Perhaps Puff

The return of the Friday night star stuff seems to be just what was required to get a blog entry out of me. I have had the time, but not the desire, to write more. It's nothing specific - no lingering grudges or anything - just haven't felt like logging into Blogger and writing. Tonight, however, Lee said he was going to blog, so I had to as well.

I'm not even going to try to summarize the last couple of weeks. For one thing, it hasn't been all that interesting. (I did see TMNT, which is a very good interpretation of the Ninja Turtles franchise.) Another reason I'm skipping the recap is that I'm lazy.

I am finally working on some thesis-related work. I am taking data recorded from thermocouples and using that to estimate temperatures inside a rocket engine. The data they have has a lot of noise (signals which have no physical relevance but exist due to the way the measurements are taken and recorded), so the first step is to apply a filter to remove the noise. For the past couple of days, I've been working with what's called a notch filter, or a band-stop filter. The goal of that filter is to remove the noise created by the electrical power system (which is at 60 Hertz). The next step is to remove other noise by using a low-pass filter, which essentially smooths the data. I've never used filtering before, so I've been relying on Dr. Smith of UTSI and Brent, who crashed on my couch most of the week. Dr. Smith told me what to do and gave me an example of how to do it; Brent helped me understand some of the details of how it works. Dr. Moeller advised, by which I mean he asked me what I was doing, asked Dr. Smith what to do, and let me show him the results of what I've been doing. All this filtering is just to make the data useful for the equations we have, so this is supposed to be the easy part.

I'm heading down to Huntsville tomorrow to try to watch some of the Great Moonbuggy Race. The weather is supposed to be bad, so the race stands a chance of being cancelled, but Lee and I are going to try to see an old CBU friend and maybe a professor or two. I'd also love to run into some people who'd like to give me a job.

I'm going to try to stay current on this blog, but the next couple of weeks are going to be crunch time. I need to finish my Missiles project (presentation and paper deadlines are coming up way too quick), plus with thesis work to be doing, I'll be busy enough for a while. When classes end this semester, I'll be focusing on thesis work exclusively, so I'll be pretty much setting my own schedule. I'm going to try to get to Memphis a little more than I have been lately. Hopefully, I can get my thesis done with lighter, steady work rather than trying to get a lot done in short intervals, and find time to enjoy my last few months in school. Yeah, that's going to happen. More tomorrow.