Greg Kelley

I had a great time in Ellensburg this weekend.  I helped judge at the Student Professional Development Conference (SPDC) held at Central Washington University.   I helped judge the RC Baja competition, one that I participated in as a student.  Teams of students from engineering programs in schools in a 5 state area gather and race their custom conceived and fabricated remote control cars.

The winning team was WSU… Holly joined me, and took a bunch of pictures.

This car, “Chaos” had a lot of hang time.

The team from WSU had team spirit and comradery not uncommon in this competition.  They enjoyed a walk of victory down the home stretch of the last heat of the obstacle course, just after their car screamed through the finish line locking down the first place position.

and the car…..

Tacoma Community College took home second place, and BYU-I third.  This was a great year for the competition!

Units?  We don’t need no stinking units!

“Loss acceleration” uses a two week trailing average against the week.  So, I guess I labelled it wrong.  Its the negative weight acceleration, or loss velocity, or the negative integral of the weight impulse, or…. basically if I’m loosing weight faster or slower than the previous two week average.  This is inconsistent with the fact that week one and two are not undefined.  Unfortunately, time did not exist before 2/16/2011 and the little scientist in me wouldn’t let me extrapolate the data, so the trailing average starts in week three.

I keep sliding sideways on my siped tires. In other words, the nonhomogeneous surface treatment of my tires results in a unidirectionally consistent coefficient of friction on the interface plane of my tires and ice. A three dimensional pressure plot on the interface plane of a studded tire and ice, with the pressure scale running orthogonal to this plane, would result in a fairly omnidirectional friction distribution.
I dunno why I didn’t consider this before buying the stupid things. Its studs for me from here on out.

Who does this?  I went like three days without taking a shower and then I washed my hair, rinsed and repeated ONCE.  But usually I shower once a day, and one shampooing does the trick every time.  The shampoo company puts on the instructions to repeat the washing “as needed” as if people need to do this regularly.  Is this true?  I mean, once your hair is clean, it is clean, right?  Is there any added benefit to sudsing up your head if its already clean?  I’m not talking about conditioner, or coloring shampoo — just the regular stuff.  I think its a plot.

Thanks to Woot.com, we will be getting a TV sooner than expected.  Since there is no room elsewhere in our new apartment, our desktop computer will reside in the entertainment cabinet hooked up to the TV.  The cabinet we found is absolutely perfect, size wise.  The only problem will be ventilation.  I noticed the Xbox fans spinning up faster than I’ve ever heard them go, and I know these units are prone to overheating, so I have devised a cooling scheme involving computer case fans mounted into the back of the cabinet, sucking air through the front and exhausting out the back.

Here is the cabinet

entertainment cabinet

Here is a sketch of the ventilation system.  The irony is that I just threw away all my spare computer fans.  But I have the microcontroller and speed controllers.

sketch

Depending on the power draw from the fans, I might just be able to speed control them with PDM right out of the microprocessor.  But if they draw too much power for that, I’ll have to use the motor controller boards (cheap anyway).  The cool thing is that I’ve already coded a microprocessor to patch thermistors readings out the PWM channels, and controlling motors in response using a separate motor controller.  I think this is a really cool application, I’m excited.  Also, I should be getting a full Solidworks 2011 soon, which makes it easy (easier than 2010)  to do a nice fluid dynamic analysis.  This will determine optimal fan placement to maximize airflow.  The airflow analysis setup will actually be tricky since the computer has fans (of unknown CFM) in it, too.

This is awesome….

He is using “comedic summary.”  Missionaries never told me I was going to hell, and when I was a missionary I never told that to anyone.  That’s the kind of judgement God forbids most people from making.  But there is a bit of true doctrine in there LDS people will recognize.

I already knew Jesus Christ from my childhood, but when I heard similar doctrine from the missionaries I wondered why I wasn’t better off ignorant.  Its a natural question.  Just like all legit questions there is an answer, and it didn’t take long at all for me to figure it out.  Do you know?

The website has undergone a visual transformation.  Most of the content is the same, but a different interface is much cooler I think.  I have added more examples of my design work in the “portfolio” section, and added a few Powerpoints and another philosophy paper in the “school work” section.  The portfolio additions aren’t formatted nicely, but its all up there.  The overhaul is aimed at making it easy for prospective employers to see my work.

Please take a gander (GregKelley.org) and give me ANY feedback by commenting on this blog poast.  It will possibly help get me a job!

Holly made a pot of potato soup on Wednesday.  She calculated that it cost about $3, and we’ve been eating it every day, adding milk, potato flakes, ham and red pepper flakes to make it stretch until payday.  Sometimes its fun being poor.  Especially since Holly can make things taste soo good.  And she’s done a really great job building a food storage and freezing dinner left overs.  So, we haven’t been able to shop for a while now, but we’re doing just fine because of the bounty we have been blessed with.  I don’t wish to paint a dire picture of poverty, we are just between school and job, and want to be as frugal as possible since there is no income.  We always live so comfortably, and have everything we need.  Life is good.

done.

did it.

I took my last examination today.  It was a philosophy final.  Last week I took a fine arts final (which was a joke), turned in my final nanocomposites paper, presented the engineering design project to a Boeing representative, and gave the final advanced CAD presentation.  That’s it!  I am half expecting something to happen to stop me from actually getting my diploma.  It is just too good to be true.

It is often said, and generally expected that serving a full-time church mission is the hardest thing to accomplish.  This has never been true for me.  Maybe I had an especially easy mission, it was Baltimore, MD.  It is probably middle on the difficulty scale of locations.  But the difficulty is usually psychological, social, sometimes spiritual.  Well, school is definitely the hardest thing I have ever done.  I’m not a fabulous “book learner” even though I think I have an aptitude for the subject.  I started at Tacoma Community College in 2003 with one math 90 class.  I eased into my formal educational career, beginning in earnest with college level classes in January 2004.  The last 6.5 years have been very difficult.  It is the longest continuous effort I have ever made on a single thing.

There are still loose ends I have to take care of at school.  Still obligations, almost deadlines.  I have to be sure the engineering design project gets shipped to the client.  I have to collect all my belongings from the ASME office, ASME shop, and the student access shop.

And now I stand on a precipice.  I had to look up how to spell that.  Turns out a precipice denotes a place of great peril.  That’s not how I mean it, but precipice seems like the right word.  I mentioned this yesterday and someone asked which way I would fall.  I don’t know.   Holly and I are hoping a job will place us in the Puget Sound area, around family and schooling for her.  We will stay in Pullman for now, while the job search continues, and move for sure sometime in August.

Its 3/14. At almost two o’clock today it was 3/14 1:59.27. At that moment, the earth’s average circumference was 3.14159265 times its average diameter. Also, amazingly, the average diameter of the Earth’s orbit around the sun was 1/3.14159265 times the distance Earth traveled since 3/14 1:59.27 last year.
Weird huh?
Pi day only happens once a year, but its magnitude is a function of no variables, time least of all. if there is one mathematical constant you know, it should be Pi.
With this in mind, I present Pi cup. Pi cup was created in the company of Holly and her parents - Dave and Faye - when they treated us to a fun filled afternoon in The Dancing Paintbrush in Poulsbo.

Tada.