Day to Day

After a long lapse, I'm updating the blog. Since updating, we took a pretty sweet trip to Spain, which I hope to post a recap at some point. In short I'll just say that southern spain is a very arid landscape and the weather is hot. We saw the Vuelta

In preparing for the Columbia Gorge Marathon on Oct. 25th, I had been getting into some good form. It's been 5 years since I've ran a road marathon(ran Portland marathon in 2004 in PR time) and I'm really looking forward to this one. The course is challenging and it's got a view of the gorge most of the way. If the weather's bad it could turn out to be an epic cold and windy death march. Two weeks ago I did yasso 800s averaging 2:46 per half mile, which (according to Bart Yasso) translates to the potential of being able to run a 2hr 46min marathon. I pre-ran the final 18 miles of the CGM course felt great. I was all scheduled to run a half marathon tune up last sunday, and then last week, on a 'recovery' run at forest park, I was running on the trail and instead of staying on erickson drive, I needed to warm up so I ran up to the wildwood on wild cherry trail and came back down dogwood, where I proceeded to crash on the down hill, tripping on a root or rock or something. It wasn't running fast, but running downhill that translated into a harder fall, and I didn't catch myself really at all, and basically landed on my side and managed to scrape both the left and right shins (very minor road rash). The worst was the impact to the lower right ribs, and if you've ever had a rib injury you know the drill. Hurts to laugh, hurts to sneeze, hurts to cough. Well try running. So I tried running 3 miles last week and it was not happening. Rested the weekend and got a couple hours on the bike yesterday in a desperate attempt to keep the fitness. Feels a little better this week than last week (but it's more sore after the bike ride), so my status is day to day for the CGM.

I'm nearing completion of school and will be looking to land a job staring in 2010 (around Feb or March). What does that mean? I don't officially get done w/ school until June2010, but I only have one class for the spring term. So the job will probably be here in the valley (portland / hillsboro area). My plans are to get employment in the semiconductor industry as it relates to solar cell manufacturing. The outlook looks pretty good. The program at the school I'm in really could prepare a student for potential employment in the wind, solar (manufacturing), solar (residential), hydro, bio-fuel or electrochemistry (fuel cell) industries. At this point I'm hoping the solar manufacturing thing works out, as I already have an internship at the largest solar cell factory in the Americas. And my senior project (call it Bachelors Thesis) topic is studying the light induced degradation of mono-crystalline CZ silicon solar cells.

Hope somebody still reads the blog, and hope to write a killer race report for the gorge marathon. And if the race doesn't go so well, that's ok, but I should be on the starting line.

School (half way point.)

First I have to say the weather has been great for the past 2 days. We're talking 50 degree-sunglasses days, of which, you don't get very many of here, during this time of year.

On to the real blog entry: So, I'm about 1/2 way through my 2nd for-ray in college. So far, I think the most important information I've learned are concepts in mathematics and electronics. Also, I've thought alot about our society's problems (like the financial crisis of 2008) are pretty much a direct correlation of human beings not being able to understand the exponential function. That is, e to the x (or e^x). I am beginning to understand it.

So this winter term of 2009, I'm taking 4 or 5 classes and here they are... Digital Signal Processing (DSP): Hands down the most interesting and awesome class I've taken so far since going back to school. Really cool stuff taught by the most inspiring instructor at OIT. This is not required for the REE program (that I'm enrolled in), but our director is letting us use it as an elective, since 3 of the renewable energy students are taking the clss. I couldn't not take this course. I have in fact considered switching to the EET (electrical engineering technology) program. probably wont... Fluid Mechanics: good concepts, great textbook, horrible instructor. Enough said there, but it's really too bad, because they just hired this guy, and he's basically reading the text to us. Embarrassing really. Photovoltaics: so far, more to do with azimuth angles of the sun and net present value / return on investment than how the shit actually works. Energy Economics: So far (i know it's only been 1.5 weeks) more about boring supply / demand curves that anything too interesting. This is an elective that I'm taking but I'm considering taking this instead: Biofuels and Biomass: even though I don't really expect to go into this in the future, it is probably going to be more interesting that economics. So i don't think I'll stay in 5 classes, but I have to decide by Friday.

This Saturday will be 5 weeks till Hagg Lake 50k. Laurie is doing the 25k this year, so we've got the training plan all set. Like last year, it will be my first race of the year, and I have cautiously optimistic goals, since this will be my 3rd ultra!!! Now I'm a veteran, and probably most importantly, a Hagg veteran. I know now, what that second lap feels like. Holy shit and well, I wasn't going to post anything about this, but we got a new ride, (I should really say, Laurie got a new ride) and it's f^*&ing awesome. Peace out.

subaru impreza outback sport

Big Day, plus news, etc. (long post)

Here I am, back in the blog-o-sphere, and taking a time out to update the world on everything going on out here. Today was all-in-all a decent day. Still have next week with 4 final exams, 2 presentations / demonstrations, but today was big progress.

This summer I'm taking a 'Fuel Cells' course. It basically consists of learning how fuel cells work, what they are good for and why we may need to put effort into learning and advancing this technology. Part of the course is a lab, and in that lab, my group's assignment is to build a real fuel cell. I'm talking hydrogen fuel cell here. Sounds pretty far out, and dare I say-futuristic or amazingly complicated? You may think it is complicated, but it's actually quite simple, and finally today, on week 7 out of 8, we connected our fuel cell to the H₂ gas line.

Keith & Jeff and I were pretty much worried sick about the whole thing and even though we still probably would have done a good job in the eyes of Bob, the professor, if it didn't work, it would be a bit de-moralizing. The cell was pretty much finished on Monday, and we planned to do final assembly it and connect it to the gas today. The first step was assembling it. Keith and Jeff were basically chomping at the bit to get this thing together, and I was like, cool it boys, we don't have to rush this process here (because they were almost shaking they were so focused on getting this thing together). It got together, and we did a pressure test (w/ about 7 PSI) and it was not successful. One of our electrodes needed to be sealed up. We sealed it and re-connected the electrode. No problem, sealed ready to go. Then Keith got a little excited and as he was tightening one of the gas valves, broke the electrode off. Luckily, the screwed in part was still threaded in the plexi glass (only way to fix this, is to re-build this half of the cell (photos are coming soon, I promise). Luckily we could still measure the voltage using a needle tip multi-meter. So we were still OK to continue.

Next step: Connect gas. We are connecting pure oxygen to one end, and hydrated hydrogen in the other end. We were putting the hydrogen through a erlymeyer flask with warm/hot water, because the middle layer of the fuel cell requires hydration to work optimally. So we finally got everything connected, I put my goggles on (because we've had explosions in the lab before during this process), and turned on the gas. There was no explosion, but instead of injecting hydrated gas go into the fuel cell, the hydrator that we connected sent water at about 5psi into our fuel cell. We (I) hooked up the hydrator wrong. So that wasn't the best case, and we could have very well been ruined right there. In hindsight, this may have acutaly helped us, because it ensured that our nafion was really hydrated. (Nafion: the expensive part of the fuel cell)

When we finally got the hydrogen running through our fuel cell we measured a no load voltage of 997 mV (the perfect ideal voltage for a hydrogen fuel cell is 1.229 volts). We were pretty stoked and it pretty much made the term, so far. Alot went in to building this thing and even though the design is pretty simple, it is a pretty cool project. I will get photos up.

- The other summer school project is a pretty cool system we're building for Motors class. Someone (me) had the idea to attach some kind of contraption to a bike wheel to generate useful power. We attached magnets the rim, and those magnets pass by a couple of coils, which create a voltage that lights low voltage super high intesity LEDs. It works pretty well, and we are finalizing our design, and once I have the pics downloaded you'll see them here (or on my flickr site).

- Friday I'm bike racing. Finally. Unbelievably it's the first bike race of 2008 for me and it's none other than the Portland twilight criterium, cat 3, 6:30 pm. I might be off the back, but not without a fight. There's $3000 purse, so it might just be the Pacific northwest Cat 3 world championships. Should be fun...

- We've been stocking up on blueberry's every weekend, and our freezer is about full of them. If anyone has any suggestions on long term berry storage let me know, because I think they tend to ice up in the freezer. We already made about 8 cans of JAM, and a pretty awesome pie.

- The garden is doing really well. The highlight so far have been lots of green beens, and in a few weeks we are going to have WAY more tomatoes than we will know what to do with. We have 3 corn stalks, and the some of the sunflowers are about 9 feet tall.

- Going to MN over laborday weekend, but leaving out of seattle. We got tickets to the Mariners at Safeco field, and they play none-other-than, the Twins, so I'm super stoked about that, especailly since the twins continue to kick ass, even though they trade all their good players, like Johan Santana an Torii Hunter. I'll be the one w/ the Joe Mauer T-shirt on in section 139.

- Tonight the Statics teacher bought pizza for the class. Pretty nice dude, thanks Joey.

- Tonight, to celebrate the last statics lecture, went to the witchita pub w some classmates. I biked there, and the other 5 renewable energy students each drove seperately. (We are renewable energy students, not energy conservation students I guess).

- Bike commuting is in full effect: Get this: in July, Laurie and I didn't get gas in the car. We did in June, (and we did a huge road trip to Montana in June, so we got alot of gas in June), but during July, we didn't need to get gas once in either the subaru, or the rally car. Take that OPEC. I don't know when the last time that happened in this household but I think it was a long, long time ago, and maybe never.

- That's it. Now the schedule is: work then school on Thursday, work then bike race on Friday, homework / study on sat-sun, one final on Monday, two finals on Wed, one on Thur, then the two presentations / demos on Friday. Then no school till sept 29th. woo hoo!

Electrolysis

School is about it these days. Still have a job, and that tends to get in the way of academics, which seems to be the priority these days. Still running, but the race schedule is a bit up in the air right now. Some good experiments going on in electro-chemistry. If you've noticed the photos in the flickr side bar, we built a Cu-Zn daniels cell, that measured 1.05 volts. So it worked, but it really wasn't that exciting. Yesterday, things got a bit more exciting. We built an electrolyzer, to capture hydrogen, and see how much we could get out of some KOH (potassium hydroxide). Well, it was working really good with while pumping about 2.5 volts in there. We were getting way more bubbles than I thought we would, so I guess you could say the experiment was a success. Next week we'll take more precise measurements. Here's a rough diagram of our design:So there you have it. But that's not the end of the story.

We asked Bob (professor) if there was a safe way we could 'light' the hydrogen. (Heck, it was already mixed with oxygen right there for us) He said "well, not really", in a sort of confused tone. Problem was, my lab partners were focused on this endeavor, to light the gas. (even though it was not part of our thesis for this experiment.) Somehow I think they must have thought it would burn like natural gas on the stove, you know gently. I thought more along the lines of the hindenburg. So, with goggles on, (lab partner 1), [aside: lab partner 1 has a few tatoos, and he has 1 behind each ear, on the left, is a whispering devil, and on the right is a whispering angel] borrows (lab partner 2) lighter, and proceeds to "burp" the hydrogen up (think like your farting in the bathtub). I was already back about 5 feet with my arms shielding my head, when all of a sudden this Super loud POP, and lab partner 1 drops the beaker (didn't break), but it did give us a good scare, and I think my life flashed before my eyes for a second. We apologized to Bob for being wildly inappropriate, and I think he might give future classes a brief lecture on safety (or maybe just common sense). No one got hurt, so we got a little bit of a laugh out of it.

Today we had the midterm in Circuits. It wasn't too bad. The final will be much harder according to Mateo (Mateo=professor, see link on right). A couple of weeks ago he showed us a computer program he wrote to predict the price of stocks. Today while we were taking our midterm, he filed a patent application for something that was related to platforms for collecting and analyzing biomedical research. He's also 27 years old, so I guess you could say he's pretty smart. Great guy to learn from here at OIT. He also assigned to us what he told us is about 15 hours worth of homework for next week (class meets once/week). Hmm. I have tomorrow and Friday set to work at my job, Saturday afternoon is Diff. Eq (yea saturday class what the hell is that?), Sunday i guess I know what I'll be doing. (NOT BLOGGING that's for sure.)

Next week is the MT HOOD CYCLING classic. Last year it was an awesome experience, racing with the cat 3s, and this year, well, the only riding I'm doing is bike commuting, so no racing next week for me. Laurie however is going to be volunteering with doping controls, to see if she can catch some of those doped up cyclists. And the first 2 stages are here in Portland this year!!!! Tuesday the prologue is going to be downtown, and it should be spectacular. I however, will be in class.

hosta la veesta.

Gas price

I know it's pretty high historically speaking, and everyone (radio, TV, sidewalk, etc) is talking about it, but I've been keeping track since sept. 2005, and here's the history at least here in Oregon, at least what we paid. I also have fuel mileage numbers, but that's another post.


The moving average is definitely on the up and up, but is 2.90 really that much different than 3.50? It might force a small shift to something other than business as usual (I use that term from an economists point of view), but if the economy goes south (like it is), the demand for gas will go down (and it actually has since last year), causing the price to go back down, and then we'll be back to where we started. The one factor that might cause problems with that theory is the simple fact that we can't pump oil any faster than we are right now. We'll need to have a shift in the model of our economy that needs infinite growth and is dependent on cheap oil (or should I say energy).

As for school, well, it's school, and I don't know what other engineering programs are like, but I may have picked the hardest one. Last year I was preparing for the PPP, and this year I'm doing lab reports in IEEE format. What would I rather be doing? hmm.

Shout out to my buddy Sean, who ran Boston Marathon! He was bummed that he didn't make his goal time, but he still kicked ass and beat my PR marathon time by 3 minutes! Good Job, and I wish I'd have been there!

Presidential Encounter (sort of)

The place where I work had the former president [William 'Bill' Clinton] come by for a campaign speech. It [the speech] was at 9:30am, and I had to work from 7:30am-11am and since it was the first day back [at work] after being off all week, I couldn't really get away. Plus, I think the line was so long that if you weren't standing in it at 8am, there was no chance you were getting in.

So I'm riding [my bike] home, and I run into a road block [on the OHSU campus]. What the heck? Must be some sort of [medical] emergency, or some sort of [presidential] motorcade! So I took the long way around to get in position for a good view, and although the security guys were real nice they [because they were under the orders of Secret Service] made us move back too far to really get a good look and give BC a big high five or something. I could only manage this shot with my cheap phone:

When he walked around the bushes, I saw his face, and it was a face I'd only seen on TV screens and stuff, so when I saw him walking in a spot I walked on only 2 minutes earlier, i was a bit shocked. It was almost like my brain took a snapshot of that moment, and that image will be in there for ever.

So we had a good spring break [at Orcas Island]. More on that later. Spring term [at OIT Portland] started today; back at school today through mid June [when we get another whole week off. woo hoo.]. Here's a rundown of what's ahead for me [acedemically] this spring:

CHE260 - Electrochemistry (w/ batteries & fuel cells) w/ Lab
REE241 & REE242 - Electrical Power w/ Lab
EE225 - Electric Circuits III (Laplace transforms / applications) w/ Lab
MATH321 - Differential Equations

Just a whole lot of fun there. Even more if you take into account that the math class meets from 1 to 4pm on Saturday!? Nothing like ruining every weekend until June, huh?

NHL Playoffs begin in a couple of weeks and like last year, I'll be submitting my playoff predictions! Stay Tuned!

[I made some edits to this blog because it was quickly written btwn classes and when I re-read it, some things may not have made sense.]

Bike commuting... Rain...

I've started taking two classes at PCC, and I've been bike commuting to get to school. Fortunately, Portland is great for bike commuting (bike lanes, dedicated bike trails, lots of bike commuters). Unfortunately, you still have to know where you're going. My first class was Monday at noon. I left a good hour early, to ensure that I'd have enough time to bike to North Portland, to get up to PCC Cascade campus. So I knew that the school was off Killingsworth, what I didn't exactly know was where on Killingsworth, so when I got to Killingsworth, I didn't quite know which way to go... So... I asked for directions (I know - not very 'manly'). The gal that I asked said... "PCC? Portland Community college? I know there's a PCC on 42nd," she even asked her friend, to confirm. So, I look at where I am... which is like 3rd. hmm 42nd minus 3rd, thats almost 40 blocks. So I put the 29er in TT mode and race up the road. Finally make it to 42nd and although it is a PCC building, it's not where I need to be... So I go up a couple more blocks and ask another lady. "Where's PCC?" she says, well, you overshot it by about 2 or 3 miles... So I have to rewind and race back, all the way to where I was, and then some, to where I needed to be. Only about 25 minutes late, ughh. I don't think I missed too much importance on the first day though. I was really close to where I needed to be the first time I asked for directions. (See, it's not always good to ask for directions -- or I suppose you just need to ask the right person).

Then on Tuesday, I had to go to yet another PCC campus (Sylvania). I was studying the map for the correct route, because there really wasn't a straight shot, and there are sizable hills between our house and the campus. So I found the best route, and I didn't go the wrong way, but it was a grind getting up the hills on my SS 29er.

Since we got here, I've been a bit anxious to get out running on a rainy day. Well, I thought yesterday would be the day. I started out in a light rain, and about 5 minutes into it, it stopped raining. Then when I got done w/ the run, it promptly started raining again. I was sort of worried, because I had to bike up to the Sylvania campus again, but yesterday it had been raining intermittently, so I figured it would stop. It didn't. I was pretty wet by the time I got to campus, but I wore a rain jacket, and brought a dry shirt. I just need to get some fenders. Wouldn't you know, that the sun even popped out during class, but then when class ended it was raining again. We have had pretty nice weather, and I'd say yesterday was probably the rainiest day since we got here.