FOB

So much for time management... Well the one thing I learned that is really important is that it is not time management as "time just happens" -- there is no way to manage it, there is however "self management" what we do with ourselves :-). The time management went out the window as my cough turned into a serious illness (which is now under control). I did meet with the consultant in IASC and she said I did do well with "self management" in that one needs to realize when you have a reduced capacity, "selection and deciding whats most important overall" is important to managing whats on your plate. Also frequent reassessment and rearranging things are key.

We had a great visit with the ITS Lab and still have yet to conduct our experiments, we are ready to go but at the time we were going to do them the publishing site (cutting edge research) that we were going to use had problems. Guess thats one of the risks you take when working with something so new that all the kinks haven't been worked out. But its also key to hitting a window for your own research.

As result of my illness, graduation has definitely been postponed to fall. Things are going well now however, I have a six month coop job at IBM that I'm working at now -- its not the type of job I want long term but its a start. I did very well with interviewing, I was finalist in the IBM Extreme Blue Program (which is a big thing) and almost had an opportunity to work at IBM Watson Research Center as well [they had their funding cut last minute for the project they were going to hire me for but now I have a contact there :-) ]

My thesis work has not progressed too much as last term I got
a new project off the ground with lots of possibilities for other MS students from which to do a MS thesis. I'm currently in the Math Dept for MS and when I finish with CS, I will continue boosting my math background as well as doing more research work with my advisor.

I made it to Cannon Beach this weekend. Haven't had a vacation in a while and have not been to the beach since I went last year to Seaside with Robert Bauer. It is so relaxing, the smell of the ocean, the wind blowing across your face and the warmth of the sand and the sun is so wonderful.

Well, so far so good I've been tracking my time all this week. I just need to keep it up. Its interesting to color in all the blanks to understand where my time goes so I can learn my patterns and change them. I went to see a time management consultant in IASC. When I'm done with my two week tracking I will meet with her again to discuss how I can improve. I have some leftover coursework to wrap up and my current work for my classes and thesis is consuming me especially since the advanced sensor network class we are doing a prototype of a system (and ideally a position paper). I'm excited as I've had positive responses from all the folks we need permission from and we'll be going to visit the ITS Lab.

I have about two classes to complete coursework for, finish my current coursework and my thesis -- then I will be done in CS for MS. I was going to file to graduate for this summer but it appears the deadlines are earlier (since its 8 wks instead of 10wks) so it will be hard to finish by those deadlines. I'll probably graduate fall term (with no classes or 1 credit thesis) so I won't get to walk as previously planned but that is probably okay as a friend of mine told me its very loooooong.

I got a pretty bad cough Monday night (no other symptoms) which is really strange. Its draining me, I hope it goes away soon. I wanted to visit with PSAS folks tonight but I was pretty wiped out when the day was over. I'll try again for next week.

Going crazy trying to make sure we are ready to go. Don't know where the time flies. We will be all flying to NYC for a few days as my daughter is in the special ensemble music choir at Jackson. They were the only middle school in the entire country that was invited and going (all the rest are high schools). I'm proud of her and the rest of the group -- they are fantastic. They were on Good Day Oregon recently, if you want to hear them sing go the link below and click on video.

On the Go with Joe

My son just played in yet another Chess Tournament at Whitford Middle School. He got first place in all of K-12 section -- 4.5 out of 5 games. I'm so proud of him. He'll go on to play at OCSF in a bit. He missed the State Finals this year (even though he qualified to play) as he overbooked himself for a school group project that had been planned by his peers during that time.

We went to see Beauty and the Beast Musical at Jesuit HS last night. It was a required assignment for my son but he decided to get tickets for all of us -- it was fantastic. My son generally does not like music but he really liked this show. I was impressed of the quality of performance for high schoolers, the voices (singing), acting and costumes IMHO were out of this world. There are sold out of a bunch of performances but if they aren't completely sold out, this is a show you don't want to miss!!!

Well not completely. My wireless still does not work but I've rebuilt the kernel a couple of times and they boot just fine.

After getting on irc and following the instructions the gurus gave me carefully, installing the etch kernel on my system didn't fix the wireless problem on my box. I made sure the latest firmware was installed in /lib/firmware.

So... now after tarballing up my data, its too large to copy to another linux box so I finally tracked down some linux tools to burn it onto dvd (dvd+rw-tools package), there are loads others out there and had problems with other ones but so far so good with this one.

Then I'll proceed to do a fresh new install of Debian on my laptop and hope I don't descend deeper into another hole

I love singing and music. My daughter sings in a very special choir and their middle school is one of only TWO in the ENTIRE country to be invited to New York and a Northwest Invitational.

If anyone might be interested in getting together on a weekend from time to time to play music it would be fantastic!

For anyone who hasn't gone, I went with family and some friends to see "Night at the Museum" (PG). I laughed throughout much of the movie -- it was very well put together and had major actors, Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney, Robin Williams -- was educational too at multiple levels. I highly recommend it!

GNU Power Management - I wanted to get it on my linux system so I could know how much battery life I had before I began my experiments, now my box is messed up once again. Hopefully I'll get it all back tommorrow. At least I have high resolution working since the patches didn't quite work. I kept getting broken packages which I suppose is not a good thing (but don't ask me how I got them). After discovering that G-P-M was only available in unstable (then I learned it wouldn't work with combo of stable/unstable). I still got broken packages, so then changed my sources.list to take only the unstable without the security stuff, it took forever and then machine hung. I rebooted then luckily figured out had to run dpkg --configure -a I think. Anyway, now I got unstable up and running the wireless doesn't work. I discovered the firmware appears to be missing (I'm not sure why probably the lib directory was removed and reinstalled I'm guessing) so I'll have to hook up to a cable to get it reinstalled. The battery monitor now appears but is not working it complains the acpi backend daemon is not running -- I don't know where to find the pieces and how it should be running and I still don't understand why this new hal backend shouldn't be running instead. I guess when I figure it all out I should post what I find here but many of the hackers here probably know the answers. It just boggles my mind that software changes so fast that one has to search so hard or figure out the right combinations of things in order for them to work. I think as long as I get the wireless working back again and the software to run my experiments I'll forget the power management for now.

I'm looking forward to this being a better year than last given recent events and being on the news. Theory of Comp is done, not exactly the way I had wanted it to go but given the circumstances, its good for now. I will study the material more on my own in the future since I like theory. I decided to switch classes last minute since my advisor thought it would be better for my thesis work and she is absolutely right...so I will take CS533 next term. I'm signed up to take the FPGA class but wondering if I have enough background since I don't know Verilog so we'll see. Over break I saw the "Pursuit of Happyness", really tells a story of determination -- I'm putting my mind in that state for this term.

It looks like I'm on track to finish Theory of Comp this term. I only need to do CS533 for next term, but when I came in one weekend, Jules talked me into signing up for the FGPA class so we'll see. I really need to make more progress on my thesis but my advisor is happy with the progression of things. I really meant to come to the PSAS meeting tonight but then I found out I had to pick up my son from Lincoln High School -- they play chess every Wed. He was playing a senior that is the top player in the state (and my son is just a freshman). I'm really proud of him -- but Jesuit is mostly an athletic school (not brain athletics like chess) so their resources are limited to help the chess players advance -- the teacher is open to resources I could find to help them. Anyhow, will be closer to graduating... can't wait.