Christa and Tom here!

Christa and Tom are out for a break from living on the set of the Wire and some Zoe time.

dinner with Zoe

We headed up to a party that some family friends were having in the Berkeley Hills today. Zoe was fairly well behaved, except for a few moments of baby anger:

Tomatoes

I finally got around to planting tomatoes. I have four different heirloom varieties from Berkeley Hort, as well as one from a guy from our climbing gym.

market day

Another trip to the farmer's market. Find of the day: Fatted Calf Basque Sausages.

I also discovered that Zoe likes to fly:

fancy table

We bought a nice Cherry table from Traditions on 4th street

Las Trampas

A few weeks ago while walking in Redwood Regional Park, I saw what looked like cliff bands off in the distance to the East. I did some google maps surveillance and discovered that they were most likely in Las Trampas Regional Park. Today was the day we planned to check them out, and although we got a late start, I was excited to see if they were climb worthy, or useless rubble piles. Unfortunately, in my excitement, I didn't look at a topo map of the trail that I had planned on taking, and it turned out to be a bit of an uphill slog with Zoe. It was made worse by the fact that when we finally got to the ridge line the wind picked up. This wasn't a problem for mom and dad, but Zoe strongly objected to it, and I had to start jogging down the other side to get out of the wind. Here I am before the run, and already bushed

And here we are on the other side:


We got out of the wind under some BOULDERS (yaaaaay!) which turned out to be sandstone, but coated in lichen. Some of them look climbable though.
.
After feeding Zoe, we took stock of where we were. We still were not where google maps showed the cliff band, so we went down the other side and found this:

which looked a bit low angle and also covered with lichen, but potentially interesting. This particular rock wasn't even visible on Google Maps, actually.

It was at this point that things got a little unpleasant. The cliff band was supposed to be off to the North, but there was no discernible trail. Worse yet, we were running out of time: the park service locks the gate to the parking lot at 7 pm and it was now close to 6:00. We bushwhacked a little through the tall grass and wild sage, but quickly abandoned hope and began heading back up to the ridge via established trails. Once at the ridge trail, we took the Cuesta trail back down towards the lot. Both the wind and Zoe were now howling, and we had to hand carry her for most of the way back down to the car. I think the 7 pm gate locking might be a bit flexible, as there were still plenty of cars in the lot at 6:45 and people were casually grilling in the picnic area. Here is our approximate route, and here is a 1.6 Mb PDF map of the park. From the map, it looks like ~1300 ft of gain total, and nothing like even the approach to Ceuse, but MAN was it tiring!

It's a beautiful park, but next time we'll leave a lot more time for walking the trails.

another market trip

The blog has been a little uneventful lately: too much weekend programming sessions and not enough road trips to the desert I guess! Eventually I'm sure I will get tired of writing about our trips to the farmer's market, but it's still novel enough to me to merit the occasional (ok, frequent) posting.

It was Earth Day at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park, and we unfortunately discovered that this makes parking for the farmers market a little difficult. It does make for some amusing pictures though:

There's something a little troubling about the words "Spinal Exam" hanging from a tent. I guess it's better than a liver transplant.

I just love how this lady (maybe the artist?) feels like it's necessary to tell the four burly dudes where to go while they are struggling just trying to get the damn borg-cube off of the truck without field-amputating any of their limbs.

Not too much exciting stuff was acquired this time, except for the delicious Tan Oak honey, and the usual Himalayan lunch, which Zoe coveted



Next was a trip down to fourth street for a crepe pan from Sur la Table, a dining room table from Traditions, and an ice cream from Sketch: All we needed was a trip to Weatherford BMW and we would have had the Perfect Yuppie Day. By this time, little ZZN was worn out, and it was time to go home

Farmers market, LHOS

We went to the Farmer's market again today and met up with one of the grandmothers

followed by the usual overspending on fruits and veggies

I bought a pretzel from the German guy with the lederhosen (hey, if you're gonna buy a pretzel -- that's the guy you want to buy it from right?) and then we started heading back to the car. Chloe and I got separated by a funeral procession for a Fireman


who had died of cancer. I'm not usually very affected by the designated occasions when you are expected to display your joy or sorrow, but there was something unexpectedly profound about this that took me by surprise emotionally. After watching all of his fellow firemen and women and his family pass by, (much to my embarrassment) I found myself trying to hide my red eyes from random passersby.

Next, we headed back to Oakland to feed and change the baby, and then headed up to the Lawrence Hall of Science. The LHOS is a science museum with sweeping views of the bay area which also happens to be where I spent many blissful childhood days learning obscure computer languages like PILOT, natural history and basic electronics. I even went to their summer camp in the Santa Cruz mountains, where I got the worst case of poison oak of my life. We met Katie, Taras and Lucy in the courtyard

and checked out the Speed exhibit, followed by relaxing on the new (to me) back patio.


(photos by Taras)
where we were joined by Caleb: an old Swan Systems buddy.

Farmers Market

We took a family trip to the Berkeley Farmers Market, where I again spent way too much money on food. The highlights were sugary baby carrots, ultra sweet japanese sweet potatoes, beautiful Swiss chard, perfect yukon gold potatoes, wild boar sausages, strawberries, purple asparagus, delicious oranges, and eggs from carefree and unionized chickens. Oh yeah, and really good himalayan food for lunch!



Later on, we headed up to the little farm in Tilden to show little ZZN the animals

megalamp, the return

Using the lessons I learned from Megalamp I, I designed and built MaxiLume Turbo Type R this weekend. The design is pretty similar to the original instructables design, but with a few key differences.

1)Log pot (http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail?name=P3H8502-ND), Panasonic EVU-F2MFL3D53
2)Cree XR-E, Q5 bin from DealExtreme. These took *forever* to arrive. Next time, I will try ordering from Cutter in Oz.
3)Flashlight clicky switch from DealExtreme
4)Running LEDs at 1000mA instead of 500mA, since the spec says they can handle that kind of current
5)Only 3 LEDs used, wired in series, not series parallel
6)Buckpuck, pot and switch are all cleverly mounted on the headlamp harness.
7)Used fancy Arctic Silver thermal epoxy, and I actually bought a heat sink (which still ended up being a bit small)


The instructables design outputs an anemic ~200 lumens without the squishy 2.5X blue correction factor at 8 watts. MaxiLume Turbo Type R however outputs a testosterone laden ~660 lumens at 11 watts, (~500 lumens at 8 watts), so better than 2x the efficiency... and you can run it super hot if you want too!

I'm using the same 10 cell battery pack with Tenergy cells, so 12 Volts, 2600 mA. The three Crees drop the voltage 11.1 volts at 1000 mA, so 12 V is just about perfect for a buck driver. Using LED pro, I should get these ball park run times:

Current (mA)    Battery life (hours)     Lumens
1000                             2.3                    660 
800                               3.0                   540
600                               4.1                   450
400                               6.5                   330

lenses (l2 optics) at left, 1000mA buckpuck at the upper left, fancy epoxy lower left, old Petzl headlamp harness at right, heatsink (http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail?name=345-1062-ND wakefield 628-65AB) middle top.

mounted LEDs


more or less finished: wide angle sub lenses on


Let there be light! Now all I need is one of those "Let there be light" T-shirts with Maxwell's equations, and I could give up all hope of escaping nerddom


Heres a closup of the head piece.


And here we are in a dark room. I have found that one of each of the three sub lenses make a nice compromise of wideness and spot. Note that there is no trickery here. ISO 200, f 4.5, 1/30 second exposure.... BRIGHT!

kick butt brownies

I bought a hand cranked pasta maker a while ago at Sur La Table, and it came with a free subscription to Gourmet Magazine. My impression of Gourmet had previously been that it was kind of old school (I was expecting "Grandmas Beef Brisket" type recipes), but we've been pleasantly surprised by the content. Last week we also received a free issue of Cooks Illustrated, which had a GREAT brownie recipe. It's done serious damage to my new weight loss scheme, but what the hell.

I have to admit that I didn't like Cooks Illustrated at all at first, because I avoid Molecular Gastronomy like the plague. I get enough science at work, thank you very much. On reading it more closely, I really like it. It has good recipes and lots of practical information.

A walk with Zoe

I took a walk up in Redwood Regional park with Zoe after picking her up from day care. Here's my reward for lugging the little sack o' bricks up and down the hills

Berkeley Farmers Market

I've driven by the Berkeley Farmer's market at least one hundred times since we moved back tot he bay area. I checked it out from afar, and despite missing the markets in France, never ventured in. A hyper allergy to all things crunchy was what kept me away, but I have become more and more convinced that eating local organic food when you can is the way to go (from a nutritional standpoint, at the very least). Well it turns out it's awesome. I bought some great carrots, chard and potatoes, as well as some farm fresh butter and $4 eggs. Yeah that's right: four dollar eggs. Some dudes show off their earning power with BMWs and Swiss tourbillon watches, but it's all about the beta carotene rich free range chicken eggs for me.

Cow ordered

I finally ordered a split quarter from Chileno Valley. We're going to split the cost and meat three ways. Hopefully we won't end up having to buy another freezer. Thirty pounds is a lot of meat, even subtracting enough for the massive BBQ that we're planning.

The next headlamp

I'm probably going to go with Cree XR-E's, Q5 bin ... I'm torn as to whether I should run at 500 mA or 1000mA. These LEDs seem pretty amazing:

107 lumens at 350 mA
171 lumens at 500 mA
214 lumens at 1000 mA

compare that to my Luxeon I Stars:

45 lumens at 350 mA

At least on paper, thats waaaaay more efficient!

I also learned that "JB weld" is a good way to attach the star boards to the heat sink. Now I just have to round up another one of those!

Mega headlamp

I switched to headlamps from flashlights around the time I started climbing. I was flush with cash from living a .com moonlighting funded grad student life, and I poured the excess into gadgets for my new sport. I bought a lot of devices of questionable utility, but headlamps are one class of tool that I have continued to find very useful. In France, I had a friend who did ski de randonnee at closed ski resorts during the night. He was able to do this through the use of a mega headlamp with a gigantic battery that lived in a backpack. I've wanted one ever since, despite not having very much justification for buying one, but could never really figure out why they cost $500.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I found a post by one of the Squid Labs brainiacs on how to build a mega headlamp with a relatively small battery pack and newly available ultra bright LEDs. I spent some time agonizing over how to improve on his design, but in the end just decided to build it as specified. I sourced my parts from Future Electronics and Battery Junction, and bought the rest of the parts at Al Lasher's Electronics on University (my childhood haunt).

Overall, I followed the instructions, but went with a potentiometer instead of switches to fixed resistors. I used 10x 2600 mAh Tenergy AAs and white Luxeon Stars (I don't believe the whole blue/green thing being better for night vision). The heat sink was off a pentium III and the head harness was off an old and extremely useless Princeton Tech headlamp. I hacksawed and drilled some aluminum stripping to mount the light assembly to the harness. Once I had the parts, I finished all the soldering and assembly in a few hours, and figured out how to mount the lights to the harness in another half an hour.


I'll post pictures, but this thing is BRIGHT! I've been blinded by it a few times, and it leaves a pleasing blue ghost image burned into my retinas (that's good for them, right? Survival of the fittest rods and cones?)





Things that I learned:
I SUCK at soldering
you don't need very much thermal paste to make a gigantic mess
The curing time of some silicone sealers exceed the maximum limit of my patience

Things to do next time:
Use an audio/log pot for power control -- linear is ridiculous
Use less glue
do a better job attaching the star plates to the heat sink
Use fancier LEDs -- the ones I use are about half (if that) as efficient as the cutting edge in LED tech.

edit: added picture

Baby spit up!

"spit up" sounds better than "baby hurl", doesn't it?

The smile that can only come from sullying grandpa's pants:

A hike in Redwood Regional Park

Chloes Dad and step mom arrived, and we all went for a hike in Redwood Regional Park


Along the way we saw a chossy looking outcrop of sandstone,

which I bravely fought my way through the brambles to check out. The rock had Fontainebleau-esque textures

and I was surprised to find a piton and four bolts on the top!

Sibley

We have grandparents in town all month to help out with little ZZN, which should be fun. Chloes mom came in on saturday, and we went up to Sibley for a little hike