as if the words knew i'd need them again

Today is one year since I defended for my Master's degree. I am still glad to be out of school.

I discovered a previously untapped resource in my Firebird search, which had been overlooked because of my loathing for it - Craigslist. It seems to be turning up a lot more hits than Autotrader, but the results may be more suited to a Top Gear challenge than actual driving.

shallow water channel and tide

I called the university today to figure out why I haven't gotten my Master's diploma yet, and it turns out my advisor never submitted grades for the summer credits of my internship. He fixed that right away after I informed him, but that means I'm back to waiting.

Work has been pretty crazy lately, at least six meetings a day, so I can't get any actual work done anymore.

In other lame news the post office has apparently reneged on their agreement to deliver something I mailed, and my attempt to buy a t-shirt from a webcomic is caught in limbo with nobody on their end acknowledging my emails but happy to take my money.

still chasing skies

Now that it's October, the rainy season is upon us here in Oregon, but I am looking forward to another new development - my master's diploma should be showing up soon. Technically I have been a Master for three months, but it's good to have the official proof. Just like how my business cards showed up, so I feel more of a proper engineer now.

Once more this is not a mere Sunday night, but a Sunday night with a new Top Gear torrent running. Series 10 just started up. From the previews it looks pretty good. I've had torrents running since 2 but none have finished yet. Now I have to gamble on whether it will finish at a reasonable hour or if I should just go to bed.

Last week, figuring I am not building a new PC in the near future, I picked up a used copy of Need for Speed: Most Wanted for the 360, and worked my way through that. I had played it before but didn't beat the last guy. Yesterday I picked up Need for Speed: Carbon, which is the sequel, and I finished it today. Obviously, the campaign is much shorter, and there are other ways you can tell the game was half-assed (in standard EA fashion), but the number one annoyance I have is that the version I got does not have the Camaro Concept, which I had been led to believe and was the only reason I got the game to begin with, and I need to hunt down another copy if I want it. The least they could do was at least offer it on Xbox Live as an extra download.

this ain't a surfin movie

So I'm a Master now. I have been since Friday but I have been in a very low energy and reclusive mood for whatever reason until today. I would put some details of my defense up but the whole ordeal did not really seem that cathartic for some reason. I presented my work again, not the smoothest version but pretty well. The oral exam consisted entirely of project-related questions so all my work studying wave functions and Maxwell's equations was useless. I would have been better off studying barium titanate and the nature of the dielectric constant. But in any case I passed, with no dissenting votes. I spent the rest of Friday running around doing things like turning in keys and passing off paperwork. Fun. Thanks to everyone who showed their support in one way or another!

Saturday I did nothing. Today I printed off the hard copies of my report. I was under the impression I had to get them professionally bound but they just want Kinkos-level. So I went to Kinkos. They didn't do the world's greatest job of copying but I now have a trifecta of somewhat professional looking reports along with the original template from which they were wrought.

You might expect that now that I'm a Master and a full engineer I would go off and buy myself something to celebrate, like a new PC or car. Today I actually did buy something - a helicopter. A really little one about as long as my hand. Fry's had them for $25 and I couldn't resist. It really is a toy of a thing - it has some kind of styrofoam body, and it will only go forward if you turn right, not left. Even so, the thing is a marvel of miniature engineering. Somehow it works by infrared control, and the materials used are lightweight but certainly strong enough to protect it from all the knocks it's taken so far. It even has a working tail rotor and an interesting double main rotor for balance. The thing brings me some joy and keeping it in the air requires no small skill so it gets a lot of your attention when you fly it. The biggest downside is that I have to turn the fan off or else the helicopter will just blow away in the airflow, so the room gets hot while I'm flying. That's not a big price to pay though. I have a helicopter!

The PC and car are still in the brain crack phase.

Anyway, it is back to work tomorrow. It will be a little different now that I am not preparing defense material - I have to go back to doing real work. It's going to be a short week though, as on Thursday I am flying back to Michigan for ten days or so.

Also, I updated my video game reviews.

like car parts, bottles and cutlery

Well somehow it's now the week of my Master's defense. Time to step up my efforts. This involves finishing my paper and presentation, studying physics and generally making sure I'm in a condition to go through this on Friday.

ride the fire eagle danger day

Well it's July 7. I am now done with my internship and will be a real engineer on Monday. I'm not sure what my new duties are but next week is going to involve more training, assisting other people with real problems rather than studying one in isolation and preparing for my defense on the 13th.

Also, Pettit and Regina are getting married today. Congrats!

yippee-ki-yay

So I spent the 4th watching Live Free or Die Hard and Transformers back-to-back. Surprisingly I like the former better. It felt really epic while Transformers tried too hard to be silly, and any action scene with the robots was useless because everything was just a blur. I was kind of hoping for more of a car chase/duel between the Camaro and the Mustang as well. And I felt let down that the Camaro wasn't rebuilt as a 2009, it just went off and did that itself.

Anyway I actually have to go back to work today, which is harsh. Tomorrow is technically the end of my internship (although I am just going back to work on Monday as a full engineer) and I am defending a week from tomorrow. Which means I need to sit my ass down and study some physics for the very last time.

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.

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.

these missiles you bubble wrap

Well I just figured out why the font is always so freaking tiny when I post. Something to do with the stupid template. I don't really want to mess with it but I can try and correct for it from now on.

Tomorrow is Friday! I have a much greater appreciation for them now that I am working full time. I even get to wear jeans.

My boss gets back tomorrow, this will be the first time he's been around since I started working. I think I have gotten quite a bit accomplished, but I couldn't do the main task he set out for me because the manufacturers are being snooty.

I finally got access to test data yesterday, but it's in another building so I've been running back and forth to upload the latest copy to the network. This isn't going to work if it starts pouring so I wrote a batch file to automatically copy the file to the network every 15 minutes.

I also started writing up some of the basic framework for my final report. My thesis. It's kind of scary because this is part of the end. It's about time.

Unfortunately I have yet to see the best part of having a real job (or something like it), a decent paycheck. My first payday isn't until next week. After that I might head down to Fry's to spend a bit of it, but mostly I need to start saving back up again after the move, especially since the financial aid office at OSU is being bitchy about the last part of my student loan.

Car sighting of the day: Lotus Elise.

she said the satellite is coming

Today was the last day of classes for the term, so I don't have to take classes anymore. Ever. The prospective grads came through today but I only came onto campus late in the day for my one class. There was an informal poster session after that to show the prospectives what the other grads are working on. I didn't have to do anything because I don't do research. This was the first time I'd seen some of the older grads in a while and it was good interacting with them again. Them talking about their research emphasized how much more knowledge they've absorbed as fifth-years, but on the flip side I'm going to have a real paycheck in the near future. All I have to do now before moving is clear out the last of the assignments that have piled up and do finals, but tomorrow I am going out to the coast with the prospective grads and that will be a nice break.

moldy

I have been kicking ass and taking names in my computational physics class, so it's annoying when a project finally gets the best of me. It's mostly the prof's fault. Up until that assignment we had been doing Metropolis Monte Carlo stuff, and we had started with something simple and built on that over several weeks. Even in the end we were still only simulated a 2D square lattice with nearest neighbors only. Then the prof turns around and tells us we had one week to make a molecular dynamics program (which is completely different), with a 3D FCC lattice, and make measurements of temperature and pressure. I wasn't even able to work on it the over the weekend because I had to grade the stupid PH212 midterms. The prof eventually realized the folly of his ways and gave us an extra week, but that second week he was at APS so nobody could ask questions. In the end I probably got further than anyone else - I initialized positions and velocities properly, got the forces working, and even had energy conserved. But when I tried to measure the temperature I got something like 10^20, so I decided that was a good place to stop. My friend asked for and got another week's extension, but I have wasted enough time on that timesink. The rest of my schoolwork has been piling up.

you'll begin to wonder why you came

Big news. I had a second interview and got an internship, and they seem pretty insistant that I stay on afterward too. The company makes things like pacemakers and implantable defibrillators, and they are hiring me on as a component quality engineer. So at the end of the month I have to pack everything up, move up near Portland, and start my three month internship. It looks like I will end up doing my defense/oral exam sometime in mid-July, and then I'll have my Master's degree.

So in celebration of getting an internship, I bought a 19" LCD monitor. It looked normal in the store but once you put something like that on your desk, you realize it's big. I switched away from widescreen so I am enjoying having extra vertical room again.

in the name of science

Yesterday was the weekly TA meeting to go over the next week's physics lab. In this case it's the thermodynamics lab, and one of the main attractions is burning a Cheeto to calculate how much energy it contains. One of the other TAs is Ukrainian and so had no idea what a Cheeto was, so I offered to go get some out of a vending machine. I also wanted to burn one to show the others how much the things go up.

So I wandered over to the business building's vending machine. I opened my wallet to find that I had spent my last $1 bills earlier that day (on a used Asimov book), and all I had was a five. I tried giving it to the machine but it wouldn't take it.

This was annoying, but I had a cunning plan. Next to the snack machine was one of Pepsi's slick new vending machines, which does take fives. So I'll use my five to get a Mt. Dew, get change back, and use that to get Cheetos. I put my five in the Pepsi machine, punched Mt. Dew, and waited for the fountain of quarters to spit out.

It gave me three Sacagaweas and a Susan B. Anthony.

I was a little stunned that anything would dispense these useless forms of currency. I tried them on the snack machine anyway, but to no avail.

So now I needed to trade one of these coins in for something more useful. There was a girl working the tech support desk in the computer lab next door so I tried her first. "Excuse me," I said, "I'm trying to get some Cheetos for a physics experiment..." and went on to explain my plight. Unfortunately, when I'd finished, the girl said the smallest thing she had was a five, which would have simply put me back at square one.

I then crashed the study lounge, where I found a guy and a girl working on something together. The girl sounded French and had no idea what currency I was in possession of. The guy was amused though, and bought the Susan B. Anthony off of me.

Now armed with a $1 bill, I returned to ground zero of this farce, the snack machine. I put it in and punched in the code for Cheetos. You should see what's coming next.

The Cheetos got stuck and wouldn't come out.

I began to despair at the prospect of obtaining another $1 bill. I didn't want to go through that again if at all possible, so I rocked the machine a little. The Cheetos did not budge at first, but slowly started to lean more and more. Finally, they yielded to gravity and fell.

Triumphant, I returned to the physics lab and set fire to one of the damned things.

cached

A pretty quiet weekend. Nothing got done on Friday of course, but yesterday I did 2/3 of my grading and I've finished the computational physics assignment that isn't due until Friday. I decided to take a short break and found another geocache, but I paid the price - I dropped my camera and now most of the buttons don't work, and the inside may smell of burnt plastic. Damn.

i think about the implications

I love getting stuff in the mail. Today was one of those days. I got a bunch of stuff from eBay, several Asimov books I haven't read (and a third copy of I, Robot) and more red pens than I could possible have need for in my last term as a TA.

Today was also a partial snow day - classes before 11AM or after 5PM were canceled. Sadly I don't think that's likely to repeat tomorrow.

i'd rather be an exposed wire than be a cold machine

It's finals week in Corvallis. Normally I would be bouncing off the walls by now but I am still kind of doing productive work. Office hours were super slow today so I brought some parallel computing code to go over. The computational physics TA just happened to stop by and I talked with him for like an hour and a half about coding and calculating pi. The only final I have left is computational physics tomorrow morning and then I'm done with another term of classes.

I've been assigned to do two labs and a recitation next term, which is new. I'm wondering how many students there will be. When I proctored the final my room was supposed to have 119 students but I only counted 93. That's 26 drops since the beginning of the term in my room alone. And then I had a bunch of students tell me they were switching into 202 next term instead of taking 212. The joke is on them since I heard the non calc sequence is harder than the calc sequence.

dead week

I only have one more class for this term, although I do have to go in and teach a lab at 3. This morning we had crash course in parallel computing and the physics department's Beowulf cluster - apparently this is going to be a major focus of my computational physics class next term, so I'm kind of looking forward to that. The department just got a whole bunch of dual-core computers and now I'm eager to get some money and build a new desktop. When I get a real job I might be able to afford things like $500 dual-core Athlons.

weniger nights

I did some hardcore exam grading last weekend - until 2:30 AM on Friday night and midnight on Saturday. That may have been a mind-numbing waste of time, but the scary bit was that there are other grad students still there at that time of night. Who aren't grading exams. I mean, seriously - how mental do you have to be to stay in the physics building on late late Friday or Satuday night by choice? I don't hate what I do but I get the hell out of there the minute the opportunity presents itself. I guess that's one of the differences between me and the Ph.D students.

title

I'm getting the hang of things, maybe. Electronics is still crawling along, we're still only measuring RC constants in lab. Last week's computational physics problem was about chaotic scattering, which was actually pretty interesting. I was a little stumped by business stuff but once I saw some problems worked out it clicked, to the point where I'm half wondering how my own financial records would look in double-entry accounting. The only class where I'm still really stumbling is semiconductor devices, but I'm hoping to change that this weekend. The prof assigned 6 homework problems but threw 3 of them out because he hadn't gotten very far in lecture, so I might stand a chance this week.

In completely unrelated news, I learned yesterday that Gillette now has a razor with no less than six blades on it, five on the front and one on the back for no good reason. The razor arms race it getting out of hand. I can only imagine that somewhere, men in white lab coats are testing the feasibility of razors with 8, 10, or even more blades. Test subjects require reconstructive surgery after using the prototypes. After all, few men have what it takes to wield the Gillete Baker's Dozen.

Anyway, off to get stuff done, and then maybe reward myself with some more Tropico 2 later. That game is pretty fun but it does take a while to play so I haven't been at it too much. I'll also throw up a new movie review later.