Belize

Off to Belize tonight with the parents. I'll try and post something from there in the next two weeks. Assuming I'm not too busy getting a tan.

Mer de Glace

2-4 inches in the mountains

yeah right. 10-20? It's hard not to like the localized storms produced by the Bridger Bowl Cloud.

Midweek Pass

Bridger was good today. Except for a couple of rocks. There were strange downhill winds that blew a bunch of the snow off the top.





(They're links)

Bridger

Opened on Friday. It's pretty good snow up there.

Strain

From my thesis project. . . this is a 1.25" tall by 1" wide by .03" thick piece of carbon fiber laminate with a notch cut in one side. The top of it has been displaced vertically upward by around .025" with around 1000lbs of force.

This picture is a graphical represnetation of strain in the x (horizontal) direction under tension in the y. The blue is negative strain (compression) induced mostly by the carbon fiber laminates geometry, which has the strong carbon fibers aligned from the notch to the left corners at 30 degrees from vertical ([±30]s ). The fibers covered by blue are holding most of the force right now.

My project uses a canon digital rebel and a series of Matlab programs to measure strain off the whole surface of a sample optically for thousands of dollars less then a comparable commercial system and with more flexibility.

Another

Random pic 'o' the day

 

Name this location.

FIRE!

Snow in the Bridgers

This picture is from last Wednesday south of Bridger Bowl. Really light, fluffy snow that was waist deep in a lot of places on top of lots of rocks. Dangerous for equipment.

Turkey Day

Deer in the front yard at the parents house, snow in their backyard, pygmy owls knocking themselves out on the windows and weird smog from a refinery near butte on the way back to Bozeman.

Salt Lake City

Marshall took a job in Salt Lake City at IM Flash. I went down there with him to help him find a place to stay this last weekend.






PHOTO MAP

Deer Pizza

Marshall and Josh made three deer into nothing but sausage. It is damn good.

Biking Baldy

Alan and I rode a little loop in the Bridgers up to one of my favorite lookouts, the top of mount Baldy. It was probably the last time we could have done it this year. It snowed a bunch up there a couple of hours later. It was windy and not pleasant up top and I didn't take many pictures.

Stellar Dendrite

I found this pic on the wall in one of MSU's cold regions laboratories. It's a Stellar Dendrite, a form of snowflake that forms in high humidity. They are generally associated with excellent skiing snow. . .

HDR

High dynamic range

The above image was made from 3 different images at 2 EV spacing. One was 2 stops underexposed, one 2 stops over and one in the middle. Each image has it's own dynamic range of brightness values that it can cover. To make the HDR image these three overalapping ranges are combined to create an image that covers all of them at once. Hence the sunset AND the town can be properly exposed simultaneously.

Another way to do it is just take an over-exposed RAW image, back the exposure off in photoshop and increase the gamma (midrange brightness) with fill light. RAW images have more color and dynamic range information then can actually be displayed on the screen. This technique just displays more of it then usual. This doesn't cover as large of a dynamic range as the previous technique, but I think it looks better. What do you think?



(edited on monday to include more info and another images)

Dyno Testing

I went to Dynojet with my senior design group and did some dyno testing on the Benz. The best run was 98 HP at the rear wheels on straight diesel. Biodiesel averaged about 5hp less. We tested B99 (99% biodiesel), B50, straight diesel, and the stuff that was in my tank which is about B70 with an anti-gel additive. It was pretty fun reving the car almost to red line at 80 up on the dyno repeatedly. These data will be compared later with what the vegetable oil system can produce. The graph below shows the power curve of the engine in 3rd gear, where it hits 5,000 RPM around 80 and power drops off significantly. I stopped reving after it was dropping off, hence the steep slope at the end of the curve. Fortunately my engine didn't blow up.

Weekend activites.

We had some excellent weather this weekend, I tried to take advantage of it.

Started with a bike ride on Friday:


Skied on Emigrant peak again on Saturday:


And then went biking on Sunday up Grassy Mountain:


The biking was excellent, the skiing was excellent, I really can't complain. Now it's daylight savings time and biking after school will require leaving at 3. . .

That's in 15 minutes. . .

Halloween

No one knew who he was, but they could tell he dressed up.

Wapta

From a trip to Canada with Rob, Marshall and Tarby last spring. Tough to get photos with any contrast when everything is bright white. We got some good face tans from that trip.

Sawmilling

The Wood-Mizer Lumber Mill Model LT40

Venice

From the archives. . . I apparently have around 40,000 photos on this computer.

Short Descent into Winter

Sure was nice today. . .

Baldy

Snow up there now. . .

Skiing

I never managed to post these. Marshall and I went skiing in the north Bridgers last Wednesday on my birthday. We both work at the university where apparently it's ok to just not show up all day if you don't want to. It was a really nice day and the skiing was surprisingly good. We skied "the Great One" which is a north facing and very well shaded chute that is well known around here because it will hold snow well into summer. Or, in our case, will hold snow that fell early in the fall.


MORE

Sign Creek

Rode the Sign Creek trail outside of Sula,MT with Chad on Sunday. It was a long and fun loop in some really remote country.



We saw Moose and Elk, rode through snow for a while and had a great time. I rode a Ventana El Rey that Chad let me try out. It has wheels that are 29" in diameter, 3" larger then a standard 26" mountain bike wheel.

bigger wheels decrease the contact angle with obstacles, which in turn decreases the amount of forward momentum the rider loses while rolling over said obstacles. Or so they say. After around 5 hours of rolling around on it I agree. You can roll over rocks that are around 2" tall without slowing down much at all. The bike handles really well and I instantly felt comfortable riding it. At first it didn't feel as good as my current bike at high speeds, but was just as capable once I got used to it. MORE PICTURES



That's Trapper Peak

Cider Party

 

 

Made a little bit of cider from a lot of apples. It's tasty, I think I'll go get myself a glass right now. . .