Haro, Portland!

Lee and I are racing to finish A Meeting at Corvallis, so I haven't taken the time to update recently. I'm about 75 pages ahead at the last comparison, but Lee tends to be more dedicated to reading. It's a really good book, and the story is reaching a huge peak. A large war has been building for three books now, and it just kicked off. You've got a loose confederarion of the good guys against a neo-feudal system of bad guys. I've read well into the war, and the outcome is far from decided. And no guns. It's all hand-to-hand combat. They do have some awesome catapults, trebuchets, and ballistae (giant crossbows for lack of a simpler explanation).

Classes have been going well, I suppose. Dr. Vakili found the homework tap and turned it to high. Dr. Kupershmidt found the foot-in-mouth switch. And Dr. Antar likes chalk. Math (Dr. K) is proceeding smoothly enough on the merits. We just started chapter 2, which is behind his schedule, but I think we all needed the extra time. A couple guys were a little more vocal about it, and that's always appreciated. I think I would have muddled through fine a little faster, but it was nice not having to. Inviscid flow is getting into the fluid mechanics portion of the semester. We've been solving simple(r) problems with just the basic expressions. They aren't obvious by any means, but, knowing what awaits, I'm not upset at all that we're spending time on it. Heat Transfer is coming off very much like a math class. We've been solving differential equations that model different heat transfer modes. They do model heat transfer, but it's been much more about the DE's (and PDE's at that).

Lee has started me watching Scrubs on Comedy Central almost every night. It's not a bad show, and I've generally seen all the CSIs airing opposite it. New TV is about to pick back up, and so, then, will the opportunities to waste time. Always good.

I had a perfect way of saying something last night, now I've lost it. Oh, well, I guess I should have written it last night. More tomorrow.