Mar 23

Zombie Jesus

adventure, blahblahblah, chaos, motorcycle Add Comment (1)

Happy Zombie Jesus day! Hopefully he won’t see his shadow and winter will be over soon.

OK, I just bought my ticket to hell there, but what the hey?

Regardless, here I am, 5:30 in the morning, sorting out my favorite pounding tracks for inclusion on my beat up iPod shuffle. I’m planning on going on a motorcycle ride tomorrow up in the hills, roads willing, and I wanted something thumping. I’ve been running Debian on my laptop here and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the iPod was reconized when I plugged it in. I rather expected an hour or two of futzing with it before anything worthwhile happened.

I hope to be down in NM soonish to wrap up some house stuff. Email if you are interested in stopping in and I’ll let you know when.

I know there have been no updates in a while, but I just have not felt inspired. I still don’t know the area up here all that well, except for my commute and the few tangents here and there, and it has been driving me nutty. Just the same interstate commute every day. The bike seems to love the 85+mph rides into work most days, though, and my fuel mileage stays firmly above 40MPG for the most part regardless.

Work has sucked up all my creativity, but probably for a good thing. I’ve been busy crunching out the daily emergency basket case and that really saps thought. Always fun to come in, and discover that someone needs a display adapter, and depsite knowing I was out of half the parts, I didnt bother to order them last time. I had to make some brackets, so I employed the CNC this time around, and chunked out 24 of them. Every 7 minutes for an entire day the CNC would start beeping frantically, asking that I feed it another block of stock so it could drill 4 holes and etch a part number.

My work load is varied, that is for sure. From mechanical design, to machine shop work, to electronic design to optics and system repairs, day to day I have no clue what I will find next. A couple of weeks ago I walked in to find half the staff home sick, and Brian needing me to take a whack at tuning up an old style CO2 laser. I’d seen them before, but never so much as turned one on. A day later I knew it inside and out and had it working well, optics aligned coaxial, tube calibrated for power at all modes, the whole works.

The project I have been spending some time on is building a Q-switch driver. Basically, I need to design a device that can shunt 3200 volts to a 6 pF load in under, say, 500 picoseconds. Yum. Oh, and it has to be entirely solid state and fit into a 4 x 6 x 1 inch area. The good news is that I have a design that works perfectly in inital testing, so now I am busy working up Gerbers for the board design. Last week I built up a cute little board with a microcontroller and etc to do automated unit testing of this board. It’ll run 7 different tests on the Q-switch over and over and report pass/fail. I felt particularily clever as it automatically calibrates on unit connection, builds a calibration table, and then measures each and every shot, plus it continously monitors current draw and shuts the whole thing down if something bad happens. Go me.

All in all, it is shaping up to be an interesting year. If I make it through, I think next year will be a fantastic year. One step at a time and all.