A Few Thoughts…

So, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything – not that my many fans are complaining, I probably talk to the people who read this blog almost everyday anyway! But for those who are a ways away, here’s what I’ve been up to since school has been out!

To start off, I have joined the Cincinnati Astronomical Society. It’s been a good long time since I’ve looked skyward at night and really studied what I saw. There are a few constellations I remember from when I was younger, but I certainly didn’t study any nebulae or other heavenly bodies. They have 4 telescopes at their headquarters, and I’m working on getting checked-out on the 14″ Newtonian. Once I get the key, I can head up whenever I want! And, they’re working on building a radio telescope using gnuradio – which I’ve been wanting to work with for a while now! I also managed to run into an old friend who I never knew was a ham or into radio-astronomy, so that was really cool! It has been a real thrill to start finding things in the night sky again (and meeting some new friends here on the ground)!

I’ve also been doing a bit of reading – quite a bit for me, but others might laugh at what I’ve accomplished in the month and a half of no school reading. I started with C.S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters” and would recommend it to anyone interested in getting a good dose of thought about the subject of temptation.

I then moved on to a book I’ve been wanting to read since the TV show “The Unit” was released (great show by the way). The series is based on a book by command sergeant major (ret) Eric Haney called “Inside Delta Force.” It’s a wonderful look at (some of) the training that the elite forces of our nation, and of some of the monotony of the missions they were tasked with. I wished there was a little more information about some of the “more exciting” missions they were deployed to, but of course, most of those details are probably classified.

Now, I have turned directions once again, and am working on a book entitled “Poincaré’s Prize: The Hundred-Year Quest to Solve One of Math’s Greatest Puzzles” by George G. Szpiro. We were having a discussion at work about the need to have n-1 dimensions to visualize an n-dimensional object (think drawing a cube on a chalkboard) – and applying that to higher dimensional objects. I knew that Poincaré’s Conjecture had something to do with a problem involving higher-dimensional objects, and that triggered a search of the bookstore for more information! I’m about a third of the way through it, and I can’t really say I fully understand the problem yet – but a lot of background knowledge being covered, which is necessary since I’ve never done any formal studies in topology. I tend to like to jump into topics like this and struggle through them – which, I guess, is a good thing since I’m a grad student!

HTG work has been going well – we’re trying to slow down some of the development on our first application and let it ride for a while. We need to get some more clients using it before we invest too much more time in it – not that I have invested a lot of time recently – Tim and Wyatt have been cranking on it hard for the last several months, and they deserve a break. Unfortunately, it’s to a point where I think I am unable to come in a make a contribution to the project feature-wise without a lot of time studying the existing implementation. And there are rumors about rewrites, but that’s another story.

We have a few new apps in the mixing pot, some that might make us some money even! One of the projects is mostly being used to bring us up to speed on a newer development model (Ruby on Rails). There look to be some really promising things with the Rails framework, and hopefully we can leverage the nice things the language provides and develop some awesome products!

Well, I think that’s all for now. We have an HTG dev meeting here in 5 minutes, and I need to get some more coffee and switch mindsets over to ruby before the others show up ready to run. If you’ve made it this far – thanks for sticking with me