Saturday, May 23, 2009

Brazil

Hey All,


Rather than giving each person who asks, "Hey, how was the trip?" the same short, generic response, I'm going to give a more detailed response here so that everyone can get the full version.

Here's some statistics first:

# of days: 9
# of miles flown: ~12,000
# of flights: 6
# of miles driven: 1,500
# of hours traveled ~30 each way
# of hours of sleep while traveling: ~4 each way
# of brazilian foods and fruits eaten:  many
# of instruments to install: 7
# of instruments successfully installed: 5
# of traffic violations while I was driving: 4
# of group members who got sick: 1 (me)

So basically the trip involved going to two different sites where we had shipped small cargo trailers filled with equipment.  At each site we had to run power cables and convert 230 V to 115 V for all our equipment.  We had to attach a clear plastic dome and a GPS antenna to the roof and get all kinds of stuff running: a MiniMe (optical instrument), a laser (for calibration), a laser shutter, pc's to record data, wireless network to transfer data.  That list sounds quite a bit simpler than it was to do.  Water leaked into one of the containers and damaged a few computers.  One we fixed, another we swapped parts around with another one to get it running.  What we weren't able to get around was that two camera controller cards went bad somewhere in transit.  This meant that we weren't able to get the imager and one of the MiniMe's running.  Sadly, this means that I'll have to go back later this summer :P.

It was quite an adventure.  Being without a home depot equivalent posed quite a challenged when supplies were needed and/or broken.  Having limited internet access posed quite a challenge when information or files were needed (2 hours to download 4 megabytes, ftl).  The sun was really hot.  Just a few minutes of exposure without sunscreen or a tan resulted in mild burns.  The temperatures were around 85-95 degrees with humidity of 50-60%.  Some days we were sweating long before we started working, others were really okay.

Hopefully next trip we'll have some time to do some sightseeing.  As it was we saw some great scenery though.  I'll post pictures when I get a hold of them.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

The Internetz

I have about six hours to finish a homework assignment that's due tomorrow, and so in the interest of relaxing for a few minutes after class, I've been reading one of my favorite webcomics, xkcd (By "favorite," I mean, "The only one I keep up with that isn't on my igoogle homepage.").  Today I came across this one, which led me to simple.wikipedia.org, where I naturally looked up engineering.  What does simple wikipedia say about engineers?  Among other things, I found this gem: "Most engineers are trained to be very clever. Much of their training involves working within a limited budget and materials."


I think I'll just leave it at that....

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Resurection!

It seems that most of my friends have given up on blogging for the time being. But I couldn't really complain about it since I haven't blogged in a couple months either... UNTIL NOW!

This semester I added a signature to my emails (or maybe partway through last semester). Anyway, I was just thinking that it'd be interesting to see how long I could make it if I listed everything that I can possibly think of. So here goes... Except that I don't want to post everything there is to know about me on the internet... hmmmm. Guess I'll just have to stay humble :D

This weekend I'm driving to another wedding. I hope my car gets me the whole way there this time. Recently I had the tires rotated and now there's some vibration that wasn't there before...

I can't really think of anything else to say since my initial blog idea got shot down by privacy concerns, so I'll leave you with this profound observation that should put to rest the epic ninjas vs. pirates debate.

If a ninja got on a pirate ship at 10 am it would be a ninja ship by lunchtime and no one would know what had happened to the pirates.