electrical devices that transfer energy from one circuit to another by magnetic coupling

TRANSFORMERS.

Because the only thing cooler than a Veyron...

...is a Veyron with rocket launchers.

you've no idea what you're like

I was at the Pontiac website today and they had a feature on countering excuses to not get a convertible. Their defense basically boiled down to "man up." They didn't actually address the concerns I have actually heard about convertibles - they have no space and when you take the roof off of a car, you lose torsional stiffness unless you put huge steel beams in the sides that add weight and spoil the performance.

Whatever. I wasn't at the Pontiac website to look at convertibles. I was there for this, which is now my new car to dream about buying. It's the Grand Prix replacement, the G8. Top Gear had the Vauxhall VXR8 on display in a recent episode, and I remembered hearing rumors that Pontiac might import and rebadge its own version of the Australian car it's based on, and apparently it shall come to pass. The G8 GT is supposed to have 362 HP, and I'm guessing the GTP model would be around the Vauxhall's 420 HP (before the supercharger kit.)

For those of you playing along at home, the G8 is actually a step back from the brink of total irresponsibility. Once upon a time I wanted a Prius above all else. Then the new Civic got Car of the Year from Motor Trend, and I thought about the hybrid a little bit. But then it turns out the normal one is almost as eco-friendly and actually moves. Then once you think about the Civic, there's a thought about the Si model, the hot one. But once you get that far there start to be similar GM products, and the GM equivalent would roughly be a Cobalt SS. I respect the Cobalt, but I'm used to the Malibu which is the next step up. There is a Malibu SS, but it didn't really catch my fancy.

Around this time its cousin the Saturn Aura was coming out, and I actually test drove a base model, but a little while after this the Aura's UK origin, the Vauxhall Vectra, was on Top Gear, and the Vectra is far from JC's favorite car. So I started looking at other cars in this class. Fischer had been down in Corvallis around then, and his G6 didn't seem too bad. So since then I have been lusting after the G6, particularly the top-end GTP model because it's got some options you can't get in the other ones, and also a good sized V6 with a little more power than the Malibu's got. I also test drove a G6 and thought it was OK, although a bit tight for a big guy like me. This has pretty much where I've been for the past few months, until PJ got a real job, got internet again and implanted an evil idea in my head because it's been rattling around in his. It can almost be rationalized. And so I've gone from wanting a Prius to wanting a muscle car.

The G8 is therefore a slightly more rational choice. It's a sedan and not a coupe. Maybe it has better trunk space or something too. That's about all I can think of. Perhaps only 97% as irresponsible as the alternative. It would certainly be more interesting than a G6 though, especially with RWD and a V8 with a hundred and ten more horsepower, and possibly more on the way. That's quite a bit. It almost makes me stop and wonder how much is enough. 362 HP is probably twice as much as my Malibu, and that 420 HP in the Vauxhall is comparable to something like an Audi RS4 or a BMW M3. Power is good, but I don't want a car that is so twitchy if I barely touch the gas pedal it tears off at 100 MPH and torque steers into a tree. I think I would be plenty happy with having the GT instead of a GTP.

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.

scrubbed

Scrubs has jumped the shark. That may be obvious to you, or more likely you don't care, but it annoys me and when I get annoyed I rant. It was bad enough when they decided to make everyone have a baby at once. Then they start giving all the characters diseases - Turk having diabetes is OK, but now JD has something or other so he "passes out when he poos." Poop jokes - always a sign of high level writing. Last week they decided to run a clip show which was awful, as soon as I figured that out I deleted it. I even went to the site jumptheshark.com and Scrubs satisfies quite a few of their criteria. (Apparently there are such criteria, and people with nothing better to do than apply them.)

we've got a wave in the air

I had an interview for an internship/job last Friday and it went pretty well. The company called and wants me back for a second interview, so I have to drive most of the way to Portland again to talk to some other people.

So with the prospect of actually making some money around the corner, I have been daydreaming what I might do with some of it. I am thinking of building a serious new desktop PC, but I am not really in a rush, especially with a whole new batch of components about to come out (like 45 nm CPUs and 1TB hard drives). There also isn't a hell of a lot coming out to force on upgrade on my part. The only think I might actually pick up is a big LCD monitor, which I could use right now with my laptop and then I'd have one for when I eventually build a new machine. A really nice LCD monitor only costs as much now as the first 15" one I bought several years ago.

There's also the matter of next gen consoles. I still think the Xbox is for Halo-playing frat boys, so that is probably out. I gave the Wii a try but I did not like it, and Nintendo is a little childish for me. So that leaves the PS3. Its ungodly price tag is an issue, but one that can be remedied with an actual paycheck and enough time. A bigger problem for me is that no one has actually released anything decent for it yet. For example, the one game that the guys at Penny Arcade like (flOw) is just a next gen version of Snake. Which is stupid.

So what games might make me change my mind? Final Fantasy XIII might, if it looks better than XII. I've heard rumors of a new Ratchet & Clank game, but I am a little wary because the series is already getting a little tired. A new Mercenaries game is in the works, but that is a ways off, as is a new Gran Turismo. A new Kingdom Hearts would also be nice, but I think that's a long ways off, and I haven't heard of any plans to bring Ace Combat to the PS3. All of these games are expected in Q4 2007 at the earliest, so I certainly have plenty of time to think about it.

i'm gonna tell you that i'm innocent

Here is what I have left from my epic battle with a bag of Cheetos.

As you may have inferred, I have a working camera. I broke down and bought another one exactly like mine from Newegg. It was only $99 for an OEM one and I figure I could easily rack up that much having someone look at my broken one. While I was on Newegg I also got a 2GB memory card for my camera, so I can take an obscene number of pictures now.

Unfortunately I have just been working on computational physics all day so I didn't get to try out the camera much. It's been rainy out anyway.

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.

chair affair

My computer chair broke this morning. Oddly enough, the failure mode was not what I have been anticipating for months. I thought the whole seat would crack off at the base since it wobbles from side to side, but as I was getting out of it this morning one of the arms sheared off, compromising the structural integrity. Didn't see that one coming. That chair lasted 14 months, blowing away the previous record of 3.

I got a new chair already, which put me down $130. The new chair seems pretty nice, but as I was putting it together I could only wonder which piece would be the first to betray me. I've already found the microfiber fabric does a good job of building up static electricity.