danger! high voltage

There was no physics colloqium this week - again - so I crashed the EECS colloqium. A guy from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory was talking about the power grid. It was kind of cool. He obviously had an EE background, but then he was talking about how a system they'd come up with is similar to thermal physics, and then noted that some market phenomenon they'd observed would be analogous to a theoretical "negative temperature." Not sure what he meant by that last bit. That dude had some mad cross-disciplinary skills going on.

Fun fact - Texas has its own power grid. So does Quebec.

pseudo coup, pt. II

So I think I've caused something of a minor insurrection in my business class. After I did a couple Sudoku puzzles in class, Vincent decided to do them too, and then the rest of my project group, and in the last class I saw some random MBA guy I don't know doing one too so I don't even know how far it's spread. I'm a very good seed of rebellion.

we promised the world we'd tame it

My iPod went completely insane just now, and only my 1337 skills brought it back from the brink. This of course requires another ponderous overnight 18GB data transfer. I'm getting slightly concerned about the long term prospects of this particular piece of hardware.

I got my last tax refund this week so I decided to spend some of it. I've already established that Corvallis, Albany, and Salem have little commercial value, so on Friday I pushed even further north to the outlet stores at Woodburn. This turned out to be a bust. The only store that had anything decent was the Levi's/Dockers store, and they didn't have anything in my size. This outlet store was simply where 40W/30L pants went to die.

Woodburn wasn't the end of my trip though. Another 12 miles further north lies one of the Wonders of the Modern World: a Fry's Electronics.

I'd never been in one of these before. Let me just say that no other store in recent memory has made me go weak in the knees. They have everything from popcorn makers to solar panels - real ones, not just science kits. Fry's has entire aisles of headphones, so I was able to pick up a pair of inexpensive folding headphones with an awesome response range. They even have Crush, so I picked up a couple bottles. Now I'll never be fully satisfied with Best Buy. Unfortunately Fry's is over an hour away and I don't have enough money to warrant frequent trips, but it's still good to know that somewhere in this state is a store that doesn't suck.

Tomorrow I have lots of work to do for business class, but if the weather's nice again I might try and get on the roof of Weniger and take some pictures of campus. It doesn't look too hard.

every morning i walk towards the edge and throw little things off

It has now been one year since I graduated from MSU. I'm not sure how much progress I can say I've made except that I'm about halfway through my Master's degree now. I swear I'll be done with school after this degree. I'm only halfway through this silly term, but it's getting close to the end of the year. Unfortunately I have a damned quantum final on my birthday, but I have plans for that. I'm not one that suffers things like that quietly.

I've had my iPod for over a year now. I've managed to keep it fairly scratch-free, so it looks nice. It's gone a bit mental though. It keeps locking up when I'm skipping through songs rapidly and I have to reboot it repeatedly, and if I leave it hooked up to the computer it will claim to not have any playlists one it until I reboot it again. I also found out that something else I thought was a defect was actually a feature. As if to prove a point, my iPod decided to crash and lose all its songs, requiring a ponderous reloading of 16GB. I bought some new headphones for the iPod, a different brand this time, and it has a wider response range and I'm impressed with the results. Especially for $5.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children finally came out on DVD. I have to say...the English dubbing didn't really work as well as I was hoping. Especially when they give Cid a Southern accent, and Cait Sith is Scottish? I think it was almost more confusing in English than it was in Japanese. The movie just doesn't click with me.

Corvallis has once again proved itself to be commercially useless, this time for restaurants. Eugene, which is as far away as Salem, has the nearest Chili's. Both cities have an Olive Garden. We don't even have a Denny's or IHOP (guess what, Salem again). There are no Big Boys in the state, and apparently National Coney Island is a Detroit thing. The nearest Cracker Barrel is in Idaho, 350 miles away, with the closest one after that in Montana. All the restaurants we have are either college food (pizza, Chinese, McDonald's) or uppity fancy places.

The new series of Top Gear started today! I really wish Honda would bring the Civic they have over here because it's a million times cooler than even our new Civics. They're going to review a C6 Corvette Z06 among other things, they don't usually review American cars but this one they can't just ignore. The new series looks awesome.

zero

Apparently I can't use a calendar, because I've been under the impression that Ace Combat Zero came out next month, when in reality it came out earlier this week. So last night as soon as I figured out I was breaking Physics Rule #1 I ran down to the store and bought it. And beat it. It's rather shorter than Ace Combat 5 and doesn't have nearly as good a story, so I think AC5 is my favorite of the series so far. I'm still going to give ACZ a working over though.

Unfortunately it's going to be a busy weekend so I won't have much time to mess around with ACZ any more right now. In particular, I have to double grade exams for 213 this weekend. We're down another 50 students or so from last term though, about 200 now, so at least there aren't as many to grade overall. We've lost so many students compared to first term that we can now fit all the students into one room for exams while before we needed two. The intro physics series here is a rough one.

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.