Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in dave_ifversen's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Sunday, July 27th, 2008
9:10 am	On the road again... The ebike was down for a couple of weeks.  The motor is great, but the wheel that came with the kit is a typical cheap Chinese piece of crap.  The wheel started wobbling while I was riding the bike, and when I looked into the problem, I discovered that the rim was bent.  Not only was the rim made of very thin aluminum, but the wheel was not assembled correctly in the first place - none of the spokes were tensioned properly.  I ordered a new rim (an Alex rim from Alfred E. Bike in Kalamazoo), and talked one of the big bikey nuts at work into truing up the new wheel for me.  (Truing a wheel is an art, not something to be undertaken lightly - if done wrong, the wheel can "taco", usually at the worst possible moment.) While truing the wheel, we discovered that one of the spoke nipples was stripped out (probably part of what caused the original problem).  Of course, the Chinese manufacturer used a non-standard spoke (2.4mm) - none of the bike stores in Chicagoland carry these (I know, because I called a *lot* of stores).  As a last resort, before ordering a whole new set of custom made spokes from Canada, I found one local bike store that would re-thread one of my existing spokes to take a standard nipple (I had to talk them into it - they were afraid of ruining the spoke).  It worked, and we got the wheel finished and back on the bike.  Nice and straight, and the rim brakes work perfectly.  I am now back to telling OPEC to stuff it! I still need to work on going up to 48 volts and getting a LiFePO4 battery (higher speed and longer range), but that will probably wait until winter. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
6:19 pm	You load 16 tons, and what do you get? Tired and sore, that's what.  Two more loads cleaned out of the garage (one load taken to Dr. B.'s dumpster, which filled it to the top; the other load is sitting in the Jeep waiting for the dumpster to be emptied).    It has made a noticeable difference in the "Pile-O-Stuff" (tm) in there, but I still have more to do.  Found lots of things that I thought had been lost in the mists of time.  Also found lots of mouse poop.  Yecch! Current Mood: exhausted (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
4:55 pm	2 loads gone... So I got two loads over to Dr. B.'s dumpster.  (Mostly old, outdated electronics and other junk that I have no idea why I moved from the old apartment - I should have dumped it before we had the moving party.)  I even found the Indiana Jones hat (no kidding - a few years ago, I bought a "licensed" Indiana Jones fedora) - I found it in the first box opened, and wore it the rest of the day to keep the sun off my head while moving stuff around on the driveway.  Two loads in 90 degree heat is enough for one day. Hasn't made a noticeable dent in the clutter in the garage, but that will come (eventually).  If I keep up with a couple of loads a day, by the end of the week there should be enough room in there to have the new door installed. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the bolt-ends of fabric in there (we have 20 or so bolt-ends of fabric from the Steelcase company store - this is the nice, heavy duty upholstery fabric they use for office furniture.  Why my mother-in-law bought all that fabric I have no idea, but it now resides in the garage, next to the crate containing the ark of the covenant).  There is more furniture to go, and then boxes (and boxes) of books that need to be sorted through and kept or disposed of (depending on the book). Much more fun to come.... (Comment on this)
9:17 am	Now where did I put the Indiana Jones hat and the bullwhip... I will need them, because I am venturing into ... (wait for it) ... The Garage ... to do some cleaning.  The garage has not changed much since we moved in - boxes piled up everywhere (some that I haven't looked into since I was in college, (mumble) years ago), old furniture wherever, misc. stuff in any old place, the ark of the covenant in a crate, and maybe even the Roswell alien (who knows?).  (What, you think we could actually put a vehicle in the garage?  Ha!  I laugh at your silly notions...) The landlord says he will have a new garage door and opener installed (yea!, we need it), but I will have to at least clean out enough stuff so the installers can get to the places they need to do the job.  So I took the week off from work - hopefully, enough time to get some of the detritus taken care of.  Disposal is not a problem - Dr. B. has a 12 yard dumpster, and he says I can fill it as many times as necessary.  Two or three Jeeploads should fill the dumpster nicely... If I'm not heard from in a week, release the hounds... (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
2:16 am	Still doin' my part... ... to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.  I've lived with the ebike for a month now, and if anything, I like it better now than I did when I first started riding it.  I managed to scrounge some 12AH SLA batteries - they work much better than the 8AH batteries I was using.  I haven't found the max range on this battery pack yet.  The local bike shop laced up a front wheel for me with the dynamo/drum brake hub I found online - I *really* like having front drum brakes, and I'll end up using the dynamo to charge up some AA NiMH batteries to run the lights I just got the parts to build (4 watt ultra-bright LEDs with optics, rated at 108 lumens per watt - <tim allen>more power, argh argh argh</tim allen>).  Someone at work also gave me a seat post with spring suspension, which I put on the bike.  Not enough O's in smooth... Still waiting on the regenerative braking controller - they must have shipped it on a slow boat from China.  Once it gets here, I'll open it up and replace the MOSFETs with higher rated ones, so I can overvolt the system to 48 volts - the motor should be good up to 60 volts, so 48 will be no problem.  Couple that with (eventually) a LiFePO4 battery pack, and I should be able to boost my top speed to 30+ mph, with a greater range than I am getting now. So far, I only drive the jeep to work when I need to haul something big or when it is raining (for some reason, I don't think it is a good idea to ride an electric bike in the rain... :-)  ).  At this rate, the kit should pay for itself by the end of the summer, and I should be able to ride this thing until it starts snowing. Current Mood: satisfied Current Music: Pink Floyd (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
10:35 am	More on the eBike.. Checking my speed with the doppler speed radar at the lab shows that I can hit ~20 mph going uphill with light pedal-assist - not bad at all.  Takes me about 15 minutes to make the trip from home to work (or back again at the end of the shift), and I can do it without arriving at work sweating like a draft-horse.  I also found out that if I don't run flat out on the motor, and pedal-assist/coast as necessary, I only draw down the batteries about 30 - 40%, rather than run the pack flat (of course, that means I am running slower than 20 mph, but not significantly so).  I still want a bigger, better, battery pack (higher energy density and a better charge/discharge rate than I am currently getting with SLA), but I can live with the current batteries while I work on acquiring what I really want (madtechie2718 pointed me at some NiMH batteries that would probably work well - they're not cheap, but they're also not priced out of the range of sensibility, either). I did discover that the headlight I am using (IIRC, a 1-watt LED running on 4 AA batteries) is really pretty wimpy - it works, but not real well.  One of the physicists at work (a serious bikey-sort) builds his own lights using the ultra-bright luxeon LED units (3 or 5 watts, I think).  He is going to let me know when he places another order for the LEDs, and I will get in on it (he buys in bulk from an overseas supplier, so gets a really good deal).  He has a pair of these on his bike, and they are actually brighter than the HID lighting available.  The other thing I am looking for is a hub dynamo (an alternator built into the front wheel hub) to power the lights.  With some mondo capacitors, the lights would stay on for a while even when I slowed to a stop, so this could work. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 16th, 2008
10:06 pm	It's up and running - In Your Face, OPEC! Got the electric kit all installed on my old mountain bike - it was actually pretty easy, even considering that I had to open up the rear frame a bit so the motor would fit.  Moves right out, too - gets me, the bike, and (more importantly) the battery pack up to 20 or 25 mph with no problems at all.  The only issue is that the 8 amp-hour battery pack I put together turns out to be pretty wimpy.  In a couple of test runs, I can make it all the way to work on a charge (just barely), so it does what I want it to, but things could be better.  The cheapest solution would be to get a 12 amp-hour SLA pack - that should get me to work without the risk of reversing any of the cells.  What I actually want is a 20 amp-hour LiFePO4 pack - I just wish they weren't so darned expensive (a pack like that would cost more than I spent on the rest of the kit in the first place - and, now that I think about it, more than what I spent when I originally bought the bike). In any event, I will be taking the bike to work whenever it is not raining.  That should stretch the time between fillups for the Jeep to a month or more.  Boo-Yah! (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 10th, 2008
6:34 pm	New Toy arriving soon.... So, with the price of gas getting up to obscene levels, I really need to start riding my bike to work.  The only problem is I don't like to get to work smelling like the clydesdale that just finished pulling the beer wagon (and I am sure my cow-orkers don't want me there in that condition either).  There is (supposedly) a shower at work, but it is not always available or working - so it can't be counted on.  Therefore, it must be time for a new toy.... I ordered a kit to convert my (mumble) year old mountain bike to an electric.  500 watt, 36 volt hub motor (rear wheel kit, comes with the motor, the wheel, a 5-speed cassette, and a cheap tire and tube), a regenerative braking controller, twist throttle, and new brake levers (with switches in them to signal the motor controller that the brakes are being applied).  Coupled with some 8 AH sealed lead-acid batteries, and I should be all set for commuting to the lab.  Even if the batteries only last for my ride in, that would be OK -  I can always pedal home and catch a shower then. The whole thing should be here on Tuesday.  Wednesday is a furlough day, so I can spend it installing everything on the bike.  Yee-ha! Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: Whatever is playing on the radio in the control room (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 19th, 2008
1:24 am	At $3.60 per gallon, every bit helps... The Jeep has been acting up lately - it has always idled rough, but it was getting worse, and the milage was suffering (when I bought it, I was getting ~17mpg around town, and up to 25mpg on the highway). The other day, it started up then stalled right out. Would not start at all after that, unless I held the gas pedal down - then it would run just fine.  Great - the idle air control motor on the throttle-body died. Managed to get the part, but I did not have time to install it, so I ended up kludging the Jeep to make it run.  I finally had time to pull the throttle-body off the intake manifold, clean it, and put the new parts on.  Dang, was it dirty (it hasn't been cleaned since I bought the Jeep, and it was encrusted with carbon and old, dried oil and just general crud).  I ended up using almost an entire can of carb cleaner, and got things put back together. Wow, what a difference!  I just checked the milage, and I am getting between 18 and 20mpg around town now.  Woo-hoo! (Comment on this)
Friday, April 18th, 2008
10:21 am	Two steps forward, one step back... The scene render went well.  600 frames (about 20 seconds), each frame done 33 times (to get all the details in), 720x480 resolution, with the LucasFilms EXR plugin (does really, really well at rendering light in space, used for Battlestar Galactica, among other shows).  A render of this type on the Core 2 Quad machine would normally take slightly over 24 hours.  On the renderfarm, it was done in less than an hour and a half (and I was only using half the available nodes).  Boo-Yah! The other advantage to ScreamerNet is that it runs in batch mode - we can queue up the scenes, and it will go down the list, rendering everything without any human intervention.  Another Boo-Yah! However, as I was setting up the rest of the farmer nodes, I suddenly lost communication with the Core 2 Quad machine (we use this as the master node).  Hmm....   Rebooting said machine resulted in it not finding the system disk.  Crap.  Looks like we lost the C: drive (no big deal - the C: drive was an older disk that I suspected might have some problems and would need replacing soon anyway).  LightWave (and all the scene files) reside on the D: drive (a whopping big, brand new SATA drive), so no data was lost.  I just need to run out and get a cheap SATA drive for the OS. We also discovered that the network switch we are using has died.  This was a piece of hardware from the surplus warehouse, so it is also no big surprise.  Fortunately, I have a pile of them that I picked up the last time I was over there, so it will be trivial to replace. If everything goes to plan, the farm will be back up and rendering over the weekend. Jimmy Kimmel show, here we come!  (The producer wants to see some completed footage - once they see what we have, they will probably want Darren (at least) to be on the show to explain what we are doing.  Another Boo-Yah!) (Comment on this)
Monday, April 14th, 2008
10:48 pm	Old MacDonald had a renderfarm... Both racks of computers up and running...   check. Network up and running....                               check. Programs loaded on farmer nodes....           check. Master node configured properly...                 check. Master node can see farmer nodes...            check. Quick test render works....                                check. Tomorrow, I'll get Darren to load up an as-yet-unrendered scene for the movie, and we'll let her rip.  In the immortal words of Dr. Emmett Brown, "If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour...  your gonna see some serious shit." (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 21st, 2008
8:30 pm	Yet another score... Wandered back over to surplus.  I found a pallet of disk subsystems, surplus from the Grid Computing Center.  So I picked up a couple to add to the render farm; each subsystem has 1.8TB of disk space (Boo-Yah!)  I may go back next week and grab a couple more. In the meantime, I have expanded the render farm.  Having reached the maximum capacity in my office for power and cooling, I have set up another rack of machines in a spare office down the hall.  All networked together, and all accessable through a data center KVM system that was being scrapped from a downtown brokerage (thanks, Dale!).  Lightwave 3D (the rendering software we are currently using) has a network rendering system called ScreamerNet - we are installing it on all the machines.  I can hardly wait to crank this baby up and see what she'll do.... (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
1:50 pm	He shoots, he scores! Wandered over to surplus today (always looking for computer upgrades for the render farm...).  Found a pallet of machines that looked interesting - closer inspection revealed that they were 1U rackmount dual processor Xeons (2.66GHz) with 200GB of disk and 2GB of RAM.  SCORE!  (I grabbed an even dozen, but there are another 30 or so left that I might go back for later...).  This should speed up the render farm a bit :-). (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
3:02 pm	Capricon photos up So I put some Capricon photos up - mostly some familiar looking people :-) They are here for anybody interested. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
12:53 pm	Baaa! (meme sheep) I am: Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs) A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s. Which science fiction writer are you? (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008
10:20 pm	More snow coming... It was actually supposed to start snowing before now, but we have just had rain up to this point. They were calling for 3 - 5 inches tonight, maybe another 3 - 5 inches tomorrow. Looks like most of the snow will come tomorrow (looking at the big radar picture, it looks pretty ugly out by the mississippi river). Oh well, if it gets really ugly tomorrow, I can always get out the bearclaws and walk to work. (And, the generator is ready to go if the power goes out...) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 6th, 2008
4:52 pm	Baaaa! (meme sheep) 79% Bill Richardson 76% Chris Dodd 70% Barack Obama 69% John Edwards 68% Mike Gravel 66% Hillary Clinton 63% Joe Biden 61% Dennis Kucinich 53% Rudy Giuliani 53% John McCain 49% Mike Huckabee 40% Mitt Romney 37% Ron Paul 34% Tom Tancredo 34% Fred Thompson 2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz Things that make you go "hmmm..." (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 20th, 2007
12:15 pm	I guess somebody has to fund W's "dirty little war"... and this time, it looks like us.  But it is not the end of the world. So the Lab Director had an All-Hands meeting this morning to present the doom and gloom about the omnibus spending bill and how it affects us at Fermi.  ($22 billion had to be cut from the federal budget, plus an additional $8 billion to make up for the inevitable "earmarks" (read "pork") that end up in every budget, in order to meet the President's spending request (notice I didn't say "balance the budget", because the federal budget hasn't been balanced for years) and pay for the war.) The Lab and the DOE are committed to Run II (the current thing we are doing, and the most "real science" we are getting in high energy physics at the moment), so they will not be shutting things down for vast stretches of time.  Instead, starting in February (and running through the end of September, which is the end of the fiscal year), there will be a "rolling furlough", where everyone has to take two days a month off (they haven't yet decided if it has to be without pay, or if accrued vacation time can be used).  These days off can be planned in advance so as to minimize inconvenience (those of us with built-in overtime in our schedules can take our days off when we are not working overtime). There will also be a 200 person RIF, probably sometime in April or so.  (Given the stated objective of full support for Run II, it is unlikely that anyone from my group (Operations) would be included in the RIF - we are short as it is, and they are not hiring *ANY* new people, so we need all the operators that we have just to keep things running.  They will probably not, however, replace anyone who leaves.) Two big projects for the future of high energy physics (ILC R&D and NoVA) were not funded past what has already been spent so far this fiscal year, so all work on those projects will cease.  Staff from those projects will be reassigned (and/or included in the RIF).  The projects were not cancelled, just not funded in full for this fiscal year - it is not clear what their status will be next fiscal year. Of course, all the details for this have yet to be worked out, and we haven't seen the final budget (the DOE hasn't even seen the final budget yet).  Representatives at the state and federal level are trying to minimize the pain (if that is even possible), so we shall see what the overall final outcome will be. Next fiscal year is an election year - generally bleak for any type of budget increases, so we were told not to expect too much more next year than we got this year. All in all, it could have been a *lot* worse.  (Although, I don't know what the future holds for any position in a lab funded by the government - the current crop of bozos running for President (both Republican and Democrat) don't instill a lot of confidence in me for the future of science funding in this country.) (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 1st, 2007
2:58 am	12 Grimmauld Place Redux I hate my mother-in-law's house.  The place is a dump, falling apart (it would probably take over $40K just to fix all the structural problems, and that doesn't include bringing it up to code).  If it were up to me, I would make one more trip there, in order to rent a bulldozer.... (I keep telling Ang that I believe that, with a big enough chipper-shredder, I could fit the whole place into two 20 yard dumpsters...) The people keeping an eye on the place called last week - the furnace wasn't working.  Normally, this would be a big deal - except that nobody is currently living there.  The city turned the water off a couple of months ago (since nobody is there, the water usage has gone way down - the city decided that the meter wasn't working properly) - they said that they classified the house as abandoned.  When we pointed out that it wasn't abandoned (it was just unoccupied), they said that they would turn the water back on if we wanted, but someone had to be there so that they could test the meter.  We just haven't had the time (a Good Thing (tm), as it turns out).   So we made a run to Bland Rapids to winterize the dump (much cheaper than paying someone to fix the furnace, if we could have found anyone). To winterize it, I had to get into the dirt floored crawlspace.  This involved squeezing through this *tiny* little window (note to self: lose the gut) - I would not fit through with my winter coat on (I just barely fit through once I took the coat off).  I had to fight through 30 years of cobwebs (think Munster's house, X10) in order to get to the furnace and water heater.  I swear I saw Shelob hiding in a corner.  I turned off the power to the furnace (the blower motor was running, but the gas had never kicked on - either the igniter board died (this happened once before), or the thermocouple was shot).  The fluepipe from the furnace to the chimney was completely rusted away, so that if the gas had actually kicked on, all the exhaust would be dumped right into the crawlspace (I guess it was a good thing that the furnace died).  I also turned off the gas to both the furnace and water heater, and opened the draincock on the bottom of the water heater.  We left the light on down there, and I added an additional 100 watt bulb in a troublelight (this should keep the crawlspace from freezing during the winter).  On the way back out of the crawlspace, I closed the main water valve (the city had already shut off the street valve).  Getting out that little window was even more fun than getting in.  I came out looking like a Welsh coal miner. Inside the house we opened all the water taps, allowing any water left in the pipes to run out through the water heater and onto the dirt floor in the crawlspace.  We emptied the toilet tanks and put RV antifreeze in the toilet bowls and all the sink traps (and the washing machine drain) to keep the traps full (and sewer gas out of the house).  The place should be just fine for the winter - we can fix the furnace in the spring, and get the water turned back on so we can finish cleaning the place out. I doubt the place would pass any inspection, so we will probably have to sell it as a lot that just happens to have a structure on it that will need to be torn down.... (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 12th, 2007
9:02 am	Yet another Windycon over and done with... ...and it went reasonably well (from a Tech Services viewpoint).  A few mis-communications (but nothing major), and things went well past the scheduled ending point Saturday afternoon (so I didn't have enough time to get any dinner before having to set up for the masquerade - many thanks to qnofhrt for squeezing a couple of pieces of pizza out of the filkers (they were the ones who ran later than scheduled) so I could at least have something to eat).  I heard (in a roundabout way) that the Suttons were pleased with the sound for the operetta, which was good - I ended up doing it cold (having never heard the piece), and there wasn't enough time for an on-stage rehearsal.  It could have been better if I would have had a few more microphones, though.  (Note to self: pick up a few more mics for doing things like this - talk to billroper about which mics work best for filk.) The hotel was more abysmal than I had remembered, but at least this year my room did not smell like raw sewage (like it did a couple of years ago).  The parking still stank to high heaven (the guys running the entrance booth ended up selling spaces (on the side) to people attending the circus at the Rosemont Horizon next door), and the elevator near us was dead most of the weekend (thank Ghu I was using one of the con PODS to stage equipment out of, and didn't need the elevator to haul stuff up to the room and back).  The door to our room was falling off the hinges, so getting it to close was an adventure (to say the least).  And, for some unknown reason, whoever designed the HVAC for the building set it up so that either the whole building could be in winter mode (heating), or summer mode (cooling), but not both.  Since they already made the switchover to winter mode, we could not get anything but heat in the room, and what we really needed was cooling.  As far as I am concerned, the Wyndham OHare should be used as a demonstration for the con panel "Blowing Things Up for Fun and Profit" - thank Ghu Windy is moving to a *much* better hotel next year!  (And, as an added bonus, the new hotel is less than two minutes away from my storage locker where all the A/V equipment is kept!  Yea!) (8 Comments |Comment on this)