Aided by two Yard Dogs from Kyle’s company, we were able to deconstruct our deck in about 3 hours. Planks had to be cut into 7-foot sections to fit within our Dumpster in a Bag (a very interesting DIY debris removal service) which also made them easy to carry. In addition to the planks, I removed a small area of siding and the stair risers which all showed signs of water damage. I will spread the reconstruction task out over several weeks to ease the burden. We are still trying to decide between the latest synthetic materials and wood.

Pictured here are two of my direct reports participating in a competitive relay race held yesterday during my annual All-Hands Engineering meeting. The exercise was designed to illuminate a distinct preference at iRobot for clever engineering over flawless execution. I believe the point could not have been illustrated more dramatically despite great furor over interpretation of the specifications. A large contingent of participants felt that a totally legal solution to the constraints listed below was to skewer the soccer ball (a grapefruit, in this case) with duct tape covered rope and drag it behind them with the rope affixed to their hips.

You will be dribbling a “soccer ball” which may look more like a fruit.
Each team will be provided a roll of duct tape and a length of rope.
Only the duct tape may contact the ball (non-sticky side).
Only the rope or ball may contact the duct tape.
The rope may be attached to the participant but never touch their hands, arms, feet, legs, or head.

The debate centered on the interpretation of the word “dribbling”. Many felt that the contents of the grapefruit oozing from the puncture points constituted dribbling while I only permitted the Merriam-Webster definition pertaining to soccer: to propel by successive slight taps or bounces.

Maya graduated from Concord Middle School this morning and has been the center of attention all day long. During the student led event she served as co-Master of Ceremony. Wearing her Panda hat from China and a pair of Blues Brothers sunglasses, she was poised, funny and unflappable. When a chipmunk wandered on stage and hid below the upright piano, Maya quipped to the terrified audience, “I hope the next person playing has on closed toe shoes.” After a 15 minute delay during which students and teachers chased the chipmunk from the auditorium the ceremony resumed. Tracking the dislocated rodent was easy; you need only look to the section of the audience squealing the loudest. The ceremony resumed with a pseudo student talent show interleaved with award presentations by the faculty. Yesterday, Jeanine was alerted by the school that Maya would be winning a “big” award and that we would want to be in attendance. This news left me with a tough decision. Also scheduled for today is my annual, full day, Engineering All-Hands meeting during which I am expected to give the opening and closing remarks and generally officiate over the proceedings. In the end the choice was simple. Being present to witness Maya’s big honor was my top priority. It is nice to work with a group of professionals I can count on to step in for me knowing they will do an excellent job in my stead. The Morton R. Seavey Award was established by the CMS faculty in 1966 in honor of Mr. Seavey, who was a Principal in Concord from 1937 to 1965. The award goes to a member of the eighth grade, voted by the faculty as having made outstanding contributions in the areas of service, leadership, character and loyalty. The final award of the ceremony, Maya was genuinely surprised when it was her name that was called to receive this prestigious honor. In addition to the plaque she received, her name will be engraved on the memorial plaque at the school where it will remain in perpetuity.

After standing for nearly three hours so I could witness Maya’s special recognition, I was all too happy to be seated in the car and on the way to my meeting. I arrived just in time for lunch and had ample time to set up a team building activity that would take place later in the afternoon. Worthy of its own blog entry I will simply leave you with this picture.

As soon as my Engineering meeting wrapped up I sped home just in time to photograph Maya and her friends as they prepared to depart for the 8th Grade Dance (middle school prom equivalent). I have known many of these girls since they were 5 years old and find it hard to fathom how they have transformed into such beautiful young women.

With all that has transpired today, I may have forgot to mention that it is Miss Maya’s 14th birthday. I suspect this is a day we will all remember for quite some time.

When we renovated our deck six years ago I fully expected it to last at least 20 years. We paid a premium for a low maintenance composite material that was supposed to be superior to wood in every way and was made in large part from recycled materials. Instead it has degraded to the point where it looks shabby and in another year will be unsafe. The fabricator of this product, which carried a ten year warranty, went bankrupt shortly before I tried to contact them two years ago. The contractor who recommended and installed the material has washed his hands of responsibility even though his company failed to install the material according to the manufacturer’s recommendations which certainly exacerbated the speed of failure. This time I will replace the deck myself with some help from Kyle’s company, Yard Dogs. His crew is coming later this week to remove and haul away the old material. Each morning and each night for the past couple of days I have been removing a couple of hundred screw fasteners in preparation. I estimate there are 1200 in total.

Torrential downpours have swept through the region for the better part of the day leaving local rivers swollen. My plans to do a little kayaking this week may have to wait until the waters recede enough for me to squeeze through under some of the lower bridges.

Maya captured this portrait of me during a post-match pool party at the home of our team’s goalie, Rob Morrison. Our team emerged victorious (2-0) from our semi-final play-off match this morning making for a very happy celebration. I was joined by Jeanine and the kids (plus my nephew John) who quickly found their way into a doubles ping pong match. Maya surprised everyone with her skills and game-winning shot.

For years it has been my ambition to photograph a humming bird. Photographically speaking it is significant challenge. At about two inches in length, you either need to be very close or use a big telephoto lens. Then there is the matter of those wings, beating at up to 30 beats per second, requiring a very fast shutter speed and/or short duration flash. Finally, you need to find one and track it through the air. Jeanine’s recently filled nectar feeder removed one of the big variables and all I had to do was wait for about thirty minutes before this little fellow showed up. I noticed he likes a particular flower in the garden as well. Perhaps I will catch him there with a more pleasing background next time.

Somewhat larger in size, Nicolai did some of his own mid-air hovering on the campus of Wellesley College. Jeanine, my nephew John, and Nico watched Maya’s last soccer game of the season before we took a few moments to make some videos of Nicolai doing front and back flips with and without his crutches. He is putting these clips together for another SideStix promotional video. Here we added to his collection of “levitation” photos.

Occasionally, my photography proves extremely valuable to my work. This afternoon I took a series of macro photos which helped us understand a failure mechanism in one of our products. Pictured here is a floating contact used in a charging station. The black pitted area at the top of the dimple is not supposed to be there. Once a failure mechanism is understood it is generally fairly straightforward to engineer a solution.

It was a long day in the office but I made it home just in time for the setting sun to light up Mattison Field in golden light. I feel very fortunate to live surrounded by such beauty.

Work has been extremely hectic this week due to the simultaneous emergence of a couple of engineering issues which demand my full attention. I handle this kind of stress best when I take time to pause momentarily each day to clear my head. On the way into the office this morning, I stopped for 15 minutes at the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge to charge my batteries before another high intensity day at the office. The little white objects on the lilies in the foreground are actually drops of water.

During a lunchtime stroll today I had occasion to make this image. Does anyone care to guess what or how big this object is? You would be correct if you guessed that it is the brush from a street sweeper which is little more than a Roomba the size of a dump truck. Whereas the Roomba uses a brush that is 10″ long and an inch and a half in diameter this one is more than ten times bigger in every dimension. My initial reason for photographing the brush was to test a new lens I received last week (a great subject for testing critical focus and depth of field). Eventually, my interest turned from technical to artistic and I settled on this perspective as my favorite.

My team has been working around the clock on a new robot which we introduced to the world today at the Infocomm Expo in Orlando. Developed for our fledgling Remote Presence business unit we partnered with Cisco to integrate their Executive Video Conferencing system with our AVA mobility platform. This robot can autonomously navigate through a facility to any destination you select and once it has arrived initiate a video-conference call allowing a person to participate in meetings, tours, or simply “walk around” a remote site which could be on the other side of the world.

My soccer team won our final match of regulation play for the spring season this morning by a margin of 3-1. Our record was a perfect 10-0-0 and we will be going back up to division one again where I believe we will fare much better this fall than last. With 6 goals, I was the second leading scorer which is not too shabby considering I missed 2 games to injury and played 3 at wing midfield rather than striker. Next week the top 2 finishing teams from the north and south regions will begin the Divisional Championship Playoffs. The winners will advance to the finals the following weekend.

Meanwhile, Jeanine has been kidnapped by her sisters for a secret 50th birthday adventure and I am told I can expect her to be returned safe and sound on Tuesday.

Nicolai graduated today from Concord Carlisle High School with National Honor Society distinction. The ceremony was held indoors due to heavy rains yesterday (rendering the normal venue a soggy mess). Unfortunately, this meant that only Jeanine and I could attend (due to the seating limitation of the gymnasium) even though my mother and sister and Jeanine’s sisters and friend all traveled here to celebrate with us. The commencement speaker was one of the school’s Spanish teachers and he delivered the best commencement addresses I have ever heard. He was funny, irreverent, and connected intensely with the students. His main theme was “Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained.” Two of our standard graduation photos, Maya inside the robes and parents kissing the graduate were taken before the ceremony (anticipating that Nico might return without his mortarboard).

We returned home after the ceremony to an intimate family celebration and small feast. The cake Maya made for her brother was the featured desert and was enjoyed by all.

Nicolai plans to attend the University of Miami in the fall of 2014 after he takes a gap year during which he will intern with SideStix just outside of Vancouver, Canada, travel across the US for a month, intern as a teaching assistant with Rivers and Revolutions, work as a gymnastics camp counselor over the summer, and who knows what else will be added to the constantly expanding list. Had it to do all over again, I would have taken a gap year between high school and college as well as between college and graduate school. Why rush the some of the best times of your life.