Category: General Page 68 of 116

Thanks for the push on this one, JoAnn!  Here are a couple of pictures inside our new house.  The fist one is of he kitchen.

The kitchen

Across from the kitchen ( in the direction everyone is looking), but in all the same open room is the “family room”.  There is also, in the same open room, a breakfast table/dining area, not to be confused with the dining room which is a room all of its own.

Family room

The last picture is a view of the (mostly empty because we do not have enough furniture) living room which is next to the room where the above pictures were taken.

Living room

That is all for today.  This weekend is supposed to be a three day weekend (President’s Day) which I kind of doubt I will get to take because we are coming up to an important trial run of our new product with our main customer sometime in March.

This post is about another project.  We have too many now, but this one is pretty cool, peripherally related to some other stuff we are already doing, and maybe could even bring some new visitors to our KamVu website.  When we lived in Albany, cars sometimes drove by our house faster than we felt was safe with so many kids in the neighborhood and certainly faster than was legal.  It never got to the point where we did anything about it, but it seems like there must be a lot of people in a lot of places that have the need to measure the speed of cars passing through their neighborhood.

At the time, I thought it might be fun to put a camera or two in the yard to look at the cars as the go by.  It would be a little tough to set them up, but not impossible.  The problem is that distinguishing between kids, cats, dogs and all that sort of thing might have been a little tough.  I think we still have a wireless camera amongst all our electronics.  I do not know why it took me so long, but it dawned on me that if I just put the camera up a lot higher so it was looking down at the street the vision part of the problem would not really be too difficult.  It would be possible to capture images of cars passing down the street and calculate their velocity.  The whole thing could be done with a remote webcam.  My first search on the web turned one up for $43.99.

The thing that is good about it is that we could do it fairly quickly, it would be fairly useful, and it would cost very little.

Here it is.  There is a link to it in the “Pages” section of the left-most column of this blog, too.

Lorena has been thinking about starting a little business for a long time.  She has come up with an idea that not only sounds like a lot of fun, but is close to the Holly Springs Public Library.  They have a farmers market there on Saturday mornings starting in the spring.  She wants to sell salsa there.  It is almost perfect.  I was getting ready to object that we would be stuck there for four hours every Saturday.  Kelly reminded me that she and Christian could sell stuff there, too, and that I could go drink gourmet coffee at the Holly Springs Public Library and work on my computer!!!  I really did not have an answer for that.  Actually, this sounds like a great opportunity to set up a little business with books and all.  Our good homeschool friends in Indiana have been quite successful at such endeavors.  Their kids are involved.  They learn a bunch, make some money, and it surely sounds like they have a good time, too.  I told Lorena and the kids I will not be involved in any way other than as an accounting and business consultant (After all, I am going to be sitting in the library drinking gourmet coffee — one has to set their priorities!).  It is their thing.  They are going to have to get their offerings developed and a production plan.  They are going to have to put together a decent display, etc., etc.  The reality is that I would not be nearly as good at this sort of thing as Lorena–she loves it, is good at it, and I am all for it.

We are getting lots of visitors in the next little while.  Last night, Grandpa Milo called to tell us he and Grandma Sarah are coming here from Oregon at the end of the month.  Dale and Karen, the parents of Ethne, Kelly’s very good friend from Texas called last night to tell us they were sending her out to spend the week of Kelly’s birthday with us.  We are very grateful for both of those visits.  There are tons and tons of things to do here in North Carolina, but it seems like one never does any of the great things to do in one’s own back yard unless someone comes to visit.  Mom and Dad will probably just hang out with us, do some cooking with the kids, give us some advise on what to do with the new house, and that sort of thing.  We really have been looking for an excuse to go to a play and this might be it!

We had a good friend and her three girls over for dinner yesterday.  When I was taking the salmon off the grill, I dumped about a third of it onto the ground.  Fortunately, no one went hungry because we had plenty of other stuff.  There was even quite a bit of salmon left over after dinner.  Kelly and Christian had a great time.  They took everyone for a ride on Christian’s hovercraft.  We have to hurry up and finish our cat tower so we can go on to the next hovercraft!  The girls are movie makers, too, so I think they spent a bunch of time making a movie with the digital camera.  One of the girls brought her MacBook.  It is the first time any of us had seen an Apple product.  It was pretty nice, but it was not Linux.  I spent a lot of the day Saturday working on KamVu and made huge progress on the line tools.  Part of that time was at the public library in the town of Garner.  We really have a dilemma now.  The Garner library is older than the Holly Springs library, but it is a lot bigger, a lot closer, and really very nice.  The problem is that no coffee is allowed there.  I am not sure how often we are going to go to each, but probably Garner will win most of the time now.  Still, it makes me sad not to be able to drink coffee in the stacks.

I have really enjoyed writing this blog.  It dawned on me that I am starting into my fourth year now of blogging five times per week.  A little less than a year ago, I put a hit counter on the site to see if anyone was actually reading the thing.  I cannot believe that we are getting over 2000 hits per month.  The got to thinking about this when we saw that the hit counter had hit exactly 24000 hits.

I realize that most of those are probably just Lorena, the kids, and I visiting the site and writing to each other.  There is another big chunk due to webcrawlers and spammer.  Nevertheless Bryan, Trisha, JoAnn, Hunter, and some others have been pretty faithful at reading the thing.  Whenever I put up a post that I want family and friends to see along with an email blast to let them know there is something interesting, we have a flurry of activity for a few days.  Still, we are getting over 100 hits per day now and have averaged over 75 hits per day since I started keeping track.  We are getting over ten unique visitors per day, so all in all, for a blog that I would write even if no one read it, we are not doing too bad.

Thanks a lot for reading.  It is fun to try to make the thing more interesting.  If you have any comments on what you might like to see that is more interesting, that would be great.

There were four or five neighborhood kids at the house when I got home yesterday afternoon after work.  All the kids were younger than Kelly and Christian, but everyone seemed to be having a great time.  Kelly was sitting on the ground in front of the garage teaching all the little girls how to knit and Christian was doing something like watch ants are do an experiment with dirt out in the yard.  They seemed like very nice kids.  After about a half an hour, I saw Kelly talking to a couple of girls that were her age or a little older.  When she came in an told me about it later, she had asked them what sport they were “into”.  They told her cheer leading.  I trying to remember whether that was considered a sport when I was in school back in the dark ages.  I do not think so, but I am honestly not sure.  After they left, one of the littler girls told Kelly, that one of girls had been her babysitter, but her mom did not like to use her anymore because all she did the entire time she was babysitting was talk to her friends on the telephone.  Maybe Kelly can start making the big bucks again as the neighborhood babysitter!  It is great that Christian and Kelly both are starting to get integrated into the neighborhood.  Just like always, they will meet all of the kids, and know what is going on in long before Lorena and I.

Special note to Blienbaby:  The contest is back on!  I am at 216!!!  I will dig out the graph.  Where are you right now?  Is the first to lose fifty from where we are now good for you or are do you want to continue with the old contest?

There is a small exercise room in the office complex where I work.  I worked out there today at lunchtime.  It was my first workout in a long time, so I took it slow.  I needed to take it slow.  It feels good to get started again, but right now it does not feel so good physically.  When I got to the gym, a television was blaring with some “entertainment” programming about movie stars and the like.  It was pretty irritating, but a couple of guys showed up, found the remote and changed the channel to something even more irritating–ESPN.  Bobby Knight was self importantly explaining that basketball was only a game while clips of him choking a kid and screaming at people was playing in the background.  I wonder less now than before why I am not a fan.

I did 291 calories in 20 minutes.  That is not so much, but it is a start.

I hesitated to even write a homeschool update for this month because I have been talking about is so much over the last several weeks.  But, for the sake of posterity, the synopsis is that, after the big move and the trip to Puerto Vallarta, we are just getting caught back up on all our work.  The highlights are the following:

• We are getting close to the halfway mark in math, Kelly in Algebra II and Christian in Algebra I.
• We should be complete finished with Rosetta Stone Spanish I within a few days (Christian is already done) so we can move on to Rosetta Stone Spanish II.
• Kelly is getting close to being ready for her first CLEP test, Freshman English Composition w/Essay.
• We continue to read through Financial Peace.
• History and Literature are still great and right on schedule (Kelly-American History, Christian-Year 1of 2-World History)
• Music is going well for both of the kids.  Kelly is getting along way better than we ever would have imagined with her new teacher and Christian is enjoying his new guitar.
• We continue to work through our Logical Fallacies book.
• Jay Wile’s science programs are still amazing.

We will be starting several new things within the next month or two.  These include:

• Develop a family budget together (as opposed to just Lorena and I) and starting the kids Roth-IRA 401K investments.
• Start taking the radio theory class and start building the radio.
• Rosetta Stone Spanish II.
• A Dad and kids read-aloud of a new book on world views.

Life seems to be a little bit of a grind right now.  We have to finish a bunch of stuff we have been working on for a long time and there is never enough time to do it all.  I am looking at my list of stuff that we have to finish before we can go on to anything new as I write this post and thinking about the projects we have ahead of us and how we can make time to do them.  This weekend we emptied the living room of boxes.  We read some more in both Financial Peace and the Fallacy Detective.  We should be caught up on the homeschool work, including Kelly’s finishing of Rosetta Stone Spanish I by the end of this week.  We have not yet started on organizing the garage and finishing the cat tower.  We have two or three weeks of finishing stuff before we can start anything new.  We know that it will be much more satisfying if we can finish well the things we have started, but it will be nice to move on to some new and interesting things.

My friend Ann, from my old job in Oregon (and a great Machine Vision Engineer) has two beautiful and talented daughters (I have seen them perform!) she and her husband adopted from China.  One of them was in a Chinese New Year with a Dragon.  Ann said she was going to get a dragon for them, but I had NO idea.  I hope it is OK with her that I am posting this picture, but I was wildly impressed.  This would be a VERY cool thing to use in a parade!  Congratulations to Siri and all here dragon buddies!!!

I was talking to Christian about career choices this afternoon.  I told him I would have loved to have been one of those guys in the back if I had the talent, but I just did not have the talent.  How much better could a day job get?  Maybe he should consider that.

This is the first weekend in what seems like a long, long time that we have no planned activities.  I was sitting here trying to figure out what might be a good thing to do when it dawned on me that it might be really great not to plan anything.  We still have lots of things to clean up in the house and the garage, so we might do that–it would be really nice to be able to park the pickup in the garage, have a living room without any boxes in it, and have a place to work on our radio project.  If we feel like it, we can cook something–we never did get around to making those portobello mushroom raviolis.  We can read a little, draw a little, nap a little, listen to some good music, go to CostCo (a favorite), and just generally hang out a little.  This weekend is going to be not for planning ahead.  We can do that next weekend.

We currently have some major homeschool projects we want to start.

• The radio construction and theory project
• The new world view study material
• Setting the kids up to Roth-IRA mutual fund investing
• Starting Rosetta Stone II Spanish
• Find a gym and get started in new workout programs
• Start a new and bigger hovercraft project
• Schedule and take the annual, nationally normed, standardized tests

Before we can get to any of that, we need to finish some other stuff.

• Put the house back together after the move (a week or two)
• Get caught up on the homeschool work schedule after the move and vacation (two or three days)
• Finish Rosetta Stone I Spanish (Kelly just needs a few more days)
• Finish reading Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace
• Finish reading the first Fallacy Detective book
• Finishing construction of the cat tower

In looking at it, it is dawning on me that the list is not so big.   Even when we add our spring break trip we have a pretty good shot at starting some cool new projects within the next month or two.  We are running out of excuses for not inviting over lots of the people who have been so kind to us since we arrived here in North Carolina about half a year ago, so we need to do some entertaining.  I have a big project coming due at work within the next month to month and a half.  I am still working on my KamVu open source and other side machine vision projects, so it looks like we will have quite a busy spring and summer.

Last night, we spent most of the night working on math.  There are two ways to use the Teaching Textbooks to go through a lesson.  It is possible to just read the material in the book or to listen to a video lecture of the exact same material.  Previously, the kids were able to get by just reading the textbook before working the problems, but now that we are moving into more difficult material.  They are doing fine, but it really seems to help them understand the material better when they see someone explain and work the problems.  It is not like any of this is that easy.  As we move forward, I think it will be necessary to both watch the lectures and then review the fine points in the textbook to be able to do the problems.  I know that in my work, it always seems to help to go to a seminar or lecture on new materials even if a book written on the subject is more thorough and has more depth.  The thing about math is that it feels so good when you finally get it.

When we got here to North Carolina we met a family who had moved out here (via several other places) from Washington (state).  We knew a lot of the same people because all of our families have lived in the Pacific Northwest for at least a couple of generations.  There is another couple we knew in South Florida from when both we and they had just gotten married.  They also moved to this area after leaving Florida for Georgia for a few years.  I think they are originally from Minnesota.  At any rate, those two families live at the north end of the Research Triangle area while we live well to the south of it, probably about a forth or fifty minute drive–not impossible but a hassle.  It is kind of too bad it worked out that way, because the women in that family are the kind that like to get the “girls” together for coffee, breakfast, shopping, and all that kind of stuff.  Nevertheless, the one from Florida called Lorena yesterday and wanted to schedule breakfast or something, so I think they are all going to meet at our house on Friday morning.  Very cool!  We all have young kids, so the plan is to get all of them to come over for dinner on a Friday night in the next couple of weeks.  The house is so empty, that it will be great for the kids to blast around.  There is another young couple who are getting married next week that will live closer to our end of town.  The wife should fit right in to this group.  Now is Lorena’s chance to be quite the social butterfly!

I put crafts in the title of this post because that is what the kids did during a lot of the weekend.  Christian spent a lot of time working on a model of a Spitfire airplane while Kelly continued to knit on her first sweater.  Both of them did a great job.  I will try to put a photo of Kelly wearing the sweater as soon as she finishes it.  Christian and I went to the rental house to get the last load of big stuff to bring to the new house and then ran over to the Holly Springs Library to meet with my buddy John S. from work.  Most of the day we did not do much other than drive around and hang out.  The big find of the weekend was a big shopping center with lots of the major outlets within ten minutes of the new house.  It has a Michaels, a Best Buy, a Target, lots of restaurants, etc., etc.  It was really an uneventful and relaxing weekend.

I put “exercise” in the title because I did not get any, but I should!

Lately, I have been trying think about how we can get some of our projects completed.  Our half-finished cat tower is still over at the rental house.  This weekend, Christian and I plan to load it into the pickup and bring it to the new house so we can start working on it again, but that is not the only project we have in the wings.  We are in the middle of our “Financial Peace” project.  It is going along well, but we are getting to the end of the reading phase and will need to jump right into the doing phase before we forget what we have read.  We have three radio and radio license projects in the works:  The radio assembly and theory of electronics class, the General Class Ham radio license test preparation, and the commercial General Radio Operators License test preparation.  We have a new book on world views that we are going to read together and we really have been slacking quite a bit in the art department (although Kelly and Christian are both working on knitting projects).  In addition to that, I am continuing work on my open source vision libraries project.  It is dawning on me that I need to put a hold on finding new projects until we complete a few of the ones that are already on our plate.  That is not even mentioning that we will have some quite big projects associated with our new back yard and how to get it into a usable state.

Update:  I cannot believe I have forgotten our cooking projects.  I have always wanted to try to make ravioli from scratch.  I think we ought to try that this weekend.  Here is the recipe (with Portobello Mushrooms!).  Lorena, Kelly, and Christian, could you make sure we have all the ingredients?