Day 327 of 1000
It is amazing to me that some men do not model masculine behavior to their sons. Boys should be taught to take responsibility for social and other situations. It boggles my mind when that does not happen. It is not only a matter of masculinity, but of good manners to stand up and be counted.
Day 326 of 1000
We had a few days of heat a week or so back up around 105 degrees. Then we got a series of thunderstorms that brought the high temperature down to about 85. That would not be so bad if it were not so muggy. It is about the opposite here as in Oregon. In Oregon there are about eight months of drizzle followed by four months of the most beautiful place and weather in the world. The good months are in the summer. In North Carolina there are about eight months of good weather (I count the two or three weeks of freezing and snow as good because that is they way I was made), followed by four months of humid inferno. Maybe what we ought to do is try to figure out a way to live in North Carolina during the Fall, Winter, and Spring, then head out to Oregon for the summer.
It seems kind of crazy that the places that seem to be prospering most in the current economic climate have about the worst weather conditions in the lower 48–Texas, North Dakota, Montana. What is that all about. I guess if you are tough, you can handle all conditions climate and economic.
Day 325 of 1000
Both Kelly and Christian are taking a compressed semester class this summer. The classes are normally given over a period of 16 weeks, but during the summer they are given in five weeks. The classes meet every day of the week for an hour and a half. Kelly is taking a three hour class in Foundations of Advanced math–a proofs class, so that is here entire class load. Christian’s class includes a lab, so he spends a LOT of time on campus. The thing that is kind of surprising to me is that they seem to be assimilating the material very well even though both of them literally need to learn a new language with a new “alphabet” in just five weeks. They have just about as much homework as they did when they had a full course load spread of 16 weeks. They are doing OK so far, but the big tests will start next week.
Christian has to get up in his Chemistry lab sessions and explain how he solved problems. He asked me how to teach. The only thing I could think to tell him was practice. He has a stellar Chemistry professor that explains things very, very well. Kelly is in an even better situation with an emeritus professor who is 75 years old that comes back during the summer to teach on class out of love for the material. The students in both classes know exactly what to expect and the professors articulate the material very well in class. What a gift.
Day 324 of 1000
My buddy Brett from my current job and I went out to dinner with four guys from a company I pretty much desipise. It is a large machine vision company with its headquarters in the Northeast who have practices and attitudes I have found to be very suspect over the years. They have a bad reputation in the industry and an inflated opinion about the quality of thier products. After the somewhat restrained business discussions we went out to dinner with these guys and had a great time. Even though the company is from the Northeast and has the attitude and morality you might expect from a company from that part of the world, all the guys with whom we met were from the Southeast. One of them even gratuated from the Citadel. We had a great time. They were good guys and, I hate to admit it, might have been more redneck than me. The funny deal is that they were wildly more informed about all things political than anyone I have every met from the area around their world headquarters. I was very pleasantly surprised and am looking forward to doing business with them in the future.
Day 322 of 1000
I read an article today from the Washington Post titled U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there. I know they are not a very credible source–I am kind of embarrassed citing anything from the NYT or the WP, but this one took the cake. The article is about highly degreed people in scientific fields who do not have jobs. The problem with the article is that it talks almost exclusively about people working in chemistry, biology, and medical disciplines. The word math shows up only once in the article while engineer and engineering also only show up once each. It is especially hilarious that the first person with a “science” degree described in the article got her PhD in neuroscience.
It has been my premise that people who can handle the math (including hard statistics) have plenty of opportunities. No one capable of doing hard math has lacked for opportunities, even during the persistent and growing under employment and unemployment that is a staple of the Obama recession. I know this anecdotally from the number of headhunter calls I get asking for help in finding technical programmers. You will find a list of graphs on the Business Insider website, here, that puts numbers to this phenomenon.
Just another reason to drop your subscription to the Washington Post and get a math, statistics, or engineering degree.
Day 321 of 1000
Another day at the Hill Library on the NCSU campus. The kids are studying math and chemistry. I think I get more done in this enviroment than any other. Today I was able to align the individual frames from the videos I have been using, perform background suppression and accentuate the things in the image that are in motion. The result is pretty noisy, but we know things about the items we want to find in the image that will help us isolate them to tell us the information we want. I do not have any pictures to put up today because I need to do some additional pre and post processing to make them show what we have done. Still, I am very satisfied and still might have something to show by the end of the weekend.
Day 318 of 1000
Happy 4th of July! I got up early to work on our CoffeeVision project. Yes, it has a name. I picked CoffeeVision because I couldn’t think of anything else. If it comes to anything, we will probably change the name. We are still very early in the process. I got most of this done before the family all went out to McDonalds for lunch. It has been a great day so far. Today, I added the ability to import videos to the machine vision image processing buffer a frame at a time. We need a framework for development and testing. This is it. I have added a YouTube video to show and explain what we did. I need to add just a little more infrastructure before I can start adding code to analyze the images.
Day 315 of 1000
This is the first time in many election cycles that my father-in-law did not work in one of the voting casillas. This is a very big election with what appears to be no good choices. My biggest fear in this election is that the people are so feed up with years of corruption, they will vote for anyone other than the two main parties, the PAN and the PRI. The problem with that is the man they might elect is a good friend of Hugo Chavez and could take Mexico down the path taken by Cuba and Venezuela. That would be a very sad turn of event. Lorena will call her mom in a couple of hours to hear how it went. She will call her dad now to get his take on the whole thing.
The Weekly Standard has an article on the presidential election in Mexico this Sunday. It expresses hope for a Peña Nieto administration. He is a member of the PRI (political party) which has generally been a part of the problem in the past, but this article explains why it may not be the case. I have never been a fan of the PRI in the past, but this year the PAN, who I have generally supported has put forward a pro-abortion candidate, Josefina Vazquez Mota. That is especially sad because it has been so closely tied to the Catholic church in the past. I like the last paragraph in the article. It says,
It’s true that many PRI officials would prefer to take Mexico backward. But there are major structural forces (both institutional and societal) standing in their way, and Peña Nieto has sent encouraging signals about his appetite for reform. The country he will govern is an increasingly confident democracy with a healthy economy. Even on the security front, there has been progress, despite the horrifying number of drug murders. As former DEA administrator Robert Bonner wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, President Calderón “will bequeath to his successor major successes against the cartels, newly invigorated institutions, and a sound strategy.” Let’s hope that Peña Nieto doesn’t waste his opportunity.
Day 310 of 1000
Andrew and I started a new project a couple of weeks back. I have been wracking my brain to figure out how to make the whole thing interesting to people who are not completely entranced by all things technical which is probably about 95% (if not more) of the population. We have engaged in some very good conversations about how we can do that. The whole goal is to find a way for mom and pop stores to use cameras to provide better service (more personal, faster, cheaper) to their customers in a way that is not invasive. It is a tough problem, but we think we have some ideas.
We are a long way from producing anything. Before we can even start, we need to capture a ton of pictures and then try to figure out how those pictures can be useful to our target end-users. Fortunately, we have plenty of people in our households who have opinions about that. We even have a Mom and Pop store that will mount cameras for us so we can take test pictures. Lorena would like to start such a store herself which we think is a stellar idea. If we do that, maybe I can write something a little more interesting than the technical drivel that I have been writing over the last several months.
The image above, is a screenshot of what I have so far. It does not do much, but it is a start!
Day 309 of 1000
We owe a great debt of gratitude to the Albany public school system. We had such a bad experience with them that we were forced back into homeschool and we are very grateful to them for that. A recent comment on our blog (you can find it here) from a couple considering homeschool in South Korea brought back those memories. We did not really want or plan to homeschool, but we were forced into it. It was one of the best things that happened to our little family. We like to think we did our homeschool differently than other homeschoolers, but I think that is true for virtually all people who homeschool. All we know is that after eight years of homeschool, we count it a major blessing that we were able to spend a dramatically greater amount of time with our children than would have been possible in any traditional school setting.
It has dawned on me that maybe it is good naratives that encourage and inspire others to find the thing that works well for the own families. We do not have any illusion that what worked for us is the best thing for other people, too, but we are humbled and grateful that what we did worked for us. The funny thing is that it was probably more important to our children that we were totally invested in finding the best way possible to educate them than the actual methods that we used. They saw what was important to us and they embraced it because they knew we were doing it for them.
It is awesome to see that other people are thinking the same way we thought. They will all do it very differently than us, but the doing is more important than the method. What a gift it is to us when others read our narrative and are encouraged.
Day 308 of 1000
A certain Klaus Feidler was the sole source of a leak that was featured on Engadget a couple of days back. Check it out here: http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/21/did-sprint-just-spoil-a-white-htc-evo-4g-lte/
Day 300 of 1000
We had a great day today. We do not know what the future will bring, but we know that we can eat shish kabobs today!
Day 299 of 1000
Lorena and I received this very big opportunity a couple of days ago. We are excited about it. We talk about it a lot. In our talks, we try to look at the big pictures. It is good for us to look at the big picture because, when we do, other ideas bubble up. It is dawning on us that we will not have anyone in the house beside us and we are a little confused about what to do about it. The kids will always need our help, but they are on their way to bigger things where Dad and Mom are pretty much in the way more than they are a help. I am sure that period will end before too long, but it leaves us a little disconcerted. We figure we have five years or so to do something very interesting, then we will need to anchor ourselves someplace close to the kids to be a help to them again. It is really very exciting, but it is hard to know how to use the time properly. I guess it just takes prayer and fatih.
Right in the middle of a new initiative to do some more interesting things and to reinvigorate my efforts on this blog, an opportunity has opened up to do something WAY exotic that, if Lorena and I decide to do it, will remove us completely from all these new initiatives and sweep us off to another part of the world. It would be awesome for the blog, too, but in a way that I never would have anticipated. We have not decided to do it yet, but we are giving it some very serious thought. None of this would happen at all until the kids graduate from college, hopefully in the spring of 2014. I cannot say to much, but will be reworking my development initiatives, changing Lorena’s education plan, and maybe even taking a class or two myself. This is EXACTLY the thing to which I would have committed in less than a millisecond before I got married, but now I am old, have an understanding wife, kids, and lots of responsibilities. Still that did not keep me from knowing I wanted to do it within a millisecond of the time the opportunity came up. I will talk more about it when I can.
Day 296 of 1000
She is getting better and better. I am enjoying this a LOT! These are some sketches of some of her friends. There are more to come.
Day 293 of 1000
My buddy Darren is on a roll! He has me all inspired on getting back in shape again. I may only be down 7-8 pounds, but he must be getting close to 80 pounds down!!! He is not done yet, but he is looking GREAT! Congratulations Darren! Here are the before and after’s.
Day 291 of 1000
I worked from home today while Lorena ran around like a maniac trying to get immunization papers to NCSU so the kids would not have all their classes canceled and have to start all over putting their fall schedules together. We got ominous notes from the Health Office at NCSU telling us that if we did not have our immunization records to them, they would cancel the classes and it would be almost impossible to get all the ones they had before because everyone who had their immunization records already in would have first pick. She got most of it done, but we were all a wreck by the end of the day. Right now, they tell us Christian needs a shot that we believe he does not really need so we got additional paperwork we will take to NCSU tomorrow.
In the meantime, I programmed all day on a very cool project that will have a pretty big impact on a pretty big industry that has its facilities by the beach in Wilmington, NC. How sad is that. I have to spend my day in Wilmington tomorrow. It is a nice drive of only about two hours and I get good food along the way! I wish I could be working on my side project, but there will not be time until I finish up some more of my GaugeCam stuff. I probably will not get to write tomorrow because I will drive out early, drive in late, and work in-between. We are having a barbecue tomorrow night with our Mexican buddies, so that will be good, but it does not give me much time to work on side projects.
Thanks Gene for inspiring me to write about this stuff. I am going to start buying some new hardware in a bit to do the project and I will try to show some pictures here.
Day 289 of 1000
I would like to say I was too busy to write in my blog this last week, but it is not true. It never takes more than a few minutes to write a few things and I could have written. Still, it often takes much more than a few minutes to think of something to write. I have been very busy, but, more than that, I have struggled with finding motivation to write about anything. The main focus of this blog has been to talk about our homeschooling efforts with our kids. That worked very, very well up until a couple of years ago when the kids entered community college. As has been obvious to many, my blogging efforts since then have been less than stellar. Now that the kids are both juniors at North Carolina State University, even though I have great joy that they are having some success, I am not so directly involved in their efforts, so there is less and less about which I have to write in that regard.
So that has left me with not so much motivation to write nor material about which to write. Really, Lorena and I have been at loose ends. We know at least one of the kids (and probably both) will be out of the house at grad school within two years so we are trying to figure out what to do next. That can be pretty hard to do when there are too many options. Lorena thinks she might want to start a business. We know what she wants to do and we have some connection in the industry (food and beverage retail), so we have a plan to get her some experience. In addition to that, we have some ideas for a very technical, machine vision product my buddy Andrew and I can do to help her with her business. I plan to start talking about that here on a fairly regular basis. It should be a lot of fun and it will require a TON of work.
On a side note, I am back on the wagon on my diet. I am getting close to having lost ten pounds. Woo-hoo!
Day 274 of 1000
Lorena and are never too excited for the kids to be away, but we are looking forward to a week alone while the kids head to California. They think it is a vacation for them, but really, it is a vacation for us.
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