Yes Dad's father ran the village general store, and his stepfather ran the village feed and grain mill. So Dad had a background in running a business. Still he got a Master's and a job for a salary. It paid the bills, paid for both my brother and I to get Ph.D. degrees, etc. But it wasn't real business.
I was at GE because they gave me a big raise from working the Navier-Stokes equations for the US Navy. Soon I was making in annual salary six times what a new high end Camaro cost. That was enough for some Kennedy Center, Wolf Trap Farm Park, Shenandoah times, good French cheese and grape juice, big times on Turkey Day, XMAS, etc. for my wife and I. She went for her Ph.D.
Later I wanted to do applied math on Wall Street -- learned of Renaissance Technologies and James Simons only much later, too late. And by then my wife was seriously ill so to have a stable job to help take care of her, I took a job at IBM's Watson lab in an AI project. I saved money even in grad school; at IBM for the first time in my life, I lost money -- cost of living in NYS was outrageously high.
For now, right, I'm doing a startup, am a sole, solo founder, do all the core applied math and the computing. So far the computing is 100,000 lines of typing and appears to run as intended. I'm rushing to gather more input data and go live. Latest problem: My first server has 4 memory sticks, DIMMs, DDR3, ECC, each stick 4 GB for 16 GB in total. Last night I discovered that Windows is seeing only 3 of the sticks and is using only 2 of them. So, later today will remove and replace the DIMMS and see if that gets me back to the 16 GB of main memory (when I first plugged the computer together, Windows saw and used all 16 GB -- last night the Windows memory test feature looked at the 8 GB and found no errors). Will be installing two new hard disk drives, 2 TB each. Just fixed a hard error on a hard disk -- with careful use of ROBOCOPY options, moved the data off, did a long form format, moved the data back, and I no longer get requests from Windows to run CHKDSK, check disk. That's how the work goes.
I hear you about the DIMMs and ROBOCOPY. Tip: I spend less time on that hardware minutia and backup reliability and restore operations now that I rent servers on AWS. You might want to try it. Focus your time where your value add is. Also looks good to investors/customers. Also helps avoid overprovisioning (capital expense that doesn't get recovered when business falls through).
I was at GE because they gave me a big raise from working the Navier-Stokes equations for the US Navy. Soon I was making in annual salary six times what a new high end Camaro cost. That was enough for some Kennedy Center, Wolf Trap Farm Park, Shenandoah times, good French cheese and grape juice, big times on Turkey Day, XMAS, etc. for my wife and I. She went for her Ph.D.
Later I wanted to do applied math on Wall Street -- learned of Renaissance Technologies and James Simons only much later, too late. And by then my wife was seriously ill so to have a stable job to help take care of her, I took a job at IBM's Watson lab in an AI project. I saved money even in grad school; at IBM for the first time in my life, I lost money -- cost of living in NYS was outrageously high.
For now, right, I'm doing a startup, am a sole, solo founder, do all the core applied math and the computing. So far the computing is 100,000 lines of typing and appears to run as intended. I'm rushing to gather more input data and go live. Latest problem: My first server has 4 memory sticks, DIMMs, DDR3, ECC, each stick 4 GB for 16 GB in total. Last night I discovered that Windows is seeing only 3 of the sticks and is using only 2 of them. So, later today will remove and replace the DIMMS and see if that gets me back to the 16 GB of main memory (when I first plugged the computer together, Windows saw and used all 16 GB -- last night the Windows memory test feature looked at the 8 GB and found no errors). Will be installing two new hard disk drives, 2 TB each. Just fixed a hard error on a hard disk -- with careful use of ROBOCOPY options, moved the data off, did a long form format, moved the data back, and I no longer get requests from Windows to run CHKDSK, check disk. That's how the work goes.