Week 7
I am going to be honest here... I am writing this in December, 6 months after it happened. Even I dont remember what happened durring this week so I am going based on photos and presentations given.
The monday after we got back from 6 Flags my sun burn had almost healed... on my right foot, my left foot was still bad. If you where wondering just how big of a deal Lidocane toxicity is, there is a comparison photo of just 1 week end after applying Lidocane to my left foot for less than 30 seconds and then aloe after daily (ok, not daily, I stopped appling it to the right foot before I stopped on the left.) Rememeber, left bad, right good.
So yah, I am never touching that evil substance again.
I went shopping, I dont know what is up with Texans, but they DO NOT put shoping carts away.
It must be the heat, but I have previously collected 3 in a direct line to the front of the store. Now here is this one as close as you can possibly get it to the rack without putting it in. Disgusting. I cant remember what I was actually shoping for, but I passed through the pots and pans isle and looked right at these cauldrons. I must say, I was tempted to get one for ma bro.
Moving right along to the check out I noticed something disturbing... The tabaco products in the store (I think it was wallmart) are in a plexi glass case with... an industrial Lock-out Tag-out lock on it...
Now those of you who are not machinists might not know what a Lock out Tag out is. Basicaly it is a security measure for operating and reparing heavy machinery (or anything that could kill/maim). The tag has several holes (usually about 6). When it comes time to service (or otherwise enter) a machine, the machines main switch is moved to off and a tag is locked through a special hole to prevent the switch from being moved. From there every person who enters/needs to enter the machine (or touch a dangerous part) puts their own padlock through a hole in the tag. A pad lock that only they have the key for. If 5 holes are filled, slap another tag on the current tag in the 6th hole. Then after you are finished your part of servicing the machine, you unlock your padlock from the tag. Only after every single pad lock has been removed can the machine be turned on. This ensures that no one is in the machine when it is powered on. Or atleast thats the theory. Naturaly this begs the question, WHY PUT ONE ON A CASE!!! Its not dangerous! there is no situation where 2 locks need to be on that case is there? Why not just lock the existing padlock through the hasp on the door? WHY!!!! JUST WHY!!!!!!
Any who, moving on, time to leave before I start asking too many questions.
As I am leaving the parking lot I just had to snap this photo. Yet another cart, but this on in the middle of the drive. I dont know why people here are alergic to returning shoping carts, but they are.
We spent most of the week getting the footage, gps data and camera calibration data from our grad student. We then spent the rest of the week trying to do anything with it. The gps data was in meters. Yah, meters! Not Lat and Long, but meters! So back to the grad student to figure out what these numbers mean. Turns out GPS isnt actually very reliable. While they give you an exact position, the Earth isnt exact. First of, it is not a sphere it is an egg, so any elevation based on gps is off. Second, the techtonic plates move quite a bit making all the land be in the wrong spot. To counteract these problems, surveyers just use baslines, which are constant points that have been surveyed generations ago and are now declaired to be "accurate." So to measure anything, you just grab the nearest baseline (EPSG:6586) and pretend like the earth is flat taking your exact distance from said marker. Cool. Sea level however, is an other challenge. For that you have to have a marker that moves with the sea level. We used the NVAD 88 baseline for this. Sufice it to say, all our "gps" data was encoded as points in 3d space. Great, now we know we can work with it. Here I was expecting lat, long, elev, not x, y, z. Thats one mistery solved, and another day gone. Still, while we waited, we ran the program on our data. The results seemed a bit..... flat? But topo maps usualy do, so we threw a 40x height exageration on and it came out beautifull. Here is a point cloud generated from our data.
Just Beautifull isnt it! After that we threw the point cloud into an online point cloud viewer that color codes the points by depth and also created this image.
Other than that we really didnt do much. We fixed some flaws and started working on the preprocessing and post processing steps, honestly I can remember what we did for those, bbut I think Jason started testing the openCV morphological operaions of Erosion, Dilation, Opening, and Closing. But we really get to far before some one *cough* *cough* *Jason* got a "fever" and had to stay home letting me present on my own on friday. I didnt mind, and did a quick presentation on that stuff.
On Wendsday a cold front hit. We dropped all the way down to 81. Thats the low temp btw, high was 92, but still, a nice cold day. I just wanted to go out side and injoy not melting.
Later that week end, I discovered some good food here! I know, shocking, that after all this time I would find some food worth eating. There is a nice Chinese BBQ place called "Dao Authentic Asian Cuisine". Boy is the food good there. The first time, I ordered Braised Port with Preserved Mustard Greens and some dumplings. I can not recomend the dumplings, but the pork was top notch!
They serve you this epic pork, the top is bbq port, nice and soft, but hidden underneath is more bbq pork, but this time kinda groud up and mixed with spices. And the white bits are a slightly sweet soft flat bread! Just pop one of those tachos and stuff it with some of the hiden pork and a slab of the top stuff. Oh, so good! I returned there multiple times!
Right next door was a asian market so I poppped in and discoverd the largest loose tea bag I have ever seen.
Nothing special this weekend, which is good, last weekend was rather tirring.
Week 8
Whats brown and sticky? Did you guess a stick? Well thats wrong, here is another clue. Whats brown, and sticky, and splattered all over this week? Thats right, the proverbial excrement made physical contact with the proverbial hydro-electric powered oscillating air current distribution device. Which proceded to splatter it all over this week.
Introducing, Monday! What could possibly go wrong on a monday? Well I will tell you what could possibly go wrong on a monday. Everything. Every Gotcha, not swearing, For real, im not THING!
First up on the list, my laptop. The primary laptop we are using to access the server btw, goes belly up. Completly unrecoverably, no choice but to reinstall the OS. But wait! There is more, I dont have an install disk with me. Fortunatly, I keep windows loaded on that computer for this reason, so I boot up windows and guess what? No ISO. So off to the great internets, but my windows side wont connect to the wifi because of some BS IT pulled (the 5 of us not local where sharing 1 wifi login, so we would kick each other by loging in). Ok, no problem, let me just borrow this ethernet cable from this machine that we cant use aaaaaand.... huh, nothing. Guess which My this is harder than I though decited to lock that port to the mac address of that pc? Yah IT, thats who! So back story on that pc, it wont boot. Someone put bitlocker on the boot drive, and no one remembers the password. Fortunatly, the bios is unlocked, so into the bios I go to find the MAC address. Then I boot my pc into kali from a live boot and spoof the MAC address of the desktop. Now I have its MAC address and can connect fine. I download the iso, switch back to windows, install the iso over kali, boot to the drive agian, install linux, then I flash kali back on to that drive. A job well done. Oh, and a full day wasted. While I was doing that, Jason was playing arround with the open CV filters, so its not all a waste... Except that we decited those filters wouldnt work for our current approch and completely scrapped them. Oh Joy.
Fortunatly Tuesday cant be worse right? Weeeeeell, technically no.
Next we attempted to do lense correction! Yaaay! What is lense correction? Well basicaly, all lenses distort light in interesting ways. Think of a Go Pro, you know how the footage fish eyes near the edge? Well all cameras (except the extreamly expensive ones), including the one on our drone, do that to some extent. Fortunatly, you can figure out what it is doing by waving a chess board arround its field of view and doing some math to figure out a matrix to undo the distortion. Unfortunatly, we trusted our grad student to do it, and he though all you needed to do was show the camera and then it would be calibrated. This is not the case, waste 1 day playing with his software trying to fix full mp4 files, no luck, it will only do single photos. (we have about 18000 frames per video). Ok, great, thats not going to work, we collect the matrix (which it would calculate) and back to our computers on Wendsday. Half of Wendsday is spent trying to explain to OpenCV what our lense correction matrix looks like and convince it to give it a try. Aaaannnnnd, it creates a black hole in out image. 
Fortunatly, we saw this comming and also collected the video file of the grad student waving a chess board arround. So we sent that to OpenCV to calculate its own matrix. Well, I say we, I really abandoned Jason to do it while I worked on a different thing. Which was just as well, turns out the chesboard we have is like 12 by 16 or something, and open cv expects exactly 8x8. So no cigar there. We decide to forgo lense correction.
While Jason was working on that, I wrote a quick program that calculates the point cloud every frame using all previous data and makes a video out of it so we can see how long it takes to be accurate. It is quite beautifull to watch really. Unfortunatly, it is a .avi video, and browsers wont play it, so here is a nice for it, and a still image.
Conclusion presentation: Nothing worked, we are sorry.
On to happier memories.
On Tuesday we had another cold snap durring a thunderstorm. I love thunderstorms! Rain in general really, but especialy thunderstorms! An this time I had my umbrella prepaired! Oh nothing quite like it. It was the strangest thunderstorm I had ever experienced though. You would see a flash, hear a boom, but you wouldnt see a bolt. Confused by this I checked out all sides of the dorms and nope, no lightning anywhere. Still flasshes, still booms. And then I looked up. Guess where the lightning was? Directly above us. It was strange, the lightning was jumping from one layer of clouds to another without ever hitting the ground or being very visible. Still, it was fun.
On Friday we all went out to eat at a fish and chips shop. I went in expecting Ivers. There was a lot on the menu so I ordered the sampler platter. Something like 3 types of fish, shrimp, oysters, and prawns I think. Oh, and a bowl of clam chowder. Now, I should mention, that this sea food joint is right on the coast. Like you can not get CLOSER to the gulf of mexico than this resturant. So I figured
"oh, its fresh fish". But it didnt taste particularily fresh. Part way through I mention to Jason that the sea food here is not as fresh tasting as it is in Seattle. He looks right at me and says "Of course not, they buy the sea food here from pikes place market."....
What kinda company buys Sea food from a suplier 2000 miles away when they are ON AN OCEAN!??? I dont know, but they did.
And thus concluded another week. By this time I had found another good food spot, Whataburger! Oh Whataburgers are so good! And starting at 11pm they start serving breakfast! If you ever get hungry at 11, go to a Whataburger and grab a Sausage BOB.