Monday, August 28, 2006

Yeah, so I'm sitting in class not paying attention right now. Its pretty exciting. The class is theoretically Mechanical Design, but mostly its a review of previous classes. The proff says the word "ok" at least once in every sentence. It makes me mad. Loud Noises!

This last weekend was ammusing. I went to Nuthouse, which is an improv comedy group on campus. It was pretty funny. One of the games they played is called "Lines from a Pocket" in which the actors are put in a situation (in this case a party) and have to complete their lines by pulling pieces of paper out of their pocket and reading whats written on it. One guy was saying "The last thing my ex-girlfriend said before she died was -- I'm pregnant." It ammused me.

On Sunday I went to the river. There are rock cliffs there that are about 20-30 feet high that people dive off of. One guy almost killed himself when he chickened out at the last second. He took a three step running start, then planted both feet and stopped right before the edge of the cliff. If he was going any faster, he wouldn't have been able to stop himself, and would have cracked his head on the rocks. Probably would have sucked. Cortni and I comandeered Nalani's raft and relaxed on the water for a while. There were lots of bikini clad women there too. It made me happy :-P.

Anyway, time to start paying attention again.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

So some of my avid readers are probably wondering why its been so long since I last posted anything. I assure you its not because nothing of interest (at least to me) has happened in the last week+, nor because I have had no time to post. The reason it has been so long is the damn thing wouldn't let me sign in! It had a very friendly page asking me to type in my username and password then click "sign in" where upon it brought me back to the exact same page. I thought at first it was some sort of glitch in the website, like someone had screwed up the link or some such. Well, after a week it seems hard to believe that a glitch like that would go unnoticed by the good folk at Google. Turns out, they had upgraded their site, adding a few features (none of which I have seen yet) and such, but the upgrade required me to click a box saying I understood the new terms and conditions before it would let me post anything more. Pretty irritating.

Speaking of irritating, everyone knows how annoying it is to get those little popup windows when you're surfing the net. It annoys me so much that I go way out of my way to avoid the damn things. I use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer (which helps a LOT) I have a popup blocker running, and I have McAfee's security center running at all times. Then, just to taunt me it seems, McAfee throws up the occasional "Would you like to try our upgraded service package?" tool tip window. Because CLEARLY I like pop-up ads so much I might just try their product because it was advertised that way. LOUD NOISES!!

So classes started this week. I'm taking 5 classes this semester, all 3 credit (that’s 15 credits for the less mathematically inclined among you ;-) ) and they all meet Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with one exception for a lab class, which meets Tuesday instead of Friday. I like most of my professors. I start at 8:00 AM (which feels ridiculously early) and go till noon, then have one more class at 2:00 PM. I'm taking Thermal Systems, Metals, Mechanical Design, Mechatronics, and Polymers.

Thermal Systems looks like it will be fairly straightforward. Its taught by an Indian guy with the last name of Dutta. His accent isn't too bad, and he's pretty friendly, so it'll be an ok class.

Metals is taught by the Materials Science department chair. He used to work at Alcoa, so he obviously worked with a lot of Aluminum. He seems like a pretty good teacher too. We're talking about phase diagrams for alloying steels right now. I remember talking about alloys a lot in my last materials science class, but I don't remember a lot of this stuff.

I've had all of two classes of Mechanical Design, and already I don't like it one little bit. The professor is a short little Chinese man named Dr. Ding. He's hard to understand, drops the word "ok" in between every sentence, and spent the last two hours of class talking about simple statics problems (sum of forces=0 and that stuff). Now, I know its all important stuff, but we learned it freshman year and have been using it in nearly every class since then. If people don't have it down by now, they probably aren’t going to.

Mechatronics is taught by a Dr. Hutton, who seems to be pretty on the ball with what he's talking about. I've heard stories of him coming to class completely tanked and canceling class because of it. (Alex, you'll be sorry to know he now has a whiteboard, and doesn't carry pieces of chalk with him anymore.) I like him though. He speaks well, and so far at least has been able to relate information well.

My last class is Polymers, and is taught by Dr. Johns. He's the same professor who taught MSE 301, which is arguably the hardest class I've taken. Actually, forget arguably, it IS the hardest class I've taken in terms of new material covered, and the depth and breadth of material covered. I got an A- in it though, so I'm pretty pleased with myself. I fully anticipate learning a lot in the Polymers class.

So far we haven’t gotten much homework, so I can't speak to that yet.

I did however do something fun two days ago (Tuesday) : I went for a plane ride with my friend Ed Patry who has a 150 that is certified to fly aerobatics. The plane is rated for +9 and -3 Gs! How do you even MAKE a 150 pull +9 Gs?! Anyway, we drove out to Colfax where his plane is hangared and went up for an hour. We did some rolls, Lazy 8s, Immellmans, loops, snap rolls... It was a blast. Its not very often I get to see the horizon as a vertical line. I can't wait to go for a plane ride with Dan Miller and see what he can do in his new RV. Ed's 150 could barely get off the ground with the two of us in it plus about a half a tank of fuel.

I'm probably going to have to go in to work today and make another batch of PZT. The last batch was "gelling" when it was spun on, which means there is water in at least one of the chemicals used to make it. There was a small hole in one of the Nitrogen hood gloves, so its possible that water got in that way. Pretty annoying as the process of making PZT involves several oil baths that take over 24 hours all told.

Well, back to the grind.

Monday, August 14, 2006

I had a good weekend. Turns out. Saturday I went up to Spokane in the morning to meet Cortni for lunch at Olive Garden. Good stuff. I had my traditional Chicken con Broccoli (hold your gasps at my eating something green. It happens every now and again.) and Cortni had Cheese Ravioli. Mine was good, but Cortni's disagreed with her stomach, which was too bad. After lunch I went up to Whitworth College to hang out with Shannon, an old friend from highschool. She just moved into a house near her campus, and was having difficulty putting her furniture together. Word to the wise: don't-buy-furniture-online,-it-tends-to-suck-monkey-balls. (I had to hyphenate it to make it one word, and the statement is meant figuratively, for those who might wonder who is going around playing with monkey-balls.) She bought a little table with a drawer in it that was made of wood. It was your typical cheap sort of furniture, comes unassembled with holes drilled in where you're supposed to put screws in. At least, normal furniture has holes where the screws are supposed to go. This particular piece of furniture had holes in the approximate, nay general vicinity of where the screws were supposed to go. The holes in the legs were about a quarter inch further apart than the pilot holes in the cross piece for the legs. Net result, we had to basically thread the fatty wood screw in at an angle, mostly missing the pilot hole in the cross piece. Now here's another piece of poor engineering. Suppose you were to make a screw for a piece of cheap furniture. Foremost in your mind would be to make them as cheap as possible, because clearly using steel screws would cost several hundred pennies more than brass ones. Also, don't bother getting screws that have sharp enough threads to actually cut their way into the wood. Oh yeah, and also don't bother using screws that have flat or Philips heads on them, but go with Allen heads (those hexagonal jobbies). While you're at it, make sure you don't make the heads deep enough to get more than 1/16 of an inch of the wrench head in, because clearly that’s enough to drive a screw through hardwood. Also, make sure you include a tiny little Allen wrench to put them in, so that its impossible to get enough leverage on it to actually assemble the furniture. . . Every last one of the screws stripped out when trying to screw it in. The end result was a piece of furniture that looks pretty, but wobbles more than the underarm of a hundred year old woman.

But, all that aside, it was good to see Shannon again. Her mom took us out to a restaurant called Prospectors, which turned out to be a pretty high class sort of place. Steaks and Shrimp instead of a burger and fries. It was pretty tasty, but after an Olive Garden lunch, I was far from hungry. But I couldn't be rude and not eat with them, so I ordered a chicken Cesar wrap that turned out weigh about 3 lbs, and took up an entire plate. Needless to say, I took most of it home.

So for the last two days I've been spending a lot of time with my girlfriend. Its nice to have her back. She has a new room mate named Nalani (nay-LAH-nee). She's friendly. She also has a movie collection to rival Net Flix, so of course Cortni's gonna steal some for our (read: my) amusement.

I had to go into work today. I had high hopes of getting a couple of wafers masked and doped, and maybe even etched. Instead, I was roped into making PZT (our piezoelectric material) which took about 4 hours. It doesn't actually take four hours to add ingredients or anything, just to get the hot plate to heat things to the right temperature. Now, I like watching thermometers move as much as the next guy, but after about two hours of it, one gets a little tired of staring at the thing. A lot like watching paint dry. . .

My dad's going to be flying up to Alaska tomorrow to fly a Cessna 210 back with John Pallister. It should be an adventure. The flight should only take 2 days assuming perfect weather the whole way, but apparently that never happens.

I managed to strike a deal with Cortni involving my laundry. Her apartment complex has a coin-op laundry room, but the washing machines are small, and the dryers don't work very well, so instead, I offered to let her do her laundry in my apartment (since I have my own washer/dryer) just so long as she does my laundry too. :-D Net result: I don't have to do laundry! *happy dances*

Well, I have a pizza on the way for dinner, so I think I'm going to make like a baby and head out.

Wednesday, August 9, 2006

Yesterday I spent seven and a half hours in a clean room, working on some wafers. Kyle and I were doing sputtering, which is basically where you take a disk of the material you want to coat you wafer with in a chamber that has Argon in it, run about a thousand volts through it to make plasma, then watch the pretty colors for about 20 minutes. It sounds like a pretty painless process, but before you can pump the Argon in, you have to pump it down to near vacuum (on the order of 10^-6 torr... which doesn't mean that much I suppose, but for comparison, normal atmospheric pressure is 730 torr). The pump down process ideally is supposed to take about 2 hours. BUT, that two hours is assuming you use a heat lamp, have a very clean chamber that you're pumping down, have a working pump, and plenty of liquid nitrogen. Of those four things, all we had was the liquid nitrogen. The lamp was inoperative, the chamber has been used a lot recently and wasn't especially clean, and the pump had a "high vac fail" which basically means you have to start the pump down from scratch. Kind of annoying, but I can't really complain about the 75 bucks I got paid for it.

So that evening, I didn't have much to do. Cortni is away on a short vacation before heading back to Pullman, and nobody else was online to talk to. I'd beaten all the games I have, and the netflix movies were still in transit. . . Basically I was casting around the internet for something to do. In my random wanderings I ended up coming across a short article about the recently failed "net neutrality" act, and I got to reading. It turns out that the guys who are running our country are a bunch of lame-brained idiots who have their heads so far up their own backsides that they can't see which end is up anymore. Basically, the deal with net neutrality is Internet Service Providers (ISPs) want to be able to charge more for certain service than for other services. They claim that there is going to be a bandwidth shortage with so many people using bit torrent and watching internet TV and such, that it will cause the internet to slow down for everyone. Also, they claim that they have put a sizable investment into upgrading phone lines to support DSL and laying high speed cable lines, and they want to be able to recoup their investment based on what users are using the connection for.

Information is sent over the internet in little chunks of data called packets. Currently, ISPs don't check what a packet contains before sending it to where its going. Several large ISPs have decided that they want to be able to give higher priority to packets that contain certain kinds of data over others, based on both the end user and the website owner paying a fee.

The only problem with that, is that the whole idea is FLAMING RETARDED! First of all, claiming that there's going to be a bandwidth shortage strikes me a lot like oil companies claiming there's instability in the Middle East, and raising gas prices. Secondly, the ISP companies that are trying to make these changes are big telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T. The government (read, US taxpayers) subsidized the laying of new cable for internet and DLS lines in order to bring the internet to more rural areas. Letting these companies choose what packets get sent is a lot like the government contracting the building of a new freeway to General Motors, then restricting the fast lanes to cars that are built by General Motors. Further, one of the new internet applications that uses high bandwidth is Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services such as Skype. These applications let people make long distance and international phone calls completely free of charge. You can bet that companies like Verizon and AT&T aren’t very happy about this. Without any government intervention, there is absolutely nothing stopping these companies from giving packets used for Skype such a low priority that the data for all intents and purposes never gets sent.

Another problem with prioritizing packets is that there are hundreds of individual ISPs at the local level. AT&T and Verizon and those guys are affiliated with most of them, but they are still individual companies. Even if someone did pay the fee to prioritize their packets, when the packet moves from one companies zone of control to another, it would be downgraded to low priority anyway.

When there were murmurings that some telecom companies were starting to lobby the government to allow them to start prioritizing packets, a bunch of grassroots organizations popped up to try and stop them. The telecoms responded by funding a bunch of psudo-grassroots groups to try and argue their side which soon became known as "Astroturf" organizations.

Anyway, even with all the problems with having a non neutral internet, our great and wise senators and representatives sided with the telecoms. Idiots.

It makes me angry.

Oh, I also got a haircut. It looks good.

Tuesday, August 8, 2006

Its hot in Pullman. I don't think I really like that. I always have a hard time sleeping when its hot out. I've decided that I'm perfectly happy at about 68 degrees F. Its cool enough that wearing jeans isn't troublesome, and warm enough that one doesn't fall on ones muscular white buttocks walking down the hill. (Ice really gets to be a problem in Pullman in the winter time. Turns out.)

Today was actually remarkably productive. Yesterday I did the first half of making a selective boron doped wafer, namely I masked, etched and doped one side of it, a process that takes about 6 hours all told. Two of those six hours is just waiting for the boron to diffuse into the wafer sufficiently. Today I did the other half, masking the other side, then putting it in BOE (a nasty acid) for a long time to theoretically etch off the silicon oxide and the layer of boron glass that forms on the surface during the doping process. (This picture explains it all in better detail.) The problem of the day was: how long should I leave it in the BOE. If I leave it in too long, the BOE will etch sideways through the oxide layer on the bottom, screwing up the windows I'm trying to etch into it. If I don't leave it in long enough, a layer of boron glass will remain on the surface of the wafer, preventing it from etching at all, which is what happened to my last wafer. It seems that as time goes on I'm leaving a swath of useless wafers in my path. . .

So to try to figure out how long to leave it in the BOE I went and talked to some people who in theory know more than I do. Mostly because they're older. And have been doing it longer. But mostly the older thing. Anyway, I showed Jeong (our resident South Korean) what I was doing, and he was convinced that the doping process didn't form a glass layer on the wafer, which would mean that I had f-ed up my wafer in some other way than I had thought. Normally I'd bow to his greater experience, but there was a recipe in the old clean room that was for removing the glass layer from the wafer. "Why" thought I, "would there be a recipe for removing something that doesn't exist?" So I went and found Dylan, who seems to be the most on top of things as far as grad students go. He told me that the boron does in fact form a glass layer just as I had thought, and also that my process should work. His caveat was that whenever other people needed to selectively boron dope, they just wiped out the oxide on both sides and grew a new one. Doing that would further complicate my life because I would have to do yet another long bake time process on each wafer. Dylan's faculty advisor Dr. Bahr seemed to think my process should work as well though, so I think I'm going to go ahead with it. They recommended an hour BOE time, which is what I'm going to go do tomorrow.

So all of this took about 5 hours today. Hurray for another 50 bucks. Before taxes. Darn government. (Realizes the irony of the previous statement given said current employment at a government institution.)

Sitting at my computer at about 8:00 this evening I decided that I should check out what classes I'm taking next semester. It looks like the line up is: Mechatronics and associated lab, Thermodynamic Systems (which given previous experience in both Thermodynamics and System Dynamics anticipate to be just loads of fun) Mechanical Design, and two Material Science Engineering (MSE) classes: Metals and Polymers. It should keep me busy. I just hope that dear Dr. Johns doesn't teach both metals and polymers. His MSE 301 class which I took last fall required more studying for a class than I have ever had to do. That includes that lame test I had to take in 5th grade about all the explorers in the 1700s and what countries they went to. Thank you Mom for teaching me how to make/use flashcards. I have a whole pile of them still that say things like: "strength", "ductility", "toughness", "hardness" etc on one side, and their associated definition on the other. The really frustrating part about John's tests and quizzes is he asks for things out of the reading that most people don't pay much attention to. Like, the units on the axes of a particular graph out of the chapter. Yeah, its in the reading, but who honestly looks for that?

Anyway, in looking to see what classes I was going to be in, I came across the schedule surfer for WSU classes. Basically, you type in the class number, and it shows you in a graphical format what blocks of time your classes fill. Pretty handy program. Pretty irritating too. Ostensibly, its set up so students can see when their classes meet so they can arrange their classes to their liking. The frustrating thing is that the schedule surfer doesn't interface with any other part of the class selection system. Its a Java applet that I assume is given a listing of all the classes when they're assigned, then sits all alone in cyberspace. The practical irritation of this is when you have your schedule all set up how you like, you can't just click a button to have it send the info to sign you up for those classes. Instead you have to go to another page and type in all the class numbers again. And you'd better pray that the class still has seats available, otherwise you have to go back into the schedule surfer and have it spit out a whole new list of classes and course numbers. Also, it would be really nice if it could look at what classes you're registered for and fill itself in without you having to type the class numbers in every time you close the applet.

Long story short, I decided to learn Java to see if I can't make a better version of the program. I figure if I get it done by next semester, it'll be one less irritant that I have to deal with, and if I get it done by the end of the school year, I'll maybe be able to pass it down to some future generation of Coug. I found a pretty insightful online textbook (its free and legal) but the part I can't figure out is how to compile java code properly. I'll have to do some more digging for that.

At midnight(ish) I went for a run, as is my custom. It was cool enough outside by then to be rather pleasant. It was a really clear night, and there was a full moon, which was kind of cool. I ran 2.25 miles, which is about as far as I've ever run. I almost lost track of how many times I ran around the track. I can't imagine how Dave runs marathons. I listen to an audio book that’s pretty entertaining, but I get kind of bored after just 20 minutes. How does one keep running after 2 hours? Crazy people. In slightly related news, I came across a 60 minutes episode in which a guy was interviewed who wrote a book about how weird Florida is. The guy had a folder of news clippings of all the bizarre things people do there. One of them was a guy who slept with two live alligators. Yes, slept with them in the way your raised eyebrow insinuates.

Anyway, on that note, I'm going to bed.

Friday, August 4th, 2006

So in the last four days, my dad and I only really got one good days work in on the 172. We spent all afternoon Wednesday picking up the engine. Kind of saps the energy out of you driving around Portland for 5 hours. Those bastards can't drive, and they outnumber me. By a lot. (On an unrelated note: stupid people shouldn't breed.)

We polished up the baffles pretty well (or at least as well as can be expected) and the firewall is cleaned up. My dad hand painted on some primer, and soon it'll have a coat of paint. The engine looks pretty good, if not the standard factory color. Apparently there were a lot of things that were falling apart on that engine. The magnetos among them (yikes!). The more I think about it, the more glad I am that the generator started leaking oil to lead to us finding all of this. I think the airplane will be much safer now. ("now" of course referring to when its actually airborne again.)

My dad flew me back out to Pullman today. He and Brian were headed for Three Forks, Montana for a little fly in with his Bucker buddies. I haven't flown in that airplane in a long time. Its much smaller than I remember inside. You climb in and its like climbing into a box. The panel is about 12 inches from your face, and once you're in you fold these two metal panels up, which block your vision anywhere below your eyes. Right in front of the passenger is a large compass, that, as it turns out, doesn't really point North. Or any other direction for that matter. Once the engine starts, the vibrations cause it to spin quickly in circles. When you're airborne and you know the world can actually spin around you, its slightly unnerving to watch the compass go round and round.

The flight was made in two hops. The first took us from Battle Ground to Kennewick, and the second took us to Pullman. All told, it took about 3 hours, including landing and fiddling around on the ground refueling and such. My dad let me fly the second leg, which was great fun. Brian led, and we were flying in formation the whole way. It was an interesting experience flying in formation. The thought process is pretty different. Normally its always a running circle of, "Where am I? Where am I headed? What's around me? Where can I land?" When flying in formation, its a much simpler "Keep that guy where he is." So you keep your wings level with his so if he turns, you turn with him, and you use power to move yourself in relation to him. Add a little power to catch up and get closer, let off on the power to put some distance between you. Being in the front seat of the Bucker has a distinct disadvantage of having two huge blind spots above and below you. My dad had me fly a box around Brian's propwash (up and over the top, then down and back to where we started). The up and over was pretty manageable, but when Brian was above and in front of us, I couldn't see him at all, and with no good landmarks in view (from the top of my box) I couldn't really guess at it either.

The Bucker is much more responsive than my Cessna 172. For a long time I thought my dad was playing with the controls, but it was just the wind pushing slightly on the ailerons and elevator. The rudder took some getting used to as well. In my 172 there's maybe 6 inches of movement from neutral rudder to full to the side. The Bucker has about a foot and a half. So I was making adjustments that would have worked fine in my plane, but did practically squat in the Bucker. All in all though, it was pretty fun. We drew crowds at both airports we landed at with people asking what they were and such. Kind of fun.

One other drawback of the Bucker is since there's so little room in the cockpit, there's no space for a back cushion, and the seat just has a curved metal back, which provides little in the way of comfort, and nothing in the way of back support.

So I'm back in Pullman, and have some fun and exciting work to look forward to this week. I need to get cracking on the selective boron wafer. Jeff called me up and told me he wasn't going to be able to come out this weekend, so I may put in some time this weekend. I think I can probably get the wafer masked, doped, remasked and possibly etched by Monday if I throw some time at it. Fun and exciting.

8 days till I get to see Cortni out in Pullman.

Tuesday, August 1, 2006

So it turns out that being home is boring when none of your friends are around. Today my folks went up to Olympia to fiddle with the boat a little, then went up to Tacoma (not Seattle as I so recently found out...) to hang out with my brother and Sherill as they opened wedding presents. They had a huge pile of them. Apparently they received like ten Target gift cards, which amused my dad to no end. My bro seems to be really happy, and I'm happy for him. I'm glad he found someone to spend his life with. I like the guy.

So while my parents were gone, I met up with my friend Michael who I haven’t seen in two years. He's Mormon, and was missioning in Georgia (the state, not the country) for the last two years. It sounds like he had fun doing it, and looks at it as a good experience. I think that most Mormon missionaries feel that way, and I think in part its because its the first time for many of them to be completely out from under their parents for an extended period of time. Mike went to college for a year before he went on his mission, but while the first year away is a step in the right direction, it certainly isn't like being away from them for two years straight as you talk to a bunch of strangers trying to convince them that they've been living their life all wrong up till now. In any case, it was good to see Mike again. We grabbed some Burgerville lunch (good stuff. The chain should get bigger and plunk down a store in Pullman) and went to see the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie. After talking to Mike about his missioning for so long before the movie, I laughed my ass off when one of the two stooges was "reading" a Bible upside down, and the other told him that he couldn't read, to which the first replied, "Its the Bible, you get credit for trying." Good stuff.

I ran three miles today. Turns out you sweat a lot when you do that. It felt good though. It was nice to be able to use the treadmill after 9:00 (since my folks weren't home to go to sleep.) I've decided that Cortni is right; treadmills really don't give you the same exercise that regular running does. But it sure beats the heck out of doing nothing.

I amused myself for about three hours watching random videos on youtube.com. There are a bunch of spoofs on the "Hi, I'm a PC. And I'm a mac..." ads. A guy that reminds me a lot of Sean Collison pops in and says "I'm Linux!" and the other two don't like him.
Linux: You know, I run all the servers that you play your games on.
PC and Mac: WE DON"T CARE!
Linux: (sulking) I can shut down your entire subnet. I am /root!

It amused me anyway.