We have been slammed since the first of the year so I have gotten behind on blogging and fell off the wagon on my diet at least a couple of times. Now however, the holidays are over, our annual church special meetings for the year are over, annual sales meeting up in Canada at my day job is complete so I will not have to try to lose weight on restaurant food or on big meals Lorena prepares for visitors. I actually did better than I usually do and currently at my lowest weight since I started the diet-16.5 lbs. lost. Only 44.5 lbs. to go.
In addition to the diet thing and my day job, I have a couple of side projects (a development project with my buddy Gene I plan to chronicle quite a bit more and a, believe or not, real estate project with my buddy Mark P.), and a three or four more remodel projects. So, I plan to write on all this until one of the side projects turns into a business and/or I retire and continue to try to find a work from home business. Over the next couple of days I will talk about the development stuff Gene and I are doing and the business idea/model behind it.
Lorena will never let me retire if my company keeps doing stuff like this. They sent a huge Christmas package with multiple boxes from 
I got back to Seattle almost two hours ahead of the scheduled arrival. The departure time got pushed up from 11:30 AM to 11:00 AM. Who ever heard of such a thing. The other thing that seems completely out of sync with my experience is that from my first ride from the airport to the hotel in Shanghai to my last ride from the hotel to the airport in Beijing, all the driving was quite sane and careful on very good roads. I am sure it must be that I was not in the right place to experience the wild driving about which I have heard, but they would have to up their insanity by several orders of magnitude to arrive at what I have experienced on numerous occasions in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon.
We drove from Suzhou to Shanghai and then flew down to Shenzhen last night. We then caught the equivalent of an Uber ride to a town about forty minutes north that is right by our company’s Shenzhen office. It is very beautiful here. We are meeting a customer later this morning, then just going to work in the local office without any meeting agenda. We have been running so hard that it will be nice to have a day that is a little bit slower to catch up.
We have been running since I hit the ground in Shanghai Pudong airport day before yesterday. There have been lots of surprises on this trip, mostly to do with the very modern and extensive infrastructure that is ubiquitous both in Shanghai and Suzhou. I know I am traveling and working in the very centers of commerce and industry for which China is known in this day and age. Nevertheless, it is very impressive.
I cannot remember when was the last time I went to Asia. I have been to quite a few places over there–Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, but I have never been to mainland China. After jumping through lots of hoops, I got my hands on the needed Visa a half an hour before the FedEx office in Olympia closed. So now I get to fly to Shanghai to celebrate my birthday tomorrow.
This is Christian’s new habitat now that he does not have Mom’s kitchen island anymore. It has been fun to have him here and it is so nice to see him sitting down in the kitchen, thinking, playing his guitar, working on his computer, and studying while Lorena works in the kitchen. We miss that. We have been to Jimmy John’s twice, and out to breakfast three times since he has been here. Lorena has him all cleaned up with a new haircut. Lorena and Christian have been down to Anytime Fitness a couple of times with the obligatory stop at Starbucks for some coffee. Christian spends a lot of study time there. It is a way to keep going on his studies while avoiding being stuck in his apartment or the lab for ours on end. It is kind of amazing to us that he actually sits and just thinks a lot. It is part of the territory with his area of Information Theory. Most of all, though, we are trying to get him to forget all that for a few days and just relax. Maybe he will come back again before too long.
First, the important stuff: Kelly’s new glasses arrived and I think she looks just stunning with her new librarian hipster look.
We still don’t have any appliances, but Mark is scheduled to bring them here and install them next week along with the propane tank and gas lines needed to run the stove. In the mean time, Lorena is on a regular schedule at Anytime Fitness again and I am working full time from my (somewhat messy) home office with the view of Rainier. This is ALL a very good thing. Mark will be here to do his work next week while we are gone. It is nice to have someone watch the house. The week after that is painting week and we should be all done.
Christian has been to work for three days and it looks like he is getting his arms around things in the lab. He really likes the area where he lives although he says the culture is a little more direct. Actually, he did not exactly say “direct,” but you get the idea. He hopes to look around a little in Boston this weekend, maybe get in a workout and see the art museum across the street.
I drove up to Vancouver, BC last night to stay at a Hilton close to where the brand new corporate offices of my new company are located. It is a beautiful drive up from Centralia and the border crossing is not too bad. Every time I come up here I think, “I don’t remember it being this beautiful.” It is truly an amazing place with snow-capped mountains, lots of beautiful stretches of water and a huge, cosmopolitan city. I am looking forward to being here now and then and my company says it is fine for me to bring Lorena.
Christian flew from Tempe to Boston yesterday to start an internship at MIT’s Lincoln Labs. He 
I will have one more work week in Texas after today. I enjoy my job and the people where I work a lot and it was agonizing to turn in my notice. Part of the job I love the most is the requirement to create sophisticated machine vision and video analytics applications with cheap USB cameras and ARM embedded computers that run embedded Linux, usually Debian. We prototype a lot of the stuff on Raspberry Pi’s which is great because there is such a big user community it is easy to quickly get answers about just about anything. There are four cameras in the article accompanying this post that range in value between $20 and $50.
This ruggedized case and computer came in the mail yesterday. If is for the project to drive cost out of the diagnosis of blood pathologies that often occur in certain developing parts of the world. This is just a prototype, but for a prototype, it is very impressive. I am looking forward to firing the thing up. I am at least a week or two from being able to do that because of everything else on our plates. My hope is to eventually be able to replace the laptop computer with an embedded computer like a Raspberry Pi or one of its more industrial strength cousins.
Sometimes all the stars align to make life more interesting than the long periods of doing the same thing day after day that seems to be normal. When I was younger, those long periods of the mundane seemed boring. Now they just seem restful. Last night, it dawned on me that, with two days before we are supposed to close on your our new (old) house, I have not made all the arrangements for all the utilities to be switched over to us. At the same time, the sickle cell disease project on which I am working is scheduled to deliver its first device for testing in Africa at the end of April which means I need to complete a boat load of finishing touches. All the while, I have to decide whether I want to stay in my current job and travel to Texas once per month or switch jobs and travel to Vancouver, BC fairly frequently with intermittent trips to China and other far away places (currently leaning toward BC).
I love my job. That is not an unusual thing. I think I have written here on this blog about how Grandpa Milo’s frequently reminded us we might as well love our jobs because we have to go do it whether we love it or not anyway and its corollary with food that we were going to eat it and we were going to like it whether we liked it or not. My current job, however, is not one that is hard to love. Yesterday, one of the VP’s walked into my office (an office with a door!!!) and saw I had one of the old stainless steel cups with the company logo (the one on the left in the photo with the blue top).
Kelly and I had an interesting discussion last night about her work. Her work is very similar to mine in many ways. The work Christian does has similarities to mine, but they are superficial (see his office in the picture to the left). Some have assumed I pushed Christian toward the kind of work I do to live vicariously through his superior training and skills. Over all the years of homeschool, I fought against that, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much. In the end, though Christian went off into an area for which I am admittedly a fan-boy, but that is so deep in the bowels of the theoretical math associated with network information theory, I have no clue about how even to talk about it with him.
One of her first steps was to find where and how different sets of features (answers to survey questions) cluster with respect to the characteristics of the customers who took the survey. Crazily, she is using precisely the same algorithms I use every day to find clusters of motion pixels in video images that indicate someone is about to fall out of a bed in a hospital. She predominately uses the R statistical programming language, but also Python which she is in the process of learning. The clustering algorithms she is trying are k-means clustering, mean-shift filtering, density based spatial clustering, support vector machines, etc.