Mitt liv som Tobin

Last night I started working on the x0xb0x, the Roland TB-303 Sequencer/Synthesizer clone that I am building from a kit. I remembered soldering as being tedious and stressful, but now I find it a relaxing and satisfying diversion. Reminds me of when Daniel at LHO told me, "Anyone can feel good about themselves when soldering!" Unlike so many other activities at school, you make guaranteed progress towards a goal, and it doesn't require much thinking. Anyway, I finished building and testing the power supply and am ready to move on to the voltage controlled oscillator.

In the last 24 hours:

• Assembled and tested x0xb0x power supply, in the Secret Underground Laboratory
• Slept a lot
• Made Norwegian waffles for breakfast
• Received a shipment of books from Duffy Littlejohn
• Scoped out the Rochester and Southern rail yard
• Fraternized with vyncentvega
• Looked at my TA evaluations. They were very positive except the students say I grade homework too slowly.
• Bought stock in the company that owns Rochester and Southern, just for the hell of it
• Ate some more waffles
• Rented a truck from home depot to move some more gravel to finish our hot tub foundation
• Got this truck stuck in mud
• Hired tow truck to get Home Depot truck out of mud

So, now I am drinking strongly spiked hot chocolate. Somewhere in the above process I lost my car keys again. Boo.

Sometime in the last four days I lost my car key--between driving to the Haitian restaurant and trying to drive to my cousin's house. We could have cycled to the Haitian restaurant but drove out of some kind of trepidation for exploring the "bad neighborhood" (aka Jefferson Avenue) for the first time in such an exposed manner. I did cycle to my cousin's house, which was very fine--remember, with the fireflies? (The one White quadrant of town, no one's afraid to cycle there.) Looking for my key, I've begun to call up the area bars. It's not at the Lux, or so they say. I think I could have lost it while lying in the hammock. Last night at dinner, Ross came into the kitchen triumphantly, arms full of Corona. Someone was slicing limes immediately, as if it were some deep-seated reflex that might have even violated causality. It's too hot to do anything else in Rochester. "There's something about the heat and Mexican beer," Ross noted. So we sat on the porch drinking Coronas and fixing my bicycle.

Uurgh, I've misplaced my keys... I hate it when that happens -- it makes me feel like I'm going crazy or something! I haven't been anywhere, so their disappearance is all the more frustrating. Haven't I looked everywhere? S-:

Anyway. On a completely unrelated subject, here's a question for physicists et al: What causes the 'washboard effect' on dirt roads? I've heard a bunch of qualitative / anecdotal explanations, but I want to model the effect. The car, I think, is pretty easy to model. Mass, spring, damper, wheel. But how do I model a sandy road surface?

Links that might be useful:

• Animating Sand, Mud, Snow - from Prof. O'Brien, whose area of research is physics-based models for computer graphics

This goes on my personal to-do list of hard modeling problems... the other thing on it is to do a proper fluid-dynamical simulation of a lava lamp, without resorting to tracking blob surfaces or other empirically developed (non-physical) solutions.