Okay, new semester same as the old semester. Classes are going well. My circuits and systems class is really cool, mainly because the teacher is really funny in that weird kind of middle eastern way that means he laughs at himself at weird times and gets a really high voice when he is excited and gives you a really great "are you a complete and utter moron" look when you ask a stupid question.
Meteorology is pretty good, it is only a 100 level class so it has been a lot of filling out work sheets, drawing in the pressure lines on a weather map, going up to the National Weather Service building, stuff like that. The best is there will be questions from the book we have to answer, so the first question would be something like “what would cause the nighttime temperature to stop dropping and possibly increase” so instead of taking the time to look up the exact answer in the book I decide to read the next question and it is “if clouds move in to an area at night what will the temperature be likely to do”. Nice.
Fluids 2 is killing me, it is only the third week and it is killing me, we just learn all these equations and vorticity and circulation and flow patterns and a bunch of other really cool stuff, but it is hard. I am kind of sad, it will be my last class with Snyder, and he told Sara (the super smart girl with the 4.0) not to take the class if she wanted to keep her GPA, so what should us mortals do?
What else, lets see, advanced mechanics is going to be pretty easy I think, but it might also come around and bite me in the end since I don’t pay that much attention since the first few chapters are all review, I just need to make sure I am there when we get to the new stuff.
Last, my senior design class is really cool. We form teams of EE’s and ME’s and we design, manufacture, market, and sell a product. We did good on our proposal and our idea got accepted, but it was a bummer because it was actually our seventh idea that we wanted to go with. We want to develop a device for motorcycle riders that will automatically open their garage door as they approach and close it once they are in, likewise it will open their garage when they start their bike and close it as they drive away so they don’t have to fiddle with pressing the button and operating the bike at the same time. We originally were going to do it just for cars, but we found there was a lot more interest from motorcycle riders. It shouldn’t be too hard to build, but we are going to have to change our design quite a bit I think to get around some other patents.
I might have gotten that job at china lake, not really sure, mostly informal kind of stuff, and I think taking it is the right thing to do, but there are a lot of other factors involved in that decision, as some of you might guess.
Shooting is going well, we have qualifying for nationals on Saturday and Sunday. I think I will shoot well, practice has been really good the last few weeks, but I am not sure if we will qualify, there are a lot of good teams and we still need to come together as a team, something it doesn’t really seem like we have done.