Stretched.  Ready to go.  This isn’t bad.  Breathing  controlled.  I could have gone faster.  Music pumping.  Focus on lyrics.  Focus on nothing.  Zoning out.  Letting go of stress.  Feeling healthy.  Each foot step closer to being more healthy.  Bananas give me great energy.  I love bananas.  Heart rate up.  Cardio zone.  Burning calories.  Training.  Training for what?  For myself?  For others?  Want to look good.  Other people train.  Cops joining the force need to run an 8 minute mile.  Marines and Army recruits have to run.  I wonder if I could survive that type of training.  Breathing a little more rapid but still controlled.  Sandstorm by Darude hits it’s apex after the initial lull.

Endorphin.

Feeling good.  Running with an unknown cause.  Running and not stopping until the time runs out on the treadmill.  If I can’t finish a run how can I finish law school?  Renewed energy.  Looking around at others in the gym.  We take for granted the men and women who serve our country in the armed forces.  They sacrifice so much so we can have freedom.  That’s a noble pursuit.  I think everyone owes something to their country.  Thinking about girls.  Girls from the past.  Girls I know now.  Girls “that got away.”  Girls I will meet in the future.  I want to look good.  Running is great.  My Nike sports headphones aren’t slipping like other shitty ones I’ve had.  They were a good investment.  The beat from Van Halen’s Panama starts pumping.  I know the next 3:32 minutes will fly by.  The hook begins to play and an awesome chill rushes over my body .

Endorphin.

Final part of my run.  Glance at clock.  Close to 5 minutes left.  Last 5 are sometimes the hardest.  Why not stop now?  No!  Finish.  Don’t be a pussy.  Kick up the MPH a few points.  Focus on breathing.  Do this for yourself.  Do this for law school.  Do this for Mom and Dad.  Do this for friends.  Do this for your country (what?).  3:14 left.  Look down at my Pi tattoo.  Pi never stops — why should you?  Realize this doesn’t make sense.  Slight cramp.  Have had those before and gotten through it.  I’ve also felt worse than this in my life and gotten through it.  As Nike says JUST DO IT!  Final 2 minutes.  Kick up the MPH again.  Don’t puss out!  No music or thoughts will help you at this point.  Just push yourself.  30 seconds.  On auto-pilot.  Running fast.  Near sprinting.  Legs working independent of mind.  Just moving. 3… 2… 1…

Endorphin.

Thank God…

1. I’m not married.
2. I don’t have a kid.
3. I have a mom and dad who love me.
4. I have great friends.
5. I’m a male.
6. I’m intelligent.
7. I’m creative.
8. I’m my own boss.
9. I went to college and graduated in 4 years.
10. I’m going to law school.
11. I’ve been to Ireland.
12. I’ve loved at least one person in my life.
13. I have my awesome car.
14. I’m not a virgin.
15. I have no disability.
16. I am able to run.
17. I am healthy.
18. I make/have enough money to pay my bills even in this economy.
19. Obama is our president.
20. I have a sense of humor.
21. I got through a difficult time with alcohol.
22. I’m not a religious fanatic (not that religion is bad).
23. I can keep a conversation going.
24. My sarcasm sometimes goes unnoticed.
25. I’m artistic.
26. I can solve a Rubik’s cube.
27. I can still take the derivative of an equation.
28. I look really good with a tan.
29. I don’t take shit from people.
30. For computers and the entire IT industry.
31. For movies and the entire movie industry (minus the MPAA — suck my balls)

Jeff and I are asking for donations so we can meet our fundraising goal of $100.  Any amount would help — $5, $10, $20 — whatever you can afford.  You can make a donation online using a secure credit card form.

Thank you in advance for your donation.  You’re helping a good cause.

Now imagine being seated at a restaurant that supports ONOSYS‘ soon to be debuted iPhone ordering app.  With the flick of a finger you can browse the entire menu, select what meals you and your family want, and place the order with almost no staff involvment.  This type of scenario would not only speed up the order-to-fulfillment process (which would make restaurants happy) but would also cut down on tons of human mistakes that invariably occur.  I also think this would become an extremely hip and cool app for people with iPhones to flaunt.  There are over 40 million iPhone users nationwide who use their device for everything under the sun — why not order food?

Stan Garber, of ONOSYS, will be in Chicago this week at the Marketing Executives Group Conference (MEG) and National Restaurant Association Show to debut the app.  I subscribe to ONOSYS‘ newsletter called “Quick Bites” which includes more details.  Here’s the newsletter in it’s entirety that arrived to my inbox this afternoon:

Got an iPhone? Get a pizza.

ONOSYS is taking the wraps off of the industry’s hottest iPhone ordering system in Chicago this week at the Marketing Executives Group Conference (MEG) and National Restaurant Association Show, and you can see for yourself how your customers can order anything from your menu with just a touch of their finger on the screen of their iPhone. 

With over 40 million phones sold, the iPhone has revolutionized mobile computing, and ONOSYS has harnessed that mobile power in a simple, elegant and powerful ordering system. 

Coming to Chicago this week? I’d love to show you the next wave in online ordering: mobile transactions. See how our mobile ordering system can help you reach more customers, increase order size and satisfy your customers who are on the go. 

Want to track me down? Email me (stan@onosys.com) to set up a time to get together, or call me on my cell (440-785-2870) if you have a few minutes of free time at the Show. 

Stan Garber 

P.S.: If you see a guy on the show floor wearing “ONOSYS Orange” shoes, that’s me. Stop and say hello and I’ll show you how mobile ordering works on the fly! 

Out of the thousands of apps currently flooding Apple’s App Store I believe this has real potential.  If the ONOSYS people get this right, and are able to prove a realistic ROI for restaurants, they’ll have a killer app on their hands.

If anyone in Chicago has video of this app in action please send it to me.  I’d love to 1) view it and 2) post it for others.

The project’s in-depth details can be found at http://www.geigel.com/signlanguage/, however, briefly, I was able to employ computational methods, initially researched in the 1980s, to recognize American Sign Language letters within computer images.  (Note: The initial research performed in the 1980s focused on recognizing faces in images which have popularly become known as Eigenfaces).  The process is called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and is widely considered to be a breakthrough discovery in the advancement of Computer Vision.  Much of PCA’s attractiveness comes from it’s ability to train similar, yet slightly different, images of a given class.  In my research, for instance, the classes I dealt with were signed letters corresponding to different hand orientations.  When it boils down to it, PCA is able to mathematically define (using Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues) the most important features of a given class (for example a fist for letter A versus the open cirlce for the letter O), and then when a new unknown image is presented to the system a calculation can be performed and a mathematically reinforced estimate can be made as to what class the unknown image belongs.

Ellen Walker, my Computer Vision professor at Hiram College, oversaw my research and offered help when I ran into issues.  Ultimately, I was able to develop/program/execute a fully functional PCA system in C++ for recognizing American Sign Language letters.  In fact, once the PCA system was trained, I was able to test it on 10 sample images with 100% recognition accuracy.  The project was a huge success!  Both in it’s results and in the lessons, knowledge, and gratification it left me.  Though Ellen has never explicitly said this to me, I think that she was also impressed and surprised with how well the results turned out.

This all took place in 2005 — the year I graduated from Hiram.  As the years went on I would occasionally correspond with Ellen and then on 11/29/2006 I received an email from her asking if my project could serve as a possible AI/Vision project that she would be submit to the University of Hartford’s “Machine Learning Experiences in AI” shared curriculum.  Of course I was excited and happy that my project would be the inspiration for such a project. 

A few years later I received another email from Ellen on 2/23/2009 saying that project was now appearing on Hartford’s website at http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/compsci/ccli/samplep.htm.  The project’s detail page can be found at this URL: http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/compsci/ccli/rasl.htm.  There’s also a PDF (http://cs.hiram.edu/~walkerel/RASLUPCA.pdf) that has in-depth details along with a credit at the very bottom stating that the project was inspired by my project!  In classic programmer speak — w00t!

So when I got my new iPhone a few weeks ago I was eager to setup my Gmail account.  Just as I expected it was painless and easy.

Then I moved on to my calendar which I thought would be just as easy.  Unfortunately it wasn’t.  I was hoping that the iPhone would support a pull architecture for iCal synchronization — basically allowing me to tell the iPhone that it’s time to sync between the iPhone and my Google calendar.  A lot of calendar software packages support the iCal standard, and Google calendar allows you to export your calendar in this format.  Naturally I thought this would be supported on the iPhone, but it wasn’t.

I then searched online to find what I was looking for.  I found a syncing program that works with the iCal standard, but only with the iCalendar application in OSX.  Since I run XP on my machine this wasn’t any help.  I then found an application that said it could do what I needed, called NemuSync, but it required that I jailbreak my iPhone — something I wasn’t looking to do.

Just as I was about to give up I found the answer to all of my problems.  It was called NuevaSync and it has been the best thing I’ve ever setup for my iPhone.  NuevaSync is free, and allows you to setup an account with them that bridges information on your iPhone with Google’s calendar without ever having to install an app.  On a more technical level, they offer a Microsoft Exchange layer to push syncing between your iPhone and Google’s calendar.

Because Exchange is a push architecture you never have to worry about activating a sync request — it’s done automatically when you add a new event in your calendar either on your iPhone or on your Calendar webpage.  So let’s say you’re on the road and enter an event on your iPhone.  By the time you get home and log on to your Google calendar it will already be there.  NuevaSync is a real-time ongoing syncing of your iPhone calendar and Google calendar.

I was so happy when I found this out that I emailed their staff to thank them for the service.  They could easily charge $99 a year for this service and I would have paid.  It’s so seamless and translucent that I literally had to write a blog article singing its praises.

If you’re an iPhone person and use Google calendar you must setup an account today.

There are a couple of new icons along each search result that allow YOU to vote/score/rank results higher/lower, remove results that you’ll never care about or need, and to comment on results.  You can also add a link that you always want to appear for the phrase you searched for.  Want “cats.com” to come up as your second result when you search for dogs?  You can make it happen now!

AWESOME!

I have thought for a long time how great it would be to simply remove a result listing you know you’ll never need, but they go even further.  These features make it easy to find repetitive information very quickly and to tailor it to your needs.

You also know Google’s taking all that feedback and making their system even smarter.  If a thousand people hide a result, or a thousand people promote a result to a higher rank, that will have an effect on future searches for everyone.  It’s ingenious!

While the commenting feature is very much like the old “Note This” feature which was bulky and mostly unusable, the commenting feature is super easy and intuitive.  I WISH they kept the “Note This” feature, however, for personal use so you can maintain individual notes on a website that don’t become public.

Anyway, I felt the need to let more people know about it because it’s slick.  And of course Google integrate these new features in an unobtrusive way — they’re known for that.

Kudos to Google!

It’s this time of year people seem to utter, “I keep asking myself why I live here.” 

I can’t speak for them, but I like Cleveland, and I like the seasons.  I don’t mind the changes in weather, and actually look forward to it.  When I was weighing the possibility of moving away from this state (to somewhere that didn’t get snowfall) it was one of the things that ran through my head.  Honestly!  I thought, if I move there, I will miss the snow.  

So anyway, for me, this morning is awesome.  I can’t wait to go sledding.

CNN report on Northeast Ohio snowfall

Unlike many other students I knew coming into college exactly what I wanted to major in, computer science. Hiram’s CS department is extremely focused, challenging and educationally demanding. We are the only college in America to have an all female faculty, and also one of only a few that require 2 research projects before graduation instead of just 1 which others schools normally ask of their students. There will always be a place in my heart for the 2 senior faculty members, Obie Slotterbeck and Ellen Walker. Their lifetime experience alone is a wealth of knowledge, and their enthusiasm for the subject matter second to none.

My proudest moment as a professional student was my research project done in Ellen Walker’s Computer Vision course. I developed a fully supervised and trained vision detection system for classifying sign language letters within photographs. I approached the project with the same energy and determination I had in my chemistry project. I dominated the research and understood every technical detail required to make my system work. The satisfaction I had from the project was some of the purest ever felt. When I gave my presentation to my fellow students and professors a great exhilaration came over me. You know what’s a great feeling? Working your ass off for something that you know you’ll get an A in, and having 100% confidence going into a presentation that you won’t get anything but an A.

Like most people who look back on their college years I remember mine as being some of the best of my life. Unlike most people, however, I don’t want to look back on them as if I can’t have even better times ahead of me! I am not done with life! I still have things to offer this world and things to do. After graduating it was a very strange feeling to not be returning to school the next fall. I miss learning. I miss research. I miss that undescribable spark a person feels when they’re on a campus with other smart people who are equally active in educational endeavors. The atmosphere is viral and electric. Hiram College, if nothing else, injected into my soul a desire to learn even more than I know today. To defend freedom of thought. Lastly, by generating a pang (sometimes painful) that I should strive for even more learning.

In the words of Hiram’s motto — fiat lux — let there be light.