Maya composed this chic outfit and did not object when I insisted on taking a photograph. Her ankle is slowly healing but in true Calabria fashion, she is pushing to get back on the soccer pitch prematurely. Being elected co-captain of her team has only added to the pressure to rejoin her teammates.
After 12 years of heavy use we are having the oak hardwood floors on our second floor refinished. We are getting an early start on preparing the house for sale after Maya leaves for college. At that time we are looking forward to moving into a much smaller home and reducing our carbon footprint. Still too many variables to know when and where we will move but giving ourselves a couple of years to get ready will make the transition that much easier. Pictured here is Maya’s bedroom and a close examination will reveal the tired and worn flooring.
We are having our upstairs hardwood floors sanded and refinished starting tomorrow. In preparation, Jeanine and I spent the better part of the afternoon moving furniture and contents out of the three rooms that will be worked on into the two that will not. During this process I found a wooden excavator and flat bed truck with trailer which I made for Kyle and Nicolai respectively when they were wee toddlers. I have built large pieces of furniture which took less time to build than these toys. The excavator has a fully articulating boom and bucket, rotating “house”, and operational tracks, all fabricated from wood. The flat bed truck has rotating wheels and I have witnessed more than one child using it with the trailer attached as a skate board. Both toys have held up remarkably well and it is my sincere wish that they be handed down to my grandchildren one day.
In soccer action this morning my team left Concord at 6:30 am to reach Taunton in time for warmups and an 8 am kick-off. We trailed by a single goal from the early minutes of the game until the last second of the match. In that last second, we scored an equalizer which felt more like the winning goal. As soon as the ball hit the back of the net the referee blew his whistle signaling the end of the game. The tie was good enough to place us atop the league standings.
The rains which fell most of the day were a very welcomed departure from recent record high temperatures. I spent the day indoors designing new parts to print at work. Jeanine and Maya did a little bit of mother-daughter shopping, something they rarely do. On this outing, someone drew on Maya’s face with a black marker of some kind. I attempted to document the results which can be observed at the interface of the eyelashes and eyelids. I think Maya is a stunningly beautiful young woman and in no need of further augmentation.
My socket wrench caddy and power-bit caddy designs/prints earned me a second place finish during our weekly “Part of the Week” party/competition. Although I missed top honors, several colleagues asked if they could get the design files to print these bit and socket holders for their own toolboxes.
I developed a small leak during soccer practice this evening. Jeanine patched me up and I am as good as new. In the future. I will save diving headers for league matches.
An earlier post this week featured the main ingredient in a pie Jeanine baked today. The memoir cookbook she is writing is composed of a series of short stories, each centered around a particular dish. Over the coming months, she will be recreating these recipes so they can be photographed for the book. In order to maintain the integrity of my work, I insist on sampling my subjects to ensure that my photographic interpretation is consistent with the gastronomic essence of the food. It is difficult work, but someone has to do it.
Five minutes into the first game of the soccer season, Maya rolled her ankle and was sidelined for the rest of the game. The injury does not appear to be severe but will probably keep her off the pitch for a week or two. The CCHS girls dominated play against Boston Latin with a 10-0 final score. Maya started the game as a striker, a change from her center midfield assignment last season.
My BMW is not offered with a roof rack or towing hitch option which precludes most available bike carrying systems. The body panels are made of carbon fiber reinforced plastic which contributes to energy efficiency but does not offer any structural strength. For some time now I have been working on a design for a bicycle carrier which does not attach to the body. I fashioned a system that employs two industrial strength suction clamps and some custom brackets I printed at work to secure the bike’s handlebars to the rear window while the seat rests against the rear of the car. Gravity holds the bike in the brackets and a safety strap provides a measure of insurance if something lets go. Followers of this blog may recall that the safety strap prevented a disaster when one of my prototype plywood brackets delaminated during a test drive. The same was true today when one of the suction cups popped off when I hit a big pothole. It has been fun working on this project, but I am officially abandoning this design concept. The leverage provided by the seat as a fulcrum translates every bump in the road into a huge force acting on the suction cups and brackets. I will either come up with a different design approach or use my Audi when I need to transport my bike.
Jeanine requested that I photograph some peaches for her. She plans to use the image in her memoir cookbook which is largely written now. My desire to try different compositions was not as strong as my desire to sample one of my subjects. There are few things sweeter than a perfectly ripe peach. I think I’ll have another.
Jeanine, Maya, and I dined at the Rapscallion Table & Tap Restaurant this evening. It was a fine summer day with just a hint of autumn in the air. Despite the fine weather, I spent the bulk of the day indoors designing parts that I will print at work next week.
August was a record month for carbon fiber production at MarkForged. My team more than tripled output from the prior month and we will be celebrating the accomplishment with an ice cream social tomorrow.
Earlier this week I sold my 300-800mm telephoto zoom lens after 8 years of ownership. At 13 pounds, I found myself using it less and less frequently. Today my Canon 6D went up for sale on Craig’s List. Whenever, I find myself with more than 5 or 6 cameras, the least used has to go. The current line-up includes a Canon 5DS full frame for landscapes, portraiture, and product photography; a Canon 7DM2 crop frame for sports and wildlife; a Canon G7X which is always with me, a Nikon AW120 for underwater and snow; and a Panasonic FZ1000 for mountain climbing and trekking.
I was pressed into photographic service at work for some glamor shots of the parts we print. These are examples of a motor cycle brake lever. One is made entirely of nylon and the other with embedded stands of carbon fiber. The latter is as strong as aluminum and lighter.
Jeanine forwarded this picture to me from her bike ride to the deCordova Sculpture Park. I wish I could say that I have been putting my new bike to as much good use. Work is still taking up all of my daylight hours.
My over-50 soccer team opened our fall season in fine form with a 3-0 win over the Mariners. My sister Alissa and Maya were both in the stands watching, Maya with a camera in hand. I am still miserably out of shape but managed to play a reasonable game. Afterwards, Maya joined me for an after game pool party at the Morrison’s before we returned home to prepare for a party of our own.
We hosted a gathering of my direct reports and their significant others to welcome our new Director of Hardware Engineering to the company. Jeanine prepared an exquisite menu, Maya was a great conversationalist (she is fluent in nerd) and I successfully brewed my first cup of coffee (ever) with the aid of a new Nespresso machine. I am very lucky to be wed to such a great cook and the father of such a socially confident child.
The rising full moon was particularly beautiful this evening and I arrived home (a few minutes before 8 PM) just in time to capture it while still low on the horizon.
For the fourth time in as many days, I have spent a good portion of the day performing a failure analysis on a returned printer. I find it very satisfying to identify root cause for a failure mechanism and trace the sequence of events that led up to it. Using macro photography, I am able to “see” better than with my woefully inadequate eyes plus glasses.
I took a break this afternoon to join Maya and her cousin John on a tour of MIT. She visited Dartmouth College yesterday with her mother. Maya goes back to school next Tuesday to begin her junior year and is putting her last week of vacation to good use by getting a leg up on college visits.
As MarkForged is still quite small, we all wear many hats. Today I spent a few hours doing a detailed failure analysis. It is important to document the process with good photographs and as my eyes get worse, I study the photographs to better see what is going on. In this case, our contract manufacturer failed to align a part properly before press fitting into another part. This resulted in the metal shavings that can be seen at the bottom of the receptacle. The loss of that material from the sides caused the press fit to fail allowing one part to rotate within the other. There is something very satisfying about solving a mystery and even more so when I get to use photography to help me do it.
I found this photo among the ones taken in California by either John, Rory, Mario, Kyle or Nicolai during their cousin reunion. I think it is an exceptionally good photo and would like to know which of the boys made it and the details of where it was shot. It appears to be some type of automated storage system with a robotic gantry used to retrieve entire boxes. Will the creator please step forward?
Every now and then Jeanine invites her friends over for a “leftover” party. In theory, each brings leftovers from their respective refrigerators to share. Of course these “leftovers” are anything but. I generally try to keep a low profile and pop up only to sample the food. This evening, I was specifically instructed to forget anything I may have overheard of their conversations. What is said on the Calabria’s sun porch, stays on the Calabria sun porch, so to speak. No such admonition was issued regarding photography, however, and I will leave it to the viewer’s imagination to extrapolate from this photograph.
The weather was distinctly crummy today and I spent a good bit of the day catching up on work stuff and doing chores around the house (hung new blinds in Maya’s room and replaced a leaky hose on our kitchen sink faucet). I also found some time to document an idea that I had yesterday. Normally, I communicate my design thoughts on a whiteboard. Now that I have learned 3D CAD, I can quickly do so on a computer.
Although I probably have the days wrong it looks like the cousins made their way to both the coast and the redwoods. I still have not heard any direct reports (Jeanine is the major conduit of communications) but I believe they had to abort their plans for camping. I am glad they still had a chance to enjoy some time in nature.
Not pictured is Nicolai who took this photo of his cousins and brother during their California reunion. To a man they are excellent cooks and judging from all the photographs they took, food was the organizing principle of their time together. What I do not understand is how they eat so much and stay so trim. It must be all the exercise they get including the yoga workout led by Rory, the youngest and tallest of the cousins.
The male, Calabria side cousins have gathered in northern California at Kyle’s invitation for what I hope will be the first of many similar reunions. The boys (technically, men; I will withhold the use of that term, however, until a review of their behavior over the next few days suggests it is warranted) are very similar in age and have been very tight-knit since early childhood. My understanding is that they will spend at least one-night camping (Big Sur, I believe) and one day touring San Francisco. Johnny, visiting California for the first time, has lined up a couple of job interviews and will stay on for a few extra days. Should Maya one day choose to extend this tradition, she will have an equal number of female Calabria side cousins to invite. Adding Jeanine’s side of the family would bring the total number of first cousins to an even dozen.
The nature of working at a startup is that you wear many hats. In addition to my other responsibilities, I am occasionally pressed into service as the company’s photographer. Today I took some photos that will be used for a company blog posting which speaks to our obsession with strength testing of our materials. Pictured here is one of our top scientists (affectionately nick-named the Bone Crusher) conducting a strength test on a small carbon fiber beam that we printed.
I have been testing a new thermal imaging device that connects to my iPhone. Pixels within the image are mapped to a color palette that reflects the temperature at that location. Pictured here is one of the machines we use at work to produce nylon-impregnated carbon fiber.
Jeanine and I enjoyed an exquisite dinner with former neighbors Gabby and Stephan aboard their Gunboat catamaran off one of the Boston Harbor Islands this evening. The 60 foot carbon fiber sailing vessel is a thing of beauty, equipped with state of the art electronics and all the amenities you would expect to find in a luxury home. The crew of Sebastian and Sophie prepared dinner and saw to our every need as we enjoyed the sunset over a distant Boston skyline. A better way to spend a late summer evening I cannot imagine.
On a bike ride this morning I traveled under the railroad bridge on Main Street where work is underway to increase the height of the bridge over the roadway. The decapitation of more than one truck by this bridge has been well documented on this blog over the years and it is about time that something is being done to address the situation. It would have been far easier to lower the roadway, so I can only imagine that the water table was too high to permit doing so. Pictured in the foreground is the new bridge which has been staged on temporary supports. I imagine it will be lifted and placed by cranes when the old bridge is removed. What is not at all clear to me is how they will increase the height of the tracks to match the new bridge height without disrupting daily commuter train traffic. Rest assured I will be monitoring the situation carefully.
MarkForged, the startup I recently joined is expanding rapidly. We have totally out grown our current facility, an extremely funky converted machine shop in Somerville. Locating a new facility fell to my team which worked on a very short schedule to secure space in this building, located a stone’s throw from the Alewife station in North Cambridge. We will occupy the first floor (production and shop area) and half of the second floor (offices). We will make the move in phases starting in about 6 weeks. The location is as near perfect as one could hope for. The northern terminus of the MBTA Red Line, Alewife station is a short walk from the office which is equally accessible by car from Route 2. Bike riders will have easy access to the Minuteman Bikeway, Cambridge Linear Park, and the Fitchburg Cutoff Path. We will be right across the street from Fresh Pond which is surrounded by several parks and a golf course. The most important attribute of our new location is that it will greatly increase the pool of talent from which to recruit. Our current location is very attractive to urban dwellers (predominately recent college grads) but not very attractive to suburban dwellers (mostly more experienced folks with families). The new location strikes the perfect balance. My commute will be shortened from 17 to 15 miles. Amazingly this will cut my commute time in half because of the terrible traffic as you approach Boston.