Feburary 24, 2018 is the 100th anniversary of Estonian independence! As one of their many good ideas, the organizers of the centennial year celebrations have suggested that anyone might offer a birthday gift to the Estonian Republic, anything from a new symphony to baking a special cake to planting an oak tree. Here's a small gift from me.

In the upper-right corner of this site, I've added an overlay banner displaying the EV100 logo (an absolutely brilliant piece of graphic design work, by the way) and linking to the EV100 website. Fortunately the official color palette is nicely compatible with my own! I'll leave it up here for the rest of this centennial year.

Some of my favorites so far

For the past six weeks or so I've been posting, fairly often by my standards, to the social media and photo-sharing service Instagram. I intend to limit this account to creative work subjects: photos of my engineering projects, materials, and techniques, for my professional clients and for my related personal pursuits. It's likely to feature a lot of pictures of work in progress. Follow me if you'd like to keep up with what I'm up to, and thanks for your indulgence!

The rumors circulating among my friends and family are true: I have laid down arms and ceased resistance to Facebook. On January 29, 2014, I became a node in the Social Network. Like so many before me, I like to think that I'll profit from this alliance more than will the network itself. Time will tell!

This site, and some of my other projects as well, have been hosted for about a year now on Mediatemple's DV (Dedicated Virtual) service. My particular DV installation was somewhat custom since I had ordered it without Plesk and did all my administration tasks on the command line. Mediatemple recently informed me that this product was being end-of-life'd and so I made yet another migration, this time to their VE hosting, which seems like a better fit for my brand of linux geekery. It's quite a bit cheaper per month as well!

Regular guests, please let me know if anything's broken from the move. Thanks for your attention.

I'm thrilled that Make magazine has featured our 2003 senior design project, the Pipe Crawler, on its blog. I thank Sean Ragan for taking an interest and for writing the post; visitors from Make are very welcome indeed. I've taken this as prompting to update the site a bit; prior readers may notice that I've added links to an RSS feed of this blog; please subscribe if you're so inclined. Using my new and very precariously assembled light tent (details of which are for a later post); I've also updated some of the photos of the pipe crawler; and finally, I've restored the link to the original paper my team gave to our professors at the end of the class, although I cringe to read it today—hopefully I've learned a thing or two in the years since!