Abby built that entire tower of Duplo Blocks pretty much on her own tonight. I built a short wide base and she very carefully and deliberately stack the very tall thin tower of blocks. The best part was when she had a block in both hands, as she attempted to stack the block in her right hand she realized she had grabbed the block upside-down. Rather than dropping the block in her left hand to help adjust the right hand block she put the miss-grasped block in her mouth adjusted her grasp on it and then placed is successfully on the tower follow shortly by the block in her left hand. Watching the intensity and focus with which she went about her building was very cool.

Enjoy!

I got to purchase an HGU-55 flight helmet for a project at work.



Fun Fun!

If I have an communicable decreases everyone in the company probably has it now. I am pretty sure everyone has put that helmet and mask on. Most have also walked around the office looking like a goof-ball giggling like a school girl.

It appears that Mechwarrior 5 will be set early enough to be all inner sphere, no lousy clans. And it appears that at least some of the old classic chassis are back. I thought Battletech had lost the rights to the Warhammer mech (the mech who's perspective you are viewing from in the video.)

I haven't bought a new computer game in many years and the only new game I have played recently was Halo 2 my brother got me for Christmas. If this games becomes reality I will be spending money on it. No doubt with much consternation from GFWTR. The game, a new video card and a good joystick.

ETA: Apparently they will be giving away Mechwarrior 4 free as a way to generate interesting in the new game. BattleTech.com supposedly will have it for download "shortly".

-Abby was up relatively early this morning.

-Off to the the Ohio BMV for a new drivers license. Service was surprisingly fast and friendly.

-No internet access at work and more detrimental to getting work done, no network server so I could not run my CAD software (network license) or access the main color printer.

-In the absents of real work progress:
--I made a stainless steel bushing for the clutch of my poor old lawn tractor
--I also fix a Co-worker's nephew's RC truck that has been sitting in my office for two months

-Left work early (since I was not getting any real work accomplished) and got a new set of Hankook tires put on the Element.

-Got home played with Abby when I could drag her away from the mother-in-law.

-Got Abby ready for bed and then washed bottles.

-Use above mentions stainless steel bushing and a few other parts to rebuild the failing clutch in my poor old lawn tractor.

-Cleaned all three guns from the 3-gun match. (Eugen Stoner is still a filthy engineer)

-Came upstairs to find an email stating that I have receive notice of award of my first Phase II program with the DoD (Army specifically) as PI!!!

So I have have been really busy lately with work and taking two extra days of vacation last week to make the long weekend really long. I got to spend time with Abby and do some shooting.

Well, Friday we finally finished the majority of the electrical work and mounted the turbine blades. This let us generate power for the first time. The wind was not real good, of course, so not much power was generate but we are getting close to finishing the system. We still have some loose ends to tie up but we will hopefully have the system up and running next week. The last major system to be finished is the close-loop controller that will keep the truss, that support the four turbines, facing into the wind. That is an active system and we are still tuning up the controller.

( Anyway, a bit more rambling, photos and a short video clip behind this cut. )

http://www.qik.com/video/1657574

Check out the above link. Jump to about 5:30 left in the video. The first 26 minutes are pretty boring.

I mentioned the CSU Wind Turbine Structure I have been managing the construction of in a previous post or two, I think. Well the structure was lifted onto the roof this morning. Everything went pretty good. The complete system should be up and running hopefully by early June. I will try to post some good still pictures and a better video. I was on the roof for the pick the above video was shot by someone else.

So we pulled the pictures from dad's game camera this weekend. We were suppose to work on the bulldozer this weekend but the bearings were not available in time. So we moved the game camera and took down 3 of the deer stands. The deer stands needed a little work and moving them off the trees keeps that from damaging the trees. Also getting them down before the bulldozer is done will save them from my uncle. He's going to be like a little kid with a new toy when that think is operational and so getting them out of his way seemed like a good idea. None the less I made a moderately large animated gif of the nearly three weeks worth of photos. You will see just a few deer in the pictures I was mostly trying to get empty photos to show the growth of the skunk cabbage in the small swamp in the background.

( 5MB animated gif behind cut )

Not sure if I posted about this before or not? My uncle bought an old bulldozer at the beginning of the year. It's an old Allis Chalmers HD-11 and I am guessing this particular one was built in the late 50's early 60's. When my uncle bought it he knew it has a bad bearing in the main left idler wheel. Well this weekend we began the work to get that idler off so it can be rebuilt with a new bearing.

Every thing is big on this thing, at work I mostly do little things. I rarely use screws much bigger than #6 and frequently use #0-80 (think eye glass screws) for things. Nearly every bolt we touched Saturday used a wrench or socket bigger than one inch. On the main screw that tensions the track we had to use a 1 7/8 inch wrench and an old car bumper jack to turn it.

So for this first go around we managed to get the blade of the crawler and get everything block up the way we wanted so that when we break the track we will be able to roll that main idler off and pick it up with a tractor while still supporting the rest of the 21,000lbs crawler. After all this prep work we tried to drive the master pin out of the track and despite most of a can of penetrating oil, prodigious amount of heat with an oxy-acetylene torch and some serious persuasion with a 16lb sledge hammer the pin refused to move. That stymied our progress but it was not bad work for the first day at it. My shoulders and back were sore Sunday and even today.

My uncle is trying to track down a hydraulic tool to drive that pin out. We'll be back at it in a couple weeks. I am really looking forward to getting to drive it after the repairs are done.

( pictures behind the cut )

In my surfing around the web for a new author to explore I found the following website.

http://www.literature-map.com/

Plug in an author you like and it will give you spacial map with other authors you might like. The closer the authors the more likely you are going to like them.