Thursday, Sept 21, 2006

So the last few days have been "fun". On Sunday night I toddled into the bathroom and noticed that there was some strange residue on the bottom of the bathtub like someone had tried to clean lint off the bottom of the tub and didn't succeed very well. A couple of hours later I went in there and there was 4 inches of sewage in the bottom of the tub, and the toilet had backed up. So, from past experience, when something plugs up, its often my fault and going to town on whatever is stopped up with a plunger tends to fix things. Just as I'm about to go at it, my next door neighbor, Sabrina, knocks on the door and asks if we're having problems with our plumbing. - First thought: "shit."

So we go knock on the third neighbor's door and sure enough, he's having problems too. So, having sewage coming up your bathtub drain isn't pleasant by any means, so we call the apartment folks. They're closed, and have a message saying "if this is an emergency, please call blah-blah-blah." So I call Blah-blah-blah and get a very helpful message telling me to leave my numeric message after the tone. Beep. So flaming much for that. So then I go upstairs and knock on everyone's door up there and tell them that the plumbing is backed up, so if they're doing laundry or anything like that to please hold off for a day or two. Ten minutes later my bathtub drains out... mostly. The next morning I go in and tell the folks in the Apartment Rentals office that the plumbing is backed up. They must be making people stupider these days because the first thing the lady in the office says is "Ok, I'll go call the carpet cleaners." - *dead pan.*

So after helping the poor stupid woman to understand that the pipes are still blocked up, and perhaps it would be best to fix that first, and that it backed up in the tub so no carpets are wet anyway, she calls RotoRuter and they say they'll be out within the our. The RotoRuter guy shows up a half hour later, flushes all the toilets on the bottom floor, looks in the tub, decides its a clogged sewer pipe (well no shit) and proceeds to use a big rotating snake to clear everything out. He ran the snake down the toilet pipe of Sabrina's apartment and in the process apparently broke the water intake valve on the toilet so now they've been without a working toilet for 4 days now. Irritating bastards.

I had a test in metals yesterday. It went alright I think, but we'll have to see how things turn out. I'm always concerned when I get 0 or 100 for answers to test questions because it feels like I'm missing something. Oh well. It was open book (though the book isn't very helpful) and open note (which was much more helpful) and the test was pretty straight forward.

I have a boatload of homework that doesn't make much sense yet to do for Thermal Systems and Machine design. The prof for Machine Design has been talking about column buckling for the last 3 classes, but he always does examples of beams with uniform cross section, and never mentions what changes when you have a variable cross section. In one of the homework problems I have a beam that is round all the way up, but is goes from wide to narrow at the half way point. Obviously the half way point is where it will buckle, but whether or not we have to use some sort of stress concentration formula is anyone’s guess. Loud noises.

I've got a meeting for the MEMS group that I have to go to in an hour. I'm not really looking forward to that either. I didn't do anything for the MEMS group this week, so I'm tempted not to go. Oh well. I'll get paid 10 bucks to go I suppose.

I also found a cool website that has lots of pics from NASA. Some are nice high resolution. I set one of the International Space Station as my desktop wallpaper. Good stuff.

Sunday, Sept 16, 2006

It's official. My classes are a lot of work. I'm sure that makes you happy, Dad. There's a reason I didn't pick chemistry for a major: it sucks large bison ass. (I'll give you a moment to ponder that image.) Spending hours reading about addition and hydration reactions isn't my idea of a good time, but its sort of required for my polymers class. I have a test in it this week, and its kind of gobbling up my time. Not much fun.

In wandering the internet, I came across some reviews for Medieval 2: Total War, which is the latest installment of what I think is the best real time strategy computer game series ever devised. It's sort of like playing Risk, only instead of rolling dice to decide battles (which is lame by the way) you actually get to command your troops on the battlefield. The graphics are insane, with battlefields that look like they were photographed, and castles that look like they were straight off of Google Earth. It comes out in November, which is cool and also really lame because that's when I'll have finals. Loud noises. Some screenshots can be seen here.

Anyway, not a whole lot went on today, but I felt like I should post something today. I picked up Cortni and her room mates from a bar last night. It was entertaining. Cortni called me at about 1:30 AM, and it was past 2:30 before I put her to bed. Fun times.

We had breakfast at Old European. I've decided thats on my list of top three favorite restaurants. They make the best French Toast ever, and have freshly squeezed orange juice (you can watch em squeeze it.) Good stuff.

Anyway, I think its time to go do something productive.

By the way, I'm sort of curious who all is reading my blog. Feel free to leave a comment (click the link at the bottom of the post that probably says "0 comments").

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Turns out most of my classes suck. And by "most" I mean all but Mechatronics, which might still start sucking. I had such high hopes going into this semester. I thought my profs were all nice guys and likely to be good teachers. I thought the classes would be interesting. . . Nope! Sure Not!

I'm really beginning to be frustrated with my Thermal Systems class. It doesn't help that it meets at 8:00 in the morning, which for me is really early. The class so far hasn't been interesting in the slightest. It seems to mostly be a revamp of Thermodynamics which I took last year with Troutt, possibly the worst professor I've ever had. But the bitch of it is I sort of got it all with Troutt, and now having an entire extra class of it is beyond boring. The assignment due tomorrow consists mainly of looking numbers off a table for properties of water. I could care less what the enthalpy of water is at 1MPa. I'm also getting tired of writing the First Law of Thermodynamics (heat + work = heat + work. . . whoop-dee-freaking-doo) over and over again.

Today was a lame day. I went in to work this morning before lab with the intention of making a batch of PZT. The process basically goes like this: clean out a jar, plastic cap and magnetic stir bar with Acetone and Isopropyl Alcohol, then stick it in an oven between 100-120 degrees C to dry out. Some of the chemicals in PZT tend to explode when mixed with water, so the jar has to be really dry. If the oven is too hot, it'll melt the cap (something like 135 degrees I think), so there's a digital thermocouple rigged up to the oven so you can maintain it at the right temperature. The jar and cap have to sit in the oven for about a half an hour. Then you stick it in a glove box (a big Plexiglas box with rubber gloves sticking into it that supposedly is kept very dry) to start mixing up the chemicals. The amounts of the chemicals are measured using a scale, so you zero it, then add however much of each of the chemicals. Most of the chemicals are liquid and the composition of the PZT has to be very exact, so you end up standing there with your hands in a box dripping chemicals from a pipette for about an hour or so. Then you cap the jar and stick it in an oil bath that is sitting on a hot plate and has to be maintained at exactly 92 degrees (why not 91 or 93, I don't know) for a half an hour. Then you stick it back in the glove box, drip in some more chemicals, take it back out of the glove box, put back in the oil bath and let it sit overnight in the oil bath this time at 62 degrees. Only problem is, you just finished using the oil bath at 92 degrees, so it takes a half an hour to cool it down, and that’s when you put the oil bath in a cold water bath to cool it off. (My idea. I thought it was clever.) So basically you're standing there adding chemicals to a jar for the better part of 3 hours.

So today I go into the MEMS lab to make some PZT. I went to clean out the bottle, and discovered that we were out of Acetone. So I plodded down to the clean room to get some Acetone, then plodded back up to the MEMS lab to finish cleaning out the bottle. Then I went to put it in the oven, only to discover that someone made off with the thermometer, so I had no way to know the temperature of the oven. (There is a melted bottle cap nailed to the wall next to the oven as testament to what happens when the oven is on too hot.) While I was at it, I took a look at the oil bath, and discovered that the thermometer in that (one of those lame glass ones with the fluid in them) was destroyed. Also the bath, which is just mineral oil, and is supposed to be clear, was dark brown, and you couldn't see through it anymore, which, according to Jeong, meant that it needed to be changed out. So I find another glass container to use for the oil bath, then grab a couple bottles of the oil from under the fume hood. . . One of them had only a splash of oil left, and the other one was down to less than a quarter. Together they had maybe half of the required oil. Loud noises.

So I ordered another thermometer for the oil bath, and tomorrow I'm going to have to order up some more of the mineral oil. Apparently the oil isn't carried by WSU Central Stores, so I have to order it from another company, which means it'll take a few days to get here.

After all that, going to lab wasn't much fun, and doing the homework for Thermal Systems wasn't very appealing either. Made me angry.

Sunday, September 10th, 2006

So its been a while since I last posted. I apologize. Turns out I haven’t had a lot of spare time that I want to spend typing away at my computer since school started. Its a lame excuse, but its the best one I've got.

My airplane works again! The engine was done being overhauled some time ago, and my dad worked his butt off to get it up and running (and attached to the airplane no less) for the last month or so. (Thanks again, Dad!) It purrs like a kitten, and makes plenty of power (for a 172, anyway) so I'm a pretty happy camper. It still dribbles oil. A few drops is all, but its enough to make a mess on the bottom of the cowling, and because of the shape of the bottom cowling, it tends to drip right on top of the front tire. It’s really hard to see where its coming from (and the engine is hot when I land) but I suspect its coming from the generator attachment. The engine has a 90 day warranty, but I hope it doesn't come to that. Its 90 days from when they finished with the overhaul, so I kind of need to decide if it needs to go back into the shop. (I really hope it doesn't though. If they do need to do some work on it, I really hope the engine doesn't need to come off again, cause that’s a real pain to do.)

So my dad flew out and picked me up from Pullman last weekend and flew me back out to Battle Ground. I was due for a flight review, which I did with Jean while I was back. I like her. She's like a grandma to me. I think its great that she still flies. I also was due for a medical, which I got taken care of the day before I flew back to Battle Ground. Anyway, the flight back was pretty uneventful. The visibility was pretty terrible for the whole trip. There are a lot of fires going on, including a big one in Dayton, which is where Devin Jeffers lives. He sent me some pictures of a helicopter picking up a bucketful of water from the lake next to his house for use for firebombing.

So the plan was for me to take my flight review, put a few hours on the 172 to be sure everything was working properly, then fly the 172 back out to Pullman. For once in the long sad history of my plans, it actually happened. No tremendous setbacks, though my plane was leaking inordinate amounts of oil for a while, but that seems to have stopped with the replacing of a cylinder gasket.

The morning before I left to head back to Pullman, I went for a flight in Dan Miller's RV-8. That is a beautiful airplane. Its so simple, but with 2 tandem seats, and a 200 HP engine, it hauls like nobodies business. The back seat has no rudder pedals, but Dan told me that it did really well without. He let me fly it for a while, and it was a blast. It is stick controlled, which was a little awkward for me, but it was really smooth to fly. There was no give in anything, so you move the stick a little in any direction, and the plane responds instantly. It was an interesting change compared to my 172. In the 172 everything happens pretty slowly, and it takes a fair amount of pressure to cause anything to happen. Anyway, it was a blast to fly with him. His panel is really clean, with just the instruments you need, as well as an autopilot and an engine monitor. The autopilot was pretty impressive. Its keyed into his stick, as well as the GPS, which made things pretty interesting. Basically it'll get the track you're heading from the GPS, and you can hit a button to make it hold that course for you. Or you can press a pause button to let you change course, then when you let up it'll track your new course. You can also press a button to start a standard rate turn in either direction. All very simple and straightforward. It made me happy. His engine monitor is also pretty cool. It'll tell you what each cylinder is doing, both head temp and exhaust temp, as well as fuel flow, and can blink a warning at you if any of the above go outside of programmed operating limits. Dan had it set up to warn him if he was heating up or cooling down the engine too rapidly. Real slick. I think I've decided I'm going to build one when I get settled into a house and have a job. I love the 172, but I certainly wouldn't mind moving a little faster. (Dan's cruising speed at I think 10 gal/hr is about 210 mph.)

In other news, school is going along well, for the most part. Some of my profs I like better than others, but that’s to be expected. Two years ago I took a class called Mechanics of Materials, and it was all about stress/strain curves, and Mohr's circle, and axial and torsional and bending stresses and such. Mostly I crammed really well for each test, and made a hell of an equation sheet for each one, and basically didn't learn much. I got the ideas immediately, but the equations didn't interest me very much. Anyway, now I'm taking a class that has so far been exactly the same thing. The worst part is, I'm still not learning it, because I still don't particularly care about it, and this time I'm annoyed that its all repeat. Irrational, I know, but there it is.

Today I went for a flight with Adam over the dam where he works, then out towards his house. He's from all of an hours drive away from Pullman on the other side of the Snake River. Curious thing though, the GPS still doesn't seem to work over Pullman. When my dad flew out to pick me up from Pullman, it went out and stayed out from about 20 miles east of Pullman, and when we left we picked it back up about that far away. When I flew back it went out in about the same place. If I didn't know better (which I don't) I'd guess that there was some problem with a satellite or something. Seems unlikely, but I have no better explanation. I should see if I can find some other people who use GPSs around here and see if they're having similar problems.

So after doing homework for the better part of 8 hours today, I'm pretty wiped out, and my bed is looking more and more comfortable with each passing moment, so I think its bed time.