Personal collective of ideas, thoughts and notes
Not quite according to plan due to an Atmospheric River, which added some weather challenges, but had a great work trip with some personal elements added in for fun.
I am getting pretty good at assembling my bike in a Hertz rental garage.
The SAP San Ramon Office is not a terrible place to work for the week. Thanksgiving Pot Luck, Diwali and a trip to the Apple Campus made it extra special.
During a recent Diwali event at SAP, a speaker shared an intriguing story about Lucila Takjerad, an Algerian who was fortunate enough to be the recipient of someone’s help, and later graduated from Harvard. Below is the speech she gave at her commencement.
Lucila Takjerad
“The Least You Can Do”
Lucila Takjerad
English Graduate Commencement Speech
May 20th, 2019
The Least You Can Do
As Harvard graduates, you will be asked to go into the world and do the most you
can do. I am here to ask you to do the least.
I was born in Algeria. Every Friday, my sister and I had our weekly shower at the
public baths. We didn’t have running water at home. On winter nights, we cuddled against the cold because our heat was cut off. And, on some days, we hid our hunger in order not to worry our parents.
When I was seven years old, my country plunged into a bloody civil war. Every night, I prayed to God that tomorrow, there would not be an empty seat at our dinner table.
A fun 3D print to Carbon Fiber project.
Designed in Fusion 360, 3D printed a mould and did a wet layup in Carbon Fiber. Pretty happy with the way it came out and impressed it held up even on the really rough NZ chip sealed roads!
There was a lot of trial and error on this due to the deep cavity and needing a vacuum to hold the material in place.
Gridfinity is a great solution for 3D printing custom storage solutions. There is a “Gridfinity” layout for hundreds If not thousands of tools, home goods, workshop items, kitchen utensils, you name it … the best part is that if something doesn’t exist, you can pretty easily design and then 3D print it.
I decided to take that challenge on since there are not many Gridfinity designs for smaller cycling or workout items, like the Garmin Varia, Drop sweat monitor, Core Body Sensor or Garmin Edge unit I have. Using the design reference and a super handy Plugin for Fusion 360, I designed and printed a bunch to keep my work space organized. Below are some images and the prototypes of the prints.
This is my second pass at producing something strong enough and reliable enough to put onto my triathlon bike, and in this case some carbon fiber arm rests. My current arm rests pretty much did the job but at 300+g for the set, it seems like an easy win to reduce weight by making something similar out of CF.
The design for these took quite a lot of time, lots of trial and error and mistakes along the way 🙂 Cardboard cutouts, angles and long prints were the most tedious aspects, but ultimately I think they came out OK in the end.
Ideation and prototyping Steps
Tool/CAD Design
Mould 3D printing
These moulds had various finishes I was testing, everything from raw prints to epoxy coated.
3 years of doing 70.3 IM NC. Such a fun race in one of my favorite coastal towns of Wilmington/Wrightsville beach. Overall, a great race. 6th this year compared to 5th from last year, but due to the fast swim current, I improved my swim 8 minutes. On the bike I had a major rookie mistake and forgot to load my nutrition bottle on the bike, which meant stopping at the first aid station and loading up as much as I could carry, giving up some time, but also really important. There my bike was 2 minutes slower than 2023. On the run, I was right around the same as previous years with a 1:28. The 5th place finisher was over 2 minutes ahead of me, so I needed quite a considerable improvement to catch up to them.
Dependency breeds animosity …
From all our interactions, what is one thing you can tell about myself, that I may not already know about myself?
One thing I notice about you is your passion for creating tools and apps that make life more efficient and enjoyable, whether for work or personal interests. You’re deeply engaged in improving processes, building apps that solve practical problems for people—from tracking sewer installations to celebrating colleagues’ milestones. You also balance this focus on productivity with personal connections, like attending friends’ weddings or sharing thoughtful moments with family. This mix of efficiency and meaningful relationships seems to drive much of what you do. It shows a unique blend of technical skill and empathy. Does this resonate with you?
Source: https://billwear.github.io/art-of-attention.html
There comes a moment in life, often in the quietest of hours, when one realizes that the world will continue on its wayward course, indifferent to our desires or frustrations. And it is then, perhaps, that a subtle truth begins to emerge: the only thing we truly possess, the only thing we might, with enough care, exert some mastery over, is our mind. It is not a realization of resignation, but rather of liberation. For if the mind can be ordered, if it can be made still in the midst of this restless life, then we have already discovered the key to a deeper kind of freedom.
But how does one begin? It is not with grand declarations or bold, sweeping changes. That would miss the point entirely. Rather, it is with a gentle attention to the present, a deliberate shift in the way we move through the world. We begin by paying attention to what our mind does—its wanderings, its anxieties, its compulsions. It is a garden untended, overgrown with concerns that may not even be our own. And the first step is simply to watch, to observe how the mind moves, without judgment, without rush.
After having some reasonable success in #D printing moulds and doing some layup in CF, I thought I would attempt a “forged” CF version of a part I have 3D printed in the past. Unfortunately it didn’t quite go according to plan, it ended up weighing close to 4 x more than the basic version. A fun experiment none-the-less!
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