Content-type: text/html Ray Manning

Monday, February 25, 2019 8:02 PM

Ending February


I start Tuesday with a good road bicycle ride and then I get cleaned up to meet with my team at CSULA. The team has finally made some progress this semester and we talk with other teams and solidify some of the interfaces. Afterwards I ride on home for a quick dinner and then ride the motorcycle to CSULB for a business incubation meeting. My CLimathon teammates from last year and I take the opportunity to work on our business plan for submission on Friday. I don't get home after 10pm - it has been a long day.

I let the weather warm a bit on Wednesday and take the mountain bicycle to the pier and back. There's a headwind all of the way out so I get in a good workout and ease back on the way home. Just in the last couple of miles does rain start to fall, but nothing serious. I have a teleconference with Karl's people that I'm working with and then go to the dentist. The white spot on my gum has shrunk in size but the gum is swollen and still has a white spot (though no pain). So the dentist does some more digging to see if there is anything causing a possible infection and then she coats the area with a topical antibiotic. I keep asking the dentist for opioids, but she knows my story and isn't buying it. So we'll see how the topical antibiotic does in the next week. I have a fairly lazy Wednesday evening.

I start Thursday with some great sleep after I've bought some bloodstone crystals as suggested by my dentist. Okay - things can get a bit whacky, but I'm willing to try new things. I go buy a birthday present for Elliott, Joe and Tony's adopted son who is as cute and healthy as can be, for his upcoming 4th birthday party and then buy some supplies at the grocery store. I get in a decent session lifting weights as I continue to lift light weights and avoid/minimize pain in the left shoulder. I take a shower today in the guest bathroom - my first in many years - and scrub away at the tile and fixtures to make them look almost new for future visitors. Throughout the day I continue to go back to the guest bathroom and scrub/touch-up fixture and other details which looked good before but now look brand new. I also "pretend" to work on some algorithms though I don't make much progress. But I do celebrate when Karl's intern tells me that my specific task algorithm works and he can move on to other topics. Us old guys aren't quite irrelevant yet. (Note that today has been a day of continuous rain that has confined me inside the house.)

I'm up at CSULA for a 9am until 2pm Industiral Advisory Board (IAB) meeting and then to meet my senior design team. There are two new members of the IAB but somehow everyone "clicks" in today's meeting and we're productive. My senior design team is behind and scrambling. As I ride the motorcycle home there's a fair amount of rain just as I leave CSULA but then it tapers off to nothing by the time that I am home. And the speed on the freeway as dryed the water off the motorcycle so that I don't have to wipe it down. When I get home I discover that I'm using a Goggle charts library that will not be allowed behind a firewall or on an Intranet. I advise Karl's team of this crap but luckily quickly find a replacement Javascript plotting library that is open source. It turns out the Charts.js library "feels" a lot like the Google charts that we were using so I quickly get one page (out of three) up and running and ask the team that that single page is not using any disallowed libraries.

I sleep well until 3 am into Saturday morning and then cannot sleep. I keep thinking about the Javascript plotting mibrary. I finally turn on the light and read for an hour and maybe get 90 minutes of sleep in before the alarm goes off. It's chilly this morning so I work on the plotting and then go cycling near 9 am. It's chilly and windy but anything involving a bicycle is better than any other activity. When I get home I get a warm shower, buy some supplies at the grocery store, and then keep jumping back and forth between the Javascript plotting library implementation and scrubbing/touching up bathroom faucets to make them look shiny and new. (After all, they are more than ten years old now.)

I'm lazy on Sunday and just get out for about an hour morning walk. I go to Elliott's 4th birthday party. (Elliott is Joe and Tony's adopted son.) It's great to see the family again and all of Joe's friends. Just a bit surprised that everyone is drinking mimosas and other drinks near 10:30 in the morning. Eventually I get back home and relax and work on cleaning up Karl's website. It's almost ready for a trial connection with the mill monitoring hardware boards.

I get out for a cold ride on Monday morning - President's Day. Afterwards I pick up some supplies and have an 11am telecon with one a student that Karl has working on for the web/board interface. Early in the afternoon I watch F1 pre-season testing from Spain with the F1TV streaming service that I just bought. I get the kitchen floor cleaned a few other things done around the house, but I'm not sure where the day goes.

I start Tuesday lazy and check emails and put a touch-up or two on Karl's website. And then I feel guilty so I pull the mountain bicycle out and ride to the end of the ocean trail and turn back towards home. I catch up to a group of four riders on road bicycles and talk with them as we ride. They are Vietnamese, so I can practice speaking some Vietnamese. It turns out they are retired Rockwell/Boeing people and one of their wives still works at my former company, Northrop Grumman. So we ride along - their road bicycle pace is about the right speed for my mountain bicycle - until I head for home on my exit of the Los Angeles river trail. After a shower I start cleaning the hardwood floors, go to the grocery store for supplies, get to the library to return two books and pick up three new ones, and then return to cleaning the hardwood floors with F1 streaming practice playing. Eventually, with the hardwood floors now clean, I see an email with another requirements change and a completely new web page for Karl's site from his distributor in Chile. And now I'm getting upset - nobody could have said anything about this page for the last two months of work? We schedule an 8 am (my time) telecon but I am pretty livid and ready to give up. I email Karl and ask him to call me so that I can express my anger to him in private.

We have an 8 am eleconference for Karl's website and the task is more cleaer. It is simpler than I expected. It is almost trivial. I work away on the site after the teleconference for a while and then I lift weights. I've taken a step up in weights and try to be as protective of my left shoulder with the strictest form that I can manage. After a shower I grab some lunch and watch more streaming F1 pre-season testing from Spain and then go visit the dentist. We talk about my poblem and agree that the gum swelling and gum whieness has gone down. So she suggests the least intrusive action of rinsing my mouth with hot salt water many times a day and to return next week. When I get home I adjust the chain on the Ymaha YZF-R1 which has just celebrated its 17th birthday with more than 101,000 miles. And work on Karl's website. As I'm taking a break I keep messing around with the buttons on the dishwasher which had decided to fail back in November. I've pulled out the contact informatio and will call them on THursday. Except that I play with the buttons and the dishwasher starts running. Was I just confused for these past months that the flashing "Start" button was flashing because I didn't close the built-in dishwasher quick enough? I start a one hour wash and keep checking for leaks and we'lll debug from there.

I'm lazy on Thursday morning and do my taxes with the recently received forms from places. Near 8:30 am I get on the mountain bicycle and ride. But I'm just not feeling it today so I ride down to the aquarium and back for about a 70 minute ride. Oh I kept up a decent pace, but I'm not feeling up for more. After a shower I buy some supplies at the grocery store, start the laundry, and make an almost-final push to finish Karl's website. In the afternoon I watch more F1 pre-season practice from Spain.

It's 37 degrees F on Friday morning and I'm not going out there to run/walk. I just assume I'll lift weights when I get home from my CSULA activities. I work on a website and then try to get to CSULA. Except the motorocycle won't start. On Wednesday it quit running for no reason on the way home from the dentist, but it immediately started back up again. Today, no matter how much I coax it, it won't start. I roll the bike back into the garage and rive up to CSULA. Fortunately there is not significant traffic getting there (or getting home later). And before the meeting a second coincidence occurs. Two weeks ago there was a messup with the meeting time, so I walked over near King hall in the sun and sat down. Just to watch students. After 20 minutes a man and woman couple turn a corner and see me and we exchange brief "Hello, how are you today" greetings and they walk off. But I remember the young man's sincere and effusive smile. Today, because I've had to drive, I have to park in a different parking lot. As I'm walking to meet my team, here comes the same young man riding his skateboard on campus to get to class. "Hey, I know you!" I yell at him. He stops and I remind him of the brief encounter two weeks ago and we start talking. He's a second year mechanical engineering student so we have a few things to talk about and I offer to put him in touch with a former co-worker astophysicist that I know because Josalai has mentioned that word. I give him my number and he skates off to class. Two mixups (the wrong meeting time and the motorcycle not starting) led me to run into the same young man twice. My senior design team and I have a productive meeting but we're not making enough progress. I don't really want to start going up to the campus multiple times each week (especially if the motorcycle is acting up), but all of the four harbor cleaner teams are getting into trouble. When I get home I go to debug the motorcycle and it starts right up. After many minutes of running it starts to run rough at idle and stall. But then starts right back up again. It sort of behaved like this once before and I had to have the throttle position sensor recalbirated or repalced, but I've vowed not to put anymore money into the 2002 Yamaha YZF-R1 despite the many years and 101,000 miles of fun it has provided for me. I let the bike sit for an hour and it again starts right up. I have to try something, so I play with the low speed idle adjustment until it is set at 2000 rpm - pretty high - but the bike seems to runs without hiccup at this setting. So let's see what happens when I want to take the bike to Long Beach City College on Saturday for the Cyber Cup.

I start Saturday with a good if chilly road bicycle ride. Afterwards I grab some food and go to the Cyber Cup. The Yamaha YZF-R1 runs well except the choked and unchoked idle speeds are too high. But at least it runs and doesn't threaten to stall. I observe the Cyber CUp activities and am pretty disappointed when they announce winners but don't let the winners explain their techniques and strategies. I ride on home and relax. Near 8pm I walk out to the garage to get something and I look up at the top shelf and see some old window screen. I've had these "new" windows since 2002, so the raw window screen material must be older than that. But I have an idea for my CSULA team so soon I'm unrolling the window screen and forming it into shapes and mounting on a PVC pipe. I realize that the PVC pipe diameter is too small, but it's all I've got and I take pictures and sent it to the team to think about. And then I head for bed to read and sleep.

I start Sunday with a good road bicycle ride again. Afterwards I go to Lowe's to buy larger PVC pipe and more window screen to try and second attempt at a harbor debris collecotr piece. For the most part I relax in the afternoon and then go to the Fair Trade Long Beach meeting. SOmehow I'm elected to the Board of Directors as Secretary for the upcoming year. When I get home I grab dinner, start working on the meeting minutes for which I'm now responsible, and work on a few other things. The person who I wanted to speak with, Dr Suely Saro who just announced her candidate for Long Beach city council, isn't present. I wanted to speak with her about doing a website for her but also providing her with a lot of crime statistics and charts that she can use as part of her campaign. I'll catch up to her soon.

I have a bit of difficulty sleeping into Monday morning and end up reading for an hour and finishing a book before falling back asleep. I get out of the house after 8 am on the road bicycle for a good ride. I feel a skip or two on the chain so its probably time for a tuneup or maybe new chain or chainrings on the bike. After a shower I watch the stock market and see a press conference with the Palm Beach, Florida prosecutor talking about the prostitution sting in Florda that has caught the owner of the New England Patriots' football team. He states his facts eloquently but whenever he can, he tries to inform the media and viewers about the atrocities anf omni-presence of human trafficking. He's articulate and well-spoken and it comes out that he's worked with a human trafficking task force for a number of years along with the FBI andd DHS. After the press conference I drive over to a new Fair Trade retail space. I've volunteered to help them paint and fix up the space for fair trade vendors. (Fair Trade fits in with human trafficking because of the need for fair, livable wages.) I just put on the old clothes and start painting and fixing the mistakes and overlooks from the people who were painting this past Saturday. I allocate two hours and end up there for just 2.5 hours - but I've accomplished a lot and the Fair Trade team is always happy with whatever contributions (energy or otherwise) that they can get. Hopefully I can help more before their soft opening on 16 March. When I get home I'm tired from the bicycle ride and rehab work and I'm glad that I took an Aleve ahead of the work in expectation of a lot of climbing and twisting and reaching. I have a slow Monday afternoon into evening though I still update a number of websites and don't even get to work on a proposal that I intend to submit for a recently announced city council candidate in Long Beaach (though she wouldn't be my councilperson). I can provide her with plenty of maps and data and scientific analysis in her run in April of 2020.