is unusual.

The test will be very, very hard and she needs to have the material down cold for Mathematical Statistics I next semester.  The next ten months are going to be pretty brutal, but all our school, up until now, has been leading to precisely this very difficult stretch.  Both the kids will need to remain very focused to pass some very hard classes–mathematical statistics, non-linear dynamics, real analysis, advance linear algebra, modern abstract algebra, design of experiments, etc., etc.  The easy stuff, Psychology, Literature, Speech, History, and all the other liberal arts are behind them.  I do not think these mathematical topics are easy for anyone.  They certainly were not easy for me.

Day 341 of 1000

I have a very cool day job. Right now I am working on application with lots of excellent toys. It includes two Imaging Source 5 mega-pixel cameras (a stunning value at a list price of only $419 which includes an industrial quality machined aluminum housing, strobe output, and trigger input), an Arduino Mega microcontroller, and a Symbol barcode scanner. I am programming it using the QT and OpenCV libraries in C++ with the QT Creator IDE.

The cameras and the Arduino work great.  Now I am bringing up the Symbol barcode reader.  This is just the kind of project the doctor ordered on a weekend when the kids will be studying for finals.  Should be lots of fun–and to think I get paid for this.

Day 340 of 1000

It is way to hot and humid to not be in a swimming pool this time of year.  It is even worse to be stuck in the house studying for finals.  Everything is so compressed there is no time to assimilate any of the material.  Kelly has a mid-term on Tuesday, a review day on Wednesday, and a final on Friday, all for just one class.  Temperatures are hot, tempers are short, and we need a break from each other, work, and school.  We just need to last one more week.

Day 337 of 1000

It seems like all I do lately is run back and forth between Raleigh and Charlotte.  I think I might have one more trip before the end of the month, but then I should be done until after the DNC.  There is so much driving in all this that I do not have much of a chance to work on anything other than my day job.  Good thing I like my day job.

Day 334 of 1000

About the same time we arrived in Raleigh, another fellow named Troy showed up.  He had just made a major career change and decided to go back to school to help facilitate that.  We met him at church and, because he was single (waiting to get married), we ate lunch with him pretty often.  We talked about school a lot.  It is amazing what he did.  It seems like he did everything exactly right, but it was a TON of work.  For the areas where he thought he was weak, he got a tutor.  When he was not sure exactly what he wanted to do for a living, he went and talked to several professors in each of several departments to find out exactly what they did.

Part way into the program, he decided he might want to go to graduate school.  He found out it was extremely helpful to have done undergraduate research so he went and got TWO undergraduate research projects in the two different departments in which he was interested.  He did unpaid work in a lot of it.  In the end, he could have studied in either department and they actually were competing between each other to get him.  The big take-aways from all this is that if you invest (do unpaid work with knowledge that it will turn into something good even if it is only new knowledge), work really hard, and just keep going, something good will happen.

The reason I thought about this today is because Christian and Kelly are currently in almost exactly the same place.  Troy has finished his prelims and is well into his dissertation research.  The amazing thing is that he started this process from literally nothing only five years ago.  I am grateful my kids got to watch the process and even more grateful for Troy’s example.

Day 333 of 1000

We are not quite to a year in our 1000 days, but we are one third of the way to meeting our goals which includes the kids’ undergraduate degrees and a few other things.  The amazing thing is that we are still on schedule.  We made an educational plan about 10 years ago and worked on it daily.  I never figured we would be able to keep up because it was pretty aggressive.  We are at least on schedule on everything, ahead on a lot of things, and way ahead on a few, fairly important things.  It is not time to celebrate yet, but we are getting closer.

Day 332 of 1000

Well, just as I stared getting a good base established for my the license plate program, work starts to stack up and a new project comes in that will prevent me from doing just about anything else but program from now through the end of the year.  I started at about 7 this morning and I am still going.  I am really glad I like my job and I like to program, but I can see myself starting to burn out a little toward Thanksgiving time.  The worst part about it is the kind of project only a vision engineer could love.  I know I was pushing the boredom boundaries with my license plate project, but in terms of snooze enducement, this project is in a class by itself.  Now I have to think of something new to make this blog relevant.  This seems to be one of those periods in life where the only thing it is possible to do is keep your head down and keep working.  There is an end to this thing though, so it makes it a lot more interesting.

Day 331 of 1000

My brother-in-law moved from Monterrey to Toluca to take a computer job there.  If you get a chance, look up the average temperature, rainfall, and humidity in that city.  It is truly amazing.  They call it the “Eternal Spring” because the temperature hangs roughly between 50 and 70 degrees F all year long.  It rains more in the summer than in the winter.  Rigo was telling us that, unlike Monterrey, it is almost never too hot to talk a long walk in Toluca.  You cannot not even make it between the house and the car without being drenched in sweat during most of the summer in Monterrey.  We are trying to think up an excuse to go down there for a visit.  It might even be nice to just stay there…

Day 330 of 1000

My room was upgraded to a two bedroom suite at my regular hotel here in Charlotte.  I am up here for one night because I have to visit a customer, but should be home tomorrow evening.  I got told that I better not plan on staying at this or any other hotel in or around Charlotte from August through mid-September because of the Democrat National Convention.  It is not like I enjoy being around that class of people anyway (political or democrat, take your pick).  I was told a lot of people are renting out rooms in their houses as there is such a dearth of places to stay.  I also got told that it would cost at least triple the normal cost to stay here during that time.  I hope that does not throw too much of a kink into my work.  There are one are two pretty big projects that are due up here during that time frame.

Day 328 of 1000

Today, the kids need to spend most of the day at the Hill Library at NCSU again, so I will have a good block of time to start figuring out how to find the license plate on the back of the car.  I spent some time looking at images of cars and reading about approaches to find the plates.  Like all general machine vision problems, it is harder than it looks.  Sometimes there are no or very few edges that define the outer boundaries of the plate, so it is not generally a good idea to look only for the shape of the plate.  They only thing you can really depend on is that the characters on the plate are of high contrast.  I am going to look for some images that will get me started.  I will probably start with three or four images to get a concept going, then expand my efforts to increasing data sets.  I think I probably should take my camera with me to take some pictures today.  Maybe I will post a few.