Still alive, just paddlin' along

Howdy peeps.

I hope this post finds you all well.  why does it take me so long to post?  Idunno.  I did get a facebook account recently, so I'm posting a bit more there, but this blog is nice because I can post whatever and it doesn't necessarily broadcast it to all my facebook friends.  Understand, it isn't that I don't want anyone there to read this, but sometimes facebook posts tend to demand the attention of one's friends, know what I mean?  This blog, on the other hand, does not necessarily alert anyone when it is updated (unless of course you subscribed to the RSS or atom feeds).  At any rate, for that reason, I feel like I can post more here somewhat more anonymously without subjecting everyone's eyes to my rantings.  Of course, I'll prove myself wrong and post a link to the this on facebook, but somehow it just seems different.  Go figure.

So where I have I been?  I have been working with the family in Orland, CA. as a design engineer for ENE, Inc.  lots of little projects going on there.  Not as many large projects finishing, but I'm working towards things.

I did have some news to report in my personal life though.  I am now dating a wonderful girl named Kristen!  We have known each other for a while, but have recently reconnected.  It is unfortunate that we live a little ways apart (she in Sacramento, I in Chico), but we make it work.  Below is a good picture of us after my last birthday party...  this was the day-after cleanup.  Actually, come to think of it, we were both in pretty good moods considering that we were running low on sleep!  ;)

Anyhow, it has been great getting to know her these last few months (since November).  I suppose this is neither here nor there, but if you haven't tried Mythos beer, you should really check it out; it's good stuff!

Speaking of parties (since I was talking about cleanup) I just celebrated my 32nd birthday on the 17th.  Every once in a while I have a big theme party, and this year was just such a year.  This time I had guests come as an international, historical noun, so I had lots of creatively dressed friends helping me celebrate.  Kristen did a tremendous amount of planning and footwork beforehand and a whole bunch of cookin' the day of.  I don't think she got enough praise for all of her hard work, so I think this is a good place to brag about what a great job she did.  We had food from six different cultures and apetizers from three.  Beer and other beverages spanning those same six cultures as well.  It was great.  The best part was that lots of people came and helped us celebrate, and they all seemed to have a fun time.

Another thing that has happened since I last posted: I bought a truck!  yeah, baby!

It's a 2007 GMC Sierra 4x4.  Man!  It is so nice to be driving a truck again.  Mind you, I'm not saying that I didn't appreciate the loaner vehicles from mom and dad this past stretch, but it feels good to finally have a vehicle that is closer to my personality.  I'm really diggin' the crew cab too.  Now it isn't a pain to invite more people to ride with me...  ;)  It should be noted that my original plan is still in effect: add lift, tires, wheels, sound, etc.  But as is oft the case, things turned out to be a bit more expensive than I anticipated  and I had a bit less cash than I was counting on originally.  All-in-all, I'm very pleased with the purchase though.

Living situation-wise, I am back in Chico living with my brother and roommates.  I had thought for a while that I would try living by myself.  I haven't totally given up on the idea, but I still am thinking that I am a social enough person that I benefit from living with roommates, etc.  So all that is working well.

I have completed the Army AFDD / NASA Ames stuff as far as my project duties, but I am still in the midst of authoring my portion of an American Helicopter Society Forum paper.  That is kind of exciting, expecially since I've never been a co-author (or author) on anything published before.

My thesis is making very slow progress these days, but I intend to crank up the heat on that.  I have to complete the modeling procedures to represent my plant, and then explore a few controller architectures.  This should be straight-forward, but for some (strange) reason, I am trying to get re-motivated to work on it since i'm not getting paid to (funny how that works).  Also, the fact that there is no deadline is really playing tricks on my psyche.

Hmmmm...  what else can I update y'all on... I have spent a good deal of time thinking about mechanical harvesting equipment and the technology surrounding some potential ideas I've had for olive harvesting (in addition to other crops), that I think could knock the socks of people.  I'll have to give some more details on that in another post.

I would appreciate prayer for my family, generally.  We are all going through some tougher times and as at all times, need God's grace to persevere.  Pray that He will give us all peace and endurance.

Personally, I face many upcoming decisions in a lot of areas of my life, and desperately need wisdom that is not of earthly origin.  Please hold me up in prayer as well. 

I'm not sure if this is really a good marketing tactic, but tune in soon to hear some more technical details and my latest schemings; I promise to thrill!  ;)    cya!  BTW, if you wanna drop me a line, send it to gavin.nielsen@gmail.com I'd love to hear from you.

Yeah baby! -> disturbance estimation looking good!

Howdy, ya'll!

It seems like I only blog when I'm back at Ames Research Center, here in the Bay Area.  I had to post something quick 'cause Scott (my cousin) is asleep and I can't tell him right now...  =)  Those of you that know me well, know that I have to get things out of my head and told to someone, partly so that I can stop thinking about it and go to bed, but of course part of it is for your own edificiation.  "Yes," I reply, this does apply to everyone, control theory is general, thus generally applicable.

As a special bonus today, if you read slowly though my monologue and see all the pretty pictures, I will let you see the pictures at the end of some satelite stuff that cousin Scott showed me today.

Right.  Well, here is the state of the union on the helicopter project: I have designed a new, truly high performance controller for the rotor.  This new one uses a more advanced algorithm with an algorithm called receding horizon control or Model Predictive Control (MPC).  Basically, it predicts what the flap will do some steps ahead (15 steps in my case) and then optimizes some "control" commands (5 steps in my case) to make the predicted response as close to what the setpoint reference (my desire) is asking it to do...  In order to do this, it has an internal "sense" of how the model will react to its commands, and then it plans out the next 5 control steps.  When the next control step comes, it does the whole optimization again and plans 5 more control steps ahead. 

When you stop and think about it, this is much like we act every day.  We have a plan of all the wonderful things that we are going to do today and how we will be very efficient with what we want to do.  Then when life actually happens, we have to re-optimize our day as different things come up that make us change our plan.  This controller is just a mathematical version of that.

Example: when you are driving a car, you look forward maybe 50 feet when you are moving slow, right?  you don't plan out what you are going to do and then close your eyes and do it, you watch 50 in front of you, then you drive a little bit and you are still looking 50 feet ahead of you.  This "receding horizon" is the essence of the controller, it optimizes inside a reasonble window of time into the future.

Above is the "natural" response of my system.  This means that when I suddenly tell it to go to the value of 1, this is how it reacts.  My new controller interacts with this natural response and predicts what the system will do, so it can make it settle down quicker.  See below

there are little "steps" in the model output and the command because this is how a computer see the world...  in little steps that are contant between the times that it measure them/changes them.

Anyhow, this new type of controller has the advantage of taking my control bandwidth from something like 15 Hz to now more like 250 Hz.  (not a bad improvement!).  This means that if you ask the little flap to move back and forth 250 times per second, it can and will do what you ask.... fantastic!

The biggest problem at the moment is that while the control bandwdith is great (I only needed to make it to 89 Hz), I still have a low disturbance rejection bandwidth.  disturbance rejection means that when I tell the flap to move to a particular spot and there is something else, external to the assembly that interferes (like aerodynamic forces in my case), how well does the controller deal with that, and at what frequencies will it stop responding.  Up until this point the highest disturbance rejection bandwdith I've been able to achieve was in the 15 Hz neighborhood.  I would really like the controller to be able to get up to 89 Hz disurbance rejection bandwidth to fulfill the purpose that my boss needs it for, so I've been working furiously to try and find a way to accomplish that.

Now, with that context, you can appreciate my accomplishments today (with the Lord's help).  After much research and consideration, I came to the conclusion that much of the problem is seperating what part of the measured position was due to response of the model to my command and what part was due to external disturbances.  This is a tricky thing though, because there is only one position signal that is being measured, so it is combined.  What a wonderful world that we live in that we CAN actually seperate these signals!!  I will not bore you with all the gory math details (unless you ask me of course), but I thought I'd show you some interesting results.  Here is the situation:  I want to control something at 75 Hz.  Meanwhile, some external force is affecting the flap at 120 Hz and then, to really mess things up, gravity is suddenly reduced by 50%, which produces a sudden step in the measured output.  In order to have the flap do as commanded, I have to seperate which parts of what I am measuring come from something that i told it to do (the 75 Hz) and everything else.  Below is a picture of what this would look like.

 So this is the result of my work in the last few days.  The blue is the real thing happening, the red dased line is the system's best guess or estimate about what is going on.  Notice how the guesses are not very good in the beginning but once it locks in, it really a great job!  Now that this portion has been somewhat addressed, I need to figure out what to do with this newly found information in the controller itself (this result is only a small part of the control system; it estimates what is going on that we can't measure directly).  Ideally, the top should be the sum of the bottom two. 

Thanks for hanging with me long enough to get through some cool stuff. 

As promised, here is the super, top-secret satelite pictures that I took when I visited one of the labs that Scott was working in today.  Some of the stuff in this picture is real flight hardware that will be in the final spacecraft.

Objective Successful

I am proud to report that I and the many other people helping me were successful this evening in "closing the loop" of the controller here at Ames.  This means that we can now issue a command to the assembly, say something like, "please oscillate at 35 Hz and at a magnitude of 1 degree."  and it will do so, but you have to say please and ask in a nice voice.  =)

This is a huge step forward for the team in general and for me personally.  This evening marks the first time I have been involved with a closed-loop control project wherein we have gone through the formal experimental and modeling stages and closed-loop control design and had a reasonably high performance controller.  While I didn't get to be involved as much as I would have liked to be in the controller (due to time), I was able to add a modifying controller (an "outer loop") that boosted one of the weaknesses of the inner controller, which was nice to be able to contribute.

One of my mentors, Hossein, and I spent this whole weekend working through the varioius implementation details including safety mechanisms, etc and we finally got the system breathing Sunday evening at about 9pm!  whew!  (the demonstration is taking place at 2pm on Monday...)

This is a funny cartoon kinda showing what closed-loop control is all about, a good reference for those reading this who have no idea what i'm talking about.

Well, I'm gonna hit the hay.  Happy trails partner!

Gavino

Southbay state of the union

Howdy y'all.  I think my blog is the only place that I have a twang and a southern drawl, but I'm reachin' for country when I'm living in the city!  I promised a few weeks ago to post some pictures of the new place, and I would like to say that I've made progress toward that, but alas I have not.  My phone (which doesn't take particularly good pictures anyway) is not working quite right, so I am without device here in silicon valley.  The ironies never end, do they.

I suppose on the bright side, if I were to post pictures, you would just be looking at bare walls, sparse living room, and a generally spartan, bachelor existence anyhow.  But all that is about to change (queue the mysterious music for dramatic foreshadowing).  I am in the processing of reinventing Gavin.  This old dog is gonna learn some new tricks, and break some old habits in the process.

For example, those of you that know me pretty well, know that I was a huge proponent of mac'n'cheese in my former bachelor ways...  but not anymore.  I BOUGHT LETTUCE.  Why is lettuce so important you ask?  Because lettuce symbolizes the type of food that you buy at the store that really only works with moderately healthy to very healthy meals.  Lettuce is something that is very perishable, which means I'm not just planning to eat it, I'm planning to eat it soon (no, I haven't eaten it yet, but I would have had it with my sandwich on Sunday had it been in my posession).  So, in summary there, I've have taken the lettuce step.  I big step for Gavin-kind.

I am seriously considering buying a slick little point-and-shoot camera to capture some of the fun things goin on around here.  I wish I would have had it earlier tonight: Scott and i took a little drive down Washington st. to a basketball court there.  We shot around and played horse, it was fun.  (I won, muwahahahahah).  But it was cool of him to let me play coach a little bit and help him with his shooting form.  Once a coach, always a coach I guess.  I was actually very impressed with the court: it has really good lighting, not bad backboards and rims for a playgound-style court, and the court is nicely surfaced/leveled for playing.  It's not half-bad!  :P

In my workplace, I've been trying to finish a security/background check set of paperwork.  What a pain that is.  I think i finally finished everything today.  Those things scare me, when the have plastered reminders all over the forms how they can sue you for $10k or send you to prison for 5 years if you get something wrong.  I did my best, hopefully I don't have to go to prison...  In some ways it's kinda fun: I had to call up a lot of the people I used to work with/for.  It's kinda cool to hear how they're doing, I was glad to hear that one place in particular was happy with a database i setup for them 8 years ago or so.  Cool peeps.

On the workout front, I got myself in gear and got a membership to Gold's Gym.  It's very inexpensive here (like $15/mo) and the facilities are pretty good.  I'm trying to go early in the morning, so that helps me go to bed earlier too.  Wow, it's already 10:50pm... I gotta get there at 6am...  I'm gonna "do the math" in my head here and say that I should probably stop writing and get some sleep.

I hope that all of my loyal readership are doing well (wow -> that sounds so impersonal, eh?)  I mean the people that care about me enough to read my text-only blog about my adventures here.  I love you guys.  But all good things must come to an end (I don't really know why there), so I'll keep my date with mr sandman.  He keeps wanting to go steady, I keep telling him that I have to get up...  our relationship is a work-in-progress.  Oh yeah!  really quick!  I don't know if I've mentioned this here or not (i think not).  I was talking to Scott and he asked me if I was a night owl (since it does seem to be my tendency to go to bed late and it does not seem to be my tendency to wake up early when I don't have to)...  I told him that it's not that I'm a night owl, I like the morning and the evening, it's just that I am transition challenged!  Think about it!!  I think that may be the difference between "night owls" and "early birds", the early people have less inertia to transition to the new state while the late people always lag behind and it takes time for them to transition into the new state.  (yeah, I'm gonna publish this theory in my thesis for sure).

Well, without further ado, I bid you all good night!  Gavin is leaving this waking world, in favor of it's nocturnal reflection...

Back at NASA! --> Round two. Fight!

Howdy there!  Well, I'm back in Mountain View, CA at NASA/Ames center working on finishing my thesis.  Hopefully it will be a quality piece of work.  I am signed up through May, but the lease on my apartment goes through the middle of July... after that, I don't know quite where I'll be.

So, what do you say?  Am I now the city slicker?  I don't think of myself that way, but in the last few days I've been pondering what that means...  there is something to be said for having all kinds of consumer items at your fingertips!  Then again, at the moment it seems like people are stacked in here so tight they may not be able to enjoy the "perks". 

I had really hoped to post some pictures of my first few days in Mountain View, so without further ado...

here is a great shot of the Best Western that housed me for the first two nights.  very exciting. (!)

And next we have the super comfy, Comfort Inn.  This is where I'll be staying for the next 2 days.  (!?)

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, "Gavin, why are you such a complainer?!"  "But wait," I interject, "there's more!"  As it turns out, I cannot charge my phone because of a mixup with the adapters I brought.  I have been trying to buy a new one for the last two days, and as yet have been unsuccessful.  But today was close, I came only 5 minutes after VZW closed.  (!)

Firstly, you might think I'm whining right now.  But no, I am relating the simple frustrations of a few days in the city.  My first day at work went really well (actually, one might not have known I was gone, my desk was just like I left it) and it felt like routine before I even got to my office.  I don't know if that is a good thing or not, but that is what it is.  Dad, you will be happy to know that I wore that ENE hoody today, and got several comments on it...  (they were positive)  ;)

My apartment will be ready to go in a few days, so I really can't complain too much, and I am blessed to have found a great place.  The rent is higher than Chico, but it's not bad for Mountain View.  I'll post some pics of the new place when I get over there on Wednesday.  In the meantime, know that I am well, tired, pondering and inconsolable.  (Smiling most of the time, but I miss my family)... Hey Garrett, is this what Hawaii felt like?

Missing all you guys...  =)  Any ideas for what I ought to do this weekend?  Maybe sleep would be good, but how can you sleep on the weekends?!?!?!?!  No, we must party!  (okay, at least go have some fun).

-City Slicker out

Back in the Saddle

It is that time again: the weather is hot, school's back in and I am once again in a brand new house! Yes, I am back from the NASA/Army internship in Mountain View and plugging away at a brand new set of classes.

It is strange to think that this might be the last semester that I am actually attending lectures, but that is the way life goes, I suppose; old seasons bend to the will of the new. I thought it would be fun to post a few pics and videos of things I didn't get up while I was in Santa Cruz, so here is a quick recap of a few things that happened that I didn't post about. By the way, I have been aiming to make one post per week, but the last month or so (and especially the last two weeks) at work were killers!

Here is a random selection of where I am now, a few things that happened since my last post, and some cool shots of NASA that I hadn't posted yet.

First off, this is the new digs... I am happy to be riding the Steed once again, my favorite truck!


Next up, my mafia-born nephew Zach-Attack. Okay, just Zach, but all this little hombre needs is one of those hats that the dudes with the tommy-guns had... he was a little stand-offish the first few days, but he'll give me a smile now. What a cute little gangster! ;)



This is a pic of how I took over one of the rooms in the house with Sharon and Scott. They were kind enough to let me spread out my computer stuff and "dig-in". This was so helpful in getting work done at home... Thanks guys!



Y'know how sometimes people ask you to solve silly puzzles and mind teasers? Well, normally I just shrug these buggers off and say, "That's okay, you can solve a meaningless puzzle..." but this particular morning, I was victorious! :) This task was to figure out a way to use these three knives to form a support structure that can span the cups, even though any single knife cannot span a single spacing...



How did I do it? Okay, I'll let you in on the secret... Just don't tell anyone I told you!





I didn't get a chance to run/exercise nearly as much as I was hoping to this summer, but I did go for a run a few times a week. Occasionally my cousin Scott would join me. This is my last run. Scott told me that this one was for "old time's sake"... meaning, I suppose that as time goes on we ought to run more often... =)

A few weeks before I came back, Nate and Ash came down and visited for the weekend. It was really cool to have them hang out and we did a few activities as well. We went kayaking in Elkhorn Slew, which was really fun (Scott was attacked by an otter! [yes, he's fine]).

Nate's Birthday was on Friday, and so we celebrated it on Saturday (they came up on Saturday). Cool cake huh? Yeah, that right... I picked it out myself. Happy B-day Nate!

From time to time, when we were car-pooling, I would need to drive by this spot on base to pick up Scott from his office. Occasionally the doors were open and you could see how large everything really is... This is the world largest wind tunnel (80 feet tall, 120 feet wide) and it can pull air through the test section at 100 knots! I think I posted something about the intake for this puppy in an earlier post, it is larger than a football field!

This video is inside the model loading area beneath the test section of the 40x80 tunnel (the world second largest). The fellow talking is Bill Warmbrodt who was kind enought to give us interns a tour. The tunnel is 3 stories up...

These next three videos are just a funny task that Scott and I had to do... split logs into firewood. Normally he is a wood-splittin' fool, but this particular time (on a particularly tough log), I got him on video having a hard time getting through... pretty funny this.

Intermediate progress...

The grand finale!

Well, that's it for now. Thanks for checkin' in. I hope to post a bit more regularly from here on out, but I know I've said that before.

It been long... too long... now to summarize! ;)

Long time no talky, folks... My bad there. I found out that I can't publish some of the work photos I've been taking due to security issues (that's kinda fun, huh?), which sorta set me back in how I was going to organize the blog entries, but that is really no excuse. My public needs me, and I now understand that I must give the public what they want! So, without further ado, and with little chronological order, I give you some snapshots of my life lately!

First off, last night Scott, Sharon and I all went to a muscial production called, "I love you, you perfect... now change." Very funny production basically making fun of (and celebrating too) relationships and the whole idea of dating, love and various thing associated with them. I was laughing the whole time! ;)


Several days ago, (I think it was Thursday night actually) I went with Barry (a fellow we carpool with) and Scott to a Jazz band performance at a club called Kuumbwa Jazz (http://www.kuumbwajazz.org/index.php) I didn't know it was such a big deal, but apparently it is a big name in the small jazz club circuit, and we saw a great show from the Gillian Harwin Band... very cool stuff. The pic below is not of that band, more of just how the inside and stage look since we weren't allowed to take pics when we were there.



Ah yes, lest you think that all I do is work on groovy electronics, hob nob with NASA scientists and go to jazz and theater performances, this is my weekend job! As I mentioned, these pics are not in very good chronological order, because I don't like the way blogger uploads them and orders them and i refuse to bow to their methods! (and i'm lazy). Anyway, the pic below is showing the bark that we moved from one end of the property to the other. I didn't realize that my cousin/aunt were quite so hardcore... some people recycle cans and paper, we are litterally building a mountain out of the wood chips that were pruned from trees surrounding the house! very cool stuff, more specs a little later!





Here is another pic of the part of the hill that we were building up. you can see how many loads of chips we brought to build up the hill compared to what was there before...



This, of course is my amazingly hardworking family that I am living with... taken a few weeks ago when we working on the same thing. They make good farmers, eh? :P

This is yesterday (Saturday), and a recap on some of the things we accomplished. we are sitting on a pile of wood that Scott and I gathered from all over the property. I think I hurt my back a little 'cause I was throwing wood up to him from lower parts of the hill, and then throwing wood down to him from higher parts: lots of wood throwing going on. Then, if you look to the other side of the pic, you will see part of the pile of wood chips that we moved. This was not particularly exciting work, so we decided to keep track of statistics so we could brag about what we got done, so here ya go: it took us 61 wheel barrow loads to move the pile. each wheels barrow load took an average of 16 pitch fork scoops to fill. Every round trip with the wheel barrow averaged about 140 paces (up-hill and then down-hill). In summary, Scott scooped 976 pitch forks full of wood chips. I pushed that wheel barrow 8,540 paces in the process of moving things, and Sharon spread 366 cubic feet of wood chips! We were all pretty tired when that was done, but we felt accomplished!

So that is the update for now. I am doing well with my summer project, and last week marked the finishing of my first prototype system. My sponsor was pleased with it, and next week hopefully I can make at least one more prototype to get things really cookin'! It is definitely a lot of fun learning the intricacies of MATLAB, Simulink, xPC and the graphical user interface constructs associated with those packages. Maybe soon I'll get my blackbelt in MATLAB! ;)

Until next time, gadget!

NASA/Santa Cruz Update

Whew! one week down! Here is a small bunch of pics from your long and frequently lost brotha! (though I have to say, I thank God for my GPS... it has been a life-saver).

This pic is of my accomadations... pretty nice digs, eh? I feel quite at home amongst the shelves of books, it reminds me of my room. In that vein, I found out today that we have to move out of the chico house by July 4th, so we gotta find a new place. That was fun while it lasted, but it is always fun to change up too... Anyhow, without further ado, I give you the pics!

I arrived early Sunday morning, and Scott and Aunt Sharon let me sleep through church (at home), but after the service, we all had lunch together and after running a few errands we worked on the plane.... it was fun!

notice the cart with screws on it? that was most of my job... put a buch of screws into the wing and call it good. And to think, this fellow flies! Amazing! I think it is tradition to have peanutbutter m&m's when working on the plane because I was rationed a few handfulls for my efforts. Unfortunately, one of those handfulls fell prey to a certain marauding pilot who spotted them unattended. this next pic was taken just minutes after he confessed to such a grievous crime. See the remorse in his eyes? :P

the first couple days, I didn't have an office of my own, so I kinda tagged along with Scott to his office and lab to read and research. Pictured below is the building where the lab he works in is, taken essentially from the building where his office is.

this picture (below) is a cool shot of the big wind tunnel inlet. It is taken from the perspective of Scott's office (facing the opposite direction from the pic above). This tunnel (in the smallest part) is 120' wide by 80' tall! It is the largest in the world, but it is hard to get a feel for the scale until you are standing next to it! I thought this pic (below) showed the scale rather well. if you click on the pic, you can see there is a hockey game going on and you can see how small the people are compared to the inlet... crazy, huh? I kept chuckling thinking about some prankster quickly turning it on and sucking all of the hockey player to wall for a bit... that'd be funny. ;)

this next pic, below, is another shot of the big tunnel, but this time from behind Scott's office building.

This is the building where I work. It is an army building that specializes in rotorcraft. Location, location, location... this buidling is nicely located directly across from the research center's cafeteria... and they have good food! oh yeah! ;)

If you were to turn 90 degrees left (counter-clockwise) from the pic above, you see the pic below. this is another shot of the big tunnel, and what it looks like down the street I'm on. (doesn't that song from my fair lady spring to mind?) Also, they have some sand volleyball courts there, which I think would be a lot of fun to join in on soon... Hopefully there are some ballers too, I have been told that there are some courts on the other side of the base.

Going into the building, my office is on the 2nd floor. Here is a shot of my desk and the development hardware that I am working on. Very cool stuff.

My office mate's window looking out on our little wind tunnel (7' x 10'). One thing that is kinda cool about the office is that the windows are like 8' tall, so if you open the blinds, you can see planes coming and going. Today we had an F-18 making low speed passes testing out something or other...

thanks for catchin' up with me, I'll post some cool pics of the model and helicopter tunnel when I can, that is really cool lookin'! Please forgive my lack of posting/calling this week -> I have been on the tired side, trying to get used to my new life for the summer... once I get more in sync, I'll be a little more social.

One more thing, I really need to get some pics of the three of us and our dinner/movie setup... it is really fun spending time with family that I've never really gotten to know. What a great thing to know your cousin and aunt better, and to have a nice place to live as well! I feel very blessed!

NASA ho!

Well, I have announcement to make:

I have been honored with acceptance into a graduate internship position with NASA/Ames Research Center over the summer! ;) Below is a shot of the center...

Ames is located in Mountain View, CA and specializes in wind-tunnel related research, but they do a lot of other things there too. My job is to design and implement a data acquisition system for an experimental helicopter rotor blade. Essentially, it is a trailing-edge flap (there are two per blade) that is independently controlled and will help reduce main hub vibration loads and noise as well as possibly increase power efficiency. I am very excited about it! I leave this evening (Sat) to go and stay with my aunt Sharon and cousing Scott in Santa Cruz, which will be a lot of fun.

I really love the unknown adventure aspect of this, it is very cool. Though, I haven't really had much of a chance to philosophize to the extent I might normally because I've been working really hard on trying to finish the Blackbox project this week. Okay, when I say finish, I mean phase 1 complete at least. That (As always) is proving to be a challenge, and I am looking forward to a time when I can relax slightly more on the weekends!

Anyhow, it's late and I need to sleep (I don't know what my sleep debt is, but I know I'm in the red!!) I just wanted to give a big shout out to all my peeps (yeah, I DID use that word) and let everyone know the good news. I wish you all a merry summer!

-Sir Gavin out!

P.s. I finally walked! yay! just to comemorate commencement, I (purposely?) forgot to put on sunscreen so I look a little darker than usual. But its all good, I hear the ladies like 'em tall, dark and handsome... two out of three ain't bad!! (:-P