Last weekend

Last weekend Hilary and I made a last-minute decision to visit the Taylors in Spokane, along with Peter and Liz. We stopped and did a few things along the way...




At the Taylors...

Riverfront park...

Spokane falls were bigger than I remembered

Drying out at Starbucks before dropping Pete off

It was a good weekend.

Portland ASA notes

I'm currently sitting in the lobby at the Hilton, downtown Portland. I came to the Acoustical Society meeting here to give a presentation on the infrasonic mic that I built, and it seemed to go ok... about to head off to bed, but I thought that I'd write down some observations that I've made so far.

1) Portland is a pretty clean, perhaps even more so than Sendai.

2) I've never seen such healthy and intelligent looking bums. I can't figure out what it is about this city but perfectly healthy and capable looking people are shameless about holding up signs asking for money. And while they are doing it I see them gathering with their cronies laughing and talking. Come on guys... really? At least play the part. Most panhandlers in Seattle look like they haven't had a decent night sleep in the last five months (probably because they haven't), but these ladies and gents look like they stepped out of a hostel or something.

3) "China Town" = 3 Chinese restaurants, a block of abandoned buildings, seedy looking 18+ clubs, a hole in the wall selling a bunch of Buddhas, and no one of Asian descent on the sidewalks.

4) I attended a session on robotic models for the vocal tract. Rarely will you hear anything scarier sounding than a mechanical model of the human voice-box stuffed into a plastic skull. They thought it was cool, I thought it sounded like demon possessed plastic. Thought upon exiting the session: truly, we are "fearfully and wonderfully made." We haven't even come close to replicating something like the human vocal tract in any realistic way.

5) Apparently the ASA held a design competition among students for the design of a spiritual center. I browsed among 15 or so posters of very detailed and well illustrated 3D models for "interfaith chapels." (One person, from Korea I think, actually designed a Christian church. That was nice to see). It was very interesting. A lot of people harp on Christians for having such awful aesthetics when it comes to designing modern churches. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of modern American church architecture either, but it was good to see that the problem isn't limited to Christians. I seriously hope, however, that an architect somewhere will wake up and start questioning what it is about the classical architecture from so many cultures and countries that give them an appeal lasting longer than 30 years. But here's the funny thing - the aesthetic hasn't been lost, it's just shifted to different arenas. The people with the best architectural ideas are computer game developers. If I were designing plans for a church I wouldn't ask an architect, I'd hire an artist from Square-Enix.

6) I miss Hily.

7) Dad's a stud.

Pics

I haven't been posting much recently, (well aware of that) in fact, I haven't been involved in much of anything digital (facebook, etc) because I've been spending a lot of time working and doing things with a wonderful lady named Hilary. At her prompting, I've decided to put up a few photos of things in the past couple months, though, admittedly most of them are from the last week. I've got a lot of snow pictures from the men's retreat that I never posted. Anyway, hope you enjoy

Getting snowed in at the men's retreat:

Kamiak















Super intense rainbow


Luna's


Rook (Tonight - Hil was in Yakima)

Happy birthday!

Edit: somehow, every time I link to my video I get "America's next top model" instead, so here is a link to the video (for Paula)

Recent stuff

Thanks for all the comments on my previous post, I really appreciate them. So much has been going on over the last four weeks that I haven't written anything for a while... here's some photos from various things that have occurred. Back in Pullman now... life is good!

Hilary and I made these cups


I took photos of some of the things I machined over the lasts couple years

Pressure sensor

Another pressure sensor...

A flow resistance measurement device

Another pressure sensor (infrasonic microphone)

Isaac got a remote controlled helicopter from Target for 30 dollars.
unbelievable.

I conquered the world.

Said quick goodbye's to a lot of friends.
Ran out of shampoo and had fun molding my hair into various shapes after a few days

Last evening with the Christian grads...

Spent the last evening in State College in the lab, in a panicked frenzy, finishing up a novel preamplifier design for the infrasonic mic.

Flew home

Dad had his birthday party

Got a lot of information squashed into me over the course of a couple days

Went on a date. Saw some amazingly talented young men and women. Talked with some amazing teachers from back in the day.

Sunset from the 12th floor. I forgot about these in Pullman

F 2.8

Valentines day

Tomorrow!

Ph.D. THESIS DEFENSE

By

TIMOTHY M. MARSTON


INFRASONIC PISTONPHONE CALIBRATION



Thesis Committee
Dr. Thomas Gabrielson – Chair
Dr. Steven Garrett
Dr. Victor Sparrow
Dr. Martin Trethewey

Applied ScienceBuilding
Room 214 (Classroom)
Wednesday, January 21, 2009, 9:30 AM

Sumi drops

Also, though I opened up that other blog, I forgot to add an address for it. It's here:

www.sumidrops.blogspot.com

My apologies for the confusion! I haven't actually decided to update it much because it seems like nobody actually really cares all that much if photos of their kids are on the web. But, you can go there for a good set of Thanksgiving pics...

ひさしぶりだね

Well, it's been a long time... Christmas break and the weeks surrounding it have been excellent. Hilary came and visited in State College, then we flew back to Seattle together. Had a great time at Christmas with both her family and mine... interesting and somewhat nerve-wracking trips over the pass during bad weather, relaxing and unstressful time with my family... I took minimal photos this year, but here's a collection of some of the ones I did take, along with a bit of commentary:

Taking infrasound measurements in the frozen wilderness hours before Hilary arrived at State College. After driving miles on icy frozen ledges and setting up camp, my equipment broke down. [The story ended well though]

Having dinner at my place with Hilary, Chenggang, and his wife Tiantian (we had a pot roast)

In Harrisburg airport - 0ur original flight was canceled, so we spent the [wonderful] day at the Holleman's (where Hilary was staying). Ash took us to the shuttle at 3:30 am which took us to Harrisburg for our flight to:

Minneapolis. It's cold there.

We flew over this weird double valley with a ridge between them. I want to google earth it...

Tired but hangin in there

On the shuttle from Seattle to Yakima - because of the snow the bus was hours late. The wind over the pass was over 70 mph, and it closed right after we crossed. The shuttle was cooooold, but we met some cool people

Hilary talking on her cell

Next morning we went to church

Christian missionary alliance church

Peter and Emily

Christiana and her friend Sarah (I think that's her name...?)

Singing at church

Kate, Emily, Hilary - dressed like marshmellows to go sledding

Hilary fixing up Christiana before the Christmas Eve service

Christmas eve dinner - Wasterbroaches!

An immense pile of presents: 12^2 = 144, and then some... it took us roughly till 3 the next day to open all of them, but they were so great! Examples:

a big block of cheese
a giant Papaya
cool knives
journals
art
socks
napkins (?)
a billion chopsticks
one giant pancake griddle

Headed solo over to Grandpa Deffenbaugh's house to see the family...

Port orchard actually got a lot of snow this year... this was just the last little bit before melting

Marston Christmas at Kent (where Myron grew up)


Myron picking a gift out of the white elephant pile... turns out we randomly grabbed each others gifts

Myron's girlfriend Lori, she fit right in with the family

Myron owning us all at some game involving the economics of power grids and gas lines

After this last shot my camera lense broke down... never fear though! I got a new one, it came in the mail yesterday, and has been inspiring me to annoyingly take photos of everything [everything] again. Hopefully, things to be posted soon, with the new lense!

But, in summary, it was a really excellent Christmas break. I'm going to be defending on the 21st, hopefully graduating, then moving to WSU for a post-doc!