I worked myself to near exhaustion all weekend to finish the second kayak frame. I'm now ready to begin skinning the kayaks. I'll probably use this next week to make sure everything is in order, so I can skin each kayak in just one day. In the meantime, I've sewn bags for both sets of kayak paddles and built a dozen float bags to put between the hull cross-sections. These keep the kayak afloat should it become swamped and are necessary on all hulled craft with out sealed bulkheads. They came out ugly as sin because the plastic I used to create them was not vinyl and would not glue up using the special vinyl glue used on the kayak skin. Instead, I used irons (clothes and soldering) to melt pieces of the float bags together. While they don't look as good as the glued bags would have, they hold air under mild pressure all the same. Oh well. If all goes as planned next week, I'm only another two weeks from the water!

I've just finished the first of two kayak frames. If I can finish the other in the next couple of days, then I will be ready to skin both of them next weekend. It's pretty exciting. I think the second one will turn out even better than this one did since I had to improvise a few times to make things fit together correctly.


The completed kayak frame with fiberglass coaming in place. Ignore the ripples in the fiberglass. It was my first time working with the stuff. The result is certainly functional, though not very pretty.

For the last month or so I've been building a pair of touring sea kayaks for my wife and I. I found a great set of plans for a home-built, skin-on-frame folding sea kayak design by Tom Yost. Last night was the first time since I started that the materials fit together and finally started to look like a kayak. Check out the early fruits of my labors. I would love to have both boats finished by the end of the month, but I have no way to gage how long it's going to take to skin them.


One kayak coming up! The other one is broken down into the pile of tubes on the far wall.

Here's a second set of photos from the 2007 SDCC which are Star Wars themed. Many of these were shot while waiting in a two hour line to get into the Battlestar Galactica panel. It was worth waiting just to get some of these photos.



Photos with some of our group (Pam and Laura, Jamal) posing in front of a LEGO Chewbacca.





Laura and Jamal posing with a Tie fighter pilot.



The Fett family collecting bounties on Andy and Jamal.





Boba Fett makes friends with Laura and Jamal.




I took a shot of Vader choking Andy too, but the lighting on the showroom floor sucked and the shutter speed was too low to expose a sharp photo.

I went to the SDCC this year with my wife and a few friends. Here are some pictures we took over the course of three days. We all had a great time. Even the long wait on Saturday to get into Ballroom 20 proved to be worth it. The best panel was probably the one for Futurama. I'm sure you can find the "Bender's Big Score" preview on youtube by now. Enjoy!


Some of our group (Jamal, Andy, Laura) posing with Optimus prime. What's with the flames?







Jamal and Laura posing at the Square Enix booth in front of Alphonse Elric from Full Metal Alchemist.




I'll post more shortly.

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL MEMORY OF YOU AND ME.

It can be anything you want — good or bad — BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE.

When you're finished, post this paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON'T ACTUALLY remember about you.

After an annoyingly busy weekend preparing for a presentation and teleconference today, I bought myself a new MacBook Pro. I can't imagine how it is that my computer became slower over time, but I'm sure that was the case. In any case, the upgrade has been virtually seamless.

I visited the Getty yesterday for the fourth time since moving out here to California. It's always a fun place to snap a couple of photos. I was lucky since they had just extended the closing an exhibit featuring James Ensor's etchings for the end of June to the end of July. Those etchings were really entertaining. A lot of them were done with a sort of satirical morbidity. He must have had a really great sense of humor. Here are a few pieces that I liked. I have some alternative titles for a couple.

I pity the fou (Ensor)



Hey you said no eye-lasers (Some 16th century artist, note how Jesus is giving Francis the stigmata)



I forgot the title to this one (Ensor)



Virgin and the angels (Bouguereau). There's another piece that he did that I like a lot, but it was missing from it's spot in the same room as this piece. The security guard didn't know where it went.



Ideal female head (I don't know who did this one either, but I like it)

I opened the first bottle of the Belgian style ale I brewed 3 weeks ago. The beer has been in the bottles for two weeks now. I thought it tasted pretty good, although the flavor was a bit shallow. It's better than some other beers I've had of the same style, which is to say, it's not the worst Belgian ale ever. I think it needs more time in the bottle to mellow out a bit more. When I performed the mashing of the grains, I made a mistake and didn't get as much of the sugars out of the mashtun as I should have. I think this explains the lack of depth in the flavor. I had to add a lot of candi sugar to make up for the mistake, and that limits what flavors the yeast can generate during fermentation. Still, it's not bad for a first attempt. Here's a picture of the first two glasses I poured. The head was thick and persistant -- something I typically consider a sign of a good beer.

Yesterday I attended the Pizza Port Brewing Real Ale Festival down in Carlsbad, CA. Before there were bottles, casks were used to store and age beer. Beer stored in this way is now referred to as either cask conditioned beer or real ale. Drinking with me was my office-mate Andy, and serving as designated drivers were his girlfirend Kathleen and my wife Laura. It cost $25 to drink at the festival which featured 45 real ales. This was supposed to buy a commemorative glass and 8 tickets which could be exchanged for 5 ounces of beer each. Strangely though, both Andy and I were given 10 tickets instead of 8. We decided to maximize our exposure to the different beers and each selected 10 different ones to sample, drinking half of each and then switching. Andy rarely drank his half, leaving me to polish off more than 60 ounces of beer in just a few hours. I should note it's note entirely his fault. I was rarely poured less than 6 ounces of beer despite the 5 ounce specification. I don't think I've ever been so intoxicated. Here is a very short photo essay of the event. I'll post some tasting notes later.
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I bought my wife a MacBook and all I got was this iPod nano. Now's a good time to buy an Apple computer from a participating university store since you can get $180 back if you purchase an iPod at the same time. I got my iPod nano for free.

HERE! I have such fond memories of Final Fantasy VII.

Here's a picture I took of the Beckman Institute and an ultimate frisbee game on the lawn in front of it. I tried to use the rule of thirds here, or some rough approximation of it. I suspect the crop could be a bit better, but I was too busy to fiddle much today.

I took this picture while on a walk with my wife this evening. I was really stuck by the orientation of the color scheme on these flowers. Virtually without exception, the line dividing the dark petals from the light petals was parallel to the ground. This plant knows which way gravity points and expresses in such a benign way. The truth is there was probably some advantage gained with regard to pollenization by this regular color scheme. Although we tend to think of the gravitational field in mostly a static context in terms of its influence in say biology and earth sciences, the truth is that the physical processes which lead to the growth of complex structures in nature are often strongly influenced by gravitational effects. For instance, a crystal grown in microgravity will be totally different than one grown under the same conditions here on earth. Gravity drives the convective flux of the crystalizing species and totally changes the shape of the crystal which emerges.

Here's another picture from inside Lucky Baldwin's. My wife took this one of me while I was enjoying some Hair of the Dog, Doggie Claws (2001). It's a barley wine with 11.5% ABV and it is delicious. Hair of the Dog is brewed up in Portland, OR. I've had a couple of their beers on tap at Lucky Baldwin's and I've enjoyed them all.

These are my friends Andy and Kathleen. We had an early dinner with them today and then visited the best brew pub in Los Angeles, Lucky Baldwins. Andy and I tried nine different beers total. They had some imperial stouts and barley wines on tap and were selling them at $2 for 6 oz. If you get the opportunity to visit Lucky Baldwins, I'd highly recommend trying some of the beer brewed locally by Craftsman brewing. I had there "Eye of the Goat (2005)" beer on tap today, and it was delicious. Laura and I have both had there beer before and have been quite impressed. You'll have to excuse the graininess. I had to shoot at ISO 1600 in order to get a fast enough shutter speed since we were sampling beers inside the pub. The outside is nice as well, but that's where the smokers sit, and I would just prefer to avoid them altogether.

This was another decent one. I don't like that the blurred horizon is tilted like it is in this picture, but I do like the angle of the central leaf. I guess it's just an unavoidable compromise. I shot this with my 35mm f1.4 lens while the wind was blowing. It's amazing how sharp it turned out. I've managed to take some really great shots with the lens. I took a couple of nice landscapes of the Beckman building and an ultimate frisbee game on the lawn after I took this one. I may post one of those tomorrow if I find the time to clean up the RAW file.

I took my camera with me to school today and took some photos around campus. I got a couple that I'm pretty pleased with. This snail wasn't the most dynamic photo, but it was my favorite. Yesterday was ditch day at caltech, and I believe the flyer the snail was lying on was for an undergrad party at the Blacker Hovse. I could be wrong though. I'm not all that familiar with the social structures -- that's not what they pay the graduate students for.