New York Times Article

A couple photos of me ended up in an article about TechShop that came out in the New York Times on April 9, 2010. I was doing work on one of the mills trying to make one of the pieces of a test rig I've been designing and fabricating these past couple weeks. It really wasn't very interesting work (I was just counter-boring some holes), but I guess the NYT editors felt there needed a little female representation or something in the photo spread.

Full New York Times article is here: Inventors Wanted. Cool Toys Provided.

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The Summer Palace

Chris and I got Victoria a new cage and it's huge! I put up some info about it on the Hamster Across America blog.

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New Poster

School has been keeping me super busy, but this week while watching lecture I managed to find the time to put together a very basic infographic poster about the solar system. I wanted to get away from the biology-based stuff I've been doing to add some variety to products, and I've been telling my boyfriend that everything is better in space as an argument for why playing Mass Effect 2 is more awesome than Dragon Age, so I decided to make a simple graphic about the planets of the solar system. No Pluto here, although the reason for it was less political statement and more, "Pluto looks like dust on my screen next to the size of the other planets" when drawn to scale. So pragmatism was the real reason for leaving it out.

Full product is here.

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Hawaii pictures

Wow it's been a while since I posted. School has been taking up huge amounts of my time, but I finally managed to sort the photos I took in Hawaii. I spent most of my time on boats and under the water so unfortunately I only have pics from hiking in Volcano National Park. The album is here: http://picasaweb.google.com/105574692844537524242/HawaiiVolcanoNationalPark?locked=true#

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Hamster potty training (continued)

Yay! Success! After a couple weeks of scrounging around in soiled hamster bedding, Victoria has finally figured out how to use her potty. It's incredibly cute seeing her climb in, turn around and stick her head out. That probably sounds a bit strange, lol. Anyways, the potty training has made cleaning her cage a lot easier. Next I just need to make a couple additional modifications to her hutch to keep her from chewing at the roof.

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Hamster potty training

With all the new modifications and additions, my hamster's cage is getting increasingly difficult to clean. One evening she even decided to turn her observatory into a lavatory and I woke up to find 4 evenly-spaced puddles of hamster pee in each of the nodules. Eew. Ok, that was it. It was time to get Victoria potty trained again. Her previous owner claimed that she had potty-trained her as a wee baby ham, but hadn't provided me with any litter or a box.

Hamsters already have a tendency to pee in only one spot, so litter-box training them is supposedly very easy. So last week I went to PetSmart and bought her a hamster toilet and some litter, cleaned out her cage, put in some soiled bedding in the toilet, placed the toilet in her former potty corner and waited to see what happened. Unfortunately, the toilet doesn't quite cover the whole corner because it's rounded, so she kept peeing in the corner and ignored the toilet. In fact, she started kicking the litter out of the toilet into the corner to cover it up. Tricksie. Very Tricksie. Once I even saw her go into the toilet and carefully position herself so her butt was sticking out so she could pee straight into the corner. Hmmm. I will need to come up with a better solution. 

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Layers of the Earth

Last week I put together an infographic about the water cycle, but after some reflection, I decided the whole traditional textbook infographic look really didn't fit into my personal art style, so this week I decided to go in an entirely new direction and try out a simple, retro design. This time, it's about the layers of the earth and atmosphere:

Ah, much cleaner and a very different take than many of the other infographics I looked at while doing research (this one in particular was exceptionally bad. I admit I'm no graphic design expert, but that graphic just really made me shudder when I saw it). A larger version of my image and full poster can be found here.

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