While I've been gone

This month has been extremely busy with trips to Oregon, Colorado and Missouri and I'm just now working on getting life back in order. Until I figure out what (if anything) I'll have to say from these trips, here is a little gem from my time in Missouri. This is a sign at a state park we stayed at; what does it mean?

When I saw it I had just realized the camp ground had no cell phone coverage and so I thought that it was pointing the way to a magic location where cell phones would work. It wasn't.

Puppy Surgery

What you see above is a bit of grass seed that has been aggravating one of our dogs, Basil, for the past few weeks. When we first noticed the problem, the only symptom was Basil licking between his toes on one paw. We investigated and found that a knot of fur and grass seed had formed there and with a quick flick of the scissors, thought we had solved the problem.

A few days later we noticed he was still licking and further investigation revealed a tumor-like enlargement between those same two toes. It didn't look like a blister and early attempts to lance and drain it produced no fluid; it seemed to be more like a callous than an abscess.

But it kept growing, slowly. We called Katie's mother, a small animal vet, and her over-the-phone diagnosis was that it was an abscess where something had gotten embedded in his skin and was festering away, motivating Basil to try to fix the problem through licking. We speculated that probably some grass seed was the culprit. Our problem: the wound didn't act like an abscess that could be drained and the offending particle removed, it was just too solid.

Last night I looked at it again and saw a long dark spot near the surface of the enlargement and the "tumor" did appear to be more fluid than before. I soaked Basil's foot in epson salt while Katie rounded up the alcohol, swabs, and sterilized a sewing needle. We dried off the foot and I poked the blister. Some blood came out but very little (if any) of the expected pus which would have indicated an infection by a foreign body and confirmed Katie's mom's theory.

We gently squeezed the sore and tried to explore and coax anything out of it but we got nothing but more blood. I talked with my co-surgeon and we decided we needed to cut it open and go after it while we could. Katie sterilized a razor blade, I cleaned the area with alcohol. She handed me the blade and while distracting Basil with puppy treats, I gently cut across the surface of the sore.

A little more blood but no obvious culprit. Another deeper cut and still no sign of anything wrong other than the obvious damage I was doing myself. Basil is a laid back dog and he normally doesn't object to our ministrations, even when we are doing things he doesn't care for, such as cleaning his ears or trimming his nails. He wasn't fighting us yet and I didn't want to make things worse but I was convinced that cutting just a bit deeper would yield results.

I did; it did. The point of the seed popped up through the blood and I grabbed it out with tweezers. We cleaned the area with alcohol, applied a topical anti-biotic, and bandaged the wound. Basil got more puppy treats and a chance to sleep in our room as both a reward for being a good patient and a half-hearted attempt to make sure he didn't lick the surgery site. This morning we redressed his foot and things appeared to be healing well. With the antagonist gone, Basil seems to be feeling much better and isn't lick his paw any more. As of right now the pocket in his skin is closing up nicely and the "tumor" is receding.

Katie's mom was impressed with our work and I'm glad we were able to get it out so easily. I bet Basil would enjoy a local anesthetic next time, though. Any ideas on how to get something like that?

New Site Design

I had a bit of free time on my hands and accidentally discovered Blogger's easy to use site designer and with a little bit of fiddling, gave the blog a new look. And, because my wife asked, the background picture behind the title is mine, taken in our unimpressive backyard.

How to...

Katie got this little container for holding plastic bags from Wal-Mart yesterday. We hang onto our plastic bags for dog-related purposes and they tend to clutter up in the pantry closet. This cheap container is supposed to hold all those bags and even has a (faux?) stainless steal finish.

Installation is easy and straight-forward and instruction are only necessary if you've never done anything like this before. Two drywall anchors and two screws. Done in less than five minutes.

The instructions do have some comedic value, though. Check out the list of needed tools, shown in universal-style images.

That's right. In addition to a screwdriver, drill, hammer, and pencil you'll also need to be a human male.

Water Dogs

Both our dogs are English Springer Spaniels, a breed whose original purpose was to help in hunting water fowl. Its not surprising then, that they love water and the only things that make baths unpleasant is all that soap and shampoo. Last year we purchased a large inflatable pool for them to play in and that lasted a week or two until they popped it. It also took much more water to fill than I expected.

This year we went with the cheaper, smaller pool and bring it out on hot summer days to help cool them off when outside. Our dogs are very different in temperament and I think the following two movie clips will make this clear.

Anise:

Basil:

Attic Fan

This past spring, in an attempt to save ourselves some money, hassle, and discomfort, we decided to purchase and install an attic fan. Katie had experience with one growing up and insisted that if we were going to do this it had to be quiet so we ended up on one provided by Airscape. As with my home projects, the install took longer than I thought but once it was in and running we were loving it. Instead of messing with multiple box fans that didn't seem to work very well we open a few windows and flip a switch. The fan pulls in the cool air from outside and shoves the hot air in the house and attic outside.

The fan ceases to be useful, though, when things don't really cool down at night very much. We knew that the fan wouldn't be able to be used all summer but based on historical data on the temperatures here in town, it seemed it would still be worth it the rest of the year. The summer heat has seemed to hit a bit early this year and already the night-time lows are 78'F at our house; there's no sense in exchanging one set of hot air with another so the fan is staying off.

Other than this not so small complication, we have been big fans of the fan. For people who live in places where the night-time lows are more reasonable, I can whole-heartedly endorse the product. Where I grew up, we didn't have air-conditioning and this worked out fine most of the year but a fan like this would have made all the difference and saved my father from same box-fan routine we used to do here.

Helping with the move

Our friends were making a move this last Wednesday and I volunteered to help them out. I have no classes during the summer leaving my schedule very flexible and I was glad to do what I could. Unfortunately, most of the working world does not have weekdays off so when we started in the morning at 9:30am, there was four of us. By lunch there was just three. The morning turned into a long day but by early evening we were starting to see more help show up, thankfully.

As the sun was setting a group of guys was trying to manipulate a sleeper-sofa down a tight squeeze in the stairwell to the basement. We were very close to making it work but just couldn't get it to fit. After tearing up the door jamb, putting a small hole in the wall of the stairwell, and scuffing a big of paint off the other stairwell corner, we gave up and decided the sofa would have to live upstairs. We gathered to eat a quick bite before finishing for the evening and I took stock of the man-power we had present and came to a conclusion: as tired as we were, we needed to move the piano tonight. We probably weren't going to have any more help at a future date and needed to get it down while we could.

I made my case to my friend the home-owner and I could tell that he wasn't thrilled with the idea as he was as tired as I. Using what little skills of persuasion I have, though, I was able to convince him to at least give it a shot. It was the last item to be moved and if we could get the piano moved, we could claim victory for the day. Six guys, one big, heavy, wooden box.

Loading it into the truck was not too difficult, though one of the casters was broken so we lifted it the entire way. Once in the truck we started the short ride back to the new place.

Half a block from the house, at the last turn of the ride, the most unbelievable event occurred. The piano, which we had not tied down, came flying out of the bed of the truck. It came crashing to the ground but, amazingly, stayed more or less in one piece. I was in the vehicle behind the fateful truck and I have never seen anything like this. The piano started to lean to one side, the top of the console got over the edge of the truck, and somehow, the caster wheels ended higher up than any other part of the piano as it seemed to jump and flip towards the street.

We all stopped, got out of the cars, and stared for a minute, still in shock over what happened. I looked back at the road on the corner we had just turned and couldn't see any of Wichita's famous potholes, drainage troughs, or uplifted pavement. It was as smooth as roads get around here. How did this happen?

We loaded the piano back into the truck and, after traveling a few hundred feet, into the house. A quick glance while walking by the piano and you wouldn't think it had fallen to the road but even the most cursory inspection showed not only deep scuff marks and gouges in the wood but also that the keyboard was uneven, elevated, and none of the keys could be moved. The piano was no beauty to begin with but now it couldn't even be played.

Epilogue:

Katie and I rode over to the new house the other day on our way home from a farmer's market to see how the unpacking was going. We found out that, as miraculous as the flying piano incident was, even more miraculous is that our friends were able to easily fix the piano and every key works! The only problem with the keyboard was that the keys had lifted out of their guides and were resting on top of them rather than sliding between them. Simply lifting the keys and resting them back into place solved the problem. The piano needs to be tuned, of course, and all the beauty marks are still there but the instrument functions the way it was designed.

June 5th

June 5th 2009 was the day I was laid off at Cessna. That morning I was told by my supervisor that I was being let go and after that day I never went back to my desk again. It was not a happy day.

June 5th 2010 at 4:30am my first niece was born to my wife's sister in Enid, OK. She had a high-risk pregnancy and was induced so as not to prevent any complications. (I assume that was the logic, anyways.) She checked-in to the hospital on Friday morning but for a variety of reasons did not progress as quickly as was expected. As seems to be the case for every mother I meet, the labor was lengthy and Maylin Brooke wasn't born until nearly twenty-one hours later.

Thankfully, other than the long labor everything went smoothly. The epidural helped that as well.

I hope to be a father some day but for now, I'm an uncle, now three times over. This June 5th was much better than the last.

Escape!

Last night Anise had a brief night on the town. I had left the door between our garage and the backyard open as well as the garage door to help cool off our garage. I forgot to close them, Katie let Anise out into the backyard, and she took advantage of the opportunity to explore the neighborhood. Thankfully somebody managed to grab her long enough to read her collar and give us a call. By the time I headed out on my bike, I could see her up the street, playing with the dogs of some of our friends. As best we can tell, she just kind of took herself for a walk along the route we normally go. She came right away when I called and raced me back home, enjoying her freedom and crazily zig-zagging down the street in front of me. When we got her inside she just kept running around the house; she was completely wired and it took half an hour for her to calm down enough to put her to bed.

She appeared to have a lot of fun and if it weren't for the fact that she lacks complete common sense when it comes to cars (and many other things) then I don't think we would have been very worried. Owning pets is like being parents in many small ways and we had a small parenting scare last night.

The Other WSU

I just got back yesterday from a conference at Washington State University in Pullman, WA. Wichita State is part of a university/industry research organization called PSERC. Twice a year the group holds a conference where new research proposals are made, updates and reports on existing projects are presented, and general networking/collaborating takes place in spades. The conferences are not very large, perhaps 50 or so individuals were there this time (though I was told that this was a bit lower than usual).

I felt very fortunate that I got to attend and thoroughly enjoyed the time. Just being a part of the conference made me feel like a "big-boy" researcher even though my part in presenting findings from the project I've been working on this past semester was very small, I had a display in the poster session. This type of presentation is exactly what it sounds like and is very similar to the grade school science fair in format, just without the classic baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano. In the world of academic prestige, being a part of a post session is the lowest form of data presentation but for graduate students in PSERC, its the only option we have available.

There were two great benefits for me in attending. One was the previously mentioned networking value. Though I was slightly sick and had a sore throat which made talking difficult, I was able to meet a fair number of other students and some of the other researchers both in academia and industry. Assuming I am able to attend more of these conferences in the future, I expect these relationships to become increasingly useful in staying connected to the current state of the art. This brings up the second key value in the conference: I now have a much better and more concrete understanding of what topics are of interest to those in the know and where the research effort is being made. This not only makes me feel more connected and a part of the academic community but will be of great value as I go forward and try to define the scope of my PhD dissertation.

Details from the conference are probably not worth getting into here so for now I'll simply leave you with some slightly interesting pictures I took while in Pullman, mostly of sights seen on campus.

I'll leave it to you to judge the validity of the labeling in public places at Washington State.

The area and the campus as a whole is very hilly and covers a lot of space. Just walking around campus would be a great form of exercise.

You know you're in a Northwest college town when the VW buses start showing up.

The community garden near campus. A great idea and use of space.

Right at the edge of campus. I think they've got their demographic nailed.

Why I don't like Quicken

After talking with a good friend the other night I got inspired to look into upgrading our old version (2005) of Quicken to the newly re-designed Quicken Essentials 2010. I talked with my wife about it and we decided that the money would be well spent since we would be able to electronically access all of our financial statements and Quicken had a converter that would transfer over all our old data.

After ten or so hours on the phone with technical support, I can attest that the former is wonderfully true and the later is maddeningly not. A converter is included with the software but in our case, it doesn't seem to work the way it should. I've called Quicken four times, each time addressing a different symptom of the bad conversion and each time the only slightly helpful technical support person has run me through the same steps of trying to re-import my data, come to the conclusion there was a problem with my file, and escalate my issue to some higher ups that may get back to me eventually. This process usually takes about an hour or so on the phone. So far, I've only been contacted once by these mysterious higher ups and, thankfully, they were able to clear up that particular symptom. I've yet to hear from them the for two of the other problems.

This last time I called things ended differently. The technical support person said there was no fix for my problem and that I could either use the software in its broken condition or I could ignore all the historical data from my old version of Quicken and start with a clean slate. I couldn't believe what I was hearing so I asked a few clarifying questions and repeated that the "solution" to my problem was not really a solution at all. He agreed that this was the case.

From a business stand-point this is hard to understand. Intuit, the maker of Quicken, is the only one that knows the format of my old data and it is the only one that can migrate this data to any other format. It has me locked in to their software right now and is in a perfect position to keep me there by supporting the transition to their newest version of software. But they have decided that they don't want to support me in this transition, that they want me to start over with my financial record-keeping. This makes two points abundantly clear to me:

1. Intuit doesn't believe in customer support. I'm having trouble migrating my data from one version of their software to another version and they aren't able to help me make this work. I've invested ten or so hours of my time with them to get the data converted and they aren't able to get the job done.
2. If I'm going to lose all my historical data, then I am free to choose software from any of Quicken's competitors and in light of the above point, I'm more inclined to choose something besides Quicken. Not only are they not able to persuade me to stay but they seem to be encouraging me to take my business elsewhere.

So we did. We have resigned ourselves to losing our historical data (sad but not the end of the world) and have found another program that is better in nearly every way, iBank 3. We haven't used it much yet but so far, it seems to do everything we need including some things Quicken didn't do very well or at all. We'll be getting a refund from Intuit and aren't looking back.

Closing remark: I can't recommend highly enough that you avoid Quicken Essentials 2010.

Tragedy on the 17th St. Bicycle Expressway (or Losing My Life on the Way to School)

Today started out pretty normal for me. Katie was going to bike home after work so I drove her and her bike there this morning before returning home and preparing for my bike commute into school. The morning was a bit cooler (~55'F) with little wind which made for a nice ride. I pulled up to the school gym to park my bike and head into the shower when my stomach sank. It was the same feeling I had when, in the same spot, my bike was stolen several months ago.

My bag, which was attached to the rear rack on my bike when I left home, was no longer there.

This bag had a good chunk of my life in it. My hard drive with both my Master's thesis and research computer files in it. My lab notebook and 3-ring binder with relevant journal articles in it. My wallet and house keys.

I hopped back on my bike and began to retrace my path, my mind racing. The bag was on the left-hand side of the rack meaning when it fell off it would have fallen off into the traffic (rather than the sidewalk) side of the road. This means it would get the way of cars traveling on the road. It also means it would be obvious and out in the open for any passerby to snatch up and claim for his or her own. This was another sinking revelation.

The movie "Signs" has a fantastic and telling bit that I call "the two kinds of people" scene. Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) and Graham (Mel Gibson) are sitting on the couch after the kids have fallen asleep watching the news coverage of the incredible events of the day. Graham, a reverend who had left the faith after the death of his wife is explaining to Merrill that there are two kinds of people and they respond differently to big events in life. One group (and I'm paraphrasing from memory) sees fantastic events and "it may be good, it may be bad but they know deep down that they are going to be all right"; they believe in a higher power that is working in their best interest. The other group knows "that whatever happens, they are on their own." There is no higher power, no God and when tragedy strikes it is up the individuals to define their future.

I don't write about it much on this blog but I am squarely in the first group, a spiritual man. When my personal tragedy struck today, I was quickly calling on God for help and mercy. The situation was entirely out of my control and it was going to take divine intervention to get the life I had in that bag back. I was pedaling and praying, both frantically, as I headed back towards home, eyes on the other side of the road, looking for that small treasure. It would take so little for things to turn out poorly. The bag could be run over and the contents destroyed or somebody could have picked it up. It would take a miracle for somebody to stop, pick up the bag out of the road, and set it aside for me to find. A small but definite miracle.

As I flew back home I began to think more about this. If I really believed in God and believed He was for me and not against me, then I had to accept the possibility that I might not get my bag back and that this would be a good thing for me. I'm reading a fantastic book right now, "How People Grow", that makes this point. Often it takes tragedy for us to grow and mature as people because we tend to slack off when life is easy and pain free. Painful events in life can work out for our best but only if we respond well to them. Cruising down the streets of Wichita I didn't want to accept that this could actually be the case. I didn't want this pain and hassle, I had things to do today. Please, please, just left me have my bag back. I was praying for mercy, for the easy way out of this. I was entirely dependent on God and I wanted Him to give me a break.

He did.

A small miracle occurred. Though it took me most of my ride home, I found my bag. Somebody had taken it and leaned it against the fence by the sidewalk. As best I can tell, it wasn't riffled through or explored, just tucked away out of harms way, waiting to be claimed.

I was thanking God the whole way back to school.

On the trail today

A few highlights from my bike ride to and from school today:

• A squirrel that had managed to abscond an entire doughnut from who knows where. He couldn't seem to decide whether to run and keep the doughnut safe or stop and eat it. He was doing some of both.
• A dozen or so Wichita Police bike-mounted officers. They were all congregated in a small neighborhood street. I had no idea we had so many bike-mounted officers and I have no idea why they were all hanging out together. I waved as I rode by; they waved back.
• A sign calling for volunteers to come out and protest Sarah Palin while she was in town for a fundraiser this past weekend. I think the newspaper said there were a few dozen protesters so I don't think that the sign was very effective. This is confirmed by that fact that I only noticed it a few days after the event.
• A long line of SUVs and trucks picking up students from the Catholic school in our neighborhood. There must have been forty or fifty of them, each picking up a child or two from the school.

Power Meter

(A warning to all my non-engineering friends: this is a highly nerdy post.)

A few years ago I received as a gift a wonderfully nerdy item for any electrical engineer: the Kill-A-Watt. The device is used to measure electrical power consumption in household items and I've been using it to do just that, mainly to see how much power devices draw when they are plugged in but turned off.

One of the measurements this device makes is something called the power factor. The power factor is a measure of the ratio of real power a device consumes to the amount of power the device appears to draw from the grid (the apparent power). Devices with a low power factor are bad because they demand more power from the grid than they actually use, sending the excess back every half cycle. Some of this power that gets sent back gets burned up in losses on the wires and is in essence, wasted.

Traditionally, power factor has been caused by electric motors due to their high inductance and the fix was relatively straight-forward: adding a capacitor near the motor provides a place to temporarily store the energy that would have been sent back to the grid. When the motor then appears to demand it again, it gets pulled out of the capacitor. In fact, in these cases, the power factor can be calculated by a tiny bit of math measuring the difference between when the peak current flows and when the peak voltage is present. The larger the difference in time between these two events, the lower the power factor.

Over the past few decades, though, there has been another big power factor culprit on the rise: rectifiers. These are the circuits that change AC into DC and are in nearly every electronic goody around the house: computers, TVs, DVD players, laptops: if you buy it at an electronics shop it has a rectifier. The power factor problems these devices create is very different from motors, though. They send the power back to the grid in a very different way; they convert some of the power at the traditional 60Hz frequency to power at higher frequencies, distorting the waveform. The fix that works for motors does nothing in this case and measuring the power factor is much more complicated.

Well, in a lab I was finishing for class, we had a very fancy (and expensive) power meter we were using that measured the power factor in two ways, the motor way (displacement power factor) and the rectifier way (true power factor, the more useful and accurate of the two). Since I had access to this, I brought in my Kill-A-Watt and we set up both meters to measure the power factor on a PC (which contains a rectifier). Much to my surprise, the fancy power meter showed that my Kill-A-Watt measured the more complicated true power factor. I was very impressed that such a simple and inexpensive device was able to measure this accurately.

This made me a happy nerd for the day.

Thunderstorm

Our helpful weather radio just went off and alerted us to a severe thunderstorm warning for our county. This is the first warning of the thunderstorm season which has thus far been pretty slow. It is not, though, the first significant thunderstorm this year; I guess the others didn't have high enough winds to be classified as "severe".

The weather radio is a curse and a blessing. We are thankful that it is loud enough to wake us (if necessary) when life-threatening weather is passing through the area. We curse it, though, when it wakes us in the middle of the night for these severe thunderstorm warnings. If we are in bed and asleep, we don't want to be waken just to find out that we have already taken the precautions necessary for a thunderstorm, namely, to be inside. There have been a few nights when we felt like parents of new-borns, being waken every few hours to a whining radio.

What can you do, though? All of this disturbance is worth the hassle when tornados do come around and we'd much rather over-alerted than under.

Happy Tax Day

Hopefully all you US residents have your taxes done and mailed in. I happen to live in Kansas right now and the state has figured out that they can save money if they allow people to fill out electronic forms online. To encourage people to do so, they make filing through their website free. Once your federal returns are done, completing the forms online is fast, maybe twenty minutes. All the forms are completed and submitted electronically and any refund you may get is direct deposited in a week or so. I'm a big believer in this idea and am glad to see the federal government is slowly coming around to the idea and realizing manually processing paper returns is expensive and error-prone compared to electronic forms.

This is all beside the point, though. The uplifting topic for today is national fiscal responsibility, the national debt, and what we are going to do about it. First, some data:

• 47% of US households won't pay any income tax at all this year.
• Most tax revenue comes from a small percentage of people with the highest income.
• (Or here, presented graphically.)
• The National Debt clock (and links to related stories).
• Holders of the national debt and how it has grown over time.
• National debt over recent past.

I don't put this data up to simply give people something to worry about. I truly believe this is a very serious problem that has been effectively ignored for several decades. We are on an unsustainable course that needs to be corrected. Sadly (but fairly) I think that the solution will involve increasing taxes (sorry Tea Party) and decreasing spending (sorry social welfare and defense people). In other words, we've dug ourselves into this hole and the path out is going to be painful.

To help keep me honest and the conversations on-track as I bring this up with friends, I'm starting to think of the solutions to this problem in terms of the sacrifices that I need to be willing to make. Rather than looking at the problem as a whole (which needs to be done), I'm trying to think of it very personally. What government benefits do I need to give up to get our country back on track financially? How much more taxes will I need to be willing to pay to make this happen? What tax credits and deductions that I enjoy now should I surrender so that our country can be fiscally responsible? Being an academic, which research and development programs that I care about should lose their federal funding?

For each of us, the answers to these kinds of questions are different. There are some that are going to have to give up federal subsidies (Medicare, welfare, etc). Others will be paying a lot more in taxes. There will probably be federal employees who will lose their jobs in the government's attempt to control spending. Its not going to be pretty or fun.

It needs to be done, though. It may not seem like it to some, but these past few decades have been ones where we as a society have ignored the financial costs of the federal fiscal lifestyle (if you will) we have been enjoying. The time is coming when we will have to face these costs and the sooner the better. The first step is always admitting you have a problem.

I encourage you to write your federal Representatives and Senators. They will only be motivated to action if we make it clear that this is important to us. Vote accordingly. The attitude of the federal government is a reflection of the attitude of us, the people. We can't expect them to act responsibly until we take responsibility for our own actions and choices. Until we are upset enough with the situation to actually do something about it, we can't expect them to do any better. Doing something can start with a simple letter or email.

If you are a person of faith as I am, pray for our nation. I have been convicted lately of just how desperate a situation we are in (beyond but including our finances) and have begun to ask God to work in the hearts and minds of others and help save us from our own self-destructive desires. For the USA, a nation that has enjoyed tremendous financial wealth, to be willing to accept a lower standard of living for the sake of our country as a whole will take a miracle.

Fish, Fish Everywhere

An acquaintance of mine recently postulated a theory to me: Taco Bell's recent introduction of the Shrimp Taco (which he declared disgusting; I'll take his word for it) was a move to allow more observant Catholics something to eat from their menu during Lent. I was skeptical but didn't know any better one way or the other so I said nothing.

I noticed yesterday that McDonalds has brought back its fish sandwich.

Today, a BBQ place I drove by was advertising its salmon BBQ.

Maybe he was onto something.

OK Go III

I found out about OK Go's third video from a podcast I listen to which I would safely describe as not being on the pulse of pop culture (much like myself); the odds are good you've already seen this somewhere else. For the rest of you like me, enjoy this greatness:

For a lab in college I was on a team that had to make a Rube Goldberg machine, one with only a dozen or so mechanisms. The demonstration of these contraptions is a school event and I had been watching them for two years before I got a crack at my own as a junior. I was highly committed to making sure that ours worked perfectly and insisted that it run without error ten times in a row the night before the demonstration. It did by midnight and we were confident it would work fine the next day.

It didn't. Two new failures popped up that we had never seen before and we joined the almost universal ranks of those who weren't able to demonstrate a working machine in that classes history.

I bring this up because, even though it took 85 filmed takes to get it right (according to their website), a Rube Goldberg this size that works at all is a miracle.

Kansas City in Spring

My wife and I are up in Kansas City for a early mini-anniversary weekend. Here's a little trip update.

• The weather was wonderful yesterday, mid-60s. Today we woke up to snow. And they're expecting more throughout today. Its the first day of spring, too.
• We were able to get our hotel room for half-price via Priceline. The thrifty man in me is very happy.
• We went to the Federal Reserve Bank here in Kansas City and visited the museum there; definitely worth the visit. The best part was a viewing area into the money sorting/counting area. We couldn't see the whole area but it looked like it consisted of a long hallway with sorting rooms on each side the whole way down. The rooms were all glass and there seemed to be about five security cameras for every worker and there weren't a lot of workers. There were also three robots that took the cases of money from the sorting into the vault. These guys were highly automated with complete freedom of movement and the ability to wirelessly open the doors to the sorting rooms to pick-up the cases of money and, similarly, the gates to the vault to drop them off. The rest of the museum is mediocre unless you're into coin collecting but the engineer in me loved the robots. They were fascinating. Oh, and we got a free bag of shredded money.
• This morning at breakfast it was clear that there was a group of guys here at the hotel that were fanatical about some kind of Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game. Every few minutes it seemed like another one would wander in carrying an elaborate game case and/or folder. They congregated in the corner and as their numbers grew we heard more and more talk of "upgraded warlocks" and "damage rolls". As an occasional board game player (but never anything like this) I've never thought of trying to hold my own mini-gaming convention.

Up on the schedule today is probably some more shopping, an art museum, and visiting with some friends.

Day-Night Map

This is what nerds like me do when they need to take a break from reading and homework. I've been wanting to put together this animation for a while but didn't know how to get the images I needed. Until today, that is. Thanks to timeanddate.com, I was able to "create" the images and then stitch them together into a movie.

The animation below shows where the sun is and is not shining on the Earth at noon Greenwich time over the course of one calendar year. The yellow dot in the middle is the sun and the white dot that quickly passes by is the moon. And, just to be clear, the light areas are where the sun is shining at that time of day and the dark areas are where it is not.

My wife and I spent several minutes watching the animation in a loop, mesmerized by it. I hope you enjoy it as well.