Content-type: text/html Ray Manning

Monday April 24, 2017 8:02 PM

Another Visitor


On Tuesday through Thursday I concentrate on school and some home activities. I have two midterms this weeks and I think I do well on them on both Wednesday and Thursday. Before the Wednesday midterm I've taken the mountain bicycle out for a super-hard interval workout and then replenished the blood sugar afterwards. On each of these days, when school is finished, I go home and do small things around the house and work on the neural network/artificial intelligence program that I've been working on (and off) for a while. I've temporarily suspended effort on fuzzy rules/fuzzy logic and now am back to concentrating on the neural networks.

On Friday I wake up after a good night of sleep and get in a very good weights workout. After a shower I ride the motorcycle up to CSULA and continue to barely help the one team that is making good progress and to seriously help the team that keeps stalling out. Finally, as I've shared today's time between teams, I give both teams advice on their final presentations and poster sessions and then I head for home. On the way home I stop in at Long Beach's newest library and pick up two books to read. I guess this indicates that I'm up to date on class reading and now have time for fun/interesting reading.

I go to bed very early on Friday night for reading and sleep and do drop off to sleep. But I wake up at midnight and cant fall back asleep again for quite a while. Possibly this is the transition time of the year where I should be opening up windows for sleep. So I just take the mountain bicycle out for a two hour ride on Saturday (rather than a longer road bicycle ride) and get home to talk with people throughout the world on my phone. I clean up the gears of both bicycles from gunk and dirt buildup for future good riding. After a shower I do some grocery shopping and pick up lunch for later. At home I trim the front bush which has grown wildly for the apast few moths and then I adjust the brakes on the mountain bicycle which has been sorely out of tune for a while. To catch my breath, I watch qualifying for the F1 race from Bahrain and see a good session and then degrease/degunk all of the gears on the road bicycle and mountain bicycle. Late in the evning I help out one of the CSULA students with an electronics sensor wiring and software interface and I hope on Sunday that he has duplicated my success.

SUnday starts with a good road bicycle ride of 48 miles. I think about getting all of the way to the Santa Fe dam for 56 miles, but my heart isn't in it today. When I get home I don't feel that tired and I feel a bit disappointed that I didn't continue longer. After a shower I watch a decent F1 race from Bahrain and do some cleaning around the house and cooking of vegetables for the week. As a transition day after midterms and before a visitor, I'm a bit bored.

On Monday I go for a long walk and get cleaned up for an 11 am meeting in Marina del Rey with a non-profit organization. I get to the restaurant a bit early and wait around and wait and wait and send an email adn wait some more. Finally, 50 minutes after were were supposed to meet, I get back on the motorcycle and ride back home. Maybe it was a mis-communication. When I get home I pull the head off the old lawnmower and see that the piston is just moving around without the conenction to the connecting rod, so it will be a fair amount of work to remedy this. So I put the lawnmower away and work on our LBCC Crisis Management class project. Nobody else seems to put in much effort, so I end up doing all of the typing and collating and printing of both individual reports and the group report. As a break from the tedium I continue to work on a skeleton program for the upcoming child abuse hackathon (in which I've been placed in a group that I don't want to be in). But I'm going to prepare ahead of time and make the best of it. Rather than being placed in a group asscoaited with child abuse prevention via data mining or resource provision via geolocation, I'm put in a group associated with transitional living for former adopeted kids who have 'aged out" of the system at 18 years old but not quite ready to face the world. A daunting task and I will put my best effort into being prepared for the hackaton and for the final product itself.

I get in a decent mountain bicycle ride on Tuesday as it very lightly threatens rain though the rain never appears. After some small tasks I go to school to see a counselor and then go to my atmospheric sciences class. After class I go on home and put together the final project notes for our Wednesday group project presentations. Before class on Wednesday I sleep late - an extra hour - and get in a good session with the weights. We have the beginning of the class at an auditorium where we have some role playing tasks and, of course, I am always asked to play the bad guy - either the perpetrator of a domestic violence incident or the perpetrator of a marital rape. Afterwards we walk to our normal class and give our group presentations. One of our group of four volunteers to make part of the presentation and goes rogue on us - he doesn't follow the team progress notes or treatment plan at all and just goes off on some tangent about culture and domestic violence. My other two team members are looking at me silently mouthing "Did you write this?" and I meet them with a firm negative head shake. I guess We will not let this team member make our presentation for the final project. When I get home I mow the lawn and clean up some underbrush and do some laundry for my visitor tomorrow.

On Thursday I go to class and come home to meet with Karl. We get on the bicycles and go for a long bicycle ride. He is out in southern California for me to help him get a new website for his company and to have some fun. After the biycle ride we drive down to 2nd street and have middle eastern food. Again, as was the case the last time that Karl visited, there is a client in the middle eastern restaurant that is so loud that it is hard for us to carry on a conversation. We both say it is due to the small restaurant and the hard walls, but we both know it is a combination of these factors and incosiderate behavior.

On Friday I ride the motorcycle to CSULA for the senior design projects. Today I am helpfull for the students and I try my best to share with them some engineering expertise and life experience. When I get home Karl and I go for a good long bicycle ride. After getting cleaned up we Uber down to 2nd street to start with and end up at a different club later. There are not many people out tonight and everyone at the clubs say it is due to the Coachella event. But we are not buying it - it is just slow tonight. Nonetheless we have fun and eventually get home near 2 am on Saturday morning.

Karl is slow to wake up on Saturday. We eventually go to Home Depot and work on my sprinkler system to replace the valves and to install a new timer. We also work on his company's new website since his current website is very very old. Later in the evening I get to practice some Thai language skills at a Thai restaurant and the food is delicious. As we are walking out I see Person H_C near the restaurant and I prompt Karl to hurry up and get out because I don't want to deal with it.