238 in the morning and just woke up… I made the mistake of lying down when I got To the hotel last night… And I fell instantly asleep. Lights on, coat on…

Oh well… At least I was asleep

Nite all, nite Sam
-me

I just got on a plane on the first leg of my trip back to Munich. .. Just coming off the longest stint in teh United States I’ve had in more than 2 years.. It’s been a mixed tiem off..It’s been very sad  with Marcia’s passing . 

it’s also been restful if those two things can go together.. 

just grabbed my traditional good luck heady on the way out..

more from the road,

 nite all, nite sam

-me

Spent the day around the house with Diane and Gabe.. The guys Gabe went out to Wyoming with got to our house this morning with our car. Gabe would have been driving with them..but he ended up flying to make Marcia’s funeral. He managed to skip that 3500 mile drive home. 

Unpacking the car was a major project… … once done the three of us went out t for a ski at camels hump.. it was ‘brisk’ (3 F) but really nice conditions. It was really nice to get some serious exercise. We’re all nicely tired tonight. 

I also managed to get some fun hardware/software hacking in. I’ve always been fascinated with infrared (IR)  photography/videography.. It’s so cool to see where heat is aand is not. It turns out that its not as easy to do as you would think. . For xmas , I bought myself one of these https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13233   crazy expensive for what it does.. but very cool. I spent the moring figureing out how to wire it up to a raspberry pi zero w. .. There were lots of chnicks of code out there..but nothing worked.. as with all these things it took several hours of trial and error to get the SPI bus interface working, correct the pinout mistakes in the tutorial. change the SPI clock speed, track down bugs in the frame rate, etc.. but minutes before going to ski, I figured out the last problem.. and voila !

here’s me with my (literally) cool glasses and hat. 

and here is my hand.. normal.. and after coming bac from Skiing.. I have something called Reynaud’s syndrome  whcih causes poor circulations in fingers and toes in cold weather.. can you tell 🙂 

OK.. time to play pool with diane and gabe

nite all. nite sam

-me

Diane and I just spent about 30 minutes taking a test called StrengthsFinder from a company called Gallup. It came strongly recommended.. and we paid an embarrassing amount to take it. I’m sitting here staring at the results and am surprised about how unsurprising it is.. here are my 5 top strengths.. all but number 3 I think I would have guessed. What I can’t figure out is what I’m supposed to do with these insights. At least with Meyers Briggs that one can take for free.. it would say that someone with these strengths would be a good fireman… or something like that.. 

this gives me no such insights.. but the colors are pretty. 

the most interesting part of the test was what came last.. of all the 34 attributes.. what do you think was my lowest ? 

ready for it ?!

Discipline… 

How funny is that.. ?!?!?

nite all, nite sam

-jc