Mary Franklin Rohr's 88th Birthday, Thompson Reunion and Edstrom Reunion

My parents, wife, sister and I flew back to Minnesota for my mother's sister, Mary, 88th birthday, a Thompson family reunion and an Edstrom family reunion.

We visited where my parents grew up and the Spring Garden Lutheran Church where many of the Edstrom's are buried that I will have in a separate upcoming blog post so my father can put in his memories and information as well.

Below are some of the highlights.

Above is my mother on the left and my Aunt Mary on the right.  It was a GREAT birthday party!

My sister and I went bass fishing with my cousin Kyle on his mother of all bass boats.  My sister caught a very nice large mouth that our Uncle Luverne enjoyed that night for dinner.

Below is my sister catching the nice bass.


Below is my mother and sister in Cannon Falls at the Fair Grounds area on a beautiful day being towed on a trailer with a couch.

The first day we surprised my aunt on the Bier Stube in Hastings.  My father is out above after the big surprise lunch.

Below is me giving a tour of my Uncle Tat Thompson's Mercury that he absolutely loved.




Below Julie and I sat on one of my cousin Troy's Harley at Tom and Cindy's house for a Thompson Reunion.

Below are the Harley's leaving Tom's.




Tom gave us a tour of his garage above and a tour of Zumbrota in his 1939 Chevy below.

 Above my father met with his five cousins in Hastings during the trip as well.

Above is Mary with her grandchildren at her 88th birthday party.

Below is at Mary and Marvin's place in Hastings.

Above is my godfather, Uncle Luverne, standing is my Uncle Merle and my father is seated next to his brother.

Below is the Red Diamond Saloon in Randolph, MN where the two uncles above and my other uncle Gene (now deceased) took me in 1977 and got me the drunkest I have ever been on my 18th birthday.  Now some of it was my fault :-), I walked in and it was .25 for a beer, so I said, "A quarter a beer, it's my 18th birthday, two beers for everyone in here on me!"  Well, needless to say that made me pretty popular for return beers in Randolph :-)  The population is 447 today and likely below 350 in 1977.  My three uncles thought, quite correctly, that it was hilarious that they got the oldest grandson of Kenny and Dorothy Edstrom and the son of John K. Edstrom absolutely stupid drunk on his 18th birthday.  They busted my chops forever on that day :-)

Below on the flight back, I put my parents in first class as they automatically upgraded me and Julie.  My mother had picked up a stomach bug and was not feeling that great as you can see in the photo.

It was a fun 6 day trip back to Minnesota.

AWS IoT Security Webinar

What I like about AWS webinars is that they tend to be very content rich and very well presented.  This is in that same category.

It is interesting that these IoT discussions still miss the most important bit -- giving a common context aka dictionary for the huge variety of devices that are out there.  The assumption is every developer knows what all of necessary specifics of what each device is capable of providing.  The problem is that translation is forced to be handled by the developer and that never scales.  This is where MTConnect could play a huge role.

10 Machine Learning Products

Absolutely worth watching:

Dave Edstrom To Speak At Top Shops Conference - $150 EDSTROM Discount Code

I was thrilled to get an invitation to speak at Top Shops Conference.

Modern Machine Shop Top Shops 2017

September 5-7, 2017 

JW Marriott ---- Indianapolis, IN

I am on the Thursday the 7th at 9:45 - 10:45 AM  on the Data Driven Manufacturing Panel

Below is from the Top Shops homepage describing the conference.

"Top Shops participants will notice an emphasis not just on the products and the processes that are driving manufacturing. But, more importantly, visitors will learn from and interact with their peers.

Top Shops will feature other manufacturing professionals who have shared their tips, tools and technologies in an effort to not just benchmark their own business, but to provide other manufacturing enterprises information that can help them improve their operation. Topics covered will include:

• Advanced Machining Technology
• Shopfloor Practices
• Business Strategy
• Workforce Development
• Operational Benchmarking
• Additive Manufacturing
• Robots & Automation
• Data-Driven Manufacturing"

Below is Doug Woods, President of AMT - The Association For Manufacturing Technology,  discussing Top Shops:

I was told by the Top Shops Conference organizers that those interested in the conference can use the code, EDSTROM, to receive $150 off their registration.

The Life of a Bolt - to be used in an F1 race car

This video does a great job showing the life of a bolt and the basic manufacturing process of turning metal into a part.  I saw this posted on a Slack thread.

God Bless Jim Vance

We moved here in 1975 and Jim Vance was THE anchor to watch.  He was THE anchor for the 42 years that I have been in the DC area.

Mr. Vance passed away and there is a very nice article in the Washington Post about him.

My fondest memories were the on-air conversations between him and George Michael the sports broadcaster for Channel 4 and his stories.  In this video they both lose it when they are watching a model continue to fall on the runway in Paris. One of my favorites was when President George H.W. Bush called him up to go fishing on the Potomac.  We watched him grow as we grew over the years as well.  In 2013 he came out against the name Redskins and I was with him on the change of heart as well.  He also liked Harleys and even though he was very famous in the DC area, he still came across as just a nice guy who happened to be the local anchor.

Below is Mr. Vance announcing he had cancer:

GaaS: Geezers as a Service -- Quantifying What Older Works Can Bring To A Company

I have an alert on "Sun Microsystems" and I received a link to this article:

               Older workers bring plenty of ideas to the table. Here’s why

The reason I received the link is because of this opening sentence that referenced Sun employee #2 Vinod Khosla:

"Does professional and life experience – also known as ‘wisdom’! – have value when it comes to big ideas and innovations?

You might think not, from reading this quote by billionaire Vinod Khosla, who was one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems. He’s been quoted as saying that “people under 35 are the people who make change happen … people over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas”."

It is interesting that the article actually quantifies what older workers can and do bring:

"A study conducted by Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and director of research at Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke, found that twice as many founders were older than 50 as were younger than 25, and there were twice as many over 60 as under 20.

After studying 549 successful technology ventures, Wadhwa recaps: “The average age of a successful entrepreneur in high-growth industries such as computers, health care, and aerospace is 40.

“Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25. A clear majority – 75 percent – have more than six years of industry experience and half have more than 10 years when they create their start-up.”

I suggest paying attention to a recent move by Google.

They’ve initiated a pilot program to support “a neglected group of innovators in the UK”. That’s right, the over-50s entrepreneurs and idea people.

The Founders over 50 accelerator provides a free platform for “inspiration, training and skill-sharing, to bring the support needed to grow a new business,” Sarah Drinkwater, Google’s Head of Campus, told Techworld.""

I have also noticed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is hiring more former Sun employees - including Adrian Cockcroft and James Gosling.  Tim Bray is there and coined the term GaaS - Geezers as a Service :-)

Remembering SPARC - Chip Hall of Fame Article In IEEE Spectrum

This was an exciting time for Sun Microsystems when SPARC came out in 1987. I remember being asked to attend the first field meeting for SPARC.  We were called SPARC Ambassadors.  I met a lot of very interesting and talented individuals at this first meeting.  One of my memories was they gave us this piece of paper that had a brass round head fastener (that you last saw in elementary school) to show off the SPARC Register windows of Ins, Outs, Locals and Globals by rotating the upper piece of paper to show the registers.  I was fairly new to Sun at that point, but I still raised my hand and said, "I think there are a few individuals who will be interested in register windows, but I know a lot of customers who we deal with will just want to know SPARC is 10 MIPS compared to a 4 MIPS 25MHz 68020 and they will need to recompile their software if they have Motorola binaries." As SPARC proved, it was not about clock rate, but rather about how much work was done in a give cycle. SPARC was a great architecture.

As the article:

Chip Hall of Fame: Sun Microsystems SPARC Processor

Using an unproven new architecture, this processor put Sun Microsystems on the map

states:

"The Berkeley group, led by David Patterson, called their approach RISC, for reduced-instruction-set computing.

As an academic study, RISC sounded great. But was it marketable? Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle) bet on it. In 1984, a small team of Sun engineers set out to develop a 32-bit RISC processor called SPARC (for Scalable Processor Architecture). The idea was to use the chips in Sun’s new line of workstations. One day, Scott McNealy, then Sun’s CEO, showed up at the SPARC development lab. “He said that SPARC would take Sun from a $500-million-a-year company to a billion-dollar-a-year company,” recalls Patterson, a consultant to the SPARC project."

Of course, Scott was right!

MTConnect Implementation Guide Webinar - Machine Tools, Devices and Sensors

In this 40 minute webinar, I provide my personal thoughts on the technical and business issues to be aware of when implementing MTConnect for machine tools, devices or sensors.

The impetus for this webinar is the tremendous amount of interest I have seen globally for companies and individuals who are considering deploying MTConnect enabled machine tools, devices and sensors. 

When I think of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) I think of MTConnect.  The reason for this is that monitoring and data analysis begets more requests for additional information and this can be accomplished by the addition of MTConnect enabled devices and sensors in the plant.

Please use the comment section of this blog for any questions or suggestions that you may have.

Round Trip Metric Century OC, MD -- North of Lewes, DE

One of the bucket list bike rides I have been wanting to do was from Ocean City, MD to north of Lewes, Delaware (where I run out of land and have to turn around). I did this last week for the first time and it was 64.8 miles round trip. It was a GREAT day for this ride.

Above is the bridge over the Oregon Inlet in Delaware.

Above is the view north of Lewes, DE.



Above is the Cape May-Lewes Ferry entry point.

Above and below is from Gordon's Pond north of Rehoboth, DE.

Above is the huge wind mill from University of Delaware and below is an old Farmall like my grandfather had that is used for pulling boats in a boat yard I pulled into north of Lewes.

Below is my bike speedometer that shows the total miles.

2017 Edstrom - Franklin OC, MD Family Reunion

In January of this year we received an email from Bobbi and Richard Franklin mentioning that we should try to get the entire crew together for a reunion at Ocean City, Maryland this summer.   We all looked at dates, spoke to our kids, and settled on the week of June 24th.  The Franklin and Edstrom families have been vacationing together since the 1990s and have always had a great time.

This was the absolute BEST week we have had!  Below are photos from this past week and in years past as well.

Above is the big group of us enjoying dinner at Crabcake Factory Seafood Restaurant.  From the left going clockwise is Michael, Tim, Laura, Janet, John, me, Taylor, Bobbi, Julie, my sister Dr. Julie, my father John, my mother Ruth and Richard.

Above is a photo of all us with Bobbi's parents sitting in the front row on the left next to my parents.

Below is the weather forecast and it turned it was correct and we had GREAT weather in Ocean City, Maryland this past week.

Above is the water bottle that I had made at Walls Litho (former boss Sue Walls Print Shop) which Tim and I designed and gave out to everyone who attended.  I thought it would be a nice way to remember a GREAT week.

Above is the view from the Edstrom compound's balcony.  We had a 5 bedroom, 3,000 sq. ft. condo at Ocean Break that we had for the week that was fantastic.

Above, Janet took a photo of Tim, John and Julie in front of the first place we hit at lunch which is The Dough Roller and Dayton's Chicken with Thrasher Fries at Ocean City's famed board walk.  Michael showed up for lunch and the Franklins got in later in the day.

A must dessert is Dumser's Dairyland for some ice cream!

Above is me and my three sons enjoying a drink before we all had dinner at the bar at Hooked the first night.

Above is all of us at Harborside Bar and Grill in West Ocean City.  Michael's girlfriend Colleen was able to make it for a few days after taking the red-eye in from California.

Above is Tim, Michael and John before they left on their 55mph Jetskis at Top Gun on Dorchester Street next to Marina Deck.

Above is my sister with her three nephews.

 Above is Grandpa with his three grandsons and below is my mother with Colleen.

Below is Taylor, Julie, Tim and me enjoying a drink at The Big Chill at Oregon Inlet in Delaware on our way to have dinner at Jake's in Rehoboth.

Below are five photos of the Edstrom and Franklin kids in the early to mid 2000s.  From left to right on the back row is Michael and John Edstrom with Casey and Max Franklin.  In the front row is Tim Edstrom and Taylor Franklin.  Unfortunately Casey and Max Franklin could not make it for the 2017 reunion.

The Jordan's know how much I love Old Bay, that they bought me the hat!  Above I am drinking Deadrise beer (Old Bay Beer) with my hat on :-)

 Above is from 2006.

Above is from 2007.

Above is from July 2007.

 Above is from 2003.

 Above is from 2002.

Above is from 2006 where are all of us including my sister holding onto Tim with my parents - John and Ruth - between Tim and me.   This was down near the lower part of OC near Marina Deck Restaurant.

Above is Taylor and Tim in 2003.

Above is Julie and Bobbi in 2015.

Above is Casey and his girlfriend Kelsey in 2015.

Above is from 2015 with our multiple umbrella setup so folks can get out of the sun.

 

Above is Bobbi, Richard, Julie and me in 2013.

Above is from 2010 with Richard and the whole crew with Janet next to John.

Above is a photo from a few years ago of Bobbi, me, Richard and Julie.

Below are two videos of Richard and me competing on who could ride the waves the furthest - Richard won one and I won one :-)

J.P.Morgan’s massive guide to machine learning and big data jobs in finance

Sarah Butcher  wrote an excellent article titled: J.P.Morgan’s massive guide to machine learning and big data jobs in finance

Ms. Butcher brings out 10 important points and I found #4 of particular interest.  It reminds of the first acronym I learned in Data Processing in the mid 1970s - GIGO - Garbage In - Garbage Out

"4. An army of people will be needed to acquire, clean, and assess the data 

Before machine learning strategies can be implemented, data scientists and quantitative researchers need to acquire and analyze the data with the aim of deriving tradable signals and insights.
J.P. Morgan notes that data analysis is complex. Today’s datasets are often bigger than yesterday’s. They can include anything from data generated by individuals (social media posts, product reviews, search trends, etc.), to data generated by business processes (company exhaust data, commercial transaction, credit card data, etc.) and data generated by sensors (satellite image data, foot and car traffic, ship locations, etc.). These new forms of data need to be analyzed before they can be used in a trading strategy. They also need to be assessed for ‘alpha content’ – their ability to generate alpha. Alpha content will be partially dependent upon the cost of the data, the amount of processing required and how well-used the dataset is already."

 The article does a great job defining areas of machine learning and what you need to know and what you do not. It also brings up the important languages and data analysis packages.

Malware on the Electric Grid

  Jim Finkle wrote a very nice article:

Cybersecurity Firms Uncover Malware That Could Cause Power Outages Around The Globe 

The sub-title is: “This could cause wide-scale damage to infrastructure systems that are vital.”

 Mr. Finkle starts off:

"Two cyber security firms have uncovered malicious software that they believe caused a December 2016 Ukraine power outage, they said on Monday, warning the malware could be easily modified to harm critical infrastructure operations around the globe.

ESET, a Slovakian anti-virus software maker, and Dragos Inc, a U.S. critical-infrastructure security firm, released detailed analyzes of the malware, known as Industroyer or Crash Override, and issued private alerts to governments and infrastructure operators to help them defend against the threat."

 It's interesting that I have had these conversations with friends and they conflate Y2K with grid malware and don't believe it is possible.

What is scary, is how easy it can be to use these malware tools as is stated below:

“The malware is really easy to re-purpose and use against other targets. That is definitely alarming,” said ESET malware researcher Robert Lipovsky said in a telephone interview. “This could cause wide-scale damage to infrastructure systems that are vital.”

The Department of Homeland Security corroborated that warning, saying it was working to better understand the threat posed by Crash Override.

“The tactics, techniques and procedures described as part of the Crash Override malware could be modified to target U.S. critical information networks and systems,” the agency said in an alert posted on its website."

Donald Trump Lies

For all of those folks who don't believe Trump lies, here is a great article quantifying and listing his lies.

Almost everything you need to know about Reinforcement Learning in 1 minute and 12 seconds

This article by Stephanie Mlot at  Geek.com titled:

Atari-Playing AI Learns From Your Mistakes

Ms. Mlot brings out a number of key a very interesting points:
"After some training, the AI managed to outperform humans at pinball and match them at Q*bert and Space Invaders. But the computer struggled with Ms. Pacman and Montezuma’s Revenge (named after an expression for diarrhea contracted while visiting Mexico).

“Atari has recently become a benchmark for testing reinforcement learning algorithms,” Kurin said, citing a 2015 experiment in which Google’s DeepMind created an artificial intelligence platform that taught itself how to play 50 Atari titles.

Read more about the Atari Grand Challenge Dataset in a paper published last week by Kurin, fellow RWTH Aachen University researchers Lucas Beyer and Bastian Leibe, and Sebastian Nowozin and Katja Hofmann of the Machine Intelligence and Perception Group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge."


The video below really drives home the point of reinforcement learning:

Great James Gosling Interview

I really enjoyed this article by Shane Dingman - TECHNOLOGY REPORTER for The Globe and Mail titled:  

Canada’s code guru James Gosling is an international star in computing

 

I absolutely agree with the opening sentence (having spent a good chunk of three years in Canada):

"Most Canadians have never heard of James Gosling. But the Alberta-born principal creator of Java – one of the most widely used and longest-lived programming languages in modern computing – is a hero in Silicon Valley.

Java is the foundational software behind Android, the operating system found on most mobile devices. By some measures, Java can be found on 97 per cent of enterprise computer systems, and the virtual-machine systems Mr. Gosling designed for Java are critical to the world of cloud computing. For those who remember the Y2K computing crisis, Java was the main tool used to repair and replace the broken systems.

There are millions of Java programmers the world over, and some of those people still stop Mr. Gosling on the street for selfies – as if he were a movie star – and then thank him for their careers.

“That tends to weird out your kids. People mostly leave me alone, [but] if there is the wrong kind of conference in San Francisco and I wander around Moscone [the city’s main convention centre], it can be a little tough,” he says. “If I go to places like India or China it can get seriously tough.”

I love the story that James tells about Oracle:

"Then came Oracle Corp.’s purchase of Sun in 2010, a marriage of two corporate cultures that couldn’t have been more different, especially for Mr. Gosling, who had been with Sun for 26 years. “It’s like grabbing your hand onto an electric fence … Oracle is a very painful corporation,” he says.

He recounts an infamous story: Even before the acquisition closed, Oracle cancelled an employee appreciation party that Sun’s founders had organized, even though Sun had prepaid to book an entire amusement park. Sun was the kind of place that had a closet full of tequila, he said; Oracle was not so loose.

“Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. You get one employee appreciation event every two weeks; it’s called a paycheque. My early experiences with it were just, like, really, really, really awful. So I just had to flee. ”"

I am really glad to see James excited about joining Adrian Cockcroft, Tim Bray and other former Sun folks at AWS:

"On May 22, Mr. Gosling returned to the world of big-time software development when he announced he was joining Amazon Web Services (one of the world’s leading cloud-computing providers) as a distinguished engineer.

He has been tight-lipped about what he’ll be doing at Amazon.com Inc., though he posted this intriguing message on Facebook: “Years ago, I worked at IBM for a while and had to go through ‘confidential-information’ training. When I came back grumpy, my manager smiled and said, ‘IBM’s biggest secret is that it has nothing worth keeping secret.’ Doesn’t apply at Amazon. It looks like it’ll be a fun ride.”"

Below is my oldest son John, when he worked for Sun Microsystems as a Campus Ambassador at Virginia Tech, between Jonathan Schwartz on the left and James Gosling on the right.