a few items of interest

What a great deal. Century Gateway 12 really came through for me on this one. I'm not a big movie-goer, when I go I like it to be really good and not just mildly entertaining. This movie was really good.

in other news:
I have 2 songs I have been working on recording, they are in fact mostly finished. They have drum, bass, guitar and other instrumental and even backup vocal tracks done but they both lack the lead vocals. I hope I can finish them before school starts to get busy. There's not a lot riding on it I know but if I can finish these recordings off soon I think I would be able to wholly focus on school and be a good student.

People have gotten colds and coughs at our house, Shule went in a few days ago for some shots, I've been doing more dishes by hand lately because I'm dissatisfied with the work our machine has been producing. Our little girls have been growing and doing active little kid things that make it hard to keep the house in order, but we've been doing our best to keep up. I have been applying for internships and looking more seriously into post school options.

That's what's going on and I'm not really inspired to put it all into a flowing blog post with clever anecdotes, but for what it's worth, I just wanted to get it down anyway.

Towards Mid-Junior Year

The end of the semester is in sight. Unfortunately the Thanksgiving holiday is right in the middle of some major lab assignments so I have to see that I get those mostly completed this week even though they aren't due till after holiday.

A brief overview of this semester's studies:
The circuits class has consisted of op-amps, diodes, and MOSFETs. Still to come is a section on BJTs. The lecture is great but the lab has been a huge amount of work. We still have 2 more lab assignments to do and they are very involved.

This semester's signals class was not so enlightening as last semester's but still good. Topics included sampling, modulation and transmission (mostly AM), feedback systems and root locus analysis. The LabView assignments aren't particularly exciting for me but hopefully I'm learning something.

My affection for VHDL seems to oscillate between positive and negative. I have been excited about it and hated it but right now I'm feeling pretty good about it. I like working with VHDL more than with software programming languages.

Random Signal Analysis, hasn't had much to do with signals at all yet. It's an introduction to discrete and continuous random variables regarding probablility, expectation and variance.

As I go into my last 3 semesters I plan on taking 3 more circuits courses, digital signal processing along with another signals course on filter design or some such, and properties of electronic materials. Oh yeah, next semester I have to take economics too, maybe it will be enlightening.

jellybeans

I've been stumped on this problem all weekend:

A candy factory has an endless supply of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet jelly beans. The factory packages the jelly beans into jars of 100 jelly beans each. One possible color distribution, for example, is a jar of 58 red, 22 yellow, and 20 green jelly beans. As a marketing gimmick, the factory guarantees that no two jars have the same color distribution. What is the maximum number of jars the factory can produce? (Hint: Think of lining up the jelly beans, by first placing the red ones, then the orange ones, etc. You also place 5 dividers to indicate where one color ends and another starts. Note that two dividers can be adjacent if there are no jelly beans of some color.)

What do you think?

The Story of a Trombone (the wonders of steel wool)

Twelve years ago my sister-in-law Brenda, knowing that I was very interested in musical instruments of all sorts, gave me a trombone that she had played in high school. This trombone was in a fire and had suffered major cosmetic damage in addition to the case being destroyed and the mouthpiece lost; the thing was ugly.






















In an attempt to make it more presentable, I put it in the bathtub and tried to scrub the scum off; soap and water did nothing. After giving up on making it look better, I turned my focus to how it sounds. I got a mouthpiece for it and I even lucked out by getting a free case. The case, while a little bit used and shabby, looked like a dream compared to what it protected. After just a little bit of maintenance the instrument worked just fine and I proceeded to learn how to play it for a few months as a curiosity.

After a little while, it got tucked away in a corner and there it waited for many years until this year because Shule has decided to join the middle school band. Over the summer, Shule and his band director decided that he would start on the trombone. Marisa overruled my idea to send him off to school with something that looked like it was just pulled out of a landfill. She's totally right too, I fell in line quickly because in those awkward times of middle school, it may be best to not create extra opportunities for ridicule.

There was talk of renting or buying an instrument but I was developing an idea to avoid that if possible. When I came home with steel wool and a smile on my face Marisa gave me a look as if to say: "I'll humor you for a little while, but if this doesn't work we're going back to the original plan".

The finish on that trombone was cooked and in many places it was charred not just on the surface but deep into it. I worked on it for 3 days and my hands ended up sore and discolored but it worked. While I was at it I smoothed out some of the dings.


This shot was taken halfway through the process for comparison. Notice how good the bell looks next to the unfinished slide.

I can't say it looks new, but it looks like an instrument that's been used and cared for. This definitely beats buying or renting one, most rentals probably don't look this good. Since I've invested some toil, I've developed a new attachment to it and Shule is even happy to announce: "my trombone has survived a fire!".

A car trip

but Shule stayed awake.

Renaissance Festival

Shazer won some tickets to the renaissance festival a few months ago. We finally used them Saturday March 28th. I took Shule and Shazer, it was the first time for all of us. We walked around a lot and saw a lot of shows, including: pipers and drums, humorous clowns, jugglers, a whip cracker, a large fowl show (falcons, owls and vultures), and jousting. Along with the numerous shows there was ample opportunity to spend a lot of money on all manner of crafts, clothing and food. We just window shopped as we walked around the park in between shows. A few things that stand out from wandering around the market were the ladies spinning wool into yarn, weaving fancy tapestries and the blacksmith with a very impressive bellows stoking a very hot fire. The boys had a good time, Shazer especially is interested in the sword fighting element so he was excited to see the dramatic jousting presentations (see video below). Shule liked the jokes that the jugglers told. He got tired but I convinced him we should stay longer and we would get to see some interesting things that we wouldn't see anywhere else. He stuck it out. Please view the full web photo album.

light is a bandit

I've started learning about special relativity in school. I've heard a little about relativity in the past and had previously developed a sort of blind trust that space and time are relative to frame of reference, or something like that. I knew that if you go really fast then time doesn't pass at the same rate, I had no clue how. Recently when working with optics I read that light travels away from the source at a constant speed and even if you were moving away from the source, as far as you are concerned, the light still approaches you at the same speed. This concept totally blew my mind because as you all know: when someone throws a ball at you and you run away, it then appears to you that the ball is coming at you slower than if you just stood still. If the ball behaved as light does then as soon as you start running it would speed up to its initial speed plus your speed. So how is light an exception to the laws of mechanics? Maybe it has something to do with light being a wave of energy stored in electric and magnetic fields, also light has no mass like a ball does. It turns out that this curious behavior of light is Einstein's second postulate of special relativity and because of it, crazy things happen. Things I don't yet understand so I won't try to explain.

I do however want to share what I think is an interesting example of current in a wire from 2 different inertial frames of reference. We have observer 1 who is stationary with respect to the current and observer 2 who is moving with the same direction and velocity as the current.

Observer 1 experiences a magnetic field (it can be calculated by Biot-Savart, or Ampere's Law).


If we imagine the current as individual positively charged particles then to observer 2 the so-called current becomes an electrostatic line of charge.

Observer 2 would experience an electric field due to these charges (we find this by Coulomb's or Gauss' Law). This might lead to a nasty disagreement between the two observers as observer 1 would insist that there was a magnetic field and observer 2 would be quite certain that it was actually an electric field and they both would be right. I must give credit to Gary Adams who showed that to me (and 170 other people in the room) last semester and is a really great physics professor.