Chapman Kids Blog

We made it to Arizona. Christian made it through his finals. We had a relatively leisurely breakfast at ihop. Now Christian is back to work and we are here in the apartment kicking back until he gets a few things done in the lab after which we can start our vacation!

When I got my new $27 EKG running a few days ago, I used a Windows program that came as a binary and that is no longer being supported. I decided I wanted to write my own GUI to read this, at least one more EKG channel (which requires another $27) and maybe accommodates the $99 EEG electronics that is available from the same company. I used the audio button (play/pause/stop) to control the data stream and connection with the EKG electronics. Right now, the only things that happens with this is that the numbers are added to the text box labeled “Data” and the numbers just scroll as they come in for the EKG electronics (fly by actually). The next thing I am going to do, though, is to plot the EKG signal as it comes in the area above the text boxes. I can already tell I am going to need to reformat my GUI to show the data in different ways and to add some configuration capability.

I negotiated the next couple of days off when I was offered my current job so Lorena and I could fly to Phoenix to see Christian and attend a church event. Some of our old friends from San Diego will meet us there. We will have a chance to see old friends, visit and eat good food. Christian finished his last final for the semester yesterday, so he will be free to spend at least a little time with us. He is in the thick of his research right now and expects to remain that way for the next two and a half to three years. He needs to take seven more classes and they really just get in the way of what he is research.

There is a meeting of the board of directors at our company today. We cleaned up the office and made everything look nice, but the higher-ups in the company seem somewhat stressed.

The CEO said, “Why did I start another company” to me in the hallway.

He really did not need to start another company for any other reason than that is what he does. I get that. I love to do what I do. I am kind of a one trick pony, but I love my trick and can make a living doing it. I am glad that I learned my trick before I took a shot at being an entrepreneur. It gave me two advantages. The first is that I had something on which I could fall back after I found I was not such a great entrepreneur. The second was that it gave me the knowledge that one can get a lot of the benefits of entrepreneurship with only half the headaches if you have a good trick and people are willing to pay you a salary and equity for your trick.

Still, entrepreneurs make the business world go round. They provide jobs for lots of people, too. I would not get to do what I do if there were not people who took the risk to start businesses. I think watching new, small businesses and the people that run them is my version of spectator sports. I love to watch all of this, but the thought of a punch in the nose or a 360 pound tackle jumping on my head is not particularly appealing to me.

Maybe it is just confirmation bias, but I keep running into stuff that suggests that IQ is not immutable. The latest article titled Telltale Signs You’re Much Smarter Than Average seems to reinforce that point. It was interesting that there were things over which a person has little control like left handedness and propensity for anxiety, whether they come from nature or nurture, are indicators of intelligence. But more so, that things that parents can do for their kids like give them music lessons and teach them to read at an early age are big indicators of high intelligence. I have always believed that children learn to read when they get interested in reading, but I also believe a parent can have a big influence over when their kids get interested by reading to them a lot, by turning the learning process into a game and by just being enthusiastic about it. Also, it was very interesting that the indicator of high IQ was NOT whether the kid was musically talented or not. Rather, it was whether they received consistent musical training. The kid being a class clown thing–who knows how that plays in and/or whether it is something that can be taught. In our case, it we worked hard to teach our kids NOT to be funny in class. 🙂

I know a lot of people just my age who are dealing with aging parents. Grandma Sarah went to the hospital last night where we found she had an infection that needs treatment. It is hard to see a parent in this condition at this age when they have little reserve to deal with health problems. We are very thankful we had the chance to take Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah to meeting for a couple of years and are very thankful they are in such good hands with our good friends Gary and Drew.

I know a lot of people just my age who are dealing with aging parents. Grandma Sarah went to the hospital last night where we found she had an infection that needs treatment. It is hard to see a parent in this condition at this age when they have little reserve to deal with health problems. We are very thankful we had the chance to take Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah to meeting for a couple of years and are very thankful they are in such good hands with our good friends Gary and Drew.

These are all the transcripts from the community colleges Lorena has attended since we got married. Actually, she took classes at a community college in Florida, too, but that was just for non-credit English as a second language classes. She is very close to her degree, so she plans to try to get it done here in Texas. The five sealed envelopes from five different places represent a lot of work. I congratulate her for her continued effort. She will take these to North Central Texas College on Monday to get the process started here. We think she only has four or five classes left for an Associates degree. Stay tuned.

Today I received an email from my blog hosting service notifying me that I had some things in the inner sanctum of the blog software and content that looked like malware so I spent fifteen minutes and cleaned it all up. While I was at it, it dawned on my that I should check to see exactly long I have been blogging. My first blog post was a couple of service providers ago on April 6, 2004 in Albany, Oregon. Kelly was 10 years old and Christian was eight. They were just finishing up their fourth and second grade years of government school. We were toward the end of the process of deciding we should homeschool, not so much because we knew much about that or thought it was a great thing (we do now), but because the local government school in Albany was so bad. That consumed a lot of our time and thought at the time.

Twelve years later, the kids are ensconced in graduate school in Washington and Arizona, Lorena and I live in Texas and our worries are of the same magnitude, but of different challenges. I have struggled to figure out what to write here since the kids graduated from North Carolina State U. I still struggle, but it helps me to write some of this stuff out on the blog. I appreciate everyone who has read, commented and stayed in contact over the years. I hope I can keep it alive another dozen or so.

I got the electrocardiogram going last night. GaugeCam is going on hold for a bit to meet some commitments on this thing. Beside that, it is really fun. The next part of this project will be to replace what appears to be an abandoned Windows project from which I got the above screenshot with a Linux project so I can have more control over the signals.

I finished reading II Kings in the Bible this morning. It was the part about when the Kingdom of Judah transitioned from evil kings to one of the greatest good kings, Josiah, then back to more evil kings which led to their captivity in Babylon. It is interesting that Judah had been so evil that even when Josiah spent his reign destroying evil and upholding good, God told him, through his prophets that Josiah would be fine in his time, but that judgment would come to Judah after he was gone. There certainly seemed to be some analogies to our life here in the United States, not to mention Europe and the rest of the world. We will soon have a new president here, but even if we get a good one, it feels like it is too little too late. Is my generation as evil as those evil generations and kings in Judah and Israel described in Kings and Chronicles in the Bible? It probably is.

Nebraska Furniture Mart delivered our new sofa bed this morning. We are all set for visitors! Lorena claims it is very comfortable. I look forward to testing that myself.

I have always been a skeptic when it comes to neo-Darwinism’s molecules to man fairytale. I found a very interesting article titled Wistar and DNA Day: A Fifty-Year Fuse Under Neo-Darwinism that describes a meeting that took place fifty years ago called the Wistar Institute conference on “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution.” The article and two accompanying videos describe the issues much better than I could, but in a nutshell, a bunch of highly qualified physics and engineering professors from elite universities decided they would take a look at neo-Darwinism to see if it passed muster with respect to the math. They invited their colleagues from the Biology departments.

The proceedings of the event appear to be available for free if you do a search for “PDF” along with the title of the conference. My understanding is that the actually papers that came out of the conference were interesting, but the discussion recorded in the proceedings are even more so. To suggest that the discussions between the biologists and the engineers/physicists was vigorous might be understating the acrimony between the two groups. There are two videos in the article. I just post one here that gives a sense for what this is all about, but both of them are worth a look:

The article also points to another article titled Intelligent Design Aside, from Templeton Foundation to the Royal Society, Darwinism Is Under Siege about an upcoming conference in a similar vein to the Wistar conference. Neither of these conferences engage at all with Intelligent Design, just the inadequacy of the current thinking among proponents of neo-Darwinism.

Yesterday I order an electrocardiograph kit for $75. It includes the electrocardiogram electronics, the Arduino embedded computer that receives the signals from the EKG and converts them to something more usable for viewing, analysis and archiving. It also includes the cables I need to hook it up to people and to another computer. I really do not want to hook the EKG up to another computer with a cable. I want to use Bluetooth, so I bought another $99 computer from NewEgg and the Bluetooth accessories I need to talk to the EKG embedded computer. This should be educational.

This is a picture taken from my desk chair in my office in Lewisville. These people are treating me very well and I am enjoying the work immensely. There is an amazing opportunity to contribute to a great product that helps people avoid injury. It does that by employing exactly the kind of technology I love to develop. What a great new job. Maybe the other shoe will drop soon, but it is great so far. This is the first time I have had an office with a door outside of my house in, well, ever.

I had a great time yesterday getting my new computer up and running on Xubuntu. It is amazing how little the look and feel changed be 15.10 and 16.04 LTS. It all just seems very solid. After all these years hearing Linux was finally ready for the desktop when it really was behind the curve, for me that is no longer true. Part of that might be that in all my trying to get stuff to work, I have learned enough to make it do what I want, but whatever it is, I am very comfortable with this newest version of Xubuntu and am thankful to be off of Windows (and especially Apple). It is nice to be able to exercise the kind of control over your environment you want as opposed to what Windows and Apple demand.

The new Xubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) release 16.04 comes out today. I was all fired up about it because of what I wrote yesterday–I have a brand new computer waiting to be used. It came as a Windows box and will be my first computer (as a professional anyway) that I will have set up as a pure Linux computer. No dual boot required. So the problem is, and I should have known this, that when they said today was the release date, they did not mean at the stroke of midnight. So, I get to wait until, at the earliest, 2100 UTC which is 4 PM my time before I can even start downloading it. The servers will probably be getting hammered, so the download will be slow which means I probably won’t get to start on this thing until tomorrow morning. So instead of having some fun for a day, I get to just write code, which is not so bad either, but I do that every day.

My new job is absolutely great. The IT manager brought me my new computer, exactly what I wanted with exactly the screen I wanted. Tomorrow, the new LTS Ubuntu comes out so I will be able to install the Xubuntu version of that. that. I never do anything on a Windows (and, of course never on an Apple product). It is all Linux all the time. The problem on which I work is a hard one–really a series of related problems. I have complete control over the technical aspects of the problem and have already been able to provide some relief. I write embedded code for kiosk style computers. It is amazing fun and I am grateful for the opportunity. My only fear is that I will get the problem solved to the level needed by the business and will be done. That is a good thing, but the likelihood of a follow-on job this good is small. Maybe these guys will find me more problems. They said they will.

We love Kiwi, the remaining twin cat sister, but this picture gave me pause. That cat is way too comfortable because she has a nice warm shelf on which to sit after her dinner (at precisely 5:00 PM every evening). The reason she is not sitting at an uncomfortable incline is because I eat to much and do not get enough exercise. Every night after work, I put together a snack and sit down to the computer to work on side jobs and volunteer project that I love. I love them because they are mostly about learning new stuff and being a help for worthy causes.

What is not so fun is eating lower quantities of less interesting food and getting out of my chair to exercise. Well, I have gotten to the point where I realize exercise and a good diet are no longer optional. Maybe this picture was just the thing I need to give me a wake-up call and get me off  center to do something about all this.

My whole life, I have been nothing more than a working stiff. I go to the work in the morning, come home after work and a very specific amount of money makes it to my bank account a couple of times per month. There have been very rare events when money would come in that was unexpected due to profit sharing, bonuses or largess (almost always from my father). That never caused much pain at tax time, because, while the amounts were significant to us, they were chump change in terms of their tax ramifications. Now though, because I am an engineer, accidentally in a field that is much in demand, I have opportunities to do consulting work. Last year, I did more than normal to help some people out of binds and to earn a some extra money.

I said all that to say that tax day this year was more painful than it needed to be because of poor planning on my part. Of course I am irritated because of the tax levels, but that is kind of a universal complaint. When I was writing the checks, Lorena and I talked about the fact that, if one has to pay more taxes, it is because they made more money. In my case, I got caught up on some stuff, but I am not sure the pain of all that extra work was worth it. If I did not love my work so much, it certainly would not have been worth it. This year, it does not appear I will be able to do much of anything on the side, but in many ways that is a very good thing. If I ever do that again, I certainly intend to manage the whole thing differently.