Another summer, another standing desk

So I’ve finally been in Tucson (which I consistently spell Tuscon) for about 5 days, I’ve been in work for about 3, and now I’m going to share a few first impressions.

The first thing I thought when I was flying over the area right before I landed was “holy crap, the entire place is brown.” I’ve flown over green places like Kansas, white places like Boston, but this was the first time I’ve actually flown over a desert. This brings me to…

“OMG it’s going to be so hot, you’re going to die.” You know who you are. The weather forcast for this week does look something like:

But! I’ve been successfully biking to and from work in 100° (that’s 37.777° repeating for you celcius people) weather. It’s actually not that bad. It doesn’t really feel that hot and biking is like running a fan, but the wind is stationary and you have to ram into it.

This is the first internship I’ve had that has a commute of > 5 minutes (*cough* Chris Lee’s lab *cough*), and holy crud how do adults have time to do anything fun? It’s like you get back home, get barked at by a few dogs, cook yourself dinner, take a shower, and get a grand total of 2 hours before you have to go to sleep to get up at 6 the next morning.

Not only that but the super hot temperatures that Tucson offers to its locals means that no one really goes out before the sun sets. Guess what? It’s summer and the sun sets at like 8pm.

My first job here in Tucson working for these guys was to build a standing desk for a coworker. The first thing I thought was: “another summer, another standing desk”

But this time I was going to really pimp it out in an effort to be “THE BEST INTERN EVER.” So that meant that I spent the next 16~ hours CADing and I think it’s safe to say that that’s not really healthy for your eyes or wrists.

See that frame on that table? I learned this thing in Solidworks called weldments, and that frame with all it’s mitered corners and 3Dness was made from a simple 3D sketch with just lines. Magic.

And then of course comes the actual building part. I’ve only started, so here are a few in progress pictures. You could play “match the part to the render” if you want.