Ultra light backpacking sites

Posted March 4th, 2012 by Sam McDonald
Categories: on the go

Ultra-light backpacking sites to check out:

www.ultralightbackpackintips.blogspot.com

www.antigravitygear.com
www.golite.com
www.gossamergear.com
www.traildesigns.com
www.zpacks.com

For those leading…

Posted January 10th, 2012 by Sam McDonald
Categories: Rocks

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost

Poem 1

Posted January 4th, 2012 by Sam McDonald
Categories: on the go

Sometimes at night,
I hear the crickets
Outside the window
And know how big
The world is
And how small
Am I. But I matter
To her

And I am ok
Then.

Sometimes you tell
Me I can never
Do right,
Only worst in the world.
And though I feel small
It’s not the same.
The stars go out,
And I’m in
The dark.

When the sun sets
I will not last long.
Only until dusk
Is over.
Then,
I must find the stars.
I’m sorry.

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Big Rock

Posted January 3rd, 2012 by Sam McDonald
Categories: Rocks

Work! Sometimes work seems to be the compressed rock, that will expand to fill your entire jar!
Definitely one place where faster could be better. But then, you get rewarded with more. :) I’m lucky, my job has enough challenges, and enough influence, that when the job goes well there is a feeling of satisfaction in personally helping our customer, as well as interesting co-workers.

In the past, I had not looked as close at the amount of dedicated mind time, and even though I did some neat things, I was ignoring the future. I went to a larger company where the stress was not at the same level, but did earn a small pension for the future.

Now, I am with a small company that has potential, ( which usually indicates lots of work too.)
and uses creativity, and has impact. I am happy to have been given a chance to get back to work, and look forward to the flexibility a small company can offer.

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Pebbles

Posted January 2nd, 2012 by Sam McDonald
Categories: Pebbles

Today was mostly spent on the rocks of work and family, with a pebble thrown in with the help of a friend from work. I have been intending to organize the basement a bit more, and there were 4 file cabinets at work that needed to be removed. Well, the cabinets were sturdy and voluminous, but could not fit in my sedan, and that’s where my friend comes in with his van. He was able to stuff all 4 cabinets into his van, with two drawers left over for the trunk of the sedan.

After he brought them over and helped take them to the basement, we went over to Leo’s for coneys. Now, thanks to him, the organizing gets a boost.

Organizing is one of the pebbles this year that will help me maximize time, and the ‘Now’ of 2012.
Stay Warm, S.

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Time Goes Bye

Posted January 1st, 2012 by Sam McDonald
Categories: on the go

Another year has started, and it seems that I have made no progress. It seems the last year could have been all spent playing

    Words With Friends

and

    Touch Tanks

to name a few, but that would be the view of the tree blocking the view of the forest. The view from the treetop looks different.

This year had one very significant change, that I think will end up affecting most areas of my life.
I am beginning to see the need for faster execution of ideas, and the need for a more conscious, willful, thoughtful method of living.

One time management meme is the jar of rocks, pebbles, and sand. The jar being a metaphor for the time available in ones life, the rocks the major commitments, the pebbles the smaller commitments, and the sand representing how we fill the rest of the time. So as I work on the implementations, I will try to document them here, and start filling the space between the rocks, and maybe changing one or two of them.

To my many faithful readers, ;) I wish the best in 2012.

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Dragon dictation test

Posted October 3rd, 2010 by Sam McDonald
Categories: on the go

This is a test to see how well I can possibly blog from the Appalachian Trail or for many truck for that matter the test is a Dragon dictation a virtual keyboard for voice recognition software that will allow me to enter the data much more quickly than hunt and peck typing method with some stunning an iPhone 2G and I would expect the speed of the processing would be better with an iPhone 3GS I’m going to keep this one other short as I’m not sure if the phone needs to connect up to the Internet to do the translations to

Olympic peninsula

Posted September 24th, 2010 by Sam McDonald
Categories: on the go

Awesome scenery while on trip with the travel lady.

3D example of the contact toolkit.

Posted April 28th, 2010 by Sam McDonald
Categories: ADAMS

This example of the contact toolkit shows a sphere making contact with piecewise cylindrical ribs in a pipe, where the cylinders are defined using ADAMS polylines, with a constant normal radius. The contact was defined in the AVIEW environment with macros, and normal forces, with frictional forces, calculated in a GFORCE subroutine.

VMSI 2-D contact modeling in ADAMS

Posted April 25th, 2010 by Sam McDonald
Categories: ADAMS

This is a nice example of a simple ratchet pawl mechanism setup in ADAMS with the Virtual Model Shop Contact tool kit. It is still available, even though it is long in tooth. It is still the easist way to model these kind of contacts. if you are interested, leave a message below. :)