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Last week I posted about the Google Lego Engineering and the Lego Engineering initiative at Tufts University. Although not strictly Legos, Stanford has an undergraduate robotics course which is worth a look for your advanced First Lego League student. The course is offered via Stanford's Engineering Anywhere initiative. I also added the robotics course to my Lego Robotics Educational Search Engine.
For a number of months, I've occasionally tracked the progress of the Personas project at MIT. Inspired by a LinkedIn status update by Francois Gossieaux where he wondered whether his MIT profile was accurate, I decided to perform a test of my two web personas. The results are shown below. Interested in seeing your own web persona? Here is the MIT link.
Click upon either image to view full sized.
Ah ... this is what vacations are made for ... enough of Web 2.0 for now. The response to the Northstar Nerd's Nordic Fashion Show has been so positive, that I created a new category for this blog, Nordic Skiing. Thus, for better or worse you now can easily pull up all my cross-country skiing posts. Here are just a few highlights from the past few years (now the Nordic Skiing Category):
and finally, the classic
You can link to the Nordic Skiing Category to read all the posts. I promise some new, and unique content this Winter! Stay tuned.
It's Thanksgiving Week, and the forecast includes snow for the Upper Peninsula, which means we should all be able to hit the trails soon. More than likely the first stop will likely be ABR near Ironwood, Michigan. Given my excitement over the impending snow, I give you my Nordic Ski Review for this year including my first ever Northstar Nerd Fashion Show!
While you might find the idea of a fashion show crazy, given the HUGE difficulty I had finding some "retro" ski wear this Fall, I want to insure my readers don't have the same difficulties! As always, it's important to point out that the NorthstarNerd never takes money to review any product. Good or bad, my opinions are my own.
(Make certain you see my Nordic Skiing Section of this site with a custom X-Ski Search Engine, Garmin measured ski trail distances ... and more via MinnSki)
Trails:
Trails via SkinnySki.Com (North Central States / Western Ontario)commentary: I'm a paying member of SkinnySki.Com. If you are from Minnesota, please consider support for Bruce Adelsman's site. He does a great job.
And now ... what you've all been waiting for ...
1st Annual Northstar Nerd Nordic Skiing Fashion Show!
In this show I will review ... (scroll down for the embedded video .. both videos require a YouTube connection to work properly. The fashion show will display w/o a YouTube connection, but you won't hear the yodeling!)
commentary: Thanks to Exos Medical who rescued my racing season last year when I broke my thumb and tore a ligament during a bad Fall, I am now outfitted in the latest racing uniform.
commentary: Due to my own stupidity and a dishonest person, I had some skis stolen at the end of last ski season. After a very hard 25k workout, I entered the warming house to get some water. Still being tired, I went to my car and left my skis in the rack next to the chalet. When I returned later ... my skis were gone. Thus, this year I will be skiing on two new pairs of Atomic Classic Skis (Pro Classic for training and Pro Race Classic for races)
Thus ... without further adieu ... Happy Holidays from the Northstar Nerd!
Nordic Fashion Show on PhotoPeach
Retro Cross-Country Skiing Roots!
Finally, if you really enjoy cross-country skiing and the retro look, visit Wood N Skis! You'll find great commentary, instructions on how to pine tar your skis, wood skis for sale ... and this great video on visiting the birthplace of cross-country skiing ... and guess what, it's not Norway! You'll be visiting the Altai Mountains in central Asia (China).
Here is the latest computer engineering prank from the hallowed halls of academic learning (via my son).
Find a friend's computer which is unattended, hopefully not an software engineering student. From the task manager turn off explorer.exe process and insert your favorite screenshot for the desktop image. Sit back and enjoy your friend's frustration! (and for this I am paying thousands of dollars per year in tuition for my son?!). Actually, GE has offered Erik (my son) a very nice electrical engineering co-op job ... thus some of the money must be well spent. Anyhow, Happy Thanksgiving everyone. At home on vacation enjoying time with my devious son who is also on Thanksgiving break from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. I plan to password protect my home latop ASAP!
And from MIT, learn about some classic engineering pranks ... such as how MIT students took over the Rose Bowl scoreboard to announce they were beating CalTech!
I've been quiet with respect to Legos for much to long! However, as anyone who is involved with First Lego League knows, it's tournament time! It seems strange after all these years of coaching S.N.I.P (Super Nerds In Pink) to be a spectator on the sidelines ... however my boys are all off to engineering colleges around the USA. Thus, I decided it was time to do a few updates to my Google Custom Lego Educational Search Engine. After a few queries, I discovered that Google itself has finally caught the Lego bug. Here are the latest additions:
The Lego Engineering lecture was given by the folks at Tufts University, who first defined this domain. To learn and see more with respect to Lego Education, link to my special section of my Engineering Learning Wiki, or just try the custom Google Lego Search Engine which I created last year.
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Enjoy a brief sojourn and Viennese Waltz with the Northstar Nerd and his wife as they hike the Lake Superior Wilderness (video link). While some folks may enjoy vacations to warmer climates, an off season get-away allowed Molly and me to hike for two days without ever seeing another person on the trails. You'll cover in about 2 minutes what took us 8 hours of hiking over two days!
A Superior Wilderness on PhotoPeach
Tomorrow it's back to work after a mini-vacation that allowed me some time to hike in the Lake Superior wilderness. Before that return to work focused activities, I though I would let everyone know about a blog (EngCom.Net) which has a neat series on engineering trivia ... a good way for me to get serious once more, but not too serious! Although I don't normally review technology blogs which have a profit focus, in this case I'll make an exception. Given them a link, and test your knowledge!
However, if you need some more serious engineering, link to my engineering learning section. You'll find hundreds of links to engineering academic seminars, courses, custom engineering search engines and even Lego engineering!
