Category Archives: Activities, Travel, Vacations

Activities, Travel, Vacations, Science, Space, Technology

My Trip To Malmo, Sweden: The Students

November 16, 2017 kleucht Leave a comment

Cool Minds

Last week after I finished speaking at the Öredev software developer conference in Malmo, Sweden, I had the opportunity to give a talk to students at the Cool Minds Play and Knowledge Center.

Cool Minds holds organized activities for school aged children after school and also on weekends. The facility is very open and playful and welcoming. The students are encouraged to explore their own ideas and be creative during the sessions. Cool Minds makes it fun and exciting for students to learn about concepts such as creative ceramics & candles, electronics/robotics, programming/gaming, biology/chemistry, and film/media.

Watch this short promotional video about Cool Minds. It’s pretty great. We need some more places like this here in the US. Large children’s museums and large science centers are great, but a small intimate instructor-led hands-on activity center like Cool Minds has several benefits over those others.

Here is the Cool Minds website link to my speaking event: http://coolminds.se/fran-nasa-manniskor-pa-mars/

Presentation

First I gave an introduction about myself and where I grew up and how I was always bent towards science and engineering. Then I talked to the students about Mars and gave them fun facts, like the length of a year, the length of a day, and the average temperature.

I had some NASA patches and pins, so I gave those away to students who raised their hands and guessed some of these fun Mars facts.

Then I talked a little bit about the Mars rovers and described what they are doing there and what their capabilities are.

Hands-On Activity

And then we went into the fun hands-on activity. I’m really excited about this particular activity because it’s easy enough for them to repeat at home with their parents and siblings. And they can add to it and improve it at home too.

The activity has each student create a robotic finger for a Mars robot using common everyday items like a drinking straw, some string, a button, and a washer. And then at the end, we combine students and they combine 4 robotic fingers to make a working robotic hand.

Overall

The students really seemed to enjoy this hands-on activity. And they were pretty excited to have someone from NASA come to talk to them.

It was a great experience for me too. I enjoyed seeing the Cool Minds facility and meeting its creator, Farzin Saber. Farzin is passionate about exposing kids to fun learning activities that they might never otherwise experience.

Here is a 15 minute Ted talk about Cool Minds that Farzin gave back in January of 2017:

Tomorrow I’ll publish a blog post about some of the sightseeing my wife and I did in Malmo Sweden.

Thanks for your interest!

Kurt

Activities, Travel, Vacations, Computers, User Interfaces, Science, Space, Technology

My Trip To Malmo, Sweden: The Conference

November 15, 2017 kleucht Leave a comment

Öredev

Last week I had the honor of giving the closing keynote presentation at the 13th annual Öredev software developer conference in Malmo, Sweden!

Here is the Öredev conference website! (Check it out! It actually has my face on it!)

http://oredev.org

Öredev is a 3 day conference for software developers with an attendance of a maximum of 1200 developers. It is pretty popular in Scandinavia and has sold out for the past several years now. During those 3 days, Öredev packed in 8 separate keynotes and a total of 140 separate technical sessions! The schedule each day was jam packed with 7 simultaneous speakers every hour all day long with no scheduled breaks! It was a pretty great event and the organizers did a wonderful job!

The Öredev organizers feel strongly enough about using only live speakers, that they pay for their airfare, hotel, and food. The venue for the conference is an old slaughterhouse that has been cleaned up and converted into a performance theater and meeting place. The theater seats 900, I believe.

Keynote

My keynote presentation is story-based and it is called “Pioneering Mars!” It presents the story of how we will get to Mars in the year 2034. It describes all the missions that will pave the way and all the technologies that have to be invented first. This version of my presentation is nearly an hour long, but I plan to create several versions of various lengths that I can pull out and present to various audience types.

Here is the official Öredev 2017 video of my 60 minute keynote on Vimeo:

My keynote presentation was very well received and I got a ton of compliments from both attendees and from other speakers!

Technical

I also gave a 40 minute technical presentation called “Writing Apps For Mars” which compares common mobile apps to the software running onboard the Mars rovers. It was a very fun talk to create and to present.

Here is the official Öredev 2017 video of my 40 minute technical presentation on Vimeo:

Videos

Full videos of all the keynotes and talks, are posted on the Öredev Vimeo channel. And if you’re really into it, you can even scroll through and watch keynotes and technical talks from prior years!

https://vimeo.com/oredev/videos/sort:date/format:thumbnail

Thanks

Also, this was only the second time I’d ever left the United States. I had a really great experience! Tomorrow I’ll publish a blog post about a children’s activity center that I got to visit and speak at while I was in Malmo.

Thanks for your interest!

Kurt

Activities, Travel, Vacations, Nature, Photography, Videos

How to make your own car-top kayak rack

February 20, 2017 kleucht 25 Comments

I designed and built what I think turned out to be a pretty decent car-top carrier rack for my kayaks. Here is a photo of the final product mounted on the roof of my PT Cruiser.

I built the rack out of PVC pipe bought from my local home improvement store. I designed the rack so that it can be attached to the roof of my car using standard ratcheting straps that loop around the car roof with the doors open. The ratchets are inside the cab of the car.

Before I built this rack, my best solution for hauling my kayak to the river was just to strap the kayak itself to the roof of my car.

One problem with that scenario was that I could only haul a single kayak that way. Another problem was that the ratcheting straps outside the cab would vibrate and buzz loudly when I was driving down the road at highway speeds. But the rack I designed and built solved both of these problems.

Below is a photo of the rack after I glued all the PVC pieces together. I designed the left side of the rack with a single upright that sits up into the seat hole in the first kayak which will hold it at the angle I want. Then the other two kayaks lean up against the first one. The right side of the rack has 2 uprights to cradle the bottom side of the third kayak.

I used T’s rather than 90’s for the 4 corners so that I could feed the ratcheting straps through the pipe and keep the straps out of the winds, thus keeping them from vibrating and buzzing.

I’m not going to give specific parts lists and specific measurements because this rack needs to be custom sized for your kayaks and also custom sized for your car. But cutting these PVC pipes and gluing them together is very very easy. So this is a project that just about anyone should be able to take on.

The below photo shows how 3 kayaks fit perfectly into this rack.

But I actually own 4 kayaks, and occasionally I will want to haul all 4 of them to the river. It turns out that my SUV has a roof wide enough to hold all 4 kayaks, so I designed my kayak rack to be expandable from 3 kayaks to 4 kayaks. So now I can use the rack on my car or on my SUV.

You can see in the below photo that the rack is now wider. The PVC pipes on the left are all 2 inch pipes and the PVC pipes on the right are all 1 and 1/2 inch pipes. The 1.5 inch pipes fit nicely inside the 2 inch pipes with not very much wiggle room, so that worked out nicely for this application.

If I was making a single size rack that didn’t expand, I would probably just use the 1 and 1/2 inch PVC pipe for the entire rack. It feels to me like it is strong enough to do the job of holding up these 10 foot kayaks, but also flexible enough to bend a bit around the contour of the car’s roof. In my case, the 2 inch PVC pipe I used for most of the rack doesn’t give very much and it ended up denting part of the roof of my car a bit when I torqued the rack down using the ratcheting straps.

Here is a photo of the rack holding 4 kayaks.

The detail photo below shows you the single upright on the rack that fits up into the seat hole of the first kayak and basically holds the first kayak upright at a slight tilt from vertical which is good for leaning the other kayaks up against the first kayak.

The photo below details the other side of the rack where the two uprights are there supporting the bottom of the third kayak. This photo also shows my solution for holding the kayaks down. I used black rubber bungee cords.

The photo below details the attachment points of the bungee cords. I bought a bungee cord that was the right length to go all the way around each kayak. And I drilled holes into my PVC pipes to attach the bungee cords. These bungee cords hold the kayaks down tight to the rack and they also keep the kayaks from moving very much left and right. And also, thankfully, these bungee cords don’t vibrate and buzz at highway speeds.

IMPORTANT: This photo shows the PVC sitting down directly onto my roof. Do not do this! The PVC is plastic, but it’s a very hard plastic and it WILL damage your paint job! Make sure you put something soft or rubbery between the PVC and your vehicle! My suggestion is to buy 2 inch wide self-stick Velcro in bulk rolls and apply the soft side to the bottom surface of your PVC rack! Also don’t ratchet it down so tight that it dents your roof! The idea is to use PVC that is flexible and conforms to the contour of your roof!

This photo shows you the inside of one of the PVC pipes. You can see the ratcheting strap and also the bungee cord attachments.

And here is the final rack. I tested it at highway speeds and it worked quite well.

Another photo of the final rack.

And one last photo of the final rack.

And just for fun. Here are a couple drawings I drew up during the process to help me decide on the design and to help me come up with a parts list to go buy.

Thanks for your interest! Please leave questions or comments below! Or use the “Email Us” link at the bottom of the website!

Kurt

Activities, Travel, Vacations, Computers, User Interfaces, Science, Space, Technology

My Trip to Krakow, Poland: The Food

September 22, 2016 kleucht 2 Comments

I just returned from a trip to Krakow, Poland last week where I was speaking at a software developer conference. I posted details of that experience here. I also posted details about my sightseeing experiences here. This post, however, is dedicated to all the wonderful food that I ate while I was there. The lighting was not great in most of these restaurants, so I will apologize in advance for the quality of these photos.

The food during the 2 conference days was catered and it was all very good, but I didn’t take notes nor take any photos of those particular meals.

The conference organizers took all the speakers out to dinner the evening before the conference started. They took us to a bistro and restaurant called Kogel Mogel which was just a couple of short blocks from the central town square.

We stared with a wonderful sour rye soup (Zurek or zur) with mushrooms. It also had some sausage in it and also some hard boiled egg. I apologize for not getting a photo of it. It was super tasty. Different from anything I’ve ever had before. It’s made with fermented or soured grains. I liked it a lot.

Our main course was a chicken schnitzel with a mushroom sauce and mild peppercorns. A schnitzel is a meat that’s thinned by pounding and is then coated with flour, egg, and bread crumbs and then fried. We also had potato dumplings (kluski slaskie) which were pretty good. Especially when dipped in the mushroom sauce from the chicken.

For dessert we had a creme brulee, which was to die for. A week later, my mouth still waters when I think about it.

The next morning, which was the first morning of the conference, I ate breakfast down in the hotel lobby. I stayed at the Novotel Krakow Centrum hotel, which was just off the Vistula river, across from Wawel Castle. It’s a very nice and modern hotel. The breakfast buffet was quite impressive and it was included in the cost of the room. I didn’t eat too much, though because I don’t eat heavy breakfasts and I didn’t want to be weighed down at the conference.

I should have taken a photo of the entire spread, which was quite impressive. I did get a photo of the meats and also of the cheeses, though.

That evening I found a great little authentic old country restaurant, also within a couple short blocks of the central town square. This family friendly restaurant is called Morskie Oko and it is in the style of an old Highlander’s Inn. While I was eating, live entertainment included singing and dancing Highlanders in full costumes, plus live musicians.

The food was really incredible here. I started with an appetizer of baked prunes wrapped in bacon fat. Now if you like your bacon cooked well done and crispy, this dish is NOT for you. This bacon was very thick … probably hand carved … and it was very moist and greasy. It was so yummy, though. I could barely even taste the prunes through all that bacon fat. Mmmmmmmmmm.

Next I ordered the sauerkraut soup which had sauerkraut and potatoes and also a small rib in it. I love sauerkraut, so this soup was delicious! It’s sour, but it’s a different kind of sour than the fermented rye grain soup I’d had the previous night.

For my main dish, I had the boar loin in red pine mushroom sauce. Oh. My. Gosh. This boar meat was quite tender. Similar to a nice steak. It had a wild taste but not too wild. It was amazing. It had grill marks on it, so it was cooked, at least partially, over an open flame. And the red pine mushroom sauce was really great. It tasted a lot like a red wine sauce, but I’m not sure whether that taste only came from the red pine mushrooms or not, since I’ve never had those before.

The portions were not too big, so I actually had some room left for dessert. So I ordered a walnut ice cream sundae with hot fudge, whipped cream, and roasted hazelnuts. I hadn’t planned on eating the entire thing, but it was so good. I couldn’t help myself!

And here is my breakfast on my second morning in the hotel lobby. Meat, cheese, and a bit of scrambled eggs. The breakfast of champions!

That evening I was tired from the conference, so I just stayed in and ordered room service. This is just an appetizer of shrimp with garlic and chilli, but it was all I needed that evening. It was very yummy. We had snacks all day long at the conference, so I wasn’t exactly starving at dinner time.

I also got this warm soft brownie and ice cream dessert from room service. So warm. So soft. So fudgy. It was delicious.

The next day was Saturday, and the conference organizers took us speakers out for lunch at a nice restaurant called Miod Malina, which again, was only a couple short blocks from the central town square.

This is the Bruschetta, which was very simple and very good.

And I ordered the sour rye soup again, since I loved it so much a couple days earlier. Many restaurants, including Miod Malina, serve it in a bread bowl.

Miod Malina put a lot more meat in this sour rye soup than did Kogel Mogel, but the Kogel Mogel version was more sour (sour being good). Both were very good in their own way.

I finally got to dig into some good old fashioned Polish pierogis, also known as dumplings. The ones I ordered were fried meat pierogis, but the restaurant also bakes them and also has a fruit version and a potato/onion version. These meat pierogis had 3 different meats inside. Some had pulled pork. Some had beef. And some had veal, I think. They were really awesome!

This was not my plate … it was one of the other conference speakers … but I had to take a photo of it. I had seen several people eating these while I was in Poland and it looks really good. It’s veal knuckle, otherwise known as veal shank.

That same evening, I had my dinner at the Wesele Restaurant, which was directly in the town square.

This time I tried the sauerkraut and mushroom fried pierogis and they were so stinking good! I could eat 4 or 5 plates of these things!

I had ribs with plum sauce which was pretty good, although I don’t think plums are really my thing.

And I also ordered fried cabbage as a side dish. I’d never had this before and it was mild, but it was very good. My pee smelled like sauerkraut for the next 2 days, and I think it might have been from this particular dish. Although, I guess it could have been from other dishes I’d had containing sauerkraut.

My last full day in Krakow was Sunday, and I had lots of sightseeing and shopping to do, so I went straight to the central town square and ate breakfast at this little handmade doughnut shop called Krakowskie Paczki, which means Krakow Packages. It’s a popular little shop as there was quite a line of customers.

They also sold waffles. So I got a jelly filled doughnut and a waffle with blackberry jam. The filling in the doughnut was different than anything I’d ever tasted and maybe it’s an acquired taste, but the doughnut itself was spectacular. And the waffle was quite good too. And yes, I had Coke for breakfast. Hey, I was on vacation! 🙂

This entire day went by pretty fast since I was trying to experience the entire central town square and also buy a bunch of souvenirs, so I didn’t actually eat lunch. And when dinner time rolled around, I wasn’t exactly starving either. So I decided to just get an appetizer. I went to a fancy restaurant on the square called Szara.

I had heard a lot about Beef Tartare or Steak Tartare, and I had seen lots of people eating it here in Poland, so I decided to try it. Even though it is raw ground beef and raw egg yolk. It was actually pretty good. I was not a fan of the smoked herring or whatever that fish is on the plate. But when I mixed all the other ingredients together, it was an interesting and nice little treat. Going around the plate, there was raw chopped onion, chopped tuna, I believe, chopped pickes, butter, and the sauce tasted like a mild honey mustard.

I finished my small dinner meal with an ice cream of sorts called Pistachio Semifreddo with caramel and chocolate sauce. It’s very light, like a frozen mousse. A pretty fancy dish.

Well, that about covers all the awesome food I ate while in Poland! Tomorrow I’ll publish a blog post detailing the trip in general along with some of my random observations about Krakow, Poland.

Thanks for your interest!

Kurt

Activities, Travel, Vacations, Computers, User Interfaces, Science, Space, Technology

My Trip to Krakow, Poland: The Sights

September 21, 2016 kleucht 1 Comment

I just returned from a trip to Krakow, Poland last week where I was speaking at a software developer conference. I posted details of that experience here. This post, however, is dedicated to the sightseeing I was able to squeeze in while I was there. I only had my iPhone 5S on this trip, so I will apologize in advance for the quality of some of these photos.

This photo sort of shows the typical countryside in Poland. Huge historic-looking castle looking structures right next to modern looking apartments right next to small modest cottages.

The Wawel Castle and the Vistula River are both important landmarks of Krakow. The river is the longest and largest river in the whole country and it snakes through the entire city. The castle sits prominently on top of Wawel Hill and is one of the most historically and culturally important sites in all of Poland.

Here’s a close up photo of Wawel Castle at night.

And here is another photo at night, but from across the river.

In the center of Krakow city is Rynek Glówny, which means “main market” or “main square”. It’s a large medieval town square, dating back to the 13th century, surrounded by palaces & churches. It’s a wonderful area of town and it’s a huge draw for locals and for tourists both during the day and at night.

Here is a photo of Wieza Ratuszowa, or “town hall tower”, which is a renovated Gothic tower that used to be just one part of the town hall, but is now a museum. I regret that I did not have time to visit any of the museums in town while I was there.

This building, also in the middle of the town square is The Cloth Hall which is a Renaissance-style market hall lined the entire length with stalls of locals selling goods. It also contains a museum.

The main visual Gothic standout of the town square, though, is St. Mary’s Basilica, which is a huge Catholic church with 2 tall asymmetrical towers. Every hour, a trumpet signal is played from the top of the taller of the two towers. The tune breaks off in mid-stream, to commemorate the famous 13th century trumpeter, who was shot in the throat while sounding the alarm before the Mongol attack on the city.

This photo fails to show the size of these huge doors since no-one is in the photo for scale.

The entire perimeter of the town square is lined with outdoor seating for the various restaurants and bars that make up the majority of the storefronts.

Street performers sprinkle the town square. All day and all night.

And also the side streets leading to and from the town square.

This is sort of random. Meet Polish banjo playing Abe Lincoln talking on his smart phone!

I’d like to see what’s under the hood of this street performer’s act. She just sat there motionless. What exactly is holding her up? She looked very stable with no noticeable wobble. It’s a great trick.

Musicians were by far the most popular choice of street performers. Both groups and soloists.

There were lots and lots of horse drawn carriage rides to choose from in the town square.

Here is what the inside of The Cloth Hall looked like. Lots of trinkets and jewelry for sale.

The streets of Krakow were very interesting. Lots of 2 or 3 story buildings of various architecture styles. Lots of narrow streets. Lots of odd angles and irregular streets.

Some buildings are quite colorful. In this photo you can see the wires that are used to power the street cars, which were sort of a cross between a bus and a train. They looked a lot like a bus. But they ran on a train track in the middle of the road.

This photo shows a typical street leading towards the town square. St Mary’s is in the distance. The streets leading to the square were full of tourist shops selling trinkets, jewelry, food, etc.

There were a few 3-dimensional bronze maps like this in the notable historical areas. Very cool. Wawel Castle is on the far end and the Vistula river is on the other side of it. In the middle you can see St Mary’s and The Cloth Hall and the Town Hall Tower.

We took a short 30 minute trip down the road to tour the Wieliczka Salt Mine. It is really cool. It took about 3 hours to tour it and they told us we had only seen about 1 percent of the whole mine. It’s huge! And it’s all hundreds of meters below the surface!

When it stopped production of salt in 2007 it was one of the world’s oldest salt mines in production. Within the mine there are lots and lots of statues that are carved out of rock salt and also many rooms and even chapels. Here is a photo of a room with large logs holding up the ceiling.

This photo shows a long mine with a railway in the middle for hauling out the salt.

The walls and ceiling and floor of the mine are all rock salt. The salt looks and feels like stone or marble. It’s very hard stuff. You can make out its crystalline structure in this photo. The salt is far from pure when it’s mined. It requires processing into table salt. I don’t recall the details, though.

This is one of many many statues on display inside the mine that are actually carved out of rock salt. Remember, it’s very hard … like marble.

This is pretty crazy. It’s a huge chapel. Underground. Carved in the rock salt. Walls, ceiling, floor are all rock salt. And the stairs! People pay tens of thousands of US dollars to have weddings in here!

Another photo of the chapel with alter detail. Everything is rock salt!

The most pure rock salt is actually clear. Crystal clear. So they carved these chandelier crystals out of that pure salt.

Here is a close up photo of some of the relief sculptures carved into the walls of the cathedral. This photo was probably a couple feet high.

Occasional statues like this one of Mary are carved out of pure salt which is clear and looks really cool with lights inside.

There are a few underground rivers and lakes inside the mine that are completely saturated with salt.

I have a lot more photos, but I wanted to try to minimize the selection and try to not overload my readers. Tomorrow I’ll publish a blog post about all the wonderful food that I was able to experience during my short time in Krakow, Poland.

Thanks for your interest!

Kurt