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.
Category: General Page 6 of 116
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.
Lorena loves to grow flowers. She did a vegetable garden last year in the Wilsonville community garden areas. She loves her vegetables but she is crazy about flowers. She bought a wrought iron flower box holder for our balcony and was very gratified her tulips bloomed before we left. She has already donated the flowers to Gladys, but hung on to the flower box holder. We hope to get some ficus trees for inside the house as soon as we get to Texas.
It was a little bit of a melancholy night last night. Grandpa Milo’s Alzheimer’s progress slowly but surely.
I told him last night, “Dad, you know we are moving to Texas in a couple of weeks.”
He said, “You are? That is disappointing.”
He had completely forgotten from when we told him last Sunday and a week ago Wednesday. Fortunately, he is in very good hands with my siblings all close by and friends from church willing and able to get him to Sunday morning meeting, the Wednesday night Bible studies and the various gospel meetings. Still it is a hard thing. It is getting harder and harder for him to get in and out of the car. He insists on doing everything himself still, but is less able by a great deal than when we got here. It is hard to see because he was truly a great father
Grandma Sarah’s mind is good, but she really finds it difficult to leave home now for anything other than doctor’s appointments. I just feel very, very grateful for parents who had my best interest at heart and, much more than that, have loved and depended on God for so long in their lives, it is now a habit that consoles them and all of us in their old age.
Betty Blonde #487 – 06/17/2010
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For posterity, I thought it would be nice to put up a picture of all of Kelly’s and Christian’s girl cousins in Mexico with Grandma Conchita on her 70th birthday.
Betty Blonde #480 – 06/08/2010
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Our friend Francois, a professor at NCSU told us that if Kelly got a degree in Statistics then went on to something in the Humanities or Business, she would be the “queen of the department” wherever she went. We thought that was pretty cool at the time, but had not thought about it much since then. Kelly got accepted into a great PhD program and then struggled. On average, everyone else in the program was eight years older than her, the youngest being three years older than her when they started. Almost all of them had an MBA and three to five years of experience before they entered the PhD program. There were a couple who went straight from their undergraduate degree to the PhD program, but had a fairly extensive undergraduate research experience. Kelly, on the other hand, was literally, just two years out of high school, or at least that was how old she was when she started.
She has struggled because she was in the habit of taking hard classes that would help her in her understanding of Statistics and not the general Business leveling classes. She has done great in her TA’ing duties and her classes. She knew (knows) how to deal with hard technical material and with people. She started slowly on her RA’ing tasks, but know that she knows what is expected, she excels. The challenge was the research. She had no background at all in formal, technical research. She has struggled. She has her first formal, publication quality paper due in the second week of February. Her work habits were really pretty good by the end of her undergraduate degree at NCSU, but no where near the level she needed to operate at the PhD level. She has hammered away at it though, and today she is performing at a higher level than she ever might have thought she was capable.
So the payback is that her roommate who is in precisely the same program as Kelly, but seven years older with a PhD professor (Dean, actually) father, is coming to Kelly for help on the truly hard stuff. It is a sweet thing, when you have done the truly hard stuff, to enjoy the benefits and security of having it behind you. Congratulations to Kelly. You can not beat a hard STEM degree, no matter what you go on to do after.
Betty Blonde #470 – 04/29/2010
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A lot of the rest of the world thinks the Nordic countries are a monolithic thing. Kelly sent me a couple of articles titled Norwegians & Swedes — What’s the Difference? and Norwegians & Swedes — What’s the Difference? Part II. My kudos go out to the blog author. They were very fascinating posts. I considered my own knowledge of the Swedes and Norwegians of my personal acquaintance, but I don’t know enough to confirm or deny any of this. I do know the Finns are a culturally very different from either group. It makes one think how easy it might be to talk past someone of even greater cultural distance than Norwegians and Swedes.
Betty Blonde #467 – 04/26/2010
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We finished the old year well watching Pink Martini at the Arlene Schnitzer concert hall in Portland, then ran over to a party of old friends in Yamhill. We will do it again sometime. It might be a bit of a cliché, but I think the New Year is a great time to make resolutions. Even with diets, I have made great progress after starting on New Year’s Day. I have three more days until I go back to work and my plan is to reflect on what I want to do next year. Right now though, we are going to continue to start the New Year right by going to the Burger Hut in Hubbard for breakfast. Happy New Year!
Betty Blonde #457 – 04/11/2010
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‘nuf sed.
Betty Blonde #455 – 04/15/2010
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For posterity–all of Grandpa Milo’s and Grandma Sarah’s grandchildren. Left to right: Kelly, Julia, Christian, Amy, Charlie and Kylee.
Betty Blonde #451 – 04/08/2010
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Kelly got here a couple of days ago and Christian arrived at three o’clock this morning. We are looking forward to a few days of too much food and hanging out together. I am actually not going to work over the holidays for the first time in many years.
Betty Blonde #449 – 04/06/2010
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An article in the Southern Blog of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary titled Science vs. Scientism: A Necessary Distinction describes an often fanatical worldview that has taken over much of our culture. The author uses Bill Nye, one of the worst practitioners of this worldview as an example of what happens when you conflate science with scientism. The whole article is worth the read, but one section describes the problem in a nutshell:
Scientism vs. science
Nye’s appeal to science as the bar of truth is what is known as scientism. According to John Cowburn in Scientism: A Word We Need (Wipf & Stock, 2013), scientism is a worldview where “only scientific knowledge is valid . . . that science can explain and do everything and that nothing else can explain or do anything: it is the belief that science and reason, or scientific and rational, are co-extensive terms.”
Richard Carrier defends scientism (which he calls metaphysical naturalism) in Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (Authorhouse, 2005) and defines it as “an explanation of everything without recourse to anything supernatural, a view that takes reason and science seriously, and expects nothing from you that you cannot judge for yourself.” One’s faith is not in an imagined deity. Instead, one’s faith is grounded and justified “by appeal to the observable evidence.” In short, scientism is a full-fledged worldview that guides one’s actions and informs their beliefs. Thus, Nye’s appeal to science in the abortion issue confuses the discipline of science with the worldview of scientism.
This conflation, in its ignorance, allows for just the kinds of evil described in the article. Science and the scientific method are not the only paths to knowledge of truth. Much or all of other ways of knowing, logic and reason, historical method and revelation get thrown out if one subscribes to scientism. How do you know whether your mother loves you using scientism. How do you measure qualia using scientific method?
Betty Blonde #447 – 04/02/2010
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Lorena bought new furniture this weekend (see below). For a studio apartment, it is harder than one might thing. She had to find something she liked (not so hard–she likes a LOT of stuff), but that was compact enough to fit in our very finite living space. I think she did a GREAT job. She got two leather swivel chairs–way more comfortable than I had imagined they might be just looking at them. They are RED! Imagine that. They are a deep red that looks great with a lot of stuff. I cannot imagine that we own two red leather chairs AND I like them.
We realized, after we sat in the chairs, we really needed a little table to set our sodas and an ottoman to set our feet. She went out and got that, too. The thing which impressed me most is her ability to get great deals. That takes a very large amount of patience and she is definitely better at that than me. We got them for the holidays when the kids get home, but we are enjoying them now. They would have been a worthy purchase even if the kids were not coming home.
With Kiwi the attack cat in the house, this might be the only time I ever get to see the actual leather. Again, see below.
Betty Blonde #445 – 03/31/2010
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I just read a very interesting article on the institutional church. It describes some reasons church membership has dropped. The whole article is quite good, but the list of ways the church has moved away from the first century church is really quite amazing. It is mostly about how and where the church meets, but it also discusses church leadership. I hope they take the thinking further to “remember” how the ministry operated in the New Testament, too, but this is a great start. The article goes into a lot more detail, but here is the list:
- All the churches in the Bible met in a home and functioned like a small spiritual family. The current institutional church, by contrast, spends a great deal of energy and money getting and maintaining a church building.
- The churches in the Bible were simple. We describe “simple church” as a way of being/doing church where any believer could say, “I could do that!”. (“they were astonished that Peter and John were unschooled, ordinary men” (Acts 4:13).) The institutional church, by contrast, requires highly educated, highly school (seminary, etc.) highly creative people to be successful. (Think Rick Warren, for instance.)
- In the New Testament (NT) churches, everyone used their gifts. In institutional church, only a few, highly gifted people (worship leaders, preachers, etc.) use their gifts.
- In NT church, Jesus brought the agenda for the meetings. In institutional churches, a few, very smart people design the worship experiences.
- In the NT, churches were started in a few hours or a few days. Institutional churches require a great deal of planning and resources and take months or years to start.
Betty Blonde #436 – 03/19/2010
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Our friends Ralph and Barbie invited Christian over for Thanksgiving this year. He planned to come up here to spend the weekend with us, but was just too slammed with work to make the trip. Lorena, Kelly and I will have a full Thanksgiving weekend and Christian will be well cared for, but this is the second year in a row when everyone was not together for our favorite holiday. Kelly, of course, is working on her research between petting Kiwi, the remaining twin cat sister. It is going to busy and nice, but we really do wish we could be with Christian. We have decided we will all try to head south to Arizona for Christmas. I hope we can make that work.
Betty Blonde #433 – 03/15/2010
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The video of this little kid making coffee is just awesome. It brought back memories of our kids as I am sure it did for all parents who see it. One of the things that we remember about when the kids were very little is that they were interested and able to learn just about anything thrown at them. The process the kids went through to learn how to read was just amazing to watch. We had no idea what we were doing when we tried to teach them, but they really wanted to learn, loved to learn, had a crazy amount of patience (in that little kid, “do it again, do it again sort of way) and there was GREAT joy when they got it.
Betty Blonde #427 – 03/05/2010
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Lorena sent a picture of her stitches from the work on her jaw yesterday. I was going to put it up here, but it is cold and wind outside and I kind of want to sleep inside tonight. Right after she got back from Oregon Health Sciences University where the work was done–actually, it was nothing too big–we heard Amy, one of our friends from North Carolina, died after a bout with cancer. She was ten years younger than me and a great person. We were saddened, but thankful for a difficult life well lived. That, coupled with all the crazy terrorist attacks and belligerence that continues to grow around the world (as was manifested again in Paris) has put us into a pensive and admittedly melancholy mood. One wonders what the world will be like for our kids and for their kids. Will a life two generations from now be even recognizable to people of my generation. The funny deal is that even though we are sad for the death of our friend, her passing has been more of a comfort than a burden because Jesus is her friend. That is no small hope in that and an encouragement to those of us left behind.
Betty Blonde #425 – 03/03/2010
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Lorena and I have very busy lives. She takes two classes at the community college (Geology and Business Law). I do consulting work with a couple of companies in the evenings while she is either in class or studying. So what does that have to do with salsa and ketchup? Not much other than that we often eat at our desks. I noticed a couple of ketchup stains on my desk and thought of that great divide in America, partly due to the influx of Mexicans here in the US, but probably mostly due to the fact that most Americans are switching from that great American condiment to its spicy competitor. Of course, if there were any stains on Lorena’s desk (that is my story and it is best that I maintain that position) they would be of the salsa variety. All of this to get to the point that it dawned on me that I now only eat ketchup about one time for every time I eat salsa.
Lorena said, “You are so American” when she saw me putting ketchup on my hamburger last night. It is not true.
Betty Blonde #422 – 02/26/2010
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