Yeee Haw- Austin

So we hit the road from Fort Worth to Austin. The drive was almost exactly 3 hours. Here's Dad driving, with one leg up and on the cell phone. He originally had his right leg up and no foot on gas or break (cruise control) but I was very uncomfortable with that and called Mom to make him put his leg down.

We met Kavon at his place of work which was a really lovely office.We need to get a foosball table for our office. No work would get done and it would be very loud.

So after a tour of Kavon's very cool pad, including the hot tub on the roof top which I could not get to because the narrow spiral staircase to the third floor freaked me out, we headed to Stubs for dinner. I didn't realize this, but Austin is the live music capital. Every single restaurant and bar we walked by had live music. The guy on the left had the coolest sounding instrument that none of us knew what it was.

Here's us with our Stubs grub. Thanks for showing us around Kave! Hopefully next time we'll get to hang out for more than a couple of hours. Next we head off to San Antonio....

Giddiyup

Dad and I headed to Texas for the beginning of our conference tour. First stop Fort Worth. The trip started off good with an upgrade to first class. Here's Dad with his warm nuts: They give you warm nuts when you're ballin'. We took some pictures out of the window. This is somewhere over the southwestern US:We got to Texas and Dad wanted steak. So we headed to The Chop House which was right up the street from our hotel. Fort Worth has a really cute downtown area.We split a surf-n-turf which was a steak with lobster tail. The next day was time to work. Despite the fact that this was the most expensive show we'd been to, and that each of us gave a presentation, it was the most dead of any conference or show we'd been to EVER. Which was pretty disappointing. It was a pretty huge show though. Over 150 exhibitors at least, the conferences I normaly go to have 8-16 exhibitors. But barely any attendees showed up despite 3500 preregistered attendees (wondering if that's true).
Lockheed brought an airplane and flight simulator. Show offs. After two days of minimal contacts with attendees, on the last day we had quite a few people that showed up at our booth wanting information. So that was good. Then it was time to hit the road.
We stopped by Le Madeline for some lunch. I had the croque monsieur and tomato basil pesto soup. Dad had the French onion soup and a roast beef au jus. It was yummy.

I made Dad do this. It took like 5 takes before I got a decent one. He humored me because I hadn't taken enough pictures for a decent post.

And now, off to Austin to visit Kavon.

Conference in Boston

Hello Family,

I have not been blogging of my travels, so I am back-blogging now. The conference was kicked off with a marching 3-man band, revolutionary style, marching up and down the aisles of the conference.

On election day, they showed the election coverage on big screens in the main hall.

I had dinner with Kristy and had my first bowl of chowdah. It didn't sit well in my tummy because of my election anxiety.
Here are Kristy and me. I had my trusty gorilla tripod with me and took a few pictures of us..

I went back to the hotel just in time for a fire alarm and had to walk down 20 flights of stairs to find out it was a false alarm. One lady in the lobby let us all know that she was in NYC for 9-11 and that she was NOT going back to her room because they were told to go back to work after the first plane hit and look how that turned out. Needless to say, I slept lightly that night. Although with a big smile on my face thanks to the fact that there enough smart American's voting in this year's election.

Wednesday night I went to dinner with our Brazilian customers. They are the nicest people. I won't post pictures, but want to mention that even though they are our customers, would not let me pay for dinner even though I invited them out.

Love you all!

Almost Famous

OK, so its Monday and I'm dating this post for Friday. I know, that's cheating, but the whole purpose of this is blog to have a sort of accurate journal of 2008. So on Friday, the paper with our article printed in the Pasadena Star, SGV Tribune, and Whittier Daily News. I only found the Star, but I got 3 copies and Aunty Zizi got 1 copy, they were sold out everywhere else.

So if you look deep in the main section, go to the business section on page 10, and there is a nice juicy article and picture of me and my dad.

MSE in the News

Yesterday we had a visit from a reporter and photographer from the local paper in Pasadena. She wrote an article on our company and it will print in tomorrow's edition. It's online right now if anyone wants to read it:

High-tech firm in Pasadena has big plans ahead

It was supposed to print today, but they are having technical difficulty and the entire business section was not printed today. I'll probably pick up a couple dozen copies for myself tomorrow.

Wednesdays at MSE

Today's post will be about Sherri Folger and the miniLDV sensor.
Sherri is in charge of MSE's finances. More importantly, she's Sheila's mommy. Right now Sherri is in the middle of reconciling our accounts, completing work for a contract audit, calculating projections, and making sure we're in the black.

I promised a quick tutorial on our miniLDV sensor in my "Wednesday at MSE" post from 2 weeks ago. Below is the complete sensor system (PC and monitor are sold separately). The miniLDV probe is the flashlight sized cylinder mounted on a tripod and stage on the right.

The miniLDV is a miniature laser Doppler velocimeter. What that means is that it measures velocity using a laser Doppler signal. An example of the use of our miniLDV is to measure inside of a fluid flow. Say you want to understand the characteristics of a flow in a pipe, river, outside of a ship as it travels, for example. In order to make an in-situ (Latin for in the place) velocity measurement without disrupting the flow and changing what you're trying to measure, you would need a unobtrusive measurement technique. The laser in the miniLDV is able to penetrate a flow at a known distance, without obstructing or disrupting the flow. The location of the measurement point is called the probe volume. That is the point where the 2 beams below intersect. The probe below is a miniLDV-100, which means the measurement point is 100 mm from the surface of the probe. They come in various probe volumes from 35 mm to 0.5 meters.When particles inside of a fluid, move through the probe volume (the intersection of the beams), the signal of the backscatter of that particle is received by a detector inside the probe. For a complete description of this process, download the PDF from the link below.

http://www.measurementsci.com/papers/miniLDV_description.pdf

Some applications include ship speed measurements, air curtain (like in grocery store refrigerated sections) flow measurements, river flow modeling, various cloud measurements, planetary studies of liquid core, pipe flow monitoring, fume hood monitoring, and various academic research in the fluid dynamics field.

If anyone would like a quote for a miniLDV, please send an email to info@measurementsci.com and mention this blog and you will get a 5% discount (can not be applied to other discounts).

Long over due Sheila post

Since The Daily Ruby has been up and running for almost 2 weeks (12 days to be exact), I felt it an injustice to not have posted a single picture of Sheila. I know I promised Wednesdays to be regular "Wednsdays at MSE" posts, but it was a little busy and rainy to take the time to post something about MSE today.

Insteady I will post some pictures of Sheila while she was as MSE. These are from last month's office Chrismas party.

Wednesdays at MSE

I've decided to (try) to have regular posts about MSE on Wednesdays. MSE is where I work. We design, manufacture, market, and sell miniature optical velocity sensors.

Miniature, meaning reduced in size relative to comparable sensors.

Optical, not meaning eyeball, but referring to the optical devices and elements such as lasers and lenses that are used to build these sensors.

Velocity, meaning, well, velocity.

Sensor, meaning a device that makes measurements (for our intents and purposes it does). Our sensors measure velocity. Specifically and uniquely our sensors measure the velocity inside of a flow.

If anyone from MSE reads this, or anyone who can beef up my descriptions, by all means leave it in the comment section. I didn't want to rattle on too much and bore people away from my perky blog.

Now that I've explained the brief technical part, allow me to introduce you all to Jojo.

Aside from enjoying basking in a warm patch of sunshine on the carpet in the middle of the office where anyone can accidentally walk on him, Jojo also likes to attack every delivery person and stranger that walks in the doors. This is generally a pain for whoever tries to get him to quiet down (Zizi, Dariush, Sherri, me), but sometimes its really funny because he is a 9 lb Pomeranian. He gets especially frenzied if you pick him up and hold him till the person has left, then as soon as you put him down he sprints to the door and barks at the person walking away. He likes to wait till the coast is clear to really show his might.

I will try to catch him in the act and post a video later today. And here it is (not Jojo's best work, but it'll do):

He's usually much more threatening and entertaining. I'll see if we get a better Jojo clip by next Wednesday's "Wednesdays at MSE".

Next week I will explain our miniLDV sensor and also introduce you all to another member of MSE.