Syrup Soppin'

Highway 14 looked like a 4-lane highway on Saturday morning.  Cars were parked on either side of the road and traffic was bumper to bumper in both directions for miles.  The Syrup Soppin' Festival made Loachapoka, Alabama the destination of choice all day on Saturday.  I arrived at about 7:45 and had to walk 1/2 mile to reach the festivities.  Hardee's biscuits and cane syrup were the breakfast of choice with fried peach pies taking a close second.

Cane syrup is made from sugar cane and in the early years the juice was extracted from the cane by squishing it between two metal drums.  The drums were connected to one end of a pole and a mule walking in a circle was connected to the other end of the pole.  The canes were manually fed through the drums; the cane juice collected in an iron cask and periodically emptied into a larger cask.  To turn the cane juice into cane syrup it was heated in a shallow pan over a wood fire.  Periodically, the syrup was tasted until it reached the "right" consistency and flavor.  On Saturday children (with big grins on their faces) rode the mule around the circle.

There was wonderful blue grass music, crafts and "fair" food--funnel cakes, kettlecorn, cotton candy and lemonade.  Hands-on exhibits let children use a wooden pestle to pound corn into a stone mortar and turn the handle to grind apples into cider.  I toured a blacksmith's shop, a doctor's office and pharmacy, a barn with old farm tools and an herb garden.

It was a glorious fall day and my two hours in Loachapoka were well-spent.

Unicycling

 HOORAY!  I rode all the way across the gym tonight!

Auburn 24 Lsu 17

What a game!  Allan and I sat on the 2nd row in the upper deck on the 25 yard line.  Except for the sun in our faces all afternoon, our seats were perfect--thank you College of Engineering!  We arrived about half an hour early because I love the pregame at Jordan Hare Stadium.  The band played "God Bless America" bringing a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes and then moved on to "The Star Spangled Banner."  The eagle took off from just above and to the right of us so we had a great view of him soaring while the crowd yelled Waaar Eagle, Hey!  An F18 flyover event was loud.  The team came into the stadium through a tunnel of cheerleaders and band members with artificial smoke leading the way followed closely by the coaches and Cam Newton.  Cam leads the players by at least 5 yards, running, leaping and waving his arms.  And, we cheered and hi-fived and sang, "War Eagle" and "Glory, Glory to Old Auburn" and "All we do is win, win,win!" for four hours.  The game was exciting; Cam broke Auburn and SEC records; and we won.  The final chant of the game, " It's great to be an Auburn Tiger!" is my favorite and the last song played through the system was "It's gonna be a good night; it's gonna be a good good night" and it was.  Toomer's Corner looked like it did when it snowed in February--covered in toilet paper.

My favorite "event" of game day was at 12:00 Noon when the bells from Samford Hall played War Eagle.  It is great to be an Auburn Tiger.

Busy, Busy, Busy

I put three "Busys" because I'm busy in several ways...

The War Damn IEagle flag football team won our first game last night, 31-0.  It was really fun and we had a beer (or two) to celebrate at Quixote's afterwards.  College is such fun!

Our project for the warehousing class is finally coming together.  We worked feverishly on Monday and Tuesday trying to learn a new animated simulation program called Simio.  On Wednesday afternoon we decided to minimize our use of Simio.  We'll use existing (free) software from the website where our textbook is posted (also free) to solve our SKU slotting into the correct locations problem and to optimize our pick paths and only use Simio to deal with congestion--pickers getting stuck behind each other in the aisles.  And our outreach group members will be working on the cut-off time problem.  I feel so much better about this project now.  We'll be able to write up a methodology that the client can implement using available software and I think that is our ultimate goal.

My research on using Ant Colony Optimization to solve the Double Row Layout Problem has gotten complicated...again.  We now have two different versions of our program in Matlab--Ant System is very basic, Any Colony System is more complicated with additional parameters to tweak so it is more likely to work as we add more machines.  Now we need to add some continuous processing to both programs and we'll try using the Linear Programming functionality of Matlab to do that.  Our benchmarking program (used in the paper that got this research started) is an exact process using CPLEX and we've been running it through AMPL.  On my old, slow office computer for 6 machines it reaches optimum in about 3 minutes; for 10 machines it took about 45 minutes and when I tried 15 machines it crashed with a memory error after about 4 hours.  So, naturally, I'm now learning a new programming language, OPL (Optimization Programming Language) to run CPLEX on a Linux server.

I'm still trying to understand EndNote.  It is one of several workable solutions for bibliography management, but since I've already paid for it I should probably stick with it.  At my meeting last Friday with my research professor I just brought the printed PDFs with me to show him what I had found.  I'm on the right track and we're expecting to narrow down to a dissertation topic before I leave here in December.

Tonight I'm going to Tiger Talk at the conference center downtown for dinner and to hear Coach Chizik talk.  I'll be with COSAM (College of Science and Math) people and I think it will be really fun.  And, finally Allan and Brandon are coming up this weekend for the LSU game and I'm still looking for tickets.

Research

First things, first...it is 49 degrees outside!  I'm sitting in my La-Z-Boy with a heater at my feet and struggling with EndNote--a program to capture information for research paper bibliographies.  A program like this is imperative when doing research and publishing papers, but it is hard to get started.  Here's a very simple overview of how the research paper process is supposed to work...After finding a topic to research (that is another story, altogether!), Step 1 is to do a literature search--find out what has already been done and when it was done.  Obviously, I only want to do these searches one time, so EndNote is supposed to capture the PDF and all of the information needed to cite the reference.  Step 2 is to read all of the related research and take notes.  Step 3 is an iterative process of writing, re-writing, submitting to journals and being rejected.  And, Step 4 is finally being accepted by a journal and seeing your work in published form.

My research assignment that is due today is to begin the literature search for a potential topic--Demand Response and its Effects on Customers and Utilities.  I've really done a lot, but I have nothing to show for it since I haven't figured out how to use EndNote yet.  I'll spend the next couple of hours working to have something to hand to my professor.

Flag Football

Yesterday afternoon was the first (and probably only) practice for our IE Grad School football team.  I remember playing intramural flag football when I was an undergraduate so I organized our team, War Damn IEagle.  The league is co-rec, which means that for each team of 8 there must always be at least 4 women on the field; after positive yardage is made by a male team member, a woman must touch the ball; and if a woman scores the team gets 9 points instead of 7 points.  We play 5 regular season games starting next week.  It's going to be fun and build camaraderie; I'm excited!

What a treat!

This morning on our walk Coma and I saw a fawn gamboling in the beautiful native backyard of my neighbor across the street.  The young deer froze when he saw us and then ran, white tail held high.  On our return we saw a long-legged statuesque doe, presumably his mother.  She stood completely still and watched us walk by.  What a treat!

Chewalca

Another beautiful day!  I had a pot-luck lunch with the Dawson family's reunion yesterday at the Lower Pavilion at Chewalca State park and it was all good southern food and company.  Some of Paula's aunts, uncles and cousins remembered me from my childhood here; all of them made me feel at home and welcome.  I'm ready for Thanksgiving and our family's annual reunion.

Before and after lunch I worked on the warehousing project.  We're missing some data so we have to figure out how best to estimate what we're missing and simulate the warehouse operation.  Our group has a meeting Monday night to put together a plan of action.  I hope everyone has done their homework.

War Eagle!

Markov Chains and Queuing Theory

Hurray!  I passed my oral discussion test about Markov Chains and Queuing theory today.  I had a list of four topics:  Markov Processes in general--both discrete and continuous; Poisson Processes; Exponential Distribution; and the M/M/1 Queue.  Sometimes it took some probing for him to get from me the answer he was looking for, but I did re-establish my understanding of the topics.

On the other hand, I did not do well on my test in warehousing.  After answering the questions I knew, I had about half of the test remaining and about 15 minutes left to work.  I had what can only be described as a panic attack.  I may as well have turned in my test and left the room.   It is such a frustrating problem.  I used to be such a good test taker and now I just can't handle the pressure.  Hopefully, our group will do well on our project and I'll manage to pass the course.  Graduation is in two months!

50 degrees!

Okay, the temperature is low enough now, 50 degrees this morning.  I may need a sweater at the beginning of my tennis match this morning.  Yesterday it never got above 75 and was beautiful.  Coma and I took a walk about 9:00 last night and we came close to an owl.  He was right above us in the trees in my neighbor's yard with all of the native plants.  We heard him clearly, but never saw him--they are so camouflaged and elusive.

I spent most of the weekend with our friends from Birmingham.  We went to the 11:00 am game and stayed through half time.  The half time show was high school cheerleaders, flag and baton twirlers and band members performing with Auburn and it was great fun to watch.   How much fun for those young people to perform in front of so many fans!  A great recruitment event for Auburn.

Unfortunately, I have another week before I have my oral discussion on Markov Processes and Queueing Theory.  The professor had a deadline Thursday for a paper and still hadn't finished it at 3:30 when we were supposed to meet.  Our appointment is now at 1pm on Friday.  And, I have a warehousing test on Thursday.  It's going to be a big study week.