This year, I’m going as a bar magnet. It’s going to kick ass (once I figure out how attach all that metal to me). A little secret though - for weight savings I’m going to use aluminum (which is non-magnetic shhhhhhhhh). Anyway, I’ll toss up the pictures once the fun stops (and the anti-fun is done too).

So I’m supposed to write this abstract for a paper that we’re going to present at the July AIAA Joint Propulsion Conference in Florida. We’re supposed to present the results of our research in metal vapor propellents. Problem is though, we haven’t done it yet. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last few weeks, but it is difficult to know what we’ll know in nine months you know? In short, I’m trying not conjure up a complete work of fiction thereby avoiding being a big ass hat at the conference. Oh yeah, and it’s due tomorrow.

I figure one of the best way to drum up some inspiration is to purge my brain of all the crap floating around and dump it on my website. I bet you wish you had a blog now. (Steps up on soapbox, clears throat) . . . . I hate my second floor bathroom. If it was a deer, I’d run it over, twice, then have it cut into to lunch meat, then I’d eat it everyday in a sandwich, twice.

So why has this inanimate object pissed of my universe so? Because everything in it leaks like a sieve. The latest is that ancient toilet. The trouble with that thing though, is it is very discrete about leaking. No, dumping water everywhere through a huge hole is just too obvious; this one operates in stealth mode. A little drip here, a little drip there. Really really really annoying. Down the road, I’m planning on remodeling that entire bathroom, but there are too many hands in my little money pot to do it now so it really needs to stop sucking.

Just sitting here, I think I should replace the whole toilet. They’re only like $80 and would probably save that in water in a year. Not to mention it wouldn’t flood my house one insolent drip after another. Good plan. FOR SALE: authentic antique toilet ? make an offer.

All right, I’ll stop whining now. I’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback about the color to paint the entryway/2nd floor hallway. After nearly being shot for suggesting white, I’ve since abandoned that plan. Yellow is out, since everything in that was has at least three coats of yellow on it. So now we’re talking more along the beige/tan line.

Ok, I think I know how to write this now so I’m going to give it a stab. Thanks for listening.

Yesterday, I was on a mission to get as much done as possible in the house. As I confided to Katie, I realized the other day (while putting up trusses at Dr. King’s house) that I was afraid to do work on the house. Not because I’m afraid of work, but rather because I was afraid to think about how nice this place could really be. Sure, Plan A has always been to turn the place into a palace, but I guess I just wasn’t ready for it. Now I am though. Anyway, I tore around pulling more wire throwing up more dry wall, sanding and applying joint compound. Then I saw it:the crack in the wall on the way up the stairs.

That damned crack. It was big and nasty - running all the way from the window up to the second floor. So I busted into with my putty knife and it was all down hill from there. You see, there are four layers of wall paper on the wall - the top layer is some paper stuff, the next is a light brown furry thing, the next is a darker brown and not so furry, and finally some green stuff that is almost like paint. The yellow stuff comes of really easy; it’s almost theraputic, but that’s where the fun stops. Fortunatly, I have some really kick ass friends who were willing to coming over and help me out. Special thanks then to Jason, Brett, Matt, Ben, Jake and Jeff - not too many people would spend a Monday evening scraping off wallpaper in exchange for some beer.

Onto the pictures - 10-28-03 (Wallpaper)
And now I have study so I don’t fail my thermodynamics exam tomorrow morning. Quick question too - paint: I’m thinking white super goupy latex (at least as a base), any suggestions?

Hah hah, finally some pictures of the house. What treats do I have in store? Only a few but they are pretty interesting. So lets get started . . . .

Last week, I had a bit of a plumbing disaster on my hands - in a nutshell, it was raining in the kitchen. Here’s what I saw (click for a larger pic):

Oh sh*t!!!!!11!!1! you say? Yeah me too. On the plus side, there’s some really neat moulding on the ceiling that I didn’t even know was there before (although it’s so rusty I’d have to put another inch of pain on it). Now, the question on everyone’s mind: where is this water coming from? Simple answer: upstairs. Not so simple answer, the bathtub water faucits were leaking water down through a hole I didn’t even know was there (no pic of that, sorry). Apparently, it had been like that since I bought it, but as the weather became colder, people’s showers became longer. Hense, two hours of leaking water per day was not very condusive for a dry ceiling.

The solution to this problem was more difficault then it seemed. Mostly because I didn’t know what the problem was right away. Anyway, Katie had ordered this awsome new faucit for the bathroom (the hot water didn’t work on the old one), do I was going about installing it like a good slum lord when the shit really hit the fan. When the final test was ready, I cranked on the water and proceeded to hear the largest water hammer ever. It was big enough to break small holes which later became large holes in a few cold water pipes.

I didn’t discover that until the next day when I came home for lunch only to discover a large puddle of water in the north side of the basement. Crap. The problem there was obvious: the galvanized pipe had pretty well rusted through and finally broke earlier that day. Needless to say, I took the rest of the day off and turned this

in to this

Nothing too spectacular, but I’d never in my entire life done work with copper pipe so in retrospect, it could have went worse. So now, most of the plumbing issues with the second floor are resolved (for this week anyway). Although I did have to plunge the sink this morning (what the hell’s up with that?) and the silcon caulk is still drying on the toilt but its coming along.

In other news, after pouring 600lbs of concrete in the basement, the sauna/bathroom floor is all done and plumbed. The next step is to toss up the walls, do the tile and buy a bunch of ceadar for the sauna. Here a dark pic of the area:

So, is there anything anyone is itching to see? Let me know and i’ll post pictures of that.

After getting a late start on life this morning, I headed to the lab (where I am now, doing what I always do - thermal model and screw around on the internet). About an hour ago, I became hungry again despite the fact that I’d just eaten the biggest plate of pasta the world has ever seen not four hours ago. Then it hit me: I’ve never eaten a pizza in the lab before. I know, I’m such a tool. So $5.30 and 15 minutes later, I had a large pizza from Little Caesars. I then proceed bask in the greasy glory of my pizza and now I think I’m going to explode.

You know, I have like a two week backlog on stuff i should post to the site, but can’t because I’m always sitting on landau (the Sun Ultra 80 in the ISP Lab) when I post. The only ammo that leaves me are my own fingers and whatever is in my home directory (mostly MP3’s and experimental results, in that order). But just to let everyone know that I didn’t break both my hands in some horrible plumbing accident, I toss up some more of the work I do when I’m not fixing pipes (yes all the plumbing allusions have pictures associated with them . . . someday).

This is the latest and greatest set of results. It’s actually from yesterday but I’ve been doing iterative testing since then. I’m working to see what kind of thermal gradient (difference) is achieved when different amounts of power are put into different parts. I probably shouldn’t say much more then that or I’ll probably end up in Cuba

In other news, I’m now checked out on the CNC milling machine so I can now re-make my own engine or something. Next up, welding . . . metal and a shitload of electricity - beautiful thing.

Yeah, my computer had an epic meltdown last night. In about 15 minutes, I managed to blow away my Linux, Windows 2000 and Windows 98 SE operating systems. That’s quite a feat considering they are all on separate drives. The fault doesn’t lie so much with the new hardware as it does with the old. The former setup had some broken hardware (namely the VIA chipset) that caused it do things in a strange way. However, so long as nothing was changed, it worked. Yeah, well I changed everything and totally went nova.
It could be worse though. Check this picture out. This wasn’t my car, but it happened last weekend up here on Covered Road. Some friends of mine were out tooling around and they took this picture of some guy’s truck blowing up (they have video to of when the FD showed up). At first I thought it was fake (sort of looks like it doesn’t it?) but I assure you it is quite real. These cars . . . hmmmm, how’s your car feeling right now? (Click on the picture for the super-human resolution)

All of my new computer parts have arrived. In truth, most of them arrived last week with the exception of my video card. That graced my presence last night. It’s really nice to have a computer again - its constant drone and occasional cough when it sucks into its bowels an unusally large hunk of plaster. For the technically inclined, here’s my “cat /proc/cpuinfo”:

[root@bigfishbowl drmassey]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2600+
stepping : 1
cpu MHz : 2079.545
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov
pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips : 4141.87

I had to go AMD. I mean, being a share holder, I just couldn’t let my boyz down. Besides, in all actuality, its a better processor with better supporting hardware. On the software side, it is official:
Linux is once again my primary OS. Redhat 9.0 if you’re curious. Upon trying to start my former os (Windows 2000), I was met with 5 Blue Screens of Death culminating in one final error - “The Registry is Corrupt - hahhahha you’re screwed”. With some new hardware, I can finally dump that hunk of crap anyway since my digital camera now works in Linux.
On the remote temperature monitor front an interesting idea was suggested to me: use the sound card. Although he only meant put the DC signal in there, it got me thinking (she’s all over now folks). I could use some voltage controlled oscillators (VCO’s) and generate different tones for different voltages. For instance 1.2532 volts would be magically turned into 245Hz sound (I’m just making up numbers here). Better yet, channel 1 could range from 1kHz-2kHz, channel 2 from 2-3kHz and so on. Then (getting really excited now) sample a few seconds of it and run a FFT on it to get the spectral content in digital form (short explanation of it here). In effect, I’ll be able to sample as many channels as I can fit in 20kHz all at the same time. Perfect. Once I get it working (probably sometime late 2007), I’ll post the whole plan and source code.

You know, I’m pretty happy to be tucked away in grad school. I don’t think I’ve done this much traveling . . . ever. Anyway, this weekend some Aerospace Enterprise folks and fellow Condensable Propellent guru Jason are heading down to Ann Arbor for the Michigan Space Grant Consortium Jason and I put together a nifty poster so we can show the world the research we do (or something like that). As soon as it finishes getting printed, I’ll post the original up on the website.

Right now, most of my research is focused around themal modeling. We’re trying out this new idea (the segmented anode) and right now it looks like it doesn’t suck. So here’s some pictures taken right out of the modeling software I use. You can click for the full size image.

	The first picture is the main thruster assembly. The different colors represent different materials (light blue is stainless steel, white is ceramic and red & green are iron). This partucular model has actually been fabricated and now sits about 8 inches from my left pinky.
	The second picture is the same model as above but with thermal boundry conditions applied (ie heat and heat transfer). Thermal modeling is funny though because to readjust the boundry conditions takes maybe 30 seconds but re-running the simulation will take from 2-30 minutes. I should take up wood carving or something.
	The third is the thermal model of our Bismuth boiler that we’ll be testing in fairly short order. We’re going to toss it in the vacuum chamber and boil the crap out of bismuth.

Ok, integrated/digital electronics were never my strongest point. I’m more of an analog/wierd stuff kind of guy. But here’s what I want to do: In an effort to better understand where the heat is going (and being generated) in the house, I’d like to set up several temperature sensors consisting of a thermistor, a bias resistor and an output stage (be it a high impedence analog signal or digital). I’d like to take these signals and shove them into one of my linux boxen littered throughout the house.
The obvious way to do this is to use a serial port and some fancy UART crap. Personally, I usually avoid serial ports like the plauge. So, all you EE’s out there - how about this: I’m thinking about killing my old non-optical wheel mouse that doens’t work worth a damn since I rolled it over 15 lbs of dust. Within the mouse are two sensors: one for the X and one for the Y. The “click” signal could be used to designate different temperature readings which would be multiplexed in there. On the software side, it wouldn’t be any amazingly heroic effort to pick up the USB device and toss some C code at it to get what I want.
In a nut shell, I want a ADC on my PC for free (my god it even rhymes). So you fellow EE dorks out there (Mike, Josh, Tim et el) any suggestions? I guess another option would be to chop up a keyboard and have it basically type in the temperature, but that is getting a bit complicated. What about video? If I can mess up a PAL or NSTC signal in a organized fashion, I could use software pattern recognition (which incidently was my CS 4099 project a while back), in which case multiplexing wouldn’t matter. Just some thoughts for your morning coffee.