Week 13, Adventures in Toscana (Pisa)

I thought I had a lot to say about this trip, but less is coming to mind a week after the fact. We decided on Monday that I should go to Pisa for a week starting on Tuesday to do some work with one of our partners, a startup in Pontedera.

To my surprise I found myself working alongside some of the people in the ARTS and CRIM labs that I went to visit for a half day in April. However, the engineer who showed me around in the Spring is now working with one of my old professors in Stanford. In a sense we’ve switched places.

It was a nice trip. I had fund working and my free time. I think it was probably my most pleasing week of work because I was able to spend a good chunk of time each day doing mechanical engineering with other mechanical engineers. I actually found it a refreshing change working to derive a system of differential equations to represent a magneto-electro-mechanical system despite the difficulties we were having reducing the number of variables into something we might have a chance of solving. This is a contrast to my usual days in the office which are dominated by quiet hours benchmarking technologies on the internet. However, I expect a change of pace in the near future because we just signed a contract with a client.

But I’m finding other outlets for my pent up creative energies. After sawing away on my violin for a half hour, I made an interesting concoction before sitting down to write to the blog. I don’t think this is something you’ll find in a bar in Italy, or America for that matter. But it turned out pretty good blend. I mixed 1 part lemon liquor with 3 parts kiwi juice in a chilled “midget” martini glass. I’m still exploring names, (actually I haven’t thought I should name it until I found myself writing about it,) but kiwi-tang might work.