Life at home

I enjoy being an engineer. I spent most of today modifying parts in a machine shop, coming up with ideas for mounting terminal strips, and wiring a machine. Not all of that was directly "engineering", per say, but it was all related and very enjoyable. The best part is, I didn't have to get out my calculator a single time to do any of it! It's nice to use the practical knowledge I have gained to do something productive instead of solving carefully crafted problems all the time.

In other news, I took my car to get it painted. I should have it back by either Saturday or Monday. It's never going to be a show car, and the interior is a bit rough with all the cracked plastic parts and the cruddy carpet, but it runs nicely and it will all be one color, so I'm excited about getting it back. The downside is cost of insurance... Ah, the curse of being a 20 year old male.

I went on my first bikeride in 6 months. I'm definitely out of shape, but I love my Litespeed, and it felt good to be back in the ol' saddle. Hopefully by the time I head back to school I'll be a little more fit and can actually keep up with the friends I ride with.

Annoying - I went to all the trouble to answer the random question posed to me on my profile, only to find out that I'm limited to 150 words. Oh well, here it is for your enjoyment (ha)

"How tall would you be if you had never cut your fingernails? "

That's a complex question. I think the best way to go about answering it is to explain how to figure it out, just in case you ever need to. You would have to find out how much energy it takes to grow an inch in height, then find out how much it takes to cut your nails. Armed with this valuable knowledge, you would then have to find the rate of nail growth as a function of time and multiply it by your age, thereby finding the length your nails would be if you had never cut them. Assuming you cut off about 1/16" at a time, figure out how many times you have cut your nails. Multiply this by the average amount of energy used to cut your nails, and you can find out how much you have expended. Tada - one simply multiplication problem and you know how tall you would be! I could go into a lot more detail about finding the energy required to cut each nail, since it's a just a moment applied by your fingers and it can easily be transformed to work and energy, but if you really care, you can ask...

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Ok, maybe that's not as funny as I thought it was at the moment. Sorry about that. If you're still reading this, you now understand what happens when you don't give engineers enough to do.

Enjoy the rest of your week!

back at home

I'm back at home now - very glad to be here among mountains and forests with beautiful weather to boot. Now I get to (mostly) quit thinking about school and instead focus on my car and working.

In all honesty, I'm sick of my car. I'm going to try to get it painted next week so at least I can feel kind of good about it when I look at it. It really is close - mechanically it's fine, I just need to track down the few minor leaks in the seals and figure out why my headlights won't turn on. Hopefully it won't take too much longer.

In July I head back to Texas in order to begin preparing for my trip to Sierra Leone. I have to write some reports for LEGS as well, one of them before June 10, but without classes and homework, it seems a lot more doable.

My family gave me flak for not updating my blog enough, so I did it - but see, when I don't actually have anything to say, it's pretty boring...