Now that we found out NCSU is going to make dramatic tuition increases, Christian has decided he is going to make do with the equipment he had. RWDub’s Reviews will be quite happy to know he uses Linux Mint on a USB stick to run the computer and persist his data between boots. There is no money even for a hard drive. It is good thing we had that old cardboard box from when we could afford to buy stuff from Amazon. We are going to have dig up a mouse somewhere, too.
Day 86 of 1000
I got to work sometime after 5:30 AM. As usual, I was the first one to arrive, but the CEO of the company (Bioptigen) showed up shortly after me. When I asked him what he was doing there so early, he said that he and two other colleagues were going to run down to the North Carolina Zoo to capture Optical Coherence Tomography images of the eye of one of the African elephants their because the opthalmologist from the NCSU Veterinary school needed them due to the fact that the elephant had cataracts. How cool is that!?!!
I would like to say one of the elephants to the left is the one that got the eye check, but it was against the rules to use the pictures because when people see them with no context, sometimes they think the elephants are being badly treated. Still, it was great to hear about it when everyone got back to the office. The elephant they imaged was a 12,000 pound African Bull Elephant. I will report back if I hear anything more about what happens
Day 70 of 1000
North Carolina State University has made a press release on our work at GaugeCam. That is the volunteer project I am doing and my buddies, Troy and Andrew with Dr. François Birgand and my buddies, Troy and Andrew, to measure water levels in the wild and post the results, with images, on the internet. Dr. Birgand has already been called for an interview by a national radio program. We will keep you posted.
Day 63 of 1000
This weekend was a wildly eventful weekend for the Chapman family. Lorena, Kelly, and Christian all had a ton of homework and I needed to come up to speed on some new technology. We finished all (or most) of that, got sick on a carnival ride at the North Carolina State Fair, and went to Sunday meeting. We had a very good weekend, but the most fun of the whole weekend, by far, was Lucia’s visit on Friday night. Lucia is Troy and Youngin‘s little one year old girl. She was with us for several hours and did not even come close to a whimper let alone cry.
We learned lots of things about Lucia. She LOVES peas (Lorena’s chicken a-la-King is loaded with peas) and tofu. She loves to read and count (one page of one book in particular). She speaks baby sign language. AND you can see from the picture she is a big fan of NCSU. A brilliant and beautiful child on all counts.
I think I scare little kids, so I back way off when they first arrive. It usually takes an hour or so for them to warm up to me if I work at it slowly in a non-aggressive way. Lucia wanted to be held by Lorena and Kelly and was very attracted to Christian, but had warmed up to me pretty early in the evening. She would bring me stuff and talk to me about it, read a book, let me feed her some peas–all that good stuff.
It is such a joy to be around a happy child and to watch and help them learn. I miss that a lot. I hope we get to do that again soon.
Day 62 of 1000
The kids are completely swamped with homework. I am completely swamped with the need to learn more about SQL and data mining. We are broke (and still a little big dizzy) from having attended the North Carolina State Fair yesterday. So, breaking our normal routine, we went home for lunch (rather than Wendy’s) after church and ate leftovers. We left Mom to study for her Financial Accounting class, and made our way into the stacks rather than to the first floor conversation area of the library where there is a lot more college drama, but a lot less studying. Now we are hard at work in the fourth floor stacks with photographic evidence that we are on task.
I decided that I needed to upgrade my Ubuntu to 11.10, load up MySQL and find myself a project that has to do both with SQL and BleAx to kill two birds with one stone–SQL and BleAx. It is really three birds because every time I go over to our buddy Lyle’s blog, I get Linux envy.
Update: I updated VirtualBox to v4.1.4 and Ubuntu to 11.10. I turned off that horrible Unity thing that the Ubuntu guys want to impose on us, I struggled for about 5 minutes to get full screen mode going again in VirtualBox with GuestAdditions. Now I am installing MySQL Server, MySQL Client, and MySQL Administrator. I am not sure that is exactly the right thing to do, but it will probably get me started. We will head home to the house in about five minutes.
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