pseudo coup

Last week I found a great new way of getting through my three hour business class while staying sane. I take all my class notes on gridded paper so I can do graphs easier. I figured out that I can copy Sudoku puzzles into some of the squares in my notebook and do those while looking like I'm taking notes. And the puzzles only take like a third of the page up so I can put real notes alongside if anyone says anything interesting. This way, I don't go mad listening to proposals about air quality-testing lichens and biodiesel byproduct diapers. I'm glad I'm not an MBA.

I'm doing really well so far in my scientific computing class. After my initial troubles with Java I'm getting the hang of things and I'm probably the furthest ahead in the class by a good margin. For example, last week's program was originally due Wednesday but was pushed to Friday. I was putting the finishing touches on my programs on Monday. This week's programs are different so I want to run some stuff by the instructor before I keep pushing. I think that is an interesting class, it's not just about coding but now we're getting into the physics that can be done with it.

I'm only about a quarter of the way through this new term but I'm getting close to being halfway done with my Master's degree. I'm going to have to start thinking about what I'm going to do for an internship next year. I'm almost out of the PSM core and can start getting into my own classes now. Next year should be good with computational physics, electronics labs and solid state physics.

i think i know my geography pretty damn well

I've finally gotten to grading this week's prelabs. My old red pen has just about had it, but they didn't have any more like it at the store so I bought a couple different kinds and I'm trying them out to see which is best. It's important to find out now because the 213 midterm is next week and that means exam grading. An inferior red pen just won't do.

I kind of feel like I didn't get too much accomplished this weekend, but I did finish the coding for this week's scientific computing homework and that's a major part of my workload for the week. I still think Java is insanely uppity but it'll take more than that to stop me. I did have to write in some bizarre stuff to get it to work fully though.

MIA

Just finished the first week of labs I TA. The first section was a little rough but by the third one I started getting back in the groove again. Lots of familiar faces in my sections, which is good. The students all seem to be distressed that one of the instructors from the last two terms (Pat) apparently isn't teaching this term. I knew he hasn't been around, but I thought he was just out for the first week or something. None of the students know where he is, so when somebody brought him up in lab all the rumors started flying. One of the students said they'd seen Pat at Safeway, so I said at least we know he's not dead. I told the students I'd look into it.

culture shock

Spring term has started and I've now had all my various new classes. Comps (quals) ran at the beginning of the week, and Vincent and I just sat on the sidelines and watched as all the other first-years joined in. Vincent and I don't have to take comps because we're PSM. It's just kind of odd because this term I finally start my major deviation from the normal course of physics.

I now have a proper MBA business class, which is composed of about half PSMs and half MBAs. It was kind of funny because there was definitely a bit of culture shock going on there. I thought it was going to be a lecture class, but it's another one of these case study classes which I'm not completely sold on. Still, we're finally getting some business training, which is a good thing.

I'm also in a scientific computing class as a prep for computational physics next year. The odd thing is that my department programs in Java. I don't know why. I don't know Java, but it's loosely related to C++ so I'm getting by pretty well so far. Vincent only knows Fortran so he's having a rougher time. I think I did work with some Java back in my SOAR days, but that wasn't writing code, just kicking it around until it compiled.

In my crash course on Java I'm finding out all these little idiosyncrasies Java has that make me shake my head. It is like C++, but 50 times as uppity. The structure is much more restrictive (like 4x won't be intepreted as 4 * x) and it seems like everything takes twice as many lines as C++ to express (like how declaring an array takes two lines of code instead of one). I tried formatting some numbers, and the process was to use a good sized command to format the number, but it got returned as a string, so it had to be parsed back into a number using another good sized command. It practically took up a full line just to say I wanted less decimal places. And there's some really weird stuff about how it handles objects.

I also discovered one of Java's dirty little secrets - it can't even add properly! For some reason Java can't express the number 0.1 properly. Java's proponents blame it on binary numbers, but C++ certainly didn't seem to have any problems. They claim it doesn't matter unless you're doing taxes or something, but any way you cut it I don't like it when I add 0.2 to 6.0 and get 6.199999999999 back. Not appreciated.

I'm not a big fan of Java.

As for my engineering bug, I made a major find at Borders last weekend. I found the other book by J. E. Gordon, who wrote the slightly eccentric but very interesting book on structures I like. This one (The New Science of Strong Materials, or Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor) is more about material science, but it's still good. I love the way this guy writes, these books are good reads.

2002 Pontiac Solstice Coupe Concept

Llast night I managed to repair my old MP3 player, the one that also acts like a USB drive. So I can hook it up to my PS2 again. Which means I can take pictures of my Gran Turismo 4 cars once again. Of course the first subject is the Pontiac Solstice, which I finally won after I'd broken the USB drive. The only reason I'm not taking pictures of cars all day is that I'm on my way back to Michigan - I'm in Portland's airport right now.

end of winter

Winter term is finally over for me. I've finished my finals, graded my last exam and reported my lab grades, there are no more stupid loose ends keeping this term alive. It seems like by the time I get used to all this I'm going to graduate. I'm already a third done. Certainly better than having to hang around for the better part of a decade though.

I had intended to celebrate by playing PlayStation all night, but I got sidetracked watching Top Gear. That's how much I love the show, although it's also true that I could use some fresh games for the PS2. Quite the lineup of games in the months ahead - Kingdom Hearts II comes out over break, with the Half-Life 2 expansion the month after that (if it's on time - which it won't be), and Ace Combat Zero the month after that. Gobeski says it must be a conspiracy to fail me out of grad school. If there were a new Katamari Damacy or Command & Conquer game as well, I might be inclined to agree. As is, I'm still surviving.

Oh yeah, and Duke lost. Good times.

sore thumbs

My thumbs are sore. I turned in my ethics term paper this morning and I've been playing Gran Turismo 4 since then. It took maybe an hour, but I finally beat Jeremy Clarkson's lap time on Laguna Seca with a stock NSX-R, by nearly a second. I then tried to attempt one of the few races I haven't beaten yet, but I had forgotten how infuriating that game can be. I also don't have much thumb stamina for that game, always having to mash down as hard as possible on the brakes...stupid pressure senstitive buttons. I think I'm going to put that game away for now and look at some quantum.

510 nm

Being the only sober person on St. Patrick's Day, I have some time on my hands. I finally got around to typing up all my quotes from Dr. Stetz. It was no small feat. So go check out my updated quote board.

Today was pretty good with the exception of my being vaguely unsettled all day. It was the last day of classes for the term, so that was good, and spring break is finally just a week away. I still think it is stupidly late. That makes me a hair short of a third of the way through my Master's degree, and 40% done with my classes. So I'm making progress, slowly. But I am starting to wonder what I'll be like on the flip side and if that's really what I should be shooting for. Some in-flight corrections may be in order.

I am also suffering from the engineering bug because I've just been saturated with physics not-practical stuff all term. If I were still at MSU I could just run off and take another civil engineering class to satisfy my need for balance, but finding time for it here would be much more difficult.

Michigan State got beaten in the NCAA tourney in the first round, which is very sad. March Madness is gone already. Now all I can hope for is that Duke and UNC will get beaten. (UNC because they beat us last year and I had to deal with those bastards while working on the SOAR telescope at MSU.)

Tomorrow I should start writing my HEP doomsday term paper for ethics. My presentation earlier this week about my topic went well. So well that it's probably hyped up to a level I can't possibly meet. Ah well.

For some reason I am still not big on video games at the moment. I played a little R&C3 earlier but put it away after quickly tiring of it. I tried to find a new book to read (I tore through Catch-22), but I couldn't find anything in Borders worth getting. I've kind of overdosed on Top Gear at the moment because I've been compiling a personal cheat sheet for the good episodes. And I'm too exhausted today to bother going out. So I have been trying to find things to do today to unwind. Hence the Dr. Stetz quotes. He's a funny guy.

when i close my eyes i am at the center of the sun

Today was the last day of proper E&M lecture, which promptly meandered into the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. I would have minded except that this particular excursion was a discussion about how lasers work, and it's a scientific fact that lasers are frickin' awesome. I'm a physics major. I know science. So we had a nice talk about population inversion and neon energy levels. And during all this laser talk I remembered that I have a Class 3A laser module sitting in a funky box that I haven't done anything with because both my soldering iron and DMM broke.

I am in a cantankerous mood because everybody else's spring breaks have come and gone and we're still slogging away here with another week to go. It doesn't help that I've been rereading Catch-22. Fortunately, most of my duties for the rest of the term are TA-related, which I enjoy. I only have one more big assignment to take on before finals, my research ethics term paper. I think I'm going to be the only person in the class that isn't taking one of the three suggested topics, even though the prof was hoping everybody would pick something different. Most research ethics stuff is boring, especially in physics, so I'm going to be talking about the possibility of destroying the world with particle accelerators. I haven't decided which side to take yet. I know the chance of catastrophe is incredibly remote, but I also can't resist slamming high energy physics.

perturbed

Two more weeks and I'll be home in MI for spring break. I have a couple big homeworks due Monday and an ethics term paper to write before then, but fortunately no real major projects are left. We changed gears in quantum and we're doing basic perturbation theory now as a prep for what we'll be doing all next term. It's more interesting that what we were doing before. We're apparently almost done with EM waves in E&M, which is odd because we have barely done anything with it. That whole class has been rather silly and pointless.

The prospective grad students finally came through and it was a little weird being in the opposite position of what I went through last year. I went to the dinner (free food) but not the Q&A session or the Newport trip.

I finished reading Fire in the Valley, an epic tome about the history of the personal computer. My favorite chapter was about the start of the PC vs. Mac rivalry, because I like to see Macs get an ass-kicking. Unfortunately, despite the book's size it doesn't seem epic enough. A lot of time was spent talking about the Altair and then the book covers less and less specifics as more and more happens. There was no real connection for me to what I already know about computers. Even at the end of the book it seems like a "computer" is still some sort of newfangled toy. The book is also out of date already - it ends in 1997 when Microsoft just got sued over IE, it didn't even get to Windows 98. The book is also kind of badly organized, with chapters broken into many sub-chapters consisting of only a few pages, even though they mostly talk about the same thing. I can't stand when authors do that.

One of the big things about the early days of computers was the whole magazine scene. A lot of computer stuff was just advertised in the back of the magazines, and the articles talked about exactly what hardware can do and how to program it. I would say that modern magazines are not like this at all, but I recently found an interesting magazine called Make that tells you how to make stuff like windpower towers and a pulsejet-in-a-jar, and there are ads for circuitboards and stuff. One of the neat little things in the magazine was a way to make origami envelopes, which is pretty cool.

I haven't been playing any games since I got fed up with Black & White 2 and uninstalled it, which is just as well because it's been busy recently. Some tempting release dates are coming up though - Kingdom Hearts II, Ace Combat Zero and the Half-Life 2 expansion should all come out later in the spring. It's about time some good games got released.