chelsea86's Xanga

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:27:26 GMT

On Thursday I got my offer from JPL. It's pretty good, but I asked for a few days to think about it. So, I've been thinking and I'm going to accept it. It's a technical job where I could learn a lot, I'd be making enough money to live decently and be able to pay off student loans, the benefits are good, and I like the area. I'm going to officially accept tomorrow. I've been looking at housing in the Pasadena area, and it's so expensive compared to what I'm used to! Most one-bedrooms are about $1500/month. Here my roommates and I rent a 2-bedroom that's almost double the square footage for about half the price...

SWE regional conference is this weekend in Pasadena, so I'll be headed back there on Friday. I'm hoping to have a little time to drive around while I'm there, but we'll see. I guess there are 9 of us going so far, the best conference attendance we've ever had. Even better than the year that conference was in Phoenix! It's kind of weird, because the reason most of us go is the career fair. I won't need the career fair, though, because I have a job lined up... There are plenty of workshops that sound interesting that I can go to instead. I was thinking of going to the career fair anyway and getting information on available internships for the underclassmen, but almost our entire section is going. There will be 8 other people getting that info for them, so I might as well just go to the workshops. I guess the Pasadena conference center is right by the outdoor mall I went to while I was there. It's on the same street as the parking garage entrance. It'll be nice to sort of know where I'm going.

Other than that, not much is going on. The first round of homework is due this week, so I've been trying to get all of that together. I have my Materials lab tomorrow, which I'm not particularly fond of. There's an odd number of people in the class and the teacher won't allow groups of three, so I'm the odd one out and have to do the entire lab myself without a partner. It's a pretty stupid way of doing things, we should at least rotate so that I'm not by myself every week, but on the other hand I was the second one finished last week, so I guess it's ok.

We also voted on the project we'll be doing for Detail Design, the second semester of the capstone sequence. We'll be building a satellite on the air bearing and making it move using thrusters. So, it's basically the same project that my class did last year for Experimental Space Systems, except we'll be using less technical equipment and sending commands through a wireless router on the satellite. It's frustrating, because I really don't want to do the same project again. There will probably also be a lot of communications issues within the team. It's hard to work with your fellow classmates because there's no hierarchy. My class is really competitive, so there's this constant jockeying for position that's enough to drive a person crazy. It certainly makes working on projects stressful and altogether not very enjoyable. It's a class that we should be looking forward to, but honestly I'm really not. But, we voted, and I got outvoted so now I have to do this project. So, I'm going to try to grin and bear it, I guess I really have no other option. In a few months I'll be working for a real company making money and working on things I actually care about, so I'm trying to just get through.

I asked to be on the team that facilitates the sending of commands and receiving of data. At least I'd find that somewhat interesting and I might be able to use some of my computer networking experience from my internship. Plus, the people who are more inclined to work on that sort of thing seem easier to get along with than the rest... The teacher picks the groups everybody is on in the end, so hopefully I'll get what I want...

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:39:32 GMT

Well, I got back from CA yesterday. I had a job interview there with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who design and operate many of NASA's missions.

I left on Thursday, which means I missed the first day of all of my Thursday classes. I drove to Phoenix, then flew to LAX. My flight got in at about 2:30pm, but by the time I got my luggage and rental car I didn't get to the highway until around 3:30. There was some traffic, but not a whole lot. Then I hit the 605 freeway, and it was constant stop-and-go traffic from there to my hotel. JPL is in Pasadena, so the internet said that if there was no traffic I'd be able to get there in about 40 minutes. It ended up taking me close to two hours...

Once I checked into the hotel I went out and found dinner, then drove from the hotel to JPL so that I'd be sure I knew where I was going in the morning. I made it there fine, and it only took about 15 minutes. It took over 30 minutes to get back, though, traffic was pretty bad. I didn't know how traffic would be in the morning, especially if I took a wrong turn somewhere. I left an hour and a half early, stopped and got breakfast at McDonalds and headed over. There wasn't much traffic at all, so I ended up being almost an hour early. There was a park nearby, so I parked there and waited for a while.

Once I got to the visitor's center, there were three other people also waiting for interviews. We talked for a while, they were all getting their Masters degrees in May. Then I met with HR and through the course of the day had 6 interviews. Everything seemed to go really well. I was asked to give a 45-minute presentation entitled "How I Can Contribute to the Success of JPL", so I did that. It's pretty typical for PhD's to give presentations during interviews, so the section that I interviewed with decided everyone should give a presentation.

I ate lunch in the cafeteria with my sponsoring supervisor. The cafeteria was really nice and the food was great. Afterward we had a little time so she took me to the Von Karman Museum. There were models of all the spacecraft JPL had been a part of, including a full-scale model of one of the MERs (like Spirit and Opportunity). There was also a full-scale model of the Galileo satellite, which took up most of one room. After lunch I had more interviews.

When I met with the HR lady again at the end of the day she said she already had a message from one of the ladies I interviewed with who wants to give me an offer. That lady works on ground systems for satellites. I've been told at school that since it's typically electrical engineers that work on communications systems, and that since I'm an aerospace engineer, I may not have the knowledge that companies are looking for yet. I mentioned that to the interviewer, and she said she's looking to add more diversity to the people in her group, so she's actually looking for someone with an aerospace background rather than strictly an electrical background. She mentioned that she wants to have one of the two new-hires she's planning to hire work quarter-time on the Dawn mission that just launched in September. Dawn is going to the two largest bodies in the asteroid belt, a very small planet and an asteroid. It would be really cool to get to work on that mission...

The HR lady also told me that I should go to old town Pasadena that night and look around on Colorado Blvd. I'm not sure I was in the area she told me to go to, but it was still really neat. There was this huge outdoor mall built on top of an enormous parking garage. When I parked, I was sure I would never again be able to find that car again. There were about 6 different entrances to the garage on two different streets and inside there were elevators everywhere. There are even two sets of terrace apartments that overlook the mall. It'd be pretty nice to live there, the mall is right there, Target is within walking distance, there's even a movie theater that you wouldn't have to drive to...

I flew back to Phoenix yesterday. If I had realized that the airport really is that close to the ocean, I probably would have gotten up and hour earlier and walked on the beach for a while before heading to the airport. My plane flew out over the ocean as we were leaving LAX. It was Saturday, so there really wasn't any smog and we had clear view of the area. The mountains are right there, the ocean is right there... It's definitely somewhere I could see myself living.

Now that I'm home I have to get back into classes and homework and all that...

Monday, November 05, 2007

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 03:32:38 GMT

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.

Monday, November 05, 2007

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 03:32:14 GMT

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 04:09:08 GMT

First things first, I got my job offer letter from Lockheed today. It's to go back to New Jersey like I did last summer and continue evaluating more commercial off-the-shelf products they could use in their computer systems on naval ships. It's a really good offer, and it's pretty tempting. It is still early, though, and I'm really hoping to get a space-related job, so I asked for an extension. From what I hear it's pretty normal to ask for more time to decide. If I didn't get another offer, this one would be a good starting point for me. I've got a lot of advice coming at me from a lot of different people, but I think for now I'm just going to wait.

It's weird deciding if I want to go back to New Jersey or not. Sometimes I find myself wondering what my old co-workers or the other interns are doing right now. It's weird to live in a place for a few months, get used to the area and people, then leave and not know if you're ever going back there...

The SWE National Conference is in Nashville this weekend. We leave tomorrow afternoon and get into Nashville around 11:00pm. The Team Tech competition practice is first thing Thursday morning, so we'll be up bright and early to cheer Jordan on with her presentation. The career fair there is going to be huge, so I'm excited for that. There are over 250 companies that are attending, and I've got a list of about 10 that I'm really interested in talking to. Sometimes they even do on-the-spot interviews, so it's pretty exciting. We have Saturday night free, so we'll be exploring downtown Nashville. That should be pretty fun. Teresa even found some kind of club that we can all get into (Ashley and I are the only ones who are 21).

I've mostly been doing homework lately. I was in the design lab from 8:30am - 4:00pm on Saturday. That was pretty depressing. It was the preview day for all the high school students who wanted to come visit, so we could see them through the tiny design lab windows. We wanted to go warn them but chose not to. Ashley is a Campus Academic Mentor, so she had a three hour meeting with various students. One of them asked her if it's hard. Um, of course it's hard. It's rocket science. It's college. If the only question you can come up with when you're visiting your possible school is "is it hard?", you're never going to make it.

Prelim is coming along pretty well. I made an amazing simulation in STK (Satellite Tool Kit). Whenever our satellite is in view of the Earth, it draws a nice green line between the spacecraft and the station on Earth. It's kind of mesmerizing, because you can watch a video of it in 3-D. I was showing it off, when Yu said I should make it a cone instead of a line so the connection between our satellite and the Earth is 3-D when you watch the 3-D view. I told him I didn't know how, so he showed me. I almost think that I learn more useful information from my peers sitting in the design lab than in class sometimes. Anyway, now my sim is basically amazing. It also requires a special program to run, but I'll try to post pictures here sometime (I'm too lazy to find somewhere to upload them right now...)

Other than that, I haven't been doing much...

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 03:33:17 GMT

Oh, school. I took a math test last week. The class average was a 47%. That's an F. By a lot. He ended up curving the grades by 28 points--almost three full letter grades. He's also letting us retake it tomorrow night for a chance to improve our grades. I spent the past two hours going over the solutions for my test and the other class's test. I actually got one of the derivations right without looking at the solutions once, so that was promising. We'll see how that goes...

I've been working on our Prelim project a lot. I'm in charge of the Communications subsystem, so I'm trying to find information on that. I did find a 71 page document on the communications subsystem for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, so I've been using that as my baseline. It's a little tricky because MRO used a lot of unnecessary cutting-edge technology that I probably won't use. We're way over on our mass right now, so everybody is trying to cut back to the bare minimum. They also keep changing the propulsion system, which changes the orbit, which changes the mission life and the position of the satellite. Communications is all line-of-sight, so when they changed the orbits again today I now have three two-week-long periods of time in which the satellite will have no communications whatsoever with Earth. Unfortunately, it's pretty critical to have communications at those three times. There are a lot of trade-offs to think about, but it's hard at this stage to think about anybody but yourself.

Thursday is a big day. It's the Career Expo on campus, so there'll be representatives from 50 companies in the gym that we can go talk to. There are also a few information sessions the night before, and some companies are conducting interviews on campus on Friday. I'm not sure if there's anybody I'm dying to go talk to, but I'll go anyway. I know Boeing will be there, but I tend to not have a high enough GPA for them to consider me. NAVAIR is conducting interviews for sure, but it's for a location in Maryland. That's where Judith got a job, and she's working with aircraft carriers. That's not really my dream job, and Maryland is only like an hour from where I was this summer, so I think it might be a little too far away. I'll probably go talk to them anyway, it never hurts to have more interviewing practice...

Thursday is also the Alumni and Senior Reception at the Hassayampa Inn. It's like a cocktail party. I think you're just supposed to go and mingle. I hate mingling. The whole thing just seems so awkward. But, once again, I'll probably go anyway. There may be somebody cool there who could help me get a job...

Friday is University Day, so we have no school. We have to finish the SWE float for the parade, then we're having a booth at the October Festival afterward. We're going to make robots out of nuts and bolts with kids. It should be pretty fun. They always have cotton candy, face painting, carnival games, inflatable jumping things, etc. It's kind of geared toward kids, although I'm not really sure why. There are a lot of alumni or professors who bring their kids, but there are a lot of college students too... After all that there's a comedian. I haven't decided if I'm going to the comedian yet or not.

Saturday is the Arizona Skyfest airshow. I've been the past three years, and I've always been disappointed by it. It's a really small airshow and for someone who doesn't know much about planes, they all seem the same. Last year I volunteered in the Women in Aviation concessions booth, which made it more interesting. I haven't been to any of the WAI meetings this year, though, I just don't have time.

Finally, Sunday is the Treasure Hunt. Ashley backed out because she has something else going on that day. So, it looks like it's just Megan and I. We probably don't stand a chance, but last year anybody who entered got a free movie ticket. It's something social to do, anyway...

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 21:52:00 GMT

So today has been kind of a weird day. I woke up at 6:30am, just like I would if I had class. On the weekends that happens sometimes, but I fall right back to sleep. Today I couldn't fall asleep again. So I got up really early. It was weird. I decided I'd go grocery shopping, so I tried to look up this week's ads online. After fighting with my wireless card for 45 minutes (it's been an ongoing battle for a couple weeks), I managed to stay connected for a full 10 minutes before the internet quit functioning. I gave up and went to the grocery store.

After the grocery store, I went to the mall. I've been looking for new black shoes to go with my suit since my old black shoes (which I LOVE) are getting worn out. I actually bought a pair today. They're not at the same level of greatness as my previous pair, but they're pretty good.

I got back to my house around noon. It'd been raining/rainy all day, but right after I got home it started POURING rain. It's monsoon season here, so that happens sometimes. It was even blowing sideways for a while. It rained for about 3 hours like that.

During the rain I did most of my math homework, then tried to get on the internet again. It wouldn't connect, of course. Only this time, my computer wouldn't even acknowledge that the wireless card existed. I reinstalled the thing twice yesterday. I know it's not our wireless router because Jordan's computer has been connecting to our network just fine (well, since I reinstalled the router yesterday...). I started thinking about how much time I've spent fighting the stupid card lately and decided that my time is worth a lot and that I should just get a new wireless card. I would have decided that sooner, but the thing is only 3 months old! It has a 3 year warranty, but do you think I saved the receipt and everything? Of course not.

Anyway, so I got to the top of the hill by Best Buy and the traffic light was out! It wasn't flashing red or yellow, it was completely dark on both sides. One part of that intersection has three lanes of straight traffic in each direction and two turning lanes, and the other street has two lanes of straight traffic in each direction and two turning lanes. It's a huge intersection, and it was absolute chaos. I needed to go straight, and there was an ambulance next to me that also needed to go straight, so I just went at the same time as he did. Worst case scenario, the ambulance is right there, right? It was quite a mess, though, because at least three of the lights on Hwy 69 were out. I also saw three cars being pushed out of roads between my house and Best Buy. They weren't accidents, just single malfunctioning cars which had stopped in the middle of traffic.

I talked to the Geek Squad guy at Best Buy about wireless cards. He recommended one, but of course it was the second most expensive one they sold. I decided to go against his recommendation and get one of the cheaper ones. This one has a lifetime warranty, though, and I'll be saving the receipt and box this time. The stupid thing had better still work when I'm 85 years old and living on the moon, or I'll be mad.

Anyway, it was kind of like that "Nightmare on Elm St." episode of the Twilight Zone. It's the one where all machinery and electricity stops working and all the neighbors turn on each other, but at the end it shows a couple of aliens nearby who have a magic button that can turn on and off their electricity. So, if we find out in the next couple days that aliens have invaded, just remember where you heard it first.

Not much has been going on this week. I've mostly been doing homework. Megan, Ashley, and I went out to dinner on Thursday night for no reason. Ashley and I had homework to do, but we haven't had social time in a while so we just stayed up late to get everything done. Megan and I are gearing up for "Da Loot Route" during homecoming. Homecoming is October 5-7, and "Da Loot Route" is the treasure hunt. They started it last year, and it was ridiculous. After three hours and heaven only knows how many miles of running around campus, a team of ROTC guys won. The rest of us were only halfway done. The prize is $300 for the winning team, though, and who wouldn't want to go on a treasure hunt? I think we have Ashley talked into being on our team. At first she didn't want to, but I think Megan's and my excitement is rubbing off...

Friday, September 07, 2007

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 04:13:14 GMT

I just got back from the club fair at school. Meg and I sat at the SWE booth. It was the most successful SWE table I've ever sat at, and I'll bet it was one of the more successful clubs at the fair. We had a ton of freshman girls who were interested, so that's always good. Probably the best part, though, was the diversity we've started to build. We had several guys sign up and even some non-engineers who thought the elementary outreach program would be cool. I'm glad that people are starting to see us as a fun professional organization rather than just some kind of sorority. It's a little tricky, because SWE's target audience is and will always be women. I think it's great that Meg is president because she's girly. She likes the diversity, and her enthusiasm is one of the reasons we got so many people to sign up. At the same time, though, SWE does cater to women's needs first. I think that guys can definitely benefit from the professional development that SWE offers, but our main goal is to help the females. Meg invites everyone to join and tells them how much fun it is, but at the same time she tells them that she doesn't want them to sign up just for the sake of signing up. My personal opinion is that some of the guys only signed up because they wanted to meet girls. Those will probably stop coming to meetings pretty quickly, but after a month or two I'll bet some of them will still be there. At any rate, the club fair was very successful.

This afternoon we also had a meeting of the Eagle Ham Radio Club which Jack is getting started. They needed officers, so I ended up being the secretary. I'm not sure how many events we'll put on, I think the main reason Jack wanted to start it was so that we can apply for a FCC Club License and a vanity call sign. A vanity call sign is kind of like a vanity license plate. It costs extra money each year to have it, but it's supposed to be cooler. The thing is, the only part you get to pick is the last three letters. I think Jack was looking into ERU a while back. It is kinda cool, though. I'm still dabbling around with my morse code which I'd need to upgrade my license. I'm not sure why I'd really need a better license, it's just that my inner nerd loves codes and thinks it'd be cool to decode things. I'm not sure if that's worth putting in the time and energy to actually learn the code, but it'd still be cool.

We also had our SWESat meeting today. Jordan updated us on what she'd learned in Texas over the summer, since she worked with AggieSat. We also decided on team leads for this year. At this point, I'm still team lead for power. I'm hoping to get Meg and J Cole more involved in it, though, because I'm supposed to be managing the overall project this year. I'm not sure how much time I'll have to devote to researching one subsystem. Plus, they've been taking classes for a year now, so they're able to understand things better.

I've also been researching for our Prelim class some. Our ultimate goal is to find out what the asteroid Apophis is made of. If they're going to need to destroy it or alter its orbit in some way, they'll want to know what they're dealing with. We found out that somebody proposed to Congress a while ago to send a nuke up there and blow it up like in the movie Armageddon. Congress wouldn't let them do it. They got shot down pretty quickly (no pun intended). The general public/world at large is pretty anti-nukes-in-space. It's unfortunate because ultimately nuclear power is more efficient and can create a lot more power than conventional sources. Amazingly good solar panels are only about 25% efficient. It makes sense, though, because a rocket is a highly controlled explosion, and mistakes do happen. If the launch of a spacecraft carrying a nuclear power source had some kind of launch mishap and ended up exploding, it could be like setting off a nuclear bomb. Depending on what altitude the explosion occurred, the fallout could end up in other countries, which could probably start World War III. Sending a nuke to Apophis is too close to the movie Armageddon for my taste. That movie is pretty ridiculous, I wrote about it a while ago.

Anyway, things are going pretty well here. Over the weekend I have to do math homework AND a SNI lab. My days of sitting in my room and watching "The Office" on DVD are about over. Which is pretty sad because the third season just came out on Tuesday and I haven't seen the whole season yet. Someday I'll have time to watch...

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 22:46:08 GMT

It's been forever since I wrote...

I'm back at school now, today was my third day of class. On Monday I had Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control (a.k.a. Attitude), Advanced Engineering Math (like Calc 5), Structures II, and Spacecraft Preliminary Design (a.k.a. Prelim).

Attitude is one of the hardest classes I have to take. The teacher does make a big difference, though, and I have one of the easiest teachers. It's the same teacher I had for Space Systems last year, so it helps that I already know his teaching style some. It's going to be a tricky class, but I'll probably do ok.

Advanced Engineering Math is going to be a real challenge. The teacher is infamously egotistical and altogether bad. He goes so fast on the boards that you can hardly write what he's saying, let alone comprehend any of it. Engineers use math a lot, but we're ultimately really only interested in applied math. Pure mathematicians, on the other hand, do math for the sake of doing math with no real application in mind. My teacher is a pure mathematician and has to prove every single equation he writes on the board. Some teachers get side-tracked and tell airplane-related war stories. This guy gets side-tracked and proves random equations. Today for no apparent reason he proved the Pythagorean theorem, which relates the lengths of different sides of certain types of triangles. I learned about the Pythagorean theorem in middle school, I don't need someone to prove to me it's true when I've already found it to be true for years. Besides that, we weren't even talking about triangles! I'll probably be spending a LOT of time in his office getting help.

The College of Engineering here last year started giving prerequisite exams to be enrolled in certain classes. It's been a pilot program, so not all classes have them. It's mostly just for freshmen and sophomores so that they prove they've got the math and physics background required to take some of the higher-level classes. So, it was quite a shock to me to find out in class on Monday that my Structures II class now has a prerequisite exam which covers not only material from Structures I, but the two classes before Structures I. The test is worth 5% of your semester grade and you must get at least an 80% on it in order to pass. You can take the test up to 5 times, but the thought is that if you can't pass the prerequisite exam you'll struggle a lot in the class and that you should go back and retake previous classes.

I took the stupid prerequisite exam today. It wasn't that bad, mostly because I had studied like crazy. The worst part about the test is that there's no partial credit. So, if you just add wrong or miss a minus sign you'll still miss the question. You can miss 4 points and still pass. I know I missed 3 points because I didn't have time to finish one question. So, I'm praying that everything else I did was perfect and that I can be done with the stupid test. If you don't get an 80%, you can retake the test up to 4 more times. I'd rather not take it again.

Prelim is the first half of our senior design project. This semester is all work on paper, we design our project but don't actually build anything. Next semester is when we get into the construction part. We got our groups today, and I'm pretty happy with mine. It's me, Ashley, Zoe, Kyle, Erik, Lynda, and another Kyle. Our homework assignment from last time was to brainstorm what we want to do for our project. In the project you design all aspects of a spacecraft mission, so we had to think of two spacecraft missions we'd like to do and write a little about them.

At this point, my team seems pretty set on one idea. There's this asteroid called Apophis. Apophis is one of many near-Earth asteroids. The difference with Apophis is that there is a small (fraction of 1%) chance that Apophis will actually collide with Earth in 2029 or on its next orbit a few years later. In 2029 it could come less than three Earth diameters from the Earth itself--between the Earth and the moon. Like I say, the chances are very, very small. However if it did actually hit Earth, it would mean almost certain extinction for most living things on the planet. NASA is passively investigating Apophis, but at this time there's not a whole lot that can be done besides just research. In the real world, nothing exactly follows equations. To predict the path of a body like that over 20 years into the future with a large degree of certainty just isn't possible right now. NASA is, however, offering a $250 million prize to anybody who will design a data-collecting mission on Apophis for them. An unnamed internet billionaire is also offering an additional $250 million.

So, we're going to design a satellite to collect information on Apophis. One of our team members thinks we stand a chance at the $500 million, but I think people like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin probably stand a better chance than a seven random undergrad students working on their senior design project... It's a pretty neat concept, anyway, and we'll end up designing some kind of impact probe which makes another team member happy.

On Tuesday I had Structures and Instrumentation (SNI) Lab. SNI is a lab on Tuesdays and a class on Thursdays. We'll get to use the shaker table, which is pretty cool.

Other than that, I haven't really been doing much...

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 01:43:52 GMT

I guess it's been a while since I wrote...

Two weekends ago the guys wanted to go to the beach again. I was still peeling from my sunburn from the previous week (not my fault! SPF 45 apparently isn't good enough!). So, Abby, Jamie (who lives a little way down from me), and I went to Philadelphia to go shopping. Abby said "Should we drive in?" I told her of course we should drive in. She suggested taking a train in instead. We looked into it, and it turns out if you drive about 10 minutes to the train station you can take the train in for less than $5 round trip. Parking in Philadelphia is outrageous, there are tons of one-way streets downtown, and I really don't like driving there if I don't have to. So, we took the train.

It took significantly longer on the train than it would have taken to drive. There was construction on the tracks, so there was a section of track that was down to one track instead of two. I think if it hadn't been for the construction, it would have taken about the same amount of time. We got off at 8th and Market and walked all the way down to 22nd Street, stopping at two malls and a lot of stores along the way. When we got to 22nd Street, we realized that we'd walked further than the train goes. So, we walked back to 12th Street and caught the train back.

Philly reminded me a little of when I was in New York because there aren't any stand-alone stores. There was a three-story K-mart in the row of stores even. The malls looked like little stores on the outside, then you walk in and realize it's a three-story mall, it's just mostly under ground. We ate lunch at Olive Garden because Abby had always wanted to go there. Jamie and I thought she was crazy for wanting to go there that bad, but we went. The food is always good, but it's not somewhere I dream about going...

I don't know if it's a local thing or a national thing, but that Alex's Lemonade foundation/charity thing is all over here. It's named after a girl who died from cancer, and they raise money for childhood cancer research. They were on every single street corner on all of Market Street selling lemonade. I bought a Gerbera Daisy plant at the grocery store, brought it home, and realized that it has an Alex's Lemonade stand sticker on it too!

Last Friday night Abby, Jamie, and I went to Jamie's house and watched a movie. On Saturday we went to the beach. Some of the guys went out on Friday night, so we got a bit of a late start. We went to Long Beach Island, which I think is way better than Ocean City. There's not a boardwalk, but the beach was way less crowded, the water was warmer, and there wasn't any seaweed! And I bought sunblock for "baby faces and tender places" which was SPF 60+ instead of the measly 45 I had last time. A total of ten of us went and then we stopped at Applebee's for dinner on the way home.

Monday is cheap bowling night at Laurel Lanes, so nine of us went there and played. They charge a $2 cover, $1 for shoe rental, and $1 for each game. Normally there's no cover, but it's $3 for shoes and $4 per game. So basically you spend the same amount of money, you just get more games. The downside is that the cheap prices don't start until 9:00pm, and we have to work the next day.

Today was an exciting day at work. My servers finally came! They were originally supposed to be at my desk, but they turned out to be bigger than we thought. So, we put them in the lab and I got to play with them there! I now have my own spot in Closed Area 39. I like saying that because it makes me sound important. It's like Area 51, only not nearly as mysterious. The reason we got the servers is because the software won't run on the version of Windows we have. So, we got demo servers. Well, guess what? The demo servers ALSO don't run on the correct version of Windows. Great. The laptop I have has encryption software that keeps us from being able to load the correct version of Windows on it. The servers, however, have no encryption. So, we were able to download a trial version of the correct Windows software and put that on the servers. That took a few hours. The I had to load the three software programs on the three servers. I have no idea how long that took. Because I left when the first program was 80% loaded. If you're the last person to leave a closed area, you're the custodian of it, so you have to go through this checklist and lock the door and stuff. Well, it was just G and I, and he wanted to leave, but I've never closed an area before. So, I just left at the same time he did. I'll figure out the rest next week.

Tonight Abby, Jamie, and I had dinner at Perkins, then went to see the movie "Surf's Up". Jamie saw a commercial for it that said it was "based on a true story". Which confused us, because it's a cartoon about penguins that travel to Hawaii and hold surfing contests. It was a documentary-style movie, which was also weird. It was a good movie, though.

Abby's friend from an hour or so away in NJ is visiting this weekend. Three of the guys are out of town, so Abby, her friend, Jamie, and I are all going to some Franklin Science Museum in Philadelphia tomorrow. Other than that, I think I'll go shopping. The people in the lab dress down a LOT more than the people in the main building, mostly because they're crawling around unplugging things. Most of them wear jeans. I'd like to get a pair of khakis to wear and maybe some shoes I can walk in better. There's a lot of walking for me to go back and forth between the office and the lab...