The Internet home of Taite R. Clark
Since I came home from Ohio I’ve been biking a lot. I finally broke 1,000 lifetime miles on my odometer, not including the miles before I factory reset it several years ago. Here are some photos from these rides and around the house.
My upcoming internship at Central Hudson could not be done remotely, so I am looking at other ways to spend the summer.
Dublin, Ohio to Sharon, Vermont. 720 miles, 13.25 hours including stops.
We have gone back and forth between snow and sun for weeks. Yesterday was winter, today is spring.
Trees have been blooming for a while now.
Aside from some dandelions, I haven’t seen many wildflowers yet. These are about ready to bloom.
These fuzzy babies occupy our pond now. Their parents kept me at a distance with death stares.
One park in Dublin has a neatly laid-out grid of 6-foot-tall ears of corn, cast in cement. I visited on a very snowy Saturday in March.
This will be a hard one for future archaeologists to explain.
The robins were out in hordes. Is that a CR-V in the background?
I have just one month left at Honda. The first time I walked through the factory, the size and complexity took my breath away, and I wondered how I would ever find my way around. Now it doesn’t feel quite as vast. The sounds and smells are more familiar. I’ve gotten used to donning safety glasses when I leave my office, and tapping the horn whenever pulling out of a parking space (something I’d like to see adopted in parking lots everywhere).
With this familiarity, I’ve gained a lot of independence. And that’s the fun part. Running all over the two factories to track down cars for quality checks; disassembling prototype cars to update their software; designing circuit boards and scribbling code for a side project; driving laps on a track to test adaptive cruise control; all with minimal oversight. I get to feel like a real engineer – until an associate whom I’ve never met tells me I look like I’m 12 years old.
This past weekend I ventured southeast to the Hocking Hills area of Ohio. Conkle’s Hollow is a gorge in Hocking Hills with a 2-mile trail around its rim, and a half-mile wheelchair-accessible trail into the gorge itself. I took both.
I went on a sunny day with temperatures in the forties, but there was still snow on the valley floor, and icicles dangled from every cliff. As the rocks warmed, every few minutes I heard a group of icicles break loose and crash into the valley. Once, I saw this happen from below. The geology of the area creates amazing undercut cliffs and caves.
There were lots of warning signs, I think geared toward locals who had never been high enough to see over a tree. After a short, steep climb, the rim trail was mostly flat, with many scenic overlooks.
I realized this weekend that the highest point in Ohio is about fifteen minutes from my work. Look for some mountaineering photos soon!
The Darby Creek Metro Park, located a few miles from my apartment, has many trails and amenities, but its main attraction is a herd of bison. The steel sculpture above sits near the visitor center. The public is kept away from the herd by two fences.
This Sasquatch photo is the best I could do. It was a bitterly cold day in the teens. But except for a few days like this, the weather has been in the thirties and forties. Only a dusting of snow, twice.
From outside, the state capitol building in downtown Columbus is modest, upstaged by skyscrapers all around it.
Inside, it is stunningly opulent. Everywhere are high ceilings, intricately carved marble, gold leaf, and murals/frescoes/whatever these are.
All but deserted on a Sunday.
The rotunda and the halls that branch off it are painted in pastels.
My roommate has the high ground.
This is the fanciest water fountain I have ever seen. Elkay, take notes.
A stained glass version of the state seal is on display in the museum, in the basement of the capitol.
The downtown is a mix of new high-rises and very old churches. We drove past some great buildings, which I will get more pictures of when it stops being so cold. It’s a surprisingly attractive city.
My three weeks at Honda have already been better than I expected. I’ve driven a prototype car worth as much as a Ferrari on the Interstate, alone. I have learned a great deal about what makes all the microcontrollers in every car work together for hundreds of thousands of miles without errors, and seen the detailed procedures that come into action when things don’t work as expected. I’ve helped to set up data collection systems for the road testing that Honda engineers do every day, and I’m working on a device to make that data collection easier.
Most importantly, the people I’ve met at Honda have always treated me with respect. I know nothing compared to the other engineers, who can recite part numbers and run through procedures from memory, but I am trusted with equally important tasks. That has been both exciting and terrifying. But don’t worry; every test I perform is reviewed by several higher-ups before the car is unleashed on the public.
Two days ago, I left Vermont on a cross-country road trip to Columbus, Ohio, where I have a co-op job at Honda of America Manufacturing. I haven’t seen much of the area yet, since I’ve been unpacking and getting settled, so these are just some preliminary snapshots of the area.
I stayed the night in Batavia, NY to break the trip into two six-hour chunks. That morning was the only time I saw direct sunlight the whole trip. It rained almost continuously for two days.
It was also an unusual heat wave. In Erie, PA, in the dead of winter, it was 72 degrees F. Here and there are signs of the Rust Belt.
Past Cleveland, the last of the hills faded away. With nothing to obstruct them, the roads out here continue in a straight line for miles at a time.
Honda set me up in a very nice, fully furnished 2-bedroom 2-bath apartment in this housing development, in a sea of cookie cutter housing developments. Some planner sprinkled traffic circles everywhere like confetti; I can’t go anywhere without crossing at least two rotaries, often four or five. That’s the upper-middle-class aesthetic of this area.
Walking around, I noticed swaths of land being cleared for yet more development, and entrances to these developments have already been built into the roads that crisscross the suburb. Columbus must be expanding. It certainly has room to grow.
Driving to the Marysville plant, you first pass the shiny new Honda heritage center, a sort of museum of their company. Then you reach the edge of this city-sized factory. Every Honda Accord you have ever seen was built here, as well as its Acura siblings, the TLX and ILX. Acres of cars sit behind it, waiting to be shipped across the country. Hondas are not American cars, but many (the Accord, the CR-V) are produced with American labor, and have been since 1982.
When you finally pass this behemoth, you find the Performance Manufacturing Center, a smaller, newer factory that produces the world’s stock of the Acura NSX supercar. Beyond that, a huge test track can be seen on satellite view, part of the Transportation Research Center.
I don’t yet know what kind of new technology I’ll be testing, and once I do, I won’t be allowed to share specifics. I know most companies are working on more intelligent cruise control, some aiming for full autonomy. Honda will certainly be working on something along these lines. They are also sure to be developing fully electric vehicles, and expanding their plug-in hybrid offerings, as many of their competitors are doing.
A surreal week spun out of three narratives:
My seven days to unwind, between RPI’s summer term and fall term, were thus a little less than relaxing. But I was happy for a change of scene and a chance to catch up with relatives.
Afterward, I plunged right back into school, hosting an orientation event for freshmen before classes started. As you can see, it’s taken me about a month to upload these photos. Yes, there are only eight. Yes, I sacrificed captions for the ability to view them larger, so you get to decide what each one represents.
My work at Honda, beginning in January, will involve testing the electrical systems of prototype vehicles—cars you may see on the road two or three years from now. It’s exciting stuff (well, to me, it is). Expect photos of snowy cornfields come January!
A few photos from cycling around the region.
