Blatant Obfuscation

I think I have come to a new level of disdain for meetings. Most meetings seem to be the product of the culture I have been raised in, yet over the last couple of weeks, I have come to a disdain or even a hate of meetings.
I serve as the Sunday School president of my student ward. I have an attitude its my calling, I will do what I can, but I can't add much more to a meeting than what is in my purview...about a month or so ago, the bishop asked me to attend an 8 am "ward council" meeting every week, instead of the twice a month it was.
I should note, I unlike others around me as well as family, have a strong grasp of time and the amount of time it takes to get things done. So long as I am only dealing with myself, time has no meaning, but if I am interfacing with people, I strive really really hard to be early by at least 5 minutes and then to get things done as soon as possible to not tie up other lives with useless waiting. I have yet to attend an 8 am meeting that started at 8 or close to it. [Introduction of an annoyance]
I attend a meeting that the agenda has nothing on it. [A second annoyance...meetings should have purpose beyond we need to meet to talk]. So for 30 minutes in ward council we sit around a table and people try to come up with something important to say, I have nothing to add, I normally attempt not to say anything. I tend to keep track of random statistics of the ongoings of the meeting to keep myself awake and entertained. [the average arrival for the meeting is 15 minutes after 8...in other words 5 minutes after the meeting gets started 10 minutes late].
I spoke up and asked that if the meeting was an 8:15 meeting than change it to 8:15 so I am not showing up at 750 and waiting for 30 minutes. It shows a lack of professional conduct.

I didn't go to church on Sunday. Due to circumstances I had a limited control over, I didn't sleep well the night before, when my alarm went off, I looked at the time and turned off the clock and went back to bed. I awoke around noon and felt like i hadn't missed a thing. I need to set the stage for a couple of things that happened. I got out of bed and dressed around 1230 after I got done reading. I ate a bowl of cereal and then took Jordan to work at 215 when he came out of his room. I came home and spent time between playing Mario Kart on the Wii and attempting to figure out what I was doing with the next 7 weeks of my life.
At 4, there was a knock at my door. There was the bishop and the 1st councilor wanting to talk. [Annoyance: people who show up and want to talk about nothing.] After some level of formalities I think I got a little to annoyed and started to show the entire annoyance to the visit that had not purpose. I end up getting a tad persnickety and asking the bishop what he wanted. It may or may not have had the desired effect I wanted. They left shortly there after, but this comes from weeks of the bishop showing up or calling just to talk about nothing. This past week, the 1st councilor was over just to visit about nothing.
I have been formulating a list in my head of why these visits to see me. I have come up with a couple of plausible scenarios. First, the bishop has it in mind that there might be a worthiness issue with me. I have evaluated my life, and can not determine that there is such an issue in my life. Secondly, the bishop is having thoughts on my calling as Sunday School President. This might be a likely thing to occur as I have been not wanting to teach a Temple Prep class if there is no one in mind to have the class taught to and it serves no purpose other than taking up time and resources. Lastly, it is closely associated with the idea of my calling, that the thought is in the bishops head I am in the wrong calling or shouldn't have a calling right now, which wouldn't hurt my feelings one bit. It wouldn't be the shortest time I spent in a calling.
I don't think I interact with family as much as the bishop is trying to interact with me on some issues. It is really odd to me.
Needless to say, I think if this continues, I might just stop going to meetings. Inactivity is looking pretty sweet to me.

~u

Posted by James at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometime over the past 6 months, I discovered in me a love for how things are computed. Algorithms in general are some of the more interesting things to be, because their intention is to take the data one has and create a useful model so that statements and predictions can be made.

When one can boil down a lot of numbers into a summary set of statistics, I can be interesting. Normally that just involves talking about the center and spread of the data, but those simple one don’t seem to be that interesting. At one point in one of my many statistic courses taken, a professor made a comment that the interesting part of the data isn’t that which conforms to expectations, rather the outliers in the data. Outliers are the part of data where discoveries are made.

So right now, I have been learning algorithms that are used to generate the estimates of a model (least-squares or maximum likelihood) which are pretty much the standard of computational statistics for 60 or more years. Most of these algorithms are well versed and have a lot of modifications to them to deal with more modern data problems, while a handful are not that well covered.

Dr. Scott at one point was talking to me about a few algorithms that dealt we decomposing the data into a sufficient statistic, and then how to update the sufficient statistics with new information, instead of spending time retrying to compute estimates. Originally this concept was important with regards to a military application of the Second World War, where the need to create estimates on artillery without having to recomputed complex and difficult formulas. The Givens Algorithm was so developed to update sufficient statistics with a new observation and then appropriately modify the estimates. With the invention/inclusion of the computer, the algorithm was ignored (sort of). So the few papers written on it were not referenced often and are somewhat hard to get a copy of.

With the inclusion of computing into the business world of the 60’s/70’s, the Givens resurfaced for a while and there were a few more papers written in the mid-70’s that try to explain it, but in effect only talk about what they were using it for. Again the technology was so far ahead of the research/programs that the need for updating algorithms almost seemed ridiculous as there were faster and faster machines that took less and less time to just run thru and entire update. Now we have times where we are talking about data that can be in the terabytes of data, and to update estimates of that based on new data, does take time.

So I started off learning about the Givens algorithm for self-enrichment purposes, then came along a professor, Dr. Tolley, who had been working with mass-spectrometer data and thought of cool ways to look at the data, one just happened to be dealing with the Givens algorithm. I was asked/tasked with getting it to work, and then told at some point that what I did with the data would be a lot of work and would qualify for the project for my masters.

I have been over the last several months coding up the algorithm and then testing it. I found problems with the coding, and each time I have tried to get better source material to see if I can find where my problem lies. Yesterday afternoon, I asked for help from Dr. Scott as I was going to stop working on a computer and go to a whiteboard and hand work thru the entire algorithm and then see if I could get my program to do the same. Needless to say, the problem in the computer code showed up in the attempt on the whiteboard, and I was stuck. Dr. Scott came in and looked over what I had done, and couldn’t get it to work out right. It was a frustration.

I looked over my calendar and my notebook, trying to find notes I had made and reference I had come up with, and took the time to figure out how much I have spent working on this problem [best guess close to 80 hours on the Givens algorithm alone] in the past couple of months. Some of that has been as I sit at home with nothing better to do, and other is at work while I am multi-tasking myself.

I made a comment a while back that I find myself more and more in my office when I should be other places. I have come to the realization that I am in my office more and more, because it easier to work here on what I am thinking about than it is to sit idly at home. Also I think I am using it as an excuse not to have to do anything in my social life if I am busy with my academic/work life. Oh well, maybe soon I will figure out what is wrong and be done with this particular problem for a while.

~u

Posted by James at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This past weekend (more Saturday) found me in Colorado at my parent's property putting in a fence on the south end. I am told there is a story there. Different people have different accounts of how things happened. I know that a fence was there. Dad replaced the old with a new. The neighbor tore out the new fence in some notion of open range ideals. There was a lawsuit. The fence was to be replaced. I am going to be honest, after 5 years of having an electric wire strung and nothing more, the fence is probably a good thing. So i spent the last day of May working on just that, a new fence.

The story doesn't begin there. It begins a week and half before then. I was tending my nieces so that my brother and sister-in-law could go out and celebrate their anniversary. To me it was no big deal, something nice to do for them. When they had gotten home, Jared asked me what I was doing at the end of the month, particularly this last weekend. I told him, like always, it was a whatever moment, and nothing was planned. He informed me that my sister Becca who had been out visiting from Mississippi all month was organizing an effort to put in the south fence for my father as a father's day gift. He told me he would just pick me up and so it was planned for me to work on a fence.

The important factors here was that Becca was attempting to get as many people to help to make the work go easier. It didn't quite work out that way.

After leaving Provo after 8:30 Friday night and getting to the parental property about 2:30, Jared and I crashed in one of the trailers and then in the morning I persisted and slept in. When I finally arose, I was told I was welding the "H" or technically it was an "A" frame for the fence line as well as capping 3 additional poles to be installed in the fence. Well let me express my love of drill stem pipe. It is cheap and given the right equipment welds nicely. Given my father's 30 year old welding box (an arc welder that should at least be looked at by a professional), I had some difficulty welding. I also choose to work at a different location than my father thought I would work at. It had to do with cars and stuff in the way.

In welding and cutting with another tool that my father has had for decades, I spent a lot of the time making sure I minimized the number of fires on the ground around me. It was fun. I got the first support into place and then not being sure of where the second and by extension what made it an "A" frame was to go, I decided I would walk to where the fence was being put in and ask my father. My brother in law Keith had to go return his rental car and so I relieved him on the fence. It was probably a mistake. That was around 11 or so. I had been up for a couple of hours and now I was driving t-stakes in the ground and wiring up the barb wire to them. Jared and I pounded away at this. At one point I had to jackhammer some rock for the t-stake to be driven into the ground other wise it was not bad.

After getting down to the bottom of the ravine and dad cutting what he thought would be adequate amount of barb wire to finish the run to where the frame i was building would go. Jared began running the next run of barbwire up the ravine. I was positioned up the run near a tree to help it get by the tree. We ran the wire all the way to the top, and then called it for lunch. It was about 12:30 or so.

Upon arriving at the barn, and thinking lunch would be done, we found out that it wasn't quite done. John and his wife were there visiting with Keith. I had been at some point under the impression that you know people were coming down to work and not visit. I was wrong and may or may not be bitter about the socializing. I having much to weld still, went over to work on the welding instead of socializing. [I was in CO to work.] At some point I was called over for lunch. It wasn't like the food was really done being made, but I went anyway. After grabbing a sandwich and some veggies as snacks, I went back to work. It might have been rude, again I was under an impression that we were trying to get something done.

As I welded people socialized and didn't head to the fence to continue work. Dad had gone to move water lines, and Jared went to take a nap. Jared had been giving me crap about sleeping in and so it was funny he took a nap. I got done welding around 4 and with Dad's help loaded the frame and posts on the back of a truck to be taken to the fence line and then everyone stopped their socializing and got ready to work.

Keith and I were tasked with placing the frame into position and then digging the holes for it to go into. It was a process, in which I broke the post hole digger's handle, and then had to go get tools. Dad and Becca had begun working on string up the second run of barb wire which was run up before lunch and Keith helped them as I had walked back to the barn for a tool and then stopped to get a tool out of the truck on the way to the bottom of the ravine.

As I cut a foot or so off the legs of the frame, Jared decided to build himself a stone bridge so that he wouldn't get his feet wet when crossing the small stream that ran the bottom of the ravine. I need to note that the bridge itself started simple, more stepping stones and then transformed into a 'bridge' as Jared added more and more rocks.

In all of it we ended up with dad taking up the third run of barb wire and everyone helping get it to the top. As Dad, Becca and Keith started to string it up, Jared and I started to clean up the old electric line. This meant pulling stakes and winding up wire. Everything was taken to the bottom of the ravine. The usable t-stakes, I had started moving to the other side of the ravine and up the slope into places about where they would go.

The day ended with the 3rd line on the posts and the 4th run being pulled up the hill. Afterwards we called it quits, which meant tools and other items were take up the ravine to the truck and driven back to the barn. Jared pulled out his FAL to shoot and I took out my recently purchased 22 to shoot.

We ended up eating that night at Lotsa Pasta/Thatsa Pizza. Normally I would have order several calzones to bring back with me, but hadn't thought that far in advance. So I had ordered Fettuccine Alfredo with Steak so Jared could take a picture of it and send it too Jordan [Jordan's response was simply "That hurts"]. I started eating and might have gotten a third of it eaten and then I was done. I was simply drained from all the work and labor of the day. So Jared finished it off as he waited for the calzone he ordered to arrive.

Needless to say, I slept well that night. Sunday we got up and mulled around until about 10 at which point Jared and I loaded into his car and began a long drive north, which only got worse when we found ourselves stuck behind a semi hauling a huge section of pipe doing 40 mph in a 65mph zone. In commenting as I have noted a couple of times to myself, the section of US191 from I70 to Monticello, UT seems to have more passing lanes for the southbound traffic than there is for the northbound traffic.

~u

Posted by James at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)