Yeah, Go Away

Tensions are running high with a major (and unreasonable) deadline for Missiles tomorrow morning. Everyone should be fine by Monday or Tuesday. More tomorrow.

Come Back, BSG!

Battlestar Galactica had its season finale tonight. The show won't return until 2008. This show is bad about doing that, and what makes it worse is that it's such a good show. Watch it from the miniseries until now, and you'll be hooked, even if you don't normally like science fiction. I don't want to wait until next year. That's one reason I'm not a Cubs fan. (Sorry, Will, had to go there.) Also, awesome music in the final scene / sequence.

I'm not in a happy place with my classes right now. In Heat Transfer, Antar keeps assigning worthless derivations. How do I know they're worthless? The book skips them. This from a book that LOVES derivations for the sake of derivations. In Missiles, I'm trying to design a propellant grain for each of my stages. I have Stage 1 by some stroke of luck, it seems. Stage 2 is virtually impossible without violating something. I can't violate laws of physics, so I'm going to have to violate a "recommendation" (read: "fiat" [from the Latin "let it be," an order from an authority, often religious]) of the instructor. It's not so much that I mind doing that (it's essentially all I did in middle school math), but I shouldn't have to. He should (1) be teaching me how to do this instead of me fumbling around in the dark on it and (2) not go off on wild tangents of his own if I'm not allowed to do the same. It's frustrating - all of it.

I'm headed up to the school a little early tomorrow to try to finish up something I'm working on for Missiles. I could do it here in the morning, but then I'd have to stop to go to school, then try to start back once I got there, then stop again for class, so I'm just going to get up, eat breakfast, and go to school and work out of the office. Makes for a long day, but it can't be helped. More tomorrow.

Who Do I Want to Win It?

Right now, the Ohio State-Tennessee game is 77-74 in favor of the Vols. I attend the University of Tennessee, so I am rooting for them. However, in my bracket, I picked Ohio State to win this game. I'm not watching it - I have the game open on ESPN.com to check the score, but I don't know who to pull for as the clock winds down. I'll probably just turn the computer off and read and find out the score tomorrow.

Today was the "try not to strangle the professor day" after he reversed the decision of the Flandro and is making us design the propellant grains. This is a step Amy had planned to skip. That didn't work out. (I was also going to ignore this step for my upper stage, but I did it for my lower stage already.) All of us have the same problem - long burn times mean large chunks of propellant, which have to be arranged just right in order to get the patterns we all want. It's just geometry, much like Mozart is just music.

I also applied for a job online today. It's with Jacobs ESTS, a contracting company with NASA. I would officially work for Jacobs, but be housed on site at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). All that assumes I get the job, of course. It's in solid rocket motor stuff, the same field as my complaint paragraph just previous to this one. It's a different set of problems in the same field, though. It would be a challenge, but interesting and fun. I hope to hear back from them soon.

Tennessee is down by 1 with a little over a minute on the clock. More tomorrow.

Basketball Sized Chocolate Mud Baby

It's from Robot Chicken - don't ask.

Yesterday, I went to school, read a technical paper related to my thesis, went to the most boring class ever, came back, and did next to nothing. The class wasn't as bad as it has been some days, but that's not saying much. I don't like the book, and he's teaching from the book almost directly. In fact, he's almost doing the one thing I hate most from teachers - reciting the book back to the class. He does try to offer explanations and put things in context, so it's not unbearable yet, but this is easily the worst class I've had at UTSI.

Today, Amy came over, and she, Lee, and I worked on missile designs most of the afternoon. Mine is coming along nicely, Lee's is a little farther behind, and Amy is planning on skipping the rest of the steps.

Lee and I are getting almost proficient at our meals now. We've done fried chicken and tacos since we've been back, and even tried a marinated-steak-in-tortilla-wrap. I hesitate to call it a fajita, but that's what we were going for. It's not up to the level of the old stand-bys, but it was tasty, and a nice first attempt.

Mythbusters formula for success: large explosions. That's all you need. Big go boom. More tomorrow.

Reaganomics!

Stayed up too late watching Robot Chicken. More tomorrow.

I Should Go To Bed

But I've only updated this thing once in over two weeks, and it wasn't much of an update. Here's all you're going to get of the last two weeks:

The week before Spring Break:
Jennifer came up to visit Lee; Brent came up to work on things for his thesis. This turned my two-bedroom apartment into housing for 4. Brent was only here for two nights, so it wasn't over crowded for too long, but that whole week just seemed long because I was ready for break. I got my thesis topic approved, and started reading some papers that will directly apply to my thesis, so that was progress, at least. Classes were long and boring.

Spring Break:
Monday, Lee and I put in a full day of work on our respective missiles. We met at CBU in the morning, worked until a class kicked us out of the computer lab, went to lunch with the coolest man on the planet - Dr. Shiue, then worked another few hours after lunch. I didn't finish it there, but over the week, I did finish my grain designs. The Flandro said today that he didn't think it was overly important to have it detailed, but it won't hurt to have it done anyway.

The rest of the week was semi-productive mixed with lots of doing nothing. I didn't accomplish anything except a propellant grain design, but I really didn't need to do any more than that. I got to spend some time with friends and family, which isn't always the case when I'm in town. All-in-all, it was a good spring break. It was also my last spring break. I may pursue other degrees, but I doubt it will be without a real job in the background (or job in the foreground, degree in the background), so these pure vacations are nice while they last.

Today:
I went to school about my normal time, 10AM and did nothing until my 10:45 class. The instructor had not shown up at 10:50, and we were debating ettiquette related to leaving, when the Flandro showed up and told us that instructor Paul wouldn't be there today. So the Flandro answered a question or two and let us go before 11. I could have waited until today or even tomorrow morning to drive back to Tullahoma if I'd known this class was going to be cancelled (granted, I don't think the instructor knew much before we did today, so there's no one to blame). I ate lunch at school, came back here and took a quick nap, then went to the store to stock up on food stuff for the next week or so, cooked some cornbread and whipped up some mashed potatoes while Lee handled frying the chicken, watched some Enterprise, then killed a couple hours staring at the interweb. Nice way to ease back into the work. More tomorrow.

I Win

I'm the first to break the blog hiatus. Maybe that's losing for holding out the shortest, but I'm calling it winning.

I'm also calling it a night. The time change and Spring Break are playing havoc with my schedule, so expect regular posts when classes resume. More then.

I have always liked . . . Cowabunga

I made a funny!

Ah, the good old days of movies and TV - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the first movie). I saw it in the theater when it came out, but I don't think I'd seen it since then. I remembered the line at the end (the blog title and follow-up), and parts of the plot (Raph healing in the bathtub at a house in the country), but I had forgotten a lot of things, too. It was still a good movie, 18 years after its theatrical release. We've been on a movie nostalgia trip of late - Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (I remember the cartoon, but same difference), Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and now Turtles (with Turtles 2 coming next), and I have to say, I'm enjoying these movies again.

I did some more work on my missiles project today. I've got my nozzle analysis working fairly well; my mass budget has numbers in it, though they are completely made up; and Cequel data is working its way into the analysis. Cequel is an advanced combustion chemistry code which we can only use through our instructor, who has a copy and gives us the data that we need for this project. My upper stage, which includes all my hardware but only about half of my structure (the other half is budgeted on the lower stage), is pushing the limits of my 150 pound estimate. I hope the real masses of the components are less than I am budgeting, because I don't want to have to re-run a lot of numbers.

Ninja . . . vanish. More tomorrow.

Brave New World

Tonight, Lee and I watched Idiocracy. The simple premise is that the average American is "frozen" and wakes up 500 years in the future. The time has not been kind - average intelligence has dropped to a degree where he is the smartest man alive by a wide margin. The whole movie is a satire (Satire (from Latin satira, "medley, dish of colourful fruits") is a technique used in drama, fiction, journalism, and occasionally in poetry, the graphic arts, the performing arts and other media. Although satire is usually witty, and often very funny, the purpose of satire is not primarily humor but criticism of an event, an individual or a group in a clever manner - Wikipedia). The premise, as presented in the first few minutes of the movie, is that the smarter and more educated people of America (and the world) tend to put off having kids and have fewer children in general, while your generally less intelligent, less educated population has more kids. Eventually, the world is populated by morons, who breed more morons who are even more moronic, who breed more moronic morons, etc. The end result is a society where the president is the ultimate fighting champion and the #1 porn star, and no one knows anything. One of the cabinet secretaries won a contest to earn his post; one is sponsored by Carl's Jr.; one is Mike Bolton from Office Space. Our average guy becomes a cabinet secretary, has some wacky adventures, and makes the world a little better place. The plot isn't as important as the satire - that for a culture as dependent on technology as we are, we know almost nothing about how it works or how to fix it. How many of you reading this could fix your computer should it break down? How do we teach medicine to students who don't pass mathematics? At what point does society start to suffer from what everyone seems to agree is a poor education system? It becomes a cycle - teachers don't know a subject well, so they don't teach it well, so the students don't learn it well, so those who become teachers can't teach it, etc. The scary thing is, and this is the whole point to a satire, nothing in the movie was all that out there. Yes, you can argue some with the premise and that intelligence isn't completely governed by genetics or environment (there are numerous examples of genius-level intellects coming from areas where formal education doesn't exist and from parents of at best average intelligence), but we are already experiencing a situation where our best and brightest aren't in the leadership of the country (no W jokes). Who is currently the governor of California? Who was the governor of Minnesota? I'm not saying anything bad about Ahhnold and Jesse "The Body" Ventura, specifically, but is it really that far a leap to see someone with absolutely no qualifications run for and achieve office simply because they're well known (assuming my two examples had qualifications to begin with)? It's all worth thinking about. Then again, I'll be dead, and this world will mean nothing.

We also watched Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, which is quite the opposite in terms of intellectually thought-provoking. I've seen it now, that's about all I can say. And I'm really tired. More tomorrow.

Lousy Smarch Weather

Not the 13th day of the 13th month, but the weather was stormy all day today. I managed to get to school, then back to the apartment again between the stronger showers. We were under a tornado watch most if not all of the day, but I didn't see anything near that bad. There was a thunderstorm last night, but today all I noticed was some harder rain.

In missles today, we had the design discussion I mentioned in yesterday's post. Amy, Lee, and I are all in similar places with similar designs. Gloyer seemed to think my and Lee's designs were very close, and they really aren't. They're in the same ballpark, mostly because we're working within the same universe. As Lee pointed out after class, a shark is similar to a dolphin because they both live in the ocean. Our designs are similar because we're working with the same requirements and similar engineering skills, not because of collaboration. We're no collaborators! Collaborators should be shot! Or airlocked.

After class, I read some papers for Dr. Moeller. They dealt with thermocouples embedded within a test medium and using the result for accurate predictions. Didn't seem that ground-breaking, but it never does when you read the polished papers (and even less so when you read it in three different papers the exact same way). I found the information he wanted, and left it on his door. I really needed to talk to him (a "come to Jesus" if you will) about my thesis, or lack thereof. It was supposed to start LAST spring, then over the summer, then take up a lot of time in the fall, then early January, then "soon." I told him well over a year ago that I was looking for a project to finish in time to graduate in May 2008, and I've kept reminding him of that goal. Now, the thesis scheduling deadline is three weeks from tomorrow, and I haven't even started on ANYTHING. May doesn't seem very likely, and August deadlines are approaching quickly. I need a thesis, any thesis will do, any advisor will do. I hate, hate ultimatums, but one is rapidly becoming necessary. I agreed to do this project, but that does require there be a project for me to do. I tried to track him down after lunch, but no success. He must have a seventh sense about these things (his sixth is his ability to tell when squirrels are frightened). I'm going to have to have that talk before Spring Break.

"And there it is."

More tomorrow.