The Other WSU

I just got back yesterday from a conference at Washington State University in Pullman, WA. Wichita State is part of a university/industry research organization called PSERC. Twice a year the group holds a conference where new research proposals are made, updates and reports on existing projects are presented, and general networking/collaborating takes place in spades. The conferences are not very large, perhaps 50 or so individuals were there this time (though I was told that this was a bit lower than usual).

I felt very fortunate that I got to attend and thoroughly enjoyed the time. Just being a part of the conference made me feel like a "big-boy" researcher even though my part in presenting findings from the project I've been working on this past semester was very small, I had a display in the poster session. This type of presentation is exactly what it sounds like and is very similar to the grade school science fair in format, just without the classic baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano. In the world of academic prestige, being a part of a post session is the lowest form of data presentation but for graduate students in PSERC, its the only option we have available.

There were two great benefits for me in attending. One was the previously mentioned networking value. Though I was slightly sick and had a sore throat which made talking difficult, I was able to meet a fair number of other students and some of the other researchers both in academia and industry. Assuming I am able to attend more of these conferences in the future, I expect these relationships to become increasingly useful in staying connected to the current state of the art. This brings up the second key value in the conference: I now have a much better and more concrete understanding of what topics are of interest to those in the know and where the research effort is being made. This not only makes me feel more connected and a part of the academic community but will be of great value as I go forward and try to define the scope of my PhD dissertation.

Details from the conference are probably not worth getting into here so for now I'll simply leave you with some slightly interesting pictures I took while in Pullman, mostly of sights seen on campus.

I'll leave it to you to judge the validity of the labeling in public places at Washington State.

The area and the campus as a whole is very hilly and covers a lot of space. Just walking around campus would be a great form of exercise.

You know you're in a Northwest college town when the VW buses start showing up.

The community garden near campus. A great idea and use of space.

Right at the edge of campus. I think they've got their demographic nailed.

Why I don't like Quicken

After talking with a good friend the other night I got inspired to look into upgrading our old version (2005) of Quicken to the newly re-designed Quicken Essentials 2010. I talked with my wife about it and we decided that the money would be well spent since we would be able to electronically access all of our financial statements and Quicken had a converter that would transfer over all our old data.

After ten or so hours on the phone with technical support, I can attest that the former is wonderfully true and the later is maddeningly not. A converter is included with the software but in our case, it doesn't seem to work the way it should. I've called Quicken four times, each time addressing a different symptom of the bad conversion and each time the only slightly helpful technical support person has run me through the same steps of trying to re-import my data, come to the conclusion there was a problem with my file, and escalate my issue to some higher ups that may get back to me eventually. This process usually takes about an hour or so on the phone. So far, I've only been contacted once by these mysterious higher ups and, thankfully, they were able to clear up that particular symptom. I've yet to hear from them the for two of the other problems.

This last time I called things ended differently. The technical support person said there was no fix for my problem and that I could either use the software in its broken condition or I could ignore all the historical data from my old version of Quicken and start with a clean slate. I couldn't believe what I was hearing so I asked a few clarifying questions and repeated that the "solution" to my problem was not really a solution at all. He agreed that this was the case.

From a business stand-point this is hard to understand. Intuit, the maker of Quicken, is the only one that knows the format of my old data and it is the only one that can migrate this data to any other format. It has me locked in to their software right now and is in a perfect position to keep me there by supporting the transition to their newest version of software. But they have decided that they don't want to support me in this transition, that they want me to start over with my financial record-keeping. This makes two points abundantly clear to me:

1. Intuit doesn't believe in customer support. I'm having trouble migrating my data from one version of their software to another version and they aren't able to help me make this work. I've invested ten or so hours of my time with them to get the data converted and they aren't able to get the job done.
2. If I'm going to lose all my historical data, then I am free to choose software from any of Quicken's competitors and in light of the above point, I'm more inclined to choose something besides Quicken. Not only are they not able to persuade me to stay but they seem to be encouraging me to take my business elsewhere.

So we did. We have resigned ourselves to losing our historical data (sad but not the end of the world) and have found another program that is better in nearly every way, iBank 3. We haven't used it much yet but so far, it seems to do everything we need including some things Quicken didn't do very well or at all. We'll be getting a refund from Intuit and aren't looking back.

Closing remark: I can't recommend highly enough that you avoid Quicken Essentials 2010.

Tragedy on the 17th St. Bicycle Expressway (or Losing My Life on the Way to School)

Today started out pretty normal for me. Katie was going to bike home after work so I drove her and her bike there this morning before returning home and preparing for my bike commute into school. The morning was a bit cooler (~55'F) with little wind which made for a nice ride. I pulled up to the school gym to park my bike and head into the shower when my stomach sank. It was the same feeling I had when, in the same spot, my bike was stolen several months ago.

My bag, which was attached to the rear rack on my bike when I left home, was no longer there.

This bag had a good chunk of my life in it. My hard drive with both my Master's thesis and research computer files in it. My lab notebook and 3-ring binder with relevant journal articles in it. My wallet and house keys.

I hopped back on my bike and began to retrace my path, my mind racing. The bag was on the left-hand side of the rack meaning when it fell off it would have fallen off into the traffic (rather than the sidewalk) side of the road. This means it would get the way of cars traveling on the road. It also means it would be obvious and out in the open for any passerby to snatch up and claim for his or her own. This was another sinking revelation.

The movie "Signs" has a fantastic and telling bit that I call "the two kinds of people" scene. Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) and Graham (Mel Gibson) are sitting on the couch after the kids have fallen asleep watching the news coverage of the incredible events of the day. Graham, a reverend who had left the faith after the death of his wife is explaining to Merrill that there are two kinds of people and they respond differently to big events in life. One group (and I'm paraphrasing from memory) sees fantastic events and "it may be good, it may be bad but they know deep down that they are going to be all right"; they believe in a higher power that is working in their best interest. The other group knows "that whatever happens, they are on their own." There is no higher power, no God and when tragedy strikes it is up the individuals to define their future.

I don't write about it much on this blog but I am squarely in the first group, a spiritual man. When my personal tragedy struck today, I was quickly calling on God for help and mercy. The situation was entirely out of my control and it was going to take divine intervention to get the life I had in that bag back. I was pedaling and praying, both frantically, as I headed back towards home, eyes on the other side of the road, looking for that small treasure. It would take so little for things to turn out poorly. The bag could be run over and the contents destroyed or somebody could have picked it up. It would take a miracle for somebody to stop, pick up the bag out of the road, and set it aside for me to find. A small but definite miracle.

As I flew back home I began to think more about this. If I really believed in God and believed He was for me and not against me, then I had to accept the possibility that I might not get my bag back and that this would be a good thing for me. I'm reading a fantastic book right now, "How People Grow", that makes this point. Often it takes tragedy for us to grow and mature as people because we tend to slack off when life is easy and pain free. Painful events in life can work out for our best but only if we respond well to them. Cruising down the streets of Wichita I didn't want to accept that this could actually be the case. I didn't want this pain and hassle, I had things to do today. Please, please, just left me have my bag back. I was praying for mercy, for the easy way out of this. I was entirely dependent on God and I wanted Him to give me a break.

He did.

A small miracle occurred. Though it took me most of my ride home, I found my bag. Somebody had taken it and leaned it against the fence by the sidewalk. As best I can tell, it wasn't riffled through or explored, just tucked away out of harms way, waiting to be claimed.

I was thanking God the whole way back to school.

On the trail today

A few highlights from my bike ride to and from school today:

• A squirrel that had managed to abscond an entire doughnut from who knows where. He couldn't seem to decide whether to run and keep the doughnut safe or stop and eat it. He was doing some of both.
• A dozen or so Wichita Police bike-mounted officers. They were all congregated in a small neighborhood street. I had no idea we had so many bike-mounted officers and I have no idea why they were all hanging out together. I waved as I rode by; they waved back.
• A sign calling for volunteers to come out and protest Sarah Palin while she was in town for a fundraiser this past weekend. I think the newspaper said there were a few dozen protesters so I don't think that the sign was very effective. This is confirmed by that fact that I only noticed it a few days after the event.
• A long line of SUVs and trucks picking up students from the Catholic school in our neighborhood. There must have been forty or fifty of them, each picking up a child or two from the school.

Power Meter

(A warning to all my non-engineering friends: this is a highly nerdy post.)

A few years ago I received as a gift a wonderfully nerdy item for any electrical engineer: the Kill-A-Watt. The device is used to measure electrical power consumption in household items and I've been using it to do just that, mainly to see how much power devices draw when they are plugged in but turned off.

One of the measurements this device makes is something called the power factor. The power factor is a measure of the ratio of real power a device consumes to the amount of power the device appears to draw from the grid (the apparent power). Devices with a low power factor are bad because they demand more power from the grid than they actually use, sending the excess back every half cycle. Some of this power that gets sent back gets burned up in losses on the wires and is in essence, wasted.

Traditionally, power factor has been caused by electric motors due to their high inductance and the fix was relatively straight-forward: adding a capacitor near the motor provides a place to temporarily store the energy that would have been sent back to the grid. When the motor then appears to demand it again, it gets pulled out of the capacitor. In fact, in these cases, the power factor can be calculated by a tiny bit of math measuring the difference between when the peak current flows and when the peak voltage is present. The larger the difference in time between these two events, the lower the power factor.

Over the past few decades, though, there has been another big power factor culprit on the rise: rectifiers. These are the circuits that change AC into DC and are in nearly every electronic goody around the house: computers, TVs, DVD players, laptops: if you buy it at an electronics shop it has a rectifier. The power factor problems these devices create is very different from motors, though. They send the power back to the grid in a very different way; they convert some of the power at the traditional 60Hz frequency to power at higher frequencies, distorting the waveform. The fix that works for motors does nothing in this case and measuring the power factor is much more complicated.

Well, in a lab I was finishing for class, we had a very fancy (and expensive) power meter we were using that measured the power factor in two ways, the motor way (displacement power factor) and the rectifier way (true power factor, the more useful and accurate of the two). Since I had access to this, I brought in my Kill-A-Watt and we set up both meters to measure the power factor on a PC (which contains a rectifier). Much to my surprise, the fancy power meter showed that my Kill-A-Watt measured the more complicated true power factor. I was very impressed that such a simple and inexpensive device was able to measure this accurately.

This made me a happy nerd for the day.