Musings

Got back at 4 AM from seeing a Muse concert in Cleveland. Hence the punny title. Appreciate what I have done. I hope you found it a-muse-ing.

PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN

Guess that means it happened.

It was a great trip, left at 1 PM yesterday, got their early, found our seats, had some expensive as hell stadium beers. Asked the lady at the bar there what the difference was between a Single Cocktail ($7.50) and a Super Premium Cocktail ($10.75). She said Patron. Most straightforward answer I've ever heard.

The show ruled with the lasers and the explosions and the leds and what have you. Muse is keeping a large number of electrical engineers employed. Everything is covered in leds, fucking everything. Like all the god damned things. At one point even Bellamy's eyes had monitors on them. Not to mention the pyramid of monitor thing you see there, which inverts itself and even covers the drummer over entirely. The amount of things that could go wrong that didn't is really kind of astounding to me. Their bloody road crew has gone ahead and made a rock show about as technically complicated as some NASA endeavors. Just because.

Then after the show we had to move with the mob back out into the streets of Cleveland to find our cars. This one group started pushing through everyone screaming "LARRY!" over and over again. Within a minute, the several thousand people in stuck in the hallways were all screaming for Larry. Where the hell is that guy? Fuckin' Larry.

Then we drove home. Now I'm back at Alfred and I've been handed a take home test, so yeah.

Also on an unrelated note, I'm enjoying the fact that Elliot's mom is Neil's unofficial StarTalk photographer. We just got handed some of her photos and were told to leak them to Reddit, to which I replied, "I can karma".

The Marden's of Beer

Well it's been a while since my last post.... Kudos to Tyler for keeping it real. 

So, a lot has happened since the end of January for starters most of February happened. I have been somewhat reluctantly getting through things for school. Pretty sure I have 4 written tests (including finals) between me and graduation, pretty excited about that. Nothing incredibly notable has been happening recently though, which is too bad. Also, with the advent of SnapChat I tend to take more pictures with my phone but they aren't saved. Oh but we did get some snow! There were some nuts snow drifts, see below. 

Got this water bottle from Analog devices earlier this year when I went down for an interview. Credit to Sam for a witty modification. I still use it everyday in the lab and I've only had a handful of people notice it without me pointing it out to them. 

Been working on a senior project report and getting better at technical writing a little. Also, I've been making at least one trivia night per week in the downtown Orono area. My buddy Josh is a trivia maniac and he some weeks hits nearly every trivia night in the Bangor area. His team is usually called "Quintanaroo" which I'm not a huge fan of. I made a team named "Four Score and Seven Beers Ago" which I think is much more fun. One week we won at this restaurant called The Family Dog and got a $25 gift card which we spent on pitches of beer this week, hooray beer! 

Speaking of beer, there is a store in Old Town called Tim's Little Big Store, where they have a huge table with loose bottles of beer that are slightly past the expiration dates (ever so slightly). You can assemble your own 6 packs of these out of season beers, $10 for 3 6-packs. At this point I'm pretty sure these guys are just loosing money and straight up promoting alcoholism. I've heard Tim's Store described as "The Marden's of Beer" and after a trip there this week I am inclined to agree. 

Went to an MSSM open house held on campus in Orono, Friedmonster showed up and a couple of Umaine freshmen who graduated from MSSM. Weird to not know the freshmen at all but they seemed like cool enough kids. Luke Shorty is a boss and Larry Berz may have single handedly inspired the entire room to attend MSSM or scared them off completely. If that's all it takes to scare them, then they probably shouldn't go though. I was impressed by the number of people who came out to support the MSSM but it was a little weird hearing parent's questions about their little Johnny's rooming situation.... Moral of the story, good things are happening up there but I have very little patience for silly overprotective parents. 

Anyways, I'm in Litchfield for most of the weekend where the pace of life is very, very slow. I am currently in eating mode. I don't know what it is but for the past couple weeks I have been constantly hungry, just never feeling full. Now is the time to change that, the picture below mostly describes my feelings. 

Currently watching the Maine High School Basketball tournament which is AWESOME. I never watch pro basketball but this tournament never disappoints, year in and year out. Proven by the recent Hampden vs. Lawrence game where Hampden pulled it out in on a last second buzzer beater shot from half court. All the games I've seen today have been tied at least a couple times in the 4th period and usually come down to a matter of about 5 points for a win. I think Ian and I once reminisced about how epic these games are. 

One more week till spring break, I'll have to start looking at places to live soon. Also, there are four tests (including finals) between me and graduation. The clock is a-tickin'. 

 

This past week: A Wedding, Smoked Eel, 3 Hangovers and a Neil Degrasse Tyson

I seem to be keeping myself busy on a whole lot of shit that isn't school work. Tonight I am locking myself in the observatory class room to force myself to be productive and after being here all day, I still haven't done much. I need a massive dose of "give-a-shit". I joke about senioritis but this semester I might need to get it looked at professionally. I just didn't go to class on Thursday because my PJs were comfy and outside was cold. I made a new bow from scratch instead. It's nice. Once it has a string I'll post pictures.

So last time I posted I said I had something big for next time. That is because I got a press pass to see Startalk Live with Neil Degrasse Tyson. The press pass means backstage access before and after the show. This is some pretty thrilling shit. So I went to NYC two weeks ago on a Thursday. Elliot, his mom and I had dinner with their social media guy before the show talking about what was wanted. I would take video, Elliot would shoot photography. They wanted us to video Neil going to the bar and making the drink of the night. Every night they do this they make a drink themed on the nights topic and they film the process between Neil and Bartender.

We got to the Bell House and went backstage to get our bracelets. When Neil arrived he gave Elliot's mom a huge hug and said "Stacey! My favorite photographer!" He then looked at me, realized he had no idea who I was and kept walking. Good enough for me! Then Jeff, the social media guy told us that something was weird. Elliot and I set up to video the drink creation when suddenly this other hipstery type guy shows up and starts setting up. Then Jeff tells us we have to put away our cameras. Apparently the venue booked their own guy to video and told StarTalk they couldn't use their own folk. Whacky. So I had to put my video camera away. We still got front row seats for the show and still had our backstage bracelets. Elliot told me to wait until after the show, we'll meet Neil. Elliot has done this two times prior and said that usually they get to hang out with all the StarTalk folk for a good hour or two after the show.

After the show we went backstage and picked up our coats from the couch. I was getting pumped to finally meet everyone (Michael Showalter and Questlove were the celebrity comic-types that night). Suddenly a bunch of dudes in really nice suits showed up and Jeff came over and told us that all StarTalk staff had to leave. Turns out they were some important donor types who naturally don't enjoy the company of common folk. So we left. Oh well, still a really amazing time, I can't even begin to complain. Plus Jeff is cool shit. He used to design RPG's at Marvel, writes his own cyberpunk novels, he is just plain cool shit.

The next day Nemo was baring down on Connecticut. We woke up an hour before the storm was predicted to start, but low and behold Nemo arrived early. No matter, not the first time I've had to race God (Irene was a bitch). We outran that bastard before he shut Connecticut down for a week. On the way back, at the request of my roommate Josh, we got off the highway and Jeeped our asses into the middle of the Catskills looking for a man we call The Eel Guy. He is called this because he makes a living smoking Eel and selling out of his cabin in the middle of the god damned woods. Cool dude, gave us a discount on the Salmon we bought if we promised to pray for the troops.

Then I got back to Alfred and my roommates and I suddenly realized that our broke asses could actually afford liquor for once. I don't remember much after that, though there are apparently some shirtless snow angels with my name on 'em.

Then this weekend my friend Ken who left Alfred last year and is an officer in the Army came to town with the intention of wedding his Russian girlfriend. So I got to go to a wedding and it was a nice ceremony (there were only like ten of us there).

And that is what I have been doing instead of my work. Now if you'll excuse me, these continuous charge distributions aren't going to solve themselves (that would be neat though).

Happy Valentines Day

Oh Right, The Blog

I am now back at Alfred which means I have tons of work all the time, except now most of it I'm making myself for Boffer and my newly found Dungeons and Dragons addiction. I didn't know how to D&D two  months ago and now I'm GMing a Firefly based campaign. Life is weird. At least the playbook has an entire chapter on cursing in Chinese. Very important.

So due to some cock-ups on my part I've had to drop my Math major, but life goes on. It is weird not having a math class though. Then again advanced Physics classes are essentially math classes so it's not that weird. Doing Advanced Electricity and Magnetism and Particle Physics this semester, so you know, I'll get my math. Don't worry. Also taking Piano and Islam in Politics because why the fuck not that's why.

Also spending an awful lot of time organizing a big event for Boffer this semester, the Civil War. I've convince a contingent of barbaric types from Alfred State to invade and then convinced my school's activities director that fighting in the streets won't do too much damage to the school. I'll be interested to see this one play out.

Haven't done too much since I've been back. But I got something big planned for later this week. If all goes according to plan, I'll have some interesting photos.

Toothpicks Everywhere

 So, lots of shenanigans this semester... which is awesome. My roommate and I balanced this sled on the bathroom door while Sam was in taking a shower. We placed a cup of toothpicks on top of it so when he came out everything would fall down, scaring him and throwing toothpicks everywhere. 

Mission Accomplished. 

The next morning the toothpick cup was balanced on top of the door and they went everywhere again when I opened it the door..... so we did the same thing to Chris too.

Anyways, I've been blasting this inverter research stuff that I'm doing which is sweet. So far it has been, make a bunch of PCBs and rock out. I really like designing PCBs and I am getting very proficient with Alitum designer which is pretty rock solid design software. Here is the first board I laid out. I fabricated it on the PCB milling machine in our engineering hall, unfortunately it is having issues picking up the tool bits from the tool holder which causes more grief than it should because the software is so terrible. At one point during the milling process, the machine went to pickup a tool and essentially slammed down on the tool holder so hard that it wrecked the holder and failed to pickup the tool. I would not recommend buying of these. Luckily after some screwing around we were able to complete the process enough so that both sides were milled and all the holes were drilled. I actually had to cut out the board with a bandsaw because the power went out over night and I lost the process I was on. 

After a long struggle with the machine, the parts came in a couple days later and I threw it all together. The best part of the whole thing is that it worked first time. Yes. That is correct. Everything worked exactly how I intended, the first time. Maybe this four year degree thing is turning out to be useful after all? Anyways, the board looks complicate but it's just 8 triacs that are used to switch on and off AC loads. Put a 15V signal in and get two adjacent spade terminals to short essentially. This will be one building block for our inverter research. Next to come will be the current and voltage sensor boards, then the actual inverter. Because the PCB mill is shitting its self so hard, we are going to send our design for the sensor board to a board shop. The inverter is special and requires high current traces that we can't produce in house so that will also be sent out. 

.... And it even works!

In other electronics related news, I'll be buying one of these fancy rigs. It is an Arm Processor (like what all kinds of cellphones run) and is pretty badass especially for that price. Hoping to make our senior project way... wayyyyyyyy wayyyy better. We'll see how that goes. 

In other news, I tried playing hockey for the first time today. I am very sore now. I haven't been on skates in like 10 years. It was fun, but everyone I played with was pretty damn good so it was kind of hard to be much help. I found that I could setup screens and block stuff sometimes though which was good enough. I also had a couple pretty good falls. Hopefully I can get some more practice skating and give it another shot soon though. Owwww....

Launching T-shirts into the Future

So, I've got 9 credits this semester and I'm working for my prof doing undergrad research which was been pretty damn cool so far. Last Wednesday Dave and I didn't have a whole lot to do seeing as it was the first week of classes, so we made the trek out to Hermon Mountain for a little skiing. I haven't been skiing in 7 years so I wanted to get my ski-legs under me again. Essentially Hermon "Mountain" is the smallest ski area I've ever been to. It takes literally under a minute to get to the bottom of the hill and then it's back to the chair lift. I think their slogan should be "Come ride the lift at Hermon Hill!" I only ate it once and it was pretty hilarious. Hopefully we'll get some folks together and make a trip out to sugarloaf in the next few weeks.

My folks came up for the hockey game friday evening where we tied Merrimack 1-1. Umaine continued our heavy use of the two shots our offense has in its arsenal, the "one-timer" and shooting directly at the goalie. Anyways, we launched t-shirts at Friday and Saturday nights games. Since the changing of the guard in robotics club, I'm not really on the hook to do much of anything anymore. I helped a bunch of Friday getting the launcher setup and moving it, etc. Then at Saturday's game I checked up on the crew and then I said "You know, I've never seen this thing operate from the stands... I'm gonna go do that." So, I did. Everything worked great both nights and the crowd was lovin it. Feels good to know everything is in capable hands for next year.

Blast me a shirt dude!

Also, found out that Who Wants to be a Millionaire on the PS2 is wicked entertaining with a group of college kids on a Saturday night. I highly recommend it.