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bookmark_borderUber ATG Magic 8-Ball

Posted on by Elliott Evans

Back in December of 2017, I was working for the Uber Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) here in Pittsburgh. This was the self-driving vehicle research arm of Uber. The group threw a holiday party at the Pittsburgh History Museum, and as a party favor they gave us all custom “Magic 8-Ball” toys that had answer dice filled with ATG catch-phrases and in-jokes. Now that the ATG is no longer a division of Uber but is now a part of Aurora Innovation, perhaps it is time to post the 20 “answers” here. I can’t find them anywhere else on the ‘net.

  • Ask The Julies
  • Catching Rain Water
  • Cheerful Transparency
  • Chicken Bucket
  • I Aaron Doubt It
  • I Do Not Concur
  • Keep on Truckin’
  • Krypton Says No
  • Let’s Have An All Hands
  • Letwin Will Fix It
  • No Swag For You
  • Reorg
  • Super Sprint
  • That’s a HW Problem
  • That’s a SW Problem
  • Winter’s Coming
  • Xenon Says Yes
  • Your Answer Is At CRU
  • You’re a Boron
  • #UberOn

Keep in mind that I was hired as part of the third or fourth wave of hiring at the ATG, so some of these jokes refer to things that were before my time. Some of them are just startup anxiety phrases, like “Reorg” and “Let’s Have An All Hands”. Some of them are somewhat specific to autonomous vehicles, like “Catching Rainwater” and “Winter’s Coming”.

“Boron”, “Krypton”, and “Xenon” were the code names of the three test platforms at the time. “Chicken Bucket” was the nickname for the large spinning LIDAR unit on the roof of each vehicle. Kryptons were the Silver vehicles that Uber bought from Volvo, and were the most numerous. A Krypton is what hit that lady in Arizona.

“CRU” was the name for the “Crucible Building” which the ATG moved into when they outgrew their original startup space. By the time I left the ATG, Uber had five or six buildings down in the Strip District. Very few people had been in all of them. I’d been in more of them than most people had, since I started in Operations and later moved to Engineering. Each was a few blocks away from the others, so if your answer was in another building that could be tiresome.

“[Nick] Letwin” and “Aaron Doubt” are the names of a couple of influential ATG engineers. “The Julies” were the two main HR people at the ATG. Troubles with HR were the main reason I left.

The ATG’s “SPA” building, with a “Boron” test vehicle

bookmark_borderSorry, it’s Politics

Posted on by Elliott Evans

The first incarnation of this blog had a lot of politics on it, and I’ve tried to keep politics off the blog this time because politics is everywhere now and I really didn’t feel the need to bring it here, but now things have changed.

Republicans in Pennsylvania actually want to go to the Supreme Court to get my vote, cast legally and in good faith by mail in the recent election, thrown out because their favored candidate for President lost.

Not that I was ever likely to vote for a Republican candidate, but this makes it certain that I will never vote for a Republican candidate in any election at any level for the rest of my life.

Just forget it. You people take your Superspreader in Chief, Total Landscaping Lawyers, and Zodiac Killer Senators and just forget that.

bookmark_borderPoplar Solar Flicker Lantern

Posted on by Elliott Evans

Progress on the wood frame lanterns to fit the solar flicker lighting units continues! I completed the fifth of six planned lanterns recently, this one made from some surplus poplar lumber I had in the garage.

Andon in Poplar

Here is the lantern hanging in the Shourou at night after a recent snowfall:

Snowrou with Poplar Andon

Here is the lantern storage box almost full of lanterns:

5/6 Complete

bookmark_borderPlaning Off Saw Marks

Posted on by Elliott Evans
Kanna on Poplar 1by1

I started working on another lantern today, and I thought I’d show you how I use a Japanese kanna block plane to remove the marks left on the wood by the band saw that I use to mill the lumber into pieces. You can hear the vibration at first, that eventually gives way to smooth shaving noises.

I spin the piece around part way through so that the blade is cutting at an angle across the grain instead of into the grain. This yields a smoother cut. You can see that at the start, the grain lines are pointing up and to the right. Then, after the spin, they are pointing down and to the left.

You can also see that the piece I am planing is not clamped down at all. Since you’re pushing down on the plane, and so down on the piece, the only thing that’s necessary is the planing stop that you can see screwed down to the “planing beam”. My planing beam is simply a length of 2by4 held in my bench vise. My planing stop is 3 inches of 1/8″ welding iron that I drilled a couple of holes in so that I could screw it down. I did have to file the edge of the iron so that it wasn’t rounded over.

bookmark_borderShelf Table

Posted on by Elliott Evans

Back at the old house, we had six shelves in the guest/sewing room. They were made from edge-glued pine panels, stained with a water-based “rosewood” stain, and finished with water-based polyurethane. Here at the new house, we only needed two of them, so the other four shelves were in storage waiting for a good project.

Two Shelves

A few months ago, the Sweetie asked if I could make a bedside table for the guest room here at the new house. The only real requirements were that it matched the room furniture, and had enough space underneath to fit this hamper that also lives in the room.

Shelf Table

I took three of the surplus shelves, cut them to length, joined them with dowels, and glued them together. Of course, that was pretty-rickety. so I added some diagonal braces that I cut from one of the offcut pieces of shelf.

Underside of Shelf Table, showing bracing

Not very fancy, but it saved us a trip to the furniture box, and we know it matches the shelves!

bookmark_borderMulberry Andon

Posted on by Elliott Evans

I just completed another lantern for the “six lanterns” project. The frame of this one is made out of mulberry wood. I had a small plank of this that Mr. Arimoto gave to me probably about seven years ago, and it seemed like a good project to use it on.

Andon in Mulberry

Of course, with the paper on it like that, you can barely see any of the wood. The fibers in this plank were very rough and wavy, but in the places where my plane got a good shaving, the surface is super-nice.

Frame of Mulberry Andon

I rough-milled the sticks from the plank using my band saw, then hand planed them down to 3/4″ square rods. There really wasn’t enough wood in the plank to make it entirely from mulberry. To compensate, I made some of the stretchers a little shorter than normal, and used dowel joinery instead of my usual mortise and tenon joinery. This was a little easier, since it meant cutting short lengths of dowel instead of cutting 16 tenons, but it meant drilling twice as many mortises, half of them into the ends of stretchers. I could not have done it without my drill press.

Anyway, it joins the other three lanterns (oak, maple, and cherry) in the lantern box.

Box-o-Lanterns

bookmark_borderRise and Fall of D.O.D.O., The

Posted on by Elliott Evans

A Novel by Stephenson, Neal and Galland, Nicole

Anybody who knows me well enough to read this here blog knows that I enjoy reading books by Neal Stephenson. Some people, including people I otherwise respect, consider him to be long-winded and tiresome. “Long-winded” I cannot argue against, but I find him to be endlessly entertaining.

DODO is 742 pages of epistolary diachronical action. It is chock full of manuscripts, emails, journal entries, after action reports, radio transcripts, running around, helicopters, car chases through the streets of Boston, boat rides, sex scenes, battles, beer drinking, quantum physics, holiday parties, and team meetings.

It took me more than a month to grind through it all, but I enjoyed the whole thing.

bookmark_borderLantern Storage Box

Posted on by Elliott Evans

I’ve only made three of these lanterns so far, but I intend to make six, so eventually I will need something to transport and store them all in, or they are going to get pretty beat up. So, another box.

Lantern Box, Closed

This was also yet another exercise in using up surplus materials from other projects. I wound up having to use a piece of MDF for the lid, because that was the biggest piece of anything I had left. The edges are off-cut from 2-by-4 lumber from when I was making pole by cutting square pieces from 2-by-4. It awfully satisfying to use up some of that stuff.

Lantern Box, Open

You can see that the extra height of the lid makes it easy to get the lanterns in and out of the box. There’s an extra half inch in each direction, so the lanterns fit snugly but not tightly.

The whole thing is finished on the outside with spar polyurethane, especially the MDF on the lid, to give it a little more water resistance than a cardboard box. I glued some blocks of wood to the bottom to serve as feet, so it won’t be resting entirely in any puddles.

Basically, the whole thing is constructed with glue and nails form the nail gun. The bottom is thicker plywood to make it bottom-heavy, and the rim on the body both supports the lid and reinforces the corners of the box. This is a design and method I’ve used before with some success.

A lot of the sizing of pieces can be done while you’re building. For instance, I make the body of the box, then I measure the outside of the top before cutting the pieces for the lid. That way the lid is sized to fit the actual box, and not just my best hope.

The whole thing is kind of rough, because it’s not supposed to be anything special. You can see in the photos that I didn’t even sand off the mill markings.