This Is Just To Say

April 21st, 2008, under Miscellaneous

This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

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Set Phasers to Stunning

February 22nd, 2008, under Miscellaneous

Slate makes the hard hitting comparisons in this election season:

http://slate.com/blogs/blogs/trailhead/archive/2008/02/22/clinton-star-trek.aspx

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Grad Student Videos

February 22nd, 2008, under Projects

This is Physics & Astronomy

A series of short skits made by Marcos Heurta and I to poke fun at life as a graduate student at Rice University. Each skit is about 30 to 90 seconds long and inspired by the This is SportCenter commercials. The footage was recorded on a standard DV camcorder and the editing was done using iMovie and Adobe Premier Pro.


Working Late


Directed by Marcos Heurta



Labor


Directed by Dan Kocevski



The Making of a Skit


Directed by Dan Kocevski

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IDL Reference Widget

February 22nd, 2008, under Projects

The IDL Reference Widget is simple Dashboard widget for the Mac OS X operating system that allows quick access to the reference guide for the Interactive Data Language or IDL produced by ITT. The code used to make this widget is a modification of original code written by Andrew Hedges for his PHP Reference Function Widget. The widget is fairly simple to use, just download it at the link below, unzip and double click the file to install. You must have Mac OS X 10.4 or later for this to work.

dashboard

Download: IDLhelp.wdgt.zip

Posted: June 12, 2007
Version: 1.0
Size: 37MB
License: Freeware

Screenshot:

idlwidget

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Video Rocket

February 22nd, 2008, under Projects

AMRAAM.jpgAMRAAM-2 Video Rocket

The AMRAAM video rocket is my first attempt at flying a rocket with a video camera. It consists of a AMRAAM-2 rocket kit from Public Missiles Limited and an onboard wireless X10 camera. The X10 camera, which can be purchased for under $70, comes with a built in transmitter and a seperate reciever which makes it quite a deal. To record the video, I used a laptop with video capture capabilites, but any camcorder would also work. To power the ground reciever, I used a 12V motorcycle battery, which also doubled as the power source to ignite the rocket engine. The onboard transmitter was powered by a 9V battery which at 150 mAh should give about 30 minutes of usuage.

construction.jpgConstruction Details

Building the rocket took about 40 hours, with the electronics and launch systems taking most of that time. The detailed PML instructions that came with the AMRAAM kit made building the rocket itself rather straight forward, but the electronics were another matter. Click below to see the construction details and an itemized equipment list

First Flight – 3/16/03

The first flight went well, although the camera wasn’t securely mounted, allowing it to come loose right before launch. This also resulted in the camera being dislodged when the parachute deployed.


Onboard video




Ground Video



Second Flight – 3/30/03

The mounting problems from the first flight were solved by a center board to which all of the electronics were attached (see the construction section for more details). This gave a better camera angle allowing for more of the ground to be seen. Unfortunately, the rocket flew out of range and the signal was lost at apogee.


Onboard video

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Star Trek vs. Star Wars Video

February 22nd, 2008, under Projects

Star Trek vs. Star Wars Video
This is a short Star Trek “episode” that my brother, Dale Kocevski, and I created to get some experience with video editing and production. The entire video is about 7 minutes long and is about a hypothetical encounter between the Enterprise-D and the Empire from the Star Wars universe. The video is composed completely of captured footage except for a few rendered objects

Software

The video capture was performed with Virtual Dub 1.4. The video editing was done using Adobe Premiere 6.5 with the special effects and 3D rendering being done in Adobe Photoshop and Lightwave 7.0. The 3D models used in several of the scenes were hosted at www.theforce.net



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Yosemite Valley Webcam

February 5th, 2008, under Miscellaneous

A very nice webcam situated in Yosemite Valley. This is turning out to be a great resource to determine what the conditions are in the park before going up.

http://www.yosemite.org/vryos/ahwahnee.jpg

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KIPAC/SLAC Talk

January 21st, 2008, under Miscellaneous

My presentation give at Stanford on January 21st, 2008.

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May 5th, 2007, under Quotes

Come on all you freedom fighters
good news to you I’ll tell
of how the good old freedom ride has come in here to dwell
which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
They say in Hines county, no neutrals have they met
You’re either for the freedom ride or you’re tom for Ross Barnett
My father was a freedom fighter and I’m a freedom fighters son
and I’ll stick to the freedom ride until every battles won

-James Farmer, Co-founder of the Freedom Riders

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Quote: Mentality of the Masses

March 15th, 2007, under Miscellaneous, Quotes

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

Soren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher (1813 – 1855)

Ah, a nice description of some of the people who live in Berkeley.

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