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Joe Naylor recently started to work at my firm in the testing area and was looking for advice is stress fracturing a device used to keep little pieces of you in place while you’re suppine after surgery.  He has somewhat powerful thumbs capable of delivering a near lethal nipple-ectomy, but even they couldn’t produce the simulated breakage requested.  I tried to think of what a person recovering from surgery could reasonably do and came up with the following:I placed the testing rig in a bench vice and using one dead-blow hammer as a landing zone on the part normally held with your thumb, I smashed that dead-blow hammer with another dead-blow hammer.  Strangely enough, the 1/8″ column of plastic held against the stainless steel wedge impacted by a hammer hitting another hammer broke under these totally reasonable real-world conditions…

Please note that in the context of medical device testing “reasonable break method” is defined as “anything doable to the device even if it requires invoking super-mutant powers or the phrase ‘so Hercules needs a colostomy’ regardless of the currently applicable laws of physics.”

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Pat Toye, Clara Rimmer, Joe Naylor and I took a spur-of-the-moment trip to the Body Worlds exhibit at the Franklin Institute and after talking about whether rain would increase or decrease visitor count with the line attendant we went in.  Notes:

  • The theme was “Body Worlds 2 & the Brain”.  I went into the exhibit with the idea that the brain was a visually uninteresting gray lump that constituted a dog’s breakfast.  I left with the impression that the brain was a visually uninteresting gray lump that constituted a dog’s breakfast.
  • The attach points of the various pieces of the male package are not where one expects; if the ones for the testes were any higher they’d be strung from the nipples.
  • Nobody looks fat after their skin has been flayed.
  • Never go to an anatomical exhibit with two medical enthusiasts without putting at least 4 dollars in quarters in the meter.  The estimated 27 minute difference between Joe’s museuming rate and Pat/Clara’s museuming rate cost me $36.00 in parking tickets.
  • Every animal looks badass when everything but their vascular structure is dissolved.
  • One can fake being anatomically competent by taking any term for a body part and adding one of the following: majoris, minoris, superior, inferior, anterior, or posterior.  This was proven by the woman who nodded approvingly as I referred to the vulva as the “hoo-ha minoris” and the gut above the point that dangles over the belt in fat people as the anterior superior dunlop.
  • When one dies, the eyebrows remain until the end of time.   Or at least that’s the impression I got as we went about and everyone had no skin but still had eyebrows (IT WAS WEIRD).
  • Due to the exhibit “The Exploded Man”, I can now accurately imagine what it’d look like to take a slow motion video cap of someone eating a hand grenade.

The end of the exhibit featured a donor statement that brought tears to my eyes.  The only other time I’ve been moved like that in Philadelphia was during the opening of the Constitution center.  I wonder what it mean that I get emotional around liberty and utility but rarely at funerals.

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Joe and I have been carpooling which costs about 30 minutes but saves gas and I get to carpool with my BFF Joe!  He drove this week and furnished his own iPod and with blinding speed I mocked him for his choice of playlist names:

Me: Play It Loud! really?  Did someone break into your iPod and rename your lists such that upon discovery by another you’d be mistaken for a homosexual?
Him: No, that’s music I like to play loudly.
Me: Descriptive I suppose, why didn’t you pick something even better like Pump Up the Jams or Workout Tunez?  I like how you took the time to add the exclamation mark so everyone knows your intended play volume.

–Next Day–

Me: Wow, you renamed all your playlists to “Generic Playlist #”?
Him: Yes.  Yes, I did.
Me: Well, I’d like to listen to 25 or 6 to 4, it’s on Play It Loud!
Him: Umm… I think you mean Generic Playlist #3

Touche, Mr. Naylor.  I wonder if there’s a group I can insult so mercilessly that he’ll have a vast expanse of “Track by Artist from Album”.

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Joe Naylor started working at the same firm as myself.  I thought it’d be fun but things have been far from all roses.  Consider the following:

  • Until he gets web access, if I want to talk to him I’ll have to get up, walk down the hallway and open three doors.
  • My lies regarding the difficulty of my job are far more transparent.
  • He now has an income stream barring my dream of having an indentured servant through debt from purchasing a stick of gun.
  • Someone now understands what I mean when I yell “Are we going to go to Babar’s house!?”

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Kyle got an iPhone and with it the Internet. I’m not sure how we got on the topic but we wanted to see what nation had the highest surface area of water. After tooling around with the Vatican and Uganda we started just hitting Wikipedia and checking nations. We spent a solid 30 minutes doing so. Netherlands was high with around 20% but my educated guess paid off…. kind of. Greenland is essentially a mini-nation being raped by a glacier but it’s still part of Denmark but autonomous. Greenland hits 80% but Denmark on has 1.6%. Seems like someone’s trying to disown a colony that fed itself for a day by killing two whales. I think there’s something rotten in… well, you know.

Once again, we spent 30 minutes in a restaurant checking the percentage of each nation covered in water… I later brought this factoid up to Joe Naylor who identified the Netherlands as being at the top immediately. He earned his GIS degree the old fashioned way.

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Kyle got an iPhone and with it the Internet. I’m not sure how we got on the topic but we wanted to see what nation had the highest surface area of water. After tooling around with the Vatican and Uganda we started just hitting Wikipedia and checking nations. We spent a solid 30 minutes doing so. Netherlands was high with around 20% but my educated guess paid off…. kind of. Greenland is essentially a mini-nation being raped by a glacier but it’s still part of Denmark but autonomous. Greenland hits 80% but Denmark on has 1.6%. Seems like someone’s trying to disown a colony that fed itself for a day by killing two whales. I think there’s something rotten in… well, you know.

Once again, we spent 30 minutes in a restaurant checking the percentage of each nation covered in water… I later brought this factoid up to Joe Naylor who identified the Netherlands as being at the top immediately. He earned his GIS degree the old fashioned way.

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Previous Days:
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5

Trip Summary: Sleepy; ouch.  Park; pretty.

For Next Time: Leave camera tripod at home.  Remember to move 2nd back to vehicle actually going to Acadia.  Try to see inside of the park instead of just coast.

There was a bit of a pall over the trip for me as before departing I received news that the EKG I had before leaving as part of my physical revealed what could be a defect in the wall of my heart.  My doctor rolled his eyes when I told him I was going camping and Acadia wasn’t nearly as strenuous as I thought it would be.

I took more photos than were listed in the entries which are available as part of the Flickr album.  I think the panoramics came out quite nice and wish to get better at taking them.

[flickr album=72157622447264170 num=90 size=Thumbnail]

I’d like to thank Pat for taking care of the cooking and Joe for putting up with the fact that I turn into a whiny 4-year old if I don’t get my ugly sleep.

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Dawn came early, and we refused to rise with it, making our exit around 9:30 AM after giving the park rangers the gift that keeps on giving: a leaky propane cylinder.  We took turns driving and Joe didn’t enjoy me as his navigator.

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We stopped at a Dunkin Donuts manned entirely by white people which included a spastic woman who listed all the allergens in my donut and got impatient with the register receipt dispenser.

We landed at 4 PM, ate dinner and decided to drive to University of Vermont to visit Matt Grob.  I have no idea why.  We visited Matt Grob and watch his friend’s room mate attempt to rocketjump before landing after jumping off a building in GTA 4.  We watched that for a solid hour.  We ate at Denny’s drove home and arrived at Pat’s house again at 1:00 AM… and decided to drive straight home.

Joe and I started on our way and I selected “HOME” as our destination.  I got suspicious of the GPS once we hit New York and it started taking us west.  I checked the future directions and the GPS apparently thought “HOME” was located hours west of me somewhere beyond Harrisburg rather than SE PA.  We put in Joe’s address which had us return east and shaved 90 minutes off of our drive, three and a half hours if you include the time we saved after overcoming the sense of whiskey-tango-foxtrot after theoretically “arriving” near Harrisburg.  I got drowsy around five AM but powered through by yelling about what I thought was wrong with Scouting, it was surprisingly effective.

Dawn came, we arrived at home, and I hit the sack like a midget boxer.  All in all the trip cost only about $250 for five days of stuff.  One day I’ll make it to the mythical “Canada” and may even remember to bring my passport.  Perchance to dream.

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One of our original plans was to shoot to Canada after our third day, but my “other bag” never made it to the Rav 4 and along with it my passport, so this was the closest we got to Canada.

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This grate was outside of where we thought the causeway to Bear Island was located, but due to tide and ignorance, we couldn’t make it.  Instead, I took a pano.

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We gunned for Cadillac Mountain and were knocked over by its short mediocrity.

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We may have gone to Cadillac Mountain the day before, but it doesn’t matter much.  We wanted to go sailing that evening and meet up with CJ Raste, aka Ice Dragon and stopped at Sand Beach beforehand.  It was stupidly pretty.  I hope I’m not being an arrogant dick in saying this but I think the following could reasonably be a postcard with a little lightening.

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We later scaled the side-trail and found some wonderful views including the following giant stitch-together.

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We met CJ before going onto the Margarette Todd, a historic vessel built in 1999.  Joe took pictures as well with his tiny tiny camera.

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There was a mediocre musician on board that played several tunes mediocrily but illuminated well.

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And to prove the power of the Golden Hour, here’s CJ for those who doubt his existence.

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Most passengers had point-and-shoots with them but one person inspired some camera envy with their L-series 70-200 f/2.8.  For the price of the lens, I could rebuy my camera, three best lenses, and pay for most of the Acadia trip.  One day I’ll get two.

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We went to a restaurant after the trip where a small Asian child repeated pushed out a window screen and nearly hurled himself from a second story window.  Their entrees sucked but their peripheral items like desserts and sides were exceptional.  We had earlier pondered shaving a corner off of our man-cards and sleeping in a motel for the evening but manned up and bought sleep drugs instead.  They didn’t work and my final night at Acadia was spent uncomfortably.

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Today was our first proper day in Acadia and after an incredibly short walk on the “Ocean Trail” we hit, the ocean.

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The above pano was made from 28 pictures or so and has some kludge-y parts where it doesn’t quite come together but the image suggests the absolute gorgeousness of the area.  I used the polarizing filter on my camera and failed to consider its effects on the image.  I repeated this error later, oops.  We were continually stunned by the picturesqueness of almost every vista.  Some shots looked like the stereotypical Caribbean  lagoon with the exception of glacial rock-rape evidence everywhere and others were just… grand.

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On the way back Joe and Pat decided to get into a tard fight…

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… and then pointed at each other’s junk in triumph (?).

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Our next stop was “Thunderhole” that just sounds messy but is named after the natural amplification of the rock shapes to certain waves like in this key-hole:

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It took about 10 minutes of waiting to get this spray, and after a few more of waiting a larger wave hit which sprayed my back.  I was angry at first until I realized I’d probably decimated my camera if I were looking in that direction and considered myself lucky.   I took a neat two-parter here which shows the storytelling power of focal distance. Here’s the first:

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To which I added the caption “hm… maybe we should get her out of there” followed by:

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which screams “This is a neat rock!”

We took an afternoon nap and headed into town that evening and I noticed three things:

  1. Every store sells ice cream, fudge, something with a moose on it, or something with blueberries in it.
  2. Anything referring to something historic was done in Copperplate Gothic.
  3. Pennsylvania consists entirely of the Amish to the rest of America beating out even Philadelphia and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

At one fudge shop Pat and I were impressed with the attendant’s ability to cut precise quarter pound blocks.  Once we brought this to his attention he lost his cooler and was all over the place.  I felt bad.  In an adjoining shop the cashier asked us what we did and I mentioned “proto-actuary”.  She thought I was an aerospace engineer, she probably says that to all the actuaries.  That night we had a fire which looks far more impressive and forge-like with the power of long exposure.

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Joe enjoyed some face time with the fire as well.

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But recoiled when he thought the fire was getting too friendly.

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That night we spent some more quality time staring at the top of the tent and had another painful night on the gravel.