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chad-meyer.com.

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Thanks!

In Loving Memory

Erma K. Meyer
October 29, 1919 - April 12, 2008

MONTICELLO - Erma Meyer, 88, of Monticello, died Saturday morning, April 12, 2008, in the Monticello Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, following a brief illness. Services: 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Peace United Church of Christ, Monticello, with the Rev. Peter Wenzel officiating. Interment: Oakwood Cemetery. Friends may call from 4 to 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Goettsch Funeral Home, Monticello.

Thoughts, memories and condolences may be left at www.goettschonline.com

Surviving are two children, Bill (Linda) Meyer of Monticello, and Lila (John) Hancock of Shellsburg; two daughters-in-law, Janet Meyer of Monticello and Lois Meyer of Murphy, Okla.; 12 grandchildren and 21 great-grandchildren.

She was preceded in death by her parents; her husband, Clarence; two sons, Ronald and Clarence Jr.; two sisters, Edna Grace and Bess; and two brothers, Oscar and Vernon.

Erma Kathleen Lee was born Oct. 29, 1919, in Wick, Iowa. She was the daughter of Oscar and Ruth Cox Lee.

Erma married Clarence Meyer on May 15, 1937, at Galena, Ill. Erma worked at the Reliance Shirt Factory in Anamosa and the Button Factory and Hoag Duster in Monticello. She retired from the John McDonald Hospital in 1979, where she worked for many years. Clarence preceded her in death on July 29, 1973. Erma had been a resident at the care center since December 2007.

The family would like to thank Above and Beyond Hospice and the staff at the Monticello Nursing and Rehabilitation Center for their dedication and wonderful care.

I'll miss you Grandma.

March Madness 2008 - 1st Round Simulation

Well, unfortunately I didn't get a chance to add the database backend to my simulation program. I got caught up in a couple other web programming projects for a friend's internet radio station. I guess there's always next year...

...but wait! Against all odds (and sensibility), I decided to simulate the tournament anyway -- entering all the stats into the source code by hand. Well, not completely by hand. That would just be plain old nuts. I created an Excel spreadsheet to help me format the lines of code (arrays) properly. It's still waaay labor intensive, hence I've only simulated the first round so far.

So how is my program doing? Not so hot it turns out.

At the end of the first round, it's predicted 17 out of the 32 games correctly -- just barely over 50%. Basically no better than random chance. Ouch.

Keep in mind these simulations are based purely on box score statistics, which can be deceiving. Box score stats don't take into account a lot of factors, not the least of which is the level of competition the team has faced to achieve those stats. In general, teams in weaker conferences may tend to have their stats "over-valued" or artificially inflated in comparison to teams that have played stronger competition throughout the year. This is obviously a fundamental limitation of my program that I've been putting a lot of thought into trying to remedy recently. Not an easy task. There are other limitations, and even some known flaws in the code that need to be fixed, so I wasn't expecting a whole lot anyway. I was just curious to see how it would do in its current state.

I'm not going to post the predicted scores of each game, because it's pretty pointless with the known issues (ahem, bugs). Instead, I'll post predicted winning percentages, which is probably still somewhat pointless, but hides the known issues a little better. ;)

Yellow Highlight: Outcome predicted correctly
Red Text: Outcome not predicted correctly
Percentage in parenthesis is predicted winning percentage
1000 games simulated per matchup

EAST



MIDWEST


SOUTH


WEST


So, as you can see...not so hot. Definitely room for improvement.

As I said before, I'm doing this semi-manually, so it's taking a good amount of time. I don't have anything beyond the first round simulated yet, and will be gone this weekend for Easter. I'm hoping to get the rest of the tournament simulated before the Sweet 16 games start next week.

I can't wait to see who this program picks to win it all...could be interesting. :P

Stay tuned!

Brrr...do you feel a draft?

I'm just going to straight plagiarize this from Cindy, since she can explain this stuff better than I ever could:

here's the latest....

we brought charlie home yesterday from isu hospital.  
his surgery went went well. they completely removed 
the meniscus and did a tibial plateau leveling osteotomy. 
in layman's terms, they basically cut the top of his 
shin bone in half, then move it upward to meet the 
thigh bone (in order to stop the bones from rubbing since
the acl is torn), then use a bone plate and screws to 
hold the bone in place. can you say ouch?  the amazing 
thing is they allow dogs to actually walk on that
leg!!  that means he's walking on a broken bone, 
which is why his activity level is so restricted.  
the vet said that dogs are powerhouse healers, and 
that's why they allow them to weightbear on the leg 
if they want to, and why this surgery is not done 
in people.

charlie is on strict cage rest for 4 weeks, then 
5 minute leash walks the next 4 weeks after that.  
we go to the vet here in des moines for staple 
removal in 7-10 days then, we go back to isu for 
xrays in 6-8 weeks, then they will adjust his 
activity level.  basically, he can't run, jump, 
or be off the short leash for about 12 weeks.  
it will be a quiet 3 months around here!

to add insult to injury, his leg is shaved 
from his hip all the way down to his foot.  
that bare little chicken leg sure gets cold 
outside!  we have to put a towel under his 
belly like a sling to help him walk outside 
to go to the bathroom, but then still keep 
the leash tight so he doesn't try to walk too 
far.  it's kind of a circus.  i can tell 
charlie is starting to feel better, since he 
is starting to get more stubborn on the leash.  
it will be a long 12 weeks for mr independent!!

i sent a few pics of the chicken leg for your 
viewing pleasure.  i hope his hair grows back fast 
since january in iowa is not the warmest month 
outdoors!  i will keep everyone updated!  :-)cm

Simulation Remake -- Update

Well, I've finished the PHP stats script. Yay!

Here's a video of the final version:



It still just grabs one team's stats at a time. I thought about trying to automate the gathering of an entire conference at a time, but decided against it. Due to the uncertainties of the (sometimes) unreliable internet, there really needs to be user confirmation of the stats along the way so garbage doesn't get inserted into the database. Screen scraping for information is not always 100% reliable, unfortunately.

It was a bit of a learning process -- dependent form elements, passing arrays between forms, etc., but I finally got it figured out. And I learned a few tricks on the way.

It's definitely not optimized, and probably a little slow, frankly. I'm sure if an experienced programmer looked at my code, they'd probably cringe or roll on the floor laughing (or maybe both). But you know what...it works, and that's all I care about. All-in-all, I like the way it turned out.

Now...on to the database connectivity inside the executable! Oh joy!

Simulation Remake - UPDATE

Just a quick update on my progress so far:

• Schema for database backend has been created using MySQL
• Currently using three tables
• Installed MySQL ODBC driver so connection to database can be established in executable (connection yet to be established)
  
• All conference and team information has been entered into the database
• 32 conferences
• 341 teams
  
• Started a PHP script to scrape player statistics from popular sports website
• Statistics scraping currently done by team, one team at a time
  
• Team selected using drop-down list -- all 341 teams are available
• Statistics scraping code completed successfully, but still need to add code to insert stats into database

That's pretty much it. All-in-all, it's been a pretty productive few days of work. I plan on adding the database insertion code to the PHP script tomorrow. Should be fairly straightforward -- just need to take care not to duplicate player stats when inserting. After that, I'll begin to tackle the database connection inside the executable.

EDIT - Here's a quick little video of the PHP stats script. My script is in the left pane, and the website the stats are being extracted from is in the right pane. If the video quality weren't so poor, you'd see it successfully retrieve the stats. Since the making of this video, I've enhanced the on-screen output of the retrieved stats by putting them in tabular format -- looks much cleaner. ;)

Note: If you're using FireFox, the video may not play completely. Not sure why. Seems to work OK with IE though. Make that semi-OK. Or maybe it's just my computer...hmmm...

Simulation Remake...yay!

About 13 +/- years ago, a group of four enthusiastic geeks set out to create a computer simulation of an NCAA basketball game as a project for their business math analysis class (lovingly abbreviated as "anal bus math"). The goal was to simulate that year's Iowa vs. Iowa State basketball game prior to the event, and compare the simulation results to the actual outcome. This would serve as a measurement of their ultimate success (i.e., their grade).

The Geeks
Jerry, Norm, Corey, Me

The Project
Programming Language: Applesoft BASIC
Computer Hardware: Apple IIe and Apple IIGS
Workhorse Programmers: Jerry and Norm. Corey and I were familiar with programming basics, but Jerry and Norm were the real experts. We helped where we could, but ultimately the workhorses pulled the majority of the weight. Not that it probably would have made much of a difference in the ultimate workload sharing because Jerry and Norm were obviously more equipped to do the work, but the development environment with BASIC was not very conducive to multiple programmers. It wasn't like the object-oriented languages of today, where you can easily break off chunks of the code to be put in separate modules and coded by separate people. I suppose we could have done that, but it would certainly have been a lot more cumbersome.

The Results
Unfortunately, the program was not finished prior to the Iowa/Iowa State game, but it did end up getting finished. I don't recall exactly how close we actually got to the final score, but I seem to remember it wasn't too far off. Of course, we already knew the final score, so I'm sure we tweaked our code a smidge here and there to get reasonable results. Doing so was not necessarily a bad thing, even though we were being graded on the results, as calibration with the real world is definitely needed for something like this. Plus, it's not like we stole the answers - everyone (including the teacher) recognized that working backwards to the solution was an available option.

In the end, we presented the program to our class, and a math class in a neighboring town (Cascade - "The Mecca of all learning and knowledge" according to Mr. Strang). I think we ended up with an "A". If we didn't, we should have. ;)

The Remake
It's not known what eventually became of the masterpiece we created. It's probably sitting in a box somewhere collecting dust in one of our parent's homes; the disk surely succumb to failure. So sad.

In late 2001, I set out to recreate the masterpiece; this time using Visual BASIC 6. I plugged away at it here and there in my spare time, and finished the basic logic of the program sometime in late 2002 or early 2003. It has sat dormant ever since. I've decided now is the time to finally finish it -- hopefully, before March Madness 2008.

In it's current state, it is hard-coded with the stats from the 2002 National Championship Game between Maryland and Indiana, which I used as a start for the underlying calibration of the code. Certainly more calibration is in order. This makes it quite tedious to simulate other games, as it requires delving into the code itself to input new statistics; a fatal flaw suffered in the original code as well. The last major task at hand is to implement a database backend for storing all the statistics, making it possible to easily input and edit statistics and simulate a game between any two teams, with the ultimate goal being a simulation of the entire NCAA tournament in one fell swoop. Now that would be sweet...

I hope to post updates of my progress now and then, but we'll see how that goes. In the meantime, here's a quick video of the current program:



As of right now, it can simulate 100 games in about 5 seconds (10 seconds if the line-by-line results are chosen to be displayed). Definitely a LOT faster than the original, which I think took about 20-30 minutes for just one game, if I remember correctly. The increased simulation speed is certainly more a result of faster computers moreso than better or more optimized code.

Folding@Home Sets Guinness World Record

Stanford University's Folding@Home project has officially become the world's largest distributed computing network in existence according to the Guinness Book of World Records (Press Release). The Folding@Home project has successfully broken the petaFLOP (one quadrillion FLoating-point Operations Per Second) barrier, largely due to the addition of the F@H client to the PlayStation3 platform in March of this year.

For more information on the Folding@Home initiative, you can read my previous blog post, or visit the Folding@Home website.

tobyMac

So I finally got to see Tim perform live this past weekend with tobyMac. They came through Des Moines a year or two ago, but I couldn't make the show for some reason or another. Luckily, I was able to make it this time around.

Even though I play in the praise band every Sunday at church, I'm still more of a hard rock/heavy metal guy. I must say though, they rocked the house pretty good. It was kind of weird seeing a friend from high school on stage, and then signing autographs and taking pictures. Tim did a great job, and the band as a whole put on an entertaining show.

Anyway, here are some video clips. I recorded these with my Canon still camera, so the video quality is not the best and the audio quality is horrible. It's a long video, so it may take a bit to load.



Here is a better quality live recording of their song Boomin'. There are also several other videos on YouTube.





Good show.

ps - For an even better, in depth review of the Portable Sounds Tour, check out Carl's blog, One Pilgram's Progress. It's great to see others enjoyed the show as well.

Your "Ideal" Presidential Candidate -- Update

So it turns out that the website I used in my previous post to determine my "ideal" presidential candidate wasn't the same one that Glenn Beck used on his radio show. Not that it really matters. Anyway, after reading Glenn's email newsletter and seeing the address of the website he actually used on air, I figured I give that site a try as well for comparison purposes. It doesn't ask exactly the same questions as the first site, so I figured there would be some discrepancies with my previous results. And there were.

So...survey says:

1. Mike Huckabee (R) - 98.98%
2. Mitt Romney (R) - 93.88%
3. Fred Thompson (R) - 90.82%
4. Duncan Hunter (R) - 83.67%
5. John Cox (R) - 81.63%
6. Tom Tancredo (R) - 81.63%
7. Rudy Giuliani (R) - 76.53%
8. Sam Brownback (R) - 74.49%
9. John McCain (R) - 71.43%
10. Bill Richardson (D) - 53.06%
11. John Edwards (D) - 51.02%
12. Ron Paul (R) - 50.00%
13. Joseph Biden (D) - 46.94%
14. Hillary Clinton (D) - 46.94%
15. Barack Obama (D) - 42.86%
16. Christopher Dodd (D) - 38.78%
17. Mike Gravel (D) - 25.51%
18. Dennis Kucinich (D) - 18.37%

Another surprise top place finisher, with even more surprising percentages. Wow...Mike Huckabee and I are like long lost brothers, I guess.

Now, let's put all this into perspective, shall we?

How well do these things really work, anyway? Well, Glenn Beck put this particular site to a pretty good test the other day by having one of the Republican candidates take the survey, and it just so happens that the candidate in question was the one on top of my list -- Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.

So who is Huckabee's ideal presidential candidate according to the "Candidate Calculator"? Take a guess.

No, actually...it's not himself. It's Mitt Romney.

What?

Another interesting piece of information is that, according to the results of his survey, he only agrees with himself 71% of the time.

Huh?

So...that either means Mr. Huckabee can't make up his mind about the issues, or this website has some of its facts wrong. Hmmm...

Oh well. No one is saying that you should go straight to the polls and vote based on the results of these online surveys. I view them more as a quick and dirty gauge of the candidates that makes you think about more than just the front runners. I know it's done that for me.

What the...?

Apparently, this bear was scared by on-coming traffic into jumping over the bridge railing, and managed to hang on for dear life and climb up to safety on the concrete arch. It is being reported that the bear slept there overnight until rescuers were able to get the equipment necessary to safely get it down off the bridge the next day. Wow.

Your "Ideal" Presidential Candidate?

So I was listening to Glenn Beck on the radio today, and he mentioned an interesting website where you answer a series of questions about major political issues, and it spits out a list of the presidential candidates and how well they align with your political views. Supposidly, the candidate's stance on topics (and subsequently the results of the questionaire) are based on a plethora of voting history, public remarks, press releases, candidate questionaires, etc. in an effort to best represent their views. I thought it would be interesting to see who I most aligned with according to this site, so I went ahead and took the questionaire. My results are below.

1. Alan Keyes (89%)
2. Tom Tancredo (85%)
3. Mitt Romney (81%)
4. Duncan Hunter (78%)
5. Sam Brownback (73%)
6. Chuck Hagel (not running) (71%)
7. Jim Gilmore (withdrawn) (70%)
8. John McCain (66%)
9. Newt Gingrich (says he will not run) (66%)
10. Fred Thompson (60%)
11. Mike Huckabee (58%)
12. Kent McManigal (campaign suspended) (57%)
13. Tommy Thompson (withdrawn) (54%)
14. Ron Paul (52%)
15. Rudolph Giuliani (52%)
16. Bill Richardson (32%)
17. Joseph Biden (29%)
18. Hillary Clinton (29%)
19. Michael Bloomberg (says he will not run) (28%)
20. John Edwards (27%)
21. Al Gore (not announced) (26%)
22. Mike Gravel (24%)
23. Christopher Dodd (24%)
24. Wesley Clark (not running, endorsed Clinton) (19%)
25. Dennis Kucinich (18%)
26. Barack Obama (17%)
27. Alan Augustson (campaign suspended) (10%)
28. Elaine Brown (3%)

Obviously, I'm a conservative republican (hey, I'm an engineer, we're conservative by trade). That wasn't anything I didn't know about myself already. But I was a little surprised by the rankings. Probably because I don't really know a lot about most of the "second tier" candidates. The chances of most of these candidates getting their party's nomination are slim-to-none, but it makes me want to learn more about their views regardless. Would I ever really vote for Alan Keyes? Hmmmm...

Anyway, give it a try for yourself. I think it could have some benefit for you whether you've already got a candidate in mind or have absolutely no clue. Perhaps it will encourage you to look beyond the top tier candidates (D or R), see who else is out there, and educate yourself about their viewpoints.

Cross your fingers...

Well, we finally did it. Tonight is the first night Ashlyn is sleeping in a regular bed. Her crib is one of those convertible jobbies, so we converted it after work tonight and re-arranged her room quite a bit. So far, so good. Cross your fingers...

PreSonus Inspire GT

So, I purchased a PreSonus Inspire GT firewire recording box to mess around with a few days ago, and I must say that I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far. I'm still learning how to use the multi-track recroding software that it comes with, Cubase, but it seems to be a pretty good software package. The Inspire ships with Cubase LE, so it's got some restrictions as compared to the full-blown version, but it seems to do what I want for the most part. It also comes with a multitude of guitar effect plugins and a few drum machine apps that are fun. I'm really looking forward to finally recording some of the guitar riffs that I've been messing around with for years!

Here's one of the first riffs I recorded: (Audio clip removed. If you really want to hear it, just ask.)

Not sure if it will ever become a full-fledged song, or just stay a quick little doodle -- I'm just glad it finally got recorded before it disappeared into the ether. :-)

Quite a dancer

Here's a sample of our little dancer:



I foresee dance classes in the not-to-distant future...

The Accident -- Part 2

Actually, it's been so long since I posted the first part to this story I kind of forgot where I was planning on going with the second part. :-P
But, since the title of the first post implies there being at least a second, I thought I'd go ahead and post a few pictures.

Scott's "head zipper"
















What I look like on the inside:



















You can even see the screw in my left shoulder from the rotator cuff surgery I had in high school. Neato.

And no, I don't have an abnormally curved spine. It only appears that way because I have severely limited mobility in my left shoulder due to the previously mentioned surgery, and I had to raise my arms above my head for the X-Ray and CT scan. In order to do so without causing extreme discomfort, I had to slightly twist my torso.

I should really make up a t-shirt with the X-Ray image on it, and some text saying: "I was in a car accident, and all I got was this lowsy t-shirt." Yeah, that would be cool...

Folding@Home

No, I'm not talking about your laundry. ;)

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project run by Stanford University to research the process of protein folding. More specifically, they are studying the phenomenon of proteins that do not fold correctly, and the role they play in such diseases as Alzheimer's, ALS, Huntington's and Parkinson's disease, and many forms of cancer. The project began over seven years ago, with the beta version of the software released in 2000.

The Folding@Home project utilizes a concept known as distributed computing, where the complex calculations required to simulate the folding process are broken down into chunks of smaller, more manageable calculations (called Work Units) that are then sent to the client software running on a home user's computer (or PS3). The client software runs in the background, using "spare" CPU cycles. Once the client software finishes the folding simulation of the individual Work Unit it was assigned, the results are uploaded to Stanford's servers where Work Unit results from users all over the world are re-assembled for further analysis. The hundreds of thousands of home computers running the client software provide enough computing power to "simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved", according to the Folding@Home website.

The online gaming group I belong to has joined the folding effort, and all are welcome to join our team. Yes, even YOU! You don't need to be a gamer, but if you are, we even welcome rival clans. ;)

So what do you need to do to join the folding effort?
- Go to http://folding.stanford.edu and download the client software. Client software is available for PC, Mac, and even PlayStation 3!
- Install the software, select a username, and join Team [760] by adding team number 70586 in the config window.
- Let it run in the background. That's it - you're folding!

Once you've finished your first Work Unit, your folding stats will appear on the Stanford website, and the Team [760] Stats Page.

As a fun added bonus for Team [760] members, I've personally put together a much more comprehensive stat tracking system: Team [760] Folding@Home Advanced Stats. We realize it's not a competition amongst ourselves or other teams -- these stats are just for fun, and serve to document our progress and help visualize our contribution to the project as a whole.

Even if you don't join Team [760], I hope you'll consider joining the Folding@Home project. It's a worthwhile cause.

Decline of a Neighborhood

When we moved into our house on the southeast side of Des Moines five years ago, we were fairly pleased with the neighborhood we had chosen. It's located at the edge of a development that was constructed in the mid-90's (ours built in '94), so the homes are all relatively modern and in decent condition. The immediately adjacent neighborhood to the west is slightly older (probably mid-80's), with the homes continuing to get older as you move farther west. Extending to the east are generally newer homes, with the most recently constructed houses popping up all around Easter Lake, which is about 5 minutes from our house. We knew that the SE side, in general, was not the nicest part of the metro area, but it provided a lot more buying power, getting us a much nicer home than we could get for a similarly priced house in the western suburbs. Basically, you have to drive through some "not so nice" neighborhoods to get to ours, and when we purchased that was OK. Unfortunately, things have changed over the years.

The most significant change has been the fact that we are now parents. Having the well-being of a young child at the forefront of your daily concerns makes you sensitive to things in your surroundings that you probably could care less about when you qualify as just a couple of D.I.N.K.'s (Double Income, No Kids). Anyone with children will know exactly what I'm talking about. Things that might seem trivial to someone without any children can often times be very important to a parent. Unfortunately, there have been more than just trivial events (even by D.I.N.K. standards) leading to the decline of our neighborhood.

In general, the SE side of the Des Moines metro could be considered a bit of a rough neighborhood -- really the entire east side. Yes, there are nicer spots interspersed among the bad areas, like our neighborhood for example, but it's generally not a highly revered part of the metro. We knew that going in, realizing that we would most likely move on after 5-7 years, so no big deal, right? Well, it wasn't at the time we purchased, and continued to not be a problem up until about two years ago when the crime associated with the bad areas around us started creeping closer and closer to our neighborhood.

It seems like there is a shooting/stabbing/robbery/hit-and-run/recently discovered dead body on the east side about every other week. Seriously. If it's not one of those things, it's another. Here are just a few examples that stick out in my mind:

- A few nights ago a 15 year-old was killed in a hit-and-run near South Ridge Mall (about 5-10 minutes south of our house).
- There have been at least three robberies of various businesses on SE 14th over the last several months -- at least one of which ended up in a high speed chase. SE 14th is the nearest major north-south thorough-fair to our house, about 5 blocks away.
- Last year, a man was arrested for sexually assaulting a young child (under the age of 10) in a van parked at the Fareway 2 blocks from our house.
- A few months ago a house on our street was broken into. I'm not sure what, if anything, was stolen. No one was home at the time.
- And most recently, there have been a rash of mailbox bashings on our street. Saturday evening/Sunday morning marked the third time it has happened this summer. This last go-around was the first time our mailbox was hit. Luckily, the damage was only superficial. There were somewhere between 5 and 10 other mailboxes on our street that weren't so lucky.

Normally, I wouldn't get too concerned about my mailbox getting bashed. And compared to the other items in my above list, some damaged mailboxes seems pretty trivial. Yes, it's annoying, aggravating, and an inconvenience -- especially when it happens repeatedly, but under normal circumstances I'd just chock it up to some bored, rowdy teenagers. That's what it appeared to be all the times leading up to the most recent. However, this last round was accompanied by, what I can only assume to be, gang symbols spray painted on the side of my neighbors boat which he had parked in his driveway. I have no idea what it meant or what gang it may or may not have been representing, but it concerns me greatly. That's just too damn close.

I feel as if it's only a matter of time before something more significant than a smashed mailbox will happen to my family, and I don't really feel like waiting around to find out what it might be. It's time to get the hell outta dodge...

Backyard Fun

My 15 minutes of fame

Well, not really...but it'll have to do.

Here's a link to a local television news spot about the last project I designed for my former employer.

http://www.kdsm.com/players/news/top_story/video.shtml
(Click on the video for "Asian Gardens..." in the video list)

The video will probably only be available for a day or two before getting cycled out of rotation.

Here's what it will look like when all the landscaping is finished (click for larger image):

The upper "pagoda" portion of the structure was hand made in China, and assembled here in the US by the Chinese craftsmen who made it. The solid marble railings and statue figures were also hand made in China.

A few other photos:


Here's what it looked like before the pagoda was installed:

I wish they would just finish the damn thing already. I designed it in 2005!