While having our weekly townhall style lunch at work today, the power suddenly went out. The interruption affected all buildings in our immediate area and lasted for well over an hour. Some employees continued to work by flashlight while others used their cell phones to illuminate the foosball table for a “night match.”
I have now lost count on how many teeth I have broken. I grind my teeth while sleeping and am apparently quite good at it. At some point, I will need to have several teeth replaced but until their loss interferes with eating, I am in no hurry.
Meet Charlotte Grace Basile-Skinner, the daughter of Jeanine’s niece, Erica. She tipped the scales at 8 pounds 9 ounces despite being a couple of weeks early. Her family calls her “Charley.” Jeanine starts a three-month sabbatical in 2 weeks and plans to travel to Kentucky for a visit with the newest member of our extended family. Charley is pictured below with her siblings, Lily and Will.
I continue to replace my corded power tools with cordless (battery-driven) versions. My planar is one of the last to make the transition and is now on Craig’s List in search of a happy home. As soon as DeWALT offers a cordless biscuit joiner, my toolset will be complete.
Those who know me well understand that I have a special place in my heart for quality tools. Today’s goal was to shop for a multi-tool that will permanently live in my car. It will join a small set of tools already there that will allow me to address any number of repair challenges I may encounter while on the road. After half a day of research, I settled on the Letherman Free P2 and procured one at REI. Once I had a chance to actually use it myself, I have decided to return it in favor of the Letherman Charge+. While the P2 is among the latest and greatest from Letherman, it is optimized for ease of tool deployment rather than the utility of the tools themselves. The Charge+ has better tools and hopefully, it will only be used on rare occasions so a few extra seconds to access the desired tool is of no consequence.
I spent the better part of the day making repairs and improvements to our double wall oven whose doors have not worked properly for years now. Fortunately, I was able to locate the perfectly sized platform I built when I installed the ovens some 15 years ago which made extraction from the wall relatively straightforward. When I took the oven apart, I found all four hinge/spring mechanisms had been mechanically deformed due to excessive weight having been placed on the open doors. I was able to look up the replacement part number only to find that the $200 apiece components are no longer available anywhere. This left me no choice but to repair the mechanisms which was no picnic as each contained four high force springs and a mechanical linkage that could easily amputate a finger if not handled carefully. It took me two hours to come up with a safe procedure and make the repair to the first one. I completed the remaining three in less than an hour. This improved the door closure but it was still not perfect. The problem now was that the gaskets surrounding the opening to the oven had hardened over time. A thorough cleaning helped to soften them slightly but still no joy on total door closure. I finally solved the problem with four very powerful rare earth magnets strategically placed to make a magnetic closure (similar to a refrigerator door). The doors now work better than they did when the oven was new.
Those who know me are aware that the only radio station I listen to is NPR. It is also my habit to send Jeanine a dozen roses for Valentine’s Day and to support the station’s fundraising in so doing. This year, I decided to also give Jeanine a Meyer lemon tree. The one that was passed down to her by her father did not survive an attempt to re-pot it last year and I know its loss has left an empty spot in her heart. She was as thrilled to receive it as I was to give it.
Today I consulted at Formlabs. I had a total of 17scheduled meetings and a working lunch with my prior engineering leadership team. Although I was exhausted by the end, it was also a very satisfying day. I enjoy mentoring and coaching and on this occasion feel I made a positive difference for many I met with. I returned home to a lovingly prepared Valentine’s Day dinner with Jeanine and we enjoyed a quiet evening at home. I outdid myself with a gift for her which I will cover in tomorrow’s post.
There was a lot of excitement at work today as parts for a new printer arrived. Everyone chipped in with the build effort. Unlike the high volume products I have worked on in the recent past, we build our products in house. The base and gantry pictured here weigh over a thousand pounds which necessitates some pretty interesting construction techniques.
Winter thus far has been rather mild. I suspect we still have at least one big storm in front of us but would be just as happy if today’s light snow is the last of the season.
The last time I was in Amsterdam was with Nicolai in 2007. We had a layover there while en route to Tanzania. We had just enough time for a bus tour of the city before heading back to the airport. Nicolai has terrorized pigeons on 4 continents.
Maya shared a photograph of her breakfast taken in Amsterdam where she is studying abroad. I am counting on her for more pictures to help sustain my daily posting need for relevant photos.
Jeanine and I spent the night at the Elm Street Inn, a delightful bed and breakfast directly across the street from Smith College. After a fantastic breakfast, we went for a walk on campus passing by the President’s house, strolling through a small Japanese garden and visiting, at length, the Botanic Garden pictured below.
Jeanine and I traveled to Northampton, MA today to meet up with my cousin Heather and her husband Burton. They treated us to a wonderful dinner followed by a modern dance recital featuring the choreography of their daughter, Toni. The performance, which we enjoyed thoroughly, was her final project towards a Master of Fine Arts degree from Smith College.
A storm this evening left vegetation covered in thick ice at higher elevations.
At work, our 3D metal printers require an inert atmosphere in order to prevent oxidation. This is achieved by filling our hermetically sealed printing chamber with argon gas. We use so much of it that we have a large tank behind our facility which is replenished every time it runs low. This evening, I had a chance to watch as the “argon man” refilled the tank within the foggy mist created by the process.
I recently depleted my supply of epoxy hardener and resin while completing a project for work. The replacements I ordered online arrived in a partially crushed condition. Needless to say, I was not too pleased with this situation and have contacted the company which shipped them to me. Based on these photos, they have agreed to a partial refund.
Also discovered in my mother’s photography collection is this picture of my aunt Barbara, the second wife of my father’s brother, Ernie. The two also enjoyed a professional relationship as Barbara and Ernie, a musical duet who produced an album of the same name. My uncle was a childhood friend of and occasional guitarist for Tony Bennett who sang at his funeral. He played on numerous albums, most notably for Harry Belafonte.
My grandmother on my mother’s side was a shrewd businesswoman. Born in Ecuador, she started a transportation business with a single bus and eventually grew it into a small fleet. She then sold the buses to invest in real estate, starting with one apartment building and eventually purchased more. She then sold these to finance the move of the family to the United States where she started again with a single apartment building. There is little doubt that my business sense comes from my Abuelita. I found this picture of her in my mother’s collection.
Two is my favorite number, no doubt in part due to my training in logic design whose language of expression is binary numbers. Today, therefore, represents an unusually pleasing date for me. I assisted Jeanine on her mission to clean out the freezer by eating long ago purchased frozen pancakes for breakfast. This pushed my standard weekend fried eggs to the lunch slot and the day ended with chili, a SuperBowl Sunday standard. I spent the rest of the day organizing my shop and office with a small excursion to get my car washed and find a remotely interesting photo given the dreary grey sky.
This morning I took Jeanine to the MIT Museum for mystery date night despite the incorrect time of day. Despite working a few blocks away while at Superpedestrian, I never had an opportunity to visit. Featured for the next few months is an exhibit chronicling the history of the Polaroid camera from both the technical and artistic perspectives. We both enjoyed the visit and thought that Maya would be really interested as well. Later we enjoyed grilled cheese sandwiches at Roxy’s.
Less than two weeks after installing our new Okuma CNC lathe at work, our machinist turned out a newly designed contact tip for our printer. The lathe allows us to hold the tolerances needed to refine our printing process and to make subtle adjustments to the geometry with turnaround time measured in minutes rather than weeks. We immediately put the new contact tip into use and it performed perfectly.
Digital Alloys is located in a rather developed part of Burlington. Even so, the Vine Brook Wellfields can be found less than a half-mile from the office. My current morning routine involves arriving at the office at about 6:30 AM and setting off on a 2.5-mile round trip walk to get breakfast. That walk takes me past Vine Brook which I paused this morning to photograph.
We received this photo of Maya in a text with no explanation. She appears to be inside a large toroidal shaped beach ball and to have lost one leg. We suspect this has something to do with her term abroad orientation.
An image of me and my mom that I have never seen before. It was one of many that I discovered after digitizing negatives from my mother’s photography collection.
Maya let us know that she arrived in Amsterdam safely with a message that included this photo and a hypothesis that the Dutch must be very tall people.
Maya left today for Amsterdam where she will spend the next four months studying on a term abroad. Jeanine organized a family send-off which took place at Time Out. There, we were joined by cousin John Quinn and enjoyed delightful food, procured from no less than six of the more than a dozen food establishments housed within. In front of the food court was an ice rink (featuring one foxy skater) and an antique 1960 International Metro Short Van converted into a food truck. Maya requested that special notice be given to her packing efficiency given the 1/3 of a year stay.
Earlier this week I started scanning film negatives that were part of the collection of photographs that I recently retrieved from my mother’s home in advance of its sale. Had I completed the task using my flatbed scanner, it would have taken me weeks to get through the collection. Instead, I purchase a $20 LED light table and placed my camera with a macro lens on my camera stand. I used heavy tools from my shop to hold down the curled edges of the film. I thought about using a glass plate for this but then remembered how a prism works. Using this technique, I was able to plow through several hundred negatives in about 6 hours. Expect to see some newly discovered photos over the coming days.
The printing technique we use at Digital Alloys requires that we maintain an inert atmosphere inside our printers to inhibit oxidation of the metals we print with. We use argon gas pumped into a large hermetically sealed glove box. Maintaining this environment is not easy given that we must pass hundreds of wires into the sealed chamber. Early versions of the printer had difficulty maintaining the environment because outside air made its way into the box traveling between the cable insulation and the wires within. This was solved by employing hermetically sealed pass-through connectors. The price for one such connector for a USB connection is $650. When a purchase request came to me for two of these, I could not believe the price. I denied the request and returned home this evening to build one myself. I cut the end off a USB extender cable, peeled away all the molded plastic and resoldered the connection leaving about a half-inch of bare, tinned wire. I then potted this end of the connector inside an empty pass-through housing with an inch of epoxy. The cross-section of the hermetic boundary is four tinned 24 gauge wires. I can guarantee this will work and the cost for the USB components and epoxy was under $8.
Photos of my parents I have bever seen before. This explains a lot!
Jeanine taught a cooking class this evening at the Concord Carlisle Adult Learning Center. The class was called One Week’s Worth of Meals in an Hour. Apparently the new title attracted a much larger class than last year’s version entitled, Healthy Soups and Stews. As is usually the case, Jeanine fretted about not being prepared for the class only to report that the session went off without a hitch and was a great success.