Nina and her parents, shortly after graduating with a Master of Arts degree in Earth and Environmental Science on May 28, 2006.

Reporting live from the Albuquerque airport, where they just paged United passenger "James Joyce." Hrmmm...

I'm off to Connecticut for the weekend to watch Nina officially become a Master of Earth (and Environmental Science).

Once upon a time, I made reference to 9^9^9 being the largest number that could be expressed using only three digits. Jimmy Hambone Lunddite wrote to inform me that, in fact, 999! was larger than 9^9^9. And basically he's right, because 999! is about 4x10²⁵⁶⁴ while 9^9^9 = 387420489^9 ~= 2x10⁷⁷.

And this is correct, assuming that 9^9^9 is interpreted as (9^9)^9, which is the correct assumption without additional information. Unfortunately, what I meant to infer was 9^(9^9), which is easier to write if you have nested superscripts (which I could not do in HTML). And 9^387420489 is vastly larger than 999!. So let me refine my statement:

9^{(9^9)} is the largest number that can be represented with only three digits.

Climbed two Colorado fourteeners yesterday, Redcloud Peak (14,034') and Sunshine Peak (14,001'). Sunshine is the lowest fourteener in the state! :)

Some major storms set in on nearby mountains while I was climbing, though the sky directly overhead stayed clear until after I had summited Redcloud. On the way to Sunshine, a storm that formed over the Eolus group moved in on me and I had to run to the summit of Sunshine to beat the storm. Unfortunately, there is no easy escape in the direction I wanted to go from Sunshine because of a band of cliffs, so I had to run quite a ways back along the ridge to a safe glissade couloir. Running at altitude is a real pain.

Anyway, once I got down to safety and rested off my unplanned run, the storm passed and left Sunshine back in the sun. All I saw when I was on Sunshine was snow. Luckily, the storm wasn't electrical and there was never any real danger other than lack of visibility. The temperature dropped about 20 degrees, but I was well-equipped for that.

Overall, a fun trip. I was able to pace myself really well, I stayed hydrated and ate frequently, so I felt really good at the summit of Redcloud. My legs weren't even feeling worked, which allowed me to do the run to Sunshine. The only real problem during the whole climb was that I was in such a hurry to get off the ridge on the glissade that I didn't take the time to switch into my waterproof shell and gloves, so the long glissade left me with frozen hands and a really cold elbow. No permanent damage. :)

My friend Dan owns 2/3 share of a Mooney Executive 21, and offered to fly me to Santa Fe for lunch yesterday. Of course I took him up on it.

I really like flying in small aircraft; I should get a pilot's license. The flight to Santa Fe Airport only takes about 15 minutes. Unfortunately, while we were in the Blue Corn Cafe, one of Los Alamos' patented afternoon storms descended on town. So when we flew back, we couldn't land. We had to orbit Espanola for about an hour waiting for the electrical storm to move off. Once the lightning had moved on past White Rock, we went ahead and landed despite the high crosswind, turbulence, and rain. It was a fun landing. Add to this that Los Alamos is one of the more difficult short-field airports to land at, and suffice to say there was adrenaline. I took a video of the landing with my camera:

Took me awhile to get around to posting these, but here are some photos from my climb of Florida Peak last weekend.

This was the only real "climb" of the weekend, though I did do some interesting drive-ups and short hikes. I met up with a bunch of the highpointing heavy-hitters to find ourselves on four of the most prominent peaks in the state as well as one new county highpoint. Woo. This included two hard-to-get-access-permission peaks— one on White Sands Missile Range overlooking the Trinity Site, and the other on one of Ted Turner's ranches (fun factoid: Ted Turner owns more than 1% of the land area of New Mexico, the 6th largest state in the union).

It was a fun weekend.

There was no one around. The sign reads, "Closed due to snow and ice conditions."

John is buying tickets for the entire group, because the airline told him they'd put us in "premier" seating if we did it that way, so I don't know the exact details yet. But I will be in Belize for the end of June. Very excited.

For those of you who read my blog via an Atom-powered newsreader, you probably noticed that my Atom feed broke, back when I upgraded to MT 3.2 (thanks for the heads-up, Adrian and Christina). You'll be happy to know that it is back to being a fully-armed and operational battlestation now. Point your newsreaders back to http://mouser.org/log/atom.xml

Found this guy munchin' on my lilacs yesterday. It is Papilio polyxenes, the Black Swallowtail Butterfly. I initially misdiagnosed this as an Indra swallowtail, which it turns out are much more rare around here than this guy. I found a biologist on the web who's research is solely with the Indra swallowtail, and he corrected my error. I like swallowtails a lot. And just as I was writing this post, Cari spotted another (different species) swallowtail sitting on the lilacs. I went out to shoot it, but the neighbor's dog started barking like crazy (like he always does) and scared the butterfly away.

This morning was the Los Alamos YMCA's 16th annual bench press competition, which my roommate Cari has been training for for the last 5 weeks.

Cari successfully benching 160 pounds

She benched 160 pounds, which ties her personal record and was sufficient to win the Women's Open division as well as the Women's Heaviest Lift.

Cari with her winnings.

And my new camera takes video, so here's my first attempt and using YouTube and embedding a video:

Congratulations Cari!

Last night I invited the ultimate frisbee crowd over to my house for vindaloo and arcade games. This is the second time that I've done this (last time, a few weeks ago, it was chicken carbonara). Last night about 10 people came over and a lot of fun was had. Stu brought a great rice pudding, Sierra made a spinach pear salad, and Sirhc brought a chocolate chip cake. There was a ton of food and no one left hungry.

The arcade machine figured prominently. The games that saw the most use were SNES Super Bomber Man (4-player) and Super Puzzle Figherter II Turbo. My control panel isn't really configured right for four players, but with the dual-stick setup on each side I was able to squeeze in the extra players. A SNES pad has 8 buttons in addition to the directional pad, so I don't have enough buttons to give all four players a full compliment. But Super Bomber Man only really uses four of the buttons, so I was able to make it work. It was a big hit.

Puzzle Fighter closed the place, with the last people leaving well after 11pm. Unfortunately, the last people only left because one of the joysticks on the P2 side got smashed in. Doh!

I disassembled the control panel today after work and discovered that, for some reason, I had only used 1/2" wood screws to fasten the joystick base to the underside of the control panel surface. Half of the screw length was squandered going through the plastic base, so each screw was really only biting with a couple of threads. I'm actually surprised this hasn't happened sooner. I'm now awaiting the arrival of Bob, who promises to bring me some 3/4" wood screws with which I will re-secure the joystick and return the arcade cabinet to it's full capabilities.

I've been designing a major circuit board for work over the last few months and we finally fabbed the first turn of boards last week. They showed up on Friday afternoon and I started populating and testing yesterday. In testing a new board, we tend to populate small functional blocks one at a time and test them. The first thing to go on-board was the power supply. The only problem with this was that the inductors we had in stock for the switching supplies were through-hole, while my layout called for SMT. Not a major issue; they just float above the board a bit and it looks bad—but the output voltages are rock solid.

Next up was the microcontroller, with which all of the other functional blocks communicate. This is the most complicated part on the board and the most challenging part to test. I put a minimum of support components on board—just enough to program the CPU and test that I had control of it. This ended up meaning populating the JTAG programming port and the heartbeat LED. A 100-pin CPU with one bit output. Sweet.

The good news is that the microcontroller (an SiLabs C8051F120) came up on the first try and all of the JTAG stuff worked without a hitch. It accepted my skeleton firmware and drew a very cool 5mA at 12V. All of my attempts to make the light blink, however, were fruitless. The LED anode is tied to 5V through a current limiting resistor, the cathode goes into the drain of an N-channel transistor. The transistor source is tied to ground, and the gate is tied to an output from the microcontroller.

Those of you with EE degrees probably already understand why this will never work. I, however, am but a lowly nuclear engineer and was unfortuantely approaching this piece of circuit with an over-simplified view of how transistors work. The concept I had going in went something like this: A P-channel transistor conducts between the source and drain when the gate is high, whereas an N-channel transistor conducts when the gate is low. This would be the case if transistors were actually switches, but they aren't; they're semiconductors.

The thing about transistors is... they work on charge. You need some excess charge to overcome the potential barrier introduced by the P-N semiconductor junctions inside. In my case, where I had the source connected to ground and a low-active gate.... there was no charge to perpetrate the "switching" and the drain floated, hence I was unable to control the LED.

When I switched to a P-type transistor with the same footprint, and swapped the polarity of the output from the microcontroller, the LED submitted to my control and ye, there was das blinkenlight. This is because now I was providing charge at the gate to overcome the NPN barrier and cause the transistor to conduct. Fascinating. So the P-type transistors work as I expected they would. But the N-type only work that way if the source is high.

So the audience-participation question is: When I had the N-type transistor in place and sent a series of 3.3V pulses into the gate, what was the state of the LED and what did the scope trace look like on the drain?