Next Saturday?

I caught Paul today at Panera, and reluctantly canceled a ride with him today. I mentioned that next weekend I plan on going for a ride, preferably Saturday. I hope that planning a ride a bit in advance will force me to make sure that I can get out. Leave a comment here so that we can tell whose around, and change the time/day as necessary. Right now the weather looks good for Saturday at 30 deg. But I'll keep watchin it. I'm always the follower on routes, but a good standard gravel route (a suggested Paul or Paul V route) would be great. I've got my Surly setup as a SS (see below) at 46/20. So I want to ride that. But I'm looking for a strict 40-50. I've got a career fair coming up, a job offer, phD thoughts, awesome scenery (darn you Cory:)) and other things to consider over the next months, so advice from some fellow cyclists on a long ride would be helpful.

After chatting with Paul I realized that I don't talk about work or school much on rides (on purpose:)). I don't like excuses for not riding, but I also want my fellow bloggers to know that I try to do everything I can to get out and ride. But sometimes there are things I can't not do. I get to campus about 9, and this week left at 10, 9:30, 11:30, 9, and 7:00.

I gotta finish some homework hopefully today. And committed to finishing draft one for chapter 3 for my thesis (which I haven't started) by Monday.















put a red box around any stop signs, and highlight the letters S,T,O,P. It took about 6 hours to get the image below which gets me the position of the signs.















There were two similar problems I worked on most of this past week.

As for my thesis, and my Research work; for those who don't know, I work with CNC machines. I (along with my co-workers) have written software that can automagically take a 3D computer model of a part and send all the code to the CNC machine to machine the part out of a block of metal. An "end mill" is what we use to machine the features of the part to make high quality parts like this guy. Oh and this guy, and this guy. One difference is that with the software we wrote, telling the machine how to cut the part is at the touch of a button. So figuring out how to machine a model of a dog's femur (a project for ISU vet med) or a Surly Jethro Tool with your name on it is simple.

My thesis is a computer aided process plan, which will improve the speed with which this software works. It will figure out the best orientations, sequence of those orientations, and tool sizes to machine the part as quickly as possible.




















It with use a genetic algorithm to find the best solutions using this function:





Anyway, chime in if you want to ride: