and in seattle too!
Teaching at UW
I received a teaching assistantship appointment at UW. This means I will be paid to help teach a class on processor architecture and my tuition will also be paid for. W00t. Additionally, I’ll get to torture a group of 30 wide-eyed, innocent undergraduates. muhhaHAHHA :-P
Fly Fishing the Tacoma Narrows
I just got back from a few days up in the Cascades fishing with my dad and my girlfriend. We hit the Snoqualmie river with dry flies and it was loads of fun! Granted we didn’t take anything home – but the joy of fly fishing is that even small fish put up a worthy fight. Yesterday the three of us joined up with my mom to fish the Puget Sound. We were at the Tacoma Narrows where Galloping Gertie was located. As an engineering student I learned about that bridge as an example of what not to do. We had a great time catching little bullheads but didn’t land anything big enough to take home. We’ll definitely be doing this again. I love the northwest!
The Blue Angels are in Seattle
This morning I woke up to the roar of several jet engines only to find out that the Blue Angels were practicing right above my house. They are set to perform their show over Lake Washington on Saturday and Sunday but I’ll miss it since I’m going to be camping this weekend . At least I get to watch them practice today and tomorrow. Since I live on Mercer Island I had a great view of the action but the practice sessions required the closure of the I-90 bridge so I was stuck there until noon.
PolySat Bites the Dust
While studying at Cal Poly, I was a member of the PolySat picosatellite team. We worked on designing and building a small 10cm^3 satellite which would perform remote sensing in space and relay information back to earth via HAM radio bands. While I was only briefly associated with the project, I did the early design work for the command and data handling subsystem which would eventually tie the microcontrollers with the payload sensors and communication subsystem.
Cal Poly’s two picosatellites, along with 9 others from universities around the world were launched toward space today by a Russian Dnepr rocket in Kazakhstan. These cold-war era ICBMs were retooled to serve as launch vehicles, providing a low-cost alternative for launching payloads into orbit. I suppose the old saying, “You get what you pay for”, rings true once again. Our satellites never reached orbit since the rocket’s engine failed shortly after launch. All that work for nothing….. Chinese-built Russian garbage for the lose.
Actually this makes me wonder how great the Russian threat was during the cold war. I suppose it doesn’t matter since the likely scenario that all the Russian ICBMs failed to launch would have been irrelevant since nuclear winter would have quickly ensued following a U.S. Titan II salvo. 9-megaton warheads can really kick up some dirt.
PolySat Latest News Page: http://polysat.calpoly.edu/latestNews.php
Crater Lake Road Trip
Little Red Hen and I spent the weekend of the 4th in Oregon as we drove down to Medford to visit my sister and see Crater Lake. In fact, earlier in my blog I posted a picture of the lake as I flew over from 35,000 feet. After showing this picture to Theresa, we both agreed that we had to go back (we’ve both been before, but many years ago).
We decided to leave on Saturday and arrived in Shady Cove (near Medford) just in time to attend my sisters church. She goes to the Red Rock Cowboy Church which originally started out as a church service at the local rodeos but eventually settled down to its current location an old barn that has been converted into a church. The service itself was enjoyable and involved a lot of country worship songs, cowboy hats and guitars. During the collection they passed around a cowboy hat for donations. We both agree that the epitome of the Red Rock parishioner was this old cowboy we spotted who sported a skoal ring, wranglers, a large Red Rock Cowboy Church belt buckle and an oxygen tube that he had to remove in order to smoke. [Read more…]