This Week in Nuzzo History

Boom. Finished my finals, got an A- in senior project (FUCK YEAH). Just rolled into Litchfield and currently awaiting the arrival of my sister.... who was accepted to the accelerated nursing program at NYU yesterday! Hooray! I'm very proud and happy for her, she will be getting done work and moving to New York very soon because the program starts next month.... talk about a life changing event. Additionally today was Papa Nuzzos very last day of work ever, for real this time, no take backs. After working in Nuclear power for 40+ years I expect dad will further his skill set by welding more, fixing everything around the house, driving mom crazy and clogging the computer with spyware (Cheney has a running bet on how long the computer will last with my dad out of work). Hooray Papa Nuzzo!

Anyways, so that's sweet. Here is a picture of our completed and passing (notice how I don't say working) senior project. The project works to meet our specs but has some serious issues when spinning the motor.... it actually stalls the motor after roughly one minute depending on the speed of the motor. We kind of ran out of ideas of why this happens and definitely ran out of time to fix it, so we just had to free ball it and run it for our hardware show. It made for some unique discussions during the hardware show.

Complete with precision speed indicator and ninja surface mount soldering splendor!  

 We may be overhauling the design again with some significant changes by the end of the year because as it is right now, I am NOT standing in front of a crowd to present this thing.... that shit is too sketchy.

Also, they put up a wind turbine on campus recently mostly to collect data for a 1/8th scale floating platform test that will happen off the coast of Maine in a few months. The Advanced structures and composites center (the people behind all this deep offshore wind stuff, formally the AWEC) also just won a big grant funding their project. The other day they took it down to run a few more sensors up the tower I think, so naturally I went over to bump fists with other windymill folks. Met a grad student who worked there and knew about Pika energy, which was sweet. His name was Curtis (good name) and he told me to come by and he'd give me a tour sometime. Nice.

Windmills always look like a fish out of water when they're tilted down. 

For now, I'm making a turkey and going to kick back with the family tonight. Hoping to read a book over break, do christmas things and start assembling the engine for the bus. God it feels nice to not be at school and damn it feels good to be a gangster.

Legos, Christmas Trees, Dirty knees.... PCBs?!?!

Week before finals here and I should be studying and stuff but yeah....

Last week we used the newly purchased PCB machine (sketchily made in eastern Europe) in the basement of Barrows Hall (where all the sketchy EET majors live). The machine is a PCB mill that actually takes a copper clad board and these little tiny milling heads and literally mills every trace out of the board to make a PCB. I was very leery about using this machine for multiple reasons, largely because there is no solder mask which essentially mean all the traces are uninsulated. So if you put a screwdriver or anything metal on the top or bottom of the board it will likely ruin your day. Also, these types of boards tend to lend themselves to being very fragile... traces tend to lift up, pads fall off, etc. Lastly, being a new machine the most knowledgable people about the machine's operation happen to be another senior project group that has made like 5 PCBs in an effort to create one working one. Lucky for us, they offered to give us a hand and our board came out of the machine the right way the first time.

Unfortunately for us, we've had a lot of issues populating the board despite the fact that I got all but one non-essential component footprint correct. Weird connection issues with the through hole components, and a lack of solder mask doesn't help. We've ripped up a couple of traces accidentally, and generally made a mess of the board. Today we finally got the entire board populated and apparently working until we blew yet another gate driver and threw in the towel for the day. Here is a picture of the unpopulated PCB.....

Top Layer of the PCB

I'll throw up a picture of the populated board once it's working. We've got to screw it all down and stuff for this coming Tuesday when we have our hardware show where the profs come in, abuse our project and grill us on all kinds of stuff about it. Bring it on bitches! 

Last weekend I went down to the First Lego League competition at the Augusta Civic center with a couple of other robotics club folks. I was a referee for the game and we brought our t-shirt launcher and shot some shirts to the crowd. We also actually nailed a t-shirt throw a crack in the ceiling of the civic center that on our first shot. It will likely stay there forever. It made me laugh pretty damn hard after I pushed the button to fire it. Whoops! Oh and the Owl's Head Transportation Museum was there!

The Benz

Last Sunday my roommate Nick and I went out Christmas tree hunting while Sam and Ariel stayed home and engineered a stand for it. We ended up finding a pretty good candidate and brought it home on top of the Subaru. Nick decorated it and it looks pretty decent. Best part is how home-like it makes our living room feel. Everyone wanted to hang out there after we put up the tree.

Festive as shit!

Today we presented our awesome project for ECE478, a PID motor controller! It controls the position of a DC motor (lego) with variable Kp, Ki and Kd terms. It works pretty awesomely except the derivative term is messed up a bit and we didn't really mess with it enough to sort it out. Essentially there is too much noise in the system and the microcontroller is taking a derivative of some BS, resulting in a jittery motor. Anyways, it's sweet and I think I might get to keep it cause I paid for most of the parts. Maybe I can get a sweet video of it in action for you guys. It's no SEGFAULT by any means and it isn't analog either.

Lego and PID control nice!

Wow. I am realizing that my inability to communicate with normal people again. I just speak jargon, that's all I do now..... ohhh bother.

Tyler Saturday! YAY!!!!

Starting to brainstorm Christmas presents too. I shipped my reddit secret santa gift today too! I bought this guy a ticket to the New Years celebration at the Joshua Tree in Somerville, MA. Hopefully he liked it, I should be receiving mine soon too. Definitely buying dad an auto dimming welding helmet.... Ok, I really want to use it alright!?! Is that so wrong?

Finals Week Bitches

Don't have much time to make any kind of lengthy post. I have often lamented the dreaded Loucks test on here and tomorrow I have two Loucks finals, in a row. I'm not really sure how to prepare for what will undoubtedly be 10 hours or more of testing other than resigning myself rather fatalistically to whatever will be. So it goes.

With all the stress this week, Boffer has been a blessing. Saturday we did a successful joint game with Nerf Squad. Then this week we are meeting every single night of finals for two hours. Won't make it tomorrow but I did go tonight. Something odd happened this month, I became good at Boffer. Like properly good. At the joint Nerf game on Saturday we were playing capture the flag and the flagbearer pointed at the other team and said, "Kill them already!" and I said "Okay" and proceeded to kill 5 people as nonchalantly as possible, winning the game for us. The next round I jumped over a shield wall with the flag to win. Today I killed the entire opposing team in a team deathmatch, nine people mind you, in under six seconds, by myself. I didn't even get behind their line, I picked off the guy on the flank and moved down their god damned line single file. That last one single handedly made whatever horror show that might happen tomorrow okay.

Looking forward to break. Just keep reminding myself that I'm going to go home, forget what a Poisson Bracket is and bring a Jeep pick up back from the dead. Also going to Orono on Saturday. Should be a rootin' tootin' good time.

James May's Toy Stories

Seriously, this show is everything I've ever wanted.

James May's Toy Stories - Scalextric

James May's Toy Stories - Spitfire

The Crank File

"Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning." -Benjamin Disraeli

I like that quote, thanks Benji. That second pillar has been firmly lodged up my ass for weeks and as a result I seem to have not posted for over a month. Most unfortunate. A month is a long time. What'd I miss?

Well Barry Soetoro is president again, I don't have a bedroom anymore and I can now legally marry either of you fine bitches in your respective states of residence and yes that was a proposal.

My Uncle and cousin from Michigan have moved into my bedroom since Tim is disabled (legs/hands don't work) due to the swine flu. His mom wanted to put him in a home of some kind and my Uncle said hell no and took him back to Maine. Bad news is I don't have a room. Good news is my Uncle is an engineering minded kind hearted dude who has every intention of working with Trevor and I to get the 196_ Jeep Pickup that is buried in the ground in our back yard back in working order. The biggest problem is my brother and I smashed the back window with a rock when we were young and the interior is completely rotted out as result. Also it is literally buried, like sunk probably a foot into the dirt. My Uncle Lee left it there years before I was born and the hope is to get it working again, don't tell him, drive it to the next family gathering. Trevor now works at the Ford dealer in town cleaning the cars so he has access to spare parts apparently. Point is, I've got a Christmas break project and I'm excited. Well a project on top of applying to grad school. My current list contains 23 schools, that is going to get cleaved in half the next time I have a chance to look it over. Probably gonna cut it in half again after that.

Also I learned an interesting perk about having a Physics PhD the other day. Dr. Loucks walked into class with a letter that he wanted to share with us. It was from the Florida State Penitentiary from a gentlemen who had developed a hydrodynamics theory to better society as a whole. It had some nice drawings of fish on it. He put it in the crank file with the other 2-3 crazy letters a semester they receive. One of the best was a large box of scrap metal and all it said on it was "For Your Space Program". They scanned it with a Geiger counter before getting too close.

Finally a formal apology for skipping out on every Google Hangout ever. I am quite literally fighting for my academic life down here, but Christmas break is coming and will be followed by next semester which will be much easier. The future is going to be okay.

Black Friday Trippin'

Figured I'd make a quick post about some adventures from break. Got home to find my sister's cat had climbed a tree to avoid being chased by Carmen (dog). The cat then fell about 25 ft on his back hitting a picnic table thing. He hit pretty hard but after a trip to the vet, it was confirmed that he was alright. He just bit his lip and was bleeding from it a bit. 8 lives left big guy...

Anyways, did the Thanksgiving thing. Ate till I couldn't eat anymore, napped, etc, etc. Here are some photos from our trip to Oxbow Brewery in Newcastle, ME.

Oxbow Kegs

Thanksgiving Feast!

Brewery Tour

Apparently you can only get Oxbow in Maine and in part of DC. Strange coincidence because that is how my sister knows about Oxbow. Anyways, we did a sampling of there stuff and it was all pretty good. I would recommend freestyle #11 if you ever get the chance but getting ahold of the stuff is about as seldom as puberty at this point. Hopefully they'll take off and get more distributers, the whole place is a 7 man operation right now which is pretty cool.

In other news, I finally got around to sandblasting my second set of VW bus heads to bring to the machine shop. The first set were cracked, so hopefully these ones work out. Cleaning heads is very labor intensive. I literally soaked them in gasoline for weeks, wire brushed them, threw every type of solvent we had at them, pressure washed them and then sandblasted them. When I took them to the machine shop the machinist said they still weren't THAT clean. Yeah this guy is a little anal but that is the type of machinist you want. Anyways, hopefully that works out and we'll start assembling the lower end of the engine over christmas break. Basically that means the case will be bolted together and piston rods will be poking out, beyond that we need the cylinder heads to be complete which they probably won't be by then. I also e-mailed a dude about rebuilding my carbs.

Oh, I'm also planning on accepting a job offer from Pika Energy this week. That probably deserves more introduction but long story short, we're gonna kick the shit out of the small wind industry. So, I guess I'll be moving to the Portland area after graduation.... The future is going to be more than O.K.

Sorry I Got Consumed by Senior Project

So I will hopefully be checked off for "C grade" on Thursday for Senior project. If we do this, then we will be sure to pass senior project and graduate on time. No pressure. I've basically been putting ridiculous hours into this thing and spending massive amounts of time troubleshooting/head scratching. Tonight we essentially are meeting all of our specs. If we can manage not to detonate the project before Thursday, then we should be able to get a check off. Like I said... no pressure.

Throughout this senior project experience, we've had some pretty hilarious times. One of the MOSFETs that is currently on the project released some smoke the other day.... but is still working just fine. I was just impressed. Our motor controller is quite possibly the most terrifying and terrible motor controller ever slammed together to meet hilarious specifications. This is how senior project has worked for years and will continue to work.... students pull specs out of their butts about something they know little to nothing about, professors say "yeah.... sure... that sounds doable" and then it's not. Due to this fact, our motor controller is hilariously bad but does meet the outlined specs and the kids next to us are making gigantic square waves instead of a functional inverter. Some other group spec'd a project that sounded challenging and then proceeded to use an off the shelf servo motor, send it a PWM and watch it move to a different angle. The project range from an awesome coil gun that is controlled via an android app to a lead acid battery charger that was essentially a circuit found online.

Project difficulty variations aside, I have been learning a bunch by doing this project which has been sweet even though it has kind of consumed my everything. Here is a picture from yesterday of our solder board for C grade... we added a couple BAMF diodes (technical term) today.

Check out our awesome photo-tachometer that I picked up at Harbor Freight in NH. Why was I in NH you may ask? Great question.... more on that soon. More rant about senior project.

Our motor controller is hilariously bad and good at the same time. It draws essentially full current at all RPM.... yes.... that means full power all of the time. For those of you not well versed in the land of brushless motors, it makes things a lot simpler. We essentially vary the frequency (and kind of the magnitude) of the 3-phase voltages applied to the motor using PWM and sine wave lookup table to control rotor speed. There is no REAL control algorithm, it is running open loop but the great thing about brushless motors is that when they are under load, the back EMF decreases which means it draws more current.... which means it produces more torque.... which means it essentially tries to maintain the same speed it is being driven at by its self (within reason). Basically, brushless motors are complicated and badass. If I could do this project again I'd do it much differently but it has been cool. We will probably be making a PCB for it which will be sweet. 

Anyways, so last thursday night I drove down to Wilmington, MA for an interview with Analog Devices. I stayed in this hotel that was right across the street from Raytheon. We were (still are) right in the thick of senior project so it was hard for me to pull myself away to go just because we had so much to do but I went. I was thinking it wouldn't be that cool but I was basically very wrong. They gave us a kind of drink the Kool-aid speech at the beginning which was kind of interesting but the folks I interviewed with just seemed very nice. I got a tour of the lab and test facility and I was pretty blown away by the stuff that they do honestly. The group I interviewed with makes analog to digital converters for various things, many are for high precision applications. Some of the layers on the chips are separated by 5 atoms..... Yes. 5. Atoms........ Atoms. If they miss one atom it is a 20% error. I was pretty blown away honestly and very impressed with the work being done there. The interviews (all 5 of them) went pretty well though so maybe I will hear from them in the next couple of weeks. I don't know much about ADCs, but I could be willing to learn... it was pretty amazing stuff. 

Also on the "What the heck is Tony doing after graduation front", I was given a sort of informal job offer from the guys at Pika Energy this week. Pretty relevant timing, with the whole Analog interview and all. Still haven't taken the GRE..... or registered for it.... Not sure about grad school. Just not sure. I may have to make some pretty big decisions on all of this stuff in the next couple weeks. I guess this is what adults do?..... 

Oh, I also got a new (to me) car! 2005 Subaru Forester with 105k miles on it in pretty good shape. The check engine light came on the other day though and the cruise control stopped working...... I also have a tail light out suddenly. Hey, still better than my old car! This one has heat AND a radio!

Wow I wrote a lot.... Google hangout soon to help me figure out what to do with my life! 

Sailplanes and Cake in a Mug

This weekend I went up to Arlington to finally learn to fly gliders.  I was hanging out on the flightline all day.  I only got one flight in, but learned plenty about their ground operation as well.  We basically operate out of the grass between the runway and the ramp.  The towplanes tow you up, our practice area is the to the East of the airport, and then you come in on a 45 degree angle to the runway and land, where you get retrieved by a guy in a golfcart and you drag the glider up to the takeoff point.  A great bunch of very nice knowledgeable people!  It is a little chilly though, I will need warmer socks for next weekend.

I went back today, but do to crappy weather there was no flying.  We did do some ground school stuff though.

Tonight on the internets I discovered mug cake.  I had the stuff to make it, so I tried it.  Turns out that stuff is delicious.  It does expand quite a bit as it cooks though, so I opened the microwave door to a leaning tower of cake.  Frosted with Nutella it is even tastier.

Nate Silver is Probably a Witch

At this point in the election cycle, there is no way you haven't heard about FiveThirtyEight.  Tyler probably followed it religiously, Tony I assume saw it occasionally.  As a huge statistics dork, I have been a long time fan of FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver.  This time around he got all but one senate race and every single state for president.

I read his book The Signal and the Noise just after it came out, and it was incredible!  While a little on the Freakonomics side (ie a lot of conjecture without hard math to back it up), Nate stayed much truer to cold hard facts.  The most interesting part of the book was the paradigm shift in the way he encouraged people to think about predictions.  The moral of the story was essentially to be extremely skeptical of predictors, because mostly they aren't that good.  The grand irony of course is that he is a predictor and gets things right.

Honestly for me the most important part of this election cycle is that more people will read that book.

He also put a great deal of emphasis on his own success by tackling challenges with low bars -- which is a viewpoint I particularly like.  Nate rose to statistical fame by writing PETCOTA, a sabermetric when he was bored at his day job as an actuary.  He then played online poker, and by his own admission he won hundreds of thousands of dollars not because he was good -- but because everyone else was so bad.  When the online poker craze died down, he stopped winning and stopped playing.

When it looked like online poker was going to get banned (and he was still making money at it), Nate got interested in politics.  He found that the actual analysis of the underlying mechanics of politics was so bad, that he could probably start a blog about it.  And he did.  And now he is selling a crapton of books and drove 20%(!!) of NYT traffic during election day.

Also his models runs using STATA, a piece of software I used in my econometrics class.  Which is pretty cool.

Not only is he a smart son of a gun, he's a rich one now too.

Is Nate Silver a Witch?

That Time I Went to NY and Had a Hurricane

So, last weekend I went to RPI for Halloween.  A good time was had by all.  Many bars were hung out at, lots of people were seen including Sam & Casey.  Due to Hurricane Sandy I had to spend an extra 3 days there, costing me 3 days of vacation.  But worth it.  Also while we there we built a gas powered airplane.

Epoxy Centrifuge because there wasn't much left.

.049 cubic inch engine.  Isn't it cute?

Finished airplane hanging in state.

Retrieving it from a test flight

I don't have the video of the test flight, but I do have a video of the test glide.

Power Electrizzletronics

Was searching through some photos today for those awesome pictures I took of Cheney posing as Suzi from those hilarious facebook pictures. Eventually I found them and it was hilarious, they are easily twice as good as I remember. While I was browsing I found a couple pictures of a typical night in A103. One of which was that nerf dart with the tack in it that landed on my laptop, stuck in but didn't damage anything. Also found this fun picture of Tyler.

Ain't he cunnin'?! 

It's funny looking at old pictures and how young everyone looks... it's actually scary. AHHH. Speaking of that I am definitely feeling like life decisions are starting to kind of come down on me. My inability to make a decision on what the heck I'm doing after May is starting to interfere with my everything. Basically, I am kind of obsessed with power electronics (and motors/generators too) and I don't know what I'm going to do about that.
The reason this has been on my mind is for two reasons, one being that I need to sign up for the GRE or decide that I am legitimately not going to grad school. The other reason is that the new professor in our department who specializes in power electronics wants me to do this undergrad research thing that sounds awesome. Also jobs and stuff. Yeah. I also think that going to grad school is kind of not what I imagine it being, which is me hanging out in a lab building awesome stuff. Grad school is probably a lot of hard bitchy work and some of hanging out in a lab being a boss. Also, the power electronics lab is all new stuff and really good stuff too. I could basically become Umaine's Charles Guan which could be potentially awesome. Of course, I could also do other things and be pretty awesome too. DECISIONS. HELP.

Tomorrow I have a very packed day full of cool stuff. We're taking the t-shirt launcher down the USM in Gorham to the 4-H robotics expo, basically a touchy-feely robotics thing where there is no winner. 4-H is cool though, I was actually in it when I was a youngin' and it's a good organization. I guess the kids can basically build anything (potentially including windmills!) so that could be awesome. Looking forward to inspiring kidos by blasting them with t-shirts, should be a good time. After that I drive back to Orono for our awesome Halloween party. We're having a bunch of people over and supposedly people are getting dressed up but I haven't settled on a costume yet.... so we'll see if that happens or not. Should be a very fun filled day and I will probably require some caffeine at some point late in the day/evening to sustain me. Costume suggestions anyone?

Also, I heard there are entry level positions available at Tesla. I am going to apply, just to try.

Buy Thai

Currently TAing a non calculus based Physics I lab. They are rolling hot wheels down a track and calculating the height to drop them from so it will go round the loop de loop. Very solid physics type lab thing.

Been getting really bored as most groups are done and am now dealing with the two straggler groups that always seem to take an hour longer than the majority. So I've been testing the build quality on the hot wheels cars based on country of origin. My results have shown that the malaysian cars are crap, all of them have wobbly wheels and honestly are just poorly designed. China is only minimally better. You want that hot wheels car to beat all, bitches gotta buy thai. Thailand is producing hot wheels cars with the sturdy axels and the high quality build. Go science!

Oh dear, team "makes things more complicated than they are" just rebuilt their entire track to answer a basic conceptual question, I should not look away like that. Until next time gents.

Quantum Exam Tomorrow (This is studying right?)

Tomorrow I have a fairly important quantum exam to prep for, so I have been for days. Learning all kinds of shit about wave functions and commutators and dirac delta functions and shit. Schrodingers cat may or may not know what hit it after tomorrows exam.

Not much happening of import in Alfred. I may have mentioned last week that I went to see Doug Stanhope live. This man is arguably my favorite comedian I watch, he's got a lot of piss and anger and anyone who has watched Louis Black know how funny that is. Throw in a massive helping of irreverence and alcoholism and you got Doug. Also a fairly substantial batch of libertarianism.

Well anyway he is throwing a national Celebrity Death Pool and me and all my friends are starting a local gambling pool. The Celebrity Death Pool is just like fantasy football, except you pick a team of 20 celebrities and if any of them die you get 100 points minus their age. You can also get bonus points for things like being the only one in your pool to pick the person or if the person dies of breast cancer in breast cancer awareness month. Stuff like that. It's pretty fucking twisted, but I'd be lying if I wasn't excited to get my roster together and put my $5 down. If your friends are nearly as fucked up as mine, I highly recommend getting in on this shit. Unless we want an Athena A death pool? Hehehehehe.

I'm kind of excited. Not gonna lie.

Here's the official site. Death goes live November 23.

Tyler the Workaholic: A Paradox of Epic Proportions

Well after working all day yesterday I actually finished all my work the day before it was due. No rushing prior to class to finish problems. Though that did mean staying up until 4 AM. Time management, getting better, but still needs work. Well got more to do tonight, though a break is scheduled for the Presidential Debate. Will be live tweeting, hopefully with booze.

Also reading this book:

Nuclear Machine Guns in Space: The Book

It costs a fortune on Amazon, so thank goodness for the inter-library loan program. Though that does mean I have only another month to finish it. Should work out though. Five chapters in, very happy so far.

Also Elliot is very sick with like Strep or something and I think he may have just died at his desk, poor little guy.

He's snoring now! Not dead!

That reminds me, time to take more Vitamin C. Talk to you later.

Sunday

Aight Tony.  For serious, that looks crazy awesome.  I have a weakness for human powered things...

Also, I'm not sure if I told you guys about my coworker/potential new roommate Brian.  Brian is super cool. He and his college roommate tricked Chile into giving them a bunch of money to go make a vertical axis windymill.  That didn't really take off (he blames solar panels). Now he's sending Arduinos to space! Talked to the guy who owns the awesome apartment we are looking into.  The pictures of it before the current tenant are very nice, but it sounds like the guy who he is forcing out is pretty awful... so hopefully it looks okay when we take a look next month.

One of my mentors at work gave me a bunch of stuff to read by John McMasters.  I would recommend reading this about him. Most specifically, his comment about his interests: "... professional and avocational interests run together over a wide range of topics, most of which have to do with things that fly or are very old, or both."

Went sailing today, wasn't that windy and then it started pouring.

Other than that, went grocery shopping today.  Next weekend going to Troy... should be fun!

Cider Weekend!

I marked my calendar for the annual cider weekend hosted by the head cool guy of Pika Energy Ben Polito. Cider weekend is just what it sounds like, a weekend of cider making with employees of Pika, friends and family members. This event has been going on for a number of years now and I will say they've got it down to a pretty good process that makes it fun for everyone. Ben and some of the other guys built human powered Cider making equipment that encourages everyone to have a role in the cider making process. They bought about 2000lbs of apples from nearby orchards and got to work.

The process starts with washing the apples and sorting out the rotten ones, some of them are salvageable and get the nasty bits cut off of them before they're thrown in the apple grinder. The apple grinder is powered by two bicyclists that spin a cutting wheel. One person chucks apples into this hopper and other person forces the apples down into the cutting wheel where they are basically turned into mush and spat into a bucket. I grabbed a video of this process in action. I found the bicycling surprisingly leisurely, especially with two people pedaling. The cutting wheel can get going pretty fast (almost too fast) but it makes you feel like you're doing something physical and making delicious cider at the same time.

After the bucket is filled with obliterated apple mush, it is brought to the human powered cider press. They take huge scoops of the apple mush and wrap it in fabric (bedsheets basically) and use a wooden form to get it all square. Stacking many of these sheets and putting wooden grates between them allows you to press a whole bunch of apple mush at one time. Of course then you need a sizable press to get the juice out. Someone did some math or something and figured out that a bicycle with a flywheel could spin up a hydraulic pump enough to create sufficient pressure to support this kind of activity. It looks something like this.

10 Year old kids love manual labor!

Note the stream of cider gushing out of the press and into a metal pot. We had a small crew of folks collecting cider in pots and funneling it into smaller containers. You can actually drink the cider right out of the press which is pretty badass. They keep a good portion of the cider for fermenting into hard cider for next year. All said and down we produced about 187 gallons of cider and were struggling to find containers to it all in. Here is a picture of the small containers, this doesn't include the 6 carboys and maybe 5 plastic equally sized containers. This is a lot of liquid!

One of these was an empty Moxie bottle... how much more Maine can you get?!

Bottled hard cider, not all is pictured here. Total of about 6 dozen bottles.

Folks brought potluck food which was amazing and paled in comparison to my crackers and cheese, hey I'm a college kid. After the cider making we paddled around on the ocean in some kayaks and canoes for a little while. Met a bunch of MIT alum and one current student who is going to work at Makani power after he graduates this year. Needless to say, we had a lot to talk about and got along very well. He actually interned at Pika the summer before I did, which was cool. We had a strong connection for being hardcore about windmills. 

Also met a couple of folks who work at Keystone Tower Systems which sounds awesome. They essentially are building equipment to manufacture huge wind turbine tower (larger than 14 ft in diameter at the base) on site so they do not have to be shipped. Moving tower components is a huge problem and is limited by how wide the roads are, typically anything over 14 feet wide can't be transported on the road for any appreciable distance. We're talking spirally welded humungous towers. These guys are eventually going to be building manufacturing equipment that will weld three inch thick steel piece by piece into an enormous structure. Pretty mind blowing stuff really. All of these guys work out of  Greentown Labs which seems to be where a bunch of the cool kids in Boston hang around. One of Pika's employees has a desk there too. 

Anyways, I got a couple jugs of cider (both hard and not so hard) to take up to Milford with me. Got some words of wisdom on my senior project from a co-worker too. Also, stole my mothers car and left the two-door caddy home because the ABS light is on and the engine is skipping and has been for several weeks. I have convinced my folks that it is time for a new ride, so we started car shopping a bit today. Checked out a 2005 subaru forester with 105k miles for $6500, pretty clean car too. Loads of room in those things but they aren't the most stylish car ever built, definitely practical though. Let the car shopping begin! 

I leave you with a scene of myself in 30 years....

Boffer Weekend

Not too much going on this weekend in Alfred, NY. Yesterday I met for the regular two hour Boffer meeting and then headed over to Alfred State where there is another Boffer Club with slightly different rules. A lot of them come over here for Boffer but we usually don't follow them back over to their side. So I got four hours of Boffer in. Satisfied.

Got a lot of work to do tonight so trying to keep this brief. Actually got a letter yesterday telling me to bring my grades up or don't bother coming back next semester. So senioritis needs to take a serious back seat.

But on the bright side, Elliot got me a SpaceX hat, so it all balances out.

Only Elon can get me to put on a baseball cap. Only Elon.

If I don't seem to be posting to often, it's because I'm trying to keep my graduation date locked on May 2013. See you around boys.

Two Streams

I just peed with two streams.

I just felt that certain life moments need to be shared.

Break Is Over

This break is going so fucking well, what time is it, FUCK. It is now Wednesday. Fuck me up the ass, I need at least another month.

So after quite possibly the worst week I have had academically since Joseph Siddiqui told me to take Statistics, I have got to enjoy a lovely 4 day weekend. Elliot was literally the only person I know who went home for break, it's just too short for it to be worth most peoples time. I've never stayed here for break since I always visited Ashley, so I did not realize how awesome 4 days of no homework in Alfred, NY can be with everyone else you know. We made it more fun by dedicating ourselves to doing all the things that Elliot would have enjoyed if he had been here so we could rub in his face with a Powerpoint presentation.

First of all I got Boffer Club to meet three times. Also we have a snazzy new website that I slapped together on Google Sites this weekend. The club remains on a constant accelerating popularity as people tell their friends and those friends tell their friends and I am getting very bad with names as there are suddenly several to remember. I'm also enjoying the fact that as President, my word seems to be the immutable word of the Lord. All I say is truth, even when I lie or joke people seem to believe me. It's quite amusing. Several people now believe that one of my friends has to drop a shield with a keyhole design on it if it is hit with a foam key blade. This is not in the rules and is borderline LARP but I watched the bitch drop his shield.

Then Josh and I went on several random adventures to Jenkin's Farm, Salvation Army and a long pipeline that runs under the University. We did a 2 AM trip to the local grocery store with several people in the car being forced to tell the Aristocrats joke. On Sunday I had bbq pulled pork smoked for over 7 hours while watching the Red Bull jump.

Sorry I disappeared for so long, I know you can't tell but I took a two day break in writing this. Sorry.

So anyway, on Monday we went to Sprague's Maple Restaurant, which is essentially Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory for maple syrup. You walk into the place through a glass hallway in the middle of their factory floor and arrive at the restaurant, a big log cabin dining room complete with animatronic animals and moose antler chandeliers. We sat down at a table under a painting of three bears taking a canoe through white water rapids. Then all nine of us ordered the Big Run breakfast, 2 strips bacon, 2 eggs, homefries and all you can eat pancakes in either buttermilk, buckwheat, apple cinnamon or pumpkin spice varieties. Those would then be slathered in the standard, apricot, blueberry or strawberry flavored maple syrups available at the table. We cleared three full bottles of syrup in our stay. Ron Swanson would have been proud. A lot of people even got bacon to go (that shit is the thickest cut bacon I ever done seened).

Then yesterday I went to class, saw Doug Stanhope and talked to you lovely bitches. Now I have work to do, again. So good to be back?

Adam Savage Should be the World's Role Model

(Before we begin I would like to point out that Honeycrisp Apples are amazing.  It's like a cross between a Macintosh and a Gala and comically oversized. I have never seen them on the East Coast, but damn you guys are missing out.)

The "Edge of Space" jump: A corresponding fall to a schoolroom globe begins 1 millimeter above its surface. I'm just saying. -Neil deGrasse Tyson

I honestly lost a lot of respect for him at that instant in time.  I get that he's all about far off planets and galaxies.  I get that a lot of space people really hate it when the "lame-stream media" talk about vaguely high stuff in the atmosphere as being in space, when in fact what really matters about space is velocity.  But while he's been busy preaching off his high astronomy horse, I think he's missed his own message.

STEM encompasses a really large number of fields.  As much as Neil loves astronomy, he'd be well to remember that not every little kid that loves LEGOs or a telescope will grow up to be an astronomer.  I love old airplanes, and I love talking to people about them -- but I do not expect everyone to walk away an old airplane freak.  What I do hope people walk away with some small bit of inspiration.

In short, some crazy Austrian guy jumping out of a balloon at 125k feet is cool.  Really fucking cool.  So cool in fact, some little kid might get interested and start googling, and end up the next Tony Nuzzo, Tyler Beaulieu, or Ian Curtis. (yes, I dig the Oxford comma.  Interestingly enough, most British writing standards actually advise against its use)  And to diminish that with some offhanded mark is really counterproductive.

To end on a positive note, I think Adam Savage is the world's greatest role model.  He's just so passionate.  His pursuit of minute details on his prop replicas is something I really respect, and you get the feeling that he is one of those people that it is just interested in everything.  If I don't know about it, I might be interested.  And even if it's not my pressing concern at the moment, it might be useful down the road.

His TEDtalk does such a good job of summing up my world view.

tested.com has some really great videos of his workshop, but you've got to scroll through a bunch of pointless crap to get to.

A New Desk

Friday night me and few coworkers checked out Lazy Boy Brewing in Everett.  Beer was pretty good (mostly IPAs and Belgians).  Its basically just a bunch of tables scattered throughout their brewery, so they don't serve food yet.  Which is okay, because their is a pizza place down the street that delivers.  So we got delivery pizza.  That was also pretty good, even though it had olives. I have gone my entire life insisting that olives ruin any food they touch, but they were actually good on that pizza.  Feels like my life has been turned upside down.

Saturday I cleaned and made the dumb choice to head down to IKEA to get a new desk.  I figured people would've cleared out by 6PM on a Saturday, but apparently not.  I did get my desk, but it *barely* fit in my car.  When I rolled the IKEA wagon up next to my hatch it looked liked it was gonna be a no go.  But the Impreza came through, and now I've got this sick workstation. (Note Howard Hughes)

Sunday I went to this great local coffee shop down the street from my house called the Spotted Cow.  As a local Seattle coffee place it's expensive (although honestly only like 50 cents more than Starbucks).  However, the coffee is goddamn delicious.  I have no idea how they do it, but the coffee tastes like 90% as good as it smells.  I like coffee, but I think in general it tastes about 25% as good as it smells.  Their large is called a Brahma, which is apparently a Hindu cow god. TIL.

While I was there I hopped on my Kindle Paperwhite (SO GOOD!) and started reading Freakonomics.  It's pretty good, but last week I read The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, who writes the FiveThirtyEight blog for the NYT and I honestly liked that significantly more.  Nate does a much better job at explaining the math and logic behind is models, I feel like the Freakonomics guys just want me to take their word for stuff.

And this afternoon I got a call from the Evergreen Soaring people, and potentially as soon as this weekend I'll be flying up there.  Which will be super awesome.

Motors, motors, motors.

Been working on some senior project stuff this week but progress is slow gents. Two steps forward and one step back if you know what I mean... and in some cases just two steps back.

Anyways, last night we got all festive at our place and carved pumpkins. We retrieved a butt load of pumpkin seeds that we are going to bake today too. Also one of the women folk made pumpkin pie and I've been drinking apple cider so I'm feeling pretty into the whole Fall thing right now. Anyways, without further ado.....

Pumpkins!

So..... which one is mine? No.... no it's not a peace sign guys, its supposed to be a windmill. Also making an appearance is the Subaru logo, a freaky looking cat and one that is eating a gourd (second from the right). Carving pumpkins was actually pretty damn fun and made the kitchen smell like pumpkin which was cool. It was a fun night for sure with just a small group of people at the house. Apparently we'll be having a halloween bash on the 27th and we're going all out on this shit. Bobbing for apples, doughnuts on a string, candy, etc. It's going to be a pretty ridiculous scene really.

Today I've got to study up for my electric drives test and chip away at a few more things. Heavily considering buying the PCBs up for sale on etotheipi guy's website...... $10 for the lot.... I should just bite.

Opportunity!

Hello World!

After a ""fun"" time in Maine, I've been pretty busy.  There is a ton of stuff to do at work, and doing lots of overtime to get it done and make more money.

I got an email today and I got invited to start flying gliders!!! Whoooo!  So that's going to be a thing.

Also there is a GREAT opportunity on the horizon.  My RPI friends are going to a cruise the week of March 11th next year and have asked me if I want to come along.  I have consulted the webernets, and both of you are ALSO on spring break that week.  My friends said tickets were like $450 for the week.

Super Hell Week: From Hell

MSSM, move the fuck over, Hell Week 5000 is currently in progress at Alfred University. I have not slept, sleep is for the week and failing. With the potent mixture of papers, homework, take home midterms and regular midterms this is what the seventh layer of super hell that Hitler undoubtedly occupies must look like. I feel drunk right now, though that is just sleep deprivation. I haven't gone to half my classes this week because they just get in the way of the homework. Break is this weekend, just a little fucking further, god god damnit damnit. I hallucinated spiders crawling on my damn Modern Algebra homework last night and took that as a cue to take my deserved two hour nap. I'm about out of money due to the ridiculous investments made in the Monster Energy Drink company, they are out of several brands now at the Unimart. Decided to take 5 minutes and type all this, probably cost me a letter grade in something. Fuck the mother fuckers.

Break is this weekend. A man under this much pressure is bound to eventually collapse into a lower energy level, violating the Pauli Exclusion Principle and going Supernova. Even my jokes are relevant to this shit!

Tonight it lets off a lot, good thing too. Elliots 21st, I will not be feeling feelings later.

I demand a Google Hangout this weekend. I'm spending break just in my dorm room so I'll actually be bored for once. Sounds nice.

See you then.

On Spinning Magnets and Washington DC

Kicked off my fall break with a minor success as Dave and I got our brushless motor spinning last Friday. As you can see, it makes a lot of noise and is basically sketchy as all hell but it does spin and it is more or less just one of many stepping stones to meeting our project specifications. The motor makes a lot of noise because the PWM frequency we are currently using is in the audible human hearing range. To get out of this range we'll have to install an external oscillator for the microcontroller, which allows us to bump up this frequency so it doesn't sound like a bad rendition of an Electric Six song when we spin it up. Anyways, it was cool.

Took off for Washington DC to visit my sister and meet up with my mom and grandmother (age 89) who made the trip down earlier in the week. I've basically done a huge amount the DC tourist stuff before and this trip was more about helping my grandma get around and do a few things she might like to do, etc. However, I still got to take care of some unfinished tourism that has gone on for far too long. A trip to the DC Tesla showroom was definitely in order.

God, I've wanted that picture for so long. 

I basically rolled into the Tesla showroom and became unaware of anything else happening around me. My sister's boyfriend, Chris, just sat in the corner and let me do my thing. For about 45 minutes or so I quizzed the Tesla sales person on everything about the Model S. She was actually a college student and knew her stuff pretty well, I definitely had questions she couldn't answer but honestly I wasn't really expecting her to. They also had a used Roadster there for sale but I couldn't get into that. The saleslady said that the roadster was the most uncomfortable car she'd ever sat in and that you can feel every bump in the road. Glad they're not making them anymore I guess? Anyways it was awesome and I was basically on cloud 9. The Model S is a damn sexy car and I was surprised at the quality of the construction and how ballin' the control panel application is too. I want one.

We also hit up the National Arboretum because Gram wanted to checkout some trees and stuff. I thought it would be kind of lame and I would be done with it in about 5 minutes but it ended up being pretty cool. The coolest thing was the bonsai trees they have on display, some of which are over 100 years old or even of unknown age. I never really stopped to think about Bonsai trees or how they're made but after seeing some of these I wanted to learn more about it. Some of the trees we saw on display are pictured in the wikipedia article Bonsai. Below is a close-up of one of my favorite ones, checkout how ballin' those roots are. The roots completely engulf this rock and the tree its self is supposed to resemble a dragon (if you could see the whole thing, it kind of does).

Anyways, jury is out on if I'll ever have a badass bonsai tree shaped like a windmill or something but I'd certainly dig that. Apparently it takes a while to do this so maybe I should get on that and by the time I retire maybe I'll have something that looks vaguely like a windmill. 

Other tourist activities included eating a whole lot of food, drinking some excellent beer and farting in a very large church. Oh and special note to Ian, I didn't fly on a boeing plane at all. Embraer planes almost entirely and maybe a Bombardier. 

Science!

Monday. Well that says it all now doesn't it.

Started the day in Philosophy, where we are discussing the philosophy of science. Hence I've actually have been waking up for the class as I have to defend science against the mob. There is a person in my class who has been arguing that science is illegitimate because its just a book written by a few guys thousands of years ago which we blindly follow. You really can't make that kind of shit up. I want to read this Book of Science, might need some peer review.

So as tends to happen in these classes, we had to go over how the scientific method works. So the teacher drew a dead flower in a pot and asked us to come up with a hypothesis for why it died and an experiment to verify it.

Science!

He actually encouraged us to come up with ridiculous answers. Here is a list of my responses.

Hypothesis: The plant exists in a house with small children who honestly thought they were being helpful when they peed on the plant.

Test: See if the soil smells like urine.

Hypothesis: The plant exists in a house with inebriated adults who honestly thought they were being helpful when they peed on the plant.

Test: Similar.

Hypothesis: The plant was suffering from extreme loneliness in solitary confinement after it was torn from it's home land, thrown into it's cold lifeless terra cotta cell to live its life for the entertainment of its captures. After years of this mental anguish, the plant decided to exit early.

Test: Check for a note.

Hypothesis: You know the movie Weekend at Bernies. The events were very similar to the 1989 film Weekend at Bernies.

Test: Watch surveillance footage while simultaneously viewing the 1989 comedy classic Weekend at Bernies. Note similarities in your copy books.

Science!

Anyway, have a good week Gents.

a = g*sinθ God God Damn it Damn it

Howdy ho gents. I'm basking in the last few minutes of freedom before the week begins and figured I'd post something in the general direction of you glorious bitches.

Last week was long. As predicted it consisted of studying for and taking my Advanced Mechanics exam on Thursday. We do these tests on Thursday since most people in the Liberal Arts college have Thursday off so we can take it when we feel like it and take as long as we want. Now I don't have mornings off as I have to TA for the Physics I lab, the one without calculus. Almost all the students are pre-med or just trying to get rid of their lab science requirement. The lab was literally just a ramp with a block, you know the angle, find the acceleration. Being someone studying for the advanced classical mechanics exam all night it was really hard not to start screaming a = g*sin θ at the top of my lungs. I did find it funny when one of the students asked if I had taken the Calculus based physics, but the way she said it, there was a lot of emphasis/reverence put on the phrase "calculus-based". I really wanted to respond, "Nay, I have only heard of it in lore" but I told her I did and that I was now taking advanced calculus-based physics which just turns out to be differential equations based physics with some tensor calculus thrown in for good measure.

Then I took the test and in good Loucks test fashion, it took me six god damned hours. Interesting fact: not the longest Loucks test I've ever taken. The past two weeks though had been building up to that test so it felt really good to be there. Because it was the end of my hell weeks for a little bit. I had that night afterwards planned out. I had a few Sam Adams in the fridge and recently had received Forza 4 in the mail as I had left it at home like an idiot. So got out, catched up on the Daily Show for a week and stayed up racing my Fiesta around Mt. Fuji. It was almost disappointing when I woke up and realized it was Friday and still had to sit through classes.

Then we went to the Spears Auction in Andover. It's this biweekly estate auction that takes place in a warehouse in the middle of the woods and is filled with lots Amish people and elderly people with camouflage clothing. You walk in and get your number, there is soda, coffee and little debbies snacks with a little bowl to put a dollar in if you get anything. Then they auction off a fuck load of stuff, complete with the auctioneer guy talking fast and making lots of cracks about Obama care when selling file cabinets. "Thirty dollars. 25 dollars. Come on people think Christmas. Opening bid at 20 dollars. Think of the 9000 pages of Obamacare you can store in that thing. 10 dollars." Its an insanely good time. I got a new charcoal grill and a big Coca-Cola pitcher. My roommates got a wireless pc game controller, some picture frame and a heated foot massager. The picture frame is for our room portrait. We're going to take a picture of the four of us and then I'm going to photoshop the hell out of it and make a paint by numbers and then paint it. Exciting stuff.

Then this weekend we had our first forest battle for Boffer. Our club has gotten so much bigger and better with this new crop of Freshmen type recruits. We had a problem last year with people who saw us as a light version of the campus Medieval Club. Most of our members were Medieval Club people who wanted to sword fight twice as much in a week. The problem was that they hit really fucking hard in Medieval Club. They have fight practice where they put on a fuck load of leather and actually bash each other in with baseball bats. This is not how Boffer Club works. Second they wear tunics and have roleplaying alter egos and all this stuff and that culture was being applied to us to the point we were having trouble distinguishing ourselves. Well these freshmen don't have such preconceptions, we had two separate booths at the Club Fair after all and our booth had no armor and handed them a free sword on principle.

So the forest battle was Grade A bad ass. We were in the woods for maybe four hours with over twenty people and they are all A+ people. I think I'm going to enjoy running this club this year. Until next time guys.

Gaze upon my creation and be in awe.
GAZE UPON IT!

A Rainy Day Post

Hello gents!

It has been raining like mad here today and most of the weekend which is kind of a bummer. We took the t-shirt launcher to our first football game on saturday but due to the crappy weather the crowd was quite thin. Here's a sweet picture of the Black Bear mascot Bananas with the launcher.

Complete with electronics rain condom

It has been a decent weekend, hung out with Dave a bit and built a motor test stand for our senior project. I'll hopefully get to see if I got the dimensions remotely right tomorrow. Got to drive this enormous diesel truck this weekend which was kind of cool. The truck pulled really hard when you step on the gas, nothing really revs up it just goes. I wouldn't want a truck that large but basically diesel powered things are sweet.

I've been learning to use this awesome PCB CAD software that costs like $6000 a seat at school. It's called Altium and it can do all kinds of neat stuff. It even has 3d models of the components which is just plain cool. On top of that you can connect different parts with a supplier webpage and it will even tell you if that part is in stock when you place it in a circuit. Pretty sweet. Hopefully we'll make a PCB design with it for our motor controller. We'll have another order of parts for our senior project coming in right off so that should be sweet.

Planning on crankin out some serious progress this week before taking off to visit my sister in DC on friday. Also talking myself out of buying this HUGE MOTOR! So many electric vehicle things....

Exhausted from the Homework or the Lectures or Some Shit Like That

I am way to exhausted for it to be Monday. I've gone through four classes and already demand another weekend.

Well instead of that shit I've just been watching these sketches about RAF Pilots from this show called Armstrong and Miller. Basically it's like these two pilots with the flying the planes and shit like that, who are always smoking their pipes yeah and talking in modern slang and this that and everything else. It's right humorous blood.







Isn't it.