June 2026 – Page 3

When things are not going well

On June 10, 2026

Lorena is reading in Genesis this morning about when Abraham was asked to take Isaac up a mountain to sacrifice him. Of course our lives have never had something as difficult as that, but now is one of those times when we wonders why everything seems so difficult. We are sinners and know we deserve nothing, but have received so much blessing over our whole lives in spite of that. Right now, though, is a confusing time. The hardest part is watching our kids suffer. As in every case with humanity, some of it is of their own doing, but a lot of it was foisted on them through as a result of their upbringing in a toxic church culture from which they were strong enough to remove themselves before Lorena and I saw the light and left, too. On the outside, they are great. The have insanely good jobs and a level of education par excellence. Still they struggle and the larger culture is not much help. All we know to do is pray for them and be available–I am not even sure we do that well, but we try. There is no point to this blog post other than to mark this as part of our family history and to acknowledge that the answers to these things only comes from God. May he help us.

GaugeCam line finder

By ken

On June 9, 2026

In GaugeCam

Machine vision, 24/7/365 in the wild under all weather and lighting conditions has challenges most laboratory and factory settings never encounter. For the GaugeCam GRIME3 software, fog, snow, glint from water reflections, debris, nighttime IR lighting vs. daytime ambient lighting, ices, and animals wandering into the scene are everyday occurrences. We have worked on our line finding algorithm for a long, long time and are amazed it how well it does. The waterline find in this image is a good case in point. The one greatest challenge for our software is biofouling when crud builds up at one or more water levels when the water level does not change for a day or even a few hours. We are working on solving that problem with AI right now, but hope to eventually get completely away from the kinds of surfaces that accumulate biofouling marks to no artificial surface at all.

More open houses

By ken

On June 8, 2026

In Texas house

It has been 47 days now and our house has not sold yet. We have lowered the price and are having open houses as frequently as is reasonable as long as people show up. We have tweaked everything we know how to tweak, but there are no bites yet. Just now, I just worked the verbiage that goes out onto the different websites–not sure that will help, but we will see what happens. We might have to stay here for another year. That really will not be so bad financially, but the rub is that we are really ready to get back to Texas and settle in for the long haul.

Scholarly pursuits and software

By ken

On June 7, 2026

In Education and scholarship

I defended my PhD dissertation in June of 2023 at age 68. Our kids flew into Lincoln, Nebraska to watch my hooding in graduation that December when I had turned 69. I thought my formal education trajectory was over at that point, but have worked consistently on GaugeCam projects and remain an adjunct professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln since them. In addition to that, I have reached out to Tarleton State University about their Masters program in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence where they were amenable to my entrance there. I have decided I would like to continue contributing in these areas as long as I enjoy it, have friends with whom I can work, God is willing. In thinking about that, it dawned on me that I could go faster in the sorts of thing required for serious academic research, which is really about pushing the state of knowledge forward as measured by the production of meaningful publications, by writing research quality software rather than bullet proof, production quality software. And when I say that, I do not mean the usual trash software produced out of even the very “best” institutions for research. What I mean is software that other, non-computer scientists can use and extend easily. To that end, I just wrote a WhatsApp message to, Troy, my fellow traveler in these circles. We will see what he has to say.

Hey Troy. I am running the 800 and 8000 random images right now. I just had a thought. Why would it be a bad thing for me to quit trying to do production level robust software where the last 90% of the effort gets you 2% more functionality? My goals in all of this are to get papers published and to push the research forward in a way that benefits our work rather than production of hardened software. To that end, it kind of makes for me to aim at making the software I write profoundly more robust than typical research software, but for research ends, not production ends. Did that make any sense? That way, we are going to publish more and get further up the conditioning curve and move on to subsequent topics much more rapidly. Thoughts?

GaugeCam GRIME3 Pre-release v1.5

By ken

On June 6, 2026

In GaugeCam

The camera-based water level measurement software upgrade from GaugeCam GRIME2 to GRIME3 hit a major milestone today today with GRIME3 Pre-release version 1.5. It is a research version, not yet ready for publication but to do the research to determine whether our new algorithms improve the precision of the water level detection in the presence of biofouling and other image degradation using a variety of both deterministic and stochastic (AI) techniques to improve the water level. I am downloading two data sets of 800 and 8000 images now and will receive a hard drive with ~30k images in the mail in a week or sot that I will run through the GRIME3 software, God willing, so we can start evaluating the numbers to see how we did.

Worry

By ken

On June 5, 2026

In God

Lorena and I have less to worry about in our personal lives that just about any time since we got married back in 1992. Nevertheless, we worry needlessly a lot. I am not talking about worries about our children and extended family because that is always going to be there. I think it might be because we have never been in a situation where we had enough to live through the next paycheck or two without me working. We are certainly not rich, but where we are going to sleep, whether I will keep my job or enough to eat, and all those categories of daily challenges have been so much a part of our lives that they are habits that we are going to have to learn to break. Well, at least we have identified that now and we have decided we are going to try to be better about living in the day and thanking God for it without such focus on extraneous goals and the stresses that come with that.

Reading my Bible

By ken

On June 4, 2026

In God

I started keeping track of my daily Bible reading on February 9, 2026. I read only one chapter per day when I got started and it took me three years, nine months to work my way through the whole Bible. The first read was in the KJV. Since then I have increased my pace, for awhile, reading through the Bible two and a half times per year, but now have settled back to two times per year. When I finish my current read, God willing, I will have been all the way through the Bible fourteen times not including the reading Lorena and I do together for our Sunday and Wednesday worship. I have read through the KJV ten times, but have decided to give that a rest for awhile. I am currently making my way through my first full read of the NKJV. I have done full reads through the ESV, NASB, and NIV. Going forward I hope to rotate through the ESV, NASB, and NKJV for awhile doing only full reads. For quite awhile, I read through the New Testament several times after each read through the whole Bible. All told, I have been through the New Testament fifty time if you include the full reads in that count. This has been of immeasurable help to me in my spiritual life and beyond. I will try to periodically put up a report of where I am in my reading.

Front of the house rendering

By ken

On June 3, 2026

In Texas house

I did a pretty good render of the front of the house we want to build, God willing.

House selling requires patience

By ken

On June 2, 2026

In Texas house

We got the report back from our house showing last Friday and from two people who came to the open house on Sunday afternoon. The people on Friday loved the house, but the living room was smaller than they expected. The two on Sunday were both work-from-home couples and were worried about the fact that all we have is StarLink for broadband internet. We were relieved that the issues were fundamentally different from the first four or five visitors who all thought the house is to close to a main road (it is not). It was a nice reminder that there are a lot of things that influence buyers over which we have no control, but that it only takes one to pull the trigger. That one is harder to find when the market conditions are not optimal with high interest rates right now. In the end, it really just takes patience. We have been very fortunate in the houses we have sold over the years, only Albany, Oregon took us longer than a couple of months and that eventually sold when we were not expecting it. So, we have decided we just need to be patient. It is all in God’s hands. We cannot start the Texas house until this house sells and that is OK. We actually love living here.