Independence: Week 5

I had a good week, and it's funny to say, but I've been too busy to blog more. Not having Internet, besides my cell phone, and not having cable or satellite the last five years basically forced me to actually do things. However, now I'm renting a room where we have Internet, including Netflix and Amazon Prime. So it's a lot easier to surf the web on my computer, or watch a Top Gear episode, or even a movie. Yes I am still running and bicycling, I haven't stopped, but my free time where I would otherwise write a blog post or read something has been taken up as a spectator simply watching. It's interesting. I think that I find it more interesting because I haven't been exposed to it as much the last five years. For example, I find commercials interesting.

I'm not sure how much I ran, but it was enough. I'm still recovering from Nolan's 14, and that trip report is 2/3rds written by the way. A quick calculation for how heat affects runners, you will run about 1 second per mile slower per degree Fahrenheit over 65 than your ideal pace. That's a simplification, the dew point matters, and relative humidity, but it's reasonable to say that at 95 degrees Fahrenheit you will run 30 seconds per mile slower than you would under ideal temperature conditions.

Work is going well. I'm not sure exactly all of my duties yet, in part because one of the benefits of my new job is defining my role. It's an interesting concept, yes I have concrete deliverables in this position, but to fill up the rest of the time there are other projects that I can work on. One of my skills is that I come from the vehicle side, so when we have questions about how the vehicle views our components, I jump in because I'm pretty good at those discussions. I'm also getting into some details that I wanted to get into. For example, I'm working on a warranty project with a moderate size of data, and statistically interpreting that data is quite interesting. There are many ways I can present the data, and it's hard to determine which way is the best, because honestly all of the interpretations help describe the situation. In other words, we want to say, X is a function of Y. But I'm finding that X is a function of Y, Y1 (Y at a different point in time), and Z, not to mention different operating conditions.  It's great, I'm making three dimensional scatter plots with best fit surfaces in Matlab to find the best correlation.