Lots of stuff

I had a little vacation last week. It was great. Didn’t bring the camera though so you’ll just have to use your imagination. Since MoMA is having their van Gogh exhibit now and it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to see all of those paintings again in my lifetime I figured out a way to go and see it. I flew to Philadelphia Thursday, had a nice dinner at Brasserie Perrier that night which was superb. I had pumpkin ravioli to start followed by the crispy duck breast and a side of root vegetable au gratin and pear crisp for dessert. It was all very good and the service was excellent. I got up early Friday morning, took the Amtrak into Penn Station in Manhattan and walked the twenty blocks up to the museum. First of all, the membership is great. There was a huge line to get in and a timed entry ticket system for the van Gogh both of which I got to skip completely thanks to my magic plastic card. The van Gogh exhibit itself was very crowded but completely worth the trip. The Starry Night Over the Rhône is amazing. I haven’t seen a picture of it that does it justice. In fact I ended up going through the show three separate times throughout the day.

The rest of the museum is fantastic as well. There is a gallery of the painting and sculpture highlights on their website that is representative of the collection. I was in awe all day long. It’s funny to go into a place and see things which were in your textbooks growing up. I’m just going to start linking in things I saw that were superb. Boccioni, Rousseau, Picasso, also Picasso, Pollock, Monet. I briefly considered hosting the images locally and in-lining them here but I think that might have some unpleasant copyright implications so instead you should just click the links and enjoy the show.

I also saw the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall in Philadelphia and had a Philly cheese steak and a slice of genuine New York style pizza. It was a great trip. Hopefully I’ll get to go back again soon.

Let’s see, other stuff. Before I went on vacation I finished the cutting diagrams and bought the wood for my bookshelves. I’ll start breaking that down into the component parts this weekend. This project has been a long time in the works and I’m not expecting it to get done quickly but I’d like to have the individual cases constructed by the end of the year at least. I’m pretty happy with how the design came out. The asymmetry is minimal considering the limitations of the room. My current complaints are that a) Engineered bamboo plywood costs about ten times what it should meaning I will have to get creative for the desktop and b) Lowes doesn’t sell my choice of jointer anymore so I ended up ordering one from Amazon. They’re giving me free shipping though so that’s nice.

The not-so-super, not-so-secret dining room lighting project also continues. The electronic proof of concept has been designed and laid out and the PCB is in queue to be manufactured on the other side of the world. The company providing this service is BatchPCB which takes a bunch of board designs puts them all onto one big 11″ x 15″ panel and then has them cut apart. It’s a pretty good deal for prototyping. When it comes time to have 120 half-inch square boards made I may need to re-evaluate my vendor. The whole design process has turned out to be much less difficult than I had expected it to be. SparkFun has good tutorials on using Eagle to do schematic and PCB design and the software only took about a week to get comfortable with. I’m sure it’s quite a bit more powerful than I’m currently exploiting but it was quick to pick up. All the actual electronic parts and my shiny new soldering iron came in last week so now I just need the board to finish up and I’m ready to see if I’m any good at routing electrons.

With all of the projects in progress and the fab shutdown and the holidays and art shows coming up it’s looking to be a busy winter. Plus there’s this video game I used to play that has an expansion next week. I may have to get some folks to lash me to the mast lest I be overcome by its call. I have to admit that though my account remains inactive my client is up to date as of this week so all it would take now is a moment of weakness and a scroll of resurrection.