Time for an update.
So many of you have left LJ, but I don't have time to tinker with Facebook group settings and I'm supposed to be respectable there. So here, if you're still reading my stuff, here are a few updates.
Yesterday started with me cycling to the Wind Turbine Testing Center in Boston harbor, to tinker wiht a solar installation, in a secure area in the middle of the car terminal. I passed lots filled with used cars going for exports, and a lot wiht Subaru foresters that arrived earlier. At the gate I was greeted by a guy sporting a man-bun, who commuted there on his New Hampshire plated monster truck. My life will never be interesting enough to warrant a movie script, but on occasion I can gather up enough visual cliches to fill a few minutes of screen time.
At the end of the day I had my hands into the innards of a several killowat inverter, to change the settings of a cloud connected component. So there I was, with this huge power source opened, wires sticking out everywhere, reaching to a set of four buttons to change that component's WPA password so it could phone home to its vendor. And it had an LCD display with a blinking "are you sure?" No, not really. Especially since each board there needed its own DC voltage level that had to come from a power supply connected to outside powe. And the damn thing talked to the cloud. For some of you, cloud computing means a computer somewhere halfway round the world stops you from getting work done. For some, cloud computing, also known as the Internet of things, means a computer halfway around the world will keep your solar panels from working properly.
I've discovered that over the years I accumulated 5 different books on the finite element method. (Well, two of them I kind of bought pretty recently.) Of these, two are Springer Verlag, naturlich, two are Dover books, and one Prentice Hall. The mane takeaway is that OMFG, typesetting matters. I am trying to read all the way through them when I get the chance.
And on other notes: Rust is awesome. Github is awesome. Erlang, well, Elixier is nice.
Yesterday started with me cycling to the Wind Turbine Testing Center in Boston harbor, to tinker wiht a solar installation, in a secure area in the middle of the car terminal. I passed lots filled with used cars going for exports, and a lot wiht Subaru foresters that arrived earlier. At the gate I was greeted by a guy sporting a man-bun, who commuted there on his New Hampshire plated monster truck. My life will never be interesting enough to warrant a movie script, but on occasion I can gather up enough visual cliches to fill a few minutes of screen time.
At the end of the day I had my hands into the innards of a several killowat inverter, to change the settings of a cloud connected component. So there I was, with this huge power source opened, wires sticking out everywhere, reaching to a set of four buttons to change that component's WPA password so it could phone home to its vendor. And it had an LCD display with a blinking "are you sure?" No, not really. Especially since each board there needed its own DC voltage level that had to come from a power supply connected to outside powe. And the damn thing talked to the cloud. For some of you, cloud computing means a computer somewhere halfway round the world stops you from getting work done. For some, cloud computing, also known as the Internet of things, means a computer halfway around the world will keep your solar panels from working properly.
I've discovered that over the years I accumulated 5 different books on the finite element method. (Well, two of them I kind of bought pretty recently.) Of these, two are Springer Verlag, naturlich, two are Dover books, and one Prentice Hall. The mane takeaway is that OMFG, typesetting matters. I am trying to read all the way through them when I get the chance.
And on other notes: Rust is awesome. Github is awesome. Erlang, well, Elixier is nice.