doodle.

So tonight on my way home I was feeling really crafty and when that happens its probably a good time to draw.
Feeling really creative is about the only time I get the drive to draw since I dont feel I am very good. And I have proof to back up my opinion of my drawing skills to follow.

My biggest problem when I try and draw is that I never know what to draw. In the headphones go with a little music for mood and off I went to try and think of something to draw. after a little looked around trying to think of things to draw my mind eventually wandered to battletech and I thought it would be cool if I tried to draw a mech or at least parts of a mech. That gave me this drawing...

Its sideways and was supposed to be a thruster or something.

After that failure I decided to move on to retro things. Specifically I was thinking about the old school nintendo controllers. So I tried to draw that...

While I was drawing that I started to ponder the buttons and how they were curved inward. I couldnt figure out how to draw that inward curve so I tried a larger version of just the button. Didnt work.

Button!!!

My next attempt came to me because I was also wondering about openGL and remembering one of the first tutorials I ever did on openGL that involved texture mapping a cube with a wood door texture. So I figured, what the hell, lets try and draw it

This one I am almost proud of. Its not amazing the I think the texture of the wood kind of works.

Finally I looked around and saw a Chokin vase that Talia has and the lip of the vase was really interesting. Its just  circle but It was up on a shelf way above me and I started to wonder how I would draw that. I have always drawn glasses and cylinder shapes from an above view. This resulted in the following image

Again, not very good but I think it was helpful to try and draw things from an angle I'm not used to 

~(' ')~

Garden

a quick 2nd post, Talia mentioned that I have been remiss in posting about one of my hobbies. Gardening. I am doing a lot of work to make an urban balcany garden in our appartement and I havent posted any pictures.

So here they are

My pride and joy grapefruit tree. I have had this baby for at least 5 years

A "Bo tree". A gift from my Mom a couple years ago. Still going strong

A new blackberry bush I planted this year. Still waiting for it to sprout from under ground

One of our 2 gooseberry plants. For some reason all the leaves died off. I'm hoping that its just working on developing roots

Some random types of wheat and oats and things. It was supposed to be for the cat but chase never liked to eat them

Golden raspberry

The other gooseberry, nice and leafy

My ginger plant I planted several weeks ago. Its growing quite nicely with a 2nd shoot coming up

Lemon tree. I've had this one for almost as long as the grapefruit tree, maybe 2 years less, but it just never grew uptil this year.Now its doing great.

Mango Tree. Planted last year

lichee tree. Also planted last year

All my plants in the living room. from left to right I have 4 cherry tomatoes in box 1, 4 chilli peppers in box 2, 4 full size tomatoes in box 3, 4 peppers in box 4, 4 more tomatoes in box 5, and 8 green onions in box 6. All at various stages of growing. Hoping to get a really nice crop in august

Talias money tree. Not technically mine but hey, its one of the plants in our place

Whats  a place without bamboo sticks. Interesting note, these arent technically bamboo as they arent in the grass family

We call this one wilty bush because he used to wilt every day I didnt water it. I have moved him and now he doesnt dry out as fast

Year 2 of my first cherry tomato. I just transplatend it into a new pot I made with my dad

All pine, no glue to hold it together. Just 2 screws and a strip of metal. Im eager to make more of these and make some for strawberry plants.

Our plants in the bedroom

Pineapple tree. I've had it for 3 years I think and I'm hoping this year it will produce fruit (have to put it in the sun)

Avocado tree

Scotch bonnet, or as we  call it, death chilli. I had to plant in in secret cause Talia hated them so much

My fist chlili pepper plant. Kind of scragally but still doing strong in year 2

2 different types of parse. Curly leaf and chilantro

My apple tree. I planted some seeds from an apple that I picked last October when my family went apple picking

Green onions, Planted several months ago, of the 5 only 3 survived

I have a total of 5 apricot trees. They are still in hibernation from the winter so most of their leaves are gone

Talias Cactus plants. There are actually 2 others on the other shelf. Interesting note. I am currently trying to save the yellow moon cactus' on the right. The stem suffered some kind of rot probably from over watering So I read up and am hoping that I will be able to save them. The small one in front is taken from the big one.

Sushi for dinner

So last week was kind of a hellish week in terms of work. lots of deadlines and not a lot of sleep as a result. But thursday was the big deadline and so when I left work thursday (having successfully met the deadline) I wanted to go and celebrate.

I called up Talia and we went wandering around downtown. We were technically looking for a green living event around Union but we never found it which was ok cause all I really wanted to do was chat with talia and wander the city.

We walked for a good 3 hours and then we started to get hungry so after much looking we decided to try this sushi place up on Yonge and Sheppard that we had passed a couple weeks earlier when looking for a chinese place.

It looked really cool from the outside with different sake bottles all over the place so we said we would try it at another time.

Out sushi dish. We also got some sake (lower right corner) and some cool appetizers

The place was really good but a little loud because of the music they were playing. I would have preferred something that looked a little more traditional but it was still enjoyable.

Unfortunately I dont go to sushi places often because it is very expensive and I have a shell fish allergy. The allergy being the primary reason I avoid them. Even with telling the server that I had a food allergy I still ended up having some soup that caused a reaction.

So when we first found the place I decided I wanted to make sushi at home and after we ate there Talia was very eager for me to try and make some as well. So tonight I finally made some. Its fairly easy to make but also fairly difficult.

The instructions are easy. Getting things to look good... thats the hard part.

2 of the better looking pieces from my first roll

My second roll. Starting to actually look like sushi

Close up view of 2nd roll

I made Talia a cute plate of sushi. complete with sake :)

We actually didnt end up drinking the sake because Talia remembered that we still had some peach wine the the fridge

A couple rolls later. Starting to get decent. The first and last peices are still hard

My very last roll for the night. I tried to pack as much veggies into as possible because we had lots of veggies left over

Thrust

So from reading my book on helicopters I have found the following formulas.

To compute the power needed to lift my quadcopter I need to know the total weight of the chopper....

With the shortened frame, the motors, the batteries and the controller it weighs about 200 grams. I am hoping to thin the supports or replace them with lighter material although the frame itself only weights 17 grams. Where I will most likely be able to trim weight is the batteries and the motors. But for now lets just say 200 grams

So my 4 rotors have to produce 200 grams of thurst or 50 grams of thrust per rotor. Now all my equations are in imperial units so that is 0.440924 lb per rotor.

T =  0.440924

My rotors are 8cm in diameter or 4cm radius so the disk area is 4^2*pi = 50.2654cm^2 or in imperial

A = 0.05410522626595922 ft^2

There is the constant rho = 0.002378 accounts for the viscosity of air at sea level. For reference that is in slugs/ft^3 whatever that unit is.

Therefore I have the induced velocity vi is

vi = sqrt(T/(2*rho*A)
= sqrt(0.440924/ (2*0.002378*0.05410522626595922 )
= sqrt(0.440924/0.000257324456)
= sqrt(1713.49434)
= 41.3943757 ft/s

The ideal power required for each rotor is then Pi = T*vi
P = 0.440924 * 41.3943757
 = 18.2517737 lb*ft/s

and this value can be converted into horsepower by dividing by 550.
therefore My rotors each need 0.0331850431 hp in order to lift my chopper.

Now this is the ideal power required and as everyone knows, nothing is ideal. so I actually  need more than this but its a start.

oh, to convert this into something useful I need to multiply it by 0.7457 to get kW

~(' ')~
so I need 0.0247460866 kW of power or 24.7460866 watts of power

Just call me a regular pastafarian

So last saturday Talia and I went down to the St Lawrence market and went to the farmers market there. It was a lot of fun and we sat some really amazing veggies. Sadly Talia had gone grocery shopping for us on thursday (when we usually go shopping) so we had all our veggies for the week but despite that we still picked up some stuff. Some fresh pressed apple cider (really non filtered apple juice) with 3 types of apples and 2 types of berries (I think). It tasted really good.

We also picked up some green onions, asparagus, and some pickled cauliflower. For a snack as we were leaving we also grabbed a small bag of sheep cheese curds which were really tasty.

Leaving I remember Talia very clearly stating that we would be going down there from now on to get our veggies.

The last thing that we picked up some a back of red whole grain flour. I dont remember the exact type but they were selling small bags and premade pasta. Now you may remember that a while ago I got a pasta machine and sadly I havent used it as much as I would like so went I saw the pasta and the flour I decided to get a bag and make my own pasta.

I also remembered that my parents had this cool little book on pasta so over easter I found it and asked if I could borrow it. I'm fairly certain that I'm the only one who has ever used it so they had no problem lending it to me.

So pasta usually had egg in it but we dont eat much egg so I just replaced it with a little extra water. I also decided to only do a half batch since it was kind of late (8:30pm when I started) and I didnt want to be working too late.

 A little salt, some water, oliver oil and of course the pasta and some time cranking away on the pasta machine and low and behold... bow down to the whole grain flying spagetti (actually linguini) monster....

I am drying it on the string I usually use for drying herbs (see the dill in the corner). Gonna have it for dinner tomorrow. Hope it tastes good.

~(' ')~

Tortillas

So today I finally got around to trying to make tortillas.  A couple of weeks ago I picked up a corn flower package with the recipe and directions. Simple enough. Corn maisa,  salt, and water. Might it into a nice dough. Make circles and cook in a pan for 2 minutes.

I used a glass lunch container to flatten each ball of dough and then rolled it out with the rolling pin to make it nice and thin

To keep thz dough from sticking I rolled it out between 2 pieces of plastic wrap.

When baking its kind of like toasting then because there is no oil or anything in the pan.

They taste really good but very different to the wheat tortillas we are used to