The Infamous Fractal Butter

If you want to know the story, email me.

A Sluicy Adventure!

Click on the picture to go to my Flickr page, where you can follow the annotations to learn more about my sluicy adventure:

I was up in the mountains behind the Air Force Academy for one of my Dad's yearly mandatory departmental picnics. Rather than sitting around watching ducks, my brother, a dude named Dan, and I went adventuring.

Archival, organization, backup...

I spent the entire day organizing, backing up, and archiving my digital files, mostly from ASMS(A). I have completed both the laptop hard drive and my CD collection. I put everything on the hard drive under C:\Christopher\ and sorted my CDs into a music case (all black) and an archival case (black with yellow corner), and backed up CDs to hard drive that had no other copies. I copied the entire Christopher folder from the laptop hard drive to Le Fantasma, a 20GB hard drive I made portable after removing it from Dad's old computer. Now that everything is organized and backed up to a portable hard drive, tomorrow I will reformat the laptop, and set up a dual-boot with Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu Linux, for the best of both worlds.

The major problem I had today was separating the significant files from the insignificant ones. At ASMS(A), I saved in the same folders my in-progress and final product files. Since a good number of temporary files lead up to each final one, this made it hard to determine which files were worthy of archival and which weren't. I tried a bit to separate them, but I mostly just left them together, making more work for the person (me and/or my eventual posterity) who will eventually browse through these files. In the future, I will use two methods to make archival easier and the archives files more useful:

1. Rather than making new copies of files when I move from computer to computer, and having to manually reconcile the various file versions, I will store all works-in-progress in one always-available location (either network, thumb drive, or portable harddrive, but not all three), and spread about as few files as possible.
2. Once I have completed any given work-in-progress, I will save a final copy in both the working folder and in a highly organized "completed works" folder. The "completed works" folder will be backed up and archived more regularly than the working folders.
   

Digital clutter is not as visible as physical clutter, but it is clutter nonetheless, and reduces the findability of files and usability of storage systems. If I put a slight effort into keeping my files organized as I go, I will hopefully never again have to spend an entire day preparing them for backup and archival.

Fhew... now I can sleep.

Chris

Contour Crafting joy!

If you haven't heard of it, Contour Crafting is an awesome large-scale (i.e. building-sized) rapid-prototyping process being developed by Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California. The process uses robotic arms with actuated, interchangeable trowels, to "extrude" concrete, layer by layer, to make walls under computer numeric control. IMHO, this technology will devastate, or at least greatly upset, the construction AND real estate industries.

I worked for in the construction industry for nine days, until I had to retire because of exposure and a subsequent allergic reaction to a certain epoxy-based concrete-sealing chemical (Carboguard 451). Fortunately, the allergic reaction only occured on my forearms to the elbows. Upon reading the Material Safety Data Sheet for the chemical (online, mind you, not openly posted on the job site), I discovered that inhalation of the chemical's fumes can lead to a PERMANENT respiratory allergic reaction. Of course, I was never outfitted with a proper chemical respirator; the respirators provided were particulate-filtering only. Besides my work-related illness, I watched first-hand how utterly and completely inneficient the construction industry is. My boss must have walked across the 1/4-mile-wide construction site roughly six times per day to pick up various items he failed to bring with him the first time when he started a new task. Scheduling and efficient resource management were nonexistent. Huge items were shifted around by crane from space to space as the spots they were previously filling became needed. The wait for a crane to pick up an item could last several hours, and often stopped useful progress completely. Well, enough ranting. Back to the good stuff. :)

Press releases stated that the first automated whole-house construction test would take place in 2005, and would involve the complete construction, plumbing, and electricity-ing of a 2000-sq. ft. home in approximately 24 hours.

Expecting not to hear a reply, I contacted Dr. Khoshnevis, and asked him for both more details on the time of the test, and permission to attend it. He offered me both, and I now plan on attending the test in December, my missionary trainining center report date allowing. This experience has taught me:

1. There is no harm in asking; the worst answer is a "no."
2. If interested in a current development, contact those doing the developing, and see if you can become more involved.
3. When in doubt, err on the side of optimism that important people will respond to you.

I have included my original email, his response, and my follow-up:

Dr. Berok Khoshnevis,
University of Southern California:

Dear Professor Khoshnevis,

Since first reading about your "Contour Crafting" technique several years ago, I have paid very close attention to the developments in your research. I cannot overstate how amazingly efficient and revolutionary I believe this technology will be when fully developed. I read in one of the press releases that a full-scale, 2000-square-foot home is expected to be built within this year. As a soon-to-be freshman and C. Prescott Davis Scholar, majoring in applied mathematics and mechanical engineering at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University, I am watching your work closely, seeing as it will have a definite impact in my chosen career field in the near future. If you are willing or able to let me know, when will the first full-size attempt occur? Will it be open for viewing by interested students willing to make the trip?

Thanks for the time and consideration,
Chris Haueter

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B. Khoshnevis	Mon, Aug 1, 2005 at 8:33 PM
To: chrishaum
Thanks, Chris, for your interest. I believe the best time to see the demo will be in December. You will be welcome to see it, but check with me when we get closer to that date. Behrokh "Berok" Khoshnevis, Professor Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90089-0193 Tel: (213) 740-4889 Fax: (213) 740-1120 http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~khoshnev [Quoted text hidden]

---

chrishaum	Mon, Aug 1, 2005 at 9:56 PM
Reply-To: chrishaum To: "B. Khoshnevis"
Professor Khoshnevis- That sounds great. I'll contact you again nearer December, perhaps sometime in November, to work out the specific details. Thank you very much for the opportunity to watch this momentous event, and I hope to see you there.

Feel Good Lists

Feel Good List No. 1 - UncleMaxSays.com
Feel Good List No. 2 - UncleMaxSays.com

I'm going to implement some of these to improve my approachability.

The Top Five (or so) Reasons I am a Dork...

Responding to Johann's tag and Michael's original mandate, I have decided to list the top five or so reasons I am a nerd....even though Johann misspelled my name as "Hauter."

1. I spent last Friday through Saturday at the Mars Society Conference in Boulder, Colorado. I mocked certain obviously ill-considered plans, such as the "sub-$10/lb maglev orbit-injection system." I had to keep myself from asking the lecturer how he planned on coping with the huge G-forces that would result from changing the direction of a multiple-ton sled by 45 degrees in a matter of seconds when it got to the exit ramp (or how it would not just crash through the ramp and explode). I debated with fellow conference-goers about the true significance of establishing a human presence on Mars, asked Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars, why he believed commercial space companies wouldn't be able to provide Mars travel in the near future, and ranted about how Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis' Contour Crafting technology (www.contourcrafting.org) will destroy the real estate industry within ten years.
2. Several nights ago I could not sleep, so I turned on the light and jotted down an idea in a notebook. Two hours and thirteen pages later, I had to force myself to go to sleep. The idea: a completely original economic system, based upon modular homes (through contour crafting), standardized appliances, trusted computing, and more which I cannot reveal. Patent pending.
   
3. I am currently reading K. Eric Drexler's 576-page textbook, Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation for fun.
4. Look at my Amazon.com wishlist. It speaks for itself. I actually bought several of these books, and was ashamed of the absolutely nerdly glee I felt upon receiving them.
5. I spend a lot of leisure time online, reading articles about new and upcoming technologies, the fledgling commercial spaceflight industry, nanotechnology developments, etc., etc. etc. I think, eat, sleep, and breathe technology, engineering, and science.
   
6. My mad hacker skills impress many. I am writing this post on a laptop that was given up for dead because of its age and broken CD drive; I restored it to better-than-new condition by installing Ubuntu Linux directly over my internet connection. I grok the Open Source movement and make telephone calls for free with Skype. I have developed a device to download every thought to a computer in realtime...just kidding. That would be awesome, though.

Need I say more?

Cheers,
Chris

It's a bright, bright, sunshiny day!

The beauty of Colorado clouds as they roll from mountains to valley is simply...impossible to describe. See for yourself: