Lorena and Christian told me about a restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona they thought was a favorite in the one true taco shop competition. To be honest, I never though anything north of the Rio Grande would ever get close to the shop we loved in Lewisville, TX. Now, after visiting Los Taquitos in Phoenix (there is another one at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix), I think we might have to relegate Tacos Regio Monterrey into second place. That is NOT to suggest that Tacos Regio is in any sense diminished. I will eat there every time I get the chance and make and effort to make chances. It is just that Los Taquitos has somehow managed to make a taco that would be hard to turn down if I had the choice between the two and that is saying a LOT. The salsa is hot and sabrosa, they are served with two small, soft, corn tortillas along with beans and rice, and the carne asada is a nice cut, cooked to perfection. Christian says they are consistent, too. The strip mall ambiance is definitely a step up from the gas station parking lot ambiance of Tacos Regio, but that is almost a downside for this kind of eating experience–Tacos Regio was 100% Mexican, including the continuous operation of TV’s showing soccer and Mexican soap operas. If these two places were in the same town, it would make me schizophrenic.
Lorena missed a day or two in her exercise routine over the Thanksgiving break. The first day she returned to work out, she broke her previous record by a good chunk. Maybe it was the additional rest and maybe it was all that good turkey and mashed potatoes, but she is less than a minute away from hitting her longstanding goal of rowing 12,000 meters in under an hour. It is hard to describe what a herculean effort was required to get this far. She has been rowing consistently now for eight or nine years, rarely missing any of her workouts–two days per week on on elliptical (45 minutes) and two days per week on a a Concept 2 rower (60 minutes). Congratulations on the new record.
After one of the nicest Thanksgivings in recent memory (by accident really), we are all back to work. Lorena dropped Christian and off at the airport–Christian is headed back to Arizona and I am writing this post on the plane en route to Boston. Lorena then ran Kelly up to work, did her workout and is back home to take her last Astronomy class test of the semester. Actually, I got a lot done on the GaugeCam/PhD project during vacation last week and in transition back to my day job. It really is nice to have a break, but it is also nice to go back to work, too.
Our Thanksgiving this year came together very nicely even though our Thanksgiving was wildly disorganized and we did not even expect to be here before it all started. We are very grateful to our guests (Jack N., Dan T. Warren B., Aaron L., and Charlotte D., not to mention Kelly and Christian) because they all fit in nicely to a fairly chaotic but enjoyable Thanksgiving weekend. Most of us were able to attend a special, Spanish language church service on Friday which very much put the right kind of emphasis on the whole affair.
On top of that, Kiwi the surviving cat sister was the true miracle of the weekend. We emptied the oranges from a cardboard box and before we could move the box Kiwi climbed in. She spent most of the weekend there, minimizing the number of times we had to lock her in her room because she was getting into things to a record low.
We cooked two small turkeys over the weekend and were going to make soup, but Lorena accidentally threw out the broth from the simmer down of the turkey remains after we meticulously removed the fat and other detritus. Oh well. We will try again over Christmas.
Thanksgiving was great this year. We were not sure we were even going to be in town together, but it all got pulled together at the last minute. Kelly came mid-morning, a few guests arrived a little later. A few more arrived after that. One arrived even after dinner to spend the night. It was small impromptu and wonderful. Of course we ate too much. Kelly started it off with a cheese board and lox, crackers and cream cheese. Aaron L. made and brought a butter nut squash pie with coconut milk whipped topping (stunningly good). I cooked the (smallish) turkey and overruled Mom when she told me I needed to leave it in the oven for another 30-60 minutes–it was the best turkey we ever had. We set the table for eight and ate and ate and ate. Cannot wait until next year.
This is the first time in years that I have taken a vacation to do just… nothing. Well, not nothing because I have made great progress on the reboot of GaugeCam–the camera based water level measurement system developed in conjunction with professors from NCSU and UNL. I think I am about halfway to the point where we will be able to start hosting water level cameras in the wild again. Today, I was able to implement some new methods to automatically find the water level by evaluating vertical swaths of the area between the bowtie targets shown in the image above. This is a really good, new thing in that the only thing necessary to set up the camera is to tell the system the x-y position of the individual bow ties in the system after the camera is mounted and pointed at the bow tie target. This is much easier than the previous system where it was necessary to follow an elaborate procedure to tell the system how and where to look for the water level. Hopefully, we will be able to publish a paper on how we do this that will help me in my PhD program if I ever get accepted and pull the trigger to do it. I am getting very much closer on all that and have hope it will happen.
We are not the only ones in our area suffering the effects of cat entitlement! We laughed hard when Gena sent this picture along. Now that Christian is here Kiwi is acting even MORE entitled and we wonder that that is even possible. Maybe we ought to invite the eagles in to have a chat with her. In the end, the only workable solution I could find to actually be able to use the computer is to raise up my monitor a little and make some space between the monitor and the keyboard so she had a place to recline. That does not work so well when one uses their laptop only.
Christian captured this picture of our Bald Eagles yesterdays. This is the first time they landed on a tree other than the one with a dead top. They soared around in circles for four or five minutes, settled in only for a few minutes, then flew away. We have finally decided we need to get a Nikon F mount to T thread adapter so we can take better pictures. Christian took this one by just holding his camera up to the telescope after removing the eyepiece. It is better than the images we got by snapping shots through the eyepiece with our cellphones, but it is still not so great.
Christian arrived from Tempe last night to spend Thanksgiving week with us. We plan to celebrate his passing the Comprehensive Exam for his PhD within the next week with a big steak. It is nice to hear the sound of a classical guitar while he is here. Our whole plan for his visit is to just sit around and relax. Kelly should be joining us soon.
This last few months has been nothing short of just hard work for virtually the whole family. Lorena took her Astronomy class at Centralia College, Christian studied for his comprehensive exam, Kelly did her normal job, applied for other jobs, applied to schools, planned a trip to London and continued her effort to up her Python and machine learning skills, and I started a new job and started the application process for a PhD. Even Kiwi was hard at it, staring at the neighbor cat through the back window. So, Thanksgiving week, we will be here doing as little as possible other than to eat and relax with maybe a little shopping or something even less strenuous in the mix. I pick up Christian at the airport in a few hours. Kelly will be here mid-week.
University of Nebraska Lincoln has all my transcripts and my recommendation letters. I have written my “Letter of Purpose” statement, but have not turned it in until my buddy Troy has a chance to look at it and tell me if I am going the right direction. After that, all I have left is to take the GRE, then it is out of my hands and in the hands of the people of UNL. I am still agnostic about whether I am going to do this, but I expect that if we can work out a way for me to do this does not cost a ton of money and allows me both to go fairly slowly and have a decent quality of life, I will pull the trigger.
Veterans Day is a holiday at my current employer, so I spent the day working on the reincarnation of the GaugeCam project. It will be either a base for my PhD research or a contribution to those who are interested in remote water height measurement in the wild or both. The image below is a screenshot from my phone as it accesses the new software that runs on a Raspberry Pi in the house. The yellow lines show the result of the automatic pixel to world coordinate calibration calculation. There is more to do on it, but the technical part is complete–the rest is just nuts and bolts (saving/loading calibrations from/to disk, associating calibrations with ranges of images to which they apply, adding motion detection to determine if the camera or target has moved, etc.
This picture of Kiwi being miffed that Lorena was trying to sit on her chair does not have a whole lot to do with what I want to write about today, but it was pretty fun. Every time Lorena sat down, Kiwi pushed her away and then sat back with a look of irritation. I needed a picture for the post, this was available, and I wanted to have an excuse to put it up.
The whole family has been inspired to talk about some of the things we do to contribute and to get ahead. A lot of it has to do with the whole concept of life-long learning that Charles Murray talked about fairly frequently. In that context, I have almost always had a project on which I actively worked that contributed to something. I earned money on some of them, but a lot of the time I just worked because the project helped in some way and I was able to learn new stuff. The reality is that I did a lot of this work with now expectation of learning anything, but it happened anyway. Examples of these projects include work on the water level measurement camera (GaugeCam), sickle cell disease diagnostics, labor and delivery management, cataract surgery, water particle measurement in flowing water, and several others.
I think the things they all had in common were that they were hard projects (in the technical sense), they required a longitudinal effort of more than a year, a bunch of non-compensated (monetarily) work was required at the front end, and I had the ability to uniquely contribute because of my technical skills. Virtually every one of those kinds of projects turned into a significant amount of money–maybe not significant for some people, but surely significant for me. In addition, every one of them opened new opportunities. The work I am doing right now would not have been possible had I not learned a bunch of new stuff about embedded programming, web programming, machine learning, etc., etc. that I never would have gotten in my day job. More important than the money is the fact that I am doing invention daily. I know it is critical to have dedicated people to perform the mechanical tasks of daily life like farming, medicine, manufacturing, etc., but it is a gift to have spent a career at the bleeding edge of invention. There is always something new and interesting to learn and use that requires all the mental faculties to even understand, let alone exploit. I know that is not for everyone, but I am certainly grateful and humbled to have had this kind of work.
Christian has been thinking about what he wants to do next. His PhD adviser is a luminary in Christian’s research area and one of the best PhD advisers I have ever seen–he takes great care of his students, is inspirational, pushes them to do hard stuff, and demands quality in every aspect of their research. He gets the very best students because of that, so Christian rubs shoulders with a great group of fellow students every day. The get great jobs in a variety of places and one of them has an idea to start a business. That is a perfect setting to find the exact kind of projects that can lead to life-long learning. One buddy even wants them to start a business together–a highly technical business that requires the kind of preparation one can only receive in a math intensive PhD program. I say go for it!
I wanted Lorena to take Christian to get a monster steak to celebrate because it is a very big deal. They both had their heart set on a hamburger so they went to the Shake Shack instead. That he passed the exam means there is a lot of pressure off Christian now because his committee has acknowledged that he has the skill and understanding to perform PhD level work and that the dissertation he defined is worthy of a PhD on successful completion. He made his oral presentation, got beat up by his committee asking a gazillion relevant and irrelevant questions, got all his committee signatures turned into the department administration, sent off his report and presentation to his benefactors at MIT Lincoln Labs, and now he just needs to write and defend his dissertation.
This is particularly gratifying because a couple of months ago his adviser told him he better hurry up and get his comprehensives done because he was in danger of finishing his dissertation before he takes the exam. There is some chance he will be able complete his dissertation and walk the graduation this spring–a pretty aggressive goal, but a good one because he is chomping at the bit to finish and go on to extend his research into new areas or finds something similar. He (and we) are very grateful he really loves his research area in Information Theory.
It is difficult to explain what a seminal accomplishment this is in a discipline that demands mathematical rigor and also requires the work to be translated into a working field solution demonstrable on real hardware. Congratulations Christian! Again, I say this is a big deal and we WILL celebrate this with a very big steak when I am there at the end of the month whether you want to or not!
I was a little discouraged watching the election returns last night, but then I read these verses and got some perspective.
Luke 17:20-21 Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”
It reminded me of when I first heard the saying, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” My sister, Aunt Julia, told us that when some kids were acting up. Precisely right. In the end, the election was not all bad from my perspective, but this is definitively not my kingdom and not my king. Still, render to Caesar…
Tomorrow is Christian’s biggest day so for in the pursuit of a PhD in Electrical Engineering. He has been working like a mad man, often with not very much sleep to get everything ready. Lorena is in Tempe for the week to lend moral support. He is working more as a mathematician than an engineering in a particularly math intensive area of Electrical Engineering. We are confident it will all go fine, but however it comes out tomorrow, it will be a time to celebrate the passing of another milestone and for Christian and Lorena to go eat a really big steak.
Kelly voted today and had some nice and interesting things to be about it. Here is what she had to say:
Dad texted me today to inform me that Susan B. Anthony was the first woman in the US to cast a vote (this is a lie, it was someone else) which I thought was VERY inspirational and anyway I looked it up and even if she wasn’t the very first, she definitely got arrested for voting illegally in 1872 and if *that* story (on top of modern events if you’re a well adjusted & morally sensitive person unlike myself!) doesn’t stir up the flames of righteous feminine patriotism within your heart I don’t know what will! What a country we live in that even my contemptible, procrastinating tush is allowed to fill out a ballot online, print it, and drop it off in the ballot box up until 8pm on election day! Apathy is for spineless chumps and I know my Rosie the Riveter kitchen plaque would say the same!! Get out there & vote your conscience!.
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(this is a picture i took of myself when i felt cute but also had to hide from employees in an anthropologie downtown bc i was using a hidden outlet to charge my phone at 2%, which is as good of a depiction of my political life as any I think).
Enough said. Vote pro-life.
We live in interesting times. The most notable non-presidential election of my lifetime is scheduled to take place this coming Tuesday. I am not wildly involved in any of this, but like to know what is going on. I do not trust any of the traditional news sources–we have not subscribed to a paper and ink newspaper for a couple of decades now and we do not have a television. That leaves the internet and, to a much lesser extent, the radio. Fortunately, I think it is possible figure out what is going on better than any time in my lifetime. I will continue to depend on non-traditional news sources and continue to vet my current sources at the same time I look for new ones.
The fall (the only good thing about Halloween) is when caldo and home made bread season starts in the Chapman household. Really, it has only been the caldo season for the last few years since our bread machine broke. Caldo is beef stew. I grew up eating wonderful beef stew made by my mother, but the Mexican version that Lorena makes has a special punch. In Mexico, it is common to put short pieces of corn on the cob in the stew. That adds incredible taste to both the stew and the corn on the cob. Now that Lorena has a KitchenAid mixer, she has been on a home made bread kick so now it is no longer just caldo. She has made the bread twice, but has not yet got the yeast quantity right, so the bread has been a little flat. She thinks she has the yeast thing figured out now so I have high expectations for the next batch.
If you click on the image (or here), you can see a live version of the new GaugeCam web server. Right now, the program is running on a Raspberry Pi in our house. The reason it is live web page is so professors at University of Nebraska Lincoln and North Carolina State University can critique the design and view adjustments as new features are implemented. There is on-going scholarly work associated with this software. One refereed journal article has already been published (click here) and two more are in the works. Click here to see an article on the early phases of the work on the web site of a commercial camera company (full disclosure–I wrote the article). The goal is to accommodate a variety of sensors that produce 2d and 3d images as well as point measurements and hyper-spectral images. Hopefully, this effort will continue on into my retirement both as a way to contribute and maybe even earn a PhD for this and previous work on similar projects.
Lorena took two pictures with her Pixel 2 camera and the software automatically stitched them together. We thought it was pretty cool.