My hard work paid off this weekend. I am working with my long-time friend and colleague, Frank, to develop some EKG software for our $27 EKG’s. Actually, the EKG part has gone up now to $51 and the Arduino needed to run it costs another $20. At any rate, the software shown here accommodates six channels (even though that has not yet been tested because I only have one channel). It needs some cleanup, but it works great.
When I started building my $27 EKG, I just assumed there would be an excellent library to chart the output to the screen in a compelling and useful way. There are a couple of libraries that are pretty good, but they are either really old, have bad open source licenses, are not fast enough (we need to eat a lot of data in real time) or they do not do exactly what we want. It is a little bit of a hassle to write something like this when in a rush, but it could not be helped. That is what I did most of the day yesterday. I hope to have the thing all up and running in the next few days. It will be useful to have an unencumbered library for a lot of the things we want to do with this little project and probably for future projects, too, so it is not a loss.
We are enjoying our time here in Texas. One of the best things about Texas, now more than ever time, is its place as firewall against many of the evils of America’s current coarse and ignorant culture. You can even see it encroaching here, but if there will ever be a bastion of sanity against the current evil zeitgeist, I am sure it will be somewhere here in Texas. I got to thinking about this because of something someone wrote in a totally unrelated context:
No doubt about it: conservative Bible Christians are under attack — subjected to stereotypes that, for any other group (except Texans) would be taken to constitute bigotry.
The thing that is good and bad about Texas is the frequently don’t care what non-Texans think because really don’t get Texas. How could they? They are not Texan. I am not a Texan and never will be. In some ways, I know I do not understand it all myself. I don’t want to be a Texan, but that does not mean I do not have anything other than a huge (as it should be here in Texas) appreciation for all the good about this wonderful place.
I have been following a discussion in the comments of a blog where a good number of fairly thoughtful people hang out. Some of the blog posts are pretty interesting, but the discussion that occurs after the posts is often even more enlightening than the posts themselves. The author of the blog engages in the comments along with several PhD’s in (I think I have this right) Math, Physics and Chemistry. The less credentialed people are equally as competent in their participation.
Atheist and skeptics show up there on a semi-regular basis. I am just going to put a couple of the comments here that are toward the bottom (at this point) and let them speak for themselves. The whole interchange was really quite interesting. As part of a longer discussion, a fellow with the moniker Jeannette, an atheist who I think actually believes she is making a coherent argument responds to commenter BillT’s observation about what she had previously written (link to comments):
From BillT:
Jeanette,
As I said before, good and bad are relative to a goal.
And this is what is so sad. Ted Bundy raped, tortured and murdered untold numbers of women but all you can say is that it might be bad if by doing that he didn’t achieve his goal. He was by any rational definition a monster. A heinous, depraved and evil man. But you say he’s only bad relative to his goal which it’s very, very likely he achieved (he certainly thought he did). What has it come to Jeanette that you can’t say he was “a heinous, depraved and evil man” and have it mean something other that he didn’t achieve his goal or that it’s meaningless. What has it come to?
Response by Jeanette:
I can certainly say he performed “heinous, depraved and evil” actions. Ted Bundy’s actions were horrendously bad according to my moral perspective—my goal of human flourishing / fulfillment for all.
I also believe his actions were bad according to his own stated goal of freedom, but I may be wrong. They might have been good according to his goals. I can’t know for sure.
I don’t think Ted Bundy—the person—was good or bad. I think that is also a meaningless statement. It was his behavior and the consequences they caused that were good/bad as measured against a goal.
I regularly read the Bayou Renaissance Man blog by a science fiction (and now western) novel writer who is especially interesting when he writes about debt. I read an article to which he pointed about a guy who got into serious debt while getting a Bachelors degree in English (bad idea), then went to Alaska to work as a laborer to pay it off (good, but unnecessary if he would have gotten a decent degree). He wanted to double down on his first bad degree choice by going to Duke for a Masters degree in liberal studies, but chose to live in a van in the parking lot and work menial jobs so he would be debt free when he finished. All of that would have been completely unnecessary if he had gotten a degree that would allow him to get a job in the first place.
The reality is that what he did was pretty cool. He was a whole lot smarter than me with respect to how he thought about debt when he was in his twenties. I in am one of those guys who, while I funded my 401K over my entire career and am in OK shape when it comes to that, I did not pay much attention to any of this at all until the blood started going to my brain sometime after my 40th birthday. So when I woke up in the early 2000’s, I had to scramble to do a bunch of things others had already accomplished. I discovered Dave Ramsey and got out of debt. That was good, but I had a finite amount of time to prepare for things like paying for the kids’ college and getting my house paid off. It was compounded by the fact that the kids both skipped high school, so my college payments started way early than I had initially planned.
I am going to try to write about the debt problem a little here. The focus is not going to be on global or national economics, but on what I did to shore up my own situation and what I expect to be another economic meltdown within the next few years. It is especially interesting to me right now because we are in the Dallas, Texas area in the middle of a house buying frenzy–houses in our town stay on the market for around three days and are selling well above appraisal value. All the signs indicate that the house of cards will come tumbling down soon. I am not sure what I should do, but I know I do not want to participate in the frenzy.
I found out today that I only work 0.8 miles, walking distance from a WhatABurger fast-food restaurant. Even though I love the things and get a couple mile walk in if I go down there, it is a bad thing. The problem is that I love them and they are definitely not on my diet. I think they have that “White Castle” effect with me. Not everyone likes WhatABurger, but I love them. People who do not like White Castle Sliders do not get why people like them and vice-versa. I think my addiction started while I was getting my Masters degree at UTEP. At that time, Taco Bell and WhatABurger were the two closest fast food joints with cheap food. I am addicted for life to both.
This is one of those posts I have to start by saying it is a true story. So, Lorena’s number two brother, Jorge was in a wreck this morning. It involved two trucks that ran into each other swiping both the trucks off the road along with Jorge. Jorge was OK, but it scared him to death. The police showed up, the insurance guy showed and they had everything just about worked out when the owner of the property on the showed up. It took them an extra couple of hours at the scene because of damage done to the fence. Take a close look at the fence. It was quite impressive to me that the land owner actually convinced the insurance guys to compensate him for damage to the fence. It was also quite impressive that this could have happened just about anywhere in the world. I think insurance turns people into victims–not that we don’t need it, but give me a break. You have to think though that the guy was probably a soccer player. Soccer, of course is a big thing in Mexico. You see what happens when one soccer play light brushes another soccer player in a even the most unimportant of matches.
Lorena arrived at an amazing milestone today. She rowed over 10,000 meters, burning over 500 calories in a little over an hour. I am sure she will get that time under an hour pretty soon, but the fact that she did over 10K in a single sitting on a Concept 2 rowing machine is an impressive feat. She has worked out hard on an uncompromisingly regular schedule for well over a decade now. Kudos to her.
I had a little bit of a breakthrough on my EKG project last night. I actually had the idea when I was completely away from the project for a few days. It caused me to re-read the manual where it said the readings from the EKG are sent down the serial cable in big endian order. Each value for a 10-bit number takes up two bytes. The high order byte can either be first or last. The receiving computer expected little endian order. I now swap the bytes before they are plotted or recorded and we get the beautiful plot above. You can barely see four little lines below the left side of the signal plot. Those lines make up the legend for the electrode channels. The system can handle six channels, but we are going to try to do just four on this setup. The next step is to get the graph to be a moving strip chart. The graph, as it is right now, just writes over itself.
I completely duplicated my current setup for a friend, Frank who is joining this project. He is way more skilled than I in a lot of this stuff–especially the electrical engineering parts. I need to order myself an additional three channels of electronics, but that is on its way to Frank right now.
P.S. We are thinking of cross platforming (Windows/Linux) and open sourcing (free as in both freedom and beer) the software and writing a user guide/tutorial on how to set the thing up if anyone shows any interests because there does not seem to be anything out there that is really hobby friendly. If I am wrong, maybe someone can correct me. Because of our day jobs we are still months away from that.
We started looking at other school options for Lorena because of the low quality of the community college system here in Texas. The criteria we are using to find something for Lorena are things like cost, accreditation, location (whether the school is one where we might envision ourselves living so should attend on campus some day), the regional and national reputation of the school (the rankings by institutions like US News are almost always completely bogus). We loved the Rankings done by the National Research Council when we looked for graduate schools in Electrical Engineering for the Christian, but Lorena is working on an undergraduate degree in business and they do not rank business schools nor undergraduate degrees.
What we found is that both Arizona State University and Oregon State University have stellar online bachelors degree programs in business. Arizona State has a significantly better business school, but either would be perfect for our needs. Both schools would accept the bulk of Lorena’s credits from her community college experience and there is a good chance we would be willing to land in either place for a year or two (if I retire or get a work from home job) so she could finish up on campus. We are going to continue looking, but at least we have some options that are profoundly better than the community college we investigated here in Texas.
Lorena took all her transcripts into the local community college north of Dallas, Texas and to say her experience there differed greatly from virtually every other community college she has attended would be an understatement. They said they would take almost none of her credits because they were taken in a quarter based system rather than a semester system. When she pointed out that most of the classes she has taken were in a semester system, they said (there were three people there looking at her paperwork), I kid you not, “We don’t care.” So in short, the facilities were shabby, the administration was surly and non-helpful, they had non-standard transfer processes, they required Lorena to take tests required for people just entering the system and not people transferring in with more than half of the credits required to graduate–and there is more, but you get the drift. It was truly a bad experience. These are the same credits accepted at better community colleges and state universities in Oregon, North Carolina and Florida. Oh well, we will find another place for her to attend. Maybe it is time for her to start at a four year college.
It might be just us, but I have to admit we have struggled to find a good Mexican food place here in Texas. Of course we can get it with our Mexican family and friends, but it seems like what they represent to be Mexican food here is really Tex-Mex. I am not even trying to suggest Tex-Mex is not good or that it does not have its place. It is just that we really like Mexican food. We found the closest place yet today for lunch, but it was not nearly is close to real Mexican food as what we (actually took a long time to find) found in North Carolina and Oregon. I am going to start asking our Mexican family what we ought to try next, but we are a little bit suspicious that he conflates the two styles, too, in as much as he has spent the vast bulk of his life here.
Christian was a pretty good cook by the time he left home for college. He could more than hold his own when it came to the basics and had a few specialties he liked to do. Kelly had an even wider repertoire and loved to experiment with her mom whenever she got the chance. I am not sure what I expected when they went off to college. I did not really think about it much, but I have to admit I am a little surprised at how much they have both embraced the art of cooking.
The Strawberry-Rhubarb concoction in the picture was fabulous. Kelly’s efforts aim at health as well as taste. She has somehow mastered the art of crust that is light, flaky and healthy. Up in Seattle, she has access to extensive varieties of fresh vegetables that she uses to eat healthy food that tastes good. Her problem is that she is so busy, her exercise regimen is less regular than it was when she is in her undergraduate degree.
Christian, on the other hand, because he follows a fairly rigorous workout schedule when he is not in finals, takes a more utilitarian approach. During the lead up to the end of the semester he is so busy he depends on this stuff to get the nutrition into his system rapidly and efficiently. That is not a frequent occurrence–the rest of the time he cooks fish, pasta, chicken and eats lots of vegetables and the fruits that are more available in Arizona than colder climes.
The interesting thing is that they both try new recipes on an amazingly regular schedule. Who knew they would get into cooking so much?
Here is a link to the finish of a great homeschool story and the continuance of a couple of others. It is about a mother and her daughter who were a little late to start homeschool, but turned the typical government school “pick the winners, give them a mediocre education and neglect the rest” situation into a fairly incredible start. It also established a precedent and a path for the younger siblings. I especially love the part about the lacrosse. Too often, team sports in traditional school settings are as much a popularity contest as any indicator of who is the best player. With individual sports (track and field, swimming, wrestling), they cannot take it away from you if you are the fastest or best. That is not to say they do not often try.
What is particularly impressive is this young student went from pre-med to graduate in a math intensive field that is arguably more difficult with plans to go on to grad school. The whole story is very impressive. Kudos to them and good luck to the younger siblings.
One of the most painful aspects of the work I do is that I need to learn to work with new software libraries on a regular basis. The pain is associated with learning new syntax, parameters, and usages. One generally knows what the libraries are supposed to do, but cannot get them to work until all of the nuances, idiosyncrasies and minutiae are well understood. For extensive libraries, that just takes a lot of time–at least for me. There are some libraries I have used for so long (OpenCV, Boost, Qt, etc.) that I can rapidly do the vast bulk of what needs to be done in a new application because I am intimate with the minutiae. But there is always something that changes and requires the use of new libraries–obsolescence, license changes, functionality changes and that sort of thing that require the adoption of new libraries. I actually kind of enjoy learning new stuff, but it is a lot more fun when there is no schedule or budget to create stress.
What was that all about? I have found some libraries I want to use to plot my EKG. They look great and I wish I would have started working with them sooner. I am confident now (well, not 100%, but very confident) they will be an excellent fit for this and future projects so I am starting to use them. Last night I spend three hours to get from the top images to the bottom image, then discovered I was probably using the wrong chart type for the thing I wanted to do, so I spent another hour to start getting the new graph type in place, but never got it quite working. This kind of thing is normal for me. Maybe I am just slow, but perseverance counts both in software development and in learning. Maybe I will be able to get the chart going tonight.
I have had little time to work on the GaugeCam project due to other responsibilities. We got a helping hand with this product when we found that there are now cameras available that do precisely the part of the product we did not want to do and at which we were not that good. The camera in this post is an example of that. Before, we had to put together a cellphone enabled remote camera with mounting systems, batteries, a solar setup, etc. Now, you can just buy it and install it yourself. So now I think we will be able to concentrate on the software and the water level data that is accumulated from the product which is really our strong point anyway.
Now I will be able to concentrate on my EKG project a little more before I go back to GaugeCam. Also, I will be able to use the BeagleBone Black I purchased on the EKG if I want. I am hoping to communicate between the Arduino/EKG electronics and the mothership computer via Bluetooth, but I am not sure I can get it to go fast enough. The Bluetooth will handle it, but I do not know if the Arduino can shovel the bits fast enough for the EKG sample rate I need (1K Hz). We shall see!
Yesterday was a long day with some accomplishments. First, and maybe most important, Kiwi did not die while we were gone. Lorena’s cousin Beto was there to look in on here every now and then, but for the most part, she was on her own. She was and continues to be annoyingly happy to see us.
Toward the end of the day, I had the chance to work on the EKG project. I did not finish as much as I wanted because there were interruptions. I had the signals coming into my program from the EKG by the time I left town for vacation so now I am working on the strip chart that appears on the GUI as it is recorded. I hope to get the charting part complete by the end of the weekend so I can move on to record the data into a database. We will probably need some help from Christian to get the math right on parts of the signal processing of the two different heart rates we want to measure (a pregnant mother and her baby). I hope I have time, but I also am excited that I might get to work with him on something that is so closely associated with the work he does for his school.
Sometime this week, I have to get my Texas drivers license. I am at that awkward stage of life where I am more worried about the eye test part of the exam than the written or driving part. In fact, I do not think there will be a written or driving part. Lorena did not have to take those.
Lorena has all her transcripts from her all the community colleges she has attended so far (Portland, Linn Benton, Johnston, Wake Technical and Clackamas) turned into our new local community colldege in Texas. She has to take an orientation test this evening–we are not sure what that is about.
Beside all that, I am wanting to get back to work on the GaugeCam/Beaglebone Black project because people want to buy more cameras and our cell connectivity system is getting discontinued. I have it started and it has been running at the house for over a month now. My problem is that I just have too many other things going right now to get it done in a timely manner. Maybe I can get someone to volunteer on the project to help us. It is a great little project.
Lorena and I spent the weekend with Christian and our friends, Al and Michele and their family in Casa Grande, Arizona. It was a weekend for reflection. We needed that and came away invigorated. We got up at 2:30 AM in Phoenix to catch a plane so I could get to work in Texas on time this morning. I am not even tired. I am sure I will hit the wall sometime this evening, but it was WAY worth it.
I read a Facebook post from the daughter of a friend this morning that truly captured the zeitgeist of the day. It’s premise was that personal happiness based on one’s own personal preferences is the highest level of human achievement and a worthy way to live one’s life. That seems to be what has gotten this country and the entire world into a state of denial and decay. Self denial and allegiance to a goal higher than one’s own gratification is the single thing that leads to personal happiness and the betterment of society, but only if that higher goal is to follow the commandments of Jesus.
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
This says nothing about self gratification.
We have turned off or cellphones and have no computer access during the day. We need to do this more often. It is amazingly refreshing. All we do is sit in done meetings, eat good food, talk with old friends and make new ones, all with no outside interruption. It is very interesting that it seems I am moving a little off the very edge of the extrovert spectrum. That is no to say I am anywhere close to being am introvert–but maybe just a little bit less of on extrovert.