Would M'lady Care to Dance?

The Scottish Rite Temple in Oakland, California plays host to the quarterly Gaskell Ball. Gaskell's is a social ball set in the Victorian era.  The signature dance is the Viennese waltz (danced in the old social style, rather than modern ballroom style) but other dances make more than token appearances, such as polka (deadly, high-velocity, skipping), heel-toe galop (aim and charge at other couples in utter chaos), polka mazurka-waltz (slow Viennese waltz with a kick every half turn to warn off hapless dancers and small children), schottiche (German interpretation of what the French thought the Scotts were doing...or something), and some insane set dances with names like "The Jolly Dog Polka" and "Sir Roger de Coverly" (the latter is often followed on the setlist by the "de Coverly Recovery Waltz").  They have a live band, Brassworks, who, incidentally, played at SteampunkCon earlier this year.

The regulars are generally the same people who work at renaissance faires and things like The Great Dickens Christmas Fair.  This means two things: first, the people are a little bit strange.  Second, the costumes are AMAZING.  Many of the people make

 their own costumes and they are phenomenal.  My girlfriend made my vest and tailcoat as well as her dress.  She's actually the only active member of the sewing club at Mudd aside from Professor Sparks, who makes positively stunning quilts.  They hope to get more members soon, so if you've an interest in sewing (or learning to sew) you should be pleased to hear that you'll have an outlet at Mudd for your creative urges.  And time.  Sort of.  This dress took Liz 2 years from start to finish, but most of the work was done last semester in preparation for Gaskell's (the ruffles, unseen in this picture took 8 hours of labor each...there are 5 of them.  I can't possibly imagine spending an entire work week doing nothing but ruffles).

Oh, and I mentioned the bizarre dance that is the Schottiche earlier.  It's danced to 4 counts as follows: step-step-step-HOP, step-step-step-HOP, step-HOP-step-HOP, step-HOP-step-HOP!  You can do any number of variants, like the Goose-step Schottiche for a military aspect, the Vecchi Schottiche for a sketchy old man aspect, or the ever-popular Penguin Schottiche for a hilarious and somewhat cute aspect.  This dance is usually danced in the shuttle position (partners side-by-side, hands held across the front of their bodies) rather than a traditional ballroom position: your partner's knee comes sharply up with each HOP....  Penguin Schottiche, however, is usually danced in something akin to a conga line.  Oh, and Schottiche is pronounced "shoddish" (like the pokemon).

In addition to dancing, I also took pictures.  I'm taking Intermediate Black and White Photography next semester (in addition to 2 dance classes, clinic, a philosophy class, and independent study...) and my grandparents gave me their old Canon A1 to use.  It's about 30 years old and hasn't been used in nearly that long so I took it with me to the ball to see how it worked.  That film is in the shop tonight getting developed (the first three pictures here were taken on my digital camera), so stand by for an update when I get it back and digitized.  Until then, happy holidays!

~KMarsh

Apprentice Products Pitches Guitar Trainer to VC's

Apprentice Products. The name 4 HMC students gave the mock company they created for Professor Evans' "Enterprise and the Entreprenuer" class. Their flagship product: Guitar Trainer. A week and a half ago four of us sat across a table from three venture capitalists, all of whom have been successful enough in the startup world to fund startups themselves. Chris Seib, Marco Thompson, and Eric Johnson took the time out of their busy schedules to drive/fly to Mudd (yes, Eric flew himself and Marco in in from San Diego in his Piper Saratoga II, tail no. N392HP. No, I didn't fly back with them) and listen to a bunch of students organized into made-up companies ask them for $2-5 Million in funding.

The whole class was fascinating -- Professor Evans has helped many student-born companies get off the ground (some succeed, others...he calls them "smoking black holes") and he told us the stories of several of them, including why they failed or some of they things they did correctly that contributed to their successes.  He lectured on the different facets involved in building a startup company and the importance of paying attention to them all.  The pitch to the VC's was the final project and really the thing the class had been building to the entire time.  The VC's listened to our pitches and gave really great feedback -- they do this sort of thing for a living, so they're rather adept at it.  After class we went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant with Chris (an HMC alumnus, actually) and had a wonderful meal while chatting with him.  All in all, a really cool experience unlike anything I think I would have gotten anywhere else.

~KMarsh

Python is Your Friend

I said I'd mention when I wrote twitter scripts and true to my word here's the first script I've written to interact with twitter. I was quite surprised to not find a command-line twitter client in the Ubuntu repositories, but perhaps it's because python makes it so easy:

#!/usr/bin/python
import twitter
from sys import argv
api = twitter.Api(username='askForCharon', password='redacted')
status = api.PostUpdate(argv[1])
api.ClearCredentials()

There's the entirety of my script. It knows my credentials (although I'm loathe to write anything that stores a password in plaintext) and takes the message to tweet on the command line. A slightly more sophisticated version would include a check to make sure the message was <= 140 characters. I wrote this for clinic, actually. I was getting ready to start a long-running job and I wanted to be alerted when it finished (particularly if it failed), so I wrote this script and ran the following:

>my_long_job ; tweet "The job finished with status $? at `date`."

This is instructive to budding linux users:

• The semicolon means run the second command (tweet) after the first (my_long_job) finishes.
• The '$?' is a shell variable that holds the exit status of the last command run.
• `date` runs the `date' program and puts the output into the string.
• I put the argument to `tweet' in double quotes because the shell will provide variable expansion in a double-quoted string, but will use a single-quoted string verbatim (I wanted it to actually expand $? and `date` into their values, not pass those characters to my program).
  

If I end up writing a more complete command-line tweet-er I'll post it here. Also, if someone could let me know of a better way to post code snippets on blogger I'd be grateful, because this is terrible.

~KMarsh

Reactions

Just a quick note for everyone...I've enabled "reactions" for this blog, so below every post you should see buttons for "Tell me more!" and "Not interested". If you liked the post and want me to blog about similar things, click "Tell me more!" and if you think I should be posting about different things (more relevant to Mudd, less technical, more lolcats, etc.) click "Not interested".

Look forward to a post next week (probably not this weekend) about the final days of the semester.

~KMarsh

Playing With Real Boy's Toys

My family went to my cousins' house in Redding, Ca. for Thanksgiving this year.  My uncle designed and built his house, an energy-efficient straw-bale home.  He owns a concrete fabrication business called Universal Precast Concrete, Inc.  We went out to visit the shop and got to play with some real man's toys.  Below are some examples:

Gary brought out his shotgun and let us shoot some clay birds.

It turns out I'm terrible with a shotgun.

Below is a really large CNC (computer numeric control) machine that Gary uses to cut molds out of styrofoam.  Once the molds are cut, they're sprayed with polyurethane.

The cement is mixed with a variety of chemicals, shown below, in the 1.5 cu. yd. mixer shown further below, to create the concrete that is then pored into the styrofoam molds yet further below.

Now we get to the most exciting part for me:  MIG welding.  Gary has a MIG welding rig that he let me play with.  He showed me how to lay a bead and let me play around with some scrap steel.

Here we see Gary showing me how leaving space between the plates when making a butt weld allows greater penetration of the weld metal.

The two weldments below are the sheets I practiced on when initially getting the feel for how welding worked (right) and the butt weld that Gary demonstrated the beginning of and had me finish.

Gary eventually got fed up with his workers breaking the hammer handles so he replaced this one with some #7 rebar.

To see more, with more complete descriptions, see the facebook album I posted with these pictures.  And Happy Turked Day.

~KMarsh

Tweet Tweet

Fitting, that just before turkey day I should break down and try twitter. My clinic team, for unknown reasons, decided to hop onto twitter. I think it was iPhone1 and iPhone2 (I try to call them that to their faces whenever possible. Half my team and our advisor have iPhones) wanting to check out the twitter apps. Whatever the reason, my twitter screen name is askForCharon. I've got a feed to it on the sidebar and who knows what else I might do.

Perhaps I'll write a script so I can tweet from the command line. Perhaps I'll write a script that posts messages both to twitter and to my facebook status. Perhaps I'll write a script that parses a file with timestamps and messages and automatically sets up my first script to post the messages when the proper time comes! You never know!

If I do write these scripts, I'll post about them here and, of course, on twitter. I wonder if I'll find μ-blogging addicting enough to keep at it. Have a nice thanksgiving.

~KMarsh

Oh, and give my regards to the ferryman.

Enormous Kites

Gliders are kind of like enormous kites. You attach a big string and then run really fast to get it into the air. Normally, to help you run fast enough, you get in a powered airplane and use that instead. The Barnstormers finally got to go gliding this month and we're very excited about it. Following are some pictures of the event. These are the three gliders we were flying in and one of the tow planes.
My feet are shown on the pedals of the glider I flew in. Notice the overall lack of instrumentation and controls. There's the big red tow cable release knob in the middle, the pedals at my feet, the stick between my knees, and the trim and spoilers controls at my left hand. And the AC vent, but that was somewhat broken. As for instrumentation, we have an altimeter, a variometer (rate of climb indicator) and airspeed indicator. And a piece of string taped on the outside of the bubble as a slip-slide indicator.
Below is Larry's high performance glider. It's worth >$100,000 and has significantly more bells and whistles than the others. And a reclined seat. With parachutes if you want to do aerobatics, and oxygen if you want to make high-altitude flights.

Larry is the man who runs Sailplane Enterprises out of the Hemet airport and he was one of our tow pilots. He gave us an excellent deal that let us use club funding to get as many students as wanted to out flying.
My co-leader getting ready to glide. She and I were lucky enough to get to fly on both the trips we took. On my second flight the instructor let me try flying while we were still on tow, which is quite the experience. I also got to stall the glider and practice some steep-bank turns. It's a bit of a difference from the Cessna 172 I've flown with Iris, but probably not quite as different as some other aircraft could be.
One of the students in the first group to fly with us is working on his private pilot's license. Larry let him help taxi the tow plane out to the runway after refueling. We also had a private pilot in the second group who got the glider instructor she flew with to sign her log book towards a glider rating.
There are more pictures and stories, but I'll let it go for now with the following group photo of the first group who went out with us. Iris Critchell is the lady at the head of the glider, and my co-leader and I are on the far left of the picture.
If you want to hear more, let me know. Until then, have a great time.
~KMarsh