endgame

The endgame of my Master's degree started with a jolt yesterday. I signed on to be a full engineer at MSEI after my internship ends in two weeks, scheduled a date for my defense and told the Graduate School to get their stupid program of study audit going. Hard to believe it's been two years already.

a conundrum of h8

I haven't been paying much attention to the new Facebook apps stuff. I decided to check it out by seeing if I could get an aftermarket mod for the stuff Facebook doesn't cover - enemies and things you hate, rather than friends and favorites.

I did find an enemies list app, but paradoxically you have to be friends with your enemies in order for it to work, which kind of defeats the purpose. I may give PJ a hard time but he isn't my enemy, and I won't friend my actual enemies just for the privilege of calling them my enemies. The one person I can think of off the top of my head is a pretty lousy enemy anyway. I don't have a true arch-nemesis sort of thing going on. Mostly I find single-serving nemeses in traffic, morons that do 23 in a 30 zone and the like.

I also found some more generic hate lists. One allowed you to type in anything you were currently hating on. That would be good for say, the asshole in the Civic who refused to suck it up and merge behind me on a 2-to-1 onramp. On my birthday. Unfortunately that app still has some major bugs in it so you can't edit things correctly.

The other hate list app lets you list TV shows, music, movies and books you hate. I was having trouble thinking of things I actually hated - I don't like Seinfeld, but I wouldn't go so far as saying I hate it. I managed to come up with a couple items but after I did, I realized that posting them defeats the purpose. I just wish they would cease existing, they don't deserve being called to attention.

Thus, I have removed all of the apps.

memory loss

The RAM upgrade failed. I bought a gig and put it in (yes I did figure out how) but only got a blank screen. I exchanged the stick and got the same result so I just returned it. It was Kingston so it should have worked.

Also, the price was not right as I had previously concluded. It's $40 for a gig of current RAM - while what I have costs $75 at Fry's and $125 at Best Buy.

In other news I got an official offer from MSEI for work as a full engineer, for more than I was expecting. Woo!

looking forward into the old days

Freeman has been getting a little more sluggish ever since I installed Kaspersky. I'm thinking after two years of service it might be time for a RAM upgrade. The price seems to be right - $40 for a gig? Actually putting this into action is a different story. I opened up the little panels on the bottom and have no idea how one goes about swapping laptop RAM. The one stick I could see appears to be wedged into place, I have no idea how they got it in there in the first place, and apparently another stick lies even deeper within the electronic bowels and requires a large portion of the main case cover to be removed. I miss having a desktop sometimes.

what the hell is an aluminum falcon

Well, my test at work is finally back up and running, although it will be somewhat jury-rigged until next week.

I was recently worried that the Pontiac G8 was going to be too much larger than my Malibu, being slightly longer and five inches wider. Well apparently the Camaro Concept is ten inches wider than my car, with promises to not reduce the width on the production version by more than 0.5". Apparently it's been decided to make the next Camaro five inches wider than any previous version. Hmm.

get busy child

So I kicked ass in my presentation to the company's general manager/COO/my boss cubed. Apparently he was impressed I did my own cross-section work. He only had some valid concerns about the test setup, which I had not designed but which I am now in the process of overhauling now that the new equipment is in. This involves like four times as much soldering - I'd say I did 550 solders today, and I haven't even started the wiring - but should last forever instead of breaking down. I am hoping to get the test back online tomorrow. Apart from the experimental benefits my boss says the retrofit ought to get me even more points with the boss cubed.

more car talk

I found some more stuff on the Pontiac G8 and it seems less interesting now for some reason. I'm not sure if I want a car that big, I'm not sure if it will have enough legroom, it looks a lot like a BMW (even if it is supposed to emulate an M5), and I'd like to see what kind of effect Active Fuel Management has because the mileage on the Commodore looks pretty low. I won't really know how I feel until I get to try one though. I might go harass a Pontiac dealer on my birthday.

Also, I saw a DeLorean on Friday when I was driving home from work. That's a new one.

that frankly will not fly

I still can't take any data at work so I've been working on my final report. I would say I'm working on my thesis but apparently it isn't one, which annoys me, because I'm doing at least as much work and it doesn't feel like my major is taken seriously. At least that means I have a little more leeway in writing my paper - the thesis guidelines are pretty strict, down to stuff like "DOUBLE HARD RETURN HERE" and "DO NOT CAPITALIZE, BOLD OR ITALICIZE THESE." I am writing my paper as close to the thesis guidelines as possible but not stressing over stuff like that. Today I dedicated the entire workday to writing and I got quite a bit further, actually filling in most of the placeholders I'd put in earlier this week.