live in Switzerland now
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 23rd, 2008
Finally back from 2 hard weeks installing our new equipment at Randa. Last week it was the solar power system and this week the fiber optic strain sensors. We installed borehole sensors with grout in our 120m deep hole near the edge of the slide, and 2 crack-meters across tension cracks at the back of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 15th, 2008
I’ve just returned from installing a massive new solar power system at Randa in support of new monitoring equipment we have going in next week. The system is 12 panels (1160W), 4 giant batteries, and 2 charge controllers. Our new technician and I designed it, and a couple others from our group worked really hard [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 3rd, 2008
This long weekend Jan and I celebrated the Swiss national holiday by going to Austria. Salzburg is a beautiful city notable for its medieval castle, being the birthplace of Mozart, but mostly as the home of the Von Trapp family singers! The train ride was a reasonable 6 hours (of mostly napping). We walked all [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 3rd, 2008
For the last two weeks I have been co-teaching our group’s summer field camp on engineering geology concepts in hard rock. Some other suckers do the soils part. We have 7 really bright master’s students, and this is their last class. This year the field camp was in the area of Oberalppass – near Sedrun [...]