ther Pages of Rages

I recently purchased a stereo microscope from eBay seller bargainmicroscopes, part of a web of similar and confusing Chinese-microscope-selling websites:

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Yesterday I flew out of Rapid City, SD as part of some work I’m doing. I was in the security line when I heard my name paged.

This crack security staff was digging through my bag. They were concerned because I brought a microcontroller programmer:

Actually, it wasn’t just the programmer, it was the 1 ohm resistor I had spliced in series with the power lead to measure current, and the 10 second RC filter I had placed across that to give my DMM a better chance of reading the average current.

“Sir, this is an improvised electronic device. You will never be allowed to fly with this.”

I responded to many questions with information about my occupation, circuit theory up to and including Ohm’s law, and a discussion of the market for bicycle power meters. But they still would not let me fly with the programmer. I had to leave it behind.

I was finally able to fly out ten hours later, with a brand-new-in-the-box MSP430 programmer. Apparently, it’s not “improvised” if it comes in a printed box.

by Anastasia Pottinger Photography

The eye doctor says Melody needs to wear an eye patch.

There are three makers of orthoptic eye patches. We tried all of them.

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I was practicing with my lathe and I made some things.

First, a valve to adjust the flow of water through aquarium tubing:

This is cut from a piece of 1/2″ dia stainless steel rod. I need to deburr the screw more carefully, because it cut the tubing when I tried it out.

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I am looking for digital camera suggestions.

I often want to take pictures of things on my desk, and the point and shoot cameras just can’t do it. They just cannot focus close enough to fill the frame with an image.

For example, if I want to take a photo of my coffee cup, to obtain focus, I must pull back until the coffee cup fills about 1/30th of the frame.

Another requirement is a fast enough lens to have a short depth of field. For example, if I want to take a picture of my coffee cup, I want the cup to be in focus, but not the unruly stack of papers and mechanical detritus that covers the surface of the desk in the background.

I don’t really care to have a huge SLR camera. (SLR makes sense for film, but it is seems faintly ridiculous to have the vestigial pentaprism and mechanical mechanism in a digital camera.) I would like this camera to be self-contained.

The image size should be an honest million pixels, with resolution approaching the Nyquist limit. If I take a picture of a 12″ ruler that fills the frame, I should be able to see graduations that are (2*12/1000) or 0.024″ apart. That is, I will be able to see 1/32″ graduations, but not 1/64″. This is enough accuracy for me. (I have a belief that most consumer multi-megapixel cameras do not reach this level of resolution.)

Does anyone have a suggestion of a camera for me?

I was trying to find the email address of my old friend Yui, so I Googled “ทวิวรรณ à¸?ังสดาน” and found this page:

http://www.eng.kmitnb.ac.th/news_box/Eng_seminar/9_9_48/seminar_eng3

It looks like she gave a seminar on the PRODUCTION of MO POWER! Cool.

OK, well maybe that means Molybdenum Power. That still sounds cool to me.

Do you know what the deal is with the Folger’s coffee bags?

It’s instant coffee in there! No wonder it doesn’t taste right. Just look on the box… “contains ground and concentrated coffee”.

In other words, instant coffee is too low class, so they’ll put it in a tea bag and charge ten times the price (per weight). “We’ve secretly replaced these fine Coffee Bags with Folger’s Crystals.”

I hate caffeine withdrawal.

I recently had reason to call the IRS’s small business line.

Their music on hold was Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King.

It seemed appropriate.

It’s good to be back online!

This blog is now hosted on a shared provider (I get 32 MB of RAM), so it may be a little slower.

mlug.missouri.edu was a great host, but it has been behind a firewall for weeks now.