Durf's excellent adventure.

I was going to blog about heros today, until I decided that I'd better say more about my micro-movie adventure yesterday.

It all started a couple of years ago when I realized that most major studmuffins wear bling. I began to wonder if I were the only one who wasn't. But it seemed like it would be a significant change, since I didn't even start wearing my wedding ring all the time until three years ago, when the springs in the couch started to poke through.

Twila and I were shopping in NYC a while ago when we saw a guy wearing earrings. Twila smiled and said to me, "Too bad you're the wrong color for that." The guy looked good, though, so I thought about it more.

Yesterday was the appointed day. I told Twila I'd do it, even if I weren't in the mood at the moment. We drove to Longmont and I let Kaiser drain off some of my blood, then we went across the street to Piercing Pagoda. It wasn't open yet, so we spent some time looking at the bling. After a while I told Twila that I'd rather wait and do it some other time, but she asked why and I couldn't come up with a good answer.

Finally they opened and I began gasping for air. Fortunately there was another customer, a girl about 13 years old, who went first. She got in the chair and I watched closely. She didn't even flinch. Then the Pagoda girl came over and asked Twila what she wanted. I butted in and pointed to earrings and said, "I'd like them, and I want them installed." There was no turning back at that point, without looking like a studwuss.

That's when my education began. Here was I, a 64-year-old guy, about to learn what most 7th grade girls already know. It turned out to be more than I'd expected.

Speaking of age, the Piercing Pagoda does enforce a minimum age policy. To get a piercing there you have to be at least 2 months old. True. But a child of that age does get special treatment. PP recognizes that after stabbing one of a baby's earlobes, doing the other would be a really big hassle. So they use two piercer persons and stab both lobes at once. I understand the philosophy. That's why I had all my wisdom teeth extracted at the same time.

It was time to hop in the chair. I wasn't nervous at all, even though I seemed to be trembling just a bit. It was a new environment for me.

The Pagoda girl slapped some alcohol on my earlobes and then put a dot on each, kind of a target. She and Twila spent about 5 minutes deciding whether the dots were in the same place on each lobe. I refused to look in the mirror. How would I know? They were the experts. Finally they agreed that the dots were okay.

Pagoda girl asked if I wanted her to count to 3 or just do it. I told her to just do it, because I really didn't want to have to anticipate it too much. I hadn't asked anyone if the piercing hurt, but I had watched the non-flinching girl earlier, and I wasn't too worried. I felt Pagoda girl put something against my lobe, and then she pulled the trigger. It felt like a nail cutting slowly through my skin. I was determined not to flinch, but I probably blanched, at least. Pagoda girl asked if I were okay, and I said, "Why sure! Why wouldn't I be?", as I pushed myself back upright in the chair. The other ear was a lot less painful. The good news was that she didn't have to push earring nails through the freshly torn holes... they were already there. Apparently the piercing gun just shoots the earrings through your ear and then slaps the clutch (new word for me) on the other side.

My education wasn't over, however. I have to wear these studly studs for 4-6 weeks, according to PP, and probably 8 weeks, according to Twila. The older you are, the longer it takes to heal. So for the next couple of months I have to wear the earrings always, even when sleeping. Twice a day I have to put some antiseptic solution on the earring nails and rotate them one full turn. It seems like a lot of work, but I'll do it. Probably mothers do it for their 2nd grade daughters, but I'm on my own.

Actually, I think the earrings look good. I definitely look more studmuffinly. And there are some other advantages, it seems. Yesterday I went to a drugstore and a young woman held the door open for me. She might have been in shock, I confess.

New blog!

We have a new blog, and I mean "we"! You're all invited to participate. Check it out at http://oui-sez.blogspot.com/.

See you there!

Rewound.

Today I declare "TwiDurf in NYC" to have officially ended, except for comments and emergency posts. Twila says she wants to start a new blog along "He Sez, She Sez" lines, but we don't have any real ideas yet about what to talk about.

This has been a lot of fun, and thanks to all of you!

P.S. Jan, are you getting my email?

Rewind.

It just occurred to me that I really don't like writing about myself, and if you aren't already bored with it you soon will be, I promise. The problem is that there are thousands of stories a day in New York and the last story in Loveland was recorded last year.

I thought I might try to keep this blog going, but Twila says she's through and I don't have anything to write about. If you have any suggestions about how to solve this conundrum, please send them to the email address of this blog, whatever it is.

I, Durfbot.

A couple of years ago when I, somewhat reluctantly, became retired, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The pay is horrible, but I really like being able to do whatever I want whenever I want. I did not experience a loss of identity, as I had when I was unemployed for several months in 1980. I could spend hours reading newspapers, then more hours flicking away the day. My failure to produce anything useful did cause some guilt, but I was raised Catholic, so I'm used to that.

I wasn't surprised that I didn't write a novel or create a best-selling iPhone application. Throughout my life I've worked hard for others, but have almost zero personal ambition. I am content to absorb whatever knowledge and pleasure flows my way.

The NuSTAR job was a wonderful experience. Twila and I had a great time, and both of us fell in love with New York City. Getting up in the wee hours and working six days a week was kind of annoying, but it wiped away any guilt I might have felt by goofing off the rest of the time. Not to mention that I was making more money than I'll probably ever make again, or at least until I finish that iPhone app.

Alas, all good things must come to an end (as must all bad things). The time passed quickly, and in a seeming flash it was time to return home to Colorado. That was fine with me. As a bobbing apple on the sea of life, I am used to change. But, there was work to be done. Twila was already in Loveland, so it was up to me to pack the rest of our stuff and get it home. That's when robot mode started.

If I *have* to do something, I just do it. It began gradually and accelerated as the deadline neared. I packed 22 boxes and took them to UPS.

Maybe I need to say something about that. Twenty-two boxes is a lot, but Twila and I weren't able to carry much to NY. Instead, we bought what we needed when we arrived. Before she left NY, Twila shipped back about 6 boxes, including a lot of items related to her business. I shipped many more boxes for two reasons. One is that I had to ship the household items that we shared. The other is that I bought more things in NY. After all, I was making money, and what is money for?

You all know what moving is like. To sum it up, "no fun". As the days wore on, I wandered around our apartment zombie-like, stuffing boxes and cleaning and absolutely determined to do a good job.

That lasted until Twila arrived to drive home with me, and even into the next morning. Then we were on the road. It was as fun a trip back as a non-recreational driving trip can be. But driving up to 10 hours a day for 3 consecutive days is tiring and not without stress. Blessedly, at last we were home.

Then there was the initial unloading of the car and unpacking of boxes and suitcases. After that there were the 4 boxes that I'd shipped first. On Tuesday 10 more boxes arrived (many of them squished and ripped). And today the final 8 boxes appeared.

In addition to the unpacking and trying to figure out where to put everything, I had to register my car, reinstall computer equipment, take care of house maintenance issues, and all the other things that had piled up. I think it will be a couple of weeks, at least, before I can return to my life of useless idleness.

In the meantime, I am a robot. I don't even think about how much I have to do, I just do it. I go from task to task in a semi-trance, almost numb to the exhaustion that's built up over the last few weeks. New hassles don't bother me, they just get put on the pile. I have become a machine.

Brilliant (until 1st round) brackets.

Durf's

Twila's

The beagle has landed.

A very busy day... well, several... lies ahead, but I think it appropriate to take a moment to tell you that last night we arrived safely in Loveland. Besides, my preferred title for this post gives me the opportunity, if not obligation, to name my Outback - Snoopea.

Leaving Tarrytown was a ginormous feat. We arrived there in June with everything packed into my Prius. Before leaving, Twila shipped via UPS 6 medium-sized U-Haul boxes back to Loveland; I managed to pack and ship 22 (mostly medium, some small). Then I folded down the seats in the Outback, smiled at the large amount of space available, and proceeded to pack it completely. It was so full that in the event of a front collision numerous projectiles would have flown forward in a terrifyingly hazardous manner. In the end we couldn't even stuff in a small but nifty waste paper basket that both of us fancied, and several non-food items were stuffed in our cooler (which we forgot to ice).

After final jamming on Friday morning, we dropped the keys off at the manager's office and hit the road. Well, tapped the road might be a more apt description. A major artery near us had been closed because of flooding, and the street outside the apartment complex was filled with bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go westbound traffic. Cleverly, we turned east and circled around most of that traffic, only to not-so-cleverly miss our turnoff. Searching for another way around the mess we ended up in Dobbs Ferry, which at the time could more accurately be described as No Man's Land. To cross the Hudson meant a huge amount of traffic in either direction from there, so we adapted by getting lattes.

Finally we did reach the Tappan Zee bridge and our long trip began. It was annoying at first, because the Outback only had 300 miles on the odometer, and use of cruise control was advised against during the 1000-mile break-in period. Being virtually wed to the concept of cruise control, I found having to use my foot to control the accelerator while simultaneously having to monitor speed to be painfully retro. I did get to 800 miles before starting to cheat, though.

We spent the first night in Youngstown, Ohio, and the second in Altoona, Iowa. We arrived in Loveland at 6 PM Sunday, though with the changes in time zone combined with the switch to daylight saving time, it could have been 5 or 7:30 PM.

Hopefully Twila will overcome her blogophobia long enough to fill in some of the blanks. I'm off to rediscover my home.

NYC, I hardly got to know ye.

I just started the last dish laundry and am about to disconnect the cable modem to return it. Twila will be taking off in 1 hour, if all goes well.

Catch y'all on the flip-flop!

Vacuum doesn't suck, Part 3.

I apologize for scooting through this thread, but Twila and I will be driving home on Friday and things have busified. It would be fun (for me, maybe not for you :p ) to talk about other kinds of vacuum pumps, but I'll jump ahead to leak detection.

With luck, our vacuum chamber pumped quickly down to high vacuum. But luck? - hah! Suppose we can't pump to a low enough vacuum, or suppose the vacuum rises too quickly when we close the pump valve? We have a leak, and the fun begins.

Remember that we aren't talking about big globs of air in the chamber, we're talking about scattered molecules. It doesn't take many new ones to affect the pressure. Gas molecules are very small and there will always be a few getting in somehow, but not all vacuum leaks are leaks.

I'm at a machine that is not reaching the required vacuum. Once I've verified that the plug is in the wall, the pumps are running, and the ON/OFF switch is in the ON position, three possibilities pop into my cranial vacuum:
1) There is a leak. Gas molecules are getting into the chamber from the outside.
2) Outgassing is occurring. Some things, such as water vapor, are extremely difficult to pump. Or there might be a contaminant in the chamber that is releasing molecules.
3) There is a virtual leak. There might be, for example, a tiny crack somewhere inside the chamber. At atmospheric pressure, air eventually fills the crack. When the chamber is pumped, air leaks from that crack at a slow rate that mimics a leak from the outside.

There are ways to diagnose and deal with #2 & #3. For example, pump long enough and both problems will resolve. We'll assume first that there is a real leak.

It's interesting to have a large chamber with portholes and fittings and o-rings and welds, and to know that somewhere there is something wrong that could be invisible to the naked eye. How will we go about it? The first step is to check obvious things. Bolts on any portholes should be properly tightened so the o-rings between them and the chamber are not distorted. The action of the mechanical pump - which will become the backing pump - should be checked by seeing if the pumping time to crossover (from mechanical pump to high vacuum pump) is typical. Seals that open and close, such as the bottom of a bell jar, should be checked for the proper amount of vacuum grease, if appropriate. O-rings should not be twisted. If all of those things are okay, we bring out the big gun - a leak detector.

A leak detector is a self-contained device that contains a vacuum pump and a simple mass spectrometer tuned to helium. The pump is connected to a fitting so it can sample gas that has been pumped from the chamber, which is then sent to the mass spectrometer. If any helium is detected in that gas, an alarm sounds.

Once the leak detector is connected and the chamber is pumped, we take a wand and spray helium on the outside of the chamber. Helium is an ideal gas to use because its molecules are very small and will slip through any openings big enough to be considered a leak; and because it won't blow up like the Hindenburg if something goes haywire. If we spray helium where the leak is, it will enter the chamber and then the leak detector, which will alarm and let us know we've found the leak.

One problem is that if too much helium is sprayed, the leak detector could continue to wail for a long while while we aren't really sure when the helium got into the chamber. (I really wanted to write "while while".) So filling the room with helium wouldn't work, although it would be a lot of fun talking.

I guess I have to aside this. If you inhale helium and then talk, your voice will sound like Daisy Duck's. Try it with a big helium balloon sometime. There isn't any danger because helium is non-toxic. If your lungs are full of helium, though, you aren't getting any oxygen, so don't get so carried away with duck talk that you don't take a real breath now and then.

Finding a leak with a leak detector requires releasing a very small amount of helium at the exact location of the leak, which is where the art comes in. I once worked for a company that manufactured custom vacuum equipment, and I had to find a tiny leak in a chamber that was the size of a Hummer. MMMMMMMMM, that was a lot of fun!

State of the project - clarification.

Sorry, I somehow overlooked that "oops" could be taken different ways. FM1 is missing because it was completed. FM2 should be completed on Friday. My own part in all of that ended last week when we were going to only one optic so I could devote myself to packing and, perhaps, sleeping in a bit.

State of the project - FM1.

oops

Vacuum doesn't suck, Part 2.

At atmospheric pressure (like you're in now!), any old fan can pump air out of a chamber. All the air molecules are pressing against each other and trying to expand. The fan blade hits them and pushes them away. But after a while there isn't as much air and the fan struggles. Air is pushing back against the blade, and a lot of those molecules get through.

When air molecules are bumping against each other and pressing in all directions, the pumped stream is called viscous flow. When the air molecules are hitting the walls of the chamber more than they're hitting each other, it's called molecular flow, and a simple fan won't do. What will pump the remaining molecules? Why, yes! Boiling oil!

There are many kinds of vacuum pumps, but one of the most common is called a diffusion pump. They are cylinders with silicone-based oil inside that is boiled by a heating element. They look like this:

The rising oil vapor goes into a device that directs the flow of the vapor back downward.

How does it work? Well, the remaining air molecules in the chamber are zooming around like crazed banshees on speed. Some of them go downward by chance, some hit a wall or another molecule and lose energy, and all of them have to deal with gravity. If they get low enough, the downward-flowing oil vapor pushes them down further. The more-concentrated air at the bottom of the pump is then removed by a simpler pump.

Here is the basic procedure which is used on a lot of vacuum equipment. There is a pump outside the production area (for cleanliness) that is similar to a fan, but the blades spin through oil to reduce leakage. Most of the time that pump, called a mechanical pump, is used to remove whatever molecules are loose in the diffusion pump. When it's time to pump down a chamber, a valve redirects the mechanical pump's action from the diffusion pump to the chamber - if the diffusion pump were exposed to atmospheric pressure, it would be overwhelmed. When the air pressure in the chamber reaches approximately 6% of atmospheric pressure, the mechanical pump switches back to pumping on the diffusion pump, and a large valve opens that exposes the diffusion pump to the chamber, and pumping the molecular flow of air begins.

Just a brief word about measuring vacuum. Atmospheric pressure is about 14.7 pounds per square inch, which is simply the weight of the air on that square inch. On half of a square inch, the weight would be about 7.4 pounds. That's not really handy, since it's area-dependent. So systems are used that measure the weight of the gases independent of area. Imagine that you have a U-shaped tube that has all the air removed and is partially filled with a liquid - mercury, for example. The height of the mercury in each half of the tube would be the same. But if you then opened the top of only one of the tubes, air would press down on the mercury in that side and the other side would rise. The amount that side rises represents the pressure of the air on the other side. It doesn't matter how big the two sides are, as long as they're equal.

Using that method of measurement, standard atmospheric pressure is about 29.92 inches of mercury. Using our U-tube, the airless side of the tube would see the mercury rise that high. That's equivalent to 760 millimeters of mercury (why is this country too dumb to switch to the metric system?). When measuring vacuum, 1 millimeter of mercury is called 1 torr, because "torr" is a lot easier to say than "millimeter of mercury".

If you're still reading, here is the last thing. When we started pumping our chamber, the pressure inside was 760 torr. To reach high vacuum, the pressure has to be reduced to 1/1,000,000 of a torr, and that's kind of low high vacuum. A billionth of a torr is common pressure for many processes.

Okay, only one more of these to go, since time is running out. The last part will be about finding leaks in vacuum equipment, which is probably the most fun part. It was for me, for sure.

Out and about.

When Twila was here in NY she was out exploring several days a week. My own explorations have been somewhat less frequent. If you leave out looking for latte shops, today was the first. I wanted to get my car some highway miles, I had to leave XM radio on for 15 consecutive minutes so it would start working, and I needed something to blog about. So I tacked a map on the wall, closed my eyes, and threw a knife at the map. Ten minutes later I was on my way to Armonk, New York.

One nice part of the trip was that I was in Connecticut awhile. It's always fun to pop into another state, even a U.S. state. There weren't any signs to let me know I was in Connecticut, but I could feel it. I felt... well, insured.

A short while later I was in Armonk. I'd hoped for a sleepy, picturesque village, but Armonk did not fit that bill. I did not, actually, see anything at all to recommend it. There was quite a bit of traffic, including some guy who leaned on his horn behind me even though there were three cars stopped in front of me and no place to go. No place to go also sums up Armonk, IMO, but all those cars must have been going someplace. Maybe they were just trying to get out of town.

My XM radio didn't start working, either. Now I have to find another reason to drive for 15 minutes. I wonder how long it takes to get to Costco.

WIWMWILNY, Part 4.

Certain aspects of this apartment.

Our house in Loveland is big and beautiful and we both love it. I did not want to leave it. When we did leave to drive to NY I was sad. But, somewhat to my surprise, I had no trouble adapting to apartment life. There are a lot of advantages: I don't have to mow the lawn (there is none), I don't have to shovel snow, and I don't have to worry about things breaking (because someone will come and fix them), among other things. But there are parts of this apartment to which I won't mind saying "Goodbye and good riddance!".

- The dishwasher. I swear on my mother's urn that it is the worst dishwasher I have even seen. It is an old Kenmore. Not only is it small, but it is impossible to load efficiently. It's as though it were designed by the devil. It doesn't get dishes clean unless they're clean when you put them in, and it leaves black specks (I don't even want to know).

- The clothes washer and dryer. Only because they're small, not that I don't see an advantage in that. Doing a small laundry every three days seems easier than doing a mondo load every ten days. I won't do that at home for a couple of reasons. First, it won't be as convenient - the appliances are downstairs, not right outside the bathroom. Second, it would be inefficient to use our industrial-sized washer and dryer for teeny loads.

- The bathroom. It's too small, the shower is poor (even though I tried two different handheld shower thingies), and the toilet doesn't flush properly.

- The kitchen sink. Too small, of course. But the worst is that there is no garbage disposal. In 2011? Give me a break! Every once in a while I read some expert's opinion that what you should put in your garbage disposal is: nothing. PFFFFT! It's a convenience, and a big one.

- The kitchen. It's too small.

I still like living here, but I'm really happy to be going home. If Twila were still here... well...

The unblogged blog.

I had a personal journey, so to speak (I hope that isn't too new-agey), a couple of months ago. Readers of this blog were witnesses to it. My posts were atypically (considering everything) emotional, among other things. I thought a lot about blogging about what happened, but ultimately I decided to let it go, perhaps to another blog on another day.

This is not intended to be a tease. I just want to say that if you noticed something different in my posts, there was a reason for it.

State of the project.

It only took one day to repair the damage to FM1. It was ugly, but limited to one layer. Plus, the guys had some (unfortunate) experience at fixing that kind of thing.

I just requested that March 11 be formalized as my last day of work on the NuSTAR project. Unless something happens, that will be the last day of grinding on FM2. Twila will be flying out to drive home with me, which I think is awesome!

State of the project.

It has become almost certain that my last day of work and my last day in NY will be March 11. That's perfect, because it's a Friday. Twila is flying out to drive home with me, and if we leave on Friday we'll be home Sunday evening. I'd planned to tell NuSTAR today that I want to formalize that date, but....

It was a day like any day. I rolled out of bed at 03:30 and hitting the floor woke me up. I was mostly awake when I arrived at the lab. I was unloading FM1 and had turned to put a load bar in a tray, when I heard a disturbing noise. The brake holding the optic in place had slipped, and the optic had rotated and dumped about 8 load bar/strongbacks on the machine base. I noticed shattered glass when I was sorting out the mess.

Only one piece of glass had broken, plus some cracks in the underneath layer. I was calm. It didn't seem a huge deal. I'd seen worse. I texted the powers that be and later talked with Todd, who also was calm. Broken glass or not, life was good. But....

Later I heard from Todd that FM1 experienced another catastrophic crash like the one on Layer 106. A disaster. *** I just found out what happened. The computer controls how far the grinding wheel goes toward the optic. As the layer numbers increase the optic is getting bigger, so the wheel doesn't move as far. FM1 is now on Layer 127, but the number on the computer (which I didn't touch today, BTW :p) was Layer 69. Not good. *** It will take a few days to repair FM1. The ultimate completion date won't change, though, unless FM2 is delayed. Or unless FM1 loses so many days that FM2 catches up with it.

I decided not to say anything today about my last day, considering.

Rhino uncaged!

Our good friend Arthur, who is a Photoshop professional, let the rhino out of its cage!

(I made the link a little smaller for convenience. If you want the huge version, let me know.)

Alternate Bronx Zoo videos.

Tiger

Gorilla

Giraffes

Monkeys 1

Ring-tailed Lemur Monkeys 2

Monkeys 3

Monkeys 4

Monkeys 5

Monkeys 6

Monkeys 7

Monkeys 8

Monkeys 9

Bronx Zoo.

Tiger (video)

[everything is clickable -

if you have trouble playing the videos,

right-click on them and save them.]

Monkeys 1

Monkeys 2

Monkeys 3

Giraffes

Monkeys 4

Gorilla

Monkeys 5

Monkeys 6

Monkeys 7

Monkeys 8

Monkeys 9

Blog fog.

Twila arrived late Friday afternoon. I picked her up at the train station and we came back to the apartment and snacked on veggies. Then we watched TV awhile. I had to go to bed early because Saturday was a workday.

On Saturday morning I picked up a latte for Twila on my way home from work and we relaxed. Then we took the train to Manhattan. It was windy and cold. We went to Ann Taylor and Saks, and then saw "Miss Abigail's guide to Dating, Mating, & Marriage" off-Broadway. One actor was an ex-girl from "The Brady Bunch" and the other was a Mexican guy - the latter was good, the play was tepid, at best, tending toward lame. After the play we walked about 60 blocks and froze our butts off, but had a good dinner at an Indian restaurant.

Sunday we went to a really nice cafe in Irvington (go figure) and had lattes. Then we drove to the Bronx Zoo, which is amazingly close to our apartment. That evening we ate and relaxed.

Today the stupid shuttle came and took Twila away.

WORK: If no disasters happen, my last workday will be March 11. The current plan is for Twila to fly here and for us to drive home together in two days. That plan is very subject to change, depending on circumstances.

Guest Post: Bricks and Bread.

This post has nothing to do with New York, or NUSTAR or anything else related to TwiDurf in NYC. Sorry.

When I was in college, I used to attempt to make bread. Occasionally, it came out OK and was actually edible. More often than not, though, it came out of the oven as a hot, dense mass of baked flour. It was barely edible when it was hot, but as it cooled, it became something more akin to a construction grade brick than food. Those loaves were guaranteed to break your teeth, if not your entire jaw. Needless to say, everyone thought these brick-loaves were rather funny. In our sophomore year, my room mate's parents came to visit for a few days, and I again attempted to make bread, which came out predictably brick-like. Before they left, they went to a local bookstore bought a book for me: "Bake Your Own Bread" by Floss and Stan Dworkin.

In the book, I learned that my problem was probably not getting the yeast going properly by not using hot enough water, and not letting the yeast, salt, sugar (or honey), and water mixture sit long enough. Even better, I learned that all of that kneading I had been doing was unnecessary! If you use a hand-mixer, and you run it for about 10 minutes after you've mixed the liquid ingredients with the first cup or two of flour, it does all of the same work of making the gluten sticky that the kneading does. After that, the only kneading you need to do is whatever it takes to get all of the flour into the dough.

If you want to try it out, here's a challah recipe for you. It's become a tradition for us to make this at Thanksgiving and Christmas. This bread makes really good French Toast.

Ingredients:
Group 1:
2 pkgs active dry yeast
4 teaspoons salt
3/4 cup honey (room temp)
1 3/4 cups hot water (about 125 degF)

Group 2:
2 cups white flour

Group 3:
1 1/4 cups unsaturated oil (e.g., canola, safflower, or soy)
3 large eggs (room temp)

Group 4:
5-6 cups additional white flour (note: up to 3 cups of whole-wheat flour can be substituted for the white flour)

Group 5:
Egg white from one large egg
Poppy or sesame seeds (optional)

Mix the Group 1 ingredients in a large bowl, and let sit for 5-10 minutes until the yeast makes a good foam.
Add the two cups of flour from Group 2, and run your hand mixer for 10+ minutes.
Add the Group 3 ingredients and blend well.
Slowly add the (Group 4) 5-6 cups of additional flour. Don't feel the need to use all 6 cups, the less you use, the lighter the bread will be. Remember, you don't need to do any kneading, so you can leave the dough slightly wetter than you might otherwise.

Cover the bowl and let it sit in a WARM place for 1-2 hours until the dough has doubled in size. If it never doubles, don't worry, it will most likely come out fine in the end. I usually put the bread in an oven and set it to Warm for a few minutes, then turn off the heat. This can be a problem, see below.

After the dough is done rising, or you're done waiting for it, pour it out on a floured board, punch it down, and separate it into however many braids you want to make. I often do three, but sometimes I make 4 on the bottom and 3 smaller braids on top. This recipe is sized for two normal sized loaves, but since I usually make it for a holiday dinner, I use a large glass pan and make it as one large loaf. Roll the dough in your hands to make long strips, then braid them together. When finished, pick up the loaf and put it into the pan. There's plenty of oil in the bread, so as long as you're using a non-stick pan or a clean glass pan, there's no need to grease the pan. I usually use a bit of corn meal to make it easier to get the bread out when it's done.

Let the dough rise again in the pan, until about doubled, then brush with (Group 5) egg whites, and add the seeds (if you want them). Put the bread into a cold oven and set the temperature to 325 F. Bake for about 50 min, or until a long toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. My oven has very uneven heat, so I have to watch it like a hawk to prevent the bottom from burning.

This is what happened in December when I used a plastic bowl:

Yeah, leaving a plastic bowl in a warm oven is a bad idea.

This is how the bread comes out:

Usually, we color the braids red and green for Christmas. The year this picture was taken, my youngest daughter decided we should color one of the loaves at Thanksgiving, too. I have no recollection why blue, green, and purple were picked. It tasted much better than it looked!

Adventures in the Outback.

[I wrote this originally using voice recognition, so if I missed something weird while editing, that's what happened.]

Before I proceed, I should state that my normal routine when I get home from work this to have coffee, fruit, and toast. That's all good, but if I don't eat something substantial within a couple of hours, I become hypoglycemic. The symptoms are weakness, sweating, and a muddled mental state.

Yesterday morning I went to the bank to get a cashiers check, and then came home and got things together for the car dealer. I was just about to leave the house when I felt a little woozy. Fortunately, I had a solution handy–Clif bars. I bought them for hypoglycemia emergencies. I ate one and, just to be safe, ate another. Then I headed off to New Jersey.

My GPS, the Navigatrix, took me on a strange route. There were many small towns, suburban lanes, and twists and turns. Finally, I got to the street the dealership was on. It was one of those streets from hell. There was a similar one in front of my father's apartment in Florida, and I hated it. They're diabolical. Six lanes, three in each direction, a speed limit of 55 mi./h, and all kinds of businesses on each side of the street. That's one more thing not to like about New Jersey. I followed the Navigatrix until she said, “you have arrived at your destination.” But no Subaru dealership was in sight. I continued down the road and saw many dealerships, but still no Subaru. Finally I turned off the highway/street and called the dealership. When I described where I was, she said I was about 10 min. away. She told me what to do and I headed back to the street. But I couldn't find it. I pulled in a driveway and set the Navigatrix to find the dealership again. That got me back to the main road. I followed the directions I'd received on the phone and not the GPS's directions, and I finally got to the dealership. It turns out they had moved six blocks and not updated all their documentation.

I parked my Prius and bid it a sad farewell. I wondered if I'd regret trading that car. Inside I did all the usual baloney and finally was ready to take the Outback. The salesman came outside with me to show me a few of the cars features. It was an impressive list. I'm still discovering things, but here are a few: satellite radio; a 10 way power driver seat; heated seats; heated side mirrors; inside and outside thermometer; a digital compass in the rearview mirror; separate temperature setpoints for the driver's and passenger's sides; automatic headlights; a warning light for low tire pressure; a warning light for low windshield washer fluid; a “find car” button on the key fob, in case you lose your car in a parking lot; an electronic parking brake; a feature that keeps you from rolling backwards on hills; a readout of the number of miles before you run out of gas, which is based on your current miles per gallon.

Finally I was ready to leave. I put the Navigatrix on the windshield. I was starting to feel hypoglycemic again, and I wanted to get home as quickly as possible. I started the car.

As you all know, there are some things you have to get used to in an unfamiliar vehicle. One of those is the accelerator pedal. In the Prius the accelerator is electric, as are all the controls. The pedal in the Outback is standard. I pressed it a little and nothing happened. Quickly figuring things out, I pressed harder on the pedal. That's how it happened that the first few feet I drove in that car were a wheelie in front of the dealership, with several salesmen watching idly from inside. I smiled at them to show I had control, and headed down a dead-end driveway. It was nice to finally pull out of there. I saw my Prius as I was leaving. I thumbed my nose at it and said, "PFFFFFFFT!"

After a while the Navigatrix told me to get off on some ramp, which I did. But apparently I had headed south instead of north, a minor error. No problem, I waited for the GPS to recalculate. It said it was recalculating, but nothing happened. By the time it finished recalculating I'd made several turns, and it had to recalculate all over again. That kept happening. Finally I saw a sign that led me to freeway going straight to the Tappan Zee bridge. Perfect!

I was going down the highway with the Navigatrix told me to get off. Then I was on another freeway going who knows where, when the Navigatrix started recalculating again. What a mess, and the hypoglycemia was getting worse. That's when I figured out the GPS was trying to avoid tolls, so it had a lot of calculations to make. After a couple of freeway on/off cycles, I made it back to the correct freeway without the help of the GPS. I paid the toll for the bridge, and managed to get off at the right exit. I didn't remember where would take me and I was getting a lot weaker. Fortunately, I was very close to the apartment. It took three tries, but I finally backed into our garage. I went upstairs and got something to eat. I didn't go outside again for the rest of the day.

Naturally, I was kind of looking forward to driving to work. The thing I'm having the most trouble getting used to now is the analog speedometer, but that will pass. I parked outside the lab and pulled the door handle–nothing happened. That was a big surprise. The door was unlocked, but I couldn't open it. I tried the passenger door and it was the same. I thought about climbing over the seat to try one of the rear doors, but then realized that they would probably be locked if the front ones were locked. I started the car again and pressed the button that releases all the locks. It didn't help. I lowered the window and pulled the outside door handle, but that didn't do anything, either. Unfortunately, the owners manual was in the apartment. This was not a good problem to be having at 3:45 AM. I knew it wouldn't look good if I was still locked inside my car when other people started arriving at the lab.

I thought about crawling out the window, but there were three reasons I didn't want to do that. 1–I was worried about scratching the car. 2–I would've had to leave the window open, which I certainly didn't want to do. 3–The idea of crawling out the window was inglorious, to say the least. Finally I pushed the unlock button on the key fob, and that worked.

I'm going to read the owner's manual from cover to cover next week.

An Outback outing.

I'm about to leave for New Jersey to get my Outback and say goodbye to my beloved Prius. Hopefully no disasters will occur.

Vacuum doesn't suck, Part 1.

Several of you already know and understand the things I'm going to say, and others might be bored by it, but I think it's way cool. As I mentioned, when I first entered the semiconductor industry, I was lucky to be assigned to high vacuum equipment. Along the way I worked on many other types of fab equipment, but mostly it was vacuum, and that was the most interesting by far. I even became a member of the American Vacuum Society, which is impressive in some circles. Not that I really deserved it. To join you have to take some classes and then be nominated by three AVS members. Taking the classes was easy, but then what? I didn't even know any AVS members. I solved that problem by going with a fat dead guy from Timex to an AVS conference in Denver. I learned that if you go around and ask strangers to nominate you, eventually you'll get the signatures, especially if you wind around to the same person three or four times.

What is vacuum, anyway? Well, that's a good question. Maybe the best answer is that vacuum is nothing, and it doesn't suck. That's probably a good thing to remember when you're vacuuming your carpets.

We are at the bottom of an ocean - the atmosphere. It's a lot like more familiar oceans, except that there are birds instead of fish. And it weighs a lot - 14.7 pounds per square inch. Fortunately, our internal pressure matches that, so we don't get squished. The downside is that if we got thrown into a vacuum like space, our blood would boil and we'd blow up. But that probably isn't worth worrying about, unless Obama loses in 2012.

Vacuum is someplace air isn't, a hole in the atmosphere. We're all painfully familiar with vacuum cleaners, a simple vacuum pump. Basically they're a fan that blows air from the hose out through some filters. If you put your hand against the end of the hose, it will feel like it's being sucked in, but it isn't. Vacuum doesn't suck. What's happening is that the atmosphere is pushing on your hand more than the hose is. Your hand is being pressed against the hose, not being sucked into it.

That might be handy to remember when you're vacuuming. Dirt isn't being sucked into the vacuum cleaner, it's being blown in by air rushing into the hose. That's why it's a good idea to use the rotating brush - it kicks dirt particles up where they are most likely to be caught in the air stream.

It's easy to create low vacuum with a fan or other simple device. But semiconductor processing and other processes require high vacuum, where a fan is ineffective. Gases have to be removed on a molecular level, and how that's done is (I hope) interesting.

TBC...

A typical misadventure.

When Twila was still here, she was out and about a lot, which made for good blogging. I don't go out much, but I did today, so I'll tell you about it.

A few weeks ago I ordered updated voice recognition software online. The package included a bluetooth headset. When the software arrived, the voice recognition part worked fairly well, but the headset did not work as it was supposed to. Apparently the bluetooth on my iMac - which I have to leave on because of a bluetooth thingy - interfered with the bluetooth adapter that Plantronics said would improve recognition. I didn't like the headset much, anyway, so I ordered a powered, wired headset. The second headset arrived and worked great, so I decided to return the software/headset package to Costco and repurchase the software alone, saving about $100.

I may have dawdled, but I resolved that today I would return the package to our local Costco, which is about 35 minutes from here. I repackaged everything, printed out the receipt, got things together, and headed out. I was on a freeway and well underway when I realized that I'd forgotten the software. ACK! So back to the apartment I went.

The software and headset were sitting near the door, so I grabbed them and started back to Costco. It was a somewhat frustrating trip due to stalled trucks, but finally I arrived. I stood in line, then placed the package and receipt on the counter. The clerk looked at the receipt and frowned. I was thinking, "Okay, I bought it online and I'm returning it here. What's the big deal?"

She was still staring at the receipt, so I looked to see what the problem possibly could be. Oops. The receipt said, Amazon.com. I grinned, picked up my things, and left.

I really shouldn't be allowed out without supervision.

Bug brothers.

I must confess - I didn't actually squish that bug. I almost killed him, accidentally. I rolled my chair over him. I wasn't in the chair at the time, fortunately, but I thought he was a goner. He was lying on his side, motionless, so close to death that I'm sure he saw the light. I was hovering over him like, "OH MY FROG!" But then he stood up and resumed pacing back and forth.

The last couple of days there have been numerous bugs in the lab, most of them of the squished (but not by me) persuasion. They even climb up on my table. Maybe it's just a buggy season around here, but what are they doing flying around when the temperature is below 20?

We have a buggy season in Loveland - Miller Moths. They migrate over us in the spring in one direction, then fewer of them in the other direction in the fall. Many of them stop in our house to rest in our vacuum cleaner. Even though Twila goes into Panic Mode when she sees one, they're harmless. They don't eat polyester, so my wardrobe is safe.

The red and black bugs in our lab now look a little like Love Bugs, who make a buggy season in Florida. You should try to experience them, if you can. They're called Love Bugs because they do give a flying... well, they mate in the air. There are all these coupled bugs everywhere, and you actually have to use your windshield wipers if you're driving. It's gross, I confess. But Florida stations people at highway rest areas who clean your windshields while you squirt. How cool is that?

One other buggy season I remember is Water Beetles in Las Vegas. They're big, black things that look exactly like beetles, which isn't so strange, I suppose. During the season they're everywhere. They cover the sidewalks, they get in your luggage, you can't escape them. The weird thing is that they just drop out of the air. Like if you're playing blackjack, they'll drop on your table, and the dealer just flicks them off. Maybe it's Frog's punishment for Vegas being Vegas.

Respect life.

A Colorado license plate series says "Respect Life" at the bottom. The first time I saw it, I thought, "Oh. Is that one of those anti-choice people?" I wondered if it was someone who thinks a blob of cells smaller than the period at the end of this sentence is an actual human being Then I decided to be more optimistic and more generous. Colorado is beautiful and open and is wild in many places. Maybe the driver of the car was one of those outdoorsy types who populate our great state. Like a hunter. With a guilty conscience.

Anyway, I was in the cocoon of the optics lab this morning, mindlessly loading strongbacks, when from the corner of my eye I saw a speck. A bug was crawling across the floor. It was a black and red bug, probably some kind of beetle. It was really ugly. Well, to be fair, to its peers it might very well have been a prince. Or a princess. I couldn't tell which gender it was - there was no way I could get my eye that close to the floor.

I don't like to kill anything, so I said hi to the bug and resumed my work. The bug was something I needed to respect, because it had life. I really didn't know anything about that bug. Maybe it was searching for food for its family. Maybe it had a really hard life. Why would I ever want to kill it?

As I worked my mind wandered and eventually came back to the bug, who was still walking back and forth on the floor. It occurred to me that the bug probably had no brain to speak of. It didn't have to go to work. It didn't have to worry about putting its kids through school. It probably didn't lie awake at night fretting about being eaten by a bird. Really, it most likely had a very easy life.

The bug didn't seem to want to leave the area, and it was becoming distracting, so I got up and squished it.

Easy, but short.

Guest Post 2: A Question of Balance.

There have been some recent articles in Slate concerning women writers, including how often their works are reviewed by the NY Times (there, that was the NY connection), and how many articles by women appear in magazines:
http://www.slate.com/id/2265910/
http://www.slate.com/id/2283605/

The upshot of these articles is that it's still a male-dominated world, with the dominance falling somewhere between 60% and 90% depending on what and how you measure. I haven't tallied the comments on this blog, but my impression is that if you did categorize them, you'd find a similar level of male dominance. The male dominance in guest blogs is (as of this writing) absolute. However, in the main blog, it's clear that before her return to Col-o-rah-dah, Twila was slightly dominant.

Is it possible, at least in part, that Twila has chosen, in general, to cease creating new entries because she has sensed the unbalance in this blog compared to the rest of the literary world and is seeking to correct it?

-cad

The infamous Gillette incident.

Before I launch into this story, I'd like to mention that one of the readers of this blog is my old friend, Ed. Wait, I should rephrase that. I meant that Ed is a person who has been my friend for a long time, more than 30 years. Our careers aligned coincidentally, and we often worked at the same companies doing essentially the same jobs. Ed is now at Lam Research, where he's worked for 25 years (I got out after 17), but he has a family to support. Anyway, Ed, feel free to jump in and offer corrections and/or additions.

In the mid-'70s, I (and Ed) worked at Timex. No, I never met John Cameron Swayze. The facility was in Cupertino, CA, right across the street from Apple, and was dedicated to research and the development of liquid crystal displays. To say that the atmosphere there was relaxed would be an understatement. Our manager was an engineer promoted (I question that word in this context) far beyond his abilities who was more interested in rearranging his office and flirting with a cute tech than actually doing any R&D. We, the workers, had a lot of latitude, especially in the morning before the engineers and managers arrived.

In a previous blog I described using an evaporator for coating. My favorite deposition equipment at Timex was a sputter machine. It looked like a very large tuna fish can with a porthole. Items to be coated are placed on a rotating metal plate, similar to the doodad that goes around on the bottom of a microwave oven. On the underside of the top of the can is fastened a target, which is the deposition source. The target can be a number of materials, from silver to quartz.

To sputter, the sputterer is pumped to vacuum, and then a gas or a mixture of gases is introduced and voltage is applied to the platen and target. That causes the gases to ionize and bombard the target with molecules, which then knock atoms from the target that are drawn to the platen and coat the substrate. That's the end of the complicated part.

I thought the sputterer was really cool, and I often played with it in the mornings. Different gases result in different colors when they're ionized. A nitrogen plasma is particularly nice, IMO, a deep crimson. So I tried different gases to see what colors they'd be. I even did a hydrogen-oxygen mixture once, which might not have been the brightest idea. I think the plasma was pale blue, but I don't really remember.

The '70s are notable mostly for following the '60s, and life was still more relaxed than it is today. So I wasn't really surprised when one of my friends (not Ed) asked me for a favor. To do it, I installed a 99.9999% pure gold target in the sputterer. Around the outer edge of the platen I placed a pack of safety razor blades. I lit it up a couple of times and… TAH DAH!… gold-plated razor blades. But I was a bit horrified to see that the images of the razor blades remained on the now gold-coated platen. It was too late to do anything about it but hope for the best.

The deposition engineer was a guy named Dave. He was a really good guy and a good engineer, but completely oblivious to the underlying dramas of the lab. On the razor blade morning, Dave came in and opened the sputterer, looked at the platen, looked at me, and said, "Please install the quartz target. I'll be back after I have my coffee."

And that was that.

Coatings.

NuSTAR glass atop cylindrical quartz mandrels being placed into an oven at Goddard Space Flight Center.

The NuSTAR team has developed a novel approach to building these optics, focusing on a light-weight design. The mirror substrates are thin sheets of flexible glass, akin to laptop and cellular phone displays, which start out as flat sheets. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the glass is heated in an oven and slumped over precision polished cylindrical quartz mandrels to achieve the right curvature. The slumped mirror segments are then deposited with a multilayer coating at the DTU-Space at the Danish Technical University in Copenhagen.

The optics are built from the inside out, shell upon shell, spaced apart by graphite spacers and held together by nothing but epoxy. This precision assemblage is done at Columbia University's Nevis Laboratory outside New York City and provides very light and flexible optics.

*********************
That's all from the NuSTAR webpage. The most interesting part to me is the coating. How do you suppose they deposit multilayer coatings on the glass? Funny you should ask, because when I was demoted from pinball repairman to semiconductor line maintenance technician, I was luckily assigned to high vacuum equipment. It proved to be fascinating in many ways.

The first machine I worked on was an RDI evaporator that was probably close to obsolete even then. That machine evaporated aluminum onto wafers. How did that work? Good question! The RDI was a cylinder with a clamshell top. The top contained a rotating planetary to which wafers were attached.

The fun part was getting the metal onto the wafers. I put aluminum pellets into a water-cooled copper crucible. Attached to the crucible was a source that contained a filament, similar to those you see in incandescent lightbulbs, but much larger. After all of the components were prepared, the clamshell was closed.

Needless to say, air would muck up a lot of things. For one, the filament would burn out in a second. So the chamber was pumped to high vacuum, which I might say something about later. When the air was removed, voltage was applied to the filament, creating an electron beam. Using both permanent and variable magnets, the electron beam left the source and was bent 270 degrees and directed upon the aluminum, which, TAH DAH, evaporated!

Line dollies loaded and unloaded the RDI, and I operated and maintained it.

I thought that was way cool!

Anniversary.

When I was a freshman in high school, I ran away from my mother to go live with my father. I was shoveling the driveway and I just left. That was 50 years ago today. Two and a half years later my dad married and moved to Arizona, and I went back to live with my mom during my senior year. That was a great year, both at home and otherwise.

The Simca.

The Simca was my first car. I bought it in the summer between my junior and senior years in high school. It cost $250.

(That isn't the actual car.)

It is hard to describe the pleasure that car gave me. Inside, it smelled like an old car, even better than a girl smells. ... ... ... Well, no, but you get the idea.

NY is kind of picky about driving... or was. Every driver needed a license, and every car needed both plates and insurance. They became really annoyed when those things didn't happen. I had the car and I had a learner's permit, but I had no insurance and no plates. Insurance was the big sticking point, and I was saving almost everything from my summer job.

Every day I went out and drove the Simca forward and backward in the driveway. It was euphoric. I probably put 100 miles on it, going back and forth. One day I just couldn't stand it anymore, and I decided to drive the Simca around the block. It went uneventfully until I approached the last turn before getting back to the safety of my driveway. There was a stop sign at that intersection, and a police car with a policeman inside was parked right there. My body went cold, but there was nothing I could do. It was a short block, and he would surely notice if I made a U-turn. So I pulled up to the stop sign, knowing that my car without plates was as noticeable as Howdy Doody in the nude, and tried to play it a lot cooler than I felt. Somehow, he didn't notice me. Needless to say, perhaps, I didn't try that trick again.

School had started when I finally had enough money for insurance. I registered the car, got my plates, started driving to school. I was ecstatic. A BMOC. Not to mention that I didn't have to ride buses, which I hated, anymore. It was just so great.

Every plus has a minus, it seems. And my minus was having to drive Richard D. to and from school. He was in my class and he lived right behind me, so I had little choice. He was a fat kid whom I didn't like, but I was stuck.

The second week of using the Simca to commute to school, I was driving home with Richard next to me. I was on James Street in Syracuse, a 4-lane street with a 35 MPH speed limit. I was driving properly, when a car full of other kids from our class started driving to my left. They were laughing and giving me high fives. BMOC. I was gesturing back at them, when the guy in their passenger seat looked forward. His face immediately took on a terrified look, so I looked where I was going. A Niagara Mohawk power truck was stopped at a light right in front of me. I slammed on the brakes.

After the collision, the silence was profound. I could smell metal and exhaust. When I realized that I was okay, except for a broken nose, I looked at Richard. He had hit the windshield and it had split his forehead from one side to the other. I could see 3/4 of an inch of fat under his skin. But he was conscious.

Needless to say, perhaps, that was the end of the Simca. It was totaled. A policeman said if I'd been going 5 MPH faster, we both would have been decapitated.

It was a learning experience.

WIWMWILNY, Part 3.

The weather.

My overarching opinion when I left NY 40 years ago was that East Coast weather... well, sucks. I have not changed that opinion. I do, however, like the winters. Winter here is weather, not day-after-day sameness. There are challenges, and they appeal to me. I like snow, even though I don't like driving on it. I prefer cold weather to hot. And that's where the problem lies. NY summers are HOT and MUGGY. You can dress up and wander comfortably outside even when it's very cold, but there is nothing you can wear to protect you from the heat.

Blizzard of the century.

Overrated, IMO. The ice storm I already described apparently is the extent of it. We're now heading into mild weather.

I'm not complaining.

WIWMWILNY, Part 2.

My Prius.

First, my Prii (Twila now has the 2002 Prius and I have the 2004) are maybe the best cars I have ever owned. Their only competition are my rotary Mazdas, maybe my VW bugs, my Simca (more to come about that), my '54 Ford. My GTO and my Corvair weren't good cars, but they have emotional value. Anyway, the 2002 Prius is great fun to drive, and the 2004 has a lot of good features. So, it isn't technically correct to say that I won't mind leaving my Prius behind.

The problem with my Prius is that it is horrible, disgusting, foul, loathsome, abominable - take any word that you'd use to describe the Bush administration or Republicans in Congress and you have the idea - at driving on snow or ice. Maybe it's because the engine is small and doesn't put as much weight on the drive wheels. Whatever the reason, it sucks. So I decided to order a Subaru Outback, which has all-wheel drive. I ordered it from the factory, because that saves dealer accessory installation charges, which are a lot. It seems like the Outback is taking a long time to arrive from Japan, which is frustrating when I'm making multiple attempts to get up a minor hill in my Prius. But I'm in Zen mode.

Talking about driving on snow and ice reminds me of something. When I was a lad in Syracuse, NY, I frequently went to a nearby parking lot when it had snowed and the roads were slippery. I'd get up speed and then put my car into spins and slides and practice getting out of them. That taught me a lot about oversteer and understeer and how to control a car. It was fun, too, of course. I'd be all over that parking lot, spinning and sliding and yelling "YAHOO" out the window. A lot of times people who were trying to park to go shopping got annoyed with me, but they were unwise, because my increased driving skills made it much more likely that I wouldn't plow into them someday.

Guest Post 1: I was that guy.

Durf wrote about some of the things he wouldn't miss about being in New York. One was New York drivers, about which I have a confession to make.

In the last millennium, my wife worked on a project to build part of the telescope for a joint US/European X-ray astronomy satellite called XMM. One of the scientists on the project, Jean, was a woman who once dated Steve Young of 49'ers QB fame. I met her and her fiancé, Greg, in South America. (That's another story.) Their wedding was about a year later, but we weren't invited because they're Mormon, we're not, and we wouldn't be allowed in the tabernacle. We were invited to the reception, which was to take place two weeks after the wedding in Manhattan. The reception only included dessert. So, we told people we were spending the weekend in New York City in the winter for dessert. (The dessert was gelato flown in from France. It didn't seem exceptional to me, but I only had a small taste, and my palate is untrained.)

Which finally brings me to the point of the story. On our way back out of the city, I decided that I should pretend to be a New Yorker for a few minutes, so I blasted my horn several times for no good reason at 11:30pm. It wasn't all that fun. Now I regret that I'm on Durf's 90% list.

-cad

Dissendat.

Ice storm! When I woke up at 02:30 it sounded like it was raining. Since an ice storm was forecast, I knew that wasn't good. Fortunately, the ice was still granular, so I was able to get out of my driveway in two tries. When I got out of work, though, the real ice storm had begun, and everything was covered with ice. I breathed a sigh of relief after getting up a steep, short hill outside the lab, then a plow backed in front of me when I was 20' from a longer, winding hill. I had to stop, and then I couldn't move an inch. I backed all the way down, got a start, and made it up. I got home okay, but everything is ice. Walking up the driveway was a challenge, as was getting up the stairs to the apartment. Ice storms aren't fun.

FM1 lost another day today. I'm guessing from what I saw on FM2 is that there are epoxy problems - it's too viscous.

Anonymous commented that the email address for submitting blogs is wrong. I think they were joking, but I'll try to make it easier. I didn't make the address clickable because I was worried about spiders trolling for email addresses to put on spam lists. I can trick them, though. CLICK HERE

WIWMWILNY, Part 1.

That means "What I won't miss when I leave New York".

Part 1 = drivers.

A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on CNN that said 90% of drivers think they're good drivers. That says something about people, IMO. I think 10% of drivers are good drivers. I base my claim on having driven over 2 million miles and having paid a lot of attention to drivers and driving, plus some other crap that I'll spare you.

NY drivers aren't bad, comparatively. I'd rather drive in NY than in CA, everything considered. CO drivers are more respectful of other drivers than in either of those states, however. Here is the scoop.

In NY, speeding is endemic. And not just a couple of MPH over the limit, but 20 MPH or more. Even then, I rarely see cars pulled over. Maybe it's the budget crisis.

NY drivers are aggressive, in the NY way. That is, they usually won't cut you off and flip you the bird. But when you're in NY, you don't exist as an individual. You're just another dot on the road. It's like in a store. A New Yorker thinks nothing of pushing his cart into the middle of an aisle, blocking everyone, and ignoring anyone trying to get by. It's the same on the road.

Another part of the aggression is that they want to get in front of you at all costs. They'll pass in a lane on the right, they'll cross a double line to pass you. It doesn't seem like they're in a hurry, but it's important to them to be in front of you.

As I mentioned in one of my first posts, if a NY driver thinks you're going too slow, he will zoom up to within 1 inch of your rear bumper and stay there awhile. I've learned that all you have to do is look in the rear view mirror to let them know you're aware of them, and then usually they'll back off. That's NY in a nutshell: you're anonymous until you make some kind of contact, and then they're really nice to you.

I'll probably add to this post a couple of times in the next month.

Analism.

Not only is Ms Big coming to the lab, but also she's sending a QA person from JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

[Carl suggested that I call her Dr Big, which would be appropriate, since I'm referring to her in her professional position in the project. I haven't met Fiona Harrison, yet, but everyone seems to have a lot of respect for her. Nevertheless, I have a 'thing' about calling PhDs 'doctor'. I was originally soured on the practice by meeting a couple of people who insisted on it, which seemed lame. And if I ever go down in the streets like a sack of beans, I don't want Fiona Harrison showing up if someone yells, "Doctor!" I don't even call my MD 'doctor', I call her 'Tracy', although I do say 'Dr Tracy' now and then, if I'm in the mood.]

JPL is a federally funded R&D center in Pasadena. It's managed by Caltech. And that's about all I knew about it before I started this job. The first skinny I heard was from Trish, Carl's wife, who told me that everything at JPL is strictly by the book. Then Ken went there a couple of weeks ago with FM0, and I heard some inside stories.

Ken thought it would take one day to mount FM0, so he planned on two. It turned out he was there for four days, which he found extremely frustrating. A lot of the time was spent idle, waiting for one QA check or another. He said there were usually three or four people working, with four to nine others watching to be sure everything was being done correctly. He speculated that the NuSTAR optics would never be finished if they were being built at JPL. Here's one example.

A torque wrench is a tool that tightens something to a specified tightness, or torque. There are different kinds of torque wrenches, with different sizes, torque ranges, etc., but they all do essentially the same job. There are different ways of setting the desired torque. Probably the most complicated way is shown here:

You turn the knurled part of the handle and the set torque is the value on the shaft plus the value on the turned part that lines up with the center line on the shaft. When you're tightening something and it gets to the right torque, the wrench stops tightening. You could probably teach a 5th-grader in 5 minutes how to use this wrench.

Ken was at JPL and someone had to torque a bolt. There were four people there, all of whom knew how to read the torque wrench. But there was a specific QA person who had to approve the setting on the wrench. They sat and waited over an hour for the QA person. When he arrived, he looked at the wrench, wrote down the value, and work resumed.

I suppose there are good reasons for that kind of care on some projects, but it is kind of anal. The JPL QA guy will probably go nuts when he gets to our lab.

State of the project.

I'm a bit behind in blogging because I've been busy reading and sorting all the guest blogs! :p

It took 3 days to repair the damage to FM1. Now, with new layers over the broken ones, the optic is beautiful again.

FM1 is on Layer 109 and FM2 is on Layer 99. If all goes well, FM2 will be finished on March 18 or so.

Ghosted!

In the Nevis Labs building there are offices, etc. The lab itself is a big room with a very high ceiling. It is poorly lit in the mornings. The optics lab is a small room near the center of the bigger room, and it is brightly lit. The door to the big lab is marked "Please Close", and it is almost always closed. I make a point to close it.

I arrived at work this morning just before 3:30 AM. As usual, no-one else was there. If anyone ever is there at that hour, which is rare, it's usually Marcella (our QA person) working late, or a student doing an all-nighter.

I mentioned in an earlier post that there is a ghost in the lab. He doesn't bother me. He makes strange noises and sometimes bangs on the side of the optics lab, but I ignore him. This morning he was more active than usual.

At about 6 AM I took a bathroom break. While I was in the bathroom, I heard a noise outside. "Someone is here," I thought. I wondered who it might be. A minute later I heard a voice say something like, "Don't worry." When I came out of the bathroom, I couldn't see anyone in the hall. I walked to the lab door and it was wide open. "YIPES!", I thought.

I got rid of fear many years ago, so I wasn't afraid. I was curious, though, about who was in the lab. But I didn't see anyone, and there was no-one in the optics lab. That seemed very strange. And when I left an hour and a half later, there were still no cars outside the lab.

It was the ghost, I suppose. I wonder what he was up to.

Call for blogs.

Blog reader, avid commenter, and resident guru Carl made a suggestion that both the Blog Mistress and I like: reader participation. We therefore invite all of you who dare to read this blog to send your own post. It can be on any topic at all and you may sign it with your name or "anonymous" or whatever you wish. We will not reveal your identity - just try not to get us kicked off blogspot.

Please send your blogs to: boopiblog@xemaps.com.

Scientific American, February 2011

I found out this morning that Fiona Harrison, aka "Ms Big", is coming to the lab.

This article is in the current edition of Scientific American (the images are clickable, if you want to read them):

Disaster repairs.

This morning Ken told me that the repairs are going to take 3 days. Tom is gluing new spacer chunks where he can. As I mentioned, we don't have glass to replace the broken panels, but Ken said we wouldn't do that even if we had the glass, because the severity of the damage doesn't warrant it. He said the telescope will have to increase exposure time by 1% to compensate.

Disaster recovery.

The optics disaster was caused by human error, which is all I want to say about that.

While at work yesterday, I took a closer look at the damage. It appears that the wheel only penetrated one layer, which is about the best possible disastrous result. In a few areas the second layer was damaged, and the third layer in one or two places. My opinion is that those were caused by debris.

I am not in the lab today, but I've been watching on a webcam. The damage was photographed. After that, Tom cleaned the damaged areas by removing all loose pieces. Now he is applying epoxy to broken spacers where some graphite remains. Possibly he is going to add small pieces of graphite which will then be ground to the correct height; or he is going to build up those areas with layers of epoxy. Support for the next layer of spacers is the issue. The glass cannot be repaired.

I should have more info tomorrow. Also, I have some potentially interesting information about the glass that we use.

Twila.

The shuttle just picked up Twila to take her to LGA. It was a *perfect* weekend (except for the too-short part, and the NuSTAR disaster). And she blogged!

What is it you can't face?

That was the question on the T-shirt of the usher who showed us to our seats in the theater yesterday. We saw The Divine Sister. (It's a play about nuns.)

Durf and I have been (sort of) following the same rule Tanya and I follow at Telluride: step out of your comfort zone and go see something you would not usually shell out peanuts to see. And that is how Durf and I found ourselves in the audience of a farce.

So in the spirit of the genre, I read the ushers' shirts and waited patiently for that line to come up in the show. Eventually the mother superior, during a heart-to-heart with another nun, said, "What is it you can't face?" whereupon the lesser nun jumped from her chair and exclaimed, "You called me cunt face!"

It might not sound all that funny to you. I guess you'd have to be there. After all that's the best part of "in jokes," they are for the people who were there.

Reminds me of another inside joke that I thought was funny. After going diving in Australia, I bought a shirt that said Great Barrier Reef on the front and on the back it said, "where going down is a way of life." My parents couldn't believe a person of substance would wear something raunchy. My friends thought it was adolescent. I thought it was funny.

And as long as I'm telling sense-of-humor stories on myself, I'll confess that I laughed uproariously at the scene in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta accidentally shoots (splatters the brains of) the guy in the back seat of his car. I try not to think about it too often because it always gets me laughing again.

Disaster.

Yesterday morning I went to work. I unloaded FM2 and started the first grind. Then I unloaded FM1 and pushed the button to start the first grind. The grinding wheel started. When it came up to speed, the optic started to rotate and the carriage began to approach the optic. During that time I stand with my hand on an Emergency Off switch in case something goes wrong. Also, an Optional Stop was set, which stops the carriage when the wheel is close to the optic. Then the start button has to be pushed again. I was watching the wheel approach the optic, and suddenly there was a sickening sound of breaking glass and spacers. The wheel had hit the optic. I pressed the Emergency Off button, but a great deal of damage had been done. This really sucks.

Toilets (continued)

Ah, mysterious Maid in Manhattan, you have unleashed a firestorm. Let me just say this: Durf and I each do our part in prep for our reunion. He cleans the toilet, I shave my legs.

I couldn't resist a quick post (I believe Carl predicted this urge). I can't say that upon my return to NY it was as tho I never left. That's because I've never seen this apartment so clean. I had an almost irresistible urge to dine off the floor. It was sparkling! I'm not sure whom I have to thank for inspiring this behavior, whether the Maid, the NUSTAR team or the NY Department of Health, but if it's a uniquely NY behavior, I'm moving here permanently.

All kidding aside, I could tell Durf was happy to see me because there was a giant Snickers bar sitting on the counter. (my secret addiction)

Our toilet.

"Maid in Manhattan" asked whimsically if my preparations for Twila's visit consist of putting the toilet seat down. The answer is 'no', but I do have to clean the toilet. As soon as I finish this post I'm going to Google how to do that. The reason the answer is 'no', btw, is that the toilet seat does not go up in this house. Here is a little Burma Shave thing that I sometimes post (before company or a party), "For Men Only".

For Men Only
It doesn't hurt
To sit to squirt,
But if you must stand
Or die of shame,
Please be careful
With your aim.

Not that it does any good.

Blogging.

I've made a list of blogs I'd like to do, and maybe one or two of them are interesting. Right now, however, I'm preparing for Twila's visit. She's arriving tomorrow! So I might not blog again until Monday or Tuesday. I'll try to get Twila to blog while she's here, but I'd say it's a long shot. :p

A lovely day.

I looked out the front window at 3:30 AM and snow was coming down heavily in large flakes. The driveway didn't look bad, though, and our porch looked like only 3" or so had fallen. The side driveway hadn't been plowed, but I drove slowly up it. The roads were really slippery. Leaving the complex, it was a big challenge to get up a short, steep hill to a main road. I slipped and slid to Columbia. The driveway there hadn't been plowed, but it was downhill. It was still snowing steadily.

Work was normal, no problems, but I was afraid that there would be enough snow to strand me at the lab. When I left the building, I was surprised to see no snow on my car. Then I realized - ice storm! It was raining rain that was maybe 80% frozen. Everything was ice. I had to scrape my windows. I was able to get out without trouble, though. The commute home wasn't as hairy, and people were driving cautiously. Now (1 PM) it's raining/sleeting/ugly/cold, but not a full-blown ice storm.

Which reminds me. I learned to drive in Syracuse, which means I was driving on snow and ice from my very first year. I even spent one winter commuting from Syracuse to Watertown on Interstate 81 on the east edge of Lake Ontario - a rough drive in the winter, especially before dawn. (I won't say why I did that commute, but try to imagine what a 20-year-old guy's motive might be.) That commute ended in an accident, but that's another story.

My memory was that people in NY know how to drive in the snow. There really isn't a big secret. Just do everything more slowly. Accelerate more slowly, decelerate more slowly, turn more slowly. I never had to use chains when I was a youngster, although I did finally accede to studded snow tires on my VW bug - the same one that eventually got caught in a crosswind on 81 and slid into a guardrail, a great learning experience that unfortunately got me sued bogusly by the same reason I was going to Watertown in the first place, which is yet another story, or maybe part of the first other story, but no matter.

Nowadays I often see a driver trying to get up a slippery slope, his pedal down way too far and the rear of his car futilely sliding back and forth and going nowhere. Did NY drivers forget how to drive in the snow? I don't think so. I think a lot of people who never learned to drive in the snow became New Yorkers, but that's just a guess.