January 2015

Another new year begins. My 59th.
Here’s what I want to do this year.
Work on the green house. Get the inside rough carpentry done, raise the roof over Celia’s room. Maybe more.
Bike more. I think I’m too old to bike like I like to, though, so how about if I fix the suzuki and bike on it instead?
Work hard on c3pr: Re-work the vision system, buy some cameras, use the jacobian, make the logger useful.
Build a back deck.
And work on my marriage.

Jan 1 thu

2015 starts in January, and January starts today.
This month, I want to get the concrete work done at the green house and start fixing the stairs. I want to catch up on correspondence. On c3pr, I should be able to re-jigger vball’s paddle bounces, re-use code used for vp and stabilize kinematics and .swats. And inside, I want to make drawers and shelves for upstairs, and maybe even a fan housing.
At least that’s the plan. In the meanwhile…
We went to Adam’s party this evening.

Jan 2-4 fri-sun
We drove Celia and Sean down to Albany and then ate at the Black Sheep in Vergennes. Really nice place. Really hard brownies.
My throat started rasping, so I laid low all weekend and did c3pr. You could think of it 2 ways: either it took me waaaay too long to debug that problem, or I took the time to review and clean up some ugly code. Either way, it is sort of under control and in a better place.

jan 5 mon
I wrote a belated seasonal email to B&Z. Better late than never.
I loaded up the water barrel and drove it next door through the howling wind. The little space heater is doing a fine job of keeping the basement ‘warm’, and I poured 9 bags of concrete to finish off the top layer of the form.  That’s 4 pours plus the footing. That ought to do it.  All this concrete isn’t really holding anything up, so much as it’s entombing the crumbling wall. I had a rough time cleaning the wheelbarrow in the wind because the sloshing water froze on the grout I was trying to clean off.
I worked on c3pr and moved the new paddlebounce detector into bno_checkforpaddlebounce(), and it worked a lot better. I looked at  inverse kinematics, fixed a bug, and it works better too. Still some bugs. Keep at it.

jan6 tue
Figured out how to approach another bug in c3pr.
Stripped the forms from the green house concrete
Made chicken chili
fixed that bug I’d been thinking about all day. Tiger.swats is very close to perfection.
Greys Anatomy and chili.

jan 7 wed
This morning, I got disgusted looking at my desk and decided to file away all the piled up paperwork. c3pr is working so well I only half-heartedly worked on a bug.  I guess I wanted to savor, for a day, the way it’s working almost like it’s supposed to.
It was cold and blowing really hard, and I ripped a piece of PT 2×4 and lugged it next door. I built the wall to hold up the first floor next to the stairs and then man-handled the basement stairs into place, backwards from the way they came out. Looking good.
I came back home to thaw out and file some more papers. Mary made a stir-fry for dinner and we watched some TV. My book Three Parts Dead is getting pretty good.

jan 8-10 thu-sat
It’s been super-cold out, and I’ve stayed away from the green house.
I’ve been trying to solve the paddle orientation, impact transfer function problem and mostly striking out. It will sort itself out eventually.
You know how Mad magazine bills itself as ‘suitable for framing or wrapping fish.’  So I framed a fish today. Painted on sheetrock and swimming next to the yellow submarine in Celia’s room.

jan 11 sun
I laid low and read for a bit this morning. I showed Mary the framed fish and asked her to finish it for me. Around mid-day, I headed next door with a vague plan to work on the support wall next to the stairs. I didn’t finish it, but it went pretty well, and I transferred the weight of the building onto the new structural column under both floors. It was pretty cold, and I was glad to quit. I watched the Patriots’ playoff game and made myself a pot of coffee, which didn’t make me pee. Go figure. We had munchiladas after she talked to Celia and watched half a movie before she shipped off to bed. I made a half-hearted effort on c3pr, but wasn’t into it. I’m thinking I should just give up on the impact transfer math and ask someone on the web for help.

jan 12 mon
put in the load-bearing post to the left of the stairs.
did some boilerplate code for visioncmd.

jan 13 tue
I put in the bathroom/stair wall and straightened up the other side too. It’s time to put in the stairs. So while I was getting groceries, I also got some lumber. Tomorrow, I fire up the stove and try to build them
I did some boring debugging of visionMode, and it will work soon.
Mary’s pork chops were tough, but tasty. College football natl champ game.

jan 18 sun
Lost track of time there. Sorry about that.
I did a lot of work on the green house. The main flight of stairs is in and the subfloor is patched. I’ve been heating with the woodstove and the house hasn’t burned down. The bathroom is gutted and the wall that’s coming down is exposed. It seems to be holding up quite a load, so I need to be really careful about how I take it out.
I took a deep dive into c3pr to track down a bug in fit continuity. It was a 1-liner to fix, but only after tracking it down.  There are more bugs, and I think this is a good time to stop adding features and fix all the bugs I can find.
I made meatballs and Mary made red sauce. We had spaghetti for dinner.
Netflix captions don’t work on the TV, so I bought a Roku.
Mary painted the kitchen red and likes it.
BZ is shitting worms, and Luci won’t sit still for medicine.

jan 20 tue
Today, I solved a really hard bug in c3pr. The vball sailed right past the paddle in about 1% of the swats. It worked fine in ss mode, and turned out to have to do with the jitter on dpvsa.time, plus the order of execution of the pipelined tasks was messing it up. It turned out to have nothing to do with the time discrepancy bug I also solved. Wow. A very difficult bug and a very productive morning. How about I solve another one tomorrow?
Then I went next door and did demolition in the closet and framed the new Right Turn at the top of the stairs. It’s ugly, but it’s solid, and it’s way better than making 3 left turns down a dark hallway.
Spaghetti and meatballs and the state of the Union.

 

jan 21 wed
I didn’t get a lot done on c3pr, but I decided to fix vision’s period rounding problem. Who knows, it might even be the cause of the p-at-paddle problem.  Note that I didn’t say I did it: I decided to do it. For one day, I am going to bask in the glow of yesterday’s great solution, because tomorrow’s going to be another bug.  So I went and bought groceries.
I went next door and ‘sorta finished’ the door to the bedroom. Then I looked the situation over carefully and demolished the walls in the bathroom. Trim, sheetrock, insulation, studs. Gone gone gone and half gone. Then I cleaned up. The woodstove is working good: I definitely noticed, on the walk home, that it is colder outside the house than it is inside. It was in the teens outside and above freezing inside.
We are invited to the Kowalske wedding in March, and Mary is thrilled.
The swordfish was really dry, but at least she tried.

jan 22 thu
This morning, I found and fixed the bug where the fpvs fit breaks in mid-flight. It was something totally unexpected, but it was easy to fix. And now, the trajectory fits are nearly perfect in all modes. I know of no known bugs, so it’s time to move on! Attaboy!
I went next door and removed the vanity in the upstairs bathroom and then exposed the joists in the kitchen ceiling. Sure enough, there are spliced joists spanning 20′, and a bathtub and some walls right on top of them. Unbelievably weak structure that definitely needs to be fixed. I only stayed for a couple hours because the woodstove just wasn’t pumping out enough heat to keep me warm.
Munchiladas and the Sunday Morning Show.

jan 23 fri
I’m trying to decide what to do next. I need a hal component that does openCV. I need to make it record. I need the paddle pov. I’ll think of something.
I went next door and transferred most of the weight of the 2nd floor to temporary columns. Quite a bit of weight…
Munchiladas.

jan 24 sat
tried to sign up for DISH freebies, but Mary doesn’t have uid, password or, for gods sake, her own gmail address. Fuck.
Went next door and cleared out more wall under the new beam and added another temporary support. Then texted Mary for a cocoa delivery. Gave her a tour. She ‘has ideas about the bathrooms’, but can’t or won’t say what they are. Fuck.
Watched not one, but 2 movies. Worked on coding frame recording and got it to compile.

jan 25 sun
Mary made waffles this morning. First time in a long time, and they were good, but she had a hard time getting them to cook right. It was cold out and I went next door with a bit of a defeatist attitude, thinking: “No point in lighting the woodstove, since it won’t be able to warm the place up anyway.” So I didn’t, and I got cold and I was back home in 2 hours. I found a cache of food Celia had left behind, and brought back 2 jars of cookie mix, and made 2 dozen cookies. Turns out the ingredients had gone rancid, though, and while I finally got the texture right, they tasted like shit.
I tested and cleaned up the code I’d written yesterday, and now I have both record and playback features strapped onto the vision system. Good job! So it’s time again to decide what’s the next feature to implement.
60 minutes, nachos, and a Bourne movie.

jan 26 mon
I called the vet to ask for worm medicine for BZ and started the car to warm it up and melt the ice. I started browsing online about posix threads and processor affinities and found some good links. I’m psyched to be even trying to do this. A couple hours went by and I remembered that the car was still running, so I decided to hit the road and left my Aubuchon coupon behind in my haste. It was seriously cold out, and the cab was warm to the touch. I’d say 2 hrs of idling is about right.
I had meatballs when I got back and then went next door, where I tore out walls and ceiling in the pantry and bath. Mary lay down for a bit and I installed the roku, which seems to be pretty darned good. We watched the Classic news anyway, and I can see that there’s some momentum to be overcome here. We powdered the pills and mixed them into the cat food and the cats were fooled for about 2 bites. They won’t touch it. Not even when it’s been watered down with more food. Maybe we should have followed the directions. We grilled the beef, but it wasn’t all that good. Nice try.

jan 27 tue
Today, I got up early because I was worried about the cats, who hardly ate last night because we put medicine in their food. I figured that when they got good and hungry, they would eat it, but no. They went until mid-day, and I decided there’s no point in being punitive about it, so I fed them and I’ll just buy a different medicine. These are lucky cats.
It was cold and windy and the storm of the century was bearing down on us, so I decided not to work next door. It should be a no-brainer, but it wasn’t easy convincing myself to take the day off. So I spent just about the whole day working on the ppcamera component, and I’ve got a pthread per camera running. It’s not much, but it’s not bad.
I put together Roku instructions for Mary, and walked her through it. Really good salmon for dinner.

jan 29 thu
yesterday was frustrating and fruitless. I tried to get opencv to run, but nothing worked. I finally used synaptic pkg mgr to get a 4-yr old release and located the installed libs and includes. Fancy dinner with Adam. Honestly, I thought it was a disaster, but nobody will say so out loud. Today, I tried it again and got oreilly sample programs to compile and read 106 pages and feel much better about it. Also learned that emc2 2.6 runs on 12.x, so that’s a relief. Next door, I’ve got the 2nd floor jacked up almost level, so I’m ready to order the beam. Pizza and a troublesome performance with Roku.

jan 31 sat
The last day of january, and it is cold and blowy out. Really cold and blowy.
Yesterday, I ‘read’ another 100 pages of openCV. Today I skimmed up to where it gets into camera calibration. I tellya, this book has everything I’m looking for. It’s just what I need, and timely, too. So this month, I really, genuinely debugged a couple of bugs, got swat and replay working, and got a good start on openCV. It’s not what I thought I was going to do, but it’s just as good.
Yesterday, I ripped out the bathtub wall upstairs and prepped a spot for a support post for the big beam and ordered the beam. So this month, I finished concrete, built structural walls in the basement and 1st floor, turned around both sets of stairs, built a landing, and ripped out both bathrooms and the pantry. That’s better than I expected, so it must be pretty good.