I updated my working plan to get to the production release for the GRIME 3 (water level measurement from ground based imagery) software package. You can find it here.
Category: Projects Page 1 of 7
I cannot believe that we have been here two and a half months and still no concrete has been poured for the new house. The latest is that the hole that was dug for the wine cellar is still to wet to pour the concrete. We are hoping it will be dry enough by Monday to get started.
I just about to finished the next version of the GRIME 3 RC9 water level measurement software. I have one more release candidate version to go and then the final production release. After that, I am going to make some hard decisions about what to do next. I might leave GRIME where it is for a while to figure it all out. In the meantime, you can download and install the latest release version here.
We were expecting a lot of rain over the last few days and got a bunch, but not nearly as much as expected. We are hoping our builder will be able to start build forms to poor the cellar and the foundation on Monday, but we will have to wait and see how much more rain accumulates in the hole they dug for the cellar. Actually, it was a tad bit lower today than yesterday, so we are optimistic.
I have been having some interesting talks with our kids, Kelly and Christian. We are all going through a pretty rough period after leaving a fundamentalist, tradition bound church that was our entire community for decades. We are all about three-four years out from having left and are kind of waking up to the fact that filling the void from leaving with out bitterness is easier said than done. In the meantime, I read a blurb on X from the first ex-wife of Elon Musk, for whom neither of which I have much respect on any level, but that resonated with me. She said that to accomplish something in this life–I took this as the temporal life we live on this earth–a good way to go about it is to become excellent at one discipline, then switch disciplines and become an expert at a second discipline. The focus being on the disciplines themselves and not the money or accolades you receive from dominating those disciplines. I think that was a valuable thought and has definitely been something I think has allowed me to achieve the limited amount of success I have received in my career.
I said all of that to say the following: I was going to ditch the idea of a second PhD. I am having second thoughts. It would be an excellent thing to get a second PhD if I can contribute to the community and dominate a new domain. And when I say dominate a new domain, I have no illusions of being a luminary in that domain, but I do think I can bring skills to bear that might advance the state of the art in several different domains that are worthy of investigation. To that end, I am going to enter into my interview with TAMU on Monday afternoon with renewed vigor. God will provide the guidance.
The concrete people and/or our builder Brad flattened out the back of the lot, dug the basement a couple of feet deeper, and made room to start digging an prepare to lot for the foundation forms. In the process of that, they found (or broke) the old sewer line that was on the property. City sewer workers were there when we drove by. They explained that they were planning to rework the sewer lines anyway, but had hoped to use some of the old line. They will have to dig a channel across the street in front of us and put in a new line to make it right.
I have a birthday coming up and something has change with regard to how I think about that age and what I “ought” to be doing at this time of life. I have had grandiose ideas I have thought I might take on. It has dawned on me, though, that I probably do not have the time and might not have the energy in a few years to see those through to the end. That idea is new enough to me that I know I need to give myself some time to figure out some tractable projects worth of my efforts in the time I have life. That time could be as much as 30 years, but I am sure that only maybe 10-15 could be actually productive time when I am able to work well. Maybe less. So, God willing, I am going to give myself some time, work on the GRIME’s, get our new house build, continue on our Mexico projects, continue my day job for a few more years, and work toward the point where I only work half time or fully retire to do more stuff with Lorena, Kelly, and Christian. But I am going to try to walk and read more while a think about it all for a month or two.
I failed to post here for several days for what seems like a pretty good reason. I have been working aggressively on the GRIME3 software to support new opportunities in both GRIME Lab research and its usage by some of our collaborators. We have reworked the research and development road map with an end to the main GRIME3 functionality work in sight, followed by new research and development on a completely new package we are currently calling GRIME4.
I spent the entire weekend working on improving the new GRIME 3 water level measurement software so it is usable by a collaborator in Idaho. I think I got it into a workable state, but will have to wait to hear back from Troy at UNL when he gets a chance to test it. It was a good time to reflect on what I want to do next now that I have pretty much kicked the idea of a second PhD to the curb. I am not sure what I will do, but going through the exercise of figuring it out has been healthy for me. I hope to spend the next few weeks avoiding making hard choices and doing more reflecting.
I had a very interesting talk to do with my PhD adviser, Troy. After finding several PhD programs interested in my background and wanting me to participate with them, it started to dawn on me that the bulk of the opportunities available to me were not particularly focused on scholarship, science, and academic camaraderie. Rather, there was what seemed to be a very transactional aspect to the whole enterprise. It became more and more clear that the environment of my department at University of Nebraska was exceptionally benign and well meaning relative to any of these other programs I was evaluating. I was offering 50 years of experience and a proven track record to people who, generally, were only interested in what advantage they could obtain rather than how the community could be served. I am very much less disposed to continue down this path after this discussion and, especially, after my discussions about this whole topic with Troy and my son, Christian who is an MIT research scientist.
I am beginning to think I did this as a result of the great experience I had in community at University of Nebraska after losing the church community of the first 67 years of my life. It turns out that even though the stakes are much lower and do not include eternal life, realizing the community that seemed to provide meaning really never existed in the first place. The thing that I am most thankful for in all this is that it pushed me away from unrealistic expectations about mere human institutions to the only ones that have any meaning–those that are found in Jesus Christ.