The coldest winter I ever spent
When I pause music in Pandora, it makes a clicking sound about 70% of the time. I contacted support and they think I’m crazy. It only now bothers me because I am often listening to quieter music while wearing headphones.
Does this happen on your computer? Hit play, then hit pause a few times. Then write a short comment!
I’m using Chrome and Windows 7 on a Lenovo T530 laptop. The click happens through my speakers as well as headphones.
Hey, this video for Megabots took place at American Steel, my friends’ shop (Sheet Metal Alchemist and Minor Catastrophe among others)! That’s Michael’s car at 0:27! I saw the American Megabot chilling at the end of Bay 4 a couple weeks ago. It’s pretty sweet.
Oh to be famous on the internets. Well, at least I keep good company.
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/07/response-to-robot-duel-challenge/
The Engineer Accelerator August 2015
http://www.engineeraccelerator.com
The Engineer Accelerator is your entry point into the electrical engineering profession. It will introduce you to essential skills you will need as a in your career. It will give you the chance to begin developing your professional network and a portfolio of work. It will give you experience in producing professional level work at the pace required by industry.
The course will consist of two parts. The first part is focused on solidifying the skills that are the foundation of your professional career. Topics include:
Task Duration Estimation and Progress Monitoring
Working with Teams and Managers
The Hardware Development Process
Design by Documentation
The second part is focused on exploring the Hardware Development Process in detail. A selection of some of the topics that will be covered are listed below:
Product Definition
Architectural and Physical Design Constraints
Sourcing and BOM Management
Managing the Manufacturing Process
Schematic and Layout Design Guidelines
Black Box and White Box Testing
Each of these topics will be introduced in a seminar and lab. Then there will be be an opportunity for practice them through an ongoing project. The project will build up to a design review and demo at the end of the class. In addition to course work there will be optional field trips and other events that will give you a inside look at how the industry as it really works.
This course will run in August 2015 in Bay Area and is targeted to engineers who are in their last two years of college through their first two years of work. It assumes a background in electrical engineering such as a BS in Electrical Engineering or equivalent, or independent electronics project work. For students who are not local to the Bay Area remote options are available. If you are interested fill out the contact form at
http://www.engineeraccelerator.com/contact/
My favorite Burning Man still photographer is putting out a stupendous book of Burning Man art. You can get a look at some of the images and buy the book at TheArtOfBurningman.com. It’s being put out by Taschen which is like “the” art book publisher.
One groovy thing is that two pieces I helped on are in the promotional video :-).
After watching this 90 second video, I registered to become an organ donor.
I registered here: https://register.donatelifecalifornia.org/register/. I told them they can have anything except my heart and they can’t use me for “research”, which is (I assume) mostly being a cadaver for med school.
Thanks to Jim Fourniadis and Paula Peters for pointing me to it.
Summer is in full swing. Abigail is growing like crazy! Megan has been posting photos on Facebook. If you want to see them, ping me to ping her :-)
The plum tree in the back yard gave us about 10 pounds of plums… kinda all at once. I had been using a broom with a potato masher taped to the end to pluck individual fruit off the tree then I thought how I really wanted all the fruit that was about to fall off the tree. I gave the tree a shake and it was suddenly raining plums! DUM BUM BUM DUM plums hitting the ground and me with my arms over my head getting hit by ripe fruit! It was wonderful!
Last week a friend on our new parents group said she had too many lemons so we went over and got like 20. Megan got this great photo of Abigail swimming in lemons! I’ve got a photo of the lemon curd we made with it. It came out AMAZING, along with the lemon cake!
In the photo:
* Megan’s home made lemon curd in the big jar
* (what’s left of) My home made plum jam and plum coffee cake
* Caitlin’s home made ghee
Megan and I want to put a patio in our backyard. It’ll be about 12’x12′. There are a zillion options. What are your thoughts? Do you love YOUR patio?
Our thinking involves: easier surfaces to have family play play time on (smoother? softer?), natural beauty (not looking like a big concrete pad), cost (looks like wood is 3x the cost :-( )
The most exciting half-hour of your life begin when you click “Play”. View full-screen.
Where is all the internet traffic going? Facebook?
Here’s my daily page-view stats for the last 2 years:
No matter. I blog for me.