Catching Up

The last two weeks at work have been brutal. I had two colleagues in from The States, and we were working on a tough problem (asynchronous extended Kalman filter for tracking 19 state variables). It was the kind of problem where I get so engrossed in solving the next step that I forget to break for lunch until about 15:00. I have notebook pages of derivatives now. Done by hand. The most calculus I've done since university. Fun (not sarcastic). As a result, I didn't feel like blogging when I got home at night. (As an aside, I finally have a fair understanding of quaternions!)

Last weekend I went with a couple of mates up to the peaks for a quick walk around. It was raining in Sheffield, but as soon as we got into the peaks (not even 5 miles away) it was snowing, near blizzard, limited visibility at the top. Below is The Girl, standing in front of Stannage Edge. There are two others on Flickr. It was cold and windy, but we had fun.



The family also went back to Bolsover Castle. I think I liked it a bit better the second time around. There were no crowds this time.

I did get Thanksgiving off. Both Thursday and Friday. Thursday was spent on a bit of shopping and fixing Amanda's car. Monday, her car wouldn't start. I figured that it was a weak battery since the weather turned cold. When I got home Monday night I tried it and it cranked just fine. I even got it to run briefly, but labored. Then it couldn't hang on and quit.

Luckily one of the guys at work used to be a Peugeot mechanic. I had him come over and take a look. My guess was that it was getting starved for fuel for some reason (fuel pump?, something else crazy expensive?). We popped the bonnet and I turned the key while he looked and listened inside the engine bay. Almost immediately he said "Got it" and invited me to take a look while he cranked the engine. Said I'd spot it right away. I was sure that I would see smoke or a leak somewhere once pressure was on the system. Instead, as he turned the key one of the spark plug wires started arcing to the engine casing straight away. Because it was dark out it was as obvious as someone flicking a cigarette lighter. Trip to Halfords for new spark plug leads (a mere 17 GBP), and 30 minutes under the bonnet. Car fixed.

Amanda wrote about Thanksgiving dinner. It was good. The breast was acceptable, though I still would have preferred a whole turkey. They had small ones at Sainsbury's (4-6 people on the label). We would have eaten half I think.

For my birthday, Amanda and I got two copies of Neverwinter Nights Chaotic Evil. It's a package of NWN1, NWN2, Shadows of Undrentide, and Hordes of Underdark. Online D&D, here we come.

Yesterday I went bouldering. I worked on some Font 4-5 problems. Some were really lame. One or two were great. I climbed until my fingers were blistered (I worked on about 15 problems). Today I ache. Bouldering problems are a lot more demanding of strength than routes. Still, you see all ages there from children to 60's. It is a life long sport.

Little Boulderers

I took the kids bouldering this weekend at The Climbing Works. What is great about this venue is that they have a kids problem section. Lots of holds closely spaced. The Boy was doing actual problems, and The Girl could get up all-holds-on under her own power. You can see a quick glimpse of the kids section in the video below. The kids actually get to top out, and then come down a slide from the top. Lucky them. It was a great day and we spent about three-and-a-half hours there.



Today is Guy Fawkes day! So fireworks have been non-stop all weekend. After bouldering we all went over to a mates house for diner, a bonfire, burn an effigy, and a few fireworks. I can just see the kids when we get back to the States.

Random Teacher: What did you learn in England?
The Boy: How to set a scarecrow on fire.

Tonight, we just got back from a fireworks display at the kids school. It was cold, but loads of fun. I really like the school that the kids go to and will miss it terribly when we get home.

Speaking of which, it looks like we will be here until the end of March, for those of you who don't read CPA Mommy. It's not carved in stone yet, but seems quite likely.

I have a coad.

(This post has no continuity.)

For the last few days, I've had the sniffles. It started Thursday night, and I took Friday off of work so that I could rest and get better for Legoland. Then Legoland kicked my ass and by Sunday night I felt like shit. Still, I had a great time at Legoland.

And, as is always the way, I'm calibrating a machine this week. So, work Monday was drug induced stupor. Today I felt much better. A bit of Sudafed to clear the congestion, but I actually felt O.K. for most of the day. Now it's evening, and my congestion has returned, but at least I don't feel miserable. I should be done with the machine on Thursday (we are doing this machine the slow, traditional way because my super-cool fast way won't work this time). If I still feel like this, I'm taking Friday off again.

I have no Halloween costume this year. It's strange. I really really want one, but what's the point. There is no party to go to.

I'm coming back to St. Louis on the 6th of December, but only for the day. I fly in about noon on the 6th and leave the morning of the 7th. I already have plans for that night, but will probably not bother going into work that day if anybody wants to hang out for lunch somewhere. Preferably a burger joint.

OW!

I did bouldering instead of routes last night. I got up some V2s which was fun. I also wrenched my back somehow. I hate getting older. So today I've been in pain. It will heal. Need to remember to stretch more before climbing. Especially bouldering.

The Stonehenge and Bath pictures are up on Flickr. I particularly like this one. I think I might get a print of it.

Not much new (random rumbles to fill space)

Amanda has been on me to post. Not much new going on. We went to Bath a bit over a week ago now. It was nice, nothing spectacular. I'll get the photos up this weekend probably. I spent most of last week and a bit on Saturday getting a demo ready at work. I now have a lame little demo where a robot puts dowel-pins into an MFI cabinet side. Mostly, I've been wasting my time.

I finally finished Zelda, Wind Waker. O.K., so I'm about four years behind everyone else in video games. It's new to me. I did enjoy it, but felt it got very tedious at the end (wait for controller to vibrate, hit [A], maneuver to a good position, repeat). I only consulted the Internet three times throughout the game, which is pretty good for me and puzzle games. Now Amanda and I are back on to Dark Alliance II, making a second pass through the game.

It gets dark here now about 6:30. A long cry from it being light until 11:00 at night before. The weather is cool and rainy. About like you would imagine England. I heard that it is hot in St. Louis. Read in the news that a few dozen people at the Chicago Marathon ended up in the hospital because of the heat. Glad I ran it last year.

I'm thinking of starting running again. I'd like to just work on doing a 10K in 52 minutes. Its a goal. Also, I've noticed that without any bike riding or any aerobic activity whatsoever my climbing stamina has suffered. I can't make it to the top of the wall on lead without a break about 3/4 of the way up. That has to change. So, back to running for a while. I also have a goal of ascending Long's Peak next summer. That is my big motivation for improving my cardio and endurance. It's about a 14 hour 8 mi one-way hike with just under 5000 vertical feet. Not technical, but not for the faint of heart, or the out of shape.

Thats about it really. Winter is setting in here, and there is less to do with less light each day.

Imagine, Laugh, and Celebrate.

I have a collection of video links for this post. You'll need sound for all of them. Grab your headphones or turn on your speakers.

The first is for TED talks. TED is a conference held anually in Monterey, California with a goal of spreading ideas. They have started putting videos of the talks online for people to watch. I try and watch a presentation about once a month, because I find them so inspiring. The people that give the presentations have amazingly creative ideas in technology, entertainment, and design (TED) that make me think more creatively about the problems I face in my work. Most of the talks are very short, some are a bit longer. This talk (at just under 8 minutes) blew my mind. It starts with the rapid and seamless display of enormous quantities of visual information, and then shows the integration of this technology into a photogrametry application. I can't really describe how incredible this is, you have to see the presentation and play with the demo. It only takes 8 minutes, go watch it now.

OK, are you back (shame on you if you're skipping ahead)? Think of the amazing implications of this. Normally, as a research scientist, I think in terms of "How can I gather this information?" This technology challenges me to instead think "Who else is gathering this information, and what does it tell me that they weren't expecting to find out?" The people gathering the information aren't even aware that they are contributing a piece of the puzzle. Each of the photographs of Notre Dame were taken by ordinary people, none of whom thought, "Gee, if I take enough photos, then I have enough information to reconstruct a realistic 3D model of the cathedral." But many researchers in my field have thought, "Gee, if I had enough photos, I could reconstruct a 3D model of the cathedral" and then set off to take a ton of photos all with proper calibration artifacts, etc. etc. etc. The brilliant part, the truly creative part, was the person who thought, "If I had enough..." and then realized, "But the world does have enough photos of Notre Dame!" and instead solved the bigger and more interesting problem of how to find these photos with all their flaws and work with them anyway. Brilliant. Now extend that network thinking to other areas! Genius.

The second is the first of two commercials that have been airing on UK television lately. One is a surreal commercial for Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate bar. It made me laugh. I like it.

The third video is for a Woolworth's commercial. "It's a bit on the dark side".

Finally, I found out last week that I was selected for Associate Technical Fellow. So yeah me! I'm glad it's over, and I really feel proud about this accomplishment. It was a lot more work than I probably thought (especially since I did the process from the UK while still being classified as "Central"). If you care to join me in celebration, go find a bottle of Black Sheep Ale. And if you do, please let me know where I can get it when I get back to St. Louis.

Moving Air

I've updated the Places I've Been page. I didn't go anywhere in July except back to the US (and other work related trips). Amanda went with the family to Scotland. Maybe I can show her how to tag the places they went to and upload those. It's kinda cool to see everywhere we went in Ireland from 300km up. We covered a good bit of the Emerald Isle.

One thing I forgot to mention that I accomplished last weekend. I fixed Amanda's blower! The heater blower fan for Amanda's Peugeot wasn't spinning (even though I was certain that I checked it when I test drove the car) and as a result if the weather was wet and cool you had to crack the windows to get the windshield to defog. Not a big deal right now, but wouldn't be acceptable come winter. I'd already checked the fuses and relays without finding a problem, but I needed some free time to really check everything out (and a multimeter).

So, last Sunday I borrowed a coworkers multimeter and took out the blower assembly. Turns out it is very easy to get to in Peugeot 306, right under the passenger side dash. First thing I did was check the windings. Measured about 45 KOhms. OK, that sounds reasonable (not open, not short). Put the multimeter on the harness. Dead simple setup, there was two wires for power and one wire to supply a speed control voltage (which means that the speed control circuit is part of the blower assembly and can be replaced in one go if it if faulty, nice). Supply voltage is 14V, good. Control voltage ranges from .7V to something around 2V depending on where I set the fan speed switch on the dash. That looks OK. What the hell is wrong with this thing?

One thing left to try. Hook it back up and see why it won't spin. So I hook up the harness, turn on the car, and whirrrrrrrrr. OK. Reassembly everything, and it continues to work. So, best case scenario, the wire harness had a bad connection with the motor assembly. Disconnecting it and reconnecting it fixed the problem. Worst case scenario is an intermittent fault somewhere in the harness which wiggling stuff around to disassemble and reassemble has temporarily fixed. As long as it keeps working right now, it's fixed. More importantly, I did it, and didn't get ripped off by a garage charging me for a new fan motor (which they probably would have just to do something).

Yesterday I went climbing up at Stanage again, and to stay on topic it was windy as hell. At the bottom of the crag, you barely noticed, but by the time you reached the top it was a very steady 15 mph or so. Never really dangerous, but it did feel like I was more likely to get blown off the face than fall off. We climbed some good challenging routes first, then Rich showed me how to properly set an anchor at the top and how to set protection in the cracks.

I led a very easy route first (I don't remember the British grade, but I'd put it at a 5.5 or maybe a 5.6). This let me concentrate on setting good protection and not having to do anything under duress. All my protection I could set while well balanced with a good hold. Then I led a Severe route. Estimate about a 5.7, maybe an easy 5.8. Again, I could set all my protection from a good spot. I set way more than I needed just to get practice setting protection. It was great. I'm glad to be leading again.

Wednesday I have scheduled some time with the instructor at the climbing gym to show him that I am capable of lead climbing. One other person in the climbing club can lead now, so I hope to pair up with her and get back to leading routes.

The kids start school on Tuesday and they are looking forward to that. I find out the results of my ATF interview on Wednesday. Looks like an exciting week ahead.