At the Hadrian Hotel

At the Hadrian Hotel

Saturday, February 24, 2007

SolarSpeeder


SolarSpeeder
Originally uploaded by Chris Tengi.
Volume 6 of Make Magazine had articles on the theory behind and the construction of BEAM robots. My wife thought that her boys would enjoy building some beambots, so she bought us all some kits from Solarbotics. Pictured here is the kit that Mark built (with my direction and assistance).

This particular beambot is a solarroller. Place it under a bright light source (like the sun) and wait a little while. Eventually, the solar cell will charge a large capacitor (located under the PC board) and the BEAM circuit will dump the charge to the motor. This little guy is quite zippy when it takes off!

This was Mark's first soldering job, and I think he did pretty darn well.

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Thursday, February 22, 2007

You Gotta Pay Attention

I've written here before about dealing with calendars. For the moment, I'm still using my Palm Tungsten E2 as my primary calendar and sync'ing it with iCal on my MacBook Pro. I try to keep everything up-to-date (so to speak), and I'm usually pretty good about that. However, the problem isn't always with data entry...

The University offers a number of courses and seminars to staff members, on a variety of topics. There are courses on management techniques, dealing with elder parents, personal finance, dealing with co-workers, and all sorts of other things. I've signed up for, and attended, a number of these classes and they've all been pretty good. One that looked particularly interesting was entitled "Setting and Keeping Goals." I signed up for it about a month ago and dutifully entered the date and time into my Palm's calendar along with a number of other classes.

Tuesday night, I made an entry into my Palm calendar to remind me to send em EMail message to somebody first thing in the morning. On Wednesday morning, my Palm started beeping and I remembered that I had to send the message. Now, I had earphones plugged into the Palm as it lay on my desk as I had been listening to a few podcasts, so the beeping wasn't too loud. In fact, it was quiet enough for me to easily ignore it as the Palm continued to beep at me all morning. I would sort of hear it and remind myself that I'd already sent the EMail I needed to send. Not once did I even consider openning the case to clear the task.

Around 1:40 PM yesterday, I logged in to my MacBook, where I was greeted by a pop-up from iCal. It turns out that my Palm wasn't beeping because I needed to send an EMail. As you've probably guessed it by now, by ignoring that beeping I had managed to miss my class on Setting and Keeping Goals. You gotta pay attention.....

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Tuesday, February 06, 2007

A Walk in the Woods


Trees
Originally uploaded by Chris Tengi.
Over the weekend, Boy Scout Troop 44 took a trip to Nuangola, PA where they had the opportunity to stay at a house on Nuangola Lake. The troop has been making this pilgrimage for 13 years but this was my first chance to join them for the trip.

One of the highlights of the trip is the annual hike. This year we hiked a bit over 4.5 miles around and across the lake. The temperature was in the mid-20s (F) and the wind came and went — it was a beautiful day for a walk through the trees. We were a group of 21 scouts and 6 adult walking along trails through the trees.

During one of our stops I looked to the west and saw this image. My photo-gray glasses had gone almost black so I couldn't see the display on my camera, but I managed to set the Canon A70 to F8 and take this shot. I had no idea how it would come out, but I think it's OK.

My thanks to the Coats family, who have been kind enough to let the troop use their summer house for our annual winter trip for so many years.

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