Since this is not a blog, I usu­ally refrain from fill­ing the screen with mind-numbing details of my daily life. But Octo­ber, packed as it was with excit­ing week­ends, mer­its some excep­tion. An excep­tion­ally long bit of HTML.

Octo­ber 8-9: Penang, Malaysia

Because of prob­lems with last-minute book­ing and full flights, I was forced to spend the week­end in Penang, Malaysia on the company’s dol­lar. Not that I could com­plain about that! Malaysia is awe­some. The exact details of my trip are would require an excru­ci­at­ingly long entry and are best left for ver­bal expla­na­tion. Nonethe­less I took a lot of pic­tures, many of which I have finally put online. I have still not reached a deci­sion on the fate of my two color rolls, which were poorly scanned by the lab. I’m exper­i­ment­ing with my options.

Octo­ber 15-16: C-labs Party

On Sat­ur­day we threw a party in the usual ware­house style: four DJs, some beer, and a cou­ple hun­dred of our clos­est friends. Due to a sur­plus of pow­er­ful NeFeB mag­nets, the cho­sen theme was Elec­tric­ity and Mag­net­ism. We built a bar table with a poly­car­bon­ate inlay that revealed a 4-station motor­ized mag­netic drink stir­ring sys­tem of our own design. Edu­ca­tional videos played on a half-dozen TV mon­i­tors. Spe­cial guest appear­ances were made by a Tesla coil, a Van de Graaf gen­er­a­tor, and a Jacob’s lad­der. Human guests ranged from the mem­bers of Scul (Boston’s bicy­cle chop­per gang) to out-of-towners from New York and Washington.

Octo­ber 22-23: Wash­ing­ton, DC

Brian lured us in with the promise of a lazy week­end sip­ping beers from his kegera­tor, soak­ing in the new hot tub in the com­pany of beau­ti­ful ladies. I flew into BWI on Air­tran; I was joined by Dave and Evan, who flew into Man­as­sas in a bor­rowed Cessna 206. We were a lit­tle sur­prised to find that the new hot tub was full of leaves, not water.

“How come there’s no water in the hot tub, Brian?”

“Well, it’s not actu­ally con­nected yet. I just installed the wiring yesterday.”

Thus the Great Hot Tub Deba­cle would unfold. Luck­ily my advanced engi­neer­ing train­ing pro­vides me with the nec­es­sary skills to per­form 240V elec­tri­cal repairs using sub­stan­dard tools while crouched in a pud­dle of water out­doors, oper­at­ing a gar­den hose and sip­ping beer. Before the week­end was out, we had rewired the wiring, replumbed the plumb­ing, rebuilt a seized pump, and recal­i­brated the ther­mo­stat. Since some din­gus had plumbed it with­out pump iso­la­tion valves, we were forced to drain and fill the whole tub twice. Brian wasn’t so effec­tive at suck­ing 500 gal­lons out of a hose. We watched him strug­gle for a while before loos­en­ing a 1.5″ pipe fit­ting, which drained the pool so fast that it neces­si­tated the cre­ation of an emer­gency drainage canal. Bad weather moved in, yet the work con­tin­ued with deter­mi­na­tion and con­fi­dence. But as Sat­ur­day came to an end, Evan’s pes­simism finally paid off: we were just about to finally get it run­ning when the 6 kW heat­ing ele­ment devel­oped an irrepara­ble ground fault. I was tired and mis­er­able. I ate a few cheese­burg­ers to con­sole myself.

For­tu­nately, we still had fun. A trip to the Udvar-Hazy Cen­ter paid off thanks to a sweet tour from Brian’s grand­fa­ther, who works for the Smith­son­ian and has flown half of the planes per­son­ally in Korea, Viet­nam, or just for the hell of it. I made Evan take a pic­ture of a mis­sile launch con­trol con­sole that fea­tures a rotary phone and a built-in ash­tray. (Obvi­ously any­one whose job it was to push the but­ton for nuclear dooms­day would be a heavy smoker; I appre­ci­ate that kind of fore­thought.) I met up with a high school acquain­tance who now works as a Wash­ing­ton lob­by­ist and later had a fan­tas­tic lunch with Emily. Jenn was too busy get­ting engaged to hang out.

Octo­ber 29-30: All over Boston

Vari­ety, some­one said, is the spice of life. I’m not sure what that really means, but this week­end had a lot of vari­ety. I sam­pled almost all the pump­kin beers at the Sun­set Grill in All­ston. I went to Limor’s going-away party, and later to Senior House where I finally shook hands with the leg­endary blind white rapper/singer/pornographer B-Lite. B-Lite has a new act. He’s not blind any­more, though he is still white. He also has an old Casio elec­tronic gui­tar in need of some soft­ware mod­i­fi­ca­tions, since it doesn’t trans­mit MIDI note-on mes­sages with full veloc­ity (“It’s all quiet and I want to be, like, Wyld Stal­lions, you know?”).

To take proper advan­tage of the sud­den change from snow to 70-degree tem­per­a­tures, Sun­day called for an impromptu 36-mile bike ride to Fram­ing­ham, fol­lowed in the evening by MassArt’s annual Post-Apocalyptic Hal­loween Iron Pour. The event is run by a stu­dent club called the Iron Guild. It’s a pretty cred­i­ble excuse to book a bunch of loud rock bands, fire up a pair of coke-fueled cupola fur­naces, smash some old radi­a­tors with a sledge­ham­mer, melt them down, and sling liq­uid metal all over the place. I took a few pic­tures to help explain the story.