Author Archives: kwiens

Snowshoeing!

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Hello readers,

I hope you had a great weekend!  This week is our reading week/spring break/week off, so I celebrated by doing absolutely no work this weekend, and it was amazing!

Back in December I bought one of those “daily deals” (I think it was from ‘Living Social’) for a snowshoe / fondue trip, and went on it yesterday.  One thing that is great about Vancouver is we hardly ever get any snow in the city, but you go half an hour away to any of the mountains, and there is tons of the stuff.  So we still get to play in it, but don’t have to deal with it on a daily basis.

Anyway, the trip was a lot of fun.  It was pretty slow paced, and most of the people were quite a bit older than we were, but it made me want to get some snowshoes and go on some trips of my own!  Our trip was through Natural Trekking which is owned by an outdoorsy Vancouver lady.  She runs the tours herself, and does all kind of them all over the world.  Our tour was at Cypress and we snowshoed up to a lookout point where we could see the Bowen Island and the Sunshine Coast.

Here you can see a group picture at the base of the mountain.  Cypress was one of the Olympic venues last year where I believe they hosted free-style skiing and snowboarding.  It was actually a little sad, it was so warm during the Olympics they had to airlift snow to Cypress from other parts of the province, and I heard they had to use dry ice to keep it from melting!  The olympic rings are still there.

We were lucky, the weather was absolutely miserable in the morning, and it had been raining on the mountain all day the day before.  Then there was a bit of a snowstorm in the morning, but by the time we got there the sun was even out for parts of it, and the snow was light and fluffy from the storm!

I wish I had taken a picture of the view at the top, but if you look around us, you can see part of it.  It was so pretty and we had the fondue there.

But now its back to the office.  I seem to be the only one keen enough to come in this early during the break, and the lights in our office are on a timer that shuts them off if the front door isn’t opened every 30 minutes or so, and its already getting pretty annoying.  GRR! AND THEY SERIOUSLY JUST SHUT OFF NOW AS I WROTE THAT! I wonder if I could tie a string to the handle and open the door from my desk …  anyway, enough grumbling.

I hope you have a great Valentines day!

Kristy

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Busy, Busy, Busy

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As I was kind of expecting, I seem to have slightly over-estimated the amount of work I can handle this term! Grad school is complicated – I hear so many people saying how amazingly chill it is—they sleep until 12, get to school around 1 or 2, and stay until around 5. Then there are the me’s who run around like chicken’s with our heads cut off who get to school around 7:30 and stay until 5, at which point we go home and do work there.

So why don’t the me’s get to sleep until 12? Well dear readers, let me tell you so you can know what you’re getting yourself into when you say “yes” to the fun extra things you can do in grad school.

1. Courses. Grad courses are a lot more work than undergrad courses. A lot of people told me that before I started, but I only semi-believed them. Let me give you an actual idea of how much work is involved in a particularly heavy grad course, so you’ll hopefully get an idea of how many you want to take in a term. The most the majority of grad students take is 3. I’m in 4. Oops.

Credits: 3

In-Class

Lectures: 3 hours per week

Tutorials: 1 hour per week

Journal club: 1 hour per week + 45 minutes of transportation to/from (this involves meeting with other graduate students working/taking classes in the field and taking turns presenting and discussing a relevant journal article each week)

Outside Class

7 assignments

~ 5 focus notes – summary notes of relevant journal articles

A 2000-word literature review

A group experimental project and report

Midterm

Final

On the plus side, the course is really interesting and the prof is great!

2. TA-ing. TA-ing is another complicated grad school thing. It is half really rewarding, fun, and really makes you know the course material inside and out, and half disheartening, frustrating, and takes way more time than you will expect.

The fun part is getting to know the students and feeling like you actually are helping them, and in some cases, maybe even getting them excited about the course (well, excited may be a strong word…). The disheartening part is when you think everyone gets what you’re talking about, and you see they totally didn’t on the problem set or quiz.

The frustration comes in when you look out onto a sea of 120 blank faces, knowing the class has no idea what you’re talking about and you can’t think of another way to explain it, or students making a big deal of you taking off a mark for something, when you know you could have taken off many more in other places but are trying to be somewhat lenient.

As a first TA position, I really recommend doing a lab since they usually only last 2 weeks and you only have to prepare one lecture that you give over and over again. Tutorials are nice since you get to know the students a lot better, but they are a lot more work.

3. Research. This one is also a complicated grad school thing since all supervisors are different. Some will definitely want you to start making some progress on your research while you’re taking classes, and others won’t expect you to start until after you’re done (the first 8 months of the program). For me, the amount of work my research has been is roughly the same to the amount of work an undergrad project course is. It’s something that is always there and I kind of put off/slowly plug away at until I have a deadline or meeting coming up, at which point it’s all you do for a day or two.

Grad school for the most part really is pretty fun, and I am enjoying what I’m doing (ugh, with the exception of one course which each lecture is an hour and a half of my life I will never get back), its just a lot of work.

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Pretty Soldering

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Hello Readers,

I am starting to wire up my pump and system, and have been thinking it is about time I learn a bit of a more professional way of doing this sort of thing over the “meh, it will work” style you can get away with on more short term projects (ie. below).  Apologies for the horrible quality of these pictures, the lighting in my lab isn’t ideal for this sort of thing.

So I turned to my all knowing mechatronics friends/YouTube, and have found this way of doing a much cleaner job.  Incase you have never done this sort of thing, I am using a soldering iron, solder, heat shrink, and a heat gun, which leads to *drum roll*:

Isn’t it pretty?! Ok, here’s how you do it.

Step 1:

Thread a piece of heat shrink onto your wire.  You can buy this in pre-cut pieces or as a roll from DigiKey.  Push the heat shrink down the wire as far as you can as the heat from soldering can make it shrink before you want it to.

Step 2:

Strip the ends of the two wires you want to join.  I stripped off about a centimeter at the most.

Step 2:

Push the ends of the wire together and twist a little bit (once or twice around maximum).

At this point I also bend the wire so the two ends to join is up in the air, which makes soldering it a lot easier.

Step 3:

Place the soldering iron under the exposed wire.  Hold the solder on the top of the wire and wait for the heat from the soldering iron to melt the solder. Realize nothing is happening, turn the soldering iron on, and repeat.

This way of doing it really does make a lot stronger of a joint.  I had been touching the solder right to the soldering iron to melt it (hey, its faster!) but today I tried both, and I could hardly break the “slow” one when pulled, while the fast way was really easy to pull apart.

Step 4:

Move the heat shrink over the joint, and heat with a heat gun (or blow-dryer) until its really tight, and you’re done!

Look how great the wires connecting to my power supply look! Love it!

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