CoffeeSig

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

Category: Projects Page 6 of 7

Leaving Virginia

By

On July 1, 2026

In Texas house

As we are packing things and working our way through the or checklists for the sale of the house and the move to Texas, it has dawned on Lorena and I that there is some likelihood we might never return to Virginia. Maybe we will pass through on a trip to somewhere else, but we have no real reason to return. It has been a lovely place to live. The people and culture in this part of Virginia seem genuinely nice and welcoming. Maybe if I were younger it might be different, but our plans are mostly to spend as much time as we can with Lorena’s mother, Conchita and our children. The kids both currently live in New York City and Grandma Conchita is in Mexico. Beyond that, our main destination will hopefully be to Oregon to visit my siblings and friends. This is not a sad thing. We love Virginia, but are happy to be moving on to the next thing, God willing.

Mexico apartment update

By

On June 28, 2026

In Mexico houses, Texas house

Our current plan is to move into one of our apartments down in Mexico while the house in Texas is under construction, God willing. Renters were supposed to have moved into the unit shown in this image yesterday. It is a spectacular apartment with an absolutely beautiful view. The renters are signed up for a 4-6 month contract. If they finish their work in Monterrey in four months, something that almost certainly will not happen, we will move in there so Lynn can have a free hand in the other areas of the apartment that are not finished. If not, Lynn will have a space for us on the floor above this one with an even more spectacular view and a balcony. He will be working on that while we are living there. That is not ideal, but we can work it out.

The calm before the storm

By

On June 27, 2026

In Texas house

I would like to say we worked really hard in preparation for the move, but it really does not seem real yet. I went through two boxes of compact disks and video tapes (old), throwing out about half and packing half for the move. We are going to do the same tomorrow. We slept in a little, drove into town to get a few things at Costco and a refrigerator water filter at Home Depot, returned home and did the packing, then just chilled. I even drank 100 ml of 1800 Tequila (Jose Cuervo brand) for celebration of the offer–I had to skip all my normal snacks to fit that into my diet budget. All in all, it was a good day. Just spending the day with Lorena reminded me that I have a spectacular wife.

Getting ready to go

By

On June 27, 2026

In Texas house

Today is the day Lorena and I start the big push to make our move to Texas. There are a lot of moving parts to this and we are cognizant of the fact that all we have is an offer. The buyer had a lender pre-approval letter, but we still have to go through the house inspection and the appraisal to have confidence the sale will actually close. The inspection is on Tuesday.

The main thing we will do to get ready is pack everything but the minimal things we need to live for the next few weeks. On my short list of other stuff I can do now is the following:

  1. Figure out how to get help to load the truck. We need professional movers to assure everything fits and rides nicely.
  2. Find a place to rent a truck.
  3. Find a short term rental in Texas so we can spend just a few months there to get the house started and get some doctoring done.
  4. Make a list of things to cancel when we leave.

Currently, the game plan is to stay in Texas only long enough to do some doctoring (annual health and semi-annual dental checkups and eye checkup), then move to our apartment in Mexico. We were planning to take our car there, but have decided to just buy something cheap and economical when we get there that we can use for the business in Mexico after we move into the house in Texas.

Of course, all of this, God willing.

House offer accepted

By

On June 25, 2026

In Texas house

We accepted an offer on our house here in Virginia today. We were euphoric for a bit, then relieved, because the market is not so good for sellers for our kind of house and price range, now we are kind of wiped out, but excited to get start with the move. I have talked to the insurance agent, made arrangements for movers to come out and give us estimates, and started looking for apartments where we can hole up long enough for the house to get built. God willing, we will be living in Texas by the end of July.

Papers with small datasets

By

On June 15, 2026

In GaugeCam

Troy has been sending me links to new papers on the measurement of water level with cameras that kind of make me crazy. We have been doing this for over fifteen years now and papers are coming out that do not cite us that describe things we did with thousands and thousands of images. Beside the fact that virtually every paper we have ever seen used data sets of 10’s to 100’s of images with maybe one or two that had up to a couple thousand. But they were presenting nothing new on with super small datasets on stuff we had already done on tens of thousands of images. One of those papers even used stop signs to perform a pixel to world coordinate conversion. Oh well.

Agenda filling up

By

On June 11, 2026

In Texas house

This month has been a roller coaster. We have been up and down with all the stuff we are doing and the lives of the kids. Things are starting to level out now with a to-do list that is growing and has some finite end-points. An agenda of things to do to work toward a finite end has a stabilizing effect on me. It even helps me with my normal day-to-day work that I would be doing even if I did not have some big goal in front of me. Lorena is the same way. We have two showing and an open house between now and Sunday. We might not sell the house, but there seems to be continuing interest in the house. The moment it sells, then we are on a good path to something stable that allows us to start doing some other things projects we love to do. Beside the move, both Lorena and I truly want to maintain our current Bible study schedules, workouts, and diets. I want to accomplish the next GaugeCam goals. And we want to visit family in Mexico and Oregon very soon. All, God willing.

GaugeCam line finder

By

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

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

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?

Page 6 of 7

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén