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.