Week 9
The week started out fairly well, nothing to sneeze at. On Sunday I went shoping for a small hand cart. I'll be damned if I am going to carry all my stuff back down in this heat by hand! (See, I am trainable) A brief trip to everyone's favorite super center Wallmart and I find this! A hand cart for only $45!
Sweet! Perfict! Load it up! Only 1 problem. This side of the sign says they are $64, a bit rich for a cart I plan to leave in Texas when I am finished with it (no wheel access to my house).
So I flag down a sales associate and ask him, "Yo whats the price?" And he says "$45," so I says, "but this side says $64." To which he responded "er, it does...." He then proceded to flag down a manager, "hey, how much are these", "$64", "but the sign on this side says $45", "what?" wander over, verify that the sign does in fact say both. Several minutes of searching ensue trying to find any distingushing marks between the products on both sides. There are none. So out comes the scanner! *Bloop Bleep! and the actual price iiiiiiisssssssss
$54.... neither of the previous options. Too rich for me, I leave them to flip the prices to the correct ammount and go back to shoping for anything else I needed.
At work we spent some time playing arround with video stabilization on out footage. Basically, we have 2 stationary easily tracked points in our image and professional video editors have a stabilization mode that tracks 2 points! Automaticaly applying rotation and translation to your video to make those 2 points not move! Great! We tried both adobe After Effects and Hitfilm Express 4 before giving up. Oh dont get me wrong, the point tracker worked flawlessly and in after effects so did the video stabilization. However, in Hitfilm the frame spun wildly and vanished into the distance. No problem, AE worked fine though,
just export the result aaaaannnnddd.... why is it black??? AE didnt like our video footage and just dumped out a black video. I dont know what was up, the footage worked fine in the editor, just at export it flat refused to export anything. FINE! We will work with the raw footage.
It was at this time the unthinkable happened. While sifting through our code I discoverd we had a major error. Rather than dividing by gravity, we where multiplying by gravity..... FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
This means that our results that looked prety topo maps we developed are, infact, off by gravity squared, about an order of 100. Yay, damn. I go in to panic mode tripple checking everything and Jason, oh helpfull ol' Jason goes in to full ground truth data processing mode. While I varified that yes, that script is currently 100% wrong, he doouble checked all wave velocities, all bathymetry data, and all intermediat data. Boy was he a life saver. I wrote a quick script that made our velocity arrows program from earlier draw just the numbers.
It looks terable, but he was able to use it to verify that our PIV data was accurate, and that the bathymetry was also accurate when calculated using only velecoites at the wave peeks. With no good way to filter out only crest velocities and only a few days left we doubled down on the ground truth. Oh, I should mention, that the regular friday presentation is a rehersal for the final presentation. Oh, and we have purly been working with our downsampled data at this point. So I did the only thing I could and threw all 48 cores in isoptera into processing all of our data. All 4 videos at once. It took a full 24 hours at 100% cpu usage on all 48 cores to process all the video and generated almost a Terabyte of data. I must say, this the most data I have ever generated in one shot and the most CPU I have ever used.
We threw together a skeleton of a final presentation faking it where we had to and presented on that Friday. We did ok, not great, but ok.
With the rest of the week Jason finally showed me to a piece of real Texas food culture. There is a nice unassuming resturant called Jason's Deli. They have a Texas baked potato on the menu. MAN IS IT GOOD! Think BBQ Brisket on a baked potato! Now this is what Texas food SHOULD ALL be like! Jason's deli is prety much the sole reason that I know I will return to Corpus Christi at some point in my life.
On friday we all went to the chineese place I went to earlier. Everone loved it, I got the same stuff but different dumplings. Pass on the dumplings still. Desert dumplings too, pass on those. But man that Pork is good! Everyone else enjoyed their meal as well.
More shoping for a hand cart, I find a nice one at a sporting goods store. I also find something I never expected to find. A Yeti Dog bowl, I think it is even vacume insilated..... because.... why? No idea.
Week 10
Sitting here at the start of week 10 I made a shocking realization. Fully half of this position has been presentations. Think about it. The first week was 100% presentations and the last week was fully focused on presentations as well. That is 2 out of 10 weeks. In the remaining 8 weeks, Friday was 100% dedicacted to progress presentations, thats another 1/5th of the time right there, and Thursday is half dedicated to preparing the presentations, for an aditional 1/10th. Thats 5/10ths, 1 half! Rediculous! Still, It didnt realy bother me. In the final days of the project we crunched the numbers. All of our ground truth data was processed by our highly trained Neural Net that we call Jason. And we cross validated the hand data with our machine data. On all counts 30fps was better than 60fps, and 50m better than 100m. We ended up to within a 10cm margin of error. We might have been closer than that, but it is impossible to say since both our ground truth poles and GPS where both only accurate to 10cm as well. Call that a job well done. We never did fix our depth generating program, however, we discovered that the depth is off by a linear constant, meaning if you know the depth in any 1 spot, you can solve for that constant and know all the depths. We theorize that the constant is dependent on the ammount of data not on a wave crest, so theoretically it can be calculated from the wave frequency and length, but there simply was not time to try. We polished up our presentation, rehersed it a couple times and threw together a paper. It is always interesting how you can make a paper sound like you did usefull research even when your results didnt actual add anything to the current knowledge base. The only real contributions we made where to verify the formulas and to make a few recomendatios to others about what they could do better than us. Still, there is a good chance we will actually publish our paper and it will make its way into a journel. On Thursday we had our final presentations. Dr. Kar (the program director) approches the two of us right before and says "Hey, do you guys mind presenting first?" "Sure, we dont mind." "Ok, good, you guys always give a great presentation and the first presentation sets the mood for the rest of the session." Well... that was unexpected. Apparently we are the consistantly best presenters and where chosen to go first. I can live with that. We did our presentation, absolutly killed it. Home run! Job well done. After that everyone else presented and we had a lunch. After lunch we got our completion certificate things. Not sure what they are for, but I am proud to have one. We then took a few pictures. I should mention, that I showed up in my suit as per normal for a big presentation... and Jason showed up in genes. Still, I knew he would, and we actualy joked about him presenting in a bathrobe. I even brough a nice summer robe (non bath robe). for him to use, but he chickened out :( . I also learned that he is not very good at framing selfies
After the presentation I went out to my car. In my suit. With my laptop. Man was it hot. I opened my car and grabed my thermomiter. It was not working. Turns out LCD displays get stuck at tempetures above 130F or so ish. This one had hit its limit and was reading all 8s (and a negative). I think it was 137 degrees based on a specific angle I could get. That was in my car, but still, waaaaay to hot.
That night we all went out for a final meal at the chinese place. Dont get the orange chicken there, its not as good as it sounds, rather dull realy. Still, the other stuff is good. Several of my friends where served their meels on a small alchohol burner to keep it warm. It was awesome!
After the obligatory "Wait? is this pot mine or yours? Who bought this pot lid again?" conversation, everyone came to the dorms to party! Except me! I used my new hand cart to load my car. Several trips later and the car was loaded with everything except my hammock, water, and a few other essencials. By that time I had to go pick up Dad at the airport, but his plane got delayed so I went and hung out with the others. Its a bit sad being at a party where everyone except you and another guy are drinking. Not nearly as much fun as going to a board game night, or the partys I am use to. I must say, I really enjoy my friend group I had durring college. A group that didnt consider drinking to be a substitute for having a good time. Eventually it was time to pick Dad up, no more delays so I drifted off to the airport. If I havent mentioned this before about Corpus Christi, I will now. It is so humid there that when it "cools down" at nignt (still 86 degrees) the humididy hits 100% and the air is forced to dew on anything it can. The onlything it can dew onto though is your nice cold windshield. This means if you drive anywhere after dark, you run your windshield wipers just like you would in a mild drisle or it is imposible to see. On the way to the airport it was doing this. I picked Dad up at loading and headed for home, pointing out the dew on the way. He was quite tired, but I knew the way just fine. It got a bit hary on the last turn where the person behind me kept going 35 while I was trying to turn. I couldnt slow down, so I made the final turn at warp with minimal stoping distance. I have had to make that turn like that 3 times while I am down here. Texas drivers do not slow down. EVER. Took dad up to the room and reintroduced him to everyone. They all where looking forward to seeing him again, apparently he is a "cool guy." I sure think so.
Tomorrow is the start of the second leg of the Great American Road Trip, the Return. For the return I am going back to daily blogs. I will see you all for Day 1 of the return.