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