Qualifying Exams Over

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday morning I had qualifying exams for my graduate program. I was happy with Wednesday's exam. I wish I'd nailed one more question on each of the other two exams. I'll receive a pass/fail verdict in about three weeks. Regardless of the outcome, I'm happy to be moving on to other stuff.

First Grant!

I've got many in process, but to my knowledge this is the first one that's gone all the way through. Thankfully the claims pack more punch than the abstract. In theory this one covers the charging infrastructure for plugging my electric car into your power outlet and routing the billing back to my electricity bill.

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United States Patent	7,376,631
King, et al.	May 20, 2008

Method, apparatus and computer program product for reporting energy consumption

Abstract

Energy consumption meters are associated with owners who hold accounts with a power supplier. The meters are assigned meter identifiers and identifiers for their respective owners. Such a meter may be a parent meter having associated submeters. In response to being plugged into a power source from the power supplier, such a meter reports its owner identifier and meter identifier to the supplier. Also, in response to being plugged into a power source supplied by one of the parent meters, a meter communicates with the parent meter. This establishes that the parent meter is associated with the submeter. The submeter measures energy delivered reports this to the power supplier. Also, the indicated association of the submeter to the parent meter is reported to the power supplier. The receipt of this information enables the power supplier to debit and credit owner accounts in a manner permitting temporary associations of meters.

Inventors:	King; Jennifer E. (Boulder, CO), Peterson; Robert R. (Rockledge, FL), Richter; Jon F. (Austin, TX), Spivey; Ian P. (Cambridge, MA), Stading; Tyron Jerrod (Austin, TX), Ulerich; Rhys (Austin, TX)
Assignee:	International Business Machines Corporation (Armonk, NY)

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Also mine and publicly in process are

App Number	Title
20080104569	CONVERGED CALL FLOW MODELING AND CONVERGED WEB SERVICE INTERFACE DESIGN
20080104238	EXTENDING WEB SERVICE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE FOR SIP/CALL FLOW INTERACTIONS
20080104237	AUTO-GENERATION OR AUTO-EXECUTION OF WEB SERVICE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE CALL FLOW IMPLEMENTATION
20070106795	Automatic orchestration of dynamic multiple party, multiple media communications
20070061326	Receiving display station on a communication network for accessing and displaying network documents associated with a television program display in which the text stream of the TV program on the display station provides user selectable links to predetermined network source sites
20070008892	Method and system for testing branch execution and state transition logic in session initiation protocol application modular components
20060268858	Communication system supporting two-way on-hold functionality
20060187902	Method and apparatus for session initiation protocol application design, development, execution and integration

with the television program display one being the best of the bunch. There's a complete technology startup complete with exit strategy rolled into it if you read between the lines.

TACC Scientific Software Day next week

I am very much looking forward to TACC's scientific software program next Thursday and Friday. Especially the talks on visualization, dynamic clusters, parallel IO, and the second day tutorial on SciPy from the guys at Enthought. Registration is still open (and still free) for anyone interested.