Friday afternoon in the lab.

View from work today:  the port that accommodates the vacuum pump and instrumentation for the Liquid Level And Mass-gauging Apparatus (LLAMA).  I'm not going to lie, even if I thought the technical aspects of my job were boring, it would still be really fun just to look at all the hardware!

Note:  I added Labels to this post and blogger republished it as a new post; not sure what's up with that.

Michael is kayaking on South Sauty today.  I was planning on going but woke up feeling crummy with a killer headache.  It's probably for the best - I really needed to get some work done, namely on a final report that was due on Friday.  We just recently purchased a new desk on Craigslist, and I'm totally loving working at it.  We have placed it in our "wood panel bedroom" so it faces the window where I can look out and see our front yard.  I love it.  Way better than my windowless cubicle at work.

I installed Instagram on my phone yesterday, and the photo above is my first attempt.  

Sunday adventures!  Michael is in red.  I'm in white.

Last week I went on a tour of the valve lab to look for valves that might be useful for testing in my branch's test facility.  The photos above show a small sample of the total hardware in the warehouse - it was incredible!  The largest valve is shown in the second to last photo.  I included my feet in a couple of the photos for scale.

Photos from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

Thoughts from my boss, in response to this article:

"Make as many mistakes as fast as you can, as fast as possible without hurting yourself or any of your stuff.  The number of mistakes required to achieve success is a fixed number, to the first order.  To the second order, the number of mistakes needed is proportional to the time between mistakes.  Thus, there is a mistake rate at which no progress is made.  For example, if we made one unsuccessful attempt at a task per year, and eight attempts were required to achieve success, it's very likely that success would never occur.  This is especially true if the forgetting of lessons is considered.  If a lesson is remembered and effective for only five years, then we'd always be three attempts away from success.  Also, make mistakes at the small scale as fast as possible, where the political, economic, and capital cost are also small.

Successful engineering occurs when the executor fails to build the object incorrectly."

Just got back from Glenn Research Center after several days of test planning meetings.  The photos above were taken in a lab I walked around during one of our breaks.  The top image is of the end of a large (~22' diameter) vacuum chamber, and the bottom two images are of solar thermal hardware.