Summer

It's July, it's in the 90s, it must be time for... the Tour!

So the Tour starts tomorrow!! Even though I'm excited for it, I'm not excited about some things. I was pretty excited for Astana, but that was before they left Christ Horner off the tour squad. You can say that one of Contador's spanish buddies got his spot, but in reality, his LordStrong is the one who's there in place of horner...

Now, I really hope either Menchov or Evans can whoop ass on both Lance 'second coming' Armstrong and Alberto Conta-Doper, but I don't really like those guys either. Either that or Levi just crushes everyone, which is unlikely. I pick Sastre to repeat, and Cavendish to get green, and a random doper to get the polka dots. Now maybe I'll just go out and ride my bike.

Anyway, I'm back at it this weekend, with the foot traffic flat 1/2 marathon. Known for hot weather, it won't disappoint, as it's supposed to be in the 90s. So I guess that's about all for now... After using twitter so much lately, it's difficult to get more than 140 characters, but I'll keep trying.

Pre classic

I had the opportunity to go to a professional track meet last sunday. The Pre-classic in Eugene is one of the best meets in the USA, in terms of the world class competition. There were no less than 34 Beijing Olympic medalists there... Here are some photos below. The rest are on flickr.

shot put winner below. He attempted a victory lap, but only made it 1/4 of the way around the track:


bowerman mile winner. His victory lap was complete in about 60 seconds, and yes he is as skinny as he looks if not skinnier. About 13 guys went under 4 minutes in the mile. Pre would be proud:


Lashawn Merrit breaking the sea-level world record in the 300m.


Dwight Phillips just after jumping the 5th longest long jump ever, 8.74m (or 28 feet 8.25 inches) holy crap.


Sanya Richards, just before going sub 50 in the 400m.

RIP Sasha Clapper

We built one bad ass power supply (below), and a sweet electrolyzer. I met Sasha in Spring of 2008, when we were lab partners in Electrochemistry at OIT. The students in our program are diverse and Sasha was no exception. We're talking about a dude with neck tattoos, on one side, the angel whispering in his ear, and on the other side, the devil.

He will always be remembered in the lab for the experiments we ran. Especially when he ignited the hydrogen that we produced in our electrolyzer.

taken 4/21/2009

Rest in peace, my friend, it's not going to be the same at school without you.

iPod charger for earth day

Not enough juice for the iPhone.

Power supply

School is keeping me busy, with Power Electronics, Heat transfer and Vector calculus. By far the most interesting is power electronics. Why? cause you get to build stuff. Lab 1 of power electronics, we built a power supply. Basically we took a PC power supply and took everything out except the fan, and designed a power supply w/ a 5 volt DC, 12 volt DC, negative 12 volt DC and an adjustable voltage with 1-15 volts DC. It takes power from the wall outlet (120 Volts AC), and converts the power to DC and regulates it. My lab partner Sasha helped. We soldered the board 3 times before we got it right, so we learned some things. The fan runs, although the power supply will probably not generate too much heat, but it's nice to have the fan run, so we at least know the thing is working.





Holy crap, 3 blogs in one day. I'm doing twitter now. yippe.

two wheeled awesomeness

thanks bro, via facebook

do you have mac envy?

Whistler Olympic Park - trail report

Well, here we are, back in rainy Portland, after having spent some time up north previewing the Nordic venue for the 2010 Olympics in Whistler. We made it up to Vancouver last Saturday, before heading up to Whistler on the 99. They are totally expanding this road, which basically means they are blasting out a bunch of rocks, to make room for a wider highway. It seems pretty amazing that they are going through all of that just for the Olympics, but I guess, that's what they had to do to get the bid. Now thinking back to last summer watching China's Olympics, w/ the 100,000 seat stadium, I think of what Vancouver has that may be similar? hmmm, they have a metrodome like structure! good luck with that. And whistler has no big venue that holds alot of people, but I guess by comparison, nobody watches the nordic races (compared to figure skating) so they are probably fine. BUT, one third of the events are going to be at whistler Olympic park (between xc, biathlon, jumping and nordic combined).

As for the Nordic trails... well, we had perfect conditions. And hardly anyone was there. Actually there were a lot of people on Sunday, but virtually no-one was skiing on the Olympic course, so it seemed empty pretty much where ever you were skiing. There is over 50k of trails. I have no idea why, but most of the rec skiers stayed on the 'recreational' trails (which were spectacular BTW). As for the Olympic courses, it was my first ski on Olympic class trails, and I thought the hills would have been steeper. They didn't seem as hard as I thought they'd be, but i was not ski racing on them either, I'm sure they are hard enough, but especially the Biathlon trails seemed easy? Camp ripley biathlon had way steeper hills.

We had one day when it wasn't as sunny, but it was still quite awesome. here are some looks:

Like skiing at bachelor on it's best day, with better trails and 100 times better scenery.


start grip tape was grippen and gliden!


These guys spent all day getting the jump ready, but nobody was jumping!


The huge jumps. This event would be the ultimate one to snag tickets for next winter.


Here's a wide view of the stadium, that will look much different next feb.


Podium!


I highly recommend a trip up there to ski, it is amazing. We will be back that's for sure. We just need to find time off, and get hook ups on excellent lodging in whistler, Thanks Belinda!