Chasing Your Tail To Spite Your Face

Or something like that.

It's been about a week, and I needed to update. I don't believe I made my promise to blog every night official, but I said it in front of Jeff which amounts to the same thing. His rationalization as to my failure to comply is essentially the one I would pose, so I will.

Dr. Vakili got back to me on Wednesday saying he hoped I would be able to get some work done over the break....but that was it. So we played email tag until Friday when I broke down and called him (at 8:00 in the morning, mind you - I could have slept until 10:00). We discussed it, and he told me to work Monday through Thursday of this week. That's not so bad, but it would have been good to know before finals got started. I just needed a yes or a no.

On Thursday, the Wyld Stallyns (Jeff and I) won a $100 gift card at Buffalo Wild Wings. So far, that makes for around $500 that I've had a hand in winning since we got started back in the summer. Not bad, at all.

Saturday was Brent Elis's wedding. It was a very nice service (a Baptist wedding, which is weird, because most of the weddings I go to are Catholic). The church looked neat with all the Christmas trees. I did get to meet Julie, and her dad (who is Mom's cousin). Nice people, but neither of them acted as if they knew of my existence before Saturday. Well, I had Facebooked Julie a few days earlier. But anyway, it was a little weird. On the one hand, I didn't really know about either of them very well before a week or two ago, but on the other hand, I'm way more interesting than most of the people I know. I think Aunt Eleanor dropped the ball when it came to bragging about me.

Jennifer followed me back up to Tullahoma on Sunday so we could hang out a little bit more. On the way up, we stopped off in Nashville to check out ICE! at the Opry Mills Mall. After spending an hour looking for the darned mall (we couldn't leave the hotel parking lot), we finally made it in. They have lots of animal ice sculptures, ice slides, and a crystal clear Nativity scene made of carved ice. It was very cool (puns!).

Research has been coming along well, characterization is painful, but still kinda neat. I've come to the conclusion that *groan* a database is really what we need to start storing all the data from each run. Right now, we're set to have 50+ Excel spreadsheets. That's going to get hard to pull data together very quickly. Such is life, I suppose.

Jennifer headed back to Memphis this morning, but I'll be back sometime Thursday evening. Right now things are looking like I'll be in Memphis for a solid two weeks until January 7th, so let me know soon if you want to do anything. Dates are already filling up.

Walking In Memphis

Dr. Vakili really should have taken my lunch money today. That would have made the horror complete. Yesterday I said that I was prepared for the Inviscid Final, and I was wrong. I was prepared for an Inviscid Final. A subtle distinction, but a distinction nonetheless. That exam was crazy! No stream functions, a crazy derivation that we did months ago, and lots of Helmholtz and Kelvin. Evil, evil I tell you.

Anyway, I was supposed to talk to Dr. Vakili about Christmas vacation, but he was tied up in a meeting until at least 4:00. So, I drove home. I did shoot him an email about it. Worst case, he'll tell me to come back at some point. Meh. The drive back was pretty treacherous on I-24, what with the torrential downpour and the car-fire that brought traffic to a screeching, splashing halt. The sky was overcast on I-40, which kept us from flying blind.

Tonight was the pancake study break at CBU, which was great. When is free pancakes not great? Answer me that.

Hokey Smokes!

Three down, one to go. Today's Heat Transfer exam was a pretty fair test - just challenging enough to seperate the A students from the B students. That was all-for-naught, however, because the B-students had a golden parachute known as homework. Basically, Dr. Antar's philosophy is that you really have to give him a reason to NOT give you an A. Show up, get a C. Do alright on the final, get a B. Do at least so-so on the final and turn in the homework, get an A. That's how I understand things for now, at least. Anyway, I turned in my test & homework without walking funny, which is a good sign. We'll see what's what around the end of the week when grades are posted.

All I have left now is my Inviscid Final. According to Dr. Vakili, if you ace the final, you get an A no matter what. Fortunately, that's always my plan. Where I stand now is a decent mid-term grade, and what I can only assume are gold stars on my homework (he hasn't returned anything. Bad, Dr. Vakili! No biscuit!). Anyway, after reviewing material and old tests, I think I'm ready to rock'n'roll.

After my exam tomorrow, Heather and I are going to talk to Dr. Vakili about skipping town for Christmas Break. I'm all for leaving immediately and not coming back until the day before classes; I'm willing to negotiate the second part. Heather doesn't care so much because it isn't as big a deal for her to come down here if she's needed, but it is for me. I've asked her to simply not say anything. We'll see if that works.

The Killer Angels

Today was a nice relaxing study day. I've been reading over notes and exerpts from the book for my Heat Transfer final tomorrow, and I think I'm close to being ready. Dr. Antar gave us the topics he'd be covering on the final (which suprisingly, are the high points of the course). The problem here is that the subject matter lends itself to really simple questions or really really really hard questions. Personally, I'm hoping for the former.

I went ahead and bought the books I'll be needing for next semester. Well, sort of. I bought my Inviscid book & Missile Design book with no problems, but it turns out I purchased the wrong edition of my Machine Design book - that's a first for me. Well, the vendor was kind enough to email me to let me know that there is a more recent edition out there, so I emailed him back that I'd cancel my order. Actually doing that on Amazon.com is essentially impossible. It turns out that the actual vendor is the only person that can do that. He emailed me at 6:30 tonight, and I got back to him a little after 8:00. If I don't have an answer by COB tomorrow, I'll raise some Cain. Anyway, once I get the right edition, I'll have spent less than $180 on books. Not too shabby, eh?

In other news, Brent's fiance' refers to Jeff and I as Rocky & Bullwinkle. That's pretty funny, especially since I called dibs on Rocky.

I'm about a third of the way into The Killer Angels, which Jennifer gave to me for my birthday. It's written by Michael Shaara (father of Jeff Shaara). Most of you know the film version - Gettysburg. Its a little different than what I'm used to from the younger Shaara; his novels cover months or years at a time, Killer Angels covers less than a week. Its very cool though, seeing the battle through the eyes of Longstreet, and Lee from the South, Buford, Hancock, and Chamberlain from the North. Good call, Jennifer.

Oh Snap!

After watching cartoons while I ate breakfast (an old, familiar ritual from years and years ago), I got started studying for my Inviscid final. Dr. Vakili gave us copies of the tests from both 2004 and 2005. Both of them look to be very fair, and very workable in the alloted 2 hours. The last two questions on both tests are nearly identical, which makes it either highly likely or highly unlikely that they'll be on the test. I'm leaning towards the former. One is a little harder to get your head around than others (there's some hair-splitting involved), but I can get it down in plenty of time.

After studying all day, it was time for Taco Night, with Chicken Little for a light-hearted mood. Recently, we've had some really high-minded (not funny) movies such as Fight Club, 12 Monkeys, and Se7en (yeah, a weird Brad Pitt series. Completely accidental, I swear). Anyway, a very funny animated movie. Good for a laugh.

When I went back up to my room after the movie, Jeff hollered from across the hall that he'd gotten an email from Kuperschmidt. I checked mine as fast as my fingers would let me. What did I find? I GOT AN A FOR THE COURSE. Oh Snap! The commie has redeemed himself, somewhat.

Studying after that seemed a little moot, and I had really hit a good stopping point for the studying anyway. In other news, if you've been paying attention, my blog looks slighty different because I recently upgraded to Blogger Beta. So far, I'm liking it. Which is weird, because Beta usually translates to "crappy." We'll see.

Math Cow Disease

Today was the day of the Applied Vector Calculus final exam.

It started off like any normal day (except that I slept until 9:00 instead of 8:00). After breakfast, Jeff and I concluded that any attempts at studying at the apartment wouldn't be very successful. After a quick good-luck phone call from Jennifer, we headed up to school.

After liberating a ream of paper from the C-Lab (C-Wing, not some dorky abbreviation for Computer Lab), Jeff and I got down to business. I'm glad I went through all of the problems over the last two days, and special thanks to Amy for compiling Kuperschmidt's solutions. I can honestly say that I did not commit any problem to memory, but it helped a lot being really familiar with both the material and the problems. Amy's flash cards also helped. I'll never make fun of anyone for making flashcards.

I should mention that around 11:00, I saved Astronomy Kid. He's the student from South Korea that likes to camp out in one of the classrooms to do his homework. This time, he seemed to have taken the camping metaphor a little too seriously - he was passed out on one of the tables. I hollered at him and made sure he wasn't missing a final, and let him be. He came by a little later to thank me, because he did have a final at 1:00 and was sure he would have slept through it. No problemo.

About a half-hour before the exam, we packed up and chilled for a little bit. It was one of those nervous, on-edge, laugh at anything conversations. We discussed Seasame Street for Grad Students, and how we would soon be knee deep in the Math exam. Knee-deep in something, at least. And somehow that conversation gave birth to "Math Cow Disease."

We headed down to the classroom at about 12:45, ready for the worst. There was plenty of gallows-humor in the room, which broke the tension nicely. My assorted-fruit TUMS were a hit, it seems. Anyway, Dr. Kuperschmidt shows up, and gives us a six problem final that I mostly remembered how to do. On one problem, it seems he didn't copy the statement correctly from the book, making the problem unworkable under the conditions. We'll see what he does about that. He was supposed to email us with our grades this afternoon, but he didn't. What a chump.

Working out at the Fitness Center went well. Packing a bag is a bit of a pain, but the free-ness makes up for so much. Dinner was at Davy Crockett's Roadhouse - the food was as good as Colton's or Logan's, but the service is a tad hit-or-miss. Dr. Who and BSG were pretty good, I think we have next Friday before the winter hiatus. Hopefully Christmas and New Years' will keep me occupied on the in between.

Lest We Forget

I'm told that it snowed this morning, but I had no idea. I was sitting three feet from a window, and had no idea. I don't think it snowed very much or for very long, but it did snow. Neat.

And why didn't I notice? Because between most of yesterday afternoon and all of today, I reworked all of the math problems we've covered since the mid-term. That's a lot of problems, and I feel like I could do about half of them on the spot. I plan on getting up in the morning around 9:00, and reviewing theory / memorizing some proofs. Here's hoping.

The Technical Writing Final was tonight, because the professor isn't going to be anywhere near Tullahoma next Tuesday. That was fine with me - I prepared as much for the final tonight as I would have next week. It was pretty stupid. It did get me out of the house for a bit, even if we're getting a draft from Northern Siberia right now.

Smallville was pretty good tonight, but the best thing about it was the trailer for the next episode in January - "Justice." Basically, we'll have Clark Kent, Green Arrow, Cyborg, The Flash, and Aquaman all fighting bad guys together in one show. Sweet.

Finally, today is December 7th, the 65th anniversary of that attack on Pearl Harbor. I generally wax philosophical on days like this, and today is no different. I'm saddened that it barely came up today, as it rarely does. I know that it was a pretty long time ago, but in all honesty it was one of the pivotal moments in 20th Century America - if not America's entire history. I guess I feel like its important to remember. Someone should.

It's A Small World After All

So apparently, one of the bridesmaids in Brent's wedding is a cousin of mine, Julie Colter Kaylor . She's actually more like a second cousin or something, I'm related to her via a great aunt. Its very likely that I've met her a few times at reunions, but I don't know that I could pick her out of a crowd. However, that won't keep me from remembering her name for possible kidney/liver donors. That's what families are for, right?

The Superfriends met again today to discuss the Inviscid Final. We used tests from the previous two years as a starting point, and discussed more and more as we went along. I think everybody got something out of it; I know I did. Lunch in the Dinning Hall was great, good chopped steak.

I'd have to say that the biggest thing I'm missing about finals back at CBU is the Pancake Study Break. That was the best idea. Ever. It was late enough at night to be a treat, it broke the tension of marathon study sessions, and it was FREE. Jeff and I have Amy (our SGA Senator) convinced to press for it next semester. Its good to know the system works.

The Mythbusters Christmas Special was on tonight. Don't drop frozen turkeys on your foot, your pet, or anything else. It won't end well, I promise. Also, the Rube Goldberg Christmas Contraption was wicked. Diet Coke + Mentos = Freakin' Awesome.

Also, I am Mighty.

Injuns On The Warpath

Today was officially the last day of classes for the semester. Woohoo.

Jeff and I got up to school at about 10:45 for a Superfriends study session, covering most of the material for the Vector Calculus exam. I'm expecting that to be my roughest exam, what with the Crazy Russian running the show and the actual math on top of that. I should be able to handle it, but we'll see.

Dr. Antar finished covering everything we needed to cover with a little less than half of the class time remaining. Not too shabby. The final is going to be 5 or 6 questions, and is supposed to cover the basics. I think I can do that.

I'm liking the FREE Arnold Fitness Center more and more. Did I mention that it was FREE? Yeah, that's pretty affordable. And its got Jeff going to the gym. Kudos all around.

I threw together my Carbon Fiber presentation in about an hour, which is more time than Hot Rod spent on his, it seemed. Jeff covered his Heat Transfer topic rather well, I covered mine pretty well, and Hot Rod seemed like he was making it up as he went along. I understand that his research hasn't been fleshed out yet (not unlike Jeff and I), but he went ahead and blundered through a bunch of technical detail that he was neither prepared or versed-enough in to talk about whereas Jeff and I wisely made completely bogus presentations. And the Injuns smelled his fear, and fed upon it. For a good 10 minutes - they even cut Hot Rod out of the conversation near the end. Eventually, I was forced to start the slow clap to end debate - luckily Jeff, Tim, and Danger caught on. Hey, we were ready to leave.

Lastly, it was brought to my attention that Brent has linked me on his website, so I'm returning the favor.

Vortex Shedding - Get The Facts

Today was the last day of Invsicid Flow. Jeff & I switched seats with Heather & Amy to see if Dr. Vakili would notice. He didn't. And we watched some ancient movies about steam lines and vorticity. They predicted lunar colonies by the late 1980s. Yowzah.

After the movies, Dr. Vakili talked about the Magnus Effect, which states that if a hypothetical airplane takes off from Atlanta heading towards Nashville moves in Inviscid Air, it leaves behind a big honkin' vortex to counteract the discontinuity at the tail end of its airfoils. Fortunately, we live in a viscous world. Otherwise, I'm sure that the Atlanta International Airport would have been sucked into another dimension what with all the vortices and all.

After class, Heather and I tried to map out our Christmas Break with Dr. Vakili to no avail. There's some high level stuff going on right now that's preventing him from making a few decisions. This leaves me in a frustrating position. Technically, he's within his rights to have me work every weekday between exams and next semester. He'd lose all of his cool points if he did that, but he can do it. Honestly, I think he's just been around the block enough times to be scared of committing to any statement without having supreme control over the situation. Most likely everything will be okey-dokey, he's just waiting to see what's up first.

There were actually people at the Fitness Center today. Crazy.

Heroes was very excellent tonight, but it was a cliffhanger that will keep me cliffhanging until January 22nd. Not cool.

I also found out today that BSG will be moving to Sunday nights when it comes back. What's up with that?

Me Fail English? That's Unpossible!

It seems that I'm not doing so good in the Spelling and Grammer department. Fortunately, I have a girlfriend and a dad to keep that in check. And for the record, most of that money spent on school was focused on science, math, and engineering.

More Heat Transfer homework today. Its a bad sign when a solution manual flat out refuses to solve a problem due to shear complexity. Very bad sign. Chapter 3 got put to rest today, and Chapter 4 should be done before I go to sleep. That'll just leave about 5 problems left to solve tomorrow night - doable, but undesireable.

The Librarian 2: Return to King Solomon's Mine premiered tonight on TNT. The first one was great, and this follow up was pretty good. You don't really have to have seen the first one to follow the sequel, and its a pretty good way to kill two hours. They'll be re-running it ad nauseam until Christmas movies start dominating the programming, which should be sometime around Thursday. Check it out.

You Got Your Batwoman In My Molemen!

I've had much, much worse Saturdays than today. Some Eggo waffles for breakfast, cartoons (Superman & the Legion of Superheroes and The Batman), and then I got to work on the ginourmous amount of Heat Transfer homework.

I've been bogged down in Chapter 3 for quite a while - separation of Variables. Repetition has helped thing make sense, to a point. I've gotten a much better grasp for the procedure, but the decision making paradigm still escapes me. According to our PDE expert Amy choosing the eigenfunction is completely random, but I don't buy it. I think its one of those things they explain to you after they give you a PhD. So basically, I'm not that interested in finding out about it right now. I should be out of the Ch 3 bog before lunch tomorrow, which is good. Then I can move on to Superposition, Complex Combination, and Normalization. Sweet.

Pizza for dinner, then Jeff and I finished watching 12 Monkeys. It got interesting, then kinda weird again, and then kinda interesting again, and then it ended weird. After that, Jeff and I watched Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Wild World of Batwoman - one of THE most awful movies ever made. Mike and the two robots, Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot made the movie watchable. Hilarious.

Also, this is my 50th blog post here at Adventures in Grad School. That's half-way to a hundred, you know. I'm going to pat myself on the back now.

I'm Ugly Like A Fox

It seems that the weather finally got a good look at the calendar, saw that it was actually December now, shouted "Great Scott!," and started making up for lost time. It was in the 30s and 40s today. I could have worn shorts on Tuesday & Wednesday. That's nuts, man.

Not much happened today, but it should have. Heather & I were supposed to meet with Pete the shop guy to talk about some kind of conveyor belt. We showed up to the Lab at 10:45 as promised, and no Pete. So I tried to load some carbon fibers on a tray for analysis, but got bored of that quickly.

Heat Transfer got really ugh-worthy when we started talking about Finite Difference Methods for transient problems (that's where something is getting heated or cooled over time). The bottom line was that you wind up having a 15 x 15 matrix that has to be solved for each time interval you go through. That gets really ugly, really fast. According to Dr. Antar, its not so bad now that we have these new-fangled 64-bit processors in our computers.

Dr. Antar let class out a few minutes early so that we could get to the seminar on time. For reasons that have not been revealed to me, we didn't have this seminar on Wednesday but on Friday afternoon instead. Aside from the scheduling inconvenience, it was a pretty neat seminar. The presentation was on current and future projects conducted by the Air Force Materials & Manufacturing Directorate at Wright-Patterson AFB. Topics included: biological heat seeking missiles, carbon-fiber aircraft (SHOUT-OUT), self-healing aircraft, transformers (robots-in-disguise), fire-fighting ATVs with super nozzles, and sentry bots that challenge intruders with a 30-caliber machine gun (SWEET!). I may have said that "SWEET!" a little too loud during the presentation, but oh well. If I were giving a lecture, I'd rather hear that on occasion rather than utter silence.

The Arnold Fitness center seems to be working out just fine. My calves & shins started protesting after my run, so I had to pass on the elliptical today. Oh well. Dinner at Ruby Tuesday's was awesome, Dr. Who was pretty good, and BSG was great. Jeff and I started watching 12 Monkeys, but he woosed out. We'll finish it tomorrow night, along with another Mystery Science Theater 3000. Good times.

No Air-Banding

Well, the good news is that I'm done with Vector Calculus class. The bad news is that our review session was more confusing than the entire course. The other good news is that we did our instructor evaluations today. Muwahahahaha. In all honesty I didn't burn him at the stake, but I did speak my mind. And a few other students in the class had plenty to say, I think. That exam is next Friday.

I did a little bit of research-related work during the break, and got my timesheet stuff taken care of too. Wasps are invading the office in ones and twos. A geometric progression like that could get dangerous very quickly.

Today in Inviscid, Dr. Vakili asked if Amy was for rent (he meant for decorating things, come on people). He also said that we were becoming one of his best classes (I don't think he says that to everyone). I have to say that the Superfriends deserve most of the credit for that, along with Rich the Canadian Spy. Its nice to get the that kind of feedback from Professors. And we talked about rotational flow around a cylindrical body and how that creates lift. Go figure.

After class, Jeff and I picked up our Student Passes for the Arnold Fitness Center from HR, then drove over to said Fitness Center. I did my usual workout, and barely limped out of there. Dinner was awesome; half because it tasted good, and half because I was starving. Lightly-breaded chicken tenders (fried), garlic mashed potatoes, and cornbread. Tasty.

I've also done some more research this evening. It's been nice to flex my Excel muscles again for a little bit. I have to be careful, though, because it could lead to Access work before I know it. *Dramatic Chord*

Tactical Missiles, Baby

The good news is that I only have one more class in Vector Calculus. The bad news is that the final is barely more than a week away. Today Dr. Kuperschmidt finished covering all the topics he wanted to cover, with tomorrow being a review day for the final. Good times.

After class, Jeff and I made a bee-line back to the apartment to start getting some work done. I worked on Heat Transfer problems until lunch, and after lunch too. I went to the gym around 3:00, and did my full 1000 calorie workout. Today was my last day at Harvey's Gym; I'll be using the Base Fitness Center until I head home to Memphis, and I'll decided how I want to do things next semester when I get back from the break.

As was brought to my attention while I was in town, I've put a few pounds back on since I moved up here, and I'm trying to remedy that. Sadly, the Atkins diet is a little cost-prohibitive while I'm up here but I can watch my calories. I've lost 3 lbs since I got back. Not too shabby at all.

I've also been trying to figure out what classes to take next semester, and I think I've got it figured out. Here's what I'm planning on taking as of tonight:

AE 512 - Viscous Flow: A continuation of Inviscid Flow, taught by Dr. Vakili. Should be pretty neat, according to Jeff.

ME 522 - Mechanical Design: It sounds like a more in-depth version of Dr. Shiue's Machine Design class, taught by Dr. Dekken (whom I've never heard of). We'll see.

ME 599 - Tactical Missile Design: The title says it all, taught by Dr. Flandro (the guy who planned the Voyager missions). Sweet.

Dr. Vakili has affirmed my first two choices, and I don't think he'll have a problem with Missile Design. I was considering the Math Seminar on Visualization, but Dr. Vakili talked me out of it (something about being completely useless or whatever).

That's all for now.

Never Doubt The Millenium Falcon

Boy, its been a while. I guess its time for the Thanksgiving Break Round-Up!

Tuesday:
Jeff & I hit the road right after Heat Transfer finished, and got into town not much later than usual. Traffic was annoying on I-24, scary on I-440, and down right perilous on I-40. That was a combination of a whole lot of cars on the road and driving straight into the sun. Anyway, I spent the evening keeping Jennifer company in the RD suite while she was on duty, and we watched Walk the Line. Good movie.

Wednesday:
I slept in (nice), and made it over to Jennifer's apartment sometime in the afternoon and watched TV / helped her do some baking. I also demolished the leftover fudge she had made for some of her law school friends. Later on, we were met by Justin & Dawn at Buffalo Wild Wings to reap the benefits of a previous Trivia Night victory - 100 free wings. We wound up getting 30 Spicy Garlic, 30 Medium, 20 Mild, and 20 Parmesan Garlic wings. And they were all tasty (well, the Mild ones were ok. We ordered those because Dawn is a light-weight).

Thursday:
First, I had lunch at the Longo's. This was the first year that I was there when the meal started. Up until now, it always seemed like I showed up in the Serengeti at a wildebeast kill after the lions, hyenas, vultures, and meerkats have had their fill. It was different this time, though - I saw food! It was pretty good, but not as good as at MY house.

So, I don't get in a rush about hustling over to my house, because I told my parents that we'd be over before 1:00, and they said they'd wait. We pull up to the house at about 12:45, walk in the door and what do we see? Right - everyone is eating. No big deal though, because there's always PLENTY of everything. Fried turkey, barbecue pork, smashed potatoes, black eyed peas, the orange stuff, rolls, sausage balls, and nine kinds of dessert. I'm salivating again, just typing. I also got to meet the new math professor at CBU, Miguel Arellano. He was very nice and we had a brief conversation about my classes. It was also great just getting to sit and talk with family.

THEN Jennifer and I went over to her aunt's house (and Jennifer can almost remember how to get there now) for dessert. Oy. Her grandmother makes pretty good fudge, if you're willing to pick out the volkswagon-size almonds. The chocolate pie was also pretty good. The family is very nice, and they nod and smile when I explain where I go to school and what I do.

Friday:
Brent wanted to play disc golf - fine. At 9:00 - not so fine. But I went anyways, and kicked his butt. And Jeff was there too. After lunch at McAlister's (tasty!) I went back to the house and vegged a little bit. Later that evening, a bunch of us (Me, Jennifer, BJ, Marly, Jeff, Russell, Scott, Whitney, Justin, Dawn, Garrett, and Kristen) went to Texas de Brazil with the half-price coupons. Its still a little steep at that, but come on. Steak! Afterwards we went back to Jennifer's apartment and played a game of Inklings! (I'm not going to explain it here). Afterwards we played Trivial Pursuit - Pop Culture Edition. The Smart Asymptotes + Jennifer, Whitney, and Marly kicked butt.

Saturday:
I got up and started working on getting Christmas stuff set up. If I don't do it, I don't think it'll get done. And it was fun watching Mack freak out when I started putting the tree together. At some point I did shatter a flood lamp bulb, but that's neither here nor there. Later on, Jennifer and I saw Happy Feet, which was hilarious and ate at Huey's. I recommend the Madison Ave burger.

Sunday:
I went and saw Jennifer before heading back, then hit the road around 2:00. The drive back had slightly less traffic, but Smokey was definitely out there. At one point near the Tennessee River, it looked like some State Troopers had busted up something big - illegal immigrants, drug smugglers, or cattle rustlers; it was hard to tell. The Sonic Chili-Cheese wrap is good.

And that brings us up to this week. Classes are winding down, I just have two more attendances for each of my classes before finals start. How did that happen?

And geez this got long. I hope none of you wished I would update, you really should have used that golden opportunity to get world peace.

It's Snowing! *Slams Door*

Craig and I saw that in Hook ages ago, and continued to do it to eachother for years and years regardless of the precipitation outside.

Yes, it actually snowed here today. Nothing stuck, at all. But it was snow, for reals. It was nice to see some snow falling.

In Vector Calculus, Dr. Kuperschmidt finally finished covering everything we NEED to cover, and has now decided to start covering infinite series (like Taylor & Forier & World). He's of the opinion that we really should have covered it in high school, which I guess is a fair statement regarding our American education system - on the other hand, he's a Commie.

Heather & I went over to the spin lab to run my fibers that I had loaded last week. We got 4 good sets of data out of 6, which isn't too bad. We're pretty sure that the fiber slipped in the wax on one run during the tensile test, and we have no earthly idea what happened on the other set. Such is life, I suppose.

Inviscid was pretty fun, we're a little behind were he wants us to be (we think), but we'll get there. Soon we're going to be discussing lift over an infinite wing (sweet!). Today we finally got to volumetric flow rates (an old, dear friend). It makes me actually look forward to Viscous Flow next semester.

The fitness center on the Base is pretty small, but I'm told its hardly ever used....I'm thinking about letting my membership at Harvey's expire, but I need to weigh my options further. I'll reach a decision sometime over the weekend.

Heroes was awesome. It's got potential to be as good as BSG, but it's still too early to tell.

I drive back to Memphis tomorrow, which is always wonderful. At least this time Jeff has the 2-way radios so we can have fun pretending to be fighter pilots. My time at home is already starting to look packed, but it should be a blast. I'm out.

Howling At A Concrete Moon

Now that's a title that jumps out at you, like a rat in your sock drawer.

Sorry about not blogging in a few days. I've been lazy.

I got up to school early (for a Friday) and went to the Spin Lab to do some more characterization. I have to tell you, it is one of the most painstakingly-annoying tasks known to man. You have to load up 10 fibers onto a tray, and wax them into place before loading the tray into the machine. These fibers are about 8 microns (5 times thinner than a human hair). On top of that being really hard to even see, I was halfway done loading my tray when it suddenly rocketed towards the ceiling. Honest Injun. After that, I just quit.

In Heat Transfer, Dr. Antar started talking about Finite Different methods for approximating heat transfer. It started off pretty familiar, like Dr. Brown taught it back when I was a junior. Then, he threw in matrix algebra. It was like watching a Nascar wreck, only worse. Why, why did he have to go and do that?

The weekly Carbon Fiber project meeting lasted another hour, but it was all very interesting and topical. Dr. Vakili gave us all journals (log books, really) to keep track of when we handle the fibers, and which batch got handled. It's easier to place blame when there's a paper trail. Oh, wait...

Dinner from Rafeal's was excellent, as well as the pie from Kroger. Dr. Who got weird even for Dr. Who, and Battlestar Galactica was a good episode in a great season.

Saturday was mostly spent doing some housekeeping, staring at my Heat Tranfer book from across the room, more housekeeping, cooking tacos (tasty!), and watching Seven. It was a pretty good movie, if a little dark. And I mean that metaphorically and figuratively. Super Troopers was a nice change of pace after that.

Today has been spent doing laundry, actually doing some Heat Transfer homework, and listening to Johnny Cash. Good stuff. And I have to say, he did a great job covering Hurt. You can really feel the emotion.

You Can't Say That On Television!

General Burnsides wasn't there to tape our classes today, so we had the crazy photography lady instead. She's not quite the skilled camera operator that Burnsides is, and she calls Dr. Vakili more unrepeatable things than Burnsides.

Yesterday was a long day. Make up class (that we didn't need, apparently - I'll get to that). Then time in the lab talking with Pete about all sorts of stuff regarding samples for characterization. On top of that, we had a seminar that was just awful. This guy wants to build solar collectors out of uranium (!). He even wants to build a giant collector over 900 square miles out in Arizona or somewhere empty to power the country. A) Uranium(!) B) Wouldn't that potentially blind the astronauts and incinerate airplanes? To top it off, he kept talking about his make-believe friend Balko. Oh, and Tom is an idiot.

Today wasn't much better. Dr. Kuperschmidt told us we'd have an extra class the Wednesday after Thanksgiving to possibly make up for missing on December 4th. But we already did that! As Blake would say, "What the junk?" Man that's annoying. What the junk, indeed?

Lunch was pretty tasty, even if we had to sit at the nerd table (my apologies to Jeff). Danger & Chewbacca made eye contact and I was momentarily powerless. Fortunately they all got up, and we were able to escape the clutches of the hangers-on with bold decisive action (getting up and leaving quietly).

We actually started talking about pressure and lift in Invscid (total geek-out). I'm not sure where Dr. Vakili wants to end up in that class, but we're getting awfully close to Viscous Flow, and not just on the calendar. I hadn't thought about it until today, but he showed how you can't have lift or drag in an inviscid flow. That doesn't seem to make sense at first, but you have to remember that you CANNOT have an inviscid flow. So, it cancels out, or something.

This got WAY longer than I thought it would. Star stuff tomorrow. Sweet.

Why Are You Wearing That Stupid Lee Suit?

Well, I spent my morning today trying to wrap up my rough draft for my Technical Writing paper. It's still pretty rough, but that's the way I roll. She's hoping to get them back to us next week, so we can turn in the final copy in two weeks. This poses as a dilemma for Jeff and me, as we plan on NOT BEING THERE next week, which means we either A) wouldn't get them back in time to make revisions, or B) get them back about a day before their due if we get our operative (Tim) to slide them under our office door. A day or so to make revisions isn't ridiculous because, honestly, I don't think we'd fool with them until the day before anyway.

The most productive thing I did today was to update my resume, which is sad because it was for Technical Writing class. And only three of us even remembered our resumes for class. Weak.

In Heat Transfer, we talked about Normalization (or Non-dimensionalization). Normalization is a lot easier to say and type, which I think is why they call it that. Basically, its a process of fiddling with things until they're simpler. Unless you do it wrong. Then it's not.

Technical Writing class was pretty lame, as usual. Apparently I interview well, at least when a befuddled Physics major and a plucky foreign student are asking the questions. And "How does Jeff interact with other people?" With utter disdain! Ha!

Subway isn't doing their 2 footlongs for $7.99 after 4pm any more. That's weak too.

What The Helicopter?

Good weekend, but long.

Dr. Antar didn't run too long on Friday, which was good. I hit the road, and got into Memphis around the usual time. Friday night was the Barrister's Ball (Law Prom) at Ernistine & Hazel's in downtown Memphis. It's a former house-of-ill-repute turned bar & dance area. Overall, I had a pretty good time. One of my fraternity brothers who is a 2-L (second year law student to all of us non-law students) showed up with 4 bottles of wine. He only got to drink two of them; the other two are walking with Jesus now. The music was good, but very very loud. More importantly, I was able to get some Central BBQ before going to the dance.

Saturday was a nice, relaxing day. Jennifer and I eventually went to Steak-n-Shake (good chili) and saw Babel. My advice on that: don't. If you absolutely must, go to the matinee.

Yesterday Jennifer and I cooked pancakes at her apartment before I headed back to Tullahoma. The drive back to Coffee County was also fairly routine, its just getting a lot darker a lot earlier now. That's really evident when you leave Nashville on I-24 and the street lights stop, and it gets capital-D dark. Strange.

Today was fine, as far as classes go. I stayed off of Dr. Kuperschmidt's radar, and Dr. Vakili has somewhere better to be, and let us know that when he ended class a few minutes early. He also mentioned something about emus during a derivation. Also, a freaking helicopter landed on the court yard today. A freaking helicopter. How many schools does that happen to? Also, I think it belongs to the school. How many schools have a freaking helicopter? Not many, I bet.

I Never Did Get The Hang Of Thursdays

It was warm again today. High of 75, I think. Seriously, I thought I left all this weird-weather crap back in Memphis. I guess there's no escaping it. Not that I'm complaining, really - the weather was beautiful today. Lunch was even eaten on the patio outside the Dinning Hall. It overlooks the lake, which is pretty impressive. I mean, the lake is right there and hard to over look. Puns!

One of these days I'm going to learn to just quit asking questions in Vector Calc. At least I'm slowly getting my head around line integrals, which have been taunting me since Calculus III. Anyway, so Rich the Canadian Guy asks a question, Meestir VanHorn asks another, then I follow up with another relevant question. What happens? A roll call through the class to see if everyone understands. Wow. Just, wow.

Before Inviscid, we had a nice discussion about last night's Mythbusters. The B-myth dealt with the idea that you can get sucked along by a fast-moving train if you stand close enough to the tracks. They even built a decent-sized wind tunnel using drinking straws for flow-straighteners. The A-myth tackled the concrete glider. Adam & Jamie proved that it can be done, but its not recommended. Guess what the winning design was reinforced with? Carbon fiber mesh. Dr. Vakili pointed out that the drinking straw idea was probably good enough for TV, but it wouldn't cut it for government work. The honeycomb design uses the same member thickness, utilizes the area better, and reduces turbulence better. Good to know.

Well, that stupid term paper for Technical Writing is pretty much done. It's a very rough draft, and that's all I got to say about that.

Tomorrow is the Barrister's Ball (also known as Law Prom 2k6), so I'll be driving back to Memphis for the weekend again. Sweet.

Well, It Was Good While It Lasted

Well, the Democrats seem to have taken back Congress and Donald Rumsfeld has been booted to save some face. Silver lining: Harold Ford, Jr. did not get elected to the U.S. Senate, and No. 1 passed with flying colors.

Well, yesterday I met with Dr. Vakili about the project. We keep having these meetings, and the same things keep being said. I'm happy if he's happy.

Well in Heat Transfer, we finally got out of Chapter 3 - Seperation of Variables. We spent over a month on that. We the spent A DAY on Chapter 4 - Superposition. The Superposition method is basically the same as Seperation of Variables, but doesn't pretend to make them seperate and equal. No pretentiousnes at all. And then he gave us more homework - BAM! just like that.

Jeff and I took advantage of the 5 burgers for $5 after 5:00 on Tuesdays at Sonic for dinner last night. I think they should make it more specific, like the 5th month of the year, and possibly accepting only $5 bills. I'm just throwing these out there, they don't have to adopt them. Technical Writing was dumb, albeit shorter than usual. We, a bunch of engineers and science majors, figured out all of Nike's problems in about a half hour, and wrote hand-written memos to their Board of Directors. You're welcome, Nike.

Stupid like that makes you want a shower afterwards.

So we got back home, and tried to follow the election when the power went out around 9:30. I thought I was going to explode. It stayed off for about an hour and a half, just long enough to ruin the evening and warrant early bed. Bummer.

Today I spent most of the day trying to get my Technical Writing term paper written, and its almost there. I wanted it finished, but I can end it tomorrow, no problem. I just need a solid conclusion, and sources to back up my flagrant plagarism. Remember: more than one source = research.

I'd Give A Kidney For Some Good Barbecue

Seriously. I've got two of them.

Friday:

During Heat Transfer, I literally ran out of paper in my notebook. No joke. That's only happened once before, back during my junior year in...Heat Tansfer! This subject really lends itself to a righteous amount of note-taking. The first time around, I think it was more about the pictures, this time has been about the differential equations and their evil derivations.

After class, I realized I had my Carbon Fiber project meeting. The meeting, by all rights, should have lasted maybe 5 minutes. Instead, it lasted a freaking hour. I've had that happen before at Smith & Nephew. I wasn't suprised that it happened, only very annoyed. That put Jeff and I in Nashville at 5:00 instead of a little before 4:00. That's a BIG difference. The rest of the drive was uneventful, and I wound up hitting town about an hour after I usually do. Jennifer and I ordered dinner from Camy's, which was really good.

I wound up getting to the house right when Mom, Dad, and Blake got in from baseball and got to talk a little bit before bed. They got Mack a haircut, and he's grown even more. He's a good dog, from what I can tell. Way better than Baxter.

Saturday:

I left the house a little before 10:00 to pick up Jennifer and meet BJ & Marly at IHOP before the wedding. I like pancakes. We got to the wedding on time, and it was great. I got to see a lot of old friends that I don't see much anymore (David Tran & Christina, Justin Khuel & Dawn, Paul & Bekky Robbins, Ashley Miller, BJ & Marly, Erik Weghorst). The wedding itself was very nicely done, and kudos to Jackie for getting it all together in a very short amount of time. The food was great too. It was also great to get proof of Erik's fiance Pam. I didn't have much to rib him with now, but that was just as well.

Later on, David & Christina met us at Chili's for dinner, and Garrett met up with us along with his new girlfriend Sheena (one of Jeff's friends from way back). It's weird, and I think one of us knows Kevin Bacon. We wound up seeing The Prestige, which was very good.

Sunday:

After a great lunch at Huey's (chili cheese fries & a Madison Ave burger) with Jennifer, I picked up Jeff and we headed back to Tullahoma. It was a pretty uneventful drive, fueled by gasoline, beef jerkey, and Diet Coke.

Today:

It was back to classes today, whether I wanted to or not. Dr. Kuperschmidt proved something using the Incoherence Method, which was fun to watch. Dr. Vakili taught us about sinks & sources in uniform flows and sketched some "strange things" on the board to illustrate. "Strange things?" you ask. Well, lets just say that they would have been more at home in a biology lab.

Now I'm struggling to get a rough draft for my technical writing term paper done, and it's slow going. So far, its been the mental equivalent of passing a kidney stone. I know it needs to get out, but that's not helping much. Oh well, sleep might help.

Mommas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Engineers

Tuesday:

In Heat Transfer, Bessel Functions reared their ugly heads once again while we were discussing an axisymmetric cylindrical problem. We also got a very interesting question about utilizing symmetry from Dr. Antar, which was spurred on by a stupid question from Annoying Guy. I really shouldn't say that; there are no stupid questions, only lots of inquisitive idiots.

I like Subway, especially the 2 foot-longs for $7.99 after 4:00 deal.

At 6:00, Jeff and I stumbled into a big, steaming pile of Technical Writing. Due to constraints of propriety & the actual language, I cannot completely express my utter dislike for this class. We sat around for 15 minutes waiting on people to show up, and then we spend an hour and 45 minutes talking about bibliographies. Bibliographies! Seriously. Seriously.

I saw Monster House after class, and I have to say I wasn't all that impressed. There was a lot of buzz about it, but it just didn't seem that great. Oh well. I did see a shooting star though, that was cool. And the fog last night was totally Halloween-appropriate. A werewolf could have jumped out and I would not have been totally shocked.

Today:

I've spent most of the day working on my stupid Technical Writing paper. Gosh, I hate that class. I'm not just a whole lot closer to being done, but getting started is always the hardest part. Especially if you hate the class more and more with every passing minute.

Back to class tomorrow, but Memphis on Friday. I'm trying to hang in there.

Lights, Camera, Action

Not bad for a Monday, that's for sure.

Instead of getting up and going to Math Class this morning, I headed over to the lab to be an extra in the promotional video that is being taped all over campus this week. I mostly stood around off camera, watching Dr. Vakili get interviewed in the Spin Lab with some totally cool blue mood-lighting in the background. After his interview, we did a few shots standing around the spin lab, pretending to work. We did a shot at the conveyor belt, one at the LabView screen, one at the video monitor, and we even did a fake loading of the heat oven (it's a redundant name, but I didn't come up with it). Afterwards, we got to see the water tunnel in action, and got to stand in front of it while Dr. Vakili explained the flow instabilities around the weapons bay of a B-2 Stealth Bomber -that's what it looked like at least; we were really talking about the Trunk Monkey.

Lunch was a usual lunch in the office - turkey sandwich and a granola bar. I do like having the fridge up there though. I hated having to walk 100 yards to buy a Diet Pepsi. Speaking of those, they don't move very fast around UTSI. They're still selling Superbowl cans. Yikes.

During Inviscid this afternoon, the video guys came by again. With any luck, the video will make it appear that I'm one of the only students at the school. That'd be sweet. I don't think that's going to happen though. Tomorrow, they're going to have a helicopter buzz the school, and film from up there. How neat is that?

Technical Writing is tomorrow night, on Halloween. That's freaking-wonderful. If some punk kids egg the apartment, heads will roll. Hopefully I won't have much to complain about tomorrow, but we all know how likely that is.

Some Days Even My Lucky Rocketship Underpants Don't Help

On the whole, its been a very good weekend. My grandparents and my mom drove up to visit me this weekend. It was great to see them and all, but it was also great to eat a lot of free food while visiting. They drove up Saturday morning and got here around lunchtime. After a tour of the apartment (10 minutes or so) we went to Applebee's for a light lunch. I think I was the only one that had anything close to a light lunch (I tried their new sirloin bistro sandwich - tasty).

After lunch I showed them around the UTSI campus before we came back to the apartment and sat around visiting, which was great. Mom thought the couch was really comfortable, but that's just because she was on the end that doesn't see much traffic. Around 5:30, Jeff joined us for dinner at Western Sizzlin'. That was the best meal we've had there so far. Since we didn't really have room for all three of them, they stayed at the Hampton Inn near the Wal-Mart. It turns out that there was a Jack Daniel's Barbecue Festival in town this weekend, and about every hotel from Murfreesboro to Chattanooga was booked. Fortunately, Dad has some serious hotel-booking kung-fu and was able to shoe horn them in.

Before Mom and Nan & Pop headed back, we ate breakfast at the Crackerbarrel in Manchester. Pop got his grits, and I had my pancakes and country ham. I also made off with three bottles of the pure maple syrup - the perfect crime. It was great getting to see them, and let them see what's up here.

And this is when the weekend started turning sour. After Jeff and I got back from breakfast, I felt the rumblings of a sinus headache, so I took some benedryl. Now, most of the time, my headache goes away at the expense of a little bit of drowsiness and/or light-headedness but nothing I can't handle. However, every once in a while, its more like a low-grade concussion. This was one of those times. I wound up very drowsy, irritable, and more than a little clumsy.

So I decided to go disc golfing. Bad Idea. My throws went from bad to worse, I kept tripping over myself, and was just generally in a bad mood. On the 16th hole, I lost it. Things were said, things were thrown, and a sports bottle was killed. Game over.

A late lunch at McAlister's went a long way towards making me feel a lot more human. Eventually I came back from that weird benedryl place, and I spent the evening relaxing and fiddling with my website. That's right, my website. I'll elaborate more sometime this week.

Form Of: An Ice Menorah!

I met in early today to meet with Dr. Vakili about some new changes to the carbon fiber project. A week or so ago, He had asked Heather to look into designing a conveyor belt to attach to the Spinning equipment, and for me to look into a "roving" machine (roving as in psuedo-rope, not ambling around). For these assignments, I observed the Wally Rule as taught to me by Mike Melzig - "90% of all projects are cancelled within 10 days, so don't do anything inside of 10 days." And it totally paid-off: Pete found a $70 conveyor belt that Dr. Vakili wants us to go check out next week, and never mind about the roving. I do have some actuall research to be doing, and to keep Dr. Vakili posted on it. Overall, it was worth driving up to school early.

Sometime around lunch, I started developing one of those sinus headaches that makes your stomach flip-flop. So that was bad enough, and then I went to Heat Transfer. The class itself wasn't so bad, but it was about 10 degrees too warm. That did not mix well with the headache and mutinous stomach I was nursing. If Antar had gone much over the appointed 75 minutes, I think I would have made a scene.

Laying down after some benedryl and tums made everything better though. I wound up doing a little cleaning before dinner, because Nan & Pop and Mom are driving up to visit tomorrow. I'll just have to make sure Jeff stays in his room, maybe I'll give him a Baby Ruth bar. I'll pay a dollar to whoever catches that reference and comments first.

Dr. Who was fine tonight. The show is really growing on me, but its very British (everything, not just the humor) so you really have to pay attention to follow it. Battlestar Galactica was probably the worst episode of the season, but this has been a spectacular season so far. The show dealt with escaping occupation through last week (with some of the awesomest pyschotic acts of bravery ever) and this week they dealt with collaborators. For a sci-fi show that does a really good job of portraying real people, they were going to have to do this episode at some point. It was a good hour, but last week's spectacle is a near-impossible act to follow.

Jeff posts a really good debate regarding tonight's Law & Order. My opinion on the matter is this: No one sells sub-par equipment to my country's soldiers on my watch. No one, No excuses.

It's Like 'Hee Haw' With Lasers

Yesterday was just about the busiest Wednesday I've had since I worked at Smith & Nephew; it was pretty strange.

First off, I had to wake up even earlier than usual to get to school in time to get my flu shot. I'm not sure if it helped or not, and I didn't even get a cool band-aid (didn't get one at all!). I think $25 should at least get me Scooby-Doo(tm) if not Spider-Man(tm). Would that have been so hard?

After my sub-par flu shot, we had a Vector Calculus make-up class for a day we haven't missed yet (and has yet to be determined). I'm not quite sure behind the logic of that, but I've quit trying to figure Dr. Kuperschmidt out.

Everytime Heather & I try to get some research done, we get way-laid by one obstacle or another. This time no one had a key to the lab. That's no way to run a project, people.

The seminar yesterday afternoon was pretty interesting, but I could have done without it. It was put on by the Head of Research at Wright-Patterson AFB, who is a very smart guy it seems. Tom, the annoying grad student, tried to solve some of his problems during Q & A while simultaneously annoying everyone in earshot. The Trunk Monkey videos were funny though.

After the seminar, I snuck off to the gym for a bit before showering and driving up to Murfreesboro to see my cousin Tara's volleyball team play in the state tournament. They lost, but played very well. I also got to eat at O'Charley's, which was very nice.

Today I got my math mid-term back, with an improved score. It wasn't as much of an improvement as I would like, but I've quit trying to deal with that man. It's not worth the frustration.

We went to Ruby Tuesday's for lunch today (Heather's birthday tomorrow) and I tried a bison burger. It tasted like beef, only more so. Go figure.

Smallville was pretty good tonight, not as great as last week, but next week looks promising. And of course, BSG tomorrow night should be awesome.

Blogger is being weird, so I'm going to end this while I still can.

The 6 Million Peso Man

There goes $38.72 of well-spent money.

Robot Chicken, you had to be there.

Well, let's see, its Tuesday now. Oh yeah, I'm going to send Dr. Kuperschmidt on a kayaking trip. I retook my Math midterm on Monday. I had asked him last week if I should be prepared to answer the same questions or not, and he told me they would be "different problems." I sit down Monday morning for the re-test and what do I see? The same. freaking. test. I guess he had his fingers crossed. Yeah, well, I got your crossed fingers right here, buddy.

Pepsi Jazz, of the Diet Black Cherry French Vanilla is pretty good. I didn't have that weird aftertaste that Diet Vanilla Coke has, and its diet. It went well with my turkey on wheat with mustard.

In Inviscid, I'm sure we did something regarding Bernoulli's Equations, and I took notes, but I was mainly seething with indignation from the affront I suffered during the morning. I would have hulked out, but nobody likes a scene.

Italian night went rather well, and Heroes & Studio 60 were great. Watch them.

Heat Transfer was a bit of a hoot today. Dr. Antar was in a pretty jovial mood, and even Annoying Guy In the Back wasn't completely annoying. Mind you, his questions completely derailed the class and Antar lost his momentum, but his question was pertinent. If I weren't there to witness it, I wouldn't have believed it. It also really hit me today that Dr. Antar looks kinda like Geoffrey Rush (Captain Barbossa in the Pirates of the Carribean). I kept expecting a zombie-monkey to jump out and throw fruit at me.

And finally, we come to the return of the Bane of My Existence - Technical Writing! Thank the Almighty that I only had to be there for 15 minutes. We had our individual meetings about our papers (a rant for another day). She likes my sense of humor, thanks me for participating and not being a retard in class, and apparently cannot remember my name for 5 minutes. I don't expect too much out of an English professor (if Br. Allen reads this, I didn't include you in that group. If Br. Allen doesn't read this, then I meant what I said).

I love William Shatner.

Too Late We Learn That Communism Doesn't Pay

Battlestar Galactica - best show on TV right now. Without a doubt.

Yesterday morning, we got Mystery Science Theater 3000: Teenagers from Space and The Tick: Disc 1 from NetFlix. Thta's the great thing about Netflix - I wouldn't really feel like paying to rent either of those, and I definitely wouldn't feel like paying to own them.

We watched MST3000 after BSG, and it was hilarious. The movie itself was horrible, but the jokes from the audience are side-splitting. Jeff has agreed that we should order more of them in the future. A few lines, per Jeff's request:

Them's spunky noodles!

TORTURE!

I slept in today, and then Jeff and watched The Tick. It was about 6 episodes (there's another disc waiting in the que), and all were amazingly funny. There's so many one liners, it's not even funny. The secondary characters, like Bat Manuel are great too. The pilot featured the Soviet-American Coalition for the Destruction of the U.S. Postal Service and their evil assissin robot, Red Scare.

This afternoon, we drove up to Murfreesboro for disc golf. I kicked Jeff's butt, as usual. Dinner at Steak'n'Shake was also great. I love chili.

I also got caught up on Heroes, the new series on NBC. If you're not watching it, do so now. That won't really take effect until Monday, but do it anyway.

Moving at the Speed of Lee

Well, I think I read too much into the "situation" with a certain professor. He was all smiles today - I think it's just an issue with language barriers, and I was being a little over-sensitive. Oh well.

Vector Calc is cooking along, what with the Integral Calculus for Multiple Variables. The explanation of the Fozzybear Flop (or something like that) was kind of interesting - mainly because it involved the Olympics, Dr. Kuperschmidt, and a girl. We also proved the equation of the surface of a sphere with some horrible notation - r, R, r_hat, and some other letters. It made sense, but only if you didn't try to understand it.

I really like having the fridge and microwave in the office. And yes, we have plates now. There's no need to worry about me accidentally ingesting a carbon fiber (there's a higher likelihood that I'd kill a cell phone or a keyboard with a fiber though). The binder is really much worse off, but it wasn't mine to begin with - so no loss there.

Inviscid was pretty neat today. We fiddled around with some special cases of fluid flow, applied Euler's equation, and got the Bernoulli equation. I love that Bernoulli guy - he's one of the few dead mathematicians that aren't on my "list." Its such a handy, versatile equation. Go Bernoulli.

Smallville was really good tonight. They've brought in Green Arrow (only comic book guys are going to know who he is), but this season is starting to be actually worth watching for the story lines, and not just because its Superman.

BSG tomorrow. Oh, and class I guess.

P.S. I think I officially have a Peanut Gallery in the "comment" section. Wonderful.

Unhappiness Is Another Word For "Not Enough Coffee"

Dilbert. Enough said.

Not too bad, for a Wednesday. Heather and I went to the Spin Lab at 10:30 to meet with Pete, one of the lab technicians that works for/with Dr. Vakili. I haven't quite figured out that work dynamic yet, but its low on my priority list right now. Pete had some good ideas about one of the tasks that we're going to be working on (the one Heather is heading up) and he didn't think my idea for my project was retarded, but then he seems really nice.

For lunch, I tried out a Hot Pocket cooked in the microwave that I brought up. It works, which was a relief. I forgot to bring plates, so I had to improvise with an empty 3-ring binder. It got the job done.

Today was my first ever Seminar. Guess who presented? Dr. Vakili. Guess what the topic was? Spinning Carbon Fibers from Pitch! Who would have guessed it?! I sure didn't see it coming. Next week is some PhD that's going to spend waaaaay too long about something. Sounds interesting.

Hopefully, I can set a certain professor straight tomorrow, and hopefully it won't require any drastic measure.

If Not Entertaining, Write Your Congressman

I saw it on the Futurama opening credits.

Jeff and I got up to school today a little early for a couple of reasons:

A) so I could meet with Heather & Dr. Vakili about some short-term design projects he threw at us yesterday

2) so we could sneak the microwave and fridge into the office under the secretary's radar.

Plan 2 was pretty successful, but Plan A was a mess. We found Dr. Vakili at his office at 10:30 as planned, but he immediately sloughed us off on his post-doctorate assistant (Abraham MEGAnathan) so we could learn more about the "fiber characterization process." It turns out that "fiber characterization" is more about measuring properties than forcing it to do chores and visit sick people. I learned something today.

Heat Transfer was fine. Seperation of Variables is a pain in the butt, but it gets the job done. Or so I'm told. We have yet to plug any numbers into anything to see if works. I'm willing to trust Dr. Antar though. Really.

I emailed a certain professor this afternoon with some questions about our make-up midterm for those of us who didn't do so hot. Apparently, these questions have incurred the wrath of a certain professor. More on that as it develops. Oy.

Taco night tonight, and I didn't get anything on my shirt. Go me.

But I'd Rather Have A Bowl Of Lee

It'll all make sense if you click Here Enjoy.

Catching up:

Friday was a great day for disc golf - high in the 70's, clear skies, no real wind. Jeff and I mainly used it as a day to practice throws and get used to our newer discs. Later, Jennifer and I met up with Jeff, Russell, Angela Dunn, Paula Cerrito, and Justin & Dawn for dinner down at the Horse Shoe and some free slots at Sam's Town. I won $12, which is way better than losing ANYTHING. I must've eaten 2 lbs of steak, as well as chili, 2 baked potatoes, spaghetti, lots of sweet-and-sour chicken, a few slices of pizza, and a napkin that didn't move fast enough.

On Saturday I got up early and helped most of my CBU friends get Garrett & Kristen Smithson moved into their new house. Its in Cordova, and I must say that the spread is really nice. Also, furniture is really heavy. Most of us (Me, Jennifer, Jeff, Russell, Garrett, Sandeep, Garrett House, Justin & Dawn) ate dinner at Huey's with a bunch more people (Jackie, 3 of her friends, Jeff's friend Sheena, and David Tran). Most of that group also went to the Cornfield Maze at the Agricenter. We weren't the only ones with that idea either - there were about a bajillion bajillion people there. It took an hour to get into the maze, and almost as long to wander around. There was a guy in a chicken suit.

Sunday was Dad's 50th birthday, or the 29th anniversay of his 21st birthday. Lunch was catered from the Germantown Commissary, which was great - all the excellent food with none of the lousy service. Key lime pie tastes weird. The drive home was nice, if a little dark. I did outrun the rain - a very good thing.

Today we got our Math midterms back, and most of us need to retake it. I'm not sure if we're working the same test or not, but I don't really mind retaking it. I just need to know how/what to study. Dr. Vakili hasn't fooled with our tests yet, which is just as well.

No Technical Writing Tomorrow (Flying Monkeys Rejoice!)

Tomorrow, Jeff and I sneak the fridge and microwave to the office. Shhh.

Mittens!

The only person that really understands that is Matt Morgan, and I'm not entirely sure that it makes sense to him.

Today was a pretty good day, on the whole. I picked up Jennifer at U of M and took her to lunch at Central BBQ (always a great time). They had the AM Sports 590 (or whatever their frequency is, I don't know/care). They had some free ticket sign-up going on, so Jennifer and I both entered.

After lunch with Jennifer, I got a second lunch in the form of a Mechanical Engineering Department luncheon (read free pizza). The idea was for a bunch of alumni to talk to the students about different opportunities outside of undergrad - there were some older alumni from Wright Medical and Smith & Nephew, as well as a good chunk of the Class of '05 (Garrett, Zach, Ian, Nate, Jeff, and Me). Nate, Jeff, and I represented the shiftless grad student population, and did so well. I say that because we fielded the most questions that weren't stupid. Dr. Santi showed up too, which was good.

Jeff and I were really wanting to play the Southaven course today, but the cold plus the constant drizzle would have been annoying - the later especially so on a course located in a drainage area for 3 neighborhoods. Consarnit.

Remember that free Tigers ticket thing I signed up for? Yeah, I won 2 free tickets. Sweet.

Jennifer and I met up with Jeff and Brent at the Hack's Cross Buffalo Wild Wings tonight for some Live Team Trivia. At half-time, we were in 11th place out of 14 teams. At the end of the 2nd half, before the final question, we were tied for 3rd. After the final question, we were tied for 1st with the Wyld Stallyns. They guessed better than we did on the tie-breaker, but we walked away with a coupon for 100 free buffalo wings. Mittens!

Signs Of The Apocalypse

Well, Jeff and I made it back to Memphis with no problems at all. There's just not much traffic on Tuesdays on either I-24 or I-40, we completely dodged Nashville rush-hour, and rush-hour in Jackson consists of 7 rednecks and about the same count of livestock - nothing to worry about.

Right after we got in town Jennifer and I went to see Entertaining Notions, which is a comedy show of sorts put on by the Memphis Bar Association. There was lots of bad acting, a few mised cues, and probably some liquid courage flowing backstage, but it was entertaining none-the-less. The (free) finger foods beforehand were great, and we bumped into Mr. & Mrs. Bostian. That really made the evening. I miss being around their house a lot, and Jennifer got some of the down-low on her professors from Mrs. B.

Today, I met Brent & Jeff at Shelby Farms for a few rounds of disc golf. Brent won the pre-game round, and I eeked out a victory in the post-lunch round with a triumphant performance in a sudden-death-final-elimination-smackdown. Go me.

I spent the afternoon keeping Jennifer company while she briefed cases. That looks like more fun than it probably is, and it looks mind-numbingly boring. She made me some fudge - I love that woman.

So, Justin Kuehl and Garrett Smithson have joined Facebook within a week of eachother. Surely this is an indication that THE END IS NIGH! Soon, other signs will come to pass, such as:

Sandeep acquiring a work ethic.
Jennifer declaring her undying devotion to the New York Yankees.
Jeff voting for Harold Ford, Jr.
Garrett House says that "wrestling isn't THAT important"

And many more...

Great Googa-Mooga!

Mid-term day is a very dangerous day.

Actually, the tests were not as bad as they could have been.

The Vector Calc test was made up of questions from our homework, so I had seen them before. That does not mean that I immediately knew how to work them, or that I could remember the non-sensical proofs that Dr. Kuperschmidt had written on the board. 7 questions, 5 of which that I think I pretty much nailed. The other 2 are a testament to my ability to look like I know what I'm doing. Also, it seems that I don't get Russian humor.

To kill some tension, the Superfriends threw the frisbee around in front of the school before lunch. It was very Serene.

The Inviscid test would have been perfect if I had opened my eyes on one problem (R means spherical coordinates, not cylindrical coordinates you fool!), and not overthought another one (just solve for z, you twit!). I hear that Dr. Vakili is pretty forgiving on tests, and if I ace the final everything else is moot. Here's hoping.

I marinated some chicken tenders in some K.C. Masterpiece herb & garlic sauce, and grilled them last night for dinner. Add them to Jeff's rolls, Amy's mashed potatoes, Heather's Salad, and Jeff's chocolate cake, the meal was most triumphant. Evolution is always a funny movie, and it's a good unwinding film.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is an awesome show. Its from the West Wing people, and just extremely well written and has compelling storylines. Almost as good as Boston Legal - Denny Crane!

Jeff and I finished up the evening with Dr. Strangelove OR How I Learned to Stop Worring and Love the Bomb. It's a Stanley Kubrick classic, and it had been forever since I'd seen it and Jeff had never. It was a satire back in the 60's, so some of the oomph is lost, but its still worth the hour and a half. Mein Herr!!

I just have to sit through Heat Transfer today, then I'll be hitting the road for Memphis. I'll be in through sometime on Sunday, that hasn't been quite figured out. Hopefully I'll update a couple of times before I'm back, but don't hold your breath. Most of you people reading this will see me in person anyway.

Hell Hath No Fury Like The Robotic Armies Of A Woman Scorned

Today has been a nice balance of silent reflection, cartoons, and preparing for mid-terms. All in all, a pretty good day. I feel like I'm as prepared for both of my tests tomorrow. Vector Calc is going to be a bit of a challenge, but we'll see. Inviscid Flow isn't nearly a threat as Vector Calc; I can screw this up, ace the final, and get an A for the class. Vector Calc doesn't quite have such a sweet deal.

Have I mentioned how funny a show The Venture Brothers is? It is freaking hilarious. IGN listed it as one of the 25 All-Time Best Primetime Animated Shows Ever. That says a lot. And I howl for an entire 30 minutes.

I'm marinating chicken right now. We'll see how that turns out tomorrow.

Long-Haired Hippie-fied Freaks

Steaks on the grill were pretty good. Quantity has a quality all its own. And baked potatoes and rolls. Tasty.

Battlestar Galactica was amazing. Absolutely amazing. It was definitely worth the wait (something like 6 months), but it would have been worth the wait back in June, you know? And it was a two-parter, which was a suprise. Nice.

So today Jeff and I drove out to UTSI, picked up Brent, drove to Manchester, picked up Amy, and drove to Murfreesboro to play disc golf at the park. The problem: the hippies had "closed the course" for a tournament. That was really annoying. I'm wondering if they can really do that. We probably could have fought them off with a dull butter knife, or pointing off in the distance and saying, "hey look, there's some pot over there," but we didn't. We found a McAlister's to eat some lunch, which was good.

A little while after we got back, Amy came by and we watched The Island and followed it up with Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. We caught the tail-end of the UT-UGA game, and the Vols kicked some serious butt (51-33). I'm trying really hard to care, and this helped nudge me along.

Now its late, and I'm sleepy. Fall Break coming soon, which means I get to see Jennifer & Family. That will be most triumphant.

Past The Point Of No Return

Another wonderful day of Vector Calculus and Inviscid Flow. We've finally meandered into Chapter 3 of our math book: Differential Vector Calculus. Dr. Kuperschmidt half-way developed/proved the super-important operators: div, grad, and curl. Holy Kuperschmidt, Batman!

The Superfriends met after Vector Calc to start looking over the practice tests for Inviscid (or Inviskid). Both tests look pretty fair, I just need to keep the calculus from intimidating me. I let myself get flustered today. I know, suprising. After studying, we went to lunch at the cafeteria (quickly becoming a Thursday thing). Salisbury steak was good, but it kept salisbury-ing all afternoon (not so good). While we walked back from lunch, we realized that we - the Superfriends - were probably the coolest group of people at the school. Yes, Jeff and I have finally arrived. At lunch, we were the focus of the room. Everyone kept getting up from their table to stop by, say hi, rub Jeff's head, and ask for advice. It was surreal.

Inviscid class was fine. Boundary Conditions for both fluid-solid and fluid-fluid interfaces. According to Dr. Vakili, things get really interesting for fluid-fluid interface when you drop the invscid assumption. Neat.

Smallville was pretty good, but definitely not as good as the season premier. Oh well. My home-made barbecue nachos made up for it, even if the Velveta re-coagulated way before I was done eating. CSI was totally out of left-field tonight. Talking dead bodies in the morgue, chapters, chainsaws - I think they've realized I'll watch anything they put on. And they're right.

Battlestar Galactica premier tomorrow @ 8:00 pm! Frack Yeah!

You Look More Flustered Than A Barefooted Squirrel At A Tire Store

Wednesday, sweet Wednesday.

Got up, ate a bagel.

Watched GUTS on TV, then Star Trek. Ate some barbecue for lunch - tasty.

At about 1:45, Brent and Amy (one of the Superfriends) met Jeff and I at our place and we all drove to Murfreesboro for (guess what!) Disc Golf! Brent won the first round by 2 strokes, and I won the second round by 4 strokes. I am all that is man.

After the disc golfing, I think we spent more time driving around Murfreesboro in search of the Chili's, but we found it. It was a process of elimination - we drove down every "major" road in the town, which is a dubious distinction to begin with. Anyway, the Triple Play is always a good bet for dinner.

After we got back, I got caught up on my Heat Transfer homework. That's always a nice feeling. Then Jeff and I watched The Sentinel, our very first Netflix movie. Not a horrible movie, but I'm glad I didn't pay $5 to rent it, and I'm REALLY glad I didn't pay $20 to own it.

More tomorrow, if you're lucky.

You Say Tau, I Say Tau

Jeff and I forgot about our Superfriends meeting today. Whoops. We eventually made it there about 45 minutes after we should have. Better late than never, right? There was some debate on the proper way to pronounce Tau (the Greek letter). I was right, but so was everyone else. We're Number 2!

Heat Transfer was more and more of this Seperation of Variables stuff. It's kinda complicated, so that makes me think it's important. Basically, you manipulate inconvenient facts about a set up with some made up constants that really turn out to be zero, which makes life simpler somehow. There's no mid-term, so I'm not going to complain one bit.

Arby's lost Jeff's fries. They'll pay for that. Oh yes, they'll pay.

Do you remember that scene in Wrath of Khan when Khan puts the sand-snail-thingies in Commander Checkhov & Captain Black Dude's helmets? And they scream and writhe and try to rip their helmets off when the sand-snail-thingies crawl into their ears? Yeah, that's what Technical Writing is like. Its enough to make me want to waporize myself.

1000 calorie workouts take a lot out of you. Oh boy, do they. Two straight days of that is making my hair hurt. I don't know how that happens, but it does.

White & Nerdy

Not bad, for a Monday.

We're almost done with Chapter 2 in Vector Calculus, much to Dr. Kuperschmidt's dismay. He thinks we should be farther along. I say, "meh." He knows my name now, and the jury is still out on whether or not that's a good thing. He isn't patronizing certain class members as much anymore, which is definitely a good thing.

The break between classes was spent: fixing my erroneous (the job code, not my completely made up work schedule) timesheet, decorating the office, and watching Weird Al videos. The room got decorated for me, I mostly watched. But it's definitely more festive. Tomorrow, I'm putting up some posters, and a picture. Anyone know where I can get a Hang In There Kitty poster?

Inviscid was fine as always. After class, Jeff and I ran to the store, and later I went to the gym. Burning 1000 calories takes a lot out of you. Go figure. We finally thawed out the Boston Butt that I bought from Craig back in August, and it was very good. I needed some good barbecue to hold me over until I'm back in Memphis for a while and gorge myself at Central BBQ. That's just over a week away. Sweet.

I'm tired and am going to bed.

See Rock City

Jennifer drove up to visit this weekend, and we had a blast.

She got in on Friday in time for dinner, so we went to Rafael's. Man, that' stuff is good. Jennifer was very impressed with the Chicken Alfredo. I had the lasagna, as usual. Garfield, eat your heart out. Then we watched Apollo 13, which is just an awesome movie if you haven't already seen it. I also recommend the book, by Jim Lovell.

Saturday was a pretty busy day. First, we drove over to Lynchburg to tour the Jack Daniel's Distillery - home of Fine Tennesee Sippin' Whiskey. The tour is really interesting, the tour guides are funny and full of stories, and best of all - it's FREE. Yes, FREE! Also, you get a little bit of buzz just breathing the air. It smells kind of like Rozier, only cleaner. After the tour (and some free lemonade, courtesy of Jack himself) we strolled over to historic downtown Lynchburg. There's some cool little shops, and a place that makes furniture out of the old barrels. Pretty neat.

After a late lunch at the apartment, we hit the road to go SEE ROCK CITY. It's actually fairly convenient to Tullahoma, not much longer than the drive to Nashville. After a short detour

Jennifer: Exit 174?
Lee: I thought it was 175?
Jennifer: Exit 174!
Lee: Oh, I could have sworn it was 175!
Jennifer: Well, it's not!
Lee: Ah, crap.

we finally found the place. Another hitch in the plan was that we forgot that Rock City, which is just (and only just) south of Chattanooga is in fact in the Eastern Time Zone. So we lost an hour and about 15 minutes. We wound up being the last people admitted into the place. We rushed a little more than we would have liked, but it was still very cool. Wriggling through the Needle's Eye and Fat Man Squeeze was pretty neat, and the view from the See Seven States sign is breathtaking. There's also a bunch of creepy-looking gnomes.

We got a bit of treat after we were done with the normal Rock City attractions - it seems that around this time of year, they also run their own Corn Maze. It wasn't as neat as the one that Shelby Farms does, but it was still kind of fun. I'm still looking forward to the one back home.

Dinner was at a Cracker Barrell in Chattanooga. Them's good eats. Driving back to Tullahoma on I-24 was a little hair raising in the dark, but not terrifying. If you haven't flown up and down the foothills of the Smokies in the pitch-black night while listening to Johnny Cash, I highly recommed it. Johnny goes well with the hills.

Today I took Jennifer up to see the school before she headed back. I think she liked seeing all the deer. Fortunately for us none of them tried to pull anything crazy, like a knife or something. I was informed that my desk is dull and needs to be decorated. I'll work on that and keep everyone posted.

The rest of the day is pretty dull in comparison after Jennifer left. I finished homework, ate dinner, and watched a little tv. Oh, I got a See Rock City t-shirt. Neat, huh?

N-Dimensional Litter Boxes!

For your N-dimensional cat, of course.

That's what we talked about today in Vector Calculus. We covered two different methods: the easy way, and the mathematician's way. And I swear, you'd think this man who holds a PhD in the subject could be trusted to do this pretty well, right? Wrong. And don't even get me started on notation. Jeez.

The Superfriends met again today to work on some Inviscid homework that's due on Monday. Unfortunately for Jeff and I, Dr. Vakili keeps ruining our street cred by assigning homework problems that we don't know how to do right off the bat. How many of you out there could evaluate a line integral over a triangle without breaking a sweat? I didn't think so.

Lunch in the cafeteria was good. Apparently, macaroni-and-cheese counts as a vegetable. I did not know that.

Also, we met tripod the deer today. He's only got three legs. The nickname seems to make sense today.

Jennifer is coming to visit tomorrow! Sweet! We're gonna go to the Jack Daniel's distillery and probably go see Rock City. Neat, huh?

I had more, but it's a lot later than I intended for this, so I'll save it until sometime tomorrow.

Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles!

Guess who showed up uninvited again at around 7:30? Show me "roofers." Survey says: Roofers! I hate them.

Lunch was good today - my other sandwich from Subway (it was also a steak'n'cheese). While I can't really taste a difference, there does seem to be more meat on the sandwhich. In my book, that's always an improvement. A sandwich should really be a pound of meat garnished with some bread.

Most of my waking hours were spent scratching my head at Heat Transfer homework that won't get collected. I really should do it simply because I want to learn. But let's be realistic. Dr. Antar isn't actually going to grade it, but completed homework is my get-out-of-jail-free card for the final - the only grade in the class. It's not the worst deal I've ever heard of, but it's hard to keep thinking about that right now in September. Oh well.

Anytime Jeff and I go out of the apartment, we see all these roofer guys just standing around. Blatantly. At least I'm good at looking busy. They're not even trying. If this grad school thing doesn't work out for some reason, I think I know my next best career path. I would get to work outdoors, wear jeans to work, spit, and say "yeehaw" and other fun things - but best of all, I wouldn't have to do ANYTHING.

Jeff and I made tacos and rotel for dinner, which I have to say turned out very, very well. You get nice change from chicken tenders, and you get a lot of mileage out of a pound of beef. Not bad indeed. Show me a man that doesn't like rotel, and I'll show you an idiot. If I offended anyone, you're wrong. It's ok - I won't hold it against you.

I somehow stumbled on www.retrojunk.com and saw the intros to a few of my favorite tv shows from waaaay back. The weirdest thing was the British opening to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - over there, they're actually the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. Driving on the wrong side of the road, calling fries "chips," and now this? To me, this alone totally justifies the American Revolution.

O Chewbacca, Where Art Thou?

The roofers are STILL working. But they've mutated from roofers to general contractors. They're like cockroaches, but with more power tools. That makes stomping on them a less-than-perfect solution. Today, however, I defiantly stayed in bed until 9:00. Score 1 for me.

Well, Vector Calc is starting to make a wee bit more sense now. We've finally gotten out of the Chapter 1 mire, and are stumbling on into Chapter 2 - multivariable calculus! This is actually stuff I kinda remember and / or might find useful. Partial derivatives are fun. However, I do think that if Dr. Kuperschmidt expects me to memorize derivatives like the secant-squared of x with respect to x, he's out of his proletarian mind. Also, he complained about my use of pencil & small handwriting. He even gave me his pen (actually, a marker, but who's keeping score?). That was weird.

Inviscid (or Inviskid) Flow is flowing right along (hahahaha). We're somewhere around Chapter 5. It's good that he's rederiving some of the more basic concepts in vector algebra notation. It's stuff we were supposed to learn in Calc III, but we didn't, so I'm not so strong in it. And I enjoy Dr. Vakili's class. And that's not just because he's my boss. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Today we had another meeting of our study group (The Superfriends) in the office that Heather & I share. Rich the Canadian guy joined us, which is cool. He says things like "zed," which is just cool. We covered a lot, and have decided that these meetings are way more productive than actual class.

Heat Transfer today was also pretty good. This class (and Dr. Antar will say it if you ask him) is really a Math Course in Engineer's clothing. Which is poor fashion sense on the part of the Math course, but that's neither here nor there. He started a big long solution method about a week ago, and we finally arrived at the solution today. I had really hoped there would be a solution, and I was fairly pleased with the result. This is really what I had in mind when I thought grad school classes. It's like being backstage during a really complicated play - the play being undergraduate Heat Transfer. I still can't quite do the homework, but its neat.

Technical Writing was another bowl full of stupid, with a side of asinine. And Chewbacca didn't even show up, so I had to hand-write our stupid group memo. I would have much rather had the wookie do the typing. I was not in the mood tonight either. At least Little Oprah and Hot Rod pull their weight. We wrapped up with some flagrant snarking from me and IMing from Jeff.

Subway has replaced their cheesesteak with steak'n'cheese. I think I can tell the difference, but then, I can't tell the difference between brown and maroon.

Urge To Kill...Rising...Rising

The roofers are on my list. Not the historical mathematician list; the list of people who need to be hit with a truck. They woke Jeff and I up at 8:00 last Friday, the day when I don't have to even be awake before 12:30. Not good.

Heat Transfer has become a confusing mish-mash of summation signs, derivatives, and other math widgets that would suggest a MATH class instead of an ENGINEERING class. Also, the bi-weekly meeting was rushed by Dr. Shet (yes, you read it right). He's ready to retire and Dr. Vakili wasn't there. Sweet.

So we get back to the apartment around 3:00, and the roofers and their extended families are standing around as we pull up. Then they leave the roof half done. What's up with that? Now Jeff has a tarp in front of his window. That's just lazy. And their stuff is everywhere.

I swear, I had more to write about, but I'm fresh out. Oh well.

Don't Pet The Rattlesnakes

So far, this has just about been the best Wednesday I've spent up here. I slept until about 9:15, ate some breakfast, and watched Nickelodeon GUTS until 10:00. So far, so good.

Then Brent Ellis, CBU alumni and fellow UTSI student, met Jeff and I at our place to drive to Mufreesboro for disc golf at Barfield Crescent Park. What a gorgeous day outside - clear skies, perfect humidity, a high in the VERY LOW 70's. The first game went to me, by a stroke, with Brent and Jeff close on my heels. Chick-Fil-A for lunch was excellent. Did you know that you can get bacon on your sandwich there? Well, you can. The second round went to Brent, by a stroke, with me and Jeff not far behind. Brent is an Ultimate (or Yultimate) Frisbee maniac, and the skills are pretty similar. His can out-distance me, but I throw a straighter drive. I own the trees.

The owners are replacing the roof on the townhouse this week. That kinda killed any chance at productivity the rest of the afternoon and early evening. It's hard to hear yourself think with all the hammering and sawing and stomping and shooting going on above your head. Buffalo chicken tenders for dinner.

I read Dr. Vakili's patent for the Spin Lab equipment. Documents from the patent office will never, ever qualifiy as "light reading." And they're in a bad format for reading that doesn't have a very good sense of flow. I think that's so that most people won't be able to interpret the patent.

I'm gonna read more of A Meeting At Corvallis tonight. Haakaa Paalle!

Well La-Dee-Frickin'-Da!

Well, it's been days again, and I've got no apology for you. Didn't see that coming, did you?

Last week was mostly a blur. I don't even think we had a Thursday. But I could be wrong on that. Wednesday was fun - Heather (the other Carbon Fiber GRA) and I got to sit around and watch some technicians run the Spin Lab. The end result looked like a Tribble From Hell. Klingons beware.

On Friday, Jeff and I tried lunch at Piggy's Place, the local barbecue establishment. I recommend it only to the starving - and I recommend it reluctantly. Maybe I'm being a bit of a snotty elitisit, but I don't think they know what barbecue is supposed to taste like. I distinctly remember having meat on my sandwich back in Memphis.

I drove back to Memphis over the weekend, and it was a pretty good trip. It was great getting to see Jennifer again. We went to the Cooper Young Festival, avoided the Soul Bowl, and went to see Sandeep's new house. The house was very nice, right down to Sandeep's very effeminate shower curtain (it looked like a giant doilie). I also ate at Huey's, Chili's, and thank the Lord, Central BBQ. Word has it there will soon be another Central BBQ opening in Memphis. I'm anxiously awating their Tullahoma location to open up. Here's hoping, at least.

Classes yesterday were fine, and so was Heat Transfer today. Some of us (Jeff, Heather, Amy, and myself) met in the Carbon Fiber office to start a study group for Vector Calc. That's a first for me, but I'm not going to knock it. I think we were more productive than class is.

And speaking of productive classes, boy is Technical Writing NOT one. It's like taking a shower in STUPID. Today, we made up 10 questions to ask a class mate, for no reason whatsoever. Then we split up into groups to talk about some fake company that's planning on spying on its fake employees that use dial-up internet. At least I got my homework back - my memo that I wrote to my fake boss to get my fake department's fake laser printer fixed without firing the fake stupid single-parent technician was very well written. Well La-Dee-Frickin'-Da.

Haakaa Paalle!

It's been a few days - whoops. I'm still doing better than my old blog, by far.

I guess I've mostly settled into a routine here, which is what I've been doing since everyone heard from me last. Classes are moving along well enough, but the workload is picking up. I've got to improve on accomplishing more things during the week, so that my weekends are (mostly) for rest. I'll do better, I swear. The main thing that's going to get in the way of that Jeff and I have come to the conclusion that we're going to have to work EVERY PROBLEM IN OUR MATH BOOK. It seems that way at least, from the way Kuperschmidt talks. Its enough to make me want to curse in Russian.

The Carbon Fiber group had its first meeting of the academic year. As I expected, it was mostly to introduce me and the new girl (Heather) to the rest of the group. It was pretty basic. Also, one guy quit the group to go work on another project. No one seemed upset at that, and I'll draw my own conclusions about it. Afterwards, Dr. Vakili gave Heather & me a tour of the "Spin Lab." That just sounds cool.

Dinner at Western Sizzlin' on Friday was good, but I ate WAY too much. The rolls and the soft serve gave me flashbacks to Ryan's from when I was little. Stargate(s) were pretty good. I'd say 7 out of 10 or better.

Our dishwasher died last night after dinner. We don't know why, but it seems to be through no fault of our own. These things happen, I guess.

Today, Jeff and I drove up to Murfreesboro to play a round of disc golf and find some civilized food. Overall, it was a great course. There's a nice mix of open fields and wooded holes, with some ups and downs and blind corners. The park is well kept, and beautiful. Lots of squirrels, too. Civilized dinner was Steak'n'Shake, because we couldn't find the Chili's. Oh well.

I'm still in the middle of The Protector's War, which I need to finish in order to start A Meeting at Corvallis. I doubt that will happen this week. Such is life.

I Saw A Racoon!

Yeah, that's right. A racoon. Viscious little marsupials.

Anyway, I crawled out of bed at 7:00 today, hit the road by 7:45, and rolled into the apartment parking lot / driveway at 11:30. Not bad at all. However, the ride is not for those with weak bladders or poor glutteal fortitude. Lots of smokies out today too.

Heat Transfer at 1:00 was a little dry, albeit timely. He did cover the book verbatim, but I definitely benefited from it because I didn't read everything beforehand and I could solve a non-homogeneous partial differential equation if the nation depended on it. Which is sad, because in my future line of work that might actually come up.

Meatball sandwiches at Subway (Eat Fresh) are really good. And cheap. That makes them taste even better.

Technical Writing for Dummies went from 0 to Asinine in 10 seconds today. See Jeff's thoughts on that and I pretty much agree. Tonight, I wrote a fake memo to get my Product Development Department's laser printer replaced. Got to earn that degree, don't I?

And then we saw the racoon.

Why Are The Vectors Wearing Hats?

Well, this has turned out to be a pretty pleasant week, what with the sleeping in and all. Dr. Kuperschmidt asked if we could have our math class today at 4:00 instead of tomorrow morning at 9:00, which meant I only had to wake up on Monday this week. Sweet - it's almost like being unemployed. Those days have come and gone, I'm afraid.

Class itself was standard math class. Kuperschmidt's variation on cooky-math professor include: foreign (Russian) accent and letters that aren't members of any alphabet I know. And today, some of them started wearing (^) hats! And I don't know why! Actually, I think he was trying to prove the Jacobi Identity, which states that you can prove any identity by making up your own notation and confusing the beejeezus out of everyone.

I swear, if the deer around UTSI become any less fearful of humans, they're going to start mugging people. Jeff and I pulled up today, and 7 of them were lazing about in a field 20 feet away. I think one of them had a knife.