Today I got an email from a man called Commander Fred Beach of the Navy regarding the railgun. We sent a few emails back and forth before he called me in my office and we talked for a long time about whether or not I'd like to work for the Navy EML projects when I get my degree. It turns out he also builds railguns at home for fun. We discussed a lot of practical aspects of amateur railgunning and he gave me some pointers for the railgun I'm working on with Holly.

And instantly I'm all hyped up about railguns again. Woo! I like being inspired.

Also in ye olde inbox today, I got email from Fox News asking if they could interview me about urban exploration. This puts me in an interesting situation. I've personally witnessed how the media will gladly screw over someone for a story, and I've seen it happen with regards to stories about UE to friends of mine. So I'm not about to walk into that one.

But on the other hand, these people are persistant as hell and they will eventually find someone who thinks being on TV is more important than possibly ruining it for everyone else as well as possibly incurring legal trouble for themselves. So there is an argument to be made for having someone reasonably informed about UE and also familiar with the tactics of the press and the repercussions of certain statements be the one doing the talking.

So I stopped short of telling the lady to stuff it and said I would be willing to help under some very strict guidelines which definitely include me not appearing on camera, not being quoted, etc. as well has having some editorial control over what gets aired. I asked for it all in writing before anything happens. I suspect she'll move on to someone less difficult. But hey I tried...

I remember when 9600bps seemed blindingly fast. And even though I'm just on a VT100 terminal, no web graphics or any of that stuff, watching my pine window refresh over the course of five seconds or so is unbearable.

But nonetheless significant. This is the first internet connection ever from the warehouse. Via MIT's 9.6kbps dialup, Alex's laptop, some alligator clips, and a long piece of crimped-up cat-5 running through the next warehouse over to some random demarkation terminal. Reminds me of the good 'ol days.

Except the part about 9.6kbps being blindingly fast. This connection speed reminds me of having a root canal.

Jamie has gotten me addicted to one of the pinball machines down in the student center. It's a mid-90's game from Bally called "Attack From Mars" and I love it. I think it has surpassed "Firepower" as my favorite pinball game now.

The walk to and from the warehouse is about two miles. Rob and I calculated that if I walk two and from the warehouse every weekday for one school year, I'll have walked about 720 miles. In comparison, Rob estimates that during five years at MIT living in distant Next House and Tang Hall, he walked an equivalent of 2000+ miles, with something like 42 days of continuous walking.

The big moving day... got the U-Haul van and moved everything I own over to the warehouse. Compared to the massive quantites of stuff that the other guys have, my pile seemed rather insignificant. Rob helped, then stayed around as we worked on putting up the walls. Turns out Rob and the nailgun get along really really well. Perhaps a little too well. But we got some free labor out of him and all I had to do was buy him lunch. Thanks Rob!

We also salvaged a kitchen counter, sink, rack, and reel-to-reel tape deck from a scrap-heap on campus. If you're lucky, maybe I'll take a picture of the "Information Collection Panel" we grabbed and put it here. It rules.

Spent my first night in the warehouse. On a chair. Neck crick. Yowch.

Mikkel and I launched more rockets today; unfortuantely my Nerd Magnet was too heavy by about 40 grams. The dry weight including RMS cannister is an even 1450g and the cutoff was 1500g, but the propellant weighs 92g. I managed to completely destroy one of my rockets, the viking, and damage three others. It was all very exciting. More details here.

With the exception of my cable modem bill, it was a good day for mail. I finally got my missing coins that I won on Ebay two months ago, and because of the lateness the shipper included a bunch of extra stuff. I made a total killing on that auction.

More exciting than that, however, was the arrival of the final shipment of parts for The Nerd Magnet, including the first two motors - an H128W and an H165R. Aside from meaning that the rocket moves from "finishing" to "active" status, and that these motors are so powerful that I'm not technically supposed to be able to launch them, this mail was exciting because it was shipped to my office - in the MIT reactor control facility.

So I stop by the office to check my mail, and there is my package sitting on the reception desk - directly in front of the armed police officer. I guess the hazmat labels on the package indicating that it contained a "propellant device" had riled up the already heightened security at the reactor.

They asked me questions about what it was, why I hadn't answered my office phone, etc. And made sure that I left the building with it. It was all somewhat humorous.

This evening I cut up the tubular Kevlar and made the final adjustments to the recovery bridle for the rocket, packaged it all up, and weighed it. Dry weight: 4 pounds.

And that's a big fat shame, since the FAA waiver for this weekend was denied and we can't launch anything over 3.3 pounds. I am so frustrated. I'll still cart the rocket out to Amesbury and give it a shot - perhaps Evan's scale is off, etc. It's at least very close. If they deny the launch, though, at least there's another launch in just two weeks.

Work proceeds depressingly slowly at the warehouse. We spent about seven hours there tonight for the express purpose of putting up metal studs for the walls. We successfully laid one runner. Troubles with the 22 cal. nail gun and the difficulty of hanging runners on the 13' ceiling with only one ladder held us back.

I'm moving in in just over a week. Looks like I may be sleeping on a couch for awhile.

The SETI@home people now have enough users that they can't collect data fast enough to keep everyone busy processing something. That's so great. I like grassroots science, and I'm glad that the SETI people are getting enough public interest to justify some funding. And now they don't have to waste the funding on data processing.

Well it's set in stone now. I will be out of this apartment by the 25th. [dramatic chord]

Supercollision was amazing. Even better than last year's Collision. Last year I made the arcade emulator/projector for people to play with. This year I didn't do anything due to a lack of time. Lots of people from the first one came back to with similar projects, but everyone had tightened up their routine.

Aaron's robot was there again, but now inside a darkened circus with two giant spinning horn drivers spewing out dark ambient while a projector plays abstract organic video on the ceiling. A total sensory mindjob, in addition to a great robot.

There was a cool laser barrier project that made it feel like I was breaking into a bank or something.

Martin Martin had his exoskeleton arm that could be controlled with a telephone touch pad, someone has a picture of me wearing it and being forced to smack Holly around. It was tons 'o fun.

Frostbyte and Carl had their LED stuff out again. Their persistence of vision displays can now do full color photorealistic images, which blows me away. They have also ventured into 2-D with a 2500-LED wall that displays amazing patterns and pulsates. Captivating.

The delightful Erica improved on her spinny nuns thing from last year to make some dancing dolls that started doing their thing when you sat on these wee chairs nearby. Definitely the most whimsical of all the installations.

Add to this the constant live electronic music and video demonstrations and the event kicked so much butt. I feel kinda sorry for Dan, who does all the legwork for this by himself, but I'm so glad he does it. I can't wait for the next one and hopefully I'll have something to contribute. So inspiring...

...so it's a shame I had to miss the after-party at the Cellar to go clean the floor at the warehouse. But at least something is getting done. We now have the metal studs we need to put up walls and the plumbing in the shower room pretty much works. Alex also got most of the lighting working. So tonight we moved all of our shit around as we sanded the floor with a big floor polisher and then shopvac'd it all up. We must have removed a metric ton of funk from the floor. Yuck. Who knew the floor near the bathrooms was actually yellow? Not us...

I finished the airframe for The Nerd Magnet today. It's super mean-lookin'. Ken thought it was pretty cool too, and said, "I've got to get a photo of this project." As I was posing, he said that it looked like a weapon and requested that I try not to look like Usama bin Laden. Not sure what that means.

Tonight I went out to Worcester with Rob & Z to investigate a drain that hadn't been explored yet. It was actually a submerged stream, so the water was relatively clear and had lots of fish in it. The ceiling was also pleasently infested with large spiders.

The initial stretch of tunnel was a low courrugated steel arch about 6.5' high and 20' wide which went on straight for a long time. Aside from the fish and the spiders, there wasn't a lot to see. Eventually I spotted light ahead that wasn't from our flashlights and we emerged out into a short stretch of stream that was uncovered. It was in the middle of some atheletic field complex and was only about 50' long. But it was a good exit point and meant that when we turned around to leave, we wouldn't have to traverse the long archway tunnel anymore.

Continuing upstream, the low arch quickly gave way to a 6.5' concrete round with redbrick manhole chambers periodically. the tunnel was much more curvy now and headed out underneath the stadium we saw when we were breifly outside. There was one point where the tunnel transistioned upwards about two feet with a really slippery brick slope/waterslide thing. This was challenging to climb because putting your hands on the available ladder rungs meant putting your hands on the spiders.

It was somewhere above this point where I suddenly saw a giant spider shadow on the wall, and quickly determined that it was coming from my headlamp. looking up and crossing my eyes revealed a really big spider right on my forehead. This was follwed rather quickly by a small yell and my smacking the headlamp off my head and into the skank water. Z inspected my head for further infestation and I picked the nasty headlamp out of the water. Much to my displeasure, I strapped it back onto my head.

For a breif stint the tunnel opened up into a 10' tall x 6' wide blackstone corridor with old rusty pipe hangers on the wall. It was clearly a very very old piece of tunnel, and it seems likely that it was below some building which is why they hadn't replaced it with the newer concrete. Perhaps this is the portion of tunnel that runs beneath the stadium.

After that, the tunnel went back to being a concrete round, though a bit smaller now. This continued for some time and then there were two shape changes in rapid succession. First the tunnel went back to a low arch, though it was made of concrete this time, and then it became a very low rectangular culvert that was very uncomfortable to move in, expecially considering the spider problem.

The combination of extreme discomfort with my being sick and my light starting to get dim led me to draw the line and wait as they continued on about 100'. Seeing nothing of interest, they turned back and we called it a night. Good drain, too bad it's a shrinker.

More work on the Nerd Magnet - now with construction photos! Getting close to done, the only thing left to do is epoxy parts together, which unfortunately takes forever because of the 24-hour cure time. Should be done with everything but the outer fin fillets by tomorrow night.

Went to a post-hack party for people who participated in a graduation hack last year, it was fun. Watched the unedited video, ate a lot of food, and had a good time.

I'm strongly considering naming my L1 certification rocket "The Nerd Magnet."

I was down in the hobby shop all afternoon today working on it, and every single person who came in there wanted to ask me questions about it. How high would it go, what sort of propellant, how do you measure the altitude, what's it made of, etc. I could scarcely get any work done on it between the explaination sessions.

Having said that, I did manage to get all of the bulkheads and centering rings drilled and the allthread cut to size. The only thing left to do is to cut the motor mount tube to size and start the long, arduous task of epoxying. This rocket is going to kick ass.

UPS apparently had been trying to get my PML rocket parts order to me for the last week. On Friday, they gave up and sent me a postcard that said "Come pick it up yourself, jerkass."

So today I went out to Somerville and picked up my package. And now I have all of the main components I need to start construction of my High Power Rocketry Level 1 Certification rocket.

Given that my advisor is out of town for the week, and that I now have a 6' tall rocket sitting unassembled on my floor... I may have to take the rest of the day off tomorrow once class is over.