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Posted by: chelsea86 Original: 11/4/2007 8:32 PM Views: 5 Comments: 0 eProps: 0 Read Comments Post a Comment Back to Your Xanga Site |
Sunday, November 04, 2007
| Conference last weekend was fun. The career fair was huge, as expected. They said it's the largest engineering career fair in the country every year. Plus, most places actually have engineers at their booths instead of just HR people. It's nice to be able to ask the engineers about the work environment and that sort of thing. We didn't end up placing in Team Tech this year, but we had a good time anyway. On Saturday night we walked around downtown Nashville. Everywhere had live music, so that was fun. We found a club that we could all get into and stayed there for a little while, but because it was an 18+ club and it was ladies night, it attracted quite a few men in their 40s-50s. The older men just lined the walls of the place and watched. It was creepy. One of them tapped Ashley on the shoulder and gave her a thumbs-up and we were out of there. Ashley and I walked down Broadway and went into about 4 different bars. The first place we went into was themed like a trailer park. There was a sort of patio room with cheap plastic furniture, then as you went back the rest of the place was decorated like you were in a trailer. It was strange but still kind of neat. The band there was really good. They were a cover band and played mostly country music. That was our favorite, and we stayed there for quite a while. Once we got back to school, things were a little crazy since we'd missed three days of school. I hadn't missed anything important, but I also hadn't done any homework for 5 days and we were exhausted from staying up late and getting up early... We've been working on Prelim stuff a lot still. We've been working on a computer model of the spacecraft lately. We've got our System Design Review on Wednesday, which is a two-hour presentation. It's supposed to have a lot of pictures in it, so we're working on generating lots of pictures. Yesterday Kyle and I figured out how to make movies out of our STK simulations, so those are pretty cool. I think everything is coming together pretty well. We've got an idea for our Detail design project next semester, but we're not sure if it's going to happen or not. The teacher who is in charge of Detail is also my Attitude teacher, and he proposed in class last week that we try our hands at the latest X-Prize competition. You have to build a full-scale model spacecraft that lifts 50 meters off the ground, hovers there for 90 seconds, then moves horizontally about 100 meters to a target on the ground and lands. You then refuel the spacecraft and it has to go back to where it started. It's a really ambitious project, and nobody has been able to do it yet. It would be fun, though... I'm still working on the job hunt. I got my extension from Lockheed, but I really want to be involved with spacecraft from the beginning of my career, I don't want to do a job outside my field for a few years with the hope of eventually maybe being able to transfer back into my field. At conference I talked to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which sounds appealing. I talked to them last year too. They're hiring patent examiners. Basically, anytime somebody applies for a patent, someone has to consider what they're trying to patent, research and see if something similar is already on file, and take care of the paperwork. You get to deal with the very latest technical developments in your field, and you job is to understand how things work. There's also technical reading and writing involved and a lot of details to consider. I think it's something I'd enjoy. I applied, so hopefully I'll hear back from that. On Friday night Megan and I went out to dinner, then we went to this place downtown called The Raven. Dalia's boyfriend and his brother were going to be playing music there, so we decided to go listen. I'd heard them play before, and they're pretty good. It turned out to be a lot of fun. There were about 20 people there from school, plus people from the other local colleges. It was fun to sit and talk with a different group of people for a change. Saturday was the first weather balloon launch of the semester. Kyle and John were the ones who got most everything set up, but I watched really closely and I think that I can do it now too. The one thing that didn't work out is that we weren't able to get data from the balloon payloads through the radio. It was weird, because we could hear the data but for whatever reason the computer couldn't record it. We were able to get the data through the internet from other stations, though, so it wasn't a big deal. We think there's a setting there we were missing. Yesterday was also $1 movie day at the theater. Megan, Ashley, Ashley's boyfriend, a couple other guys, and I all went to see "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford". It was a pretty good movie, though a little long. Afterward we all went to Red Robin for supper. Then Megan, Ashley, and I went back and saw "Bee Movie". It was ok. There really aren't many good movies out right now. They're all bloody or political. Or both. Today I worked on our SNI project in the machine shop. My group doesn't communicate very well, which makes us pretty inefficient. So far someone has ordered the wrong size I-beam and nobody knows what size of shaft we ordered for the motor. Everybody likes to feel important or something, so no information gets shared. It's pretty frustrating. I was given the task today of drilling holes in a bracket to mount on a base. I asked how big the holes should be and they said they'd let me pick. I asked where the bracket should be mounted and again they told me it was up to me. We have a computer model of what the final assembly should look like. That model has dimensions on it. I have no idea why we're randomly choosing bolt sizes and hole placements when all that is laid out in the model, but it explains why we've ordered the wrong sizes of two parts so far. I thought the point of making a computer model was to make sure everything fit before you started cutting anything. It's really annoying. | |
Posted 11/4/2007 8:32 PM - 5 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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