Happy fourth of July.

I hereby pledge at least twice a week to write more.  It turns out I actually have a reader. A program I randomly signed up for eight months ago has brought me some great answers for engineers starting over in a new career field. If you would like to try it sign up for www.mentornet.com. It's a great way to meet and ask professionals some serious questions without going through the interview process for a job. I enjoyed it throughly as my mentor really gave me some great advice.

The speed dome project is slowing down.. :( I know I uncovered an Altera FPGA device and another programmable mico controller within the device. and unless anyone knows how to extract actual VHDL of VERILOG out of those devices I am pretty well going to have to leave that item a black box. The other problem I have is that "Sensornet" is proprietary and not much is know about it. I did manage to find a basic string of answers from someone on the internet who stated this:


Sensormatic protocol in a nutshell:
4800 baud start bit 1, data 8, parity none, stop bits 2.


to send simple single byte commands send three bytes
byte 1: ID of dome (set with the rotary switches)
byte 2: the command
byte 3: checksum formed by subtracting byte 1 and byte 2 from 0x00.


the dome will acknowledge reception by sending its ID.


single byte commands in hex:
80 home
81 start pan left (24 degrees / s)
82 idem right
83 stop pan
84 start tilt up
85 idem down
86 stop tilt
87 focus near
88 focus far
89 stop focus
8a zoom in
8b zoom out
8c stop zoom
8d start pan fastest mode (96 degrees / s)
8e start pan fast mode (48 degrees / s)
8f start pan normal modfe 
90 iris open
91 iris close
92 stop iris
93 stop all movement


There is much more it can do and learn but that takes more complex multi byte communications.
The above provides for basic control. 

So it's a start. I have the jumpers set. to go and am going to try a "Shift out" command via a handy Arduino.

Today being the fourth I am going to be hopefulPublish Postly enjoying some fireworks tonight. I caught Maroon 5 in concert on Saturday at Summerfest this past weekend as well. They are actually AWESOME in concert. I did not think at all that it would have been that great. I also learned how to play cricket this past weekend. A confusing game at first but then after a while you get used to it and stop thinking about it in terms of baseball.

Have a good one

With the Job going well we decide to attack a Sensormatic Speed Dome 2000

Okay... another month has gone by but things are going very well. I have been working hard at my new job at GE healthcare and completed some cool tasks. The foremost is the GUI program I wrote in MATLAB to convert selected parts of a .MAT file into CSV files. I had not written any type of program until that time and for a while it kicked my butt until I started asked questions on Matlab forums and got some great answers and some great help. I am also setting up our new electronics lab outside the clean room so we don't have to suit up to test anything. It can be a hassle sometimes as there is no bathroom in the cleanroom.

So with that said I started a new project today. Last year a friend gave me an old Speeddome 2000 camera on a three axis control system from Sensormatic. it's old (maybe 1998 ish) but apparently it still works.If not I will toss it and bury myself in something else.) I have to replace one voltage sensor that was broken. a 0.79 cent part from digikey but the problem is ordering from digikey that one part will wind up costing around ten bucks due to shipping.So I'm going to hold off until I get a few more things on my list.

I powered the device up this weekend. I have a few old but large 60Hz transformers sitting around from various devices I took apart. No labels but I sent a signal through a signal generator at two volts and figure out how they were wound by guessing the primary and secondary windings and looking at the voltage peaks at the secondary sides.

The device needs 24 Volts.... AC. I'm not totally sure why. I'm curious to see if the voltage gets rectified inside somehow.  The transformer generated 22 vac and that was within specs. I hastily tied it all togather and voila'  the device powered up. Here are some pictures below.

If anyone has any detailed info on these babies let me know. I am looking up all the IC's I can get at on the device. There are a few IC's with programs on them I am going to try and extract the programs from. no idea how but We'll try.

This will probably take a while but my goal is to be able to control this thing to tilt and rotate on command from an Arduino or something.

Thanks all

Bill

DONE. (Period)

Holy Moly it's been two weeks since I wrote anything. Alas I have more time! Let's break down what happened.
First Senior Design Ended. I will post pics as soon as can find them. I spent the most on the device and therefore it is mine. What I will do with it remains to be seen. We finished a few days ahead of schedule and fixed the last thing a few hours before our presentation. We were last to present and went through the whole thing reather quickly. The questions asked were very good. The esteemed professor Armstrong was at our presentation and grilled us somewhat. Our demonstration worked flawlessly. and the perfect moment when we hooked our project up to the router to my laptop forming a little tiny network and controlled it via the ethernet connection was (I don't know how to express it exactly) pure engineering awesomeness. They were all very pleased. Three of the group went our to celebrate and the final one went home.

Of the four in our group three worked hard. One had a child a week before the project was due and this was not entirely her fault but we became very annoyed when her stuff stopped working and she left claiming she had to "Go". We spent four hours troubleshooting her block before it began to breathe again.

IT worked during the presentation and we all help our breaths for a moment while the sensors were activated.
Flex sensors I learned cannot be continuously deflected or they will lose their springlike qualities. I learned this the hard way and though they worked in the end they were only able to tell us if it were full or empty. not 1/2 full or whatnot. Next time I'll use something different. 

The Arduino Mega board almost melted down on the eve of the last night. I had to buy a back up which I will return as I already have a mega and have no need for another.

Senior design (EE595) was not technically difficult but just a lot of busy work. If you undertake it I have a few  good ideas for you to contemplate before you really dive into it.

First: use what you are comfortable with. The semester is no time to learn a whole new microprocessor or language. I used an Arduino because I had one and was able to play with it for a while before using it on the project.

Next figure out what you can do with whatever you are comfortable with. Look around the internet for example code and if you can find some use that device and slap it on your compiler. The whole Idea of the project is to build something unique and document it. going way out to left field is where so many groups failed. Later on during your own time, try out the new designs, chips and code. but during SD stick to what works. You will have enough problems as it is.

Don't wait till the last minute to buy and assemble. it make cost you a few extra bucks buying a part or two that you didn't use but waiting until two weeks left to assemble the device leaves little room for error. when you choose your project have it all researched out. with a good idea if not a concrete one on how to do what you want. this will entail you to think a lot about your design before the class starts but trust me It's worth it!!!

Lastly stay organized and keep up to date with the paperwork. Getting behind will kill you faster than a superbug. A few groups had to finish their paperwork after they presented which turned into a nightmare.

Tomorrow, my first day as a free man I am getting up and going to a VHDL seminar to re-hash my skills and sharpen any dull knives. I will be doing a lot of this later on but it's never too late to re kindle older knowledge. Wish me luck :)

Fun with Firmware

Twelve days left ot go before I am a college graduate for the second time around. Today I have been beating my self to death with firmware problems. I am first off going to post the code when it is complete. This will hopefully inspire someone else to improve my design and make it better.


I just got News that Osama has finally bitten the dust.

It's 1 am I'm going to bed

Ready Set.... Employed!

That's right I got a JOB the company is General Electric. I had a long but good sit down conversation with the Engineer in charge during an interview. I figured I had to beat out one other guy but low and behold they made me an offer that I couldn't refuse. So now I have to get my suit dry cleaned and figure out what to do with 10 more hours of free time during my we--- Oh wait Senior Design! A sprint to the finish with less stress. Oh Please go fast these next two weeks

Peace out

Acutally see you soon :)

Fifteen days later

Last test tomorrow for Senior Design. The last test I'll be taking in at least six months. I have been studying like a madman. The laste few weeks have been a blur of interviews. I've had an average of two sit down interviews a week and and two phone interviews. I am now giving Oscar worthy performances after a few. Practice makes perfect.
The project for the class itself is nearing completion after I spent re-soldering the new circuit board. The first attempt had too many bugs I had to work out and I screwed a couple of runners up. The second time around the board is much better. I used a better quality perf board ( I will post pics later) I discovered a few tricks I will also share at a later date as I learned there are certain things you can do to make everything easier. Largest is to have a solder sucker on close hand.

Soon all this will end and I will write more

Poster Contest Today

Today is the day I stand before people with lots of letters behind their names and let everyone know about my poster  I'm reviewing non-linear support vector machines at the moment. I'm then going to pick my lovely girl friend run some errands and its off to the contest. The top prize is 1,000 dollars which is more than likely to not end up in my coffers seeing as it is my first time doing this but if I get anything close to an honerable mention I'll be happy.  I will hopefully have a picture or two to display to my one or two loyal readers. 

Today my problem is Orcad.

UWM has Cadence OrCad. an awesome suite for Electrical Engineers everywhere. I want it too ! But there is one serious problem with UWM's Orcad seats.  Nobody knows how to use it. It was one of those "Hey this is great software used all over industry WE should have it on our computers!" But now it's there and it sitting .... Sitting.... Sitting and nobody is using it. So in an effort to boost what I consider to be an unacceptable grade Prof Kautzer has asked me to create a simple tutorial on it. It's hard and I am absolutely begging for resources. I have found a bit online but I really need a cheap book from which to figure out all things capable with this software because it really is cool and interesting to use but as the rule for most engineering software goes the more powerful it is the more difficult it is to use. There are millions of parts wires buses, connectors etc. in this software for the user it can be a bit overwhelming.

The brighter side is that two of my three classes are winding down as most of the project work is complete in one, I have to write a five to ten page paper for another. Then the focus is on our "eFeeder" for senior design. It will rock. Just you Wait!

Are PLC's technician level projects or Electrical Engineers?????

Here's the part where I wish people actually read this and commented on it. My questions today or even all this week is working with PLC's still considered Electrical Engineering or is it Technician level stuff?
I attended a class taught by a technician. Kohler hired technicians and engineers but the technician got to do all the cool stuff which irked most of the engineers.

Every year they seem to get easier to program and the jobs just seem to be simpler and more routine. Everyone at UWM seems to think they are for techs and not engineers but they seem to want to hire engineers to do this stuff in industry. Nobody seems to want to hire me to do anything else anyways. I suppose PLC's with the ability to advance to something else would be nice but I do not see that happening at places like Oilgear where they have a routine way of doing things and just crank out projects left and right.

If only I had a choice  *sigh* .....

Let's look at some points  and lay it all out and compare it to Say VHDL code

They both create logic. PLC logic goes into a big box that outputs 24 volts DC. PLC's do the same with 24 Volts. PLC's can have analog signals VHDL needs a DAC which creates a binary number normally around 16 bits long. (Not sure if PLC's can do this)

Result: Tie


VHDL chips need to interface with chips and cannont directly store their programs in memory. They are placed on PCB boards and require all sorts of power circuits and buss circuits. PLC's are just one big box a tech can program but a tech cannot get the PCB layouts and the other circuitry correct without an enginer.

Result VHDL has this one.

Both are used in a variety of equipment though PLC's are constrained to industry.
Both have some sort of language although VHDL is a much more elegant language and is more powerful

I guess it all boils down to what you like better.

Looks like someone has a case of the MOONdays :(

Great way to start off the week. I get sick. not the flu thankfully but enough of a head cold to shut me down for a day. hopefully I'll get a phone call and a clear head tomorrow.And I cannot say this enough (Phone Call! )

mayhem on a C6713 chip

Its amazing what two weeks without compiling code will do to one. I have been working so hard on senior design that I forgot about compiling and loading code onto the development board. I did get our lab working properly and figured out what the code was doing. normally c code on a computer using a compiler isn't too touchy about memory as long as you have enough. In the embedded systems world you have buffers and more buffers which have finite sizes and therefore must transfer stuff in and out of the at a near constant basis.

Tonight I have to create a poster for a contest I am not entering for pattern recognition. I still have to make the poster and still have to finish everything. I really hope this project results in some good measurements. I am going to be up all night.

See you all in the morning

Last day of spring break :(

I had a week and I can honestly say I've used it to get a lot done. Yesterday we started building the amplifier circuit and got some results. Today I want to tweak the design and get the two scales working and recognizable by our microcontroller. Below is the simple script I wrote in MATLAB to get the resistor values and the offset voltage. apparently the solver wants numbers instead of being all numeric. One has to run this, get some numbers and run it again for the thing to work. If anyone has a better idea I'm all ears.

clc
clear

Vohi = 5;
Volow = 0;

%%Thevinin Equivalents

Flexlow = 13500;
Flexhi = 14500;


Vthevlow = 5*(Flexlow/(10000 + Flexlow))
Rthevlow = ((1/10000)+(1/Flexlow))^-1


Vthevhi = 5*(Flexhi/(10000 + Flexhi))
Rthevhi = ((1/10000)+(1/Flexhi))^-1

%Solver

 [R, V] = solve('0 = V-((2.8723 - V)*(R/5.7447e+003))',...)
   '5 = V-((2.9592 - V)*(R/5.9184e+003))')

Today I also want to get the motor circuit working and find the parts needed to control it via the micro controller. If these things get done this week it will have been a spectacular week.

Omp amps have a purspose?? Yes!

Spring break is upon me and instead of gracing some tropical beach to knock back a few fruity drinks while listening to Margaritiaville I am striving to finish my senior design project.. Todays hot topic was using the Flex sensors to determine the weight of product in the bowls which tips a scale. the data sheet for these guys is here: Flex Sensors A resistance claim of 10-20k Ohms depending on how drastically one bends it. we are in a hard position where our sensor ranges from 13-14k Ohms. this produces a small window of voltage change between 2.08 volts and 2.17 volts.

Not bad though we are using an OMP AMP! here is a picture of a basic inverting amplifier. We see in this one that the (+) input to the circuit is grounded. This needs to change to a voltage that we can use to make the low voltage aka 2.08 volts to equal a gain of zero and the 2.17 volts to equal a much larger gain. Since the window is small here our relationship between the flexing and final voltage output (between zero to 5 volts) is going to be quite linear. We did some math and plugged the numbers into MATHCAD (Here is the link Mathcad ) and voila we have an answer for the value of the R2 and the voltage offset. Note though in order to understand what is going on here you need to know we used a Thevinin Equivalent circuit to represent the voltage divider created by the flex sensor on top and a 10k resistor on the bottom.

The circuit may need a little bit of tweaking as we are assuming the op amp is ideal but I am confident we can make it work.

Tomorrow I am actually going to go somewhere. I am taking my Lovely girlfriend to the Museum of Science and Industry. I will be thinking of senior design but hopefully I will be intrigued by the Body Worlds exhibit (Link http://www.bodyworlds.com/en.html ). My philosophy is that if you're going somewhere cool or scenic why not learn something or work up a good sweat. you'll be surprised how much fun that is and if the place to a lot of sweating to get to it certainly won't be that crowded.

To-ta-loo everyone

The should I or Shouldn't I

As I inch forward to graduation I keel thinking about what to do about my job situation. I am certain I could get a job programming PLC's of any kind and be successful at it. But is it the right thing? That field is actually labeled as more technician based stuff than EE stuff. Accepting a job like that would almost be backing myself into a corner with little or no maneuvering room.  Once you start doing that, it's all you'll be doing. No more C or VHDL programming which I'd rather do.

I haven't accepted anything and am more than likely to draw this one out for a month or two to see what else pops up. Any suggestions pleas?

Daylight savings takes its toll

Well I cannot fall asleep and it's nearly 1pm on a Sunday night.  I miss Hawaii where daylight savings time only meant that the Packer Game started at 6am instead of the 7am way too early kick off.

I have made significant progress in "Ye olde Speech Recognition"  program where I started taking averages of Mel Cepstrum coefficiants and low and behold I have classifiable data

As you can see it is separable and with a little tweaking I may be able to make them MUCH more separable. 

The other program I had to write was a compression analyzing program where we were suppost to create fifty random strings of letters in fifty different files, zip them via MATLAB and then analyze the size in various combinations. I can do this.... I did it. It took a long time because I had never done it before but... then we have to randomly corrupt one of the files, and perform NCD analysis on them. I am still hashing out how to randomly corrupt a file in C code. I have a feeling I am going to be in the lab all day tomorrow working on this one. I was told in lecture (We Were Told) this would take on the order of 30 - 90 minutes to do depending on the level of understanding. Sadly and I'm not alone on this one it has been over 8 hours and will probably break 13 if I am not lucky. 

Yesterday there were an enormous amount of people wearing these green shirts making a pilgrimage down to North Ave. This is where the bars are located. Normally I wouldn't be curious as to this but it was about noon on Saturday. It was a pub crawl. Don't these people have things to do? I am racing around for time and resources, trying to find a job get good grades and keep up with my reading. Whomever says college is a leisurely life didn't study Electrical Engineering or was pretty damn smart. 

I've also been glued to what's happening half way around the world in Japan. How can one country so small have such bad luck with nuclear energy? I really don't think they should go after the engineers who designed the reactors. if you can build a reactor to withstand a 7.9 earht quake you could be reasonably sure it will hold... but I guess not. I am hoping they can quickly stabilize the place and get to helping the citizenry who appear to be in rough shape. From what I hear it is the best prepared country in the world for dealing with earthquakes so once they get the reactor secured the wheel will once again begin turning. 

I'm trying to think if anything else exciting has happened since I last wrote or blogged. this means I must write more.

A late night at Kinkos

I am annoyed. Texas instruments has a software package called "Code Composer" studio on the market that I am using. I cannot find all the necessary files to do all the tutorials. We've been through numerous lab sessions but I need to dive in deeper to the debugging section to understand snippets of code and am missing files. even worse was that class was cancelled tonight. We are far behind in that class and I do not want a sprint to the finish due to lack of planning. My laziness is not a factor here because I WANT to go ahead and do this stuff.

I have the help files neatly printed thanks to Kinkos. Which by the way is only open until 11pm everyday instead of the 24 hours it used to be. That is horrible. I have actually been in there at three am and always found it to be comforting that I could go in whenever and print out whatever I needed. sigh....

Still no luck with the speech recognition although I am mounting a new plan of attack. One of the biggest gripes I have about UWM's EE program is the lack of required programming classes. I don't have many but this one is huge. Right now I am competing with a number of well schooled CE's who have the experience and don't care about power grids. I know how most of them work but really don't care.

Now it seems that I am suppost to know C hands down. I know a little. and I am learning now but I have to work three times harder than the others because they have the skills needed to get the code written while I am reading chapters of "A book on C" late at night (Think tonight). That book however is a really great book. I just need time to read it.

All is well at the moment

Alas I have not posted in a while and since then so much has happened. which is exactly why I haven't posted in a while.  First off my debounce problem is solve. I bought some better buttons from www.sparkfun.com and they worked much better. Combining them with a library specifically for buttons and presto! the incrimenting works wonders. the buttons Radio Shack sells work but are very noisy. for those of you purchasing any I recommend a "D" flip flop. That will debounce the button and give you a solid yes or no.

Since then I have also rigged the DS1307 RTC (Real Time Clock) into my design and figured out how to get it to correctly log the time and bring it to the Microprocessor as a variable. It works very well at the moment. It is using the I2C 2 wire network and has an address of 0x68. I had to do quite a bit of reading before I new exactly what to do. A few online tutorials helped greatly.

The motor problem for our food dispenser was solved today by a quick trip to American Science and Surplus. The store has a very unusual but awesome inventory of all things for tinkerers. We found our water tank (an empty cleaned Cheetoes Tube) for all of forty cents and several motors for half the cost of a new one online. Please shop there. I cannot say enough about how valuable a store like that is in the area. I have no idea where they got the motor. It is used but works great for a prototype.

Things are coming together for this project which is a good thing because the other nightmare my Pattern Recognition project is going to keep me up several nights.

In other news I have officially broke onto the job market and am activly looking so if anyone....

Debounce anyone??

Maybe its the cheap buttons I picked up from Radio Shack or maybe it's the program. But I cannot seem to incrment the counters I have written in my code only once when the button is pushed. Clearly someone else has run into such a problem and solved it. If it's you please let me in on a secret. I have started looking at libraries people have compiled for a solution as I could not get it to debounce properly or only increment once and not twice (on the way up and on the way down).

The two toolboxes The "Button" library and the "AdvButton" are up for it hopefully. I tried the "Button" library and it sort of worked but I think the switches are just two noisy with lousy contacts and cheap parts. I ordered some new buttons from www.sparkfun.com and those will hopefully solve the problems I have encountered because new and bigger programming parts are looming in the future.

Tomorrow is the UWM Career Fair. Time to get dressed up and play ball with future recruiters. I will be there most of the day trying to fenaggle an interview with SOMEONE.

Today also marks the ninth day of Protests in Madison.  Now as a future employee of the private sector I am divided on the issue. I think the teachers union needs to make a few concessions. However I feel teachers are being constantly picked on by government.

Education I feel is the foundation of our society. when Egypt and Tunisia Roll into the modern economic system we will have even more workers willing to work for less hungry for whatever they can get. This will only increase the pressure to create better thinkers at home who can solve problems easier. If we drive the teaching profession into chaos or any sort of situation where students cannot thrive we have only shot ourselves in the foot. the children of today will be running this place tomorrow making big decisions on how our country runs in the future. I wish teachers were given the respect they deserve and the profession of teaching was ranked right up there with a doctor or lawyer. Let us all today, take a moment and thank those teachers who've made a difference in our lives.

Reading is a necessity but not a luxury at the moment.

How is it that hundreds of pages of very rigid technical manuals need to be read with the reader not having time to cover them all. It's like needing Cliff's notes for Cliff's notes. I suppose than it should be called "Cliff's Notes Once Removed".

I did actually get the foundation of our senior design project completed and started writing some of the functions. The code isn't that complicated until it gets to the part where this thing has to communicate with the outside world via internet. Yea I am going to have to read all those technical notes as well. Let's just hope the processor I ordered gets here by Saturday so I can spend vast amounts of time trying things out.

My blackberry is on Gag order.

No phone calls. 18 job applications submitted and not one single phone call. I hope I don't have some evil gnome or split personality that logs on to my job sites late at nights and changes my resume to include something like "Greatest Achievement to date: 15 drive-by shootings and no jail time."

I hate looking for work....

I'm not exactly submitting my application for the CEO ether. Most are in fact "Mid-level" which I may or may not qualify for depending on the job. Mostly not. My guess is that someone in China or India is doing the job I would have been hired to do except they cost much less.

Meanwhile I am still reading about Fisher and his chaotic but elegant pattern algorithms. My latest results from the last homework actually worked out to my advantage. Now give me my freaking "9" okay?! See it worked

The top one is the actual classification done by a multilevel perceptron that stems from the data below. The last image is what the function spit out which is (and I think, still learning) the attempts to minimize the error as a few points were not totally captured by the algorithm. Ho-Hum. I really am curious as to when if ever I'll be expected to actually write a function that does this stuff. as of now we're using a lot of pre-defined functions. This one would take me a long time to write. But! seeing as nobody care to hire me I think I might actually have that time.

Today I'll admit to being a Nerd.

The last few days have been great but I need to once again focus on my Pattern Recognition programs that are Due on Monday. yesterday was Esankies Birthday so I took her to see "Black Swan" which was a very creepy movie but absolutely fantastic thanks to Ms. Portman. I still am thinking about what happened at the end.

This morning I went to a MATLAB seminar on importing data into MATLAB and manipulating the data by sorting and plotting it in various forms. Apparently I need to "Wow" Dr. Cohen when I turn my programs in for class and I hope that this seminar will provide me with some information on just how to do that. The software MATLAB http://www.mathworks.com/ is a fantastic application for those of you who don't know about it to... well do math in a very hard, fast, detailed, and "number-crunchingly" quick. It is built around matrix manipulation and works very well. I am finally learning how to present the numbers calculated in a much more professional way. I will be posting more code later on as I sort out how to do this.

I will also be posting a lot more on my other two projects this semester. My senior design project which is a ethernet controlled dog feeder and my speed recognition door lock. both of which will be using matlab software.

In other news I got a T-shirt from Mathworks for asking questions. I will wear it. And No, I'm not that much of a geek.

The aftermath of Snowmageddon.

It really wasn't that bad if you stayed inside like a normal person. I suppose in the rare event you decided to stay outside in shorts and flip-flops it could have been lethal but in reality it was just a lot of work. It cancelled two classes putting our senior design group once week behind schedule in the second week. We are however diligently working and plugging ahead. I for one ordered a "PicKit 2" for programming our little microprocessor and getting the heart of the project working. The device assumes for some reason that I want to write all the code in assembler which is just not the case. Assembly language is really low level and cumbersome. it's free software for assembler compilers but I'd rather spend the cash and save the headache. I'm instead writing it in C. I am currently going through the tutorials in the users guide. although they themselves are in Assembler I am more focused on what this software can do that the actual minutia of the code. Hopefully I am full immersed in this in a week or two. I'd love to had the processor working perfectly by spring break allowing me some breathing room.

Here are the pictures I took of our place after the storm.

Just before the blizzard.

Homework was done and that is both good and bad. It is done but the next class we get another confusing topic and yet another assignment. This one I'm a bit nervous about because most engineering text books teach you the nice easy linear way of doing something and then move into "Non-linear" where things get extremely messy. This is the "Linear" Chapter and while I understand most of it .. some parts are one big long "WTF"??

In other news we're suppost to be getting a huge blizzard tonight 13-18 inches total but in all seriousness. the more they hype it the less we actually get. Almost as if there is a linear relationship between the two.

Mickey, my parents dog is staying with me this week and I actually really enjoy his being around. He dances for you every time you come home. Even if you've been gone for maybe five minutes. Somehow he thinks the fact that you disappeared and then came back is AMAZING on the order of someone setting foot on the moon. Today after I have some coffee I am going to study for a while and head to the gym for a bit since I missed it yesterday.

Still trying to wrap my head around what exactly a "Covariance Matrix" is. It is in the normal distrubution and is part of Bayesian Statistics but after that my memory starts to fade. This image took me about seven hours to get to. it is seveal random normally distributed groups and I am trying to use a function to get the program to recognize the difference between the three clusters.

I am going to focus now on the roast that is slow cooking in the oven. I'll have better luck getting that to work out tonight.

First Entry

The first entry is always hard. I created this to hopefully document the last semester in what has been three years of ups and downs while searching for the great thing called a career. Trust me, this time I'm ready for it.