crushed, part IV

I went up to Woodburn on Saturday to get some jeans and while I was up there I hit Fry's and got a lot more Crush, so I'm stocked up for a while. I also picked up Tropico 2, which is taunting me because I can't play it right now, and it seems like a pretty good game.

I was wrong about the 'theme' of this term's classes. It's not-physics. I got stunned by classes last week because I'm not expected to think like a physicist anymore - I'm now supposed to think like a business student, an EE and a computer scientist. The triple culture shock was a little much, I'm probably going to pull an all-nighter here just to tread water. Hopefully things will settle back down.

crushed, part III

I'm down to my last glass bottle of orange Crush. I came up with what I thought was a great idea last night: take a 2-liter bottle of Crush that Fischer brought down from Seattle and put it into some empties. I almost got a six-pack out of it. However, when I drank some it just wasn't the same. I'm not as crazy about Crush as I was a few months ago, but it would still be nice to have some. Oh well.

I like the looks of my business class already. The one I had last term was horrible, it really didn't teach anything and it had the extra horror of making us work with MBA students. There are no business students in this class because they're all taking real courses, not crash courses. (This class is teaching the basics of both accounting and finance.) Most of the students are from science, including a batch of new PSM students who I haven't met yet. In addition, although we've only had one class so far I've already learned something. The prof handed out copies of Harley-Davidson's annual report and we went through it and now I have some idea what those numbers mean.

Today has just been a lazy Sunday. And I do mean properly lazy - I had 11 hours of sleep last night, and I'm sitting around in a comfortable sweatshirt thinking about a nap. I did manage to do some business homework, and I punched out this entry over the course of an afternoon, but really it hasn't been productive today. I guess I'll just have to enjoy it while it lasts - I'm certainly not going to be able to laze about when I'm up to my neck in coursework.

post number 2^8

First day of classes today. Electronics seems alright except a bunch of my ex-students are in it as well, which makes it weird. Double weird since one of the undergrad TA's worked with me as a TA for some classes last year. Some other grads are supposed to be in there but they were taking quals today. I don't have to.

Vincent has a dartboard in his office now, so we played with that for a while. I should have moved into his office when I had the chance, I spend way more time in there than in my own office anyway. My own office also has new accessories, most notably a rocket launcher. It looks like a fake AK-47 made out of PVC and wood but it can apparently fire Estes rocket engines. It was burned inside the barrel so I take their word for it.

Then it was over to the new engineering building for semiconductor devices. This is my first class over there because I had to crash an engineers-only course. My first impression of the classroom was that it was like something the UN would have. Engineering classrooms are nicer than physics ones. The old asshole prof is out and the new prof seems like a good guy, so I'm hoping that will be a good class.

I also had a bunch of TA stuff today, which was more backwards zaniness. Last year I was the most junior person involved and now I've somehow been promoted to the most veteran member of the team - the other two TA's are first years (seem like OK guys) and the prof isn't the same one as last year and hasn't taught this course in 10 years. So they all look to me as if I know how this class should be run. I don't think they liked my ominous warnings about how hard the prelabs will get. The prof also teaches my electronics class, so I'm both his student and TA.

I ended up having to pull lab duty already. There are so many students enrolled in 211 that there's a new Monday 6PM section of lab. Today I had to hand out clicker things used for in-class quizzes. I brought my Pontiac brochure and ogled a G6 GTP sedan in Electric Blue Metallic while waiting for students to turn up.

Also, more of my neighbors are moving out. This time the ones with the god damned Doberman. Good times.

If last term's overall theme was 'bad profs', it's looking like this term's theme is just the weird role reversals and juxtapositions. I'll have to see how the rest of my new classes go though.

1111111

It's Friday night and I am cruising an obscure corner of the internet. I have been searching high and low for the original score to the movie Pi. I have the album, which contains bits of the score and is great in itself, but the score is really very powerful and I'd like to get my hands on it. One problem - it's unreleased. However, in the composer's online forum he posted:

"It's the 10th anniversary of π next year and there have been some rumblings about what to do to mark such an event. Over the next month or so Tezzer and myself will be launching www.clintmansell.com and by that time a few plans should be in place - and the release of the π score is on the 'to do' list."

That would be awesome.

I saw Fearless tonight and I have to say it was stunning. I didn't come out of it feeling slightly let down like I did with Hero. Better than Fist of Legend I don't know, I have to let it sink in. And maybe see it a couple more times. Definitely a good movie for Jet Li to go out on.

your world is different from mine

It rained today. That's as sure a sign as any that fall is here. Only a little over a week until classes start up again. Kind of exciting that this is my last year of school though...and not even a full academic year of classes.

Yesterday was a very car-focused day. I bought the new issues of Top Gear and Motor Trend. MT's cover story is about how GM might import another Holden, this time as the Grand Prix. It looks quite interesting. MT also had the Solstice GXP and the Aura, so I had to check it out.

I also went and test drove a Pontiac G6 GT, and I think I like it more than the Aura. I have been avoiding the G6 because I was annoyed it looked like every other Pontiac, but I found out the 2007 models are going to have GM's new six-speed automatic transmission and I've really pulled a 180. The G6 GTP is the one I really want of course. The dealer didn't have any of those, but he said there are some new ones coming. So in a few weeks it will be more test driving, Aura XR vs. G6 GTP.

I played through Command & Conquer: Red Alert. I may have only beaten the Soviet campaign once before, and I know this is my first time beating the Allied campaign. I've been playing through the whole series and the early ones are definitely harder. I never noticed before how bad the acting in Red Alert is.

Also: The MSU Physics Shirts are coming back for a third run. I know this is the third time I've claimed this, but I swear it's going to happen this time because I'm not the one handling it. My brother is looking at doing a run as part of the new improved SPS that actually does things. So if you're interested, either let Jim or me know. Not taking orders just yet though.

cutting the voltage to your powerlines

I went up to Salem a couple days ago and test drove a Saturn Aura. The dealer only had one, an XE model with no options, so there weren't any toys to play with. It was pretty nice except the steering wheel kind of hit my knees and I couldn't see out of the thing as well as my Malibu, although the stupid sticker on the windshield may have been part of the problem. The salesman said he was getting some XR models (what I'm interested in) in a few weeks. The Aura XR has the same engine as the Cadillac CTS and a six-speed semiautomatic gearbox. (Those are good things.)

In other news life has pretty much been jury duty and screwing around, with a little bit of getting important stuff done. School doesn't start for another three weeks so this is a good time to take care of stuff before I get bogged down with classes. Now that my fall schedule is done, all I have to do is work out a student loan and then I can focus on finding an internship for spring.

Guess what, more jury duty tomorrow.

sunspot cycles

I discovered that deep within the submenus of Photoshop CS is a tool called Photomerge for putting pictures together as a panorama. I put a couple rough panaoramas from my recent Oregon vacation together. The best part is that as long as you have Photoshop open you can smooth over the seams. I tried putting together a 360 degree panorama from La Jolla, and it looked like it was going to blend pretty well, but Photoshop complained about RAM and quit so I will mess with it tomorrow.

I also wrote a Java program that solves Sudoku puzzles. I needed the practice in Java and I wanted to see how hard it would be. The code is hideous but it can solve the last problem in my Sudoku book in 129,000 operations, which is a trifle for the computer. I guess the algorithm I made up isn't that bad after all.

The rest of today was spent playing Ratchet: Deadlocked and We Love Katamari, but I did register for ECE 417 so I can claim a little progress for the day. More jury duty tomorrow.

charged with battery, pt. II

I set aside some of the batteries my camera refused to run on and checked them with a DMM. They still have 1.5 volts on them. If anything this makes my problem more confusing. If I put them back in the camera they will work for a while again, but not if it's right after the camera refuses to take them. Maybe the batteries are heating up and the camera won't work until they're cool again?

charged with battery

My digital camera, while awesome in most respects, has recently developed a malfunction that causes it to use up batteries at an alarming rate. As in, they need replacing several times a day.

Even with this handicap I still managed to take quite a few good pictures in the past few days. My parents came out to visit me and I gave them a crash tour of Oregon as I have so far come to know it. The Columbia River Gorge was great. We were lucky to see Mount Hood because parts of it are on fire and this apparently presents difficulties for tourists. We also checked out the wine country to the north, and Newport to wrap things up. It was pretty cool overall.

gone fission

So today I got to apply an important grad student skill - raiding free stuff. Some prof retired and left a bunch of old books for people to take. This was last week sometime, but apparently not many people have bothered because there's still piles of them. I went through them today and got a bunch of good stuff. I found an instructor's solutions manual for Marion/Thornton and Halliday/Resnick, but they are 2 and 3 editions out of date respectively. I just like acquiring what used to be contraband - they have the answers to every single problem in the texts.

There was a lot of miscellaneous stuff too, like microcomputer manuals from the late 70's and early 80's, and some books on the nuclear arms race. I took a couple books that opposed Reagan's SDI. I also took a book called "The Discovery of Nuclear Fission" which looks very interesting because it has excerpts from the original research papers. That book is from 1971 though, I think it underplays Lise Meitner's role. I'm still looking forward to reading it

In other news, my dumbass neighbor moved out yesterday, so I'm pleased with that. I also went in for jury duty orientation and got assigned to the circuit court's grand jury. I have to go in two days a week for eight weeks and here about all the horrible stuff going on in the county, but at least it's not hard and it fits in my schedule. I even get a little bit of cash out of it, though that probably won't show up until early November.