Archive for May, 2007
links for 2007-05-17
Wednesday, May 16th, 2007links for 2007-05-15
Monday, May 14th, 2007beautiful spring day
Sunday, May 13th, 2007Today was fantastic. I went with Mare this morning to volunteer with Great River Greening. A group from her company was helping plant trees/plants along the east side of the mississippi (just north of the Marshal/Lake bridge on East River Road. The weather was perfect and apparenlty we planted like 3000 plants along a newely built walkway that at one time was the site of a dam/lock on the Mississippi. It was fun getting my hands (and feet and pretty much everything else) dirty.
After the planting we took a nice nap and I went home to go on a bike ride. I’ve only been out one other time this sprint (which is pathetic) but I got a nice long ride in. I hit the Greenway, rode south along the east side of lake calhoun then down to lake harriet. It was windy so there were a TON of sailboats out on harriet. I made a loop around harriet then headed over to lake nakomis. I don’t think I’ve ever completely ridden around nakomis so I did a loop…and then another half loop because i forgot to exit and head east towards the river. I crossed highway 55, met up with West River Parkway, then headed north into downtown. I made it to Hennepin Ave and started heading home through downtown. At this point I was starting to feel quite fatigued and wasn’t too excited to stop at all the lights. Note to self, don’t ride through downtown when you’re tired. I made it home with the tripmeter rolling over 28 miles. I think that’s the longest single ride I’ve ever done so I felt pretty good. Spring is such a great time of year! 
Tronix Team
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007A few weeks ago I blogged about attending the MHTA spring conference and mentioned the cool stuff that the Tronix Team was doing. For once, I actually followed through on something and decided to volunteer. Today was my second week (day) volunteering and it was a blast. There are about 10 kids in the session I’m working with and they’re project is the Lunchbox Boombox.
Last week’s session was spent drilling out holes, taping circuit boards, then etching the circuit boards with an acid bath. The kids did well, though it wasn’t the most exciting of tasks. This week was a little more fun. Today was spent soldering all the components to the boards. Everyone was a little slow at first due to inexperience with soldering. However, after figuring out the soldering technique and putting in a couple of components, everyone was off to the races. It was very interesting seeing the kids progress and gain confidence in their work. At the end of the day everyone had soldered about 9 components and 10 wires to their boards.
Once the kids had left, the volunteers installed the microchips. Of course, I screwed one up (put it in backwards) and nearly snapped a pin trying to remove one without a chip puller. oops I was ready to fork over the $5 for the chip…hehehe.
I’m _really_ enjoying the experience and am so glad I stepped out of my sheltered little world to help out!