Tahoe

The week leading up to the 4th of July my parents, brother and I headed out to Tahoe. My family was nice enough to work around the shutdown week at the company I work for and to head somewhere in driving distance for me. We stayed at a huge house with a great view of the lake in south lake Tahoe just on the Nevada side.

The trip could be described as short hike + work out video, 8 mile bike ride, longer hike, drive around the lake, 20 mile bike ride, kayaking. In addition to the outdoor activities we (well, mostly the other three) spent some time cooking up healthy meals. And generally hanging out as a family. Oh, and can't forget Tiger Wood's golf on the Wii and especially can't forget the frisbee golf section of the game since that was the one part I dominated - my dad clearly had the lead on the normal golf part. The last night we watched the fireworks over the lake from the house. There was a show across the lake we could see clearly and there was a closer one partially blocked by the hill. Oddly the partial blocking of the hill created a cool effect and made the fireworks a bit more interesting.

The second hike was at Emerald Bay which is a bit hilly and next to a little bay (weird to think of a lake having a bay) with an island in the middle. So great place to hike. Oh and I'm purposefully just telling my stories from the trip since I'm publishing this online. The 8 mile bike ride was a fun ride through a historical area. The 20 mile ride was a bit taxing, I'm going to blame a piece of that on the altitude. We rode from North Lake Tahoe to Squaw Valley where we biked around for a bit and got some food then biked back. It was a good ride. The only downside was it was the 3rd so Tahoe had filled up and pedestrians had taken over portions of the bike path. Up by Squaw was great since almost no one else was on the paths. On the 4th we headed to a cove near the house. They only had tandem kayaks left so Eric and I shared one. After we had covered the whole area where we were supposed to go we headed off for a ways. Apparently my estimating the time based on the position of the sun skills need some work since what I thought was about 1 hour turned out to be 2. Oddly the only muscle soreness I felt was some shoulder pain, but the next day my whole back let me know what it thought about those 2 hours. While we were at the cove we watched all the college students roll in and fill up the beach in preparation for the fireworks.

One final thought. It may be tempting to think - oh a biggest loser exercise tape - I should be able to do what a bunch of overweight people can do. However, there are several flaws to that thought. First, this is post competition so they're no longer overweight. Not only are they not overweight, they've been doing so much exercise they were able to lose a ton of weight so they're actually in great shape and very strong. On top of that, they are mostly the ones who did well so they are indirectly selected for a willingness to exercise really hard.

The Nameless Day

Julie let me borrow The Crucible Series by Sara Douglass. I read the first book The Nameless Day. I liked the book and I'm enjoying the story. But at this point there's a lot that still isn't clear so I'm going to hold off on writing more till I finish the series (I think it would be like talking about The Fellowship of the Ring before reading the other two, except in this case it is not even clear that Frodo should destroy the ring). I will say she does a good job of putting you in the world (Europe in the 1300s), and does a good job with the main character's transition. And unlike some authors who write long books with lots of characters (Neal I'm looking at you) she's nice enough to sometimes remind you who they are and what happened that you should remember.

Project #2 Part 3

I've been very slowly building a boost converter as part of the grand plan for the iphone charger. A boost converter takes power from one source and then outputs power. What makes it special is the voltage it provides is higher than the input voltage. It does this by storing energy from the source in an inductor and then disconnects the inductor from the source and dumps the power onto a capacitor. The output draws power from the capacitor.

While 4 batteries in series works as a perfectly good charger for the iphone (I actually used it on the lost coast trip). It doesn't fit into the desired case, is hard to charge from USB and can be higher than 5V, which is fine for the iphone but technically above specifications.

The Maxim MAX1703 does the whole job of boost converting with just a few external components. And should be able to handle more current than needed.

I spent some time thinking about how to position the big components which I'm kind of happy with. However, when I went to actually connect things I just started putting things in one by one without a grand plan (obviously I had a schematic of what connections to make, just not where to physically put the wires). I think the technical term for the soldering style I ended up using is: crap. I was going to say rat's nest, but that actually is a technical term. Thanks in part to the poor style at first I had missed a couple connections when I hooked up the battery and the chip got very hot. Not sure if I did damage or not. Once I got that corrected the output was 4.6 V (within spec of 4.5 to 5.5). But when I connected a 10 ohm resistor the voltage dropped to 3.8 V (so it was only able to source 380 mA instead of 500 mA).

When I connected my ipod mini it charged for a moment than stopped. The ipod mini only requires 200 mA. So this is really a story of failure :(. I have more of all the components so I may try the same thing again and see if better wiring and not cooking the chip will work better.

I also learned the limits of 90 second epoxy. Its strong, but some inadvertent lever action can overcome it. Also, when the two sides mix it gets a little hot - not a big deal unless you don't know that and get some on your fingers and wonder what on Earth is happening to you.

I'm also going back and forth on if this is really the right approach or if it makes more sense to just find a nice case for the 4 series battery option.

One of the Series of Pipes is for Jose Cuervo

Used the series of pipes and tubes to do a cross country video chat shot with Laura and Jeremy. I know the technology has been around for a while, but was still a first for me.

I'm really looking forward to seeing Mike and Laura when they come out to the Bay Area in July! And it is great that they found such cheap flights. Coming out for the weekend is definitely worth the cost of those tickets.

I realized that I only posted about Dollhouse once, early on in the season. Before every episode I declared that this would be the one where it gets awesome so I was very disappointed when we got to episode 5 and it was still just ok. But then episode 6 happened and awesomeness occurred and continued through episode 12 (10's main story has a cool concept, but isn't as awesome, but the side story totally makes up for it). If you're dedicated I'd say watch the whole way through (don't be scared off by episode 3). If you're willing to watch a few episodes I'd say watch episode 1 to get introduced to the characters and idea then start at 6 and go up from there till you're hooked. If you're a Firefly/Buffy/Angel/BSG/Matrix fan you should be able to identify 5 actors by the end of the season. And you'll want to be caught up with season 1 so you're ready for when River shows up in season 2.

Weekend

Julie and Saeed fed me dinner Friday night - thank you! Also got in some good castle crushers and bomber man time.

Saturday afternoon I headed to a party with Jeremy and Emaily. I only knew a few people, but it was a fun crowd. After hanging out there for a few hours Julie and Saeed picked me up (thanks again) and drove me to Dublin where we had dinner with Ben who was in town and Adam (from aepi) and his wife who apparently live about 10 miles from me. It was great to see all of them. Then headed back to the party for a bit before heading home.

Sunday I killed a lot of the day watching TV, but eventually got off my butt and headed to Planet Granite to go climbing with Jeremy and Nina. I passed my belay test so I won't have to deal with that next time I go. I had a few moments where I thought I had suddenly gotten a lot better and a few other moments where I failed on stuff I expected to be able to do.

Overall great weekend.