LSU Football

I am not the biggest LSU fan in the world, nor am I the biggest football fan in the world. That being said, drinking a nice Abita Amber and watching LSU dominate Mississippi State 45-0 was quite enjoyable considering they did it at Starkville and most of my coworkers are Mississippi State fans.

Tomorrow is my last day of work for a week. The government enjoys a 3 day weekend for Labor Day and then I am taking the rest of the week off. This may be the longest stretch of time off I have taken since before Katrina.....crazy. Off to Ruston for the weekend and then down to NO.....stay tuned kiddies.....

Katrina

Today is the 2nd anniversary of Katrina, I am sure by now everyone is sick and tired of the news coverage....I know I am. So, how about some math?

Gary, IN had a murder rate of 48 murders per 100,000 people in 2006.

New York had a murder rate of 7.3 murders per 100,000 people in 2006.

Gary had the second highest murder rate in the country.

New Orleans had the highest………

70 murders per 100,000 people, 25% higher then second place.

CNN is reporting on the crime and they are saying NO is on track to hit 200 this year (161 last year). However, they are wrong, they say NO is at 137 so far, in reality NO is in the 150s already. I think 151 was this past weekend, family of 5 Vietnamese shot in the East, 2 dead 3 wounded, home invasion robbery.

I had a coworker tell me how he was watching the news about Katrina and they said there had been 150 murders SINCE Katrina, and he was appalled at that number. I had to explain to him that it was not since Katrina, just this year. I guess he will stop telling me about the “high crime rate” in Greenville now.

In other commentary, how about a travelogue?
As everyone knows I am in Greenville, MS. Two years ago I was in Ruston, LA for about a month. Then I ended up in Clemson, SC (actually I lived in Seneca and worked in Clemson and spent a chunk of time in Greenville, South Carolina that is) for 9 months or so before heading back to NO before making this little move.
My sister, Melissa, went from Ruston to Jackson, MS for 4 months and then back home. My parents ended up from Ruston to Alexandria and then back home.
La ended up in Monroe for a shortwhile and then caved in on her southern departure and went back to the Chicago area.
Jacqueline went to Houston, then Memphis, then Athens, GA, and now Washington, DC.
Leslie may be the most travelled, she went to Leesvile, LA (and got whacked by Rita) and then Blacksburg, VA, and finally settled in San Antonio with pretty much a whole new life.
Elena got run out of town and had to finally give in and move to Houston with Beau.
My old boss, Devron, ended up settling in at Clemson, and decided not to retire.

I think that is a cursory overview of some of the traveling in the last two weeks.

Katrina -1

Tomorrow is the anniversary of "the thing" and all the fun that has shaken up so many of our lives in the last two years. I don't have too much to say, but I think if you have not been following Chris Rose's columns you have been missing something.
He has been a master at telling the story of New Orleans and the idiots who run the city. His book "1 Dead in Attic" is a must read. Unfortunately, he has been going through even more hell lately but keeping it to himself. I encourage you to read about it, especially if you have been following his columns for the last two years. Another good thing to check out is NPR's coverage by Chris Rose.

I am not usually a serious person, especially on here, but I think it deserves a mention.

Weather Control

China is promising that rain will not interrupt the weather for the Beijing Olympics. They have dumped tons of money into research and practice to be able to control the weather around venues. I have a better solution: ME!
Some of you may not know that I have the ability to control the weather. I can't make it not rain but I can make it rain. I simply work on my house and it rains. Like magic!

Yes, boys and girls, the second day of working on my house this weekend was rained out like so many other days on my house have been.
This weekend's fun!

Government Problem Solving

My boss got reamed for our industrious unit not meeting the majority of our 30+ annual benchmarks and milestones. Why did we not meet them? I don't know for sure since I was not working here, but his answer was that none of the current staff work as hard as the previous boss. Umm, perhaps that was not the best answer he could have used.
So what is the problem with this? Congress does not care which benchmarks we hit, they want to know as an agency what our total percentage of hit benchmarks his. We hit 85% last year and Congress would like 90% this year.
The solution?

Rewrite the benchmarks and milestones of course! How simple! This includes the milestones for the year that just finished. We went from 30+ to 9! Want to guess our success rate for the past year? A whopping 100%!

Your tax dollars at work! Bet your job can't improve efficiency that much in one day!

Think I am joking? Sadly I am not.

Deep Fried Food Is Always Better

I thought I posted about this, but La pointed out that I hadn't. I looked back and realized it coincided with "Is Your Boss Evil?" and well, obviously I had other things on my mind at the time. In my continuing quest for food in the Delta some of it found me last week. We had a lunch at the lab which was the usual catering food in the Delta: fried catfish. To go with the catfish was the usual french fries and hush puppies. The hush puppies are a bit plain in the Delta as they don't believe in much seasoning beyond salt and pepper. However there was a third side dish that appeared to be an egg roll on steriods: fried corn on the cob. It was not bad, not great, but interesting and tasty.
I guess in the South you really can fry anything.
Oh yeah, desert was banana pudding.

Connecting Motorola RAZR V3 to Computer

In the previous post I included a picture from the accident that was taken by my cellphone. Anyone who has a Motorola RAZR has noticed that they included a mini-usb port on the side of the phone to charge it with. You might think it is a simple process to just plug the usb cable into your PC and RAZR and connect..........nope. That won't even get your phone to recharge. You can buy a cable (any mini-USB will work) and software from Motorola for $50 or more or you can use the power of Google.

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WARNING!
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This is not as simple as it should be. It took me over 2 hours of screwing around to figure out how to do it easily. You need some drivers which are found in a file called "razr V3 usb driver.zip". Installing these drivers will allow your computer to recharge your cellphone....handy but of limited use. Then you need a software package called P2K Commander. That can be found here. Installing this program will then require you to go to System and Device Manager and right-click on the cellphone in Device Manager. Three different applications need to have the drivers update, however they are all included in P2K Commander, just point Windows to that directory and you will be good to go. Then reconnect your phone to your computer and start P2K Commander. You can then navigate around on your phone and move files to and from. That alone has a learning curve as well. If anyone is curious for specifics just let me know. It is a very useful tool.

Traffic Accident Pictures

I promised pictures from this weekend's adventure and here they are. Mustang meets F-150: CRUNCH!
And for comparison is a picture from the Escort that ran into the front of my truck on August 12, 2006 (Yeah, just 53 weeks earlier).

Termites and Traffic Accidents

So a second wall was torn down and rebuilt this weekend, unfortunately I did come across a few live termites, however chemicals solve that problem. That was a nice part of the weekend.
That night my truck got hit for the third time since I have owned . In all three cases it was parked, this time, however, I was in it. I had just parked in front of Theo's Pizza on Magazine (good grub) when a person in a "slightly altered" state rear-ended my truck. Once again a fiberglass and plastic front end of a car was no match of the solid Detroit steel bumper of my truck. Pics will be coming soon.

Is your boss evil?

Okay kids! Question time. As the title says, is your boss evil?

Mine may be. He has already told me he hired me because I was the most qualified person and at other times that I was the easiest to hire (long story short, that is not true). Today I found out that a project he assigned me to is a project he was explicitly suggested not to do. I will be working with a salesman who can best be described as a snake oil salesman. The last agency scientist to work with him had their career ruined when he disputed the results and went on a letter writing campaign against the scientist.
When a senior staffer of the agency asked my boss why he had accepted this project, especially assigning the newest scientist to the project, his response was "It is Chris on the firing line if it goes bad". The senior staffer at that point reminded my boss that part of his job is to protect his scientists...my boss was silent.
So I ask you: Is your boss evil? Mine might be.


Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Government Fun!

I was at my old job in NO yesterday and was reminded of some of the fun reasons I don't work there anymore.
For starters, the Center Director aka Mr. Burns has finally decided to retire....effective in January.
The Agency has decided to allow the Chemistry group to replace a few people, my favorite being replacing someone who has not been fired but will be fired maybe although he has been on paid leave for 18 months at $129,000 per year and he can not be replaced until he is maybe possibly eventually fired. Confused yet?

Anyway, I was down there to interview candidates for a job. Neither candidate was an ideal fit for the job, but c'est la vie. The best part of all of this may be the list of questions my old boss wrote up for us to go through with the candidates, including:
1) Tell us about yourself?
2) What are your short-term and long-term goals?
3) Give an example of a real situation or activity where you had to overcome obstacles, barriers, or differences of opinion in order to resolve a conflict or difference in a satisfactory manner.
4) What is/was the biggest accomplishment in your life?

Oh yeah, for those who are wondering my old boss admitted to reading through HR manuals to make up his list of questions.

P and NP Complete

There is a set of terms on computational math called P and NP. NP-complete problems are non-deterministic in polynomial time, or basically they are damn hard to actually prove the correct solution. Fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, and other fun sorts of math must be used to approximate the solutions. For example, there is a problem known as the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). It sounds very simple: "Given a number of cities and the costs of traveling from any city to any other city, what is the cheapest round-trip route that visits each city exactly once and then returns to the starting city?"
The math in this problem is resolved readily into a solution space of (n-1)!/2 where n is the number of cities. This seems easy to brute force, after all if there are 3 cities then n=3 and the solution space is 1, if there are 4 cities then the solution space is 3. Not too hard, right? If there are 5 cities then the solution space is 12. A slightly larger set. That is the catch, if the number of cities is 6 then solution space is 60. For an example as to why this gets hard to solve, at 10 cities the solution space becomes 181,440.
The reason for all of this, besides the fact that I sat through classes on this crap, is that a scientist is using this problem as a possible trial for using photons to perform computations. A few years ago someone proposed using DNA, however individual DNA are too big to actually solve complex problems, because as you can see from above, you need incredibly large numbers to solve this problems. In the case of n=10 you would need 181,440 pieces of DNA, which is not too bad. However, when you get into larger and more realistic numbers, it becomes physically too large. For example, n=100 requires 4.7E+155 (for the non-math folks that is 47 with 154 0s behind which is a really really big number. Photons are considerably smaller then DNA, in fact they are so small they have essentially no mass but are merely sized by the energy they carry. A photon of visible light possesses 4E-19 Joules. 1 Joule = 1 kg *m^2/s^2. The energy is related to the speed of the mass moving in other words, 1 J also is equal to 1 Watt-sec (recall we pay for power by kilowatt-hour). So to solve a TSP problem where n=100 would utilize 6.72E+137 kilowatt-hours. At current Entergy rates in MS of 1kWh costing $0.007365 (less then $0.01) it would cost $4.95E+135, or more money then you can imagine.
Ok, I admit it, I am a huge geek sometimes!

Thesis update: Onto the conclusions and working page 62 at the end of the day. Still have conclusions, future work, and appendices to do.

A Couple of Assorted Rants

I was at the grocery store today, one of the 2 in town, both of which are Kroger. Anyway, Kroger like every other damn grocery store has their own discount card. I have a strict policy of not bothering with those discount cards for several reasons. Most stores have cashiers who will use their own card if you don't have one, so it is not like I am losing out on savings. Today the original bill was like $24 and with the discount card it was $19. That is a pretty hefty bump in the prices if you don't use the discount card. I don't use them because everywhere I go is a different grocery and this is the first time I have lived some place that only has one chain of stores. I also hate to carry around the little card and don't want more crap in the mail. I could give out false information but I don't want to carry the card. What infuriates me is that if you don't use the card the store makes a lot more money on you. If you do use the card the store does still make a lot more money because they sell the data they collect. A couple of years ago when I was taking courses on data mining, the going rate for the checkout data was $10,000 per gigabyte. That is crazy, especially since the data is skewed.

My other rant is the reason I was at the grocery today. I am supposed to be in NO on Monday for work. I am interviewing some new people to run the test lab in NO. My boss approved of the schedule with my old boss last week, but he did not tell me until this morning. That would be after I asked him this morning if he had talked to my old boss. He said he had and he had written a note to talk to me about it but forgot it. A little while later I asked him when was the Delta Council meeting next week and he told me it was Tuesday morning.....that would be useful when you have me in NO for work on Monday. I guess that means a late night drive back from NO on Monday night. But it gets better, around 3:30 this afternoon my boss decides to tell me that a few weeks ago he made plans for a vendor to come visit he and I on Tuesday afternoon as well. This sort of information is useful....do not keep it to yourself! Because I will be out of town all weekend and not back until after 10:00 on Monday I had to get my grocery shopping out of the way for at least the early part of next week.....ARGH!

Thesis update: Working page 51 this afternoon. This section is nanocomposite nonwoven formation......oh boy!

Thesis Fun!

One of my goals when I took the job here in the Delta was to finally get around to knocking out my thesis and finally putting this little adventure through LSU Grad School behind me. Things have been a bit slow at work for the last week or two while I am waiting for a vendor to check out a machine and waiting for harvest time to come around. As a result of sitting in my office and having read a ton of papers on cotton ginning, I decided to start the thesis. In the last 5 work days I have knocked out 42 pages. I was averaging 9 pages a day until today. At this rate I am hoping to have the whole thing in rough draft form in the next two weeks.
Anyone who does not know what the thesis is all about can check the patent out.

And for those who don't know, I owe a huge THANKS to Leslie for doing probably 99% of the work! I was in the right place at the right time.

Tools!

As per my last post, I was knocking work out on the house and got to play with some of my favorite toys...umm I mean tools.
Joist Hangers are a wonderful invention and allow for one person to easily build a joist system and it is multiple times stronger then a traditional toe-nailed or end-grain nailed system.
Bostitch Palm Nailers are a great replacement for traditional frame nailers or a hammer for those who still use such things. It works great for working with the fasteners like the joist hangers above and for places a framing nail gun can't fit. It works with regular nails and is a nice addition to the tool box.
I still love my Framing Nail Gun, which is one of the most useful tools I own.
There has been a great invention from Bostitch for use in nail guns and that is the HurriQuake nail. A lot of work went into developing this nail which has received a lot of awards.
And finally, just so everyone does not think I only enjoy using expensive power tools, I do have a few more traditional tools that were handy this weekend. An upgrade to a 1 quart industrial caulk gun is useful when using construction adhesive. A standard caulk gun is 1/10 of a gallon, so a 1 quart caulk gun holds 2 1/2 times more which is nice when you are working fast on big pieces like say the entire rim joist of my addition. I do use a hammer some times, there are still good uses for one. I do have a framing hammer that I like to use.

House Renovation Fun

I am in NO for the weekend (shock!) and finally have a chance to get some work done on my house. The addition on the back is in pretty bad shape. It was added on in the 1950s and then was converted to a laundry room and 3/4 bath when the house was split into apartments 20+ years ago. The pictures show that moisture and crap wood combine to be a haven for termites. The flooring is redone now, but there is much much more work to be done on this addition in the next few weeks. There is also some lovely plumbing to be straightened out.
I thought you all would enjoy the pictures.

Also got to enjoy some good food while in town. Check out La Vita.

If anyone is a fan of the Food Network, in particular Alton Brown, check out his second series of Feasting on Asphalt. The first episode aired last night and was in New Orleans.

Dumas, AR

So earlier this week I attended a Ginners' Association meeting Dumas, AR. Dumas, like Greenville, is in the middle of nowhere. It is pretty humorous when no one in the room lives in the town, even though a number of them work there. I do applaud the fine folks in Dumas for putting out a big bottle of Crown Royal and Jack Daniels before the dinner and meeting began. Good booze and good fried catfish, the combination was almost enough to make the drive worthwhile. One thing though, folks in the Delta do not make the best hushpuppies to go with their catfish.