Tried to get photos of the bioluminescent red tide (blue waves at night), but they weren't there.  Random night shots at the beach instead:

As shorter domain names are increasingly unavailable, longer names are inevitably becoming more common.  How long is too long?

Let's look at the top 100, 250, and 1000 domain names listed on Alexa (from http://en.wikipopia.org/toplist/alexa), and examine the distribution of the lengths of all .com/.net/.org names.  Here's the result:

The length counts here include the four characters ".(com|net|org)", so #1 "google.com" counts as length 10, and #2 "facebook.com" counts as length 12.

The median length of a top 100 domain is 10 (for example, "google.com", six plus .com), and the median length in the top 250 or 1000 buckets is 11 (for example, "weather.com").  And roughly 90% of all of the top 1000 are of length 15 or less!  That's just 11 characters of creativity, plus four characters of ".TLD".

Sure, short names correlate with older, established companies that were founded when short names were more easily available.  And we shouldn't confuse correlation with causation.  However, there's no doubt that at some point, names become too long to be easily remembered and brandable in the eyes of consumers.

I'd like to see a syllable count if anyone has such data!

This past Monday at about 2am (up late as usual), I ordered about $150 of parts across 24 different items (screws, bolts, nuts, drill bits, taps, etc.) from McMaster-Carr.  I selected "Ground" shipping instead of "Next Day Air" or pick-up. As usual with McMaster-Carr, I didn't know the actual shipping cost I'd be charged.  That usually makes me hesitant, and on most websites stops me from getting through the checkout process at all, but I'd ordered them from them in the past and had seen them charge roughly the actual rates for UPS Ground.

Monday at 10:30am, my order was tagged as shipped on their website.

And after dealing with processing a near-record volume of orders to ship ourselves, literally as we were walking out from the NerdKits office to hop in the car and go out for a late lunch around 3pm, there was a delivery truck in the driveway with my parts!

Same-day delivery from their LA warehouse to San Diego, even when I selected "Ground".  I probably would have been waiting longer if I had selected "Next Day Air"!

And the shipping charge?  Less than $7, for ~8 lbs and a fairly large box, same day delivery.  It would have cost me much more than that in gas just to drive to their warehouse.

That's an incredible customer experience.  It makes me much more likely to order from them in the future -- even though I will try not to expect same-day delivery again.

1. Buy window air conditioner unit and milling machine.

2. Outfit milling machine with z-axis DRO.

3. Design bottom-side brackets from 1.500" x 0.375" aluminum bar stock to take the weight of the A/C and also the torque generated by the weight hanging out the window, and to fit around and transfer that weight and torque to the window frame/sill.  Make two on the milling machine.

4. Use 1.5"x1.5"x0.125" aluminum right-angle stock to form a top crossbar to handle the torque that's now trying to pull the air conditioner out of the window, as to spread that force to the verticals of the window frame.  Screw into the horizontal crossbar of the air conditioner with two #6-32 screws. (Caution: make sure your window frame verticals can handle this force.  Mine could without any issue, but yours might not!)

5. Use a piece of filler material (cardboard, plywood, acrylic, whatever) to fill in the space above the A/C unit.  Hold it in with two small right-angle brackets, one of which is attached to the top crossbar (shown above), and the other is screwed into the top of the window frame.

6. Enjoy!

It's November 17th, and it's finally time to remove my window A/C (but still sunny and a high of 71 today here in San Diego), so I was finally able to grab these photos.

Warm and sunny in mid-November...

After a weekend with a bunch of MIT friends in Las Vegas, and then a Sunday morning trip to see the Hoover Dam, I found myself back in Vegas filling up for the ~300-mile trip home.  However, the car did not want to cooperate, and the gas pump would shut off within 1-2 seconds of starting, sometimes leaving a small puddle above the flap in the filler tube.  I moved to a second pump at the same gas station and had the same issue.  No matter how slowly I tried to add gasoline, it would stop within a few seconds.  After about 15 minutes, I had only added about 2 gallons of gas -- that's almost as bad as charging an electric car!

What's the big idea here?  The gas tank is a fixed volume and is not under much pressure, so when I push a gallon of gasoline into it (which takes < 10 seconds at a typical gas pump), a gallon of air and gasoline vapors has to be pushed out to make space.  If the vapors don't move, then the pressure inside the tank builds, which forces the one-way fuel fill valve between the tank and filler pipe to close.  The gasoline then builds up in the filler pipe and touches the nozzle, which forces it to shut off.  (Click here to see more details and illustration of the automatic shutoff gas nozzle.)  Similarly, if no fresh air can enter the fuel tank as the car is driven, then the pressure would drop and would create a vaccum relative to atmospheric pressure.  So to summarize, air needs to be able to enter the tank slowly while driving (at a rate of at most a few gallons per hour), and air needs to be able to exit the tank rapidly while refilling (at a rate of a many gallons per minute).

Nowadays, the air/vapors exiting the tank are cleaned in order to prevent hydrocarbon vapors from simply being emitted to the atmosphere -- "Onboard vapor recovery" has been mandated by the EPA since 2000.  Now, the path looks something like this (from the Hyundai service manuals website, linked from this helpful forum post):

In fact, this shows less than half of the "plumbing" involved around the fuel tank, so this diagram was a bit confusing as we tried to attack the problem.

On this car, the gas tank filler hose is on the driver's side.  Below is the view from under the left rear tire, which shows three connections.  The left (small) tube goes to the small ports around the main filler pipe.  The middle is the main filler pipe which carries gas to the tank.  On the right is a odd-looking unit which happens to be the "liquid-vapor separator".  I can't be 100% sure, but the hypothesis is that it's just a physically-higher unit which ensures that if one were to really over-fill the tank, liquid fuel would still have a hard time crossing to the canister.

And below is the view of the same thing from underneath the car.  The large pipe on the left is the main filler pipe, where gasoline goes when refueling.  The liquid-vapor separator is the long rounded object parallel to that pipe, and in this photo, the bottom connection to it is coming from the fuel tank's vent valve (at a point high up on the fuel tank), and the top connection is going into the box on the right of the photo.  The box on the right of the photo is the charcoal canister which collects fuel vapors.  This serves two purposes: one is that during vehicle operation, those vapors can be purged into the engine intake and combusted, which prevents the release of hydrocarbons.  Second is that this is the path for air intake/exhaust for the fuel tank.  The upper (thicker) hose in this photo going to the charcoal canister from the liquid-vapor separator.  The lower (skinnier) hose in this photo coming out of the canister is for the purge system, which sends those vapors back into the engine.

After a little bit of work, we removed the canister assembly, as shown below.  This involved removing two bolts for the canister holder, disconnecting the two vapor hoses, removing an electrical connector, and loosening the zip-ties.

The canister assembly is composed of three primary elements: the canister itself, an air filter which is open to the atmosphere, and the canister close valve, which connects or disconnects the air filter from the canister.  The last two photos in this gallery show the canister separated from the air filter+CCV.

Well, after all of that, we didn't find anything wrong.  No kinks or obstructions in the hoses, no significant back-pressure or other issues.  Since most people on the forums described finding hoses filled with little carbon pellets, we knew that that sort of thing should be obvious enough, and it wasn't.  So we put everything back together, drove to the gas station, and guess what -- it filled up just fine!

An unsatisfying conclusion!  Still, that fill-up in Vegas was the hottest the car had probably seen in its lifetime, which makes me wonder whether it may have been related.  Or it could have been the two pumps I tried, or any number of other things.  A learning opportunity, and an opportunity to get more comfortable working on cars, and a working vehicle at the end of the day, so I think I'll call it a victory.

I recently made this bottle opener on the milling machine from some aluminum bar stock. As you can see from the photos, it has changed a bit since my original CAD sketch, but I've decided to include the drawing anyway.

It's very strong and light. If I were to do it again, I'd probably make it thinner than the current 0.200" thickness, and would reduce the length of the thin extended arm and increase the length of the part before the "hook" to give the user a slightly longer lever arm.

Humberto had the idea of having the step in the thin extended arm to allow it to better deform the metal bottle cap (contacting roughly at its center) instead of simply prying it off (contacting at the far edge of the bottle cap as per the CAD sketch). Any opinions on which is better?

Two photos and a sketch:

Lunch at "Bar-B-Que House" Ocean Beach (yelp link).

View from the pier at Ocean Beach, San Diego:

Tried the water, but it was a bit too cold for swimming.  Still a few surfers in wetsuits and little kids who don't care about the cold.

24-hour water temperatures:

1-year water temperatures:
This data is much noisier than I expected, but it appears that only July through September have >=70 degree ocean water temperatures.

Just released my Python command line utility for Notifo, which is an API and iPhone app that allows for easy push notifications to the iPhone. For the source code and more details, see:

http://www.nerdkits.com/files/notifo/

As a follow-up to my earlier post: http://blog.compumike.com/new-tires-now-including-a-free-broken-lug-stu

Thursday 3/25: I got new tires. They broke a lug stud and the broken part is stuck inside the wheel nut. The tire place sent me to a nearby mechanic and said they'd take care of it (paid for by the tire place). I'm informed that they'll get the parts and will call me either Friday or Saturday to do the repair.

Friday 3/26: Hearing nothing, I call the mechanic in the afternoon. They have the lug stud, but haven't been able to get the wheel nut yet. I make sure they have my number, and they assure me that they'll call as soon as they get it.

Saturday 3/27: Heard nothing -- and they're open on Saturdays.

Monday 3/29: Heard nothing. Should have called them, but got busy with work and didn't get to it in time.

Tuesday 3/30: Still hearing nothing, I called the mechanic in the afternoon, and was informed that they got the wheel nut from the dealer, but it was the wrong one, so they're sending it back and trying to get the right one. I'm assured that they'll have it on Wednesday, and they even ask me whether the morning or afternoon is better for me. I say morning, and am told that they'll likely call me around 10am, and confirm that I could bring my car in around that time.

Wednesday 3/31: It's now 2pm. So much for that 10am call. Haven't heard anything, and am about to call them. Any bets?

All for < $10 in parts, and a job that I could probably do myself in about an hour -- but really shouldn't have to.