Balanced Life and Compassion in 2016! (short version)
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| Thoeny Family Dinner (2015-06-23) |
Phone:
+1-408-505-5108
From Peter
We are very late with last year's update and seasons greetings - again. Better late than not at all. 2015 was an eventful year. Looking through the photos I realize, lots of high power rocketry, and lots of HDR photography. Ladina is in her third year studying linguistics at the University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong. She spent 6 month as an exchange student in Luxembourg. She took this opportunity to travel all around Europe, of course including visiting relatives in Switzerland. Alexis finished high school and decided to study aerospace engineering at San Jose State University. His first choice was University of Boulder Colorado, but the out of state tuition is at an impossible level. Besides rocketry he found a new passion, working at the Tech Shop in San Jose. They have lots of machinery for metal and woodwork; he can take courses to learn the machines, and can use those machines for his projects - all for free because he works there part time. He scaled back on archery and golf. But boy, he took rocketry to the next level. He got his level 2 certification, and he already talks about level 3. We built a 9 feet tall rocket and launched it several times. The rocket has two flight computers for redundancy, a GPS receiver and ham radio transmitter for location tracking, and two on-board cameras. We also built a minimum diameter rocket out of fiber glass and carbon fiber that went 18,000 feet, pulled 70g acceleration, and reached Mach 2.6 (faster than a bullet). Things need to be designed properly to sustain so much stress to the air frame and electronics. For example, a regular on/off switch for the battery would not work because a switch has a spring that can disengage during high acceleration. I continue my consulting work with TWiki. It is an up and down business. One major client had layoffs and they stopped paying me and other consultants in June. I am still trying to get that money. Cost of living in the Silicon Valley is very high, and is increasing disproportionately compared to other regions in the USA. Fortunately I found a good consulting job at Broadcom in November as a product manager and manager for internal tools. Work is interesting, I am learning new technologies such as MongoDB (a NoSQL database) and Node.js (server side JavaScript). Interns report to me, sometimes though I feel I would be faster without interns. The open source TWiki.org community continues to be relatively small. As before, the primary focus is usability and quality. We had a new TWiki-6.0.2 release in November. The dashboard add-on is a popular feature that lets teams create appealing and useful dashboards. We are working (slower than I'd like) on a packaging standard for TWiki applications. My vision is to create a marketplace for TWiki app developers so that we can grow the whole open source ecosystem of TWiki. I invite you to join us! If you follow me on Facebook or Flickr you can see that I am passionate about HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. I have a new Quality HDR Photography website where I sell prints. In December I had my first exhibition at the German Christmas market in Mountain View where I sold a few prints, including an acrylic glass print, which looks really cool with a spotlight. I was invited to be an instructor at the Digital Photo Academy in San Francisco, where I occasionally teach camera control and composition in the field. Read my photo blog "What is High Dynamic Range (HDR) processing?" if you are interested in learning how the process works. Flickr is the main site I use to publish my HDR photos - 11,000 people now follow my account. If you like my work you can get beautiful HDR photos for your home or office printed on canvas, acrylic glass, or metal. Family friends from Hong Kong came to visit us in June. We took this opportunity to go for a fun trip through California, Utah and Nevada, including Los Angeles and Las Vegas. I wish you a balanced life with compassion in 2016, personal growth, good health, lots of success, and last but not least lots of joy!From Shona
Dear ALL, Finally two of the triplets from Hong Kong came visiting us in summer, and we had a good time together traveling around. Everything was fine last year, nothing special, this is the best. I wish you all a good year 2016! Keep in touch! Best regards,Shona
From Ladina (20 years)
Lots of love, happiness, and success for all of you in 2016! I celebrated New Year's in Hamburg with some friends of mine; we all met in Luxembourg where I studied this past semester and decided to welcome 2016 in Hamburg. I am now back in Hong Kong and am continuing my studies at HKU. I'll be a lot busier now that I am nearing the end of my program, but I'm lucky that I've never found a single course to be boring. Hong Kong itself is exciting to live in, and there's always something to do in the city. You just have to look for it.From Alexis (19 years)
2015 has brought me a bunch of new things and experiences; from my new lady friend, to attending San Jose State University for Aerospace Engineering (AE). It's definitely been a different experience than high school. I actually get to study and learn about what interests me and what I have a passion for. By coincidence, one of the AE majors I met was an employee at TechShop San Jose, where I currently work. It turns out this was one of the cooler opportunities I experienced. For those of you who do not know, TechShop is THE place to build your dreams and ideas, and for me that meant learning how to use machines only industry professionals use. This fit perfectly with my projects and major. And finally, it led me to 2016, wherein I met a TechShop member working at NASA, and a few days later, he hired me to help build an airship. But more of that next year, and regarding 2016... I hope everyone has had a great 2015, and I further hope and wish for the best for everyone a great 2016!Photos from 2015
Please see our 2016-01-31 letter with many photos from 2015 at 
http://thoeny.org/letter_2016-01-31.html