Thursday, September 27, 2007

snap

i think that most people declare the end of summer in seattle when you wake up in the morning for the first time and there’s fog or light rain. When you have to wipe the condensation off of the windows and the side view mirrors before you drive off for the day. When you have to actually think about wearing some fleece when you leave the house before 10AM.

then of course there’s the scientists that would say that summer ended exactly on september 24th, because that date corresponds to a particular position of the earth in it’s orbit around the sun.

my criteria has always been a little different however

when i walked out of the house this evening to go home depot, i got hit by this sudden, intense flash of mental imagery. the briefest scene of the halls of gastineau elementary around thanksgiving. the dark, the fluorescent lights, the cold, the warmth, the colors, orange and brown and red, the smells. it’s something that happens every few years on the right day, triggered by something environmental, that comes unbidden, but amazingly comforting. it’s a kind of crispness to the air that’s difficult to describe. maybe a particular smell. i often think it’s the color of the sky at the horizon, right before the sun goes down, but since i got the sudden nostalgic feeling tonight when I left the house after dark, so that couldn’t be it.

that feeling comes and then i start to think about october as a kid in juneau. trick or treating. it comes so quickly on the heels of the first image that it’s almost reflexual (if that’s even a word). i miss alaska. it was a good place to be a kid.

once, the same thing happened when i left the union during my sophomore in colllege. i actually wrote something about that for a class. i wish i could find that file. i was kinda proud of it.

incidentally, i’m watching the premier of bionic woman at the moment. i’m reserving judgement until a future episode, but they cast the chick that plays starbuck on battlestar galactica, so it’s off to a good start at least

Posted by sand at 07:20:52 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

why?

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

why are people always telling me to ‘be safe’?

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

funk that

Miller, Zane B says:

lol

Miller, Zane B says:

maybe we should start a new trend

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

I’ll keep in *dangerous* fools

Miller, Zane B says:

tell everybody to be reckless

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

I just invinted a new saying:

Miller, Zane B says:

or careless

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

yes

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

“be dangerous”

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

and “empty chambers!”

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

Russian Roulette ref

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

I think it’ll catch on here pretty soon

Miller, Zane B says:

this old guy at the diesel shop last week said to me

Miller, Zane B says:

after telling me that he was in the nazi concentration camps as a kid

Miller, Zane B says:

and that he did crazy stuff later on

Miller, Zane B says:

and that he imported the first mazeratis and ferraris to the states

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

I guess he would have a *valid* excuse for acting out

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

rad

Miller, Zane B says:

well, that’s what lead up to our parting remarks

Miller, Zane B says:

as i left he said to me

Miller, Zane B says:

“enjoy your youth!”

Miller, Zane B says:

“give it hell!”

Miller, Zane B says:

i fear that i am not giving it hell

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

I’m keepin` it luke-warm

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

lately

Miller, Zane B says:

his stories were so extraordinary that either he had an unbelievable life or he’s good at making stuff up.

Miller, Zane B says:

but i dont think it matters

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

not really

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

old guy stories are the best

Miller, Zane B says:

that advice should prolly be heeded just the same

Cawthorne, Christopher D says:

no doubt

my plan now is to someday open a chinese restaurant, nevermind that i am neither chinese nor a good cook. it’ll be called budha belly. that way for my television and radio commercials my catch phrase can be

“who da belly?

BUDHA BELLY!”

that is all…

Posted by sand at 09:05:45 | Permalink | Comments (6)

Thursday, July 27, 2006

actually i forgot something

the other thing that occured to me is, maybe it’s a function of which bits are loose and “external”.  having pants or underwear on, lends a feeling of security or something.keeps everything in the correct place, regardless of what position you happen to throw yourself into during the night.

just a thought.

Posted by sand at 00:33:10 | Permalink | No Comments »

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

gender equality in sleeping attire

i did something kinda weird today. when i was changing back into my regular clothes after going to the gym, i put on my shirt before pulling on my pants. i’m sure a lot of ppl couldnt care less which order their clothes go on, but it was enough of an anomoly for me to consciously take notice of.


topless

i thought “the only time I ever put my shirt on before my pants is if i’m actually going to have to tuck it in” (i.e. virtually never). i think this is pretty typical of guys. pants first, shirt second. the thought occurred to me then, not for the first time that its a lot like sleepwear. how today at any rate, men tend to or are often depicted as sleeping shirtless, while women usually forgo the bottoms and sleep in a t-shirt. until this morning, however, i had never really contemplated the reason for that. i imagine this is probably a function of which part of our bodies are considered accetable to show, even in a lockerroom. guys are allowed to go shirtless and women are expected to show some leg.

i expect i will be shamed and ridiculed for making such generalities. especially since i have absolutely nothing except personal experience to base them on…


bottomless? victoria’s secret. honestly, i did not go strait to that website to find a photo.

Yesterday a guy standing a few urinals down from me was coughing his lungs out, but he never took a hand up from his crotch to cover hist mouth and really give it a good hack. Why did he need both hands? It’s like he was checking himself for a hernia. turn and cough.

Posted by sand at 03:26:37 | Permalink | Comments (1) »

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

sharon stone wont get it

a fresh experience.  whaddya know?  i’m gonna skip the preamble because its 12:45AM.  i know it will make it less interesting, but whatEV!  you can skip to the underwear picture if u want. 

class last night was on biomechanics.  at the end of the class we broke into groups to discuss a hypothetical design problem.  during this discussion, being the only mechanical engineer in our group, i was showing the others the stress strain curve for skin and explaining how it’s different from non-biological materials like metal.  blah-blah.


note that there are two linear regions.  ahhhhh, composites!  gotta love ‘em!  text is color coded to match the protiens in the next figure.

for the non-chumps out there that had better things to do then spend 2 years in mechanics and materials classes, this graph describes how a material deforms under load.  where the slope is shallow, it will stretch more with just a little bit more stress (i.e. force).  where it’s steeper, the material is much stiffer and it takes progressively much more load to strain the material an equivalent amount.


late night playing with fireworks.  the program, not the pyrotechnics.  at least it has colors!

the reason skin has a two phase curve like that is due to it’s composite nature.  there are two main extra-cellular protein fibers that make up skin:  elastin and collagen.  the elastin fibers are in blue and are always aligned.  they behave basically like a rubber band and are very elastic.  hence the name.  the red lines represent the collagen fibers, which are all normally all bunched up.  as you pull on skin, the elastin elongates (first part of curve) and it moves easy, until the collagen fibers finally align to take the load (second part of curve) at which point it gets much stiffer.  if you reach that point, you’re gonna be howling in pain.


danielle may be getting a pair of these in the future.

anyways, facinating as i’m sure that is, i was sketching these same things out on the back of a piece of paper and explaining the mechanism as i went along.  everybody got it i think, but it was still poorly drawn and described enough that even i wasnt sure i had gotten it right.

standing in the shower after i got home tonight, i thought of a pretty good analogy and a better way to describe the system.  think of the structure of skin as the elastic waistband in your favorite pair of underwear.  in this model, the elastin is represented by the latex strands and the collagen is represented by the cotton treads.  sitting in your drawer, the latex is unstrained and the cotton is all bunched up, but when you pull them up over your ass, the latex stretches out and the cotton fibers start to line up.  this is the 1st part of the stress-strain curve above.  depending on how big your ass is, you may completely align the cotton in the waistband at which point, the cotton fibers take over the load and the amount force necessary to stretch them just a little bit becomes significantly higher.  that’s the 2nd slope in the stress strain-curve above.  now if you were unlucky enough to have bought some underwear that was too small, you may just stretch those cotton fibers to failure and rip the fabric.  that’s the little trailing end of the curve up there.  (i strained the crotch of my jeans this weekend to failure.  i’m still not sure how that happened.)

and there you have it!  an analogy for the microscopic structure of skin that anybody can understand.  unless you’re sharon stone and you dont wear underwear.


aaaaah sharon stone.  you made a man out of me.  or u would have if mom and dad had let me see the movie…  fortunately, we have the wikipedia for the full shot.  i still cling to the illusion that this is an all ages site.

see this is why i never get around to writing the car stuff.  crap like this gets in the way.

Posted by sand at 09:32:49 | Permalink | Comments (7)

Friday, October 21, 2005

chills

something interesting and unexpected just happened this morning.  i am sitting here, looking at pictures of some parts that I DESIGNED that were actually fabricated.  these things that i put together in virtual space now have a physical existence beyond charged transistors on a chip.  i’m sure i’ll get jaded eventually, but right now… it’s pretty cool.
Posted by sand at 16:00:00 | Permalink | Comments (8)

Friday, October 14, 2005

proof of my nerdiness… i mean worthiness

sunday… i’d say about 90% of the people who were there on saturday for the wedding showed up for breakfast the next morning at the same restaurant where we had the reception.  at breakfast, george gave me his copy of our sophomore high school yearbook and said that it contained condemning evidence.

in that vein, i’m in trouble with d for that last post.  “i married a jock?  i thought i was marring a nerd!“  well, that and she’s mad about the pic of the busty lady  below.

to alleviate the latter concern, i have changed the picture.  to alleviate the former, i present some of that condemning evidence below.


ahhhh, there he is.  glasses and all.  no bling here alex


and another one that i’m sure will surprise most of you.


i’ve heard that some chicks dig a man in uniform.

yeah, that’s right.  ROTC baby.  i actually look pretty good in a uniform.  alas, asthma.  oh well.  eyesight would have kept me out of flying anyways.

Posted by sand at 06:41:29 | Permalink | Comments (8)

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

joss whedon is my master now

case was right all along…

Here is the result of your Jock Purity Test.

You answered “yes” to 34 of 98 questions, making you 65.3% jock pure (34.7% jock corrupt); that is, you are 65.3% pure in the jock domain (you have 34.7% jock in you).

Your Weirdness Factor (AKA Uniqueness Factor) is 33%, based on a comparison of your test results with 90586 other submissions for this test.



The average purity for this test is 60.6%.

The first submission for this test was received March 4, 1996.


i was gonna put a pic in here of a jock, but i swear to god, every image that popped up on google looked like gay porn.  so, instead, i present… straight porn.  this ones for the guys in the audience… well, the straight ones.

i am a jock.  a failed jock, but a jock none-the-less.  friday before last, that was abundantly clear, when we went to opening night for serenity.  if u’re not familiar with it, its based on a 14 episode sci-fi cum western series that ran for about a half season on fox about 2 years ago called firefly.  it was created by joss whedon, the guy who created buffy the vampire slayer.  anyways, the number of long-haired, trench coat clad geeks and dorks in line for the movie rivaled the population of the microsoft campus in redmond.  i felt thoroughly out-nerded, standing there in my stab city t-shirt and emerica baseball cap.  danielle and i were two of the only people there not carrying some kind of movie paraphernalia.  i felt… inadequate…  uncool somehow.  i mentioned this to a girl i know and she said, “well, now u’re just cool in another way.”  she implied i looked too hardcore for the crowd.  whatever the hell THAT means.


most of them werent this cool

so, what are we doing THIS friday?


jocks in their own right.  aren’t u jealous bro?

going to see the last roller derby of the season for the rat city rollergirls.  alex tells us that we are obligated to root for the sockit wenches, which i think is appropriate given my aspirations to being a gearhead.  that having been said, i’m gonna root for kim reaper of the derby liberation front, just cause i think she’s kinda hot.


oh, and the movie is friggin’ AWESOME!

Posted by sand at 08:15:11 | Permalink | Comments (5)

Friday, September 30, 2005

interlude: wtf do u do for a living again?

i seem to have strayed a bit from the “nerd humor” pretext of this blog.  i’d say that i’m revisiting it now, but then… well, at least its kinda nerdy.


oops!

while this news comes almost as late as the news on the wedding, apparently on sept 22nd, a jetblue A320 busted an axle on the nose landing gear.

so richie sends us an email with a bunch of photos similar to the one below of the broken front axle.


sheared like a sheep!  that is, the axle failed in shear.  u can tell from the 45 degree angle of the material.  but u knew that…

of course this promts tanju to shoot back with.

From: Bayramoglu, Tanju J (GE Energy)

Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 1:18 PM

To: ANDERSON RICHARD C; Romas; Zane Miller

Subject: RE: Jet Blue at CAL hanger in LAX



Zane,

I hope thats not indicative of your work….you do work on landing gear right?

well… sorta…

to clarify things, i says to young TJ:

—

From: Miller, Zane B

Sent: Wednesday, September 27,  2005 1:30 PM

To: ANDERSON RICHARD C; Romas; Bayramoglu, Tanju J  (GE Energy)

Subject: FW: FYI: A320 - LAX - Sep  21



nah, actually, its the stuff like that axle jack they have proping it up.  ground support equipment for removal and installation/maintainence of landing gear components.

 

and, i’d say its not indicative of my work.  not because my work is anything spectacular, or even reliable for that matter, but because it’s an airbus airplane and we don’t have much to do with those.

eventually, somebody sent out some more pix, which i dutifully passed on to
tanju, richie and romas.  richie is a dilligently curious lad, so he was prompted to ask the following question of me.

—

From: ANDERSON RICHARD  C

Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2005  3:02 PM

To: Miller, Zane B; Romas; Bayramoglu, Tanju J (GE  Energy)

Subject: RE: FYI: A320 - LAX - Sep 21

 

Zane, what is typically done to get the aircraft off of the run way  after a situation like this one occurs?  Do they simply jack it up, put  spare tires on them?  I assume the aircraft of this size weights about a  100 tons or more?

ahhh!  excellent question lad!  and perfect material for a blog post!  well, since you asked…

—

From: Miller, Zane B

Sent: Wednesday, September 28,  2005 4:30 PM

To: ANDERSON RICHARD C; Romas; Bayramoglu, Tanju J  (GE Energy)

Subject: FW: FYI: A320 - LAX - Sep  21



the maintenance and ground operations systems group (MGOS), of which my group is a part, maintains a series of manuals called airplane recovery documents (ADR’s).  there’s at least one for each major model (737, 777, etc) and probably ones for the minor models as well (737-900, 777-200).  these describe recover operations for when an airplane has a landing gear failure.  if the tire blows, then yeah, they do just jack it up and pull the wheel.  not too tough really.  there are commercially available axle jacks like the one you see in these pix that are rated up to 150 tons. 

 

http://www.malabar.com/

 

the one in those pix is proably a 10 or 20 ton hand jack.

 

of course, u’re not supporting the whole weight of the AP on just one wheel, so that’s sufficient.  otherwise, they can actually jack the airplane with tripod jacks on jackpads that are installed on hardpoints on the fuselage and then the whole gear can be removed.  depending on the airbus unscheduled maintanence procedures for the A-320, that may be what they have to do, since the entire axle seems to have sheered off and i dont know what components are individually replaceable.  it looks like they can just pull the axle on that side wihtout having to resort to jacking the nose of the AP.

notice how i never actually answered his question…


remember not to fail in shear.  god this looks dirty to me…

Posted by sand at 08:58:38 | Permalink | Comments (7)

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

inertia

if i have a superpower, it’s the power of procrastination.  i gotta  appopligize to the legions of faithful fans that religiously check this blog daily for updates.  long ago, there was a computer game called populous that was adapted for the sega genesis as a two player game.  the  gyst is, you play god over a world map.  you have the power to raise and  lower land masses and manipulate the weather, etc, and you gain points  from then number of followers u have vs the other guy.  we always played this game over at the house of jason guthrie so one day when i was  challenging him, my brother case, who is infinitely more clever than i, chirstened our clans the “guthronians” and the “millerites“

if i ever run for office, my followers shall be called millerites.  in the interim, i may begin start using that term to refer to the 5 ppl who read this blog.

anyways, as most of u know, newton’s first law of motion tells us interia is the tendency of a body in motion to stay in motion and a body at rest  to stay at rest.  the greater the inertia of an object, the greater the force required to speed it up or slow it down or change it’s direction.  i  have high inertia.  it takes me a long time to get started doing  something.  a LONG time.  but once i get going and gain some momentum, i  feel antsy to keep doing stuff even once i’m finished with the orginal  task.

take, for instance, the events since i last updated. for the last two weeks,  our friend bill was visiting and danielle’s dad showed up here last  saturday.  for months the motorcycle has been sitting in the garage  awaiting my attention, fence posts have been standing lonely in the back  yard awating slats and the FC had multiple problems begging for attention.


say goodbye. i sold it WAY to low.  $400 on craigslist.  over 50 emails in 1 hr.  gone that evening.  oh well…

when bill got here, we finished the fence and paved the garbage can areas  in two days.  dan showed up and the motorcycle was fixed and sold in one.   we worked on the house and the FC until 10:30 at night because it was day  light out until then, and nasty looks of elderly pedestrians aside, nobody cared that we had the car up on jackstands in the street.  bringing that south avondale feeling back to ballard.

the force of their presence and me not wanting to look like a lazy bastard in comparison drove me to finally get all that stuff finished.  well…  that and they’re both much better mechanics/carpenters/plumbers then i can ever hope to be.  they did most of the work…

the other force at work here was that the passenger side doorlock on the FC finally went bad on me.  the drivers didnt work when i got the car so when the door was locked, i had to open the passenger side, stick my head in the car and reach accross to open the drivers side door with my ass sticking out the right side.  i was down in ballard when it finally  decided to break and had to call danielle and bill to come down and bring  me a broom handle.  i opened the rear hatch and reached forward with the  stick to pop the lock on the drivers side.  i would have been perfectly  content to continue doing that forever, except that the FC has a built in  security system that pops the lights and sounds the horn when the door is  opened with out the key dissabling the alarm.  this i learned standing in front of sunny teriyaki in downtown ballard.  obviously the pure evil of ethnic japanese food prepared by koreans was enough to finally cause the lock to fail.

meanwhile, it looks like the bombing in london is being used by the conservatives to further implement the set of gestapo enabling laws otherwise known as the patriot act.  so now, unpopular, unconstitiutional  provisions that were due to expire are probably not only going to be renewed, they’ll most likely be expanded as well.  this is so 1984, its  killing me thinking about it.  i’m glad amanda wasnt around when it happened.

i wonder how case is enjoying hurricane season in florida.

Posted by sand at 07:31:45 | Permalink | Comments (8)