The main office area of the office in the basement has been being painted over the last week or so. I have been relegated to the dining room table. When I moved back down and was shuffling things around, I found the the lights Gene made for the bean sorting project. I am going to get them sent off to him so he can start sending me some images. We might get lucky and have our original setup work, but I think that is pretty unrealistic. We will definitely have to make modifications quite a few times until we get the whole lighting designed tweaked to the point it works with the falling beans. That is not to mention the fact that we have not even started at all on the mirror setup to see both sides of each bean.
We saw a beautiful eclipse of the moon last Sunday night like we had never seen it before. It was a spectacular sight both through the microscope our friend Bob lent us, but also with the naked eye. We tried to take pictures of it, but just did not have the equipment we needed. Luckily, our friend Scott P. (he and Gary P. are staying with us for a couple of days), passed along some shots his dad took. The thought we had was that not only did the camera and lens have to be pretty amazing, the setup of this shots took a highly skilled photographer. These shots really captured the awe of this event.
I was able to advance on the bean sorter program sufficiently to send the computer and camera off to Gene so he can start working on the lighting. I am amazed that we are continue to move forward. This project is not moving along at lightening speed, but with Gene’s efforts and great mechanical skill and knowledge we make steady progress. Hopefully, he will be able to take some images of dropping beans and it will allow us to see the spread of the beans and whether I believe I can see them well enough in the images to do the calculations needed to sort them properly. The next big challenge is two-fold: 1) getting the beans to fall as straight as possible and 2) getting the mirror set up. After that, we will attack the lighting.
This is the normal view I see from my easy chair. The chair is a Barcalounger, just like the one my dad used for the entire time I lived with him. The one where all of us kids rifled to find spare change that dropped there from his pockets. The view is about average for a winter day–not as good as some days, but better than others. Lorena chose this chair and bought it for me along with a matching couch for the living room. Even though the view from the chair is spectacular and we love the house and everything about it, we are thinking about a change. We are not sure whether we will do it or not. It largely depends on both my work and where the kids land. More importantly, it is about where we might be a help. This is a hard thing to know and balance. It makes me want to be more sensitive to the Holy Spirit.
We moved Kelly’s things down to Centralia from Seattle yesterday. The coarse culture and poor planning that are the hallmarks of that city elevated the hassle of the move by a good margin. Nevertheless, we had great help to get the big stuff out of the second floor apartment and into the U-Haul. We got it all unloaded from the truck in about an hour after we got here. It is amazing how much easier it is to move stuff when you do not have to go up or down a narrow set of stairs. Lorena and Kelly made pasta with shrimp and we all went to bed early. Fortunately, when everything settles out, her new company will pay for the move to whatever new digs she finds. That is four or five months from now, so we get to have her here in the state for a little while longer.
Kelly is at the start of a new chapter in her life that will feature several months of chaos followed by something pretty big. The first step is to move to short-term housing for a few months. I have been sworn to secrecy on the rest. So, über-kid-helper Lorena is up in Seattle right now helping her pack. Tomorrow, I will go load up her sofa, her bed, some other furniture, and a bunch of boxes to haul down to Centralia for storage in our garage until she makes her move to the next (actually, very) big thing. I can hardly wait to be able to talk about it because it is a big deal.
The new $243 plus tax computer arrived today and I have to admit that it is great. I loaded Linux Mint, OpenCV, Boost, Qt Creator (only for the IDE), the Wt libraries, downloaded the bean sort code from Subversion and had it compiling in three hours or so and that includes building OpenCV, Boost, and the Wt libraries from source.
Tomorrow I hope to get the thing taking pictures via the USB 3.0 port so it will be ready to ship to Gene early next week. The biggest challenge is keeping Kiwi out of the way. Maybe that says something about how hot the thing runs.
A couple of days ago, I broke down and bought a refurbished laptop for the bean sorting project. It surely seems to be a smoking good deal at $243.09 plus tax. I have been working to get the thing running on a Raspberry Pi and that works fine, but is way more hassle than we need during the development stage. It was necessary to hook up a keyboard, a mouse, a monitor, and the camera which, during the development stage, needs to be moved around a lot. It is just easier to do it on a laptop.
The other really big benefit is that, for the Raspberry Pi, I needed to do my development and testing on my home laptop, commit the code to a repository, switch the camera from the laptop to the Raspberry Pi and rebuild the code on the command on the RPi. That was a hassle. Now I will be able to put the entire development environment on the laptop and send it off to the mechanical designer (Gene). We can get all the lighting and controls developed with a full blown computer, then switch over to whatever cheap embedded computer we pick when everything is working. In the meantime, when I get some new code for Gene to consume, it will be way easier for him to build it and test it out with duplicate systems.
I usually get up very early because I need to coordinate my work with the people in the Boston office, a three hour difference from where we leave. Fortunately (or unfortunately–however one looks at it), Kiwi is an earlier riser, too. The thing is, she only rises long enough to park herself on my lap when I start work. After 10-15 minutes, she gets irritated with me moving around to much for her to sleep, so she moves to the area between the keyboard and the monitor. That is way more manageable because the most I usually have to do is push her head down when I cannot see something on the screen.
I added another image taken from the same place, but an hour later. The mountain frequently appears pink as the suns starts to set in the evening–often it is much more pink than what is shown here. We are grateful to have this spectacular view.
I cannot help myself. It is January in rainy Washington state and yet Mt. Rainier looks like this from our living room window in the middle of the winter. This is important because we have been trying to make some retirement decisions. Christian is months away from graduating with his PhD and who knows where he will land after he graduates. Kelly has an opportunity on the east coast for, at least, a couple of years that she cannot pass up. I am, God willing, about three years from retirement. Everything seems to be up in the air and there is no way to know where we should be or what we should be doing in the next few years. This view from our window and our kids love for our new place is going a good way in helping us make that decision.
Last week, one of my very long term colleagues (Frank E. ~35 years) flew out to Boston to consult with my current employer on my behalf. We had dinner one evening and discussed retirement and how to do it. I learned a lot and am ever grateful for his mentorship when I was a young engineer and, even more, his mentorship now as a soon to retire, senior level engineer. Based on my conversations with Frank, Lorena and I are pretty sure now that we should stay where we are in Washington, both for financial reasons and for spiritual and personal reasons. Grateful is the best word to describe about these recent interactions. God is good.
Kiwi is getting older and her grooming skills are not what they used to be so Lorena ran her down to the local PetCo to bring her shots up to date. While she was there, she scheduled a bath, grooming, and toenail clipping. Kiwi hates that kind of thing, but she is easier to manage this time than when she was younger. She was given a clean bill of health and even though she is a little out of sorts, she now longer has matted hair, her toenails do not scratch up everything in their path and she smells very nice. Here she is waiting for her ride home. It would have been impossible to let her free in the car when she was younger, but not she sits there nicely. I think the motion of the car puts her to sleep. We plan to do this again every 2-3 months now.
This is the development GUI for the coffee bean sorter project. I am amazed at how easy it was to develop using the latest version of the Wt libraries. This will allow Gene to istalk pictures of falling beans that I can evaluate to see whether they will be good candidates for analysis and to adjust the lighting and shutter times.
A month or so ago, Kelly’s old boss from her college internship to ask her to return to work for him as a data scientist. It is quite a prestigious institution at the bleeding edge of lots of different technologies. Her job will be to work on a range of problems, improving her skills as she goes. The reality is this would not be a bad place for Christian either, if he can get hired there. She can either continue to work as a data scientist and/or get paid for getting a PhD in Statistics at Johns Hopkins University. She is really grateful for the opportunity, especially because she knows the people and the kind of work she would do.
I got a book for Christian at Christmas time. While he was with us, I read the preface. I liked it so much, I bought for Kindle on my phone. The premise is that the business model represented by Google will be supplanted by a business model with block-chain money that is fundamentally more secure and monetarily stable. I love the way the author, George Gilder, writes and I believe he is write on this. This is not the first time he rightly called a sea change like this would represent.
One of the things that was particularly interesting about it was that the technology underlying the functionality that will cause the change is precisely what Christian has studied and researched for the last four years for his PhD program: Information Theory
Lorena took Kiwi to Petco this morning for her annual shot and de-worming. I use the word annual very loosely here because Kiwi has not been for awhile. She was amazing better behaved than in past years and the vet said she was healthy. Lorena was even able to let her run free in the car on the drive to Olympia instead of in her pet carrier. After she arrived at the store, she did fine in Lorena’s arms for quite awhile, but eventually needed to be put in the above cardboard box while she waited her turn. She is healthy, but old and has gotten very skinny–enough so they had to take three jabs at her for the vaccination because she did not have enough meat to make it easy. We do not think she will be around much longer, but who knows, we have been wrong about that before.
I lost my wallet on my last trip to Boston and suffered through the pain of cancelling all my credit cards, then ordering new ones along with a replacement drivers license and a replacement Nexus card. When Christian lost his wallet, he did something about it that he recommended to Lorena and I. He bought a two Tile key and wallet trackers. I ordered four of them–two for Lorena and two for me. It is the little device circled in red on my key ring. I also have one in my wallet. The application also allows me to track my cell phone in case it gets lost. The way it works is that everyone who has that app running on their phone knows and broadcasts the location of every “Tile” within Bluetooth distance to a central server. As a user, I have access to that server to see where my tiles were last seen. Christian said it has saved him several times. It also allows a user to tell the Tile to beep from his cell phone. The only rub is the sound is not so loud for an old guy with bad hearing like me, but all in all it seems like it will be a big help! A pack of four of these little Tiles with year-long replaceable batteries cost $60.
Kelly sent this photo of her and Christian yesterday. They had a pretty good time in San Francisco over the New Year. More than anything, I think they are pretty tired. Lorena and I had a quiet day at home because I was still suffering from the residual of a cold. We DID have a big steak with a grilled onion, and a baked potato. Also, I spent most of the day working on the bean sorting project. Gene has made really big progress, so I need to get an application going so that he can have a way to see what the camera captures as the beans drop. That will allow him to develop the lighting. It is a little more complicated than just creating a capture application. We really need to find a way for me to upgrade is program (running on a Raspberry Pi) over the internet. I have done this before, so it will be great to get a little more experience at doing this sort of thing.
New Year’s Eve was good. Lorena and I spent a couple of hours at our friends’, Stan and Diane, house with a small group of older folks from our church. We, of course, ate too much then came home a little early, talked and went to bed. I spent a good chunk of this holiday season in bed or an easy chair with a cold so I had a lot of time to reflect on life and what we are doing with it. When I say we, I mean Lorena and I. That reflection led to more questions than answers. Do we live in a house that is too big? How soon should I retire? Do stay here or go somewhere else when that happens? Or sooner? I guess my New Year’s Resolution is to seek some guidance from God on those questions. I am surely thankful to be married to Lorena as my she wants precisely the same things–the right, or at least good answers.
I am averaging 241 posts per year. I am going to try to maintain that as I go forward even though I have moved to more of a diarist posture where only I (and select friends) can see what I post. In a few months I will hit fifteen years. It has absolutely been worth it.
The sun is shining in Centralia. The pure steam coming from the coal fired generation plant on the left side of this image and one cloud above Mt. Rainier is all that is in the vast expanse of sky behind the house. We are very thankful to be here in Centralia right now. We love our house, I love my work, there is a path toward retirement that might be a little rocky, but God is in control of all that–I have a lot of faith that I will get what I need and it might not be the easy path that is what I want, but it will be better to be out of my hands and in the hands of God than planning my own path.
One thing that has become evident over the last months (maybe years) on which I need to operate, is that it is not good, not scriptural even, to engage with people of bad faith or bad will. The good news is that there are a lot of people of good will and good faith–not perfect by any stretch, but of good will and good faith. So, after doing an inventory of the things in which I am currently involved, I have decided I will work on one and possible two of five projects. All of them are worthy projects, but the people involved in the one or two are people in whom I have confidence. The other three or four, not so much. Life is too short and I do not have so many years left to invest in projects with people of dubious motivation. It is not that I am such a great prize myself, but I want to be.