Evaporative cooling

I’ve often mentioned that if I was going to settle here, I’d set up a cooling fountain because this is an arid climate and evaporative cooling should work rather well here. It seems that I’m going to be here for a while, so I’m going to look into making a smaller, more compact evaporative cooling device than a decorative fountain. I should get some sleep soon. I pulled my thermodynamics book out so that I can crunch a few numbers to help figure out how well this will work. I’m tired and I want to put together some sort of rough plan as well as pick up a good thermometer to try to measure actual performance.

Blog comes to life

I guess the spider must have come around yesterday. 12 hits in one day is a record for my blog. My last record was 3. Seven of those came from search engines using the following search terms:

gay calgary
price on copper in ottawa
“how to” build “3d printer”
“3d printer’
where to buy 3d glasses in ottawa
salvation army ottawa blog

with two people searching for gay calgary.

I’ve never really tried to do anything in the Calgary gay community. I’m not sure if I’ve really said anything meaningful on that topic. I have talked about a few queer issues, what happened at pride is the only Calgary specific thing that I talked about. The price of copper in ottawa was definately about my talk of the production cost of a penny and what those are made of. For the record, there’s very little copper in a penny. The bulk of all canadian coins are steel.

How to build a 3d printer and 3d printer hits, I might be able to be more helpful with that. I’ve been meaning to do a bit of experimentation to see what works. Thus far I haven’t really done anything useful though. Maybe I should go to the mall and gather parts for testing my printhead idea and see how it compares to the one the people in the bath project are using. There’s still a few details that need to be hashed out.

As for where to buy 3d glasses in ottawa, you got me. I don’t really know where would have something like that. My first instinct is to ask the people who supplied the 3d projector and media that you want the 3d glasses to use. If that doesn’t work, maybe try asking the museum of science and technology.

I never made any comments about the Salvation Army in Ottawa. However, I did make comments about a retailer, Target, which does not have a location in Ottawa, Ontario, and their interactions with the Salvation Army. They might do good work, but when people start getting polical. Maybe I didn’t quite bash traditional media enough when I wrote about the Salvation Army. Knowing the way they generate profit, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just one screwball who yelled gay-wiccan conspiracy. If you simply don’t print any other statements, you can make it look like a prodominent view. If that screwball happens to be part of the salvation army, you can even make it sound like the general view of the organization. There’s a chance the truth could have been twisted. Religion and politics is a hazardous mix. You can use them as leverage for fundraising in charity, but using them to lash out in anger really makes you look bad.

Now that people see me, I wonder when they’ll start commenting… As in legitimate, non-spam comments.

Life or something like it

Today was fairly uneventful. I went to some charity booksale at a farmer’s market today. There wasn’t really anything of interest there. There was a cookbook that dealt with recipes involving four ingredients or less, which would have been interesting if I had any interest in the food in there. If you live alone, chance area that you seldom go through enough of anything to have much variety in your diet. Cutting down the number of ingredients in a meal helps get through stuff. I’m hoping to be living alone again soon instead of with family. It just feels like the way things should be.
In other news, I finally generated the last plot I wanted for my polarization article. It just needs to be resized and a dash of colour. I also wrote the heavy water article. There’s a mess of equations in it, which I’m not sure what to do with. Hopefully MS word’s save as webpage thing will convert them all to images for me. That’s going to be a big page when it’s done. So, I’ve got a bit of a sense of accomplishment right now. I’m getting the feeling that I should print and proof read these before putting them online, then again, it’s unlikely to get that many hits the first day anyway. There’s still plenty of time to make revisions before I have a layout anyway. Whatever will the next article be?

Last Exam Down

Well, I’m all done. Unless there are any surprises, that should be the last exam of my degree. Despite my lack of understanding of some things and my poor preparation, I actually wound up doing fairly well. Fairly well may be an understatement there. It doesn’t really make me feel any better though. The important thing about that though isn’t that I know the equations, I’m sure I’ll forget that soon enough. It’s important that I understand the methodology and I think I correctly demonstrated that.
So, what do I do next? I feel like celebrating, but I’m not sure how. Something big though. After that, I find a job and go work. It also feels like a good time to start a new project. Probably going to get some machining equipment going. It looks like I’ll probably be heading back to Calgary and I have some unfinished business there. Calgary is home to the Western Canadian Robot Games and I used to always enter it with a friend of mine. It’s time to show off a bit of new technology. Once I develop it that is. Before I can build anything though, I need to have tools to build things. I want a mill drill.

One last post tonight

School work is moving a little slower than I had hoped. My notes are a little incomplete and I was hoping to clear enough of the stuff I know for sure is correct tonight. There’s still quite a bit that needs to be recorded in my 7 pages of crib sheets that I’m allowed to bring in. The goal is still to get all that out of the way by noon. The only way I’ll be doing that is to get a good night sleep and start right away in the morning. At the moment, thoughts are on getting this material covered so that I can stop worrying about the last exam.
I also can’t stop thinking of the 3d printer nozzle that I want to build. I think I’ll try to get everything I need at one stop after the exams. There’s some information that I need first, mainly the grain size of the pellets, what temperature they melt at, and what temperature they’ll be irreperably damaged. I’ll also need a good termometer. At the moment, I’m thinking one of those meat thermometers will do nicely. It’s roughly the right temperature range and I should be able to just poke the tip into the test area. I’m undecided about how to connect my drive motor to my drill bit, though cordless screwdrivers are cheap enough. Heating element is also undecided at this point. I’m kind of leaning towards seeing what’s inside a USB coffee warmer simply because of low voltage. I’m also tempted to just keep looking around the trash till I find a broken toaster or just use a few resistors. Light bulb is undesirable at the moment. Maybe an old transformer. At the moment, I want to keep my voltages low and avoid using house current when possible. There’s still many details to be decided. Of course, most of them will be just improvised.
Goals for the moment, good night sleep, early start tomorrow, finish static stability section of crib sheets and move onto dynamic.