Weekly Email 12-27-04

As we all wind down to 2005 the weather here in the East has not exactly been snowy. Cold yes - but not enough of the white stuff. I hope 2004 was a great year to reflect on!

The other day in the country (Woodstock) there was some snow in the mountains, and as I stood on the edge of Cooper Lake you can see the snow falling. The lake/reservoir was frozen and barren. It was about 20 degrees, crisp and quiet.

Hope you all had a nice holiday!

Weekly Email 12-21-04

As we are in the midst of the heavy drinking festivities I thought I'd share an image of a familiar device for imbibing our favorite libation. I've skipped the holiday cheer with Santa this and that - so instead enjoy the holidays with friends and family and drink up! But not too much! Boy is that stuff hard on the head the next day!

Weekly Email 12-10-04

Talk about all this water falling from the skies huh?
Yesterday I went dow to see the National Geographic Society - they are a large customer of ours. I went down to the basement of their sprawling building complex and went to see the machine shop for underwater devices. This group of guys basically make anything needed for underwater sea exploration and photo capture.

I "highlighted" 2 devices they built (from scratch) - the one on the left has a large glass ball which provides about 56lbs of buoyancy
- it is housed now to prevent scratches in the yellow cover. This perfect sphere can withstand all sea pressures since it is perfect, and the pressure cannot crush it due to it's shape and some sort of physics you can look up. They basically dangle this from a ship to wicked depths and wait for stuff to swim by or watch the sea floor action. The black boxes are cameras and batteries, with lights on both sides.

The other more mobile device has a Fujifilm S2 connected to a custom built mini computer that is then remotely controlled from the surface - UP TO 6,000 feet. Now that's a lot of cable! They had to calculate the buoyancy of every pipe and it's air content and of course all the battery tubes and camera housings. Neat huh?