Robots, Cornhuskers, and Parking Meters - Part Two

Continued from http://www.groesser.com/2017/01/robots-cornhuskers-and-parking-meters.html

So Bennet and I made a trip to the University of Nebraska, Lincoln campus. We went through the student union. Not much happening on a Saturday Morning.
I happened to remember that there was a tower that I've always associated with the university and I tried an online search and I found that there was a tower called Mueller Tower. Hey, I know someone named Mueller. Got to visit that. We also found another sculpture.

On the other side, there was the stadium and the gym

Then we noticed off the right, there was a mastodon. I took the first picture and I wanted to know what he was doing. He mentioned that he wanted a pic to show he was holding it up. I came close.

Then, when walking back to the car, just past the bookstore, I saw the tower I was really looking for. Then the realization hit me that that was the state capitol. Of course it was. I felt kind of stupid for thinking it was part of the university. I must be slipping.

We had to make a quick run back to the motel and I noticed just to the side of the motel was a sculpture of a paper airplane. Notice the last photo that the paper folds are present. You may need to click on it to expand it.

OK. Off to the robotics competition.

Setup.

I don't have a video of the first competition but there are some good facebook videos that I will link to. Let me tell you about how the competition works. The first 30 seconds are devoted to autonomous action from the robot. It can do a few things in this stage, I think. It can shoot the two given balls into the basket. It can push off the large ball off the pedestal and park there. It can move to the wall and hit a beacon to change the color. After the autonomous time, the teams can drive the robots and points are established. Each color has two teams that are to work together. Also, the actions are similar but the robots can lift the large balls and put them in the basket.

Match 1 for Team 5037:
Facebook Video
My Video

Match 2 for Team 5037:
Facebook Video
My Video

Match 3 for Team 5037:

Facebook Video

My Video

Match 4 for Team 5037:
Facebook Video
My Video

Match 5 for Team 5037"
Facebook Video
My Video

Semifinal Round 1 (They were ranked #2 from 24 teams!!):
Facebook Video
My Video

Semifinal Round 2:
Facebook Video
My Video

OK. They didn't win. They did very well though.

Robots, Cornhuskers, and Parking Meters - Part One

So this past weekend I took a trip with Madsen and Bennet to the magical land of Nebraska for Madsen's robotics competition. I actually have an affinity to the Omaha/Lincoln area because the Union Pacific Railroad has such a strong presence there and it was the starting point of the Transcontinental Railroad. I like railroads. :)

So picking up the rental car was uneventful and it took me some time to understand how to get the bluetooth to understand my phone. I've had bluetooth in a few of my rental cars but this is the first one that could connect to the extremely popular Samsung phone that I own. Go fig. I have saved up my bandwidth and I planned on using my Google Play account to enjoy tunes all across the rolling hills of Iowa. We then packed up the car and loaded the pool toys that Ellie filled with air for Bennet. When we would actually have time to use the pool, I didn't know, but I checked on the website and the motel had a pool, so we took stuff for it.

Madsen rode in the van with his team all the way to Lincoln. Aside from an accident that backed up traffic for several tens of miles around Iowa City, the trip was uneventful. I'd taken it several times before so it was well remembered.

When we arrived, I couldn't remember the name of the motel and with a check of my email, I eventually found it on my map. It was just across the road from where I stopped to check. We met Madsen in the lobby as they had just arrived a few minutes before we did. The room was nice and clean. It had a fridge that I promptly plugged in and put in my diet Dr. Pepper for later. I planned out the next day on my computer to make sure I knew where things were. Madsen was leaving at 6:30am but the competition didn't really start until around 11:30am. I wanted to stop at the University of Nebraska to just check out the campus that I had seen so many times on televised football games. The bookstore opened at 10am so I had plenty of time to find a parking spot. The map mentioned that there were metered stalls all around the place so I shouldn't have a problem.

Morning went off without a hitch. Madsen went with his team. Bennet and I ate breakfast and I even made a marvelous waffle for Bennet. We packed up the car for the day and off we went. Finding the university wasn't hard at all. The stadium was huge and stood out on the skyline. It didn't hurt that it was only a few miles from where we were staying. We also found out that there wasn't an indoor pool. The other motel in Lincoln for this brand did, but not this one. Bennet was greatly disappointed.

Here is the problem. There was parking everywhere. All meters. The thing is, on the way there, I realized I didn't have any change. I figured that I would need at least a dollar for an hour, and all I had was some dimes and pennies. Still, I found a parking spot right behind the bookstore and went out to see what the meter had written on it so I could pay for parking. Hmmm. it seemed I had to load an app on my phone in order to park. I don't want to load an app on my phone. This is stupid. The meters stopped being needed at noon and it was close to that. Did I take a chance of getting a ticket? I'm in a rental car and I know they don't take too kindly to getting tickets on their cars. Grrr. Ok, maybe there's some parking. a little south of here. I just needed an hour.

So I drove around town, expressing my frustration to Bennet about how I couldn't find a place to park yet there were spaces everywhere. I eventually found myself on the other side of the stadium, having come full circle around the campus. I pulled in to a vacant lot and got out to re-read the meter to see if I could do this without giving my life history on an app just to park in a strange town for an hour. I noticed that I could go to a website and do this. Perhaps that was less intrusive. So I stood out in the wind going through a setup process. Ok. login...choose password....who am I....choose a pin...get a text....put in the code...THIS IS FREAKING RIDICULOUS!....I'll just park and get a ticket. This is maddening.

I made our way back to the bookstore, trying to avoid a bunch of high school students carrying pro-life protest signs. Hmmm. Well, I'm in the bible belt so I guess that fits. I once again faced my nemesis parking meter....OK fine!! I don't want to cheat the residents of Nebraska from their dollar. SHEESH! So I took my phone out and looked at the web page again. It wanted my credit card. I don't want to give you my credit card. I really don't. I know you are safe but....Let me just look at the other side of this meter....Oh. What's this? What appeared to me is what you see in the photo above. There was slot for coins. "Insert coins at anytime" OK. I didn't have any, but cool. What really captured my attention was that thing on the left....it was a credit card slot. In Chicago, there are stations on every block where you pay and you then put the stub in your window. I was hoping that is what I was to find in Lincoln. Instead, if I had just taken the time to walk around the stupid meter, I would have found this on every meter. I checked the other meters and sure enough, each one had one. So I fished out my visa card and slipped it in. $1.25 for an hour. Ok. Credit or Debit. Credit.  Done. Thank you. What a way to waste time. I felt so stupid. Of course the engineer in me immediately wanted to know how they were connected to the central office but I pushed those thoughts down as I took Bennet on campus.

I went to the bookstore and found the pens that Tracy wanted and I fought back the urge to buy an engineering pad. I had enough paper, but I did have to handle them a bit, to get my fix. I walked back to the T-shirts to find an affordable shirt, red, with "Nebraska" on it. I had to look a bit but I found one. I purchased it and walked out to check the rest of the place.

-To be continued.

It Seems I Need a Goal

The picture above is the cycle room at my gym. It will be my new home for the next few months. You see, a couple years ago I had the goal to ride the length of the Hennepin Canal. I did that. It consisted of 3 days riding about 30 miles per day. I could have done more per day but there were extenuating circumstances. Well since I did that and a few other rides, I haven't gone to a gym for no-reason no-how. I felt guilty, but I really didn't want to move much.

So I was playing with google maps or something, perhaps it was a railroad group on Facebook, and I read about a rail-to-trail in Southern Illinois that has some interesting railroad bridges. I check it out and I am interested. I had a goal last summer to head down there with a motorcycle and check it out. That didn't happen. So, I'm thinking that the kids are old enough now and maybe I can take Tracy down there and I can do the ride. She and I did one leg of the Hennepin Canal alone and it was a nice time. I really do enjoy time with her one to one. Perhaps we can take some time off to do that?

So, along with that ride, I want to ride up to the Wisconsin border on the Fox Trail. I can do that. For whatever reason, it helped me commit to getting to the gym to get the body ready for the trips.

Another downside of my self-imposed inactivity has been my sugar levels. I can feel it when I eat any significant amount. I need to exercise to feel better and burn it up. I need to lose weight as that is also key to bringing it down.

Kind of a boring post, but that is what my life is like at the moment. I want my summer to be better than it was last year.

Raspberry Pi

Do you mind if I geek out for a bit? Thank you.

During my mission, you know, that two years where I had all the time in the world to think about all the things that I had done wrong, listen to leaders that told me what I was doing wrong at the time, and then have random strangers reject and tell me how wrong my most personal beliefs were, (sorry. I digress) I looked forward to getting back to school and finish my engineering degree. I loved the idea of understanding the world, building and using tools, and all kinds of engineer stuff. I was getting tired of looking at something and guessing what made it work because I didn't have that information available. 

One of the joys of engineering classes, over, say, technology classes, is that you go into the why and how, not just the application. Over the process of my 5 years for my B.S., I learned how to build a computer from sand. We made the wafers, we made the circuits, we built the state machines, CPUs and memory and we learned how and why to program them. There was little that we didn't investigate. That isn't to say we completely understood. Each of these areas had sub areas and people had devoted their lives to particular aspects of everything we studied. That wasn't lost on me, so please don't think I'm arrogant in what education I have. I am acutely aware of my own ignorance.

So, one class I had was machine level programming. We had a board that was about a foot square. It had a small keyboard for Hex input 0-9 A-F, an LED display (Red LEDs, not LCDs), and bare chips. It was an 8086 processor on board with a whopping 16K of memory. With this, we had to build programs and become familiar with how data was stored and processed with the lowest level of programming. We had to be aware of each bit and where it was and where it flowed. It was a chore to work on. Plus, Intel chips did everything backward so we had to take that into account. Bytes were hard to read. It made me really dislike Intel's chips.

In keeping with my program's "make them suffer and then show them an easier way" paradigm, we were moved to a lab with Apple computers. Apple used Motorola's chips, the 64K series. There were emulators that allowed us to create low-level programs on the machine and we could see where the data was in memory, in the registers and all the other places data moved around. It was so much easier to understand than Intel's chipset that I fell in love with the stupid thing. It eventually landed me a job with Motorola, where I work to this day. My interview there consisted of "Can you read assembly on the 64k?" and my response was probably along the lines of <pupils dialated> " I LOVE the 64k! What a terrific instruction set!" My main accomplishment during that period was solving a memory leak in low-level code that plagued a product for over a decade. The product used a Real-Time Operating System that passed messages back and forth to the processes via a queue and occasionally, it forgot a message and the memory never cleared. That was the "memory leak."

So here we are 22 years later and I order the computer above. Yes, it is a full blown computer. $50 on Amazon. The drive is 16G, not out of line with the servers you can get from Amazon or Azure for VMs. The OS is a version of Linux. You simply connect a keyboard, mouse and monitor and boom. you have a computer. When the first version came out, I had read about it and thought that it would change the world. It is that accessible. Now we can buy cell phones with the same specs, but they aren't completely accessible in that it isn't fully interactive. Still, this thing is amazing. It is essentially that foot square board I worked on but it has a quad-core ARM chip with 1G onboard and whatever SD card I can put in. I can access the internet and program the board to run peripherals. For me, it is an amazing tool. 

I hope I never get tired of being amazed by what mankind can do with what we have learned over the millennia. It keeps me from being depressed by the stupidity that mankind is still capable of.

Alma 32

Alma 32:33 And now, behold, because ye have tried the experiment, and planted the seed, and it swelleth and sprouteth, and beginneth to grow, ye must needs know that the seed is good.

This is a verse in the Book of Mormon about faith, and trying out a new way of thinking, of viewing the world. In context, it is one of faith. It was a section that I knew well as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints back in my early 20's. It is the foundational book of the church and one that we hawked non-stop for my two years in the service. While I personally was embarrassed by some of the story contained in the book, I wasn't ashamed of this chapter in particular. It was one that I used in my own life. I was indeed happier by associating with the church before and after my mission. During, not so much, but I've written enough about that.

Since that time, I've used this verse differently. My faith has faltered as I studied Christianity and my church in particular. Now, before anyone gets all judgemental here, this is MY story. I don't speak to anyone's experience but my own.

Still, coming to terms with this new information wasn't comforting. I found it difficult to operate in my old paradigm. I wrote new friends and old trying to make sense of what I was reading and learning. I wrote blog posts on other blogs to document what I felt and when. When I confided with Tracy about what I was going through, I was beside myself because unbelief is the worst thing a man can do to anyone, and I was expressing my unbelief to the person that meant the most to me. That it didn't go over well is an understatement.

After a hard year of endless discussion, I/we decided that we would try Alma's experiment in reverse. We stopped going to church as our nerves for both of us were on edge.

It worked. I had such deep-seated self-loathing because of who I was and how I felt and that it was wrong in the eyes of the church and ultimately, the Lord, that it affected most of my world-view. I began to look at things entirely differently. My political leanings became more centered. My feelings of empathy became so much stronger. I forgave myself of what I had done in the past and realized that I was a pretty decent person and that if God couldn't accept me as I was, then he/she had issues, not me. I honestly and visibly became happier outside of the church instead of in it. I think the same could be said of the rest of my family. In many ways, we have flourished in just being ourselves without fear of judgment.

Yes, in many respects, the church made me happy at one time. I became more social than I would have been otherwise. I met some of the greatest people in my life. I had a great education. My family, in many respects, is here because of the church.

I listened to others. I read books by members of the church that brought into question the foundational claims of Christianity and the church in particular. I started, I feel, to honestly evaluate all the history that I knew and ask myself if I wanted this in my life especially since I couldn't give it my ringing endorsement any longer. I didn't believe in magic, and that is where the Book of Mormon came from. I couldn't believe in the Restoration of the Priesthood, because that seemed to be a later fabrication. Everything that I read talked about how the scriptures changed with time, why members left when they did (and it seemed like the reasonable thing to do if I was in the same position). Indeed, as a father, if Joseph Smith asked of me what he asked of his followers, I would have asked for his arrest. Since that time, these "anti-mormon lies" have been admitted to by the church essays, if you care to read the footnotes and make fairly logical conclusions, you might think the same.

But I'm happier outside of it. I put the experiment to the test in reverse, and I'm happier without it in my life. Who knew?

The Priest, The Lemon, and The Secret

There was once a priest who went to see the world after taking his oath. After many years of wandering, he finally arrived in a small village in the middle of nowhere. The people there believed in the same religion as he did, but they had no church; they had to go to the nearest one which was in a small town 25 km's from there. The priest took the initiative, asked the Church for support, and with the help of the local men they built their own temple. From there on, he was celebrating the Sunday masses, joining together men and women in Holy Matrimony, and saying prayers at the funerals.

Many years passed by like that.

At the end of an ordinary mass, in early spring, on a chilly Sunday morning he was just guiding the people out of the church, was about to close the gates when an unknown man stepped into the churchyard.

With his dirty and torn clothes, he stood before the priest and said:

Priest, please be good and give me half a lemon! - the priest was a good man, and even though he thought the request was a bit strange, he went back to the rectory, took out a lemon, cut it in half, took it back to the man and gave it to him, who looked back to the priest with gratitude. However, the priest was curious. He asked:

Son, why do you need this half of a lemon? - with a fright on his face, and before the priest could have said a thing, he rushed out of the churchyard gate and took off.

A week later, around the same time, when the priest was leaving the church, he found himself in front of the same man in the churchyard. The man said:

Priest, please be good and give me half a lemon! - the priest was surprised by the appearance of the man and his strange request. Of course he was good, went back to the rectory, and brought the half lemon. Placed it in the stranger's hand and immediately he asked:

Here it is, my dear son, but please tell me why do you need this half a lemon? - the man was obviously frightened and immediately ran away but the priest was not sluggish either and ran after him. He wasn't in a very good condition, he has never run so much and so fast before so he was out of breath by the end of the village, almost fainted. He thought the strange man might appear again next week, and it would be nice if he could keep up with him, so he spent his week working on his cardio. It turned out to be a good idea, because as he thought, the stranger entered the churchyard on Sunday. The priest didn't even wait for the request, he was good, and brought the half lemon. He received these words from the man:

Thank you priest for being so good and giving me half a lemon.

Don't mention it son, -said the priest- but please tell me, what do you need it for?! - by the time he finished his sentence the man was already running, but the priest was close behind. They were running for a while and the priest was starting to feel exhausted when they arrived at a wide and swift river. The stranger without thinking threw himself into the river and swam across the river and disappeared on the other side. The priest didn't follow because he couldn't swim. He was annoyed when he got home. He spent the next week learning to swim at the swimming pool in the small town 25 km's away. He was anxiously waiting for the next Sunday; now he was sure that the weird fellow would visit again. On Sunday, as he was closing the church, the gate creaked, and entered the man:

Priest, please be good and give me half a lemon! - the priest was good, went back, put on his swimming trunks, his running shoes, grabbed half of the lemon and took it to the stranger:

Here it is, my son, but please tell me already, why do you need it? - the guy was terrified, rushed out the gate with the priest following. Reached the river, swam across, the priest right behind him. He kept running on the other side of the river and the priest was still on his tail. They kept running until they got to a tall tree on the verge of a deep ravine. The man climbed the tree with the agility of a cat, the priest not knowing how to climb a tree, stood on the ground. He was cursing everything as he walked back home. The following week the villagers watched as the priest in the garden of the church climbs trees, jumping back and forth, and generally behaving very strangely. The priest didn't care, he was exercising obsessively, preparing himself for the meeting. On Sunday before the mass, he put on his trunks and running shoes under his cassock. In fact, he was good and put half a lemon in his pocket in advance. The mass finished much earlier than usually, and he emptied the church as soon as possible so he could warm up. In the same exact time the mass should have ended, the strange man entered the churchyard.

Priest, please be good... - the priest was already handing him half of a lemon, and asked:

Son, why do you need it for God's sake? - the man ran away terrified, the priest followed him. They ran to the river, swam across, ran to the tree, climbed up. The priest almost catched the stranger when he grabbed a vine and swung to the other side of the ravine. The priest was about to have a stroke, but then he saw another vine. Whoop, he grabbed it and swung across. There, however, he encountered an unexpected obstacle: it was a plane graveyard and the man closed himself in one of the wreckages. The priest was raging as he walked around the wreckage several times, but he found no entrance except for the sealed door on the side of the plane; he had to open it somehow. He was furious but he went home. He spent every day at the village's locksmith and learned every possible way of opening a lock. On Sunday he held the mass in his swimming trunks, running shoes, on his back in a waterproof backpack was a crowbar, a cutting torch, a wrench and a drill, then he stood in front of the church and waited for the man. He was there on time.

Priest, please be good and give me half a lemon!

There you go, son - handing him the lemon, because he was good, but in the same time he grabbed the stranger's arm, pulled him close, and with obsession in his eyes, asked:

But what do you need it for?! - panic came over the man as he made his escape from the priest's hands and ran away, but the priest was very close behind. Racing to the river they quickly got across, running up the tree almost breaking their necks, one after the other swung across the ravine, the man barely managed to close the door of the wreckege in the priest's face. Little did he know that the priest would not stop there, because he grabbed his backpack and started working on the lock with his tools. In less than an hour the heavy door creaked open. Inside, the stranger was shivering in horror, he was afraid of the priest's fierce and triumphant look. The priest slowly strode up to the man, crouched down, and very quietly, with a friendly smile on his face, gently asked:

Son. You have been asking for half a lemon for the last few weeks. I'm very happy to give it to you, even in the future, I am only asking in return that you tell me: why do you need it?

All right, priest ... - came the answer in a trembling tone - I will answer your question, but please, be good, and do not tell anyone.

The priest was good, and never told anyone.

Guest Post - Biggest Fear

A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life.
Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.

~~~~~~~

I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.

After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.

She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.

Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.

The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.

The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.

Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.

I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.

~unknown