I am still not full convinced I can or should do this PhD thing, but all the pieces are still in motion. I expect I should be able to make a decision to move forward or not by late winter or sometime in the spring. In the meantime, I continue to make progress on the GaugeCam reboot as Open Source software (free as in liberty and free as in beer). The video speaks for itself. We hope to present a journal article and make the beta software available for download by spring. The video kind of speaks for itself
It was really nice to get back to Washington this morning (at 11:30) even though we had to drive through a rain storm filled with a couple of bad wrecks and construction on the freeways. We were pretty tired when we got to bed at 1:30 AM, but were, as always, grateful and amazed when we woke up this morning to a spectacular fall view with the leaves changing out into the distance from the deck. I have to turn around and go back to Boston in a week, but even that is getting better. I found out that I have earned “Lifetime Platinum Elite” status at the hotel where I stay, because I spent so much time in a hotel in Prescott, Arizona when we lived in Raleigh. That means they will give me high priority in reserving a room along with a few other perks. In addition to that, I am five flights from that same kind of special status on the airline I currently use to get to Boston. That means that after the first of the year, I will start getting bumped to first class sometimes and I will able to get on the plane before everyone else. Not so bad, but it will be even nicer when I do not have to fly to a far away place every other week.
When we lived in Raleigh and the kids were going to Wake Technical Community College and North Carolina State University, Christian did most of his studying at the bar in the kitchen while Lorena worked there. They loved that. It is really nice for both of them to get the chance to do that again. Lorena absolutely loves to cook and even more so when she can do it for the kids. Now, though, she has to study herself. The Astronomy class she is taking at Centralia College is a lot tougher than we imagined. One thing she has been trying to figure out is how to get the 10 extra credit points given for visiting a big telescope. 
There is one that qualifies not too far from our house in Olympia, but there is an amazing one–one of the best in the world in Arizona, the Lowell Observatory, not too far from Flagstaff. Christian went there and got the postcard to the right. On the back, it explains that Pluto, the ex-planet (we still like to think that it is), was discovered with the aid of that telescope. The timing is not going to work for us to visit there in time for Lorena to get her credits, but we should enjoy the one at Olympia during Thanksgiving week. The Lowell Observatory is definitely on our radar now, too, and we plan to make a special trip there. The Astronomy class may not be an easy one, but it has been very, very interesting for all of us.
Lorena is visiting Christian right now as he prepares for his comprehensive exams for his PhD two weeks from now. We always get some kind of a surprise when we go to visit him. This visit was no different. Christian’s friend, Beau, got him a leather strap and canvas book bag. Christian loved it. He wanted to make sure his books stayed dry so he treated the canvas with beeswax. Now, beside being very cool looking, it is now very functional. Lorena says he uses it all the time. He also started a collection of some other stuff I will write about tomorrow.
I learned tonight that the world series is starting here in Boston at Fenway Park. The Dodgers are playing the Red Sox. I have fond memories of watching baseball games in my youth. It was the one sport where I really did not have any ambitions of being competitive, so it was just nice to watch. I grew up in one of the few baseball towns in Oregon (it was mostly all track and field all the time–Nike/Duck U.). My brother, Doug and I watched American Legion and Babe Ruth League baseball during our youth and enjoyed it a lot. In the mid-1980’s when I lived in Silicon Valley, I attended matinee games at Candlestick Park. It was a great joy. Different from other sports. It would be nice to go to a Major League Baseball game, but there is something that is even more compelling to me about amateur baseball played for fun. My undergraduate university (Oregon State) has won three NCAA national championships. The head coach went to high school with my little sisters. Still, that is not nearly as compelling as hometown baseball. We currently live in a baseball town. Maybe I should take Lorena to a high school or American Legion or Babe Ruth league game this spring.
For the first time in several years, I did a workout last night that was more rigorous than a brisk walk. I spent just a 1000 meters on a Concept 2 rowing machine and felt pretty pathetic when compared to Lorena’s 12,000 meters in an hour. Working out and eating right while I travel is hard for me. Still, I do not have any excuses. I am within walking distance of a Whole Foods (not my favorite grocery store, but it will have to do) so I can eat OK foods. There is no workout facility at the hotel where I stay, but we have access to a great workout facility with three rowing machines just like the one we have in our workout facility at home.
Now that I am in my sixties, I have already gone through the pain of trying to start out programs too fast, so now I have decided to start at 1000 meters, go at that for a week, then figure out how fast I can add time and meters in subsequent weeks. I am going to try to do five days per week and will modify that as needed. At the same time, I am getting in plenty of steps on my Fitbit, so I am not doing too bad for the amount of calories I am burning. My goal is to see if I can get back up to 7500 meters in 40 minutes, four or five times per week and try to start eating right again. I know I will feel and work better if I do this. Just takes discipline. We will see if I have it.
I am in Boston right now and am in a great mood. Three good things happened since I got here. First, I found the fanciest business cards I have ever had on my desk when I got in to work work this morning. They are on thick card stock with die-cut corners, full color. I hate to give these things away. Even the box they came in is a keeper. Second, when I arrived at the hotel last night, they asked me what I wanted for my Platinum Marriott membership. I had not realized that I had spent enough time in the Marriott Residence Inn in Prescott, Arizona that I am now a lifetime platinum member of Marriott which makes getting what I want on my stays here way easier. The third thing was that when I asked about the workout facility for the hotel at the desk at the Marriott this morning, they told me they did not have one in the hotel, but I have privileges to use the world class workout facility a half a block away. It has a beautiful Olympic size swimming pool and just amazing workout facilities. I am going to try it out tonight and Lorena is going to love it.
My cousin, Trisha, attended the Donald Trump rally in Elko, Nevada yesterday. She lives only a mile from the venue. She said it was amazing about every school bus and piece of heavy equipment in the county was used as crowd control and security barriers. The crowd was huge and 6000-7000 people were turned away because they ran out of room. It sounds like it was very high energy and consisted of the standard stump speech kind of stuff. What was the best was the Trump did not use a teleprompter. Everything he said was from him. He might not be the most polished orator, but much better than the previous occupant of his office who read in monotone from a script in front of him.
This morning I finished a read through the Bible that I had started in November of 2017. I had never done that before. I have to admit it was very gratifying and possibly the most enjoyable since I started reading more systematically in 2006. I keep the list of my reading here. I do most of my reading the first thing in the morning at my computer using the Xiphos software package (it only runs on Linux and Windows–real computers, not Apple), but I do a little reading in an actual book. This read was of the ESV. I plan to continue my pattern of reading through the whole Bible (Old and New Testaments), then reading through the New Testament two additional times. So next, my plan is to read through the ESV New Testament a couple of times and then start over again with the NASB or NIV. I want to do both of them, but I am not sure of the order. After that, if I am brave enough, I will probably take a shot at the Reina Valera 1960 Version in Spanish. But that is two and a half years from now if I maintain my current reading enthusiasm.
We had a power outage for about an hour this afternoon starting at about 3. We have been so busy lately that if we had not had one, we would not have seen our eagles. And, this is the first time we have been able to take a half-way decent picture ourselves through Bob’s telescope. The backdrop for the picture is, of course, Mt. Rainier, with the diagonal white stripe at the center top of the image being the slope of the mountain. We really need to stop and smell the roses more frequently. This is life affirming stuff.
I took this picture sitting at the gate in PDX to catch an early morning flight to SFO. It is a day trip. I am one of those guys that feels uncomfortable not getting to the airport at least a couple of hours early. Consequently, I spend a lot of time like this–sitting in an uncomfortable seat attempting to get some work done on a screen that is small enough that I either cannot see the text or, if I make the font bigger, do not have enough screen real estate to do meaningful work. I have hope this will all come to an end in only a handful of years, but I have been wrong before. Maybe I will have cause to travel in retirement or just need/want to keep on working.
I think it is a mercy that one tends to forget how lazy and irresponsible they were in their youth. That is certainly true for me. I took and odd trajectory to get to my Masters of Science degree. It started with a really bad undergraduate degree in Marketing–I do not have the transcript I ordered yet, but I am cringing just thinking about it. That was followed by a thoroughly mediocre (3.00 GPA from a pretty good tech school–the first transcript to arrive), but that should have been profoundly better had I been paying attention. I started out well, but then fell off the wagon for whatever reason. That I got was accepted into graduate school for a PhD and an MS, both in Engineering is almost miraculous. Well the PhD was less miraculous because by the time I did my MS, the blood had started flowing back to my brain and I did a good job. That will be a story for when my other transcripts arrive.
I got this for Lorena for our anniversary and am putting it up here to see if she actually reads my blog or just SAYS she does. The reality is, she has wanted one of these things for many, many years. My hope is that she is going to make me some homemade bread and even some egg bagels. Also, I have a feeling that this will be a big draw for Kelly to come home. It comes on Tuesday and I will report back whether Lorena sees this before the thing arrives. She USED to read my blog every day, but after 26 years, my shtick has admittedly gotten a little stale.
Well, I thought I was going to waffle myself out of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) because I am old, experienced, and should never have to suffer such indignities again because I have done it so many times in the past. My hopes were shattered earlier this week when I heard from my buddy who had talked to the bureaucratic high mucky-mucks at the UNL graduate admissions office. I indeed have to take the General Test (thankfully none of the specialized tests). So, in the next few months I will have to drive either to Portland or to Tacoma or take the train to Seattle to spend the night with Kelly so I can go to a test center and try to remember stuff I have not considered for over thirty years. I suppose I should not let such a small indignity prevent me from moving forward, but if I am not up to the task it will give me pause–not so much because it will prevent me from entering the program but because I was not up to the task of taking a general knowledge test.
Lorena and I got married on a beautiful fall afternoon at El Tio in Monterrey 26 years ago today. Grateful.
Forgive me, for another picture of the scenery here on the west side of Centralia looking east. Lorena took this picture about an hour ago and it reminded me of how much there is for which to be grateful. With lots of stuff going on at work and the new consideration of entering a PhD program, it is good to be reminded of the magnificence of creation and the Creator.
This is a snippet from a larger video Lorena took right out our front door maybe twenty feet from where we were standing. There are lots of deer right now including a few young bucks.
One positive outcome of this new effort to get a PhD in my retirement years is the impetus it will give to the spinning back up of the GaugeCam project as a wholly open source project (free as in freedom and free as in beer, as they say). I will be doing the heavy lifting on the software end of the project, taking over the server part and maintaining and improving the client parts. I have started on a very basic web server to show the graphs of the water height and point to our blog and downloads and documentation. I have a bit of a learning curve on this, but am on my way (see above).
Now I just have to figure out a way to include the bean inspection in all this.
I ordered a bright red raincoat and had it shipped to the Boston office. Bright red because it gets dark early in the winter and I do not want to get hit by a truck. It is not really a winter coat, but something more than just a windbreaker. The plan is to wear sweaters underneath and get some weatherproof shoes when the snow hits. My decision to take Uber from the airport to the hotel and back seems to still be a fine decision because it forces me to walk the mile and a half to the Whole Foods (not a fan, but it is the only grocery store within shooting distance) and driving in Boston in the winter is, I think, a sport for younger men with faster reactions. The raincoat will join my Boston scale and a large container of skin moisturizer that I keep in the file cabinet at my desk. I am sure that repository will grow.
It has been a long time since I have been in college. Fortunately, my adviser from UTEP where I did my Masters degree, Dr. Carroll Johnson, is still around and willing to write a recommendation. He is what a professor should be–truly looking out for his students while maintaining high academic standards. In addition, because of my volunteer work with professor Francois Birgand from the Biological and Agricultural Engineering department at NCSU, I have a second academic recommendation with whom I hope and plan to continue working whether this thing works out or not. After that, I got a couple of stellar industrial references with whom I have worked for over thirty years. I hope it is good enough. In my discussions with the professor who is sponsoring me, he said that if I meet the bare minimum, his recommendation will carry more weight than recommendations. Still they cannot hurt. Next come the transcripts. Some of them are over 40 years old. Who knows how that will go. The one funny deal is that if you are wanting to get a Masters degree, the transcripts can be no older than ten years old, but if you want a PhD, there is no expire date.