Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Some snow

We took the Subaru into the shop last Monday and it stayed overnight. Then we drove it home Tuesday and Wednesday, leaving the Mazda at work:
 It was plugged in, keeping the engine warm:
 Some of the signs around town are getting hard to read. It's not just motion which makes this one impossible:
 There are two roads into our subdivision. We call this one the "low road" and it's our default because it's less steep (we live on the ridge to the upper left). Anyway, this time one hopes not to meet oncoming traffic.

Totem pole project

I missed my final last week due to snow, but here are some images of the final project. The assignment was to make a totem pole of at least four objects at least five inches big in some dimension that represents something about our life. Here is mine:

 The base represents some trips I took to Alaska before we moved here, before Rob. I went canoeing with Dave Musgrave twice on memorable trips. So when he offered us jobs, it was hard to say no:
 This is the TV I bought in 1988 to watch the winter Olympics:
 The TV was pretty much permanently turned off as soon as we started playing Puzzle Pirates. See above for a hint of the sailing puzzle on the laptop screen:
 The crows nest doesn't fit on top in the new office location, but it does balance on top (surprisingly). This is us playing Tai Chi, the next thing that's trying to take over our lives:

Thursday, December 13, 2012

We shovelled Tuesday evening...

We pushed a good four inches over the cliff on Tuesday, and now this. Last night the bottom of the Subaru was plowing snow just for the last bit into our subdivision and it continued to snow all night. We've gotten at a foot since Tuesday night:
 Trying for a picture of Rob pushing snow over the cliff and somehow the flash just got blurry snowflakes. That's my snow scoop on the ground:

 The procedure is to fill the scoop, then drag it to the edge of the cliff and push. It's going to take many trips:


We're taking a break for tea and photos. The news from campus is that UAF is open today even though the public schools are not (and they never, ever close for snow). I have a final today at 4 PM and we should be able to get in by then as long as the plow comes to clear the roads.

Here's the view from inside:

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Trees

Art department on left, bookstore on right.
I had to go to the main campus to pick up my parts for the totem pole project, all glazed and fired and everything (I'll post about it later - two parts are still at school).
View from Wood Center bus stop.

We left work early to drive home in the daylight, such as it is. A few hours later our boss wrote to say that we should feel free to do what's necessary to be safe (like leave early). Here's the view of our balcony:

View up the driveway, showing some of the better visibility of tire tracks.

I got everything wired together on Tux's head. The six pins of the Arduino are facing down because they are used to connect it to my laptop via USB. The other things you see are a battery and a buzzer.

Here he is all together with a motion sensor on his head and LEDs on his helmet. The central one is a tri-color LED while the rest are blue.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Abstraction/reproduction

The fourth pottery assignment is to recreate something as realistically as possible, then make another item which is somehow different. I chose to do a yellow-eyed penguin since we enjoyed watching them in New Zealand several years ago:

The big guy is Tux, the Linux penguin, inspired by a photo of Penguin Computing, but the gun mine has comes from the game Spiral Knights. I used the pink/blue slip shown last time and at the lower temperatures used here, I got the pink. It's always a learning adventure!

Then there's the piece of yellow felt with an Arduino Lilypad computer on it. The plan is to put that inside Tux's head and have it control some lights and stuff on the helmet. Time to get to work on that...

I heard there was a request for tree photos. It's a bit dark right now, so I bring you candles instead: