Long time since the last post. I am working madly on my PhD research. The above is the results of a machine learning predictor of stream flow calculated from images. I am amazed how much I enjoy this work. There is no money and not glory in it, but it is very interesting. The above is a machine learning prediction graph that will be part of our first journal article.
Christian recommended I get a new, better keyboard a long time ago. I used one he had at his apartment in Tempe every time I was there, but for some reason, never thought it would be a good idea to get one. Well, a couple of weeks, I broke down and had him buy me one for $70 after having spent the last couple of decades using keyboards that cost in the range of $20. The keyboard he picked out for me arrived today and there is truly a world of difference for the better. The keys have a profoundly better action and the whole thing just seems more solid. The keys are back lit, it sits at the right angle. I like it a lot. Additionally, it came just in time for me to work on my journal article.
I have written quite a lot over the years and have even published a few journal articles. I am starting on what I believe is my first serious technical journal article. We have most of the research complete for the article and I have started putting things down on “paper.” One thing I can tell you about this is that it is not my favorite thing in the world to do. My plan is to do the minimal amount of writing necessary to finish the degree, then relegate myself to the fun stuff of writing machine vision and machine learning code. I hope to relegate my non-programming writing to emails, a letter or two and this blog. We will see how that works out.
Lorena called me over to the window a few minutes ago to show me this owl on a stump. He sat there for fifteen minutes or so swiveling his head every now and then. Then he flew down behind the stump so we could only see a little bit of what was going on. After 10-15 seconds, he flew back up to sit on the stump with what we think was a snake in his mouth, stayed there looking around for a few seconds, then flew off. It was an amazing thing to behold. Lorena filmed what we could see of the snake hunt.
Lorena decided to do a smaller gardening project this summer. Last year her garden got decimated by the deer and was on the wrong side of the house to maximize the sunlight. So, this year she decided to put it on our deck. We surely hope the deer do not come up there. The added benefit is that we will be able to see the garden from our bedroom. Lorena has starts for Oregon and Sweetie Tomatoes, chives, and basil. I am hoping for cucumbers and chiles, but there might not be enough room. Maybe she will put the herbs in a pot or two so we can make room. She loves her garden!
I really do have the best wife. It is a joy to be sheltering in place with her. Maybe it is the isolation together that I has me reflecting on the gifts that derive from waiting on God. It is something at which I have never been particularly good, but for which I have always been grateful when things happen according to God’s timing. I have to admit that most of the time my waiting has been a function of having no other options, but I believe that is in God’s hands, too. It is nice, at this point in my life, to be reminded of what is good in my life. Lorena made shrimp fried rice today. That is what triggered my thinking about the great gifts I have received. And believe it or not, a wife who makes me shrimp fried rice because she knows I love it is not a small gift.
Lorena has identified our bedroom window as the best place to start her tomatoes and assorted herbs. She has Oregon and Sweetie Tomatoes, chives, and basil so far. That window really is a place that gets a lot of sun. Her next step will be to transplant them to a galvanized steel planter-tub. I am trying to talk her into growing her little garden outside our bedroom on the balcony. I think it is fun to watch all this stuff grow and maybe the deer will not eat everything if it is up on the balcony. Who knows, though, those deer are pretty wily.
I am a big fan of Linux and, more particularly, a big fan of Xubuntu Linux. This is not a review of Xubuntu but an acknowledgement of my biennial struggle about when to replace the previous Long Term Support (LTS) release, Xubuntu 18.04 with the new release 20.04 that is scheduled to drop on April 23. I do not think I have made it more than half a day before I bite the bullet and make the change. This will be a pretty straightforward deal with the computer I use for my PhD work and our home computers, but my day job machine is another story. We have lots of heavy lifting going on and the setup of a development computer of any stripe (Linux, Windows, or apple) for the kind of work I am doing is often a challenge and generally takes at least half a day if I am really lucky. I could just install over the top of 18.04, but that kind of defeats the fun and I like the idea of completely cleaning out cruft every now and then, so I plan to wipe the hard drive. I will continue to run into stuff I forgot for a few more days or even weeks. This is true even though I write down all the stuff I need. New thing just keep popping up.
I am all Linux all the time at both work and home. For the first time ever, I have no reason to ever boot to Windows and we avoid allowing the plague known as apple into the house. The guys at work mostly use Ubuntu, but I really like Xubuntu, mostly because its use changes only minimally. I always look forward to a new release and this one is no exception.
I cannot believe I am writing this blog post, but for a variety of reasons, I now spend about half my time programming in python. It is still pretty useless as a tool for doing the thing for which I normally get hired, but it is great as glue, for machine learning, and for other types of utility programming. As or solving hard machine vision and image processing problems–for that C++ is still the king for both speed of performance and speed of development. In both my day job and for my PhD research, I have a lot of the C++ vision code I need already coded up so it runs fast and does what I want. Now I need to make stuff play nicely with GUI programmers and other user so I am doing that in Python. The thing I hate to admit is that I really like it quite a lot and I CAN go faster with stuff like Scikit-Learn, matplotlib, and other great tools.
Lorena is the champion of our property. This year, she decided she would take on both the weed patch that the gardens and flower beds had become and also the pruning of the fruit trees. Last spring we had our gardener clean out a lot of the weeds and put in bark dust. Lorena has kept the weeds at by in those areas with Roundup and has worked, little by little on other areas of the garden. She pruned two of the fruit trees–an apple and a pear. It was a ton of work but she really enjoyed it. Now, with spring’s arrival, they are blossoming spectacularly. Her plan for next year is to start a little earlier and do all of the trees. She also plans to clean up more of the flower beds and lawn. It is a lot of work that she can hardly keep herself from doing all the time.
Everyone really needs a good Easter hat. Lorena found the one Tio Lauro gave to me as a gift and I think it works for the professorial look at which I am aiming. That is a hard look to accomplish for a farm/logger/mill-worker kid so I take anything I can get. We had a party of four for Easter dinner which was, of course, ham, deviled eggs and scalloped potatoes. Very nice. It would have been great to have the kids here with us, but it was not possible so we want to do something extra good next year.
This article about a chef in the UK fighting a terrorist with narwhal tusk was inspirational to me. Of course, he would have been much more efficient if he was in America and had access to a gun, but you go what you can with what you have. After I wrote about the article, I mysteriously started receiving narwhal paraphernalia in the mail. And I am grateful for it. The last one showed up yesterday. It was a book titled “I’m a Narwhal.” I have been getting all these anti-terrorist tools and now the sent me the manual!
I found this picture of my dad (Grandpa Milo) and I while looking for a sibling picture of Kelly and Christian for Kelly to post on Instagram for National Siblings day. I like it a lot. The picture was taken on Grandma Sarah’s 77th birthday on one the last of our several trips as a family to Puerto Vallarta in January of 2008. It is hard to believe that is over 12 years in the past. It is good to remember how fortunate it was to have had a father and mother who truly loved us and did all that was in their power to help us their entire life.
In thinking about the current China virus crisis, it made me consider some of the things Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah had to endure in their lifetimes. Just a few of them are the great depression, World War II, polio, the 9/11 bombing, the Cold War, and personal crises that like Grandma Sarah’s almost fatal car wreck and the crib death of their daughter and my little sister, Amy Louise. I am just so grateful for the both of them and cannot wait to see them again in the not too distant future.
I know I should be putting up an image of my siblings who I appreciate greatly. I think I will do that soon even if it is not National Siblings day. I thought I would put up a picture of these two siblings from back in around 2005-2006. They were actually very, very good friends and kind to each other. I get a strong sense of melancholy when I see these photos, but am thankful that they have moved on to new things. I think it is hard to focus on enjoyment of the age you are. The moment I learned that lesson is one of those moments when my life become easier and more enjoyable. It is one of my biggest wishes for all those I love.
I had heard that most people who work for someone else never quit worrying about getting fired. That is at least until they are forty, but probably until the day they retire or die. Today, I came to a point in some of my work where some of the problems I thought belonged to me were not really anything over which I had any control AND most of the people around me understood that. After the meeting where I arrived at that conclusion, I looked out the window and saw our magnificent Mt. Rainier. It is not any different than it has been since we arrived in Centralia and the same is true for my job. I am at the point in my work that if there is a problem in my domain and I cannot solve it, there are probably very few others that could either. That is more a product of longevity and experience than brilliance, but I need to remember that. People are almost never against me in these contexts, they just have their own burdens and their own angst about getting fired. I need to be on their side.
In yesterday’s post I talked about my video conference setup. I was frustrated that my Cowin E7 headphones had mechanical problems that led me to buy something new. My Plantronics BackBeat PRO 2 Special edition arrived a couple of days early and I could not be more happy so far. The fit and finish seems good. I will report back if I have problems. The case they sent it in was not as good as the Cowin hard shell case, but fortunately, the Plantronics headphones fit into the Cowin case. I am listening to President Trump’s China virus press conference and the headphones are working great.
I am in a meeting right now with nine of my colleagues, most of whom are in the Boston area, but which also includes myself in Washington state, one guy in Colorado, and one guy in Utah. Everyone in the meeting is in a different location. In addition to the people in the meeting, the guy running the meeting is sharing his screen with information on the topic we are discussing. It works amazingly well. I regularly use three different video conference tools–Google Hangouts, Slack, and Zoom. Every now and then I also use WhatsApp and Skype, but that is mostly that is for personal stuff.
Over the last week, I got in a new microphone and speakers that have made these meetings a good chunk better. About a day after I got these new parts connected and working, my bluetooth headphones (Cowin E7) broke mechanically. This was pretty disappointing because I had been very careful with them, always carefully returning them to their case when they were not in use. I ordered another set of headphones (Plantronics this time) a couple of days. With the China virus, deliveries have slowed down pretty dramatically from Amazon and Walmart so they will not arrive until late in the week–probably Thursday. All my housemates have to listen to both ends my rather boring conference calls until they arrive.
Today, with the sun shining here in Washington state, it seems to be a good day to discuss my progress at University of Nebraska Lincoln on my retirement* PhD program in the School of Natural Resources. The short version of the story is that everything is going well. I work closely with my adviser, Dr. Troy Gilmore, on research for my dissertation–we talk almost every day. We have an academic poster in progress and have enough research results for at least one scholarly article. The more we talk about what we are doing, the more we believe we are onto something that will be of interest to a lot of people in the world of hydrology.
What we are doing is figuring out a way to measure the water level in images of streams and rivers when normally available data from the United States Geological Survey is available at the site where the images were captured. We have done a literature review and it appears no one has attempted what have already accomplished. That is a good thing. So, my non-retirement, retirement PhD proceeds ahead full bore. The plan is to finish our first pass at the research, publish a poster and a paper or two, then when I retire, take classes to catch me up on the highly technical aspects of Natural Resources Science and Hydrology about which I know absolutely nothing before finishing the writing of a thesis based on research we have pretty much completed (with a few small nooks and crannies we need to fill in).
*Scheduled to retire and go full time on the PhD within about two years if COVID-19 does not foul up our plans.
Lorena has learned that the deer around her like tulips a whole lot better than they like daffodils. She is dedicating herself to planting a LOT more daffodils and some tulips, but only after she gets a fence or screen to protect them. That kind of seems to defeat the purpose, but it IS nice to have some tulips.
Hemex Health has released their Sickle Cell Disease diagnostic product (PDF brochure here). It is a big deal because it is inexpensive and fast (10 minutes) compared to previous methods of diagnosis. This product will save lives through early diagnosis. I was fortunate to develop some of the enabling technology for this product, for a brief period as a volunteer and later on as a contractor. Congratulations Peter, Patty and the whole team for this successful product release!
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