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[Sep. 12th, 2007|08:28 pm] |
A couple of weeks ago I went to Coney Island. That place is the ultimate in people watching.
There was this dude:
who looked like a characturture and was, ironically, getting a characturture done.
Then there was this dude:
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 1st, 2007|11:01 pm] |
Today, at work, we ran a short circuit test on one of our power converters. For this test we used a wire to short the output. During the 1 second test, the power converter would draw 3,000 Amps and dissipate 84 kW -- the equivalent of about 900 household light bulbs in something that has the same volume of about 5.
These sorts of tests are known to produce "smoke and flames," so I held a camera a couple feet away to capture the event. About 3/4 of a second into the test there was a tremendous POP and a bright flash. It was so loud and disruptive that I dropped the camera. Then I saw that the location of the flash was now a fire. I stood there in shock staring at it for a brief moment while it self extinguished.
After I collected myself we realized that the wire got so hot that it heated up trapped gas which expanded and blew open the teflon insulation. Strips of it were hanging off the wire. There were also sprinklings of little metal spheres everywhere about 0.05 inches in diameter. The solder on the wire connections had melted and sprayed off, solidifying in midair. Unfortunately the video was not captured. It would have made a great addition to YouTube. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 17th, 2007|10:42 am] |
quote of the day is soooo much better than word of the day.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
- Steven Weinberg
Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
- Mahatma Gandhi
I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.
- Richard Feynman
They're like that every day. It's like they somehow figured out what quotes I would be interested in. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 7th, 2007|09:11 pm] |
I got a new bike to go along with my assless chaps and 520 wheelies.
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| flame on! |
[Mar. 21st, 2007|08:38 pm] |
I started a fire at work today. Well, not me personally, but it was because of a project I'm working on. A heat sink design I am working on uses high temp solder. We don't have any ovens that run hot enough to melt the solder so we tried running it through a wave solder machine. The machine has a conveyor belt of titanium tines that pull the workpiece through the machine. On our second pass, I saw a 2" flame at one of the tines. At first I was completely shocked and rationalized to myself that flames must be normal in a flow solder machine. I turned to the manufacturing engineer to point it out to him and turned back to look at flame that went from one side of the machine to the other!
the wave solder machine
We were both screaming for the operator to come over who was about 20 feet away. He came back yelling obscenities, grabbed a fire extinguisher, opened the glass curtain, and put out the flames while we both stood dumbfounded. After he put it out, there was enough smoke to set the alarm off. We also called facilities who had just arrived and were screaming for everyone to clear the area (a small group had collected earlier due to our unusual activity -- in fact we were joking about it going into flames not five minutes prior!). 800 people had to evacuate the building.
After returning to the scene we pulled out my heat sink, which was completely torched, but success! The solder had melted!
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 5th, 2007|07:11 pm] |
Recently, I saw Neil Hamburger open up for Tenacious D at the Paramount. He was completely in his element on stage in front of thousands of people. It's one thing to see the show with a small crowd that is in on the joke, heckling him and what not. It is another thing entirely to see him getting heckled for real by thousands of people that were absolutely livid. A weaker person would have cowered off stage. Hamburger worked them like a conductor.
Here are some of the jokes that I remember.
He was saying something about getting in our wallet, then "I'm getting paid $25,000 for this show. You can go back to your job at McDonalds and make me some fucking french fries! Come on, get the hell out of here!"
"These are my people over here... I'll make sure Tenacious D perform on this side of the stage... we're going to lay a brick wall over here so you guys can stare at it all night."
"Everybody, i want you to get ready for... Tenacious D's.... curtain! this is an amazing curtain folks, the cotton is imported for china and the silk is from thailand. this is a wonderful curtain! I want everybody to give a round of applause for the curtain!"
"I have five more hours left in my set, and Tenacious D will play for about five minutes."
crowd chanting "D, D, D" "everytime I here a D, I add a joke to my set 1, 2, 3..." amazingly, that shut them up.
some video is to come. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 1st, 2007|09:15 pm] |
The weather in the puget sound region is pretty localized. Yesterday was a good example of this. Yesterday I left work a little early because of the snow. It was coming down pretty hard all day and was starting to accumulate.
As I drove south, the flakes were less and less until there was none. The slush had turned to rain. By the time I got to Capitol Hill, the streets were completely dry! This isn't the first time it's happened either.
I also experienced this alot driving south to visit my friend who used to live in Maple Valley. It always seemed to rain down there more than up here. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 19th, 2007|09:27 pm] |
I was watching kramer vs. kramer last night and kramer-dude's eyes bugged out of his head when kramer-chick said her yearly salary was something like $32,000. That got me to thinking, how much is that in 2007 dollars so I went to an inflation site and looked it up. $103,000. Fuck. Where has the dollar gone? Then I got curious as to what a graph of this would look like as a function of time, so I looked up what $100 in 2006 would be equivalent to every 10 years dating back to 1800. Behold...
This is scary because the consumer price index looks like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Consumer_Price_Index_US_1913-2004.png
which I think means we fucked, to use a technical term.
Also, a million dollars was a big deal in those 60's spy movies because that is the equivalent to 5.8 BILLION dollars today. Crap, I think I just outed myself on watching Austin Powers.
OK, one last interesting tidbit. Prices have increased by a order of magnitude since about 1940. So if you want to know how much your grandparents paid for something, just divide by 10. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 27th, 2007|12:38 pm] |
Have you ever woken up one day and suddenly feel like you aged 40 years?
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 6th, 2007|06:10 pm] |
New Year's was great. It started out at the McLeod Residence, where there was wayyy too much booze for my own good as is evident in the photograph below.
Fortunately, there is not an accompanying puke photo because that did not happen. I retired from that after my glorious puke of Halloween '04.
There was an interesting mix of people at the McLeod Residence from nerdy, to arty, to arty-nerdy. This one dude was cool. He just didn't give a shit. Most people spend alot of time putting together their NYE outfit, as was the case with the dude on the left, but this guy on the right was like "fuck it" I'm gonna wear my tour de triad shirt and some fucking khakis.
After that, some of us went to a party at the Smith Tower to take in some breathtaking views to start the year.
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 16th, 2006|09:54 pm] |
I was walking around capitol hill and saw a very strange sight -- a rolling living room with christmas decorations. It was very odd to see a bright, lit up room driving through the night. It looked kind of like this:
Apparently, they also drive down the highway:
As much as we all hate advertising, it's hard to deny the genius of this campaign. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 16th, 2006|05:48 pm] |
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Traffic was freakishly bad on Thursday. No doubt because of the storm and the football game. It took me three hours to get home from Lynnwood! Average speed = 6 mph! |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 3rd, 2006|10:25 pm] |
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yesterday i saw a bikecop that had a pig on his handlebars. |
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