Weather at the Methots' House

A very good and generous friend and fellow geek sent me a personal weather station a few weeks ago: an Oregon Scientific WMR200. It's been set up for a while now but I had to write some code to get the data it gathers uploaded to the internet for all to see.

If you've never visited The Weather Underground, it displays data from thousands of personal weather stations everywhere. The "WunderMap" will guess where you are and show stations in your area. The Methot homestead is now present as station ID KMAMELRO4. Bookmark that and you'll always be able to see what the weather is on our back porch!

Mystic Seaport

Mystic Seaport

We've been itching to get out camping this spring. This past weekend had a decent weather forecast so we loaded up the camper van and headed to Mystic Seaport in Mystic, CT. I have heard about it for years but had never been. Their web site lists lots of activities for kids.

It is a museum that was started in 1929 to preserve the history of America's relationship with the sea. Starting with a single sailboat, it has grown into a large site on the Mystic River with a 19th century village consisting of real period buildings that have been moved to the site from nearby over the years. Each of the buildings now houses a business that would have been present in the area during the peak of shipbuilding just before the Civil War: a cooperage, a sail maker, a cordage, wood carvers, shipwrights, a navigational instrument shop, etc. Plus there are a schoolhouse, a general store, an apothecary, a couple of churches and other town buildings.

For kids there is a playground with boat "playscapes", the Map Spot where kids learn about maps by making them, an exhibit on canals where kids have to "engineer" one, tons of model boats in various exhibits, three sailing ships to climb around in and on, a sawmill where they make huge parts for ship restoration, period games on the town green and a huge 3D model of the Mystic River area when it was a center of shipbuilding. Oh, and a place to build your own wooden boat. Audrey and Charlotte loved all of it. We got there about noon on Saturday and stayed until it closed at 5:00. Then we returned about 10:00 on Sunday morning and stayed till 3:30. We still didn't see everything.

We stayed at a KOA campground nearby. The girls were very excited to sleep in the camper van again. Charlotte decided she is old enough to sleep in the pop top and she did, all night without even waking up! I got to sleep on the lower level for the first time ever, on the softer mattress and with my sweetheart.

We're going to be locked down at home for a while with an imminent kitchen remodel and coaching Audrey's T-ball team, so it was nice to get away for a weekend. We had a really fun time.

Robotics Competition Videos

As I've mentioned I volunteered as a mentor for the Melrose High School iRaiders robotics team for the 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition season. The 2010 Boston Regionals were held March 26-27 at Boston University. Below are links to several videos from the competition.

We didn't complete construction of our robot until the last minute, so we didn't have nearly enough time for testing. We had reliability problems in the competition: mainly the chains kept slipping on the drive wheels, making it difficult to maneuver. More testing would have revealed that weakness. Next year we'll try to manage the schedule better.

* Overview Video
* Qualifying Match 59
* Qualifying Match 67
* Qualifying Match 77

Charlotte Ballerina Redux

For some reason the initial attempt at uploading the video failed. You can now see the video here. I also updated the link in the previous post.

Charlotte Ballerina

Charlotte really loves to dance ballet. As far as I know, the only ballet she has ever seen has been the really crappy Barbie animated DVD "Swan Lake". That doesn't have much ballet in it but somehow she picked up some movement vocabulary. Charlotte was dancing for Audrey and Carol the other day and when I got home from work they all said that she had to dance for me. Even Audrey told Carol, "We have got to get Charlotte into ballet lessons!"

Click on the image for the video. I overdubbed the audio for better quality, but it is the same piece of music Charlotte was dancing to and synced in time (Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, Spring, Allegro).