Stopping to smell the roses

When you’re road-tripping, it’s usually worth taking those little side trips and stops rather than just powering on through to your destination. They’re often the things that memories are made from.

Breakfast stop

After our stay in Portland, OR, we road tripped through Oregon and Washington, and stopped in Post Falls, ID so that we could add another state to our list of Visited States.  With Montana so close, we drove through the mountains along I-90 and stopped at a neat little spot 16 miles past the ID/MT border. Lincoln’s 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar and Gift Shop is a neat little family owned stopping place with a good sized gift shop, restaurant, inn, gas, and camping ground. Pretty much everything you need when looking for a road-trip stop.

Lincoln's 50000 Silver Dollar Bar and Gift Shop
Lincoln’s 50000 Silver Dollar Bar and Gift Shop

We got there early in the morning, browsed around and picked up a couple of state Christmas ornaments for our collection, gazed at the massive number of silver dollars mounted on display in the bar, and had breakfast in the restaurant. It was a very nice and enjoyable stop.

Stop in, browse the gift shop for some souvenirs, check out the 50000+ (and growing) collection of silver dollars on display in the bar area, and grab a bite to eat at the restaurant. Get something with bacon in it.  Make sure to pick up the sheet of paper that tells you the story behind the place.

Scenic views

Somewhere along I-90 in the middle of Washington State is a very nice place to stop where you can get some scenic views of the Columbia River. We stopped for a while to enjoy the scenery on our road trip back to Seattle.

Stop a bit, go for a bit of a walk and stretch your legs, and enjoy the scenery.

Spruce Goose and other planes

About an hour away from Portland, in McMinnville, OR is the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum, home of Howard Hughes’ famous H-4 Flying Boat (aka the Spruce Goose) as well as many other planes, rockets, and aviation related artifacts.

The Spruce Goose (made mostly of birch) is enormous.  It’s probably one of the largest planes you’ll ever see in person.

H-4 Flying Boat (Spruce Goose)
H-4 Flying Boat (Spruce Goose)
Spruce Goose tail section
Spruce Goose tail section
H-4 cockpit high above
Spruce Goose cockpit high above

Its 8 propeller engines are puny compared to the wings they’re mounted on, and the plane’s fuselage. It’s hard to imagine that even 8 engines would have provided enough power to move the H-4, but fly it did.

Four of the H-4's 8 engines
Four of the Spruce Goose’s 8 engines

There are plenty of other planes to see in the museum, both military and civilian.

Biplanes under the wing of the Spruce Goose
Biplanes under the wing of the Spruce Goose

There’s a 21 seat DC-3A (originally belonging to United Air Lines) that you can walk through to get a look at what commercial passenger flight would have been like in the 40s and 50s.

DC-3A
DC-3A
SR-71 Blackbird
SR-71 Blackbird
A-10 Warthog (BRRRRRTTTTT)
A-10 Warthog (BRRRRRTTTTT)

When you need a break from wandering around, airplane seats scattered about the museum provide nice, reasonably comfortable places to sit (and with a good deal more leg room than in an airplane).

The Space Museum takes you through the history of rockets and space exploration, starting with a replica of Goddard’s first liquid fueled rocket, a V-2, a Titan II (used for the Mercury Redstone launches), the Apollo space program, and others. There’s also an IMAX theater (a full-sized one) that shows some pretty good movies. 

There’s a lot to see at the museum, and you can easily spend an entire day and then some exploring all the exhibits both inside and outside.  If that’s not enough for you, go hit the waterpark and slide out of a Boeing 747.

Worth a visit if you’re in the area. Plan on spending at least a half day. Take your time and spend the whole day if you can. Make sure to catch one of the IMAX movies.

Visiting the VintageTEK Museum

During my vacation to Beaverton, OR, I got to visit the VintageTEK Museum with a local friend.  The museum relocated recently to the Tektronix campus, which seems to a fitting place for it to be.

The VintageTEK museum is a pretty cool place with a fair bit of space to show off their collection of old Tek scopes, test equipment, tubes, CRTs and other equipment beginning with an original Tektronix 511 CRT oscilloscope.

Tektronix 511 CRT oscilloscope
Tektronix 511 CRT oscilloscope innards

Many of the scopes and gear on display are static, but quite a few of them are operational and interactive.  In a side room you’ll also find a Tektronix electron microscope and a Digital PDP8.

Tektronix electron microscope
Tektronix electron microscope
Digital  PDP 8/e
Digital PDP 8/e

A new offering by the museum is an instrument lending  program for students. If you’re working on a project and need some test equipment, you can borrow it from the museum. Available equipment includes scopes, DMMs, function generators, counters, and power supplies.

We also got to see the back area where they have a huge collection of equipment and parts, and where they work on restoring equipment.

Definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area. The museum volunteers are friendly and know a great deal about the equipment in the collection. Their regular hours are on 10AM-6PM Thursday and 10AM-4PM Saturday, but they’ll also open upon request. 

First post + 15 years

15 years ago, my first blog post appeared on the Interwebs!

I was a bit of a late comer to the blogging world. I’d seen people doing it for at least a couple  years or so before this, but at the time it wasn’t anything that interested me. But, then I figured “What the heck, let’s try it out“.

So now here I am, 15 years later.  Probably not blogging as much as I was when I started, but it still provides a good outlet for my ramblings.

Breadboard jumper wire reference

Used an Adafruit Perma-Proto board to make this reference guide for the breadboard jumper wires I’ve acquired recently.

Jumper wire reference
Jumper wire reference

The bottom one has wires from sets that I bought before my local Radio Shack stores closed, and the top ones are from the 700 piece kit from Sparkfun. Since they each used different colours for the various lengths, I thought it would be useful to have a reference guide for what length each colour was.