Bill’s Blog Blog Blog

I have got to be the world’s worst blogger. It is so simple to surf to this page and write a simple little entry, yet I have the hardest time doing it even once a week.

I have lots to blog about too. My son is playing baseball, my wife just got another tattoo, I am starting a new robot project at work, I had a fun fourth of July, and I just got back from Los Angeles.

I also have the dumbest website ever. I need to do something simple and interesting with it. I have an idea for a geo located photo display thing that should be pretty cool, but I haven’t had time to finish it yet. I could bring in feeds from other sites that are interesting to me that would make my site seem current but it would be a total sham.

Ok, so here is a blog post.

I wanted to log a short blog entry about something that happened recently. My son Will plays baseball on a little league team and overall the experience has been great for everyone. I very much enjoy helping coach, practicing and watching the games and I know that Will has a great time, not to mention that he is turning out to be a great ball player.

Anyway, about a week ago we were practicing at the ball field and inparticular we were practicing picking off a base runner trying to steal from second base to third base. Will was playing third base and to get to the point, he got struck in the nose with a baseball thrown very hard from less than 15 feet away. Of course it blead like crazy and swelled up for about a week.  Will was of course pretty upset about the whole ordeal but later that night I convinced him that it was cool to have black eyes and that he would get a lot of attention from the injury. That made him feel much better.

The next day the doctor confirmed that he broke his nose and deviated his septum. Of course this just magnified the attention he received from his friends and any nearby adults. That very same day following the incident Will had a baseball game against the Panthers, who are one of the best teams in our division. Will is the number two pitcher on our team and the coach thought it would be a good chance to give Will some innings in a game that we were not likely to win. But lo and behold we BEAT the Panthers! Will pitched a fantastic game and the rest of the Cubs played great as well. So not only did Will have a broken nose, he pitched a really good game, and won a game where we were the underdogs by a lot.

What a weird wild week.

I was fortunate to land a short trip to Israel with my work at Northrop Grumman and it was fantastic!

I left on March 28 and flew from Knoxville first to Newark, New Jersey where I had a six hour layover before departing for Tel Aviv, Israel. This layover was suggested by my friend and colleague at work John Ritter, who I was going to meet up with in Israel the following morning (he left the day before me). Anyway, the whole point of a long layover in Newark is you can take the train straight from the airport into Manhattan for fifteen bucks. I had never been to Manhattan before or anywhere in New York for that matter so it sounded like a good plan to me.

Manhattan was really cool. I spent about four hours walking around the city and I saw many notable landmarks including Madison Square Garden, the New York Public Library, the Manhattan Mall, and of course Times Square. I then had a $15 lunch at a deli near the Manhattan mall and headed back to Penn Station to get back on the train to the Newark Airport. All in all I would probably choose to take the layover again if I am fortunate enough to travel to Israel in the future.

The flight to Tel Aviv was about ten hours and covered seven time zones and ended up being pretty uneventful. I watched the movie Juno and slept most of the time. I was a little disappointed that it was consistently overcast as we flew over every piece of land from Newark to Tel Aviv, but it was dark anyway.

I landed on Saturday morning and after going through customs and collecting my baggage I met John Ritter who was waiting for me with his friends Oded and Mirry. Saturday would be the only day in Israel that I would have any amount of free time and John made sure that we took advantage of it. The four of us headed off to visit the Masada. You can follow the link in the last sentence to learn a great deal more about the Masada, but basically it is an ancient Jewish fortress on a giant plateau over looking the Dead Sea. To get there we drove through the outskirts of Jerusalem into the West Bank past the ancient city of Jericho, all along the Dead Sea finally arriving to the Masada. The entire trip took a total of about 90 minutes. It’s amazing how much history and turmoil there is in such a relatively small place.

Hmmm. This post is getting long and I am only on the first day. I will try to be more succinct going forward. Anyway, although there is a tram that takes visitors up to the Masada from the desert floor, John, Oded and I decided to take the “Snake Path” up to the plateau, which is a narrow path that takes about an hour to hike ( Mirry was the smart one and took the tram ). The ancient fortress was amazing. Now I am not normally one who enjoys museums and reading information markers but if you put it on top of a 1000 foot plateau over looking the Dead Sea in one of the most history laden places in the world, well, then even I am pretty impressed by that.

Before I forget, Oded, who I saw on most of my days in Israel, was an excellent host and was more than happy to answer all sorts of questions. He was extremely helpful for my first visit to this new country.

We started the real work of business meetings on Sunday where we had an all day engagement in Haifa. The meeting was long but informative and we concluded with a business dinner in Akko at an Arab restaurant right on the Mediterranean. Monday and Tuesday were more business meetings that I found very interesting. I know that my experience is limited, but I found the way the Israelis conducted business to be very direct and straightforward. I liked their style very much.

Overall my trip was a great experience. It was simply awesome to be in Israel and see places in person that I often see in the news. The cities were clean and modern. The restaurants were also excellent. Even now, weeks later, when I am hungry I find myself craving Houmous and pita bread. The hotel was also top notch (the view from my room is in the picture below) and John and I went running along the boardwalk on two of our days. It is my hope that I will again be back in Israel.

I recently had the opportunity through work to travel to Oshkosh Wisconsin to work with Oshkosh Truck company for about a week. Unfortunately it was the coldest week they had experienced all year (the trip actually took place in late January). The high temperature for the entire week was 15 F and it snowed about a foot the day I got there. I didn’t mind much being that I was raised in MN and I have not experienced the extreme cold and snow for a number of years. Overall I thought the weather was pretty nice.

I really can’t say much about the work that I did, but I can say that Oshkosh Truck company has some fantastic vehicles. It is hard to grasp the scale until you stand next to them or crawl around inside them. Of special note to me and the reason for the blog post so long after the fact is I got to see Oshkosh’s robotic Terra Max vehicle that they entered in the Darpa Urban Challenge. I was at the Darpa event and the Terra Max vehicle was definitely a crowd favorite. What impressed me so much with this particular vehicle was not only its size, but the fact they primarily used computer vision to solve the situational awareness problem. Most other teams used active sensors such as scanning lasers to detect their environment. Computer vision is where I believe the future of robotic perception will eventually converge to.

Unfortunately they were not able to finish the course during the Darpa event. However, I did speak with John Beck while I was at Oshkosh and he told me that a few weeks after the event, they took the Terra Max vehicle back to the Darpa course and they went over 60 miles perfectly.