I’m still catching up from being out of town on Monday/Tuesday. I realize that I’ve been on the west coast during each of the past 3 weeks. It’s catching up to me now.. My internal clock is so confused.   That said, I really did enjoy my short trip to Seattle. I really enjoyed the people that I met at ISCAS.. .. After hanging out at the conference all day Tuesday.. I had the afternoon and evening to work.. I found a quiet place and dropped back into my day job.. I did run into  a few friends.. Like my buddy Patrick from Belgium.. but for the most part I just worked . 

About 20 minutes before 9PM when I was going to catch my limo to the airport, I got a call. it was Bill B.   I’d called him earlier trying o find a replacement transistor for my shorted out tesla coil.   I’d invited Bill out for a beer.. but he’d had a meeting.. turns out the meeting ended in time.. so we had 20 minutes to meet each other and grab a beer.

I gotta tell you how cool it was for me to meet Bill in person His web site amasci.com has been one of my favorite places for weird science..  (Check out his weird science videos here).   He had his web site even before there were things like yahoo or Google to make things findable on the web.     Anyway.. Bill and I had one of the most interesting 20 minute science discussions I’ve ever had.. he’s tried everything.. and knows tons.. He’s into so pretty far out stuff.. like tesla’s mythical energy beam weapan technology.. It was a great conversation.. but it was 9ON and time to grab my limo.. We were having such a good time talking that Bill decided to ride with me in the limo to the airport.. then catch a cab back to his car.. We got in the limo .. said a brief ‘hello’ to the driver and kept talking.. all the way to the airport.. .   In no time it seemed we wer at the airport.. we pulled up to the curb and I was preparing to get out when the driver sad  .. ‘i don’t mean to but in.. but… ‘ and proceeded to tell us how he’d volunteered to watch nuclear blasts in the south Pacific.. and was a mad scientist in his own right.. His name was Don..

The three of us sat around geeking out for a while.. it was very cool talking to them.. Don had to run.. and I had a plane to catch.. so we said goodbye to him.. . Bill and I wen tin to the airport to check in my flight.. As we walked into the building I saw the cool light sculpture made from bike reflectors.. I’d taken it’s picture the day before and put it my previous blog entry

This time there was an interesting looking guy with his nose pressed against the piece.. he was wearing a white shirt and hand tied US flag bow tie.. Since we were ogling the same sculpture, I started up a conversation.. To make a long story short.. He is Prof. John Sidels of the U . of Wash. . He was there with his smiling wife, Connie

Prof Sidels  is working on perfecting a magnetic resonance force microscope that will someday soon allow scientists to image individual viruses and things at that scale. We had a really, really interesting discussion abut the challenged of making such precise measurements so near to the quantum limit for noise. His story sounded like a mystery novel mixed with science fiction. It was so cool. We ended up knowing lots of the same folks.. since John works in the same field as several of my friends  at our Almaden labs.
   We talked until I absolutely had to run to catch my plane.. I aid good bye to John and his wife.. and to Bill and made a mad dash to the plane.

I made the plane.. slept through the night .. woke up in DC (the other Washington) .. caught a plane ot BTV.. Worked all day then went and saw Gabe play lacross in the cold (45 F) weather. We came home to fnd that Max and his friends had made aa great stirfry for us..   It was nice to be home…

I’m now just sitting down to blog.. I was looking up John to put a link to his work (which is here btw)   In searching I was saddened to learn that  John and I had another connection:. John and Connie’s foster son Glen had  passed away in 2006 while in the military..  You can see Glen’s Myspace tribute page here.

It is such a small and connected.. and sometimes very sad world.. eh Sam ? Gnite all. Gnite Sam !
-me

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I’m still in Seattle.. waiting for my flight back.. It’s been an odd and strangely enjoyable couple of days out here..   My talk today went pretty well..except that all my equipment malfunctioned.. somehow… it still worked out.. more on that later..
   I still have pictures from yesterday.. so I’ll start there.. One of the things I truly love about traveling is seeing  the ‘incidental art’ that folks put in pubic spaces to cheer them up.. Chicago had a great collection of slumped glass plates.. each about 3′ x 3′ suspended from the ceiling in a busy walkway..

Then there’s my favorite public light sculpture.. in the walkway under the runway at O’Hare.. it’s a cool collection of sequenced neon, colored light panels and ambient speech.. I always go down there and hang out in it if I’m flying out of terminal C.

When I landed in SEATAC I found this very cool panel made entirely of bicycle reflectors.. very nice.

I was met by a limo driver at the baggage claim and driven into the city

I got to the hotel.. found the equipment box I’d shipped and went up to my room to work on my talk.

I had a nice corner room on the 9th floor… Not a bad view..

I took out the box and started to assemble stuff.. Thats when the trouble started.. My theremin hadn’t survived the trip somehow.. several of the wires had been broken either in transit or before.. Not sure .. that was only the start of my equipment problems it turns out.

I quickly assembled my potato canon out of the parts I shipped.. the place smelled so much like glue !

I worked on my talk for a while.. then called my friend Raye.. I was so pysched to find out that her folks  and my really good Vermont friends Homer and Mary were still in town.. i had thought that I would miss them. They came over with Raye’s friend Andreas.. It was o cool seeing them out of context like this.

We all went up to my room and did science demos together.. Here we are getting the tesla coil to hit us.. Alas.. these were to be it’s last sparks for a while..

We ordered a bottle of wine and toasted friends and family near and far.. living and spirit…

We’d been together for about 2 hours when Raye said.. ‘let me show you my rat’… and proceeded to pull a very cute and rather large girlish rat out of her dress.. She carries her around like that all day.. She was awfully cute.. …but… doesn’t that tickle ?

Raye showed me  a cell phone  picture of  a Samstone she’d placed down in Chico..

Those guys left around 9:30..

which was time for the conference chairs dinner at Etta’s down the street.. We had a great meal there..  It was nice hanging out with a few friends.. it helped calm down my nervousness about my talk this morning.

I went back and worked on my talk a bit more..blogged feebly.. ten went to bed around 1.. At 4:30 I was wide awake again.. sleepless in Seattle.. i started to meditate.. and luckily fell back asleep until 6:30.. I quickly pulled myself together and went down to meet my friend Terri for a 7AM breakfast and setup for my talk.

My talk started about 8:15.. it went by very quickly..  I was really into the message I was giving. on the need for education outreach.. it was hard to read the crowd… which was 80 percent academics.. and about 70 percent from overseas.. and my data was from a US industry perspective.   I got enough laughs to know that I wasn’t tanking badly.

. but.. when It came time to run the tesla coil.. it gave a slight spark then nothing.. oh-oh.. A piece of metal had fallen into the circuit board .  It was toast.. I was bummed but didn’t panic.

 I  recovered by frying another pickle.. and ended the talk on time..   I got a few questions after the talk.. then folks started to disperse.. I was about to start feeling bad about how the talk had ended.. but then Diane’s voice popped into my head and reminded me that I always do that after a talk… So.. I just sat there in present state for a few minutes.. then i was quickly surrounded by folks from the audience who wanted to talk about the subject .. At that point I knew it had gone pretty well..
We sat there talking for about an hour until I could break away.. by that time I felt pretty ok about the talk..  As I cleaned up I talked to the AV guy David for a while.. he and this cool guy Ludwig had been a huge help in the set up and filming of the talk.   David and I filmed a little segment explaining what had happened to the tesla coil.. and I gave him some movie footage to include to say what it should have looked like    I gave both David and Ludwig a SamStone.. .   David held his upside down and said ‘was’ ?   .. I’d never seen it.. but there it ‘was’ ..amazing.. Sam Was.. Sam is..

I left the spud gun for the next presenter.. since I couldn’t take it on the plane with me..

Then a funny thing happened .. a crowd of the guys  decided that we were going to try and diagnose.. and hopefully repair the tesla coil. we found some voltmeters.. and went to work.. unfortunately.. I quickly determined that it had popped one of the very expensive and hard to find IGBT i (Insulated gate bipolar transistors) in the power bridge.. The transistor switches 600V at 75A… not the kind of thing that radios hack carries.. here.. the 20 dollar transistor had blown while the 15 cent protect diode had survived intact.. go figure.

I tried some heroics calling around to electronic stores.. but no dice.. I even called Bill Beatty a famous uber geek from U Wash.. he had something close.. but not close enough.. I packed up the coil  with the help of my new friend Peter

Nice slow day. I needed that. I stayed up most of the night working on a talk for next week.. so I only got a few hours sleep. We just hung out around the house this morning enjoying the sun.   My folks and I took the dogs for a walk along the rivershore..  the ferns are now up to my waist.. .. amazing because the ground was bare just a few weeks back.

Around 1 I drove my folks to South Burlington to watch Gabe’s Lacrosse games.. They played well again. and it was wonderful just hanging out in the beautiful weather..

Gabe came over during a break between the games.. he was quite fragrant as we took this three generation shot with my dad.

The team was looking a little green.. since Iforgot to turn off the color filter in Gabe’s camera.

The games were in the field behind the South Burlington ice rink… so I went and stuck my feet in the scraped snow to cool off.

We got back to the house around 5 and have stuck here since.. My folks are here and are behaving nicely.. Aren’t they cute ?

We were sitting inside talking when we heard Satori start barking like crazy. I went out to find that she’d climbed into the old climber thing and gotten her leash completely tanlged in it. She couldn’t get out… It was cute and sad.. I felt like a jerk running in to get my camera before letting her go.. Am I a bad dad ?

Max and his friends had decided to rehabilitate the old big raft. It had been serving as a snowboard rap for the winter. The guys took it down and strapped the 4 barrels back on and hoisted the monster down to the river.. It must weigh 350 pounds. It took them 3 and a half hours for the six of them (Max, Alex, Mason. Abbott, Nate and Justin) to make it down to the green from here.. They got beached several times.. and the raft started to break apart.. but they made it !
My mom and I happened to drive by just as they were pulling the raft out of the water.

I helped them hoist the waterlogged beast up on to the van.. It took all 6 of us to lift the thing up.